The man sitting on the flat boulder outside Meteor Falls held a chunk of void-black rock up to the sunlight, a jeweller's loupe screwed tight into his eye socket.
He couldn't have been older than twenty-five, silver-haired, draped in a tailored suit that had no business surviving the dust and humidity of a mountain pass. Next to him sat an open leather bag bursting with jagged mineral samples. When Adam and Ren emerged from the damp breath of the cave, he didn't even look up at first. But as the crunch of their boots on the gravel grew louder, his gaze drifted over, and his entire face transformed.
He didn't look at Adam. He didn't look at Ren. His eyes locked onto the Larvitar.
"Oh," he breathed, the loupe slipping from his eye into his palm. "Oh, now that is a magnificent specimen."
"He's not for sale," Adam said, stepping instinctively to block the line of sight.
"No, no, of course not. Wouldn't dream of asking." The man rose, brushing red canyon dust off trousers that probably cost more than a cross-ocean ferry ticket. "Forgive me. I've been out in this canyon for four days and my only company has been two lost Zubat and a deeply uncommunicative geologist. I'm Steven."
"Adam. This is Ren."
"You came straight out of the falls?" Steven's gaze flicked past them toward the shadowed mouth of the cavern, a sharp, hungry spark igniting in his eyes. "Did you find anything deep in the belly? Some of my rarest specimens came from those high ledges."
Ren, who could spot a fellow fanatic in a heartbeat, leaned back against a rock with a smirk. "He found something, all right."
Adam reached for the heavy ball at his belt and clicked the release.
In hindsight, Adam had never seen a grown man lose his composure quite so fast. The noise Steven made was entirely undignified—a soft, strangled gasp. He crossed the rough terrain in four quick, frantic strides, checked himself at a respectful distance, and dropped straight to his knees in the dirt.
"Where," Steven whispered.
"Near the back pool. Deep down."
"They don't come that low..." Steven stared at the seamless joint where the Metang's twin bodies fused, his fingers twitching as if desperate to trace the metal. "They stay in the dark depths. I've been through this place eleven times in my life and I've seen exactly one Beldum, at range, for maybe six seconds. And you have a Metang." He snapped his head up. "How long were you in there?"
"Two days."
"Two days to track it?"
"Two days to catch it."
Steven let out a bright, ringing laugh, purely delighted, stripped of any pretense or arrogance. "Yes! Ah, yes, that sounds about right. They don't fight you with teeth, do they? They just solve you like a puzzle." He stood, slapping the dirt off his knees. "May I show you something? It's a bit of a boast, but I've been alone in a ditch for ninety-six hours and I'm dying for an audience."
He unclipped a ball from his belt and tossed it underhand.
The creature materialized with a thud that vibrated through the soles of Adam's boots.
It was the same species line as Adam's Metang, yet it felt entirely alien. Four massive iron pillars for legs, a body like a forged steel ingot, and a gleaming silver cross slammed across an iron face. It was enormous, utterly still, and radiating a dense, oppressive gravity.
Adam's Metang drifted backward half a meter. From a creature built of iron and telekinesis, that sudden retreat was the equivalent of a blood-curdling scream.
"Metagross," Steven said softly, resting a hand on the blue carapace. "Raised him from a Beldum no bigger than my fist. He used to sleep in my coat pocket." He patted the cold alloy, and the behemoth leaned into the touch slightly, the way a mountain tolerates a passing breeze. "Fourteen years we've been together."
Sage. Adam called mentally.
[ SCAN — Metagross (Steven Stone) ] Potential: Blue Steel Affinity: A | Psychic Affinity: A Ability: Clear Body Speciality: None. It is not an anomalous specimen, Host. Route: Fully Realized.
Adam read the blue overlay twice, feeling a sudden, cold prickle at the back of his neck.
Blue? Mine is Purple.
[ Correct. ]
So?
[ So, as you are right now? Yours loses ten times out of ten. ]
Steven asked for the battle so casually, so politely, that Adam almost missed the invitation.
"Full six?" Steven offered, adjusting his cuffs. "It's been a long, quiet four days."
"Oho, a real match," Ren hummed, settling in.
"Six," Adam agreed.
They cleared a stretch of flat, sun-baked gravel along the river bank. Ren scrambled up onto a flat ledge with her Weavile, crossing her legs like she'd just bought front-row seats to a theater play.
Steven recalled the Metagross without hesitation. Adam noted the movement: you don't open with your anchor. You open with the piece that shapes the rest of the board.
Adam unclipped his first ball and sent out Primeape, mostly because if he kept the ape caged any longer, it would break the ball from the inside out.
Steven countered with a Skarmory. Then, he did something that took Adam four full seconds to comprehend.
The steel bird didn't attack. It surged straight up nine meters, banked sharply, and shuddered mid-air. A shower of jagged, metallic slivers detached from its feathers, raining down across the gravel bed between them. Small, razor-sharp, scattered everywhere. Then the bird wheeled higher, circling lazily in the heat shimmer.
Sage.
[ Hazard deployment. Caltrops—steel, barbed, dense. It has poisoned the entire ground state for your team. ] A short pause. [ Host... that bird isn't trying to deal damage. ]
I see it.
A knot tightened in Adam's chest, but his pulse spiked with adrenaline. He's setting the trap. Every ground-bound switch-in I make is going to bleed before it even takes a breath.
"Go!" Adam barked. "Fast, before it settles!"
Primeape lunged forward, a blur of white fur and rage, but speed meant nothing when a brawler needed leverage. The moment its foot hit the gravel, metal burrs bit deep. It stumbled, tried to leap for elevation, but couldn't find a clean surface to launch from.
Skarmory folded its wings and swooped straight down the slipstream.
Adam's eyes were fast enough to trace the trajectory, which only made watching it worse. The dive. The wing edge whipping around without a breath of wind-up. The clean, crimson line opening across Primeape's shoulder. The effortless climb back into the sky before the ape's feet even re-touched the stones.
"Aerial Ace," Steven called out, his voice barely raised above the sound of the river. "Again. Then seed the air with Toxic."
That was the part Adam hated. Not the raw speed—the complete lack of wasted motion. Six words in the entire exchange, spoken like a man reading a morning paper.
The second pass opened a gash along Primeape's forearm. The third pass wasn't a blade strike at all; Adam watched a fine, purple mist bloom in the air, catching the ape square across the face. The monkey thrashed, shaking its head violently, trying to charge again, but its footwork was already breaking down.
"He can't reach it," Adam muttered under his breath.
"No," Steven agreed pleasantly from across the field. "He can't."
Adam raised the red-and-white ball. "Return! You're done, Primeape. We regroup."
The recall beam burst from the button—and Primeape dodged it.
It didn't even look at Adam. It kept its bloodshot eyes locked on the sky, shifting half a step left so the red light hissed uselessly into the dirt, before hurling itself into another desperate, hopeless leap toward the clouds.
Adam stood frozen, holding the open ball.
"Ah," Steven murmured. There wasn't an ounce of mockery in his voice, which made the moment burn ten times worse. "Does he ignore orders often?"
"He has anger issues."
The venom acted faster than the bird. Mid-jump, Primeape's knees gave out. It dropped out of the air like a stone, collapsing face-first into the bed of razor-sharp caltrops.
Behind them, Ren let out a low whistle. "Oh, wow, what an amazing showing."
"Shut up, Ren."
"I'm cheering for you!"
Adam stood over the field, letting the silence stretch while Steven waited patiently.
Skarmory was a concrete wall designed to ruin physical attackers. The answer had to be a special attacker, and it had to be something that didn't touch the ground.
No boots. No claws.
"Haunter!"
The ghost didn't burst onto the field; it seeped up through the gravel like ink, hovering effortlessly above the carpet of steel spikes. It floated opposite the armored bird, grinning wide, entirely in its element.
Steven's eyebrows twitched up a fraction of a millimeter. "A ghost. Unconventional."
"Don't chase it," Adam ordered sharply. "Force it down from a distance. Shadow Ball, keep them coming!"
Skarmory stooped into another diving run, but Haunter wasn't there when the beak arrived. It vanished, reappearing directly behind the bird.
The first Shadow Ball caught Skarmory beneath the left wing. It didn't explode so much as seep—a wave of freezing, dark energy soaking straight through the steel plating. Armor was built to deflect edges and impacts. It had no defense against cold decay.
Skarmory pitched upward to gain altitude, but Haunter was already waiting at the crest of the climb, cackling.
The second orb struck it square in the back.
"Aerial Ace," Steven commanded calmly. "Then force a landing."
Adam realized the trap half a second too late. Skarmory didn't try to pull away; it snapped its wings flat and threw itself backward in a blinding mid-air pivot, slamming its metallic wing-edge across Haunter's face before the ghost could phase through.
Haunter snarled, taking the blow, and fired a third Shadow Ball point-blank.
Skarmory didn't make it to the ground under control. The black sphere detonated against its throat, and the steel bird spiraled downward, crashing heavily into its own bed of caltrops. It didn't get back up.
"There we go!" Ren called out.
Adam looked across the field. Steven was smiling. It was the first thing that genuinely terrified Adam. The man had just lost one Pokémon, and he looked like a grandmaster who had confirmed his opponent was taking the bait.
"Claydol," Steven said softly.
The entity that materialized was a heavy, ancient clay idol ringed with unblinking eyes. It didn't engage Haunter. It lowered itself over the caltrops, grounded its base, and pulsed. The air in front of it hardened into a wall of shimmering gold light. A heartbeat later, a second barrier layered over the first.
"Light Screen. Reflect," Steven instructed casually. "Take your time, old friend."
Sage.
[ Dual screens active. Damage output from Haunter reduced by fifty percent. ]
"Yeah," Adam muttered aloud.
Haunter tried anyway. It was vicious, relentless. Shadow Balls slammed into the golden barriers, but they emerged on the other side thin, weak, and robbed of force. The ghost flickered in and out of the rock faces, popping up from new angles, but every time it surfaced, a dozen clay eyes were already tracking it.
Claydol slammed its base into the riverbed, sending a localized shockwave rolling through the stones.
"Earthquake won't touch a levitating ghost," Adam said through gritted teeth. "If it doesn't have a coverage move, it's trapped."
"Wait for it," Steven advised softly.
Ten seconds later, Adam saw the cruel reality. A fully evolved Gengar could have blasted through dual screens through sheer force of will. A Haunter couldn't. It lacked the raw mass to break the mathematical advantage Steven had just built. Steven hadn't countered Haunter; he had simply out-calculated it.
A jagged shard of levitated rock, whipped up by a targeted Ancient Power, caught Haunter across the chest. The ghost slowed down. The second shard dragged it out of the air.
It vanished back into its ball, its wide grin fading last.
Two down. Adam wasn't being out-fought—he was being disassembled, system by system.
"Marowak!"
The bone-wielder hit the dirt, and the caltrops immediately tore into its footpads. It didn't even flinch, growling through the pain as blood dotted the stones.
Steven observed the Marowak's stance, then reached for his belt and recalled Claydol.
"Indulge me," Steven said softly. "Aggron."
Adam's chest tightened, not with dread, but with a sudden, dangerous spike of hope.
Steel and Rock, matched against a Ground-type holding a thick club that doubled its attack. That wasn't just a type advantage. That was an execution waiting for a signal.
"Bonemerang!" Adam shouted. "Both ends! Then crush the gap!"
Marowak whipped the bone forward. The thick club spun like a circular saw, catching Aggron behind the knee on the outward arc. The giant's leg buckled. Marowak snatched the bone out of the air mid-sprint, leaped into the air, and drove the full weight of the weapon upward beneath Aggron's iron chin.
The shockwave vibrated through the riverbed. Eight hundred pounds of armored steel were lifted clean off the ground.
Aggron slammed onto its back with a deafening crash.
Ren stood up on her rock, shouting, "Now that is how you hit!"
Aggron didn't rise.
"Ah," Steven breathed, his eyes wide, looking at Marowak like a man who had just pulled a rare gem out of a pile of slag.
And that was when Adam realized how deep the water really was. Steven wasn't rattled. He was fascinated.
"Cradily," Steven called out.
The creature that materialized looked like an ancient, root-bound barnacle. It anchored itself into the gravel and unfurled a web of pale tentacles. It didn't move to strike.
A soft, hypnotic red light pulsed from its central core, washing over Marowak's eyes.
"Confuse Ray," Steven said smoothly. "Follow up with Giga Drain. Keep the cycle tight."
Adam saw the trap instantly. Steven had watched Primeape refuse a recall. He had seen the slight friction between Adam and his team. He was no longer fighting the Pokémon; he was attacking the chain of command.
"Left!" Adam bellowed. "Marowak, turn left and swing!"
Marowak lurched to the left. Then it spun left again, disoriented, its eyes clouded with red mist. It slammed its club wildly into a boulder, shattering the stone but leaving Cradily untouched.
Coils of green energy erupted from Cradily, wrapping around Marowak's limbs and siphoning its life force back into the ancient plant.
"Stop! Focus on my voice! To your left!"
Marowak didn't ignore him out of spite. It simply couldn't find him through the static in its own brain. It swung blindly at the air until its knees gave out, drained dry.
"That's three," Steven said softly. "I'm sorry. That was a bit cruel."
"It was effective."
"It was," Steven acknowledged, entirely unashamed.
"Beedrill!"
The giant wasp swept over the caltrops, hovering inches above the ground, its dual lances humming with aggressive potential. For the first time all afternoon, Adam had a fully evolved, mobile threat on the field that didn't care about hazard setup.
Cradily launched its green siphoning tendrils, but Beedrill was already gone. It dropped out of the sun at a terrifying angle, lances locked, driving straight through the barnacle's armored stalk like a nail through thin pine.
Once. Twice. A third strike on the return arc before Cradily could even pivot.
The fossilized plant collapsed, dissolving into red light.
"Three!" Ren yelled, leaning forward. "Woho, three to go Adam!"
Steven was already holding his next ball. The smile hadn't left his face. "Armaldo."
The creature that hit the gravel was low-slung, heavily plated, and built like an apex predator designed specifically to crush chitin.
Beedrill struck first, landing two clean, brutal hits across Armaldo's neck plates, but the armor barely scuffed. Armaldo didn't even try to dodge. It absorbed the impacts, whipped its heavy, scythed tail around, and swatted Beedrill out of the sky like a fly.
Adam had two left. And one of them, he wasn't ready to pull.
"Larvitar!"
The rock pokemon slammed onto the field, utterly ignoring the caltrops. It ate mountains for breakfast; jagged gravel didn't mean a thing to its hide. It took a full-force Ancient Power straight to the chest, grunted, and shook it off like dirt.
"Sandstorm!" Adam ordered. "Blind it! Follow with Rock Slide!"
For twenty seconds, it worked. The sky turned gray as a localized tempest of grit tore through the staging area. Larvitar charged through the gloom, pulling a massive slab of canyon wall down directly onto Armaldo's spine. The armor held, but Armaldo's back legs buckled under the sheer tonnage.
Then Steven's voice cut effortlessly through the howling wind.
"Water Pulse, please."
Adam's heart dropped into his stomach.
Rock and Ground.
A compressed ring of high-pressure water erupted through the sandstorm, slamming into Larvitar like a cannonball. It picked the small creature up, launching it eleven meters backward across the gravel.
Larvitar struggled to its feet—because it always got up, but its legs betrayed it on the second step, collapsing into the dust.
Adam recalled it before it could hurt itself further.
"Potential is a promise," Steven said gently, stepping forward as the sandstorm dissipated. "It isn't current reality."
"I know."
"Do you?" Steven countered, his tone mild, but carrying a sharp edge.
Adam found himself disliking the man intensely in that moment.
Five down.
Adam stood alone on the edge of the riverbank, one ball left at his belt, his hand hovering, refusing to touch it.
"You don't have to," Steven offered, noticing the hesitation. "We can stop here. It's been an extraordinarily informative afternoon."
Adam's pride, bruised and battered in front of Ren, bristled. "No."
He didn't reach for a ball. He didn't have to.
From the dark, elongated pool of shadow cast by Adam's boots, a shape rose. Small, smoldering, made of charcoal and smoke. Marshadow stepped onto the caltrops as if the metal spikes were made of light mist, its burning eyes fixed on Armaldo.
The temperature along the riverbank plunged. The sound of the rushing water seemed to recede into the background.
Steven froze. The easy, casual posture vanished in an instant.
"That's not..." Steven started, his voice dropping an octave. "What is that?" He snapped his gaze to Adam. There was no greed in his eyes, only an intense, cold gravity. "It came out of your shadow."
"He likes it there."
"Fascinating," Steven whispered, staring at the small gray figure. "An uncatalogued mythical. Adam... I hope you realize that if the wrong factions learn you have that, your life as you know it ends."
"I'm aware."
Armaldo, lacking the intellect to process ancient dread, roared and charged.
Adam didn't give an order. It wouldn't have mattered if he had.
Marshadow vanished. In the span of a heartbeat, it was inside Armaldo's guard, beneath the sweeping scythes. Its small fist struck the chest plate four times—a rhythmic thump-thump-thump-thump so fast the sounds overlapped into a single crack.
Armaldo kept moving forward for two meters on pure momentum before its brain registered the damage. Then its eyes rolled back, and it collapsed sideways into the dust.
Ren muttered something under her breath—a harsh, foreign curse. "Four," she whispered. "Adam... that's four."
Steven stared at his fallen Armaldo for three seconds. Then he recalled it, pocketed the ball, and walked over to his Metagross, placing a palm against the cold steel of its brow.
"Yes," Steven said quietly, a terrifying kind of excitement blooming in his voice. "Let's see it then."
Adam knew the typing. Ghost against Psychic/Steel. Ghost hit Psychic hard. Psychic hit Fighting, Marshadow's primary typing, just as brutally. On paper, it was a volatile, high-damage mirror match.
But paper didn't account for reality. One of these things was an ancient myth. The other was a perfectly conditioned apex predator.
Marshadow struck first.
It crossed twelve meters without touching the ground between steps. It plunged beneath Metagross's massive front pillar and delivered a shadow-infused strike to the central core, the force of the dark energy shoving eleven hundred pounds of solid iron sideways.
Metagross didn't lose its balance. It used the momentum of the push to pivot on all four legs simultaneously.
Adam saw the blind spot opening as the giant turned. "Left! It's slow on the turn, go left and take the back leg!"
Marshadow went right.
It didn't do it out of malice. It did it because it had fought for centuries without an advisor in its ear, trusting its own predatory instincts.
Metagross was already waiting for it. Steven had uttered a single syllable—"Hips"—a fraction of a second earlier. One word, and the steel titan had anticipated the wide flank.
The massive, iron-sheathed forelimb came swinging around, glowing with a brilliant, blinding white aura, catching Marshadow square across the chest.
Meteor Mash.
The impact sounded like a meteor striking a cliffside. Marshadow was thrown thirty feet across the riverbed, skipping off the gravel before tumbling to a halt.
It had never been hit like that. Not once since Adam had found it.
It rose from the dirt, its smoking head-tendrils flaring with dark fury. It plunged straight into the ground, turning into a flowing ink-stain, and erupted directly beneath Metagross in a massive geyser of pure spectral energy. The eleven-hundred-pound monster was lifted two meters off the ground and slammed down hard onto its side.
Steven looked genuinely stunned. His Metagross was brilliant, but raw, ancient authority couldn't be completely mitigated by tactics.
"Show them why we never lose, my friend!" Steven called out.
Metagross lifted a meter off the dirt, its anti-gravity drive humming wildly, and accelerated straight at Marshadow like a railgun projectile. Marshadow dropped into shadow-form to let the heavy mass pass over, firing a Shadow Punch into the underbelly as it slid past.
"Don't clash head-on!" Adam roared, desperate. "Angling! Hit it as it passes!"
Marshadow ignored him entirely. Drunk on its own power, it locked eyes with the oncoming engine of destruction.
Metagross came in with a radiant, mind-shattering Zen Headbutt. Marshadow met it face-to-face with a maximal-output Shadow Punch.
The collision created a shockwave that threw up a wall of dust and sprayed gravel across the river.
When the air cleared, Marshadow was staggering, its form flickering, losing its physical cohesion. Metagross was battered, its steel plating cracked and smoking, but its four legs were planted firmly in the earth.
With its remaining strength, Marshadow dissolved into a whip of darkness, slashed across Metagross's rear joint, and collapsed into the dirt, unconscious.
Metagross shuddered, its eyes fading to black, and collapsed onto its stomach a second later.
Silence fell over the canyon.
Adam stood frozen, staring at his collapsed mythical.
Steven had won. He still had one Pokémon left in his pocket.
Steven Stone didn't celebrate. He recalled Metagross, walked over, and sat down directly in the dirt beside Adam.
"I see it, just ask," Steven said, looking out over the river.
"How."
"You already know the answer. You just don't like it." Steven picked up a flat river stone and flipped it between his fingers. "First, an admission: You took five of my Pokémon. I want you to think about that before I say anything harsh. Nobody has taken five of my team in over two years. And you did it with a team you've put together."
"I still lost."
"You did. And here is why." Steven tossed the stone into the water. Ripples. "You possess six extraordinary creatures. Truly. That Marowak fought well and made an intuitive adjustment I didn't foresee, and I've been doing this since I was nine years old. Your Larvitar is going to be a force of nature in a few years. But right now? You have six individuals. I have a team."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning when I fight with Metagross, there is no gap between my thought and his execution. When I say now, he has already moved, because he knew what I wanted before the word left my mouth. That took fourteen years. It isn't a strategy you can read in a book. You cannot buy it. And there is no shortcut to accelerate the timeline."
Steven turned his head to look Adam in the eye.
"Your Primeape refused the recall because it didn't trust your judgment over its own rage. Your Marshadow went right when you told it to go left because it views you as an observer, not a commander. That isn't two problems, Adam. It's one problem. That entity in your shadow is the most terrifying creature I have ever stood across from. It should have torn my Metagross apart without taking a scratch. Instead, it traded its life away in an ego clash, because you were standing eight meters away yelling orders it chose not to hear."
Adam stared down at his boots. The words cut deep, precisely because they were devoid of malice.
"It's been two months," Adam said quietly. "You've had fourteen years."
"Precisely," Steven said gently. "That is my entire point. And you know I'm right, or you wouldn't feel the need to defend it."
Adam sat with the cold weight of the statement. It was a brutal, flawless summary of everything holding him back.
Steven stood up, dusting off his knees, and offered a hand. Adam ignored the hand, pushing himself up on his own strength.
"Come to Rustboro," Steven said, unclipping his canteen. "Both of you. There is something in my father's vault you need to see. I've just realized you are precisely the kind of lunatic who needs to see it, which is annoying, because I was rather enjoying being the most interesting man in this canyon."
The Devon Corporation building occupied six massive blocks in the heart of Rustboro City. The lobby was dominated by a prehistoric fossil the size of a haul-truck, which Adam's Larvitar tried to take a bite out of within forty seconds of entering the glass doors.
A suited security guard sprinted across the polished marble, hands flailing. Steven raised a single finger without turning around.
"Let him," Steven said smoothly. "Bill the damage to my personal account."
"Sir! That is an authentic Cradily cranium! It's worth four hundred thousand—"
"Then it's had a remarkably good run. Downstairs, please."
Two sub-levels down, past a security checkpoint requiring three separate keycards, they entered a sterile, white room. In the center stood a reinforced glass display case resting on dark velvet. Under the recessed halogen lights sat two stones.
The first was small, polished, and translucent, harboring a swirling core of crimson and blue energy that seemed to pulse in time with a faint, unseen heartbeat. The second stone was larger and rough-hewn, the same dual-color swirl locked deep inside it.
Ren, who usually had a commentary for everything, went entirely silent.
"The smaller specimen is a Key Stone," Steven explained, stepping up to the glass. "The larger is a Mega Stone. We have not yet identified which species the larger one corresponds to, which represents the bulk of our work here: being confused expensively."
He tapped the glass lightly.
"Together, they trigger an anomaly. For a brief window, a Pokémon that has reached the absolute apex of its evolutionary line force-evolves again."
"Beyond its final form," Adam said softly.
"Beyond its final form. It assumes a shape it cannot sustain on its own. Faster, denser, sometimes altering its primary elemental type entirely. And when the energy depletes, it reverts, exhausted, but fundamentally unchanged." Steven's reflection caught the glare on the glass. "Once per engagement. The stones are not consumed. But you need both. And you need the third element, the part every amateur tries to skip."
"The bond," Ren supplied quietly.
"The bond." Steven beamed at her. "The stones are merely the lock and key. Resonance requires synchronization. There are executives in this building who have held matched sets in the same room as the correct species and achieved absolute silence. They write lengthy whitepapers on 'frequency misalignment,' but the reality is simpler: the Pokémon doesn't trust them enough to break its own physical limits for them."
He leaned back against the display case.
"Where do they originate?" Adam asked, staring at the swirling crimson core.
"Ah," Steven brightened. "Now we enter the realm of myth. There are two competing histories."
He held up a finger.
"Kalos claims priority. They speak of an ultimate weapon fired three thousand years ago, a machine powered by life force that saturated the surrounding geology with radiant energy, creating these stones. They have a neat little legend about a hero and a Lucario. It's a clean story. Most of the world accepts it."
"You don't," Ren noted.
"Clean stories make me nervous. Real history is messy." Steven shrugged. "Also, Kalos has a better public relations department than Hoenn."
He raised a second finger.
"Then we have the Draconid tribes to our east. An older culture, far less concerned with convincing tourists. They claim a meteor struck the continent a thousand years ago, carving out the crater where Sootopolis now rests. They say the dragon of the sky transformed itself to meet the cataclysm because the people's collective need summoned that change. Not a weapon. An impact event, and a bond."
Steven turned to look at Adam.
"I have spent my life crawling through caves filled with extra-terrestrial rock, so adjust my bias as you see fit. But you emerged from Meteor Falls today carrying a creature born of space debris, and the Kalos narrative fails to explain why those falls exist in the first place."
"Where are the rest of them?" Adam asked directly. "The stones."
"Scattered. Hidden in terrible places, which is good news, because it means the collectors haven't ruined them yet." Steven began ticking them off on his fingers. "The stone suitable for a Tyranitar rests high in the volcanic passes above Lavaridge. Extreme heat, unstable terrain."
"Climbing an active volcano," Ren muttered. "Charming."
"The stone for a Gengar resides on an isolated island off the eastern coast. If you intend to train a Gengar, retrieve it before a collector buys the land. As for the Metagrossite..." Steven paused, his eyes narrowing slightly. "I have tracked the location of the Metagrossite personally for six years. When I locate it, I will claim it. I prefer we remain transparent on that point."
"Understood," Adam said.
"And the Lucario stone rests in Kalos, inside a cavern near Geosenge, guarded by the Tower Master of Shalour, who views everyone in Hoenn as enthusiastic amateurs." Steven smiled warmly. "He isn't entirely wrong."
"And a Key Stone for a trainer?"
"There is exactly one in this facility. It belongs to the corporation, and I intend to requisition it the moment I prove my readiness." Steven adjusted his cuffs. "They surface occasionally. Sunken wrecks, ancient burial sites, wealthy estate auctions. When I secure mine and achieve full synchronization with my Metagross, I intend to challenge Wallace in Sootopolis for the championship seat. I would appreciate your presence in the stands."
"We'll be there," Ren said.
"Splendid." Steven straightened his jacket. "In the meantime, Adam, you possess a Metang that has yet to mature, a mythical in your shadow that treats your orders as optional suggestions, and zero stones. You have an immense amount of work ahead of you."
"Yeah," Adam said softly. "I'm starting to realize that."
They stepped out of the Devon tower into the cooling evening air of Rustboro. Ren walked beside him in silence for four full blocks, an unprecedented stretch of restraint for her.
"He beat you with a Blue," she said finally, her hands jammed deep into her jacket pockets.
"I know."
"A Blue that has spent fourteen years with one trainer." She tilted her head up toward the glowing neon of the city skyline. "You get what the lesson was, right? Because if I have to spell it out, it's going to ruin my reputation."
"No need to mention it, I get it."
"I think my team is better in that regard," Ren said, smiling.
"Honestly, you might be right. I focused more on their individual skill than on bonds."
Adam stopped at the crosswalk. The streetlights flickered on overhead, casting his long, dark shadow stretching across the asphalt ahead of him.
There was nothing visible in the dark patch on the ground. But he could feel the cold, heavy presence waiting inside it.
He didn't speak to it. He didn't know what words would even work, and deep down, he was beginning to understand that words weren't the language they needed to be speaking anyway.
AN: If we get to 300 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 500, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123