Chapter 224: Rayquaza: DAD!! COME SAVE ME!! THE NON-FLYING TYPE IS HITTING ME!!
Leon made the decision in about a quarter second.
"Incineroar — move!!"
White light, and the wrestler-cat Pokémon was already sprinting toward the captured Wallace before fully materializing, clearing the distance and erecting a Protect barrier between Wallace and the expanding Glaciate wave.
The cold ring swept through.
One second. Two. Three.
On the fourth second, the Protect held.
Elsewhere across the ruins, every combatant who had time had done the same — pulling their Pokémon into Protect configurations, humans sheltering behind them, letting the wave pass over.
When it ended, there was a moment of absolute quiet.
The Protect barriers dissolved. Vision cleared.
Alder looked around and felt his breath stop.
Ice. Everywhere.
The ruins were gone under it — every stone surface coated in crystal, intricate formations of ice grown up between the rubble like something architectural. Snowflakes drifted down in the sudden stillness. The ground glittered with irregular frost formations that caught what light remained and scattered it in cold sparks.
And the sky.
The sky was the part that made every person present go quiet.
A continuous canopy of inverted ice formations hung from the cloud ceiling — ice formations that shouldn't have been possible, formed from the freezing of the Primordial Sea rain where the Glaciate wave had hit it at altitude. The sky looked like the underside of a glacier. Like something that belonged in the deep ocean, transposed overhead.
"That's—" Colress had stopped mid-motion and was looking up with the unguarded expression of a scientist confronted with a genuinely interesting phenomenon. "Remarkable."
"Remarkable is barely the word." Wallace had also looked up, and the person responsible for capturing him might have been surprised by the expression on his face — not fear, not anger, but the particular bright-eyed reverence of a man whose aesthetic sense has been struck by something without warning. "This is extraordinary. The Contest applications alone—"
"The ice dragon's power." Mammon exhaled slowly, looking up at the frozen sky. He'd known theoretically — in the games, Black Kyurem had once frozen the entire city of Opelucid in the story; the end credits showed Drayden still dealing with the ice. In the movies, Kyurem had frozen Primal Groudon with a single shot.
All of that had been abstract data.
This was standing under a sky that had been frozen solid by a move that, in the games, was barely stronger than a standard Icy Wind, and feeling the gap between text description and reality land somewhere in the chest.
I want it, was Mammon's honest internal assessment.
Game Glaciate had 65 power. They called it "Blizzard's disappointing little cousin." This is not that.
The ice crackling sound began before the silence had fully established itself—
CrackCRACKcrack—
Primal Groudon's body blazed back to red. It broke free of the ice — lava-light seeping through the fracture lines — and rose to its full height.
"ROOOARR!!"
The roar was personally offended in a way that was unmistakable even without understanding the language.
I HELPED YOU FIGHT THE FAT FISH AND YOU FROZE ME. TWICE.
White Kyurem paid no attention to this.
The Glaciate had ended, but the fight had not.
Hmmm~!
White Kyurem's turbine cycled — the red-orange heat cycling through cold again, the chill preceding the move by a full second.
Blizzard.
The storm erupted from White Kyurem's position and swept across the entire battle zone — visibility reduced to approximately nothing, wind strong enough to physically move anyone not anchored or sheltering.
"Blizzard!" Mammon ordered.
Primal Kyogre opened its jaws and answered with its own — ice meeting ice, the two Blizzards detonating against each other at the midpoint. Dark Mewtwo and the Shiny Genesect added their own to the exchange, three streams of freezing wind pushing against White Kyurem's single storm.
Three-on-one.
The push-pull lasted several seconds before White Kyurem's volume and power simply started winning.
Desolate Land side:
Primal Groudon was drawing breath, white light building in its maw, another Solar Beam—
—but with its attention fixed entirely on Primal Kyogre, it didn't register the green shape until it had already arrived.
SLAM.
Young Rayquaza hit Primal Groudon in the left cheek with Extreme Speed.
Groudon's head tilted. The Solar Beam fired at the wrong angle, striking the frozen sky directly.
The impact point cracked.
What followed was genuinely spectacular in a way that nobody had intended: the frozen sky ceiling at that location gave way, and the water that had been held in suspension above it — Primordial Sea's rain, frozen in place — came down all at once.
A cascade.
Like a river falling from the sky, except the Blizzard below caught the water as it fell and froze it on the way down, and the refreezing mass extended upward into a column, and the column was large, and the column was fast—
A frozen pillar formed between the sky and the earth, crackling into existence in about three seconds, and everyone in range stopped to stare at it.
"Hm," said Colress.
"Amazing," said Alder, who didn't mean it in a positive way.
Primal Groudon turned its head toward the young Rayquaza.
"ROOOARR!!"
The roar was different in texture from its earlier ones — specifically, more personal.
You.
You hit me. Me.
Do you understand what you've done.
Young Rayquaza backed up, fast. Kept its eyes on Groudon. Assessed.
Groudon couldn't fly. Rayquaza had the aerial advantage. In a pure battle, this was manageable. Twenty-eighty odds, maybe, but manageable.
Compared to going anywhere near White Kyurem, it was an excellent assignment.
The young Rayquaza held its ground.
Groudon's expression went from offended to extremely purposeful.
"Giovanni. I am going to use this Rayquaza as a jump rope."
"That's fine," said Giovanni, keeping his expression neutral and deciding not to ask the obvious follow-up question about whether Groudon could realistically jump.
(It did know Aerial Ace. The trajectory was, theoretically, upward. Probably.)
The Blizzard exchange resolved itself after a few more seconds, the combined output pushing back against White Kyurem enough to prevent clean contact.
But what followed was worse.
Out of the remaining snow and mist — no warning, no sound preceding it — a grey-black shape materialized at close range.
Black Kyurem had used the Blizzard as cover.
"ROOOARR!!"
The Cross Thunder was already live, the electrical ring crackling as it drove directly at Primal Kyogre—
"Protect!!"
Kyogre pulled back. Green barrier up.
BOOM.
The Freeze Shock hit the Protect and transferred — all that force driving through the barrier's surface, the temperature differential so extreme that ice was already forming on the inside of the Protect before the impact was fully processed.
Kyogre held.
"Focus Blast!!"
Dark Mewtwo — single arm raised, one blue sphere condensed in under half a second — launched it at Black Kyurem.
The Focus Blast detonated against the Freeze Shock.
The Freeze Shock didn't stop.
The Protect's time ran out.
CrackCRACKCRACK—
Primal Kyogre took the Freeze Shock full on. It went backward — not gracefully, not controlled, just the physical consequence of that much force contacting that much mass — and the ice crystals that formed on contact were thick enough to be visible from the ground below.
Kyogre's cry was pain.
"Techno Blast!!"
Shiny Genesect was already low, cannon charging—
"ROOOARR!!"
Black Kyurem snapped backward toward the Genesect before the shot could fire — a single sweep of cryogenic wind from Blizzard, not a full move, just incidental usage — and both Dark Mewtwo and the Shiny Genesect were scattered, knocked off their previous positions.
"Mammon!! I don't think we're winning!!"
Reshiram's voice in Mammon's head was not calm.
Primal Kyogre wasn't keeping pace with Black Kyurem. Dark Mewtwo and Genesect weren't filling the gap. The math wasn't adding up.
"Don't panic. We still have plays left."
Mammon was calm about it. He'd run this scenario in his head before coming here and hadn't liked the numbers then either. He'd prepared for this.
"Rayquaza — call your father. Or your mother. Whichever one picks up."
He turned to locate the young Rayquaza.
Primal Groudon had it by the tail.
Groudon was — it was slamming it into the ground. Left, right, left, right, Rayquaza's head bouncing off the frozen stone with each impact, small cartoon stars practically visible from the angle Mammon was watching.
Slam. Slam. Slam.
"Rayquaza. Are you okay?"
Mammon stared.
How. You have Extreme Speed. It can't fly. How did it catch you by the tail.
Young Rayquaza's eyes gradually refocused. It took a moment to fully return to consciousness. Then—
Young Rayquaza went very red.
"THAT IS IT. I WILL MAKE THIS CREATURE SUFFER."
A pause.
"DAD!! COME HERE RIGHT NOW!! THE NON-FLYING TYPE IS HITTING ME!! IT'S HITTING ME, DAD—!!"
(End of Chapter)
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