The heavy stone doors slammed shut behind them, squeezing the already suffocating air of the Core Arena even tighter.
At the rim of the crater Gyarados had smashed into the ground, water seeped out, spreading slowly across the stone—threaded with streaks of shockingly bright red.
Ash stood at the edge of that pit. His fingers still remembered the chill of the Poké Ball, and the faintest, almost imperceptible tremor—his partner's pain echoing through it.
Honestly, he wasn't used to it.
He wasn't used to seeing his own Pokémon hurt this badly.
Fortunately, Gyarados had the temperament of a battle maniac.
Getting battered in a fight? Gyarados really didn't care.
Ash slowly lifted his head. Under the brim of his cap, his gaze cut through the drifting dust and locked onto the far side of the field.
The gray-brown rock behemoth coiled there, cold stone eyes glaring down at him. Its rough, segmented body caught a dull sheen under the overhead lights. At the tip of its tail, a faint residue of the power that had just shattered the golden dragon still lingered in the air.
Stone dust, wet rock, and a thin metallic tang of blood mixed together into a heavy stench.
Brock's face was like carved granite, completely unruffled. Only that deep, still, abyssal scrutiny remained.
The referee's cold voice rang out again:
"Challenger Ash, send out your second Pokémon!"
No hesitation.
Not even half a heartbeat of doubt.
Ash's reply wasn't loud, but it sliced through the dead silence of the arena like a knife.
"Pikachu!"
"Piiiii——ka——CHU!!!"
Answering him came a sharp cry, crackling with pent-up, razor-edged battle lust.
Golden light exploded.
A small body, like a bolt of lightning finally loosed from a bow, crashed down onto the wet stone, scattering a fan of glittering droplets.
Pikachu didn't look back at Ash. Its glossy black eyes blazed with a fury deeper than anything it had shown so far—
And they were locked on the massive Onix.
Pikachu had watched the entire fight with Gyarados.
If this had been a wild melee, it would have charged in on its own long ago.
But this was a Gym battle. It couldn't move until its Trainer called on it.
Ash's voice was calm—almost flat—but there was a chill edge buried in it.
"Partner."
"Don't waste what Gyarados bought us."
"Go all out."
"Take it down."
The words had barely left his mouth when—
"PIKA——!!!"
Pikachu's figure vanished.
Not just a blurred afterimage.
It was simply gone.
The only trace it left was a ring of warped air from instantaneous ionization, and a sharp, eardrum-stabbing crack as compressed air burst.
The next heartbeat—
A golden spear of light, as thick as a man's arm and made of nothing but annihilating electricity, flashed into existence out of nowhere—right at the vulnerable joint where Onix's thick neck met its rocky body.
The armor plates there were thinner, the gaps wider—and still slick with the water Gyarados had flung everywhere in its last struggles.
"Zzzzzla——KRA-KOOM!!!"
The golden spear of destruction, carrying the speed and will to pierce everything, slammed straight in.
Time seemed to freeze on that frame.
In Onix's cold stone eyes, a flicker of stunned disbelief had only just formed—
And then—
"Hss… ROO?!!!"
A short, twisted howl tore out of it—cut off almost immediately.
Its massive rock body convulsed as if something had smashed straight into the core of its weak point, then lost all strength at once, collapsing like a landslide.
"RUMBLE-RUMBLE-RUMBLE——!!!"
The impact shook the entire Core Arena.
Stone fragments and dust, mixed with water driven up by the shock, billowed like smoke.
When the haze began to clear—
Onix's hill-sized body lay sprawled on the soaked rock, completely still.
At the neck joint, a charred, punched-through hole oozed faint wisps of smoke. The wound was deep enough to glimpse the energy channels within. Fine arcs of golden lightning crackled wildly around the edges like a spiderweb, hissing and popping in a grim, fading chorus.
Silence.
Dead silence.
Even the sound of dirty water dripping from the cracked dome onto stone rang out crystal clear.
The referee's flag hung frozen in midair, his mouth half-open, as though he'd forgotten the next line of his script.
For the first time, a change flickered across Brock's stone-hard features.
His pupils contracted a fraction. The deep, still calm in his eyes shattered under waves of sheer disbelief.
A dual-move fusion?
Brock was a very competent Trainer—and that Onix wasn't even his main ace.
With his experience, he could roughly guess what Pikachu had just done.
That was the sort of technique veteran Trainers only attempted after breaking into a higher tier of battle.
After enough training, a Pokémon went beyond mindlessly firing off moves. Once it truly grasped the essence of its techniques, it could begin breaking them down and recombining them.
Brock couldn't name the exact moves Pikachu had fused—
But he could tell there were two. Fused imperfectly, maybe, but fused all the same.
In reality, Pikachu's "trick" was simple.
Volt Tackle was its strongest offensive move—but it needed charge time.
Volt Accelerate was one of its highest-priority moves—almost no wind-up at all.
What Pikachu had done was use Volt Accelerate's zero-startup burst to spin up the electricity in its body, then cancel straight into Volt Tackle mid-skill.
The result:
Slightly slower than pure Volt Accelerate, a little weaker than full Volt Tackle—
but combining both power and speed.
In other words, pushing its combat performance to the absolute limit.
The downside was obvious: the strain on Pikachu's body was enormous.
After firing off a strike like that, it would be stuck in a long recovery period—drained and unable to move. A recoil not unlike Hyper Beam's post-cast paralysis.
But as long as the opponent went down, that "drawback" turned into nothing at all.
Now, Pikachu stood on the soaked stone with its tiny arms folded, tail braced against the ground to keep itself upright.
"…" Ash tugged the brim of his cap down, letting its shadow cover his eyes.
Now they had to wait for Brock's second Pokémon.
That brief window would be enough for Pikachu to steady its breath.
Every gaze in the arena was nailed to that charred, brutal hole in Onix's neck, as if everyone needed to confirm it wasn't a shared hallucination.
One hit.
A clean, absolute, no-questions one-hit KO.
At the entrance passage—
Misty, who had just sprinted back, skidded to a stop so hard her boots nearly slid out from under her. Her orange ponytail flew up with the motion.
Her hand flew to her mouth.
"!!!"
Her wide eyes reflected nothing but the fading afterimage of that golden lightning and the collapsed stone titan.
She had walked in just in time to see Pikachu one-shot Onix.
"Pika…" Pikachu's small silhouette stepped out of the thinning steam and dust.
It was breathing a little faster, golden arcs still dancing over its fur. Its gaze ran coldly over the unmoving Onix—
Then turned, unapologetically provocative, onto Brock himself.
They hadn't known Gyarados all that long, but in Pikachu's heart, that big idiot had already been filed under "little brother."
Even if Pikachu smacked that "little brother" around every time they fought, Gyarados had never once resented it.
Every time its rampage ended with a brutal beatdown, it would just crawl over, tail swaying, to cling to Ash and Pikachu anyway.
Brock drew in a long, steadying breath. The air tasted of rock dust and cold humidity, heavy as it sank into his lungs.
The shock finally ebbed from his face, replaced by something deeper and more solemn—
The raw, unbending will of stone.
He raised his hand. A Poké Ball shot out, red light wrapping around the unconscious Onix.
"Jiro."
His low voice had barely faded when a boy stepped from the shadows—his features similar to Brock's but softer, still young.
His younger brother, Jiro.
Shock still lingered in Jiro's eyes, but his hands were steady as he caught the ball. He cast a worried look at the battlefield, then a nervous, almost reverent glance at that small Pikachu. Clutching the Poké Ball to his chest, he turned and sprinted toward the emergency treatment corridor.
Pikachu had held back.
If that strike had gone for Onix's head, it could have killed it outright.
If it had aimed for the center of the body instead… well, Rock-types had ridiculous vitality. It would've taken more than that.
Brock's gaze returned to Pikachu. The sharp look in his eyes felt like it wanted to peel back every layer of golden fur and see the core of the power hidden underneath.
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