At that exact moment, Flapple unhinged its jaws and spat a stream of thick, brownish acid. A pungent, acrid scent immediately spread through the air, and within seconds, the corrosive fluid was violently sucked into the spinning twisters.
Sensing the powerful centrifugal pull of the acid-infused storm, Deino stumbled but managed to maintain its footing, sprinting erratically across the cracked flagstones. Several times, it passed a hair's breadth away from a swirling vortex of burning acid.
"Flapple, use Air Slash!" Proctor Victor bellowed.
Flapple aggressively beat its wing-peels, launching a volley of razor-thin energy blades that hummed through the air. They flew like a barrage of guided arrows, tracking directly toward Deino.
But Deino was exceptionally limber; twisting its torso, it rolled across the ground to cleanly dodge the Air Slash arcs.
"Flapple, bring it down—Grav Apple!"
A brilliant, deep-emerald aura erupted from Flapple's body, and dozens of heavy, stylized energy apples suddenly materialized in the upper airspace, plummeting down toward the field like meteors.
Deino (Internal Calculations): Oh? My optical arrays log a massive, free nutritional bonus. Millions of apples falling from the stratosphere... and my internal energy cells happen to be registering a hunger deficit.
Deino enthusiastically smacked its lips. Unhinging its jaws, it snapped forward with absolute ferocity.
Deino (Sensory Evaluation): Magnificent flavor! Truly exceptional texturing.
The small dragon's hidden senses flared with delight. It hadn't calculated that the organic projectiles generated by Flapple's Grass-type matrix would taste this exquisite. Amidst a succession of loud, crisp crunching sounds, Deino systematically devoured the falling apples, clearing the entire barrage within seconds before letting out a massive, rumbling burp that echoed across Ring 002.
"Excellent processing, Deino. Purge the residue—Acid Spray!" Feng Che commanded.
Deino forcefully contracted its stomach walls, weaponizing its own hyper-acidic digestive juices to break down the apples before violently vomiting a massive torrent of corrosive acid down the channel.
The high-velocity spray instantly collided with the acidic twisters, triggering a chain reaction that sent lines of corrosive, brownish fluid splashing outward across all four quadrants.
Suddenly, a majestic Latias plunged out of the upper rafters, unchaining a powerful psychokinetic shield that perfectly contained and dissolved the stray acid droplets. Had her barrier failed to clear the airspace, dozens of the surrounding masked traditionalists would have had their facial plates permanently scarred by the fluid.
"Our house offers its deepest appreciation, Latias," Drayden said, inclining his head respectfully toward the eon dragon.
"Think nothing of it, Master Drayden. My protocol dictates I enforce absolute security over the Dragon Shrine while insulating the internal stability of the Unova League," Latias communicated telepathically. Shifting her physical composition, she fluidly compressed her mass to manifest as a young, red-clad human girl, monitoring the crucible with intense fascination.
In her small palm, she held an intact apple siphoned from Flapple's previous attack line—having quietly integrated an unmonitored Ally Switch script to harvest the fruit for herself.
This cloaked human... his biological blueprint leaks a trace of a legendary artifact that triggers an immense, instinctual pull within my core, Latias calculated, her large eyes locking completely onto Feng Che as a trace of clear drool pooled at the corner of her lips.
Latias (Neural Scan Lock): The energetic resonance verifies it... that human is carrying a flawless, completely pristine Soul Dew inside his spatial grid.
Latias (Historical Archive): The sacred Soul Dew belonging to our lineage has been uncoupled and missing from our altars for an extensive duration.
Latias (Existential Risk): Should our house fail to locate and bind a pristine Soul Dew core ahead of schedule, the ancestral combat torque of our entire bloodline will experience a catastrophic, permanent downward shift.
Latias (Medical Assessment): My sovereign brother, Latios, has sustained critical structural trauma... his cellular recovery algorithms require the absolute purity of a Soul Dew to initialize a total cure. I pray this human is willing to barter.
This Latias commands an exceptionally dense sensory intuition... to think her arrays could seamlessly parse the cloaked frequency of the Soul Dew resting inside my spatial ring, Feng Che calculated silently, his visor logging her internal gaze.
Should my console manually unseal the Soul Dew to structure a high-leverage transaction with the twin dragon guardians of the shrine, the long-term geopolitical dividend would comfortably multiply. The math is highly favorable; a Soul Dew yields zero tactical utility to outside species, its absolute peak optimization limits locked strictly to the Latias and Latios lineages.
"Deino, lock the match—Dragon Pulse!"
Deino unhinged its jaw, projecting a gargantuan, pulsing beam of draconic plasma. The violet energy violently mutated mid-air, formatting three roaring, feral dragon phantoms that charged Flapple with catastrophic momentum.
Flapple attempted to deploy its speed engine to clear the vector, but its visors flagged an immediate lockdown error—the local spatial coordinates had been completely compressed and anchored by the raw gravity of the Dragon Pulse aura. It thrashed its wings, but its motor lines failed to breach the barrier.
"Flapple, contract your chassis—Withdraw, then immediately layer Iron Defense!"
Proctor Victor's battle experience was immense. He instantly diagnosed that Flapple's nervous system had been suppressed by the sheer majesty of the dragon aura, its evasion vectors short-circuited.
Flapple rapidly pulled its limbs inward, transforming into a tight, dormant apple shell as a brilliant silver-gray metallic sheen rolled across its hide. The Iron Defense initialized successfully, maximizing its material density.
BOOM!
The three feral plasma dragons slammed point-blank into the node. Under the weight of the Dragon Pulse, Flapple's protective apple shell was violently fractured into splintered shards. Yet, when the smoke cleared, the core asset had completely vanished from the turf.
An elegant defensive sequence... I comprehend Victor's tactical calculations now, Feng Che analyzed smoothly.
He deployed Withdraw first to maximize Flapple's innate impact insulation against Dragon-type damage, before layering Iron Defense to buffer its structural hit points. Finally, the exact millisecond the Dragon Pulse detonated, he authorized Shell Smash to let Flapple trade its shattered armor for a massive velocity boost, allowing its system to forcefully shatter the spatial lock.
"Flapple has submerged into the sub-soil layer. Deino, ground your senses and monitor the tectonic lines for any trace of movement!" Feng Che barked across the field.
Right on cue, the dirt violently heaved, and a dark shadow aggressively breached the surface directly beneath Deino, unchaining a set of razor-sharp, flashing fangs. Though Flapple possessed a remarkably compact physical clearance, the raw piercing density hard-coded into its dragon teeth was undeniable; sustaining a direct bite would force Deino to register a critical health drop.
But before Deino could execute an evasion script, dozens of identical reptilian shadows suddenly broke out from the surrounding flagstones concurrently.
"A Double Team matrix layered over a Substitute projection..."
"This Flapple is exceptionally clever, weaponizing visual distortions to exhaust Deino's processing bandwidth."
"Deino, level the entire quadrant—Flamethrower!"
Deino drew a massive, deep breath into its chest plates before unchaining a torrential, high-output stream of roaring white-hot flame.
Flapple's processors completely failed to calculate that an unevolved infant specimen could project a Flamethrower commanding a thermal payload that comfortably mirrored a fully matured Charizard.
The sea of fire swept across Ring 002, instantaneously incinerating Flapple's holographic illusions into ash. The unmitigated intensity of the thermal output was so extreme that the surrounding concrete bedrock was baked a deep, molten crimson—vividly tracking a hair's breadth away from dissolving into liquid magma.
Standing dead-center of the blackened, smoking scorched earth, the small Deino hoisted its head, unchaining a spectacular, earth-shaking roar that comfortably matched the vocal frequency of a fully evolved Hydreigon. Its entire presence radiated the raw, suffocating field of an absolute apex hegemon.
Auditing this young, extraordinarily vibrant battle roar from the shadows of the gallery, the depressed Hydreigon monarch that had traveled from the depths of the caverns began violently weeping, thick tears pouring from its three independent craniums.
Hydreigon (Maternal Emotional Overload): My beautiful child... your mother has saddled your upbringing with an unforgivable debt of absence.
Hydreigon (Lineage Validation): Yet, my heart is flooding with absolute, uncompromised joy. Your system has consolidated such immense physical power... and though my analytics cannot isolate exactly why your framework has chosen to suppress its evolution into Hydreigon...
Hydreigon (Maternal Solace): ...my sensors verify your cellular health is pristine. That clears every ledger for my house.
"Look over at the boundary walls! The wild Hydreigon patriarch from the deep caverns is openly weeping... Could this challenger's Deino command a direct biological connection to its lineage?"
"I archive historical data logs confirming that Hydreigon monarch spent an extended seasonal cycle wandering the external wild grids years ago. Could this infant have been sired during that exact deployment?"
"The probability is exceptionally high! But if its genetic traits are this pristine, why does the Deino refuse to initialize its multi-stage evolutionary rewrite?"
"Could its cellular engine contain a hidden, fatal physiological defect that blocks metamorphosis?"
The surrounding gallery of masked traditionalists unraveled into an intense chorus of whispering and analytical speculation.
Right at that chronological intersection, the authentic Flapple finally materialized at the margin of the smoke. Its optical sensors had turned completely crimson with absolute, manic desperation, thick bands of dark draconic energy violently crackling around its wing-peels as it prepared to launch its final, high-stakes gamble.