Drayden’s next pokémon was larger than his first, though much of its height was its slender, graceful neck that stretched nearly a full metre from its body. Two long plumes extended out from the back of its head, fluttering in an unseen wind. Strangest was its body; it looked almost cloudlike, with its feathers puffing up around it, shifting in that same unseen wind.

Altaria, Drayden’s favoured option for flying types that were beyond tyrunt.

Its beak, the same colour as the fluff of its body, cracks open as it sings a short, beautiful stanza. Then its eyes, somehow both beady and kind, land on Shandíín flying high above, still basking in the attention of the crowd. In only a moment, it seems to take Shandíín’s measure before it glances at Drayden as if it is more concerned with its trainer than its opponent. Regardless, its cloud-like body shifts even more, and two long wings stretch out to its side. With a single graceful flap, the altaria slowly rises an almost unnatural distance into the air, looking more like it was levitating than flying.

For a moment, the altaria circles in the air above Drayden, a lilting lullaby on its beak. Aidinza considers the flying dragon as his hand returns once more to the pokéballs by his side. Shandíín had been burning the candle from both ends for nearly ten minutes, pushing his body beyond its limits with agility. He had also not escaped physically unscathed from his final attack on the tyrunt; he was favouring his left wing, the same wing he had used to slam the tyrunt into the ground. The sheer speed he had slammed the wing into the heavy form of tyrunt had hurt him as well.

In a different match, Aidinza probably would have forfeited Shandíín; the fire-type had performed beyond Aidinza’s wildest expectations and deserved a break.

But this was a match against Drayden; Aidinza could not afford to spit out water, even if it came with a bit of sand; he needed every advantage he could get.

The question then was, what could Shandíín even manage to do? The altaria was a step above the tyrunt. A fully evolved dragon trained by the leader of the Pheyan’atho, a man who has fought tens of thousands of battles. But worse, it was fully capable of flight, entirely negating Shandíín’s greatest advantage against the tyrunt.

At this point, with how tired Shandíín was, Aidizna doubted that the fletchinder would even be faster than the altaria.

Which meant Shandíín had a very limited window to do something that could stick.

Unfortunately, before Aidinza could come up with an answer for that, Drayden broke the uneasy ceasefire. With a piercing cry and a mighty flap of its cloudlike wings, the altaria surged forward at a blistering speed, utterly at odds with its previous lilting flight.

“Just a little bit longer, Shandíín!” Aidinza calls as the bird tilts downwards, trading height for speed as it cedes airspace to the charging altaria. It was obvious that Aidinza had underestimated the ember pokémon, as it kept ahead of this new, fresh challenger. He could work with that; at a much lower volume, he speaks again. “We’re not going to have long to make our mark here.”

But before Shandíín could even acknowledge the quiet words, the altaria spits a long spray of flickering, blueish, translucent vapour at him. The attack was slow, at least in comparison to the insane speed of the beams of draconic energy that the tyrunt had been throwing about, but there was not even a measure of effort to it; in one moment, the altaria was surging forward, and in the next this blast of breath was forcing Shandíín to pull up out of his dive.

Then two more long streams lash out from the altaria, the first forcing Shandíín to bank harshly and the second forcing the bird to twist downwards. It was corralling the fletchinder, almost leisurely gaining on the flying type as it forced Shandíín into manoeuvres that sacrificed speed and position. With only three attacks, it had coerced Shandíín into flying away from his opponent, leaving the fletchinder with few offensive options.

Drayden was taking the fight easy, slowly guiding it towards an inevitable conclusion and conserving his pokémon’s energy. He wanted his altaria to be fresh for whatever came next; he wanted this to be clean.

And frustratingly, it seemed like Drayden would be getting that clean fight. Every blast of the altaria’s breath attack was placed with surgical precision to force Shandíín to either bleed speed dodging or force him to stay nearly directly in front of the altaria.

Aidinza needed to do something, or the two of them would be choked out of the fight. But he struggled to think of what he could do; he had never been in this position before. He usually let Astazhei bully flying types out of the air or had Naazin act the part of the tyrunt, blasting flying types from a position of defensive impunity. But how was Shandíín meant to attack an enemy that seemed to so easily corral him in the air? How could Shandíín do anything when he was stuck flying away from his enemy?

What could a pokémon do when they are flying through the air and have a pokémon directly behind them?

Aidinza just did not have the experience to know.

Shandíín, on the other hand, lacked Aidinza’s inexperience and felt even more pressingly the looming defeat, the exhaustion in his wings, and the sputtering of the power inside him.

So he made a move, and with a startling suddenness, he flipped upside down. His forward momentum, which had managed to keep ahead of the altaria by the scarcest of amounts, bleeds from him as the aerodynamics that made him so suited to speed turned against it. Gravity, now unopposed, tugs the bird unhindered towards the earth and underneath the altaria.

The altaria, its beak glowing with the blueish, translucent light it had been using to corral the fire bird the entire fight, flared its wings half a second later, a span nearly three times anything that Shandíín had to offer, dragging against the air as it tilts to aim a point blank range breath at the fletchinder.

It was a matter of fractions of a second and the barest of inches. Half a moment, more or less, would have changed the outcome immeasurably.

But Shandíín does not make it. He comes as close as possible, but rather than letting the altaria slip past him and expose its vulnerable underside, their speeds equalise, and instead, he was facing up at the looming front of the altaria, no wind in his wings or speed to call on to avoid what would come next.

The altaria’s beak opens, and it spits out the fight-ending deluge of translucent vapour as Shandíín gives one last defiant cry.

Aidinza had Shandíín’s pokéball in his hand in the same moment, expanding it and pressing the return button. The fight was over; no more tricks to see, only to spare pain to spare Shandíín.

But he was not faster than the altaria, and dragon breath slammed into the fire type’s chest, sending the bird hurtling towards the floor in an uncontrolled spiral, utterly limp and smoking with the residue of the powerful Move that had just slammed into him.

Halfway through his descent, the red beam of the pokéball lashes out and catches him, returning him to the stasis of the pokéball to rest and recover.

“The Challenger’s pokémon has been eliminated by knockout! Challenger, choose your next pokémon!”

Aidinza squandered the opportunity, and with almost contemptuous ease, Drayden had reset the fight, arresting Aidinza’s momentum and Shandíín’s heroic effort. Well, not all of his efforts, Aidinza thinks to himself as his hand falls to his second pokéball. Shandíín managed to essentially give Aidinza the opportunity to start the fight with a counter to Drayden’s pokémon rather than the other way around.

Then a pained cry splits the air, and Aidinza’s eyes snap up to Drayden’s altaria high above. An orange-burning glow spreads through the bundled fluff coating the altaria, racing through strands and clumps of the woollen feathers at such burning intensity that the outline of individual plumes could be made out from the mass.

A grin curls at Aidinza’s lips as he realises that he might have squandered the opportunity, but Shandíín had not, managing to score a searing hit in the bare moments he was facing his opponent and managing to ignite the altaria’s feathers.

The burn had not spread far; the glowing smoulders sputtered out not long after Aidinza had looked up, but it left behind a patch of blackened, limp feathers covering where the altaria’s right wing met its body, exposing the knobbled bulge of its shoulder joint.

Not a crippling injury, but it was well beyond good enough.

Naazin appears on the field a moment later, his lazy blue eyes casting around the arena for his opponent before they catch Drayden. The Clauncher’s thoughts, beyond searching for the next nap spot, were inscrutable at the best of times, and without being inside the crustacean’s head, there was no telling what he thought as he eyed the opposing trainer.

But the slow stretch of his orange, segmented body, as his eyes drifted away from his trainer’s opponent to his own, and the long flex of his powerful primary claw, was as eager for a fight as Naazin ever really got.

There was no restful pause this time; within moments of Naazin being released, the altaria spat another translucent stream of dragon breath at the clauncher, clearly intending to seize the same control that had almost left it unharmed against Shandíín. A good plan, doubly so because Naazin lacked anywhere close to the speed of Shandíín to keep ahead of the attack.

“Bubble beam.” If not for the fact that, unlike Shandíín, Naazin was very capable of standing his ground. A current of dozens of bubbles explodes out of the clauncher’s primary claw, spilling into the air in a concentrated beam, glimmering in the sterile floodlights of the gym.

The two attacks, both translucent in vastly different states, slam together with a crash and explosion of energy and smoke. Viscous, chemical water splatters everywhere as the crowd cheers their new champion.

But Naazin, unlike Shandíín, does not give any attention to the crowd, merely eyeing his opponent high above.

“Smack Down.” The clauncher’s large primary claw slams into the earth in front of him, sending a swarm of shattered rocks exploding into the air in front of him; then he skitters in a shockingly tight circle, bringing his tail around to slap the rocks, sending them rocketing at the flying dragon in grapeshot.

The altaria dove to avoid the smack down, easily twisting away from it in graceful motion as it spits another dragon breath at Naazin. But like the first, a stream of bubbles met it immediately, neutralising it utterly.

“Water Pulse cut it off.” The pulsating, dizzying ring of water was in the air before Aidinza had even managed to finish the order. Like a disorientating riptide, the water pulse lurched through the air on a collision course with the altaria’s dive. The altaria attempts to rip itself out of that way, long wings flaring to catch as much air as possible, but before it could reach full extension, its shoulder buckled in on itself, instinctively flinching away from the painful burn.

Naazin’s water pulse slams into the altaria’s side, the concentric turbulence tearing the altaria into an uncontrolled tumble. Despite the force of the blow, it seemed as trifling as a direct hit from Naazin could be, water merely soaking into the hefty fluff protecting the altaria, as the dragon evened out its flight.

Just in time to catch a grapeshot of energy-infused rock to the face, causing its wings to lock up and a shudder of greyish energy to dye across its body.

Smack down was a confusing move, in ways Aidinza struggled to understand. It was just a fact that Naazin’s water pulse hit harder than smack down; not only was Naazin a water type, but his massive primary claw was uniquely suited to imparting more power to the move. But despite lacking the beguiling force of Naazin’s water pulse, the crack of smack down slamming into the atlaria sent it hurtling to the ground, powerless to take control of its body.

But he did not need to understand why it worked to knowthat for the next several seconds the altaria would be incapable of flight.

And helpless to avoid what was coming next. “Rockslide.”

The pollex of Naazin’s primary claw digs into the earth, tearing up a deep furrow of dirt and loose stone that travelled further than his body’s reach before exploding upwards in a tall arc.

Aidizna did not really understand the mechanics of smack down, but he had a great deal of understanding for rockslide. He knew with intimate familiarity the mind-flinching terror of when the ground collapsed and raced to become the sky.

Naazin’s rockslide, learned in the little hours of the morning with a device the size of Aidinza’s fist, was a pale imitation of a real rockslide.

But an imitation was more than enough.

The altaria tries to brace itself as its cottonlike feathers glow and begin rapidly growing, but its leaden wings were sluggish to react, and the growth of its body was not fast enough to cover its head.

Dozens of fist-sized rocks slam down on the altaria, with terrible, cracking force, as clumps of dirt explode into disorientating clouds all across the altaria’s form. The dragon flinches away from the attack, eyes closing as it tries to tuck its long, vulnerable neck into the rapidly grown fluff in a flustered panic.

But even that peeled back, flaking away into a formless energy as the altaria lost focus on the defensive move, leaving it even more vulnerable.

A vulnerability that Naazin took immediate advantage of as a second water pulse sloshed through the air. The water pulse crashed down in a riptide of force that swept up the altaria and sent it twisting over itself in a crosscurrent of turbulence until it was doubtful the dragon even knew which way was up.

But that was not the end of it; before the water pulse had even properly connected, a second rockslide was slamming down from the skies, catching the altaria mid-air and sending it slamming into the ground with flinching force.

Desperately, the altaria lashes out, trying to break out of the combination barrage juggling it across the arena floor. It blindly spits out a sustained beam of purplish energy sharper and more potent than the dragon breath that it had been spewing for most of the fight. The beam carves across the battlefield, tearing chunks out of the ground with all the terrible power that the altaria’s almost lackadaisical dismantling of Shandíín had only hinted at.

But it misses Naazin, pulled too short; the altaria, dizzy from being tossed halfway across the field and unsteady from the crash of the earth down upon it, was too disorientated to properly aim.

And too disorientated to realise when it should have stopped, as the chaos and disorientation overtook it, and it turned its beam well beyond anywhere Naazin could have been, catching a nearby wall.

The beam, too close to dissipate even in the slightest, explodes. The force sent the already befuddled dragon flying backwards, its own power turned against it in the daze and confusion.

But not even its self-hurt gave Naazin pause, and he kept up the pressure, catching the altaria in another water pulse that bounced it off the same wall it had just blown itself away from and sent the earth crashing down on it as it was pinned up against the wall.

The altaria was being overwhelmed, it had its flight torn from it, then had the earth become the sky, then had even the concept of where was up and down ripped away as it was tossed around like a leaf in a storm.

This was one of the innumerable plans of the Pheyan’atho; domineering and brutal, it leveraged all of Naazin’s strengths and forced the altaria, a powerful pokémon in its own right, into complete irrelevancy.

It was the prize Shandíín had won by triumphing against a pokémon he had no right to win again and going above and well beyond in landing a debilitating blow against his next opponent.

Even if Drayden had something up his sleeve, it would be impossible for altaria to pull it off in its current state. Even if it could hold itself together for long enough to not flinch from the fist-sized rocks cracking down on it or the dirt clumps blinding its eyes, it had proven too dizzy to aim properly, to the point where it had hurt itself and not even come close to singeing Naazin.

Drayden, it seemed, agreed.

“I am switching pokémon.” For the first time in days, Aidinza heard Drayden’s voice loud and clear, and despite what he had expected, it was not shaking with some barely concealed rage. It was calm and measured.

But there were cracks in the stoicism on his face, his breaths too measured, and the slightest hint of a frustrated flush darkening the skin visible above his beard.

The altaria withdraws in a flash of red light, avoiding by the barest of inches taking another water pulse unbraced. But Aidinza was unconcerned; even if the altaria made another appearance in the battle, it was weakened terribly; he doubted anything caught in that… bombardment would be able to shake it off with only a few minutes rest.

Though, something tugged at the back of his mind, a detail not illusive enough to forget it existed, but enough to not grasp it, yet not enough to know what it was.

He shakes that feeling off as he focuses on what Drayden would send out to replace the altaria. There were dozens of potential picks, some that would force him to withdraw Naazin himself, sending the two trainers down the Dunsparce den of trading switches, and just as many that Naazin would be able to make the difference for Aidinza’s next pokémon.

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A moment later, in a flash of red light, Drayden threw a wrench in all of Aidinza’s, and the Pheyan’atho’s plans.

A long serpentine form, nearly cresting over a full nine feet, materialised on the battlefield. It was mostly blueish green, with patches of moppish white fur covering two arms that it had tucked against its chest as if to reduce its gargantuan bulk in some way. Its face, with two kind pink eyes framed by almost childish yellow eyebrows, a borderline comical moustache, a patch of beardish fur, and four segments of clumped ‘hair’ created an almost disorientating juxtaposition with its size.

This was a drampa, a pokémon that Aidinza, at worst, expected to meet as his final hurdle against Drayden.

Drayden was looking to end this fight, right here and right now.

Aidinza’s mind raced, tumbling over dozens of plans the Pheyan’atho had stuffed into his tired mind, trying to account for every eventuality. But this just was not part of them; the idea that drampa would be sent out here, the third pokémon had been absurd.

The Ya’an-ah’s thoughts freeze, as he feels something watching him. He looks up, and sees the drampa staring at him, rather than its opponent. The dragon’s kindly eyes shift from him, to its own trainer, then back again. It lingers on Aidinza, the pink of its eyes… deepening. It seemed to be studying him, committing his face and form to memory, and Aidinza’s mind drifted unbidden to tales of it burning down the houses of the bullies of its friends.

He shook his head, breaking eye contact with the dragon. He needed to focus.

Naazin needed to stay in, the Naisho’h decided; he needed to weaken the drampa, or Aidinza’s entire team would be run roughshod over. Or maybe more realistically, he needed to get the drampa angry; as placid as the pokémon naturally looked, it hid a terrible temper that could overwhelm its better judgement.

“Water Pulse. We need to get it angry.” Once more, the dizzying, pulsating ring lurched through the air; the drampa was far too large to rip off its feat like Naazin had done to the altaria, but even without the disorientating effect of being caught in a riptide on land, the water pulse was still one of Naazin’s most devastating moves.

The drampa let out a single chuff that sounded almost amused to Aidinza’s ears, accompanied by a short burst of dragon breath that slammed into the water pulse and overpowered it easily.

A hush fell over the crowd; they had grown quiet as they watched Naazin’s dismantling of the altaria, but this was a bone-dry silence. The drampa had turned aside Naazin’s attack with not just contemptuous ease but genuine contempt.

It was a statement of the sheer gulf between the two pokémon.

The dragon’s kind pink eyes did not seem quite so kind in that moment, as its gaze slowly pulled from Naazin to Aidinza, the easy contempt that batted away Naazin’s move still lit in its eyes.

A moment passes, and the dragon explodes forward. Its serpentine body coiled underneath it, and the furred claws curled up against its body lashed out to slam against the ground, throwing it forward. Its body undulated in the air, driving itself forward with an unseen

propellant.

“Smack Down, keep it away from you.” Naazin’s claw smashes into the ground once more, and a moment later, a grapeshot of stone was rocketing towards the drampa. Dozens of rocks slam against the drampa with shattering force, but it was not the drampa’s scales that shattered. The rocks explode into shards of stone, ricocheting wildly in a cloud of pulverised stone. Grey energy hardly even began shuddering across the drampa’s form before dissipating, so ineffective that it did not even give the dragon pause as it bullied through the attack.

Before Aidinza could call anything else, the drampa slams down in front of Naazin. The force of its landing cracks the ground, sending the clauncher reeling. One of its claws snaps out, glowing with a rich purple light, smashing into the clauncher with a terrible crack and sending him skidding across the ground like a stone across water.

The water gun pokémon scrambles to arrest his motion, his lesser claw attempting to jab into the ground as his larger primary claw lets out a short burst of highly pressurised water, but by the time he had managed that, the drampa was already in motion again, chasing after the lesser pokémon with dogged determination.

“Aqua Jet, get out of there,” Aidinza shouts, a desperate tinge to his voice. Naazin, no matter how resilient he was, would not be able to take another blow. It was questionable if he had even weathered the first blow; the water type was sluggish to react to the order, his stabilisation claw sluggish to plant itself, and his primary claw listing slightly to the side.

But it was fast enough, a shell of water forming over his scuffed actual shell, and his primary claw spitting out a sharp burst of water, flinging him backwards, away from the approaching drampa.

However, fast enough did not mean good enough. The drampa once more smashed down on the just vacated ground with earth-shattering force, and not missing a beat as its prey jettisons away from it, swung its long serpentine head towards the retreating form of Naazin, and a blinding orange sphere formed at the tip of its mouth, crackling with power.

“Naazin, get out of there!” The ball shoots out with incredible speed, catching the retreating form of Naazin in a bare heartbeat. The energy consumed the clauncher, tearing across his orange-white plates before exploding with incredible force.

The explosion sent Naazin straight into the wall, denting the aged concrete and burying him inside, the sheer force of the impact shaking the building as the deafening crunch of concrete and carapace filled the air.

Aidinza stood there in shock for a long moment. That had been brutal. There had been no contest; it was only describable as a fight in the cruellest of terms. He feels something watching him, and he shakes himself out of his shock just long enough to look up to see the drampa staring at him once again.

You could have avoided this, it’s eyes seemed to say. But you had to rouse my kind anger, they accused.

Aidinza was not sure how his hands did not shake as they slowly lowered to the pokéball on his belt. But before he could retrieve Naazin’s ball, the loud sound of shifting rock filled the arena.

With almost glacial slowness, Naazin pulled himself out of the crater in the wall. He was easily in the worst condition that Aidinza had ever seen the crustacean, not even in battles that had left Naazin unconscious and defeated had he looked half as bad as he did taking that single blow. Thick cracks webbed across his carapace, one of his antennae was bent forward, two of his legs seemed to limp and trail against the ground as he shuffled forward, and one of his eyes was forced closed, whether through pain or swelling.

Yet the water-gun pokémon merely stabbed his stabilising claw into the ground and levelled his own blue-eyed stare at the drampa so terribly beyond his capabilities.

He was still standing.

Aidinza reached for the clauncher’s pokéball; this was far beyond anything he could expect his pokémon to go through, no matter the pride or the stakes of the battle. But Naazin’s eye flicked towards him as he did so, filled with a calm certainty.

He did not want to be returned, not yet. Aidinza did not know what was pushing the normally indolent pokémon to such lengths; unlike Shandíín, he had no care for the crowd. But he would let Naazin do what he wanted.

The drampa tossed its head, a contempt saturating its body language as it smoothly rose back up into the air and slowly approached the clauncher, rightfully thinking that the water type was on its last legs and that it had no need to rush.

Naazin stared at the drampa as it approached, his sole blue eye conveying both boredom and some kind of disdain.

For a single moment, the drampa hovered above the water type, staring down at him, before letting its body thump to the ground. It lifts one of its claws, the same purple glow building to a daunting luminescence.

Then Naazin did something that no one watching could have expected. It was not a trick, or a hail mary, or a last-ditch effort, or even a move.

No, Naazin straightened up out of his slouch as much as his battered form would allow him, tilted his head up so that he was looking down at the pokémon that utterly towered over him as the dragon scoffs and lashes out for the final blow.

And he spits in its eye.

For a moment, there was not a sound in the world. Not a breath nor a heartbeat. A pin would have been heard falling from a kilometre away.

“Outrage.” Drayden’s voice snarls across the field, a statement and command both burning with tarnished pride.

Pink bled into red, as a terrible energy shuddered up and down the drampa’s form, blueish-green scales thrumming with a furious power. Flickers of energy pour and bleed off the drampa, as it lets out a seething roar.

Outrage, one of the pinnacles of dragon-type moves, that brought their dreadful pride and mythic rage to bear in a single terrible rampage, completely unstoppable. It infused draconic energy into every inch of the user’s form, bringing them to untold heights, imbuing their every movement with a potency to rival some of the most powerful moves pokémon could use.

A single blow sends Naazin from one wall straight into the other; his body did not skid across the ground but dug straight through it until he came to a stop in an explosion of dust and concrete.

Aidinza did not let there be a second blow, returning the undoubtedly unconscious Naazin with numb fingers. The anger issues of drampa had been something he knew intellectually he could take advantage of somehow, should take advantage of somehow, but in that moment, faced with it in person rather than through a screen, he could not help but wonder if he had made a mistake.

“The Challenger’s pokémon has been eliminated by withdrawal! Challenger, choose your next pokémon!”

But he was in too deep, and at this point, he just had to trust the plan. With a decisive confidence he lacked, he had an unfamiliar pokéball in his hand, and with a flash of red, Aidinza’s third pokémon appeared.

The enraged drampa did not hesitate for a moment, throwing itself at the flash of red before it could have any chance to even take its new opponent’s measure. It crashed down in front of Aidinza’s pokémon still thrumming with reddish power, and it lashed out with its claws.

The same blow that had sent Naazin, who was easily one of Aidinza’s strongest pokémon, hurtling dozens of metres, stopped dead against a black, grinning jaw.

Glowing met gleaming as two pairs of red eyes met, and Mawile swung his right hand to point up at the looming dragon, letting out a stream of incomprehensible babble. The drampa twists around, tail snapping like a whip, splitting the ground like water.

It slams into Mawile’s undefended left side with steel-shattering force, with all the power of its ten-foot frame behind it, bolstered by the incredible, unstoppable potency of Outrage.

And it stops dead as a distorted metallic clang spreads through the air.

Outrage, as best as Aidinza understood, infused the pokémon with draconic energy so deeply and heavily that their every action was empowered by it.

Mawile was a fairy type. Aidinza understood that implication as well as he understood the mechanics of smack down. But the only thing he needed to understand was that the fae energy that thrummed inside the small yellow pokémon utterly rejected the draconic energy that Outrage had sent burning through every cell of the drampa.

The drampa lunged at the steel type, both of its claws smashing down on the much smaller pokémon in a hammer blow that would crush a lesser pokémon with an infuriated roar. That, even without the strange energy of pokémon empowering, would have been a staggering blow.

It stops dead.

For as long as Outrage was active, the drampa would be unable to harm Mawile.

“Fairy Wind.” There were just two problems with that. The first was that Mawile and Aidinza had not spent very long together. Life had come at him very fast recently; it had maybe been two and a half weeks since they had met, and between travel, the forest, and preparing for this very fight… the two of them had maybe spent a total of four days actually training together.

The second, an almost extension of the first, was that… Mawile was Mawile. So Aidinza found himself watching Mawile, instead of using fairy wind and taking advantage of the window of opportunity that Naazin’s act of disrespectful defiance bought him, start incomprehensibly babbling.

His jaw shifts to his left side, just slightly behind him, and the steel type presses his hand into it as if positioning himself to defend it. His other arm comes up to point at the raging dragon, his babbling intensifying in between being muffled by the enraged form of drampa pounding down on him.

Then, after spending several seconds posturing, and only then did Mawile actually act. He twists backwards, his black false jaw cracking open for a moment and spilling out a pinkish mist, and in the refracted light of that mist, the world seemed … more colourful, more lively, the large field they were fighting on - dotted with mild signs of the two previous fights - became for a moment an expansive horribly scarred battlefield. Then he grabs that mist with his hand, and with an outright theatrical spin, he flings it towards the rampaging drampa in an almost benign underhanded toss.

But there was very little benign about what it did to the dragon.

With unsettling force the wind rushes over the drampa’s form, clinging tightly to its form, contorting around every scale, and filling every crevice. Reflected through the mist the drampa grew and twisted into what could only be described as a towering edifice of rage and might, a mass of pointedly formed energy more akin to a dragon pulse than a pokémon.

Then that energy spiked out to touch the wind and, in a violent twist, rapidly unravelled. The drampa roars, a noise bordering on a scream of pain, and thrashes; even with the pink mist unravelling, there was seemingly no visible damage to its form, its scales utterly unscuffed. But there was a drained weight to its form, the energy that so suffused it far from absent but visibly diminished.

That did not seem to be a good thing for Mawile. Though the energy suffusing the dragon waned, it still left behind terrible anger and potent limbs coiled with corded muscle.

Which was to say the drampa’s retaliation slammed across Mawile’s real jaw and sent him spinning in a decidedly untheatrical fashion. The steel type dazed on his feet for a moment, reorienting himself with the fact that he had just been spun a hundred and eighty degrees by a whiplike tail.

“Iron defence.” Aidinza snaps, his mouth tightening in frustration. He had hoped to take advantage of this trap for a while longer than a single move and knew that when the drampa dropped out of outrage, it would have a veritable arsenal of moves able to brutalise Mawile.

But Mawile did not follow that order. Instead, his false jaw darkened with a caustic, shadowy power, and as the drampa lunged forward to bite down on him, he lunged to meet it. Gnashing teeth met gnashing teeth in an unsettlingly metallic clack, the two pokémon struggled against each other furiously. Though the vast height disparity gave the drampa a nearly insurmountable leverage advantage, Mawile utterly refused to let himself get bowled over, standing his ground against every twist and lunge for his neck, forcing the drampa into deadlock after a deadlock, more akin to a sword fight than the primaeval thrash of monsters vying for dominance.

But it was a crash of limbs that could not last forever, and inevitably, the tides began to turn, but it was not against Mawile. The waning draconic energy very abruptly stops waning, burning through the drampa’s form with a waxing potency, ironically leaving Mawile impervious to its struggles.

The steel fairy type smashed past his opponent’s attack, teeth closing around its thin neck. He twists his feet, dragging the drampa forward and slamming it into the ground, false jaw tightening down as it pumps caustic dark-type energy into the dragon, even as he chokes it against the ground.

But the drampa did not stay there long, wrenching itself away from the pin with a furious roar, and with barely a pause to fill its empty lungs, it threw itself back into the fray, struggling fruitlessly against Mawile, met at every turn by Mawile’s false jaw, dripping both with fairy wind and the caustic power of Crunch.

But Aidinza found himself looking away from the fight, towards Drayden standing opposite him. He had expected the gym leader to have recalled the drampa; this situation was just as tenuous as it had been for the altaria, if not worse. The altaria, at the very least, could, in theory, hurt Naazin if it could pull itself together enough to act.

Yet he simply watched, staring with an almost naked fury as intense as his pokémon’s outrage as Mawile slowly whittled the drampa down from a position of nearly unassailable invulnerability.

Aidinza was not keen to look a gift mudsdale in the mouth, but there was an unsettling feeling stirring in his gut, like he was slowly reaching into the gaping maw of a krookodile, tempting a much larger predator. Outrage would end inevitably, and Aidinza had no doubt the fight would end soon after; Drayden certainly seemed to think so, leaving his dragon in to wait out the rampage.

“Heat wave.” And when the jaws snapped shut, it was as decisive as it was brutal. The drampa snapped out of outrage with frightful suddenness; in one moment, it was chasing after Mawile with unhinged anger; the next, it had stopped on a dime and was spitting out a wild gout of flame that bathed the entire room in a white-orange glow, and consumed Mawile utterly.

It was over in that same instant; Mawile crashed into the ground, his yellow mantle blackened with char, broken by the same incredible power that had so trivialised Naazin.

Yet it was clear that power was on its last legs. Mawile had not managed to put the dragon down, but he had managed to savage it. It heaved with every moment, struggling to breathe after being choked against the ground. Its body shook underneath its own weight, swaying in an unfelt wind. Its two claws limp by its side, and its once livid, vivid pink eyes had dulled.

“The Challenger’s pokémon has been eliminated by knockout! Challenger, choose your next pokémon!”

Aidinza’s hand traces along the pokéballs on his belt, pausing for a moment on one colder than the others. He glances across the field towards his opponent, where Drayden glared out, the thin veneer of his stoic control slowly reasserting itself.

Then his hand fell to the most familiar ball on his belt, fingers slipping into subtle grooves, and in a flash of red, Sandile appeared on the field.

Unlike the pokémon before him, that was a rather understated affair. He did not joyously showboat like Shandíín, or stare down his opponent with terribly sharp eyes, nor did he come under immediate assault by a potent dragon.

No, Sandile appeared with the same guileless innocence as always, a big gummy smile on his face and no two brain cells to rub together.

To him, it might as well have just been another day on the road; there was no weight to the fight for him.

“Keep at a distance, Sandile. Dark Pulse.” Which meant Sandile would not mind a shift from his usual fighting style. The desert croc’s jaws yawned open, a dark ball of roiling distorted energy between rows of razor-sharp teeth, growing larger over several seconds before collapsing in on itself. A lance of midnight blue energy vented out of the collapsed ball, cutting through the air towards the unsteady, half-slumped form of the drampa.

But the dragon was not going to roll over that easy; in a surge of effort, it straightened out and, with a snarl, spat out two harsh purple beams, with the same crackling savagery that had characterised the tyrunt’s beams, in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the condition.

The beam slams into the dark pulse, an explosion of smoke and energy rattling the air as the moves shatter against each other.

“Sand Tomb, intercept it.” Aidinza calls a bare moment before the cloud of smoke splits apart, and the drampa’s second beam tears out of it. In turn, Sandile manages to pull up a cloud of sand with his own bare moment to spare.

The beam crashes into the dervish of sand, caught in its swirl and left to peter out harmlessly.

“Dark Pulse.” Aidinza calls again, watching as the dragon struggles to keep itself upright, the effects of trying to use draconic energy so soon after being absolutely bombarded by fairy energy, and in the confusing exhaustion of outrage’s aftermath, seeing the energy still animating it fleeing rapidly.

Another lance of midnight blue energy raced across the field, and once again, the drampa attempted to rally a defence, purple light flickering in between its teeth. But it was exhausted, left bereft of the energy of outrage, its body weak and unsteady. It buckles under its own weight, and crashes forward into its own attack, the draconic energy just as vicious to its owner as it would be to an enemy.

Then the dark pulse slams into its forehead, snapping its head back and sending it teetering backwards in a boneless collapse of limbs, bouncing off the hard gym field ground.

A moment passes, the dragon still on the ground before it stirred again, weakly pulling itself upright, pink eyes blurry with exhaustion glaring out at the gormless sandile across the field.

“Dark Pulse, finish this,” Aidinza ordered for the third time, feeling more like he was calling for an execution than for a fight to finish.

The drampa refused to go quietly; it pulled itself together for one last act of defiance, pink eyes flashing to Aidinza and then towards Sandile. It seemed to gather something in its mouth for a moment before a thick deluge of water exploded out of it, a veritable torrent of pressurised water an arm’s length thick.

It was mind-boggling that even so close to unconsciousness, the drampa still had such power to pull on. If it - If Drayden - had not fallen for the Pheyan’atho’s trap, Naazin’s taunt, then he had no doubt it would have torn through his entire team. The hydro pump shreds through everything in its path, ripping through the ground and punching a crater into the far wall.

But it missed its target by half a dozen metres; it had never finished turning towards Sandile.

Then, the third dark pulse collides, and the behemoth falls.

Aidinza lets out a sigh of relief, Drayden’s crossed hands tighten in frustration, and Sandile gets distracted by his tail, oblivious to it all.

“The Gym Leader’s pokémon has been eliminated by knockout… Gym Leader, choose your next pokémon.”