Pheyan'atho were born for combat.
In times past, it was a common refrain, a boast usually spoken by the Pheyan'atho themselves.
It took Aidinza sitting next to a Pheyan'atho boy hardly teasing his teens, whose only experience of his blood's culture was intermittent meetings with Unktehila, as he utterly picked apart a pokémon battle, to realise that it was not just a boast.
They had war in their veins, hot and fierce.
A war that they bent solely and wholly to rip apart tens of thousands of recordings of Dra'khíza-ide'en's gym battles. It was an ungainly process, a thousand different ideas and a thousand different ways to convey them.
But convey them, inevitably, they did. Write-ups and word of mouth consolidated and consolidated. Built upon and refined over and over as the Pheyan'atho painted a picture of what made Dra'khíza-ide'en the pinnacle of Unova's gyms.
A picture that was writ grim for Aidinza. The Gym Leader had been fighting for decades, had seen tricks that would baffle Aidinza for days, and turned aside teams that would sweep him without a sweat.
Maybe if this fight was to happen decades before, there would have been some glaring weakness that Aidinza could exploit to a victory. But those had been long since ironed out of the pinnacle of Unovan Gym Leaders. He had seen every trick and learned to adapt to each in turn, often in the same battle he encountered them, building up an endless repertoire in which even the craftiest tricks became almost rote to him.
At this point in Drayden's career, there was only one actual path to beating him.
Being good enough.
Aidinza, mere months into his journey and with only a single evolved pokémon to his name, was simply not at the point in his career where he was good enough.
It should have been as simple as accepting that. The Sun exposed all truths in its rays and brooked no delusion about those truths. He should have accepted the obvious outcome and simply taken the crushing defeat he was owed.
Yet… that obvious truth seemed to not matter to the Pheyan'atho, and even as they painted a picture of grim, inevitable defeat, they continued painting. Slowly building a plan of a thousand iterations, predicated on a hundred different combinations of pokémon Drayden could send out, forked what felt like an impossible amount of times based on how Drayden would act, or react, or not act.
It was humbling to understand just a taste of how far pokémon battles could actively be planned.
But every single plan, no matter how elegant, or complex, or simple, or clever, or optimistic or or or… inescapably, ran into the same problem. Aidinza's team would run out of steam. Even the cheapest 'trades' Aidinza could hope to manage would see him down several swaps or multiple pokémon.
It always came back to the same issue. It was obvious.
It was obvious. The Sun exposes all truths in its rays.
It was obvious. So why was Aidinza sitting in front of this boxy screen long after the Sun had slipped past the horizon, long past the trickster moon's apex? Why was he sitting in this horribly claustrophobic room, with nothing but a tiny window, half a dozen boxes of tapes, a chair that dug uncomfortably and a boxy screen that hurt to look at for too long, trying to get into the heads of trainers decades removed and impossibly more skilled than him?
…
But he supposed that, too, was obvious.
He presses the tape into the machine once more, as his lips thin.
-
Unova was a strange land of strange people. Strangely, Jurgen almost found that to be more familiar than if they were the same as those back home. Maybe that was because Jurgen always felt like an outsider looking in; maybe it was something else.
The strangest thing about Unova, to Jurgen at least, was, almost ironically enough, one of the few things it shared with most of the world. The Gym Circuit. A part of him almost wanted to call it barbaric, some sort of strange edifice to violence.
The larger part of him simply appreciated the elegance in how it inspired the next generation into something more controlled and restrained.
He also appreciated the outlet it offered; he grinned to himself as he focused back on the fight in front of him. This Drayden may be young, but he was a lethal fighter. He had already removed Jung and Kaspar from play, something few other Unovan Gym Leaders had managed.
"Lawrenz, Guidance." His voice naturally deepened into the boom of command, rolling across the shattered field and over the din of combat. Lawrenz, the steel behemoth who had long been the guiding anchor of his team, whirled. Yellowish energy blitzed from his steel frame as he distanced himself from the terribly powerful dragon Drayden had at his command.
Drayden calls something to his beast after a moment of hesitation, carefully modulated to be just low enough to be unintelligible to Jurgen. But the split moment of hesitation was all Lawrenz needed as his body rattled and the twin prongs that made up his arms locked into place.
"F Forty Six." In his people's culture, it would be considered somewhat dishonourable to hide your commands beneath code. But Jurgen was always an outsider, and the frustration at his own foe toeing that line was mounting.
Not that knowing what had been commanded would have helped Drayden, Lawrenz was a monster through and through, having ripped through entire ecosystems of lesser monsters in their journeys.
The steel behemoth's body lit up with yellow energy, and then the screws that jut from his back began tightening of their own accord, the energy turning white, then a deep blue.
Once more, Drayden ordered something, but it was pointless. Lawrenz unleashed a beam of gathered energy that arced across the battlefield in a moment. The beam slammed into the dragon, consuming it utterly in a flash of light and the terrible rattle of an explosion.
A moment later, as the dust settled, it brought with it a surprising sight. Drayden's dragon, singed and charred but still standing, the barest touch of white slowly bleeding from its claws.
“Haxorus, mánikaŋyéla!” Drayden's voice was steady and firm. But the fact Jurgen could hear it clearly sold his desperation as much as any quiver in voice would have.
Jurgen's lips twitched up into a half smile; Lawrenz did that to everyone who witnessed the sheer power of F-
-
Aidinza's thumb ejects the tape, one that he had watched a dozen times by now. Yet, strangely, he kept coming back to it. The battle was one of the older ones recorded, with poor quality and only a single camera angle that struggled to capture what would have been a magnificent battle.
Yet there was a lesson here. His gut was telling him that there was something here that he could figure out then…
Something would happen.
Or maybe it was the sleep deprivation giving him delusions.
He shakes his head and grabs the next tape. With one hand, he pushes it into the player, and with the other, he pushes his hair out of his eyes.
-
Kanaye was not impressed.
Which was, in his opinion, a shame. Unova was meant to be a land of conquerors and warriors. Gym Leaders act more akin to warlords than protectors. The beating heart of the dark of humanity.
All he had seen thus far, however, were hypocrites and weaklings. They were too scared to grip their blade barehanded and too weak to thrive in the true anarchy of battle.
Drayden seemed like just another permutation of that. Standing so far back that he would not even feel the heat of battle singe his skin, and eying Kanaye with nervous energy.
Kanaye would crush him like he had crushed everything else in his path, and he doubted the man would even warrant a footnote in the glorious legend Kanaye would be known by.
The Gym Leader's kenin rattled off some inanity, and rather than bothering to listen to him, Kanaye simply released the first of his team. A low hum filled the air, which quickly deepened into a rumbling growl that shook the earth. A tall, slender figure with pristine cream fur framed by regal violet and collared by a writhing flame of purple and red that obeyed no rational whim as it moved.
Drayden released his own monster, a tall, rough creature with blue wings that seemed too small for its body and wicked red spikes that jut out from every part of it.
The kenin awkwardly tried to interject, begging Kanaye to move himself off the field. But the man simply let a small smile stretch across his lips. "Rin, shadowclaw."
Kanaye's pokémon exploded forward, crossing the distance between her and the fluttering dragon in a flash, her shadow twisting and writhing behind her. Drayden's dragon rushed to meet her, its sheer speed belied by its tremendous bulk shaking the ground.
The two pokémon were set to crash together in a crash of terrible physicality. Rin's form was lithe, but the lean muscles underneath told a story of limber strength, and no dragon could ever be considered a slouch in a brutal melee. It would set the pace for the entire fight and establish the tempo of strength that both fighters would carefully evaluate. The stronger would press their advantage, and the weaker would attempt to mitigate it.
At least, that was what should have happened. Instead as the beast crashed into Rin's form, it's claws met nothing material, punching straight through like Rin was a ghost, or a cloud of vapor.
Kanaye grinned as a snicker filled the air, and the illusion of Rin's lithe form fell apart. In its place was a much shorter figure, with a mane of blood-red hair tipped with black spikes, grey fur, and, most importantly, shadow-wreathed red claws that had slipped completely underneath Drayden's monster's guard.
It roared as the shadow claw slammed into its stomach unimpeded, buoyed by not only the strength in Mikasa's short form but also the unanchored momentum of the monster's own charge.
“Mikasa, Night Slash.” The words were unnecessary; Kanaye's illusionist knew as well as he did to never waste time taking advantage of surprise, and already she was preparing to rip into the reeling creature as it struggled to decide what to do with the head-spinning pain and strangeness of its opponent changing mid-fight.
But a barked command from Drayden cut through its confusion, and with two heavy beats of its wings, it ripped itself away from Mikasa's strike, leaving the ill shadow of Night Slash to bleed away into the open air.
"After it," Kanaye instructs, but Drayden's monster was not going to give up its space easily, its mouth flickering with multi-hued light.
-
Aidinza shoved his finger into the fast-forward button; he knew what came next. While Drayden's Druddigon was slower than the fox, its constant barrage of purple beams was enough to force the fox to abandon its pursuits, and it never seemed capable of finding the right angle to re-engage in the fierce melee it obviously thrived in.
It was honestly a bit of a disappointment of a fight if it could even be described as a fight. Neither combatant was particularly excellent in the range that Drayden forced, but at the very least, the druddigon had the capacity to fight at that range.
He pulled his finger away from the fast-forward button as he reached the end of the first bout, watching the furious scowl spread across the Challenger's face.
-
"Rin." Kanaye glared across the field as, in a flash of red, a tall, slender figure appeared once again. But this time, the pristine cream-furred frame was not just an illusion but the powerful pokémon in truth.
He had not expected to be humiliated like that; he had not expected Mikasa to be humiliated like that. Most opponents she fought would be doggedly chased down by Kanaye's fox, picked apart and broken over her knee without even needing the illusions that her kind was famed for.
It seemed he had grown complacent in this soft land. Allowed Mikasa's training to slip and his own overconfidence to lead to an avoidable loss. He let the illusion go too early, losing the element of surprise well before it needed to.
Across the field, Drayden gave his own pokémon an order, and once again, that infuriating multi-hued beam began flickering in his dragon's mouth. It seemed he was sticking to his strategy, perhaps thinking that Mikasa and Rin's capabilities were similar if the first had come out disguised as the second.
"Hyakki Yagyō." He seethed out, and the ethereal purple flame that flickered from Rin's collar flared, intensifying for a moment before a myriad of fireballs split from it. The purple fire wavered in the air strangely, bordering on the obscene line of reality and something… other.
The drake spat out its attack, the multi-hued glow in its mouth coalescing into a jagged beam that spiked out against its own bounds wildly, the sharp erraticism almost reminiscent of a dragon itself.
The three jewel-like fires around the front of Rin's regal purple fur flashed twice, and the hovering purple fire snapped from bordering on the obscene line of reality and something other into something that could only be described as wrong. The fire twitched and writhed across the air to meet the drakes' attack, like angry spirits being ripped around by an unseen, uncaring demon.
As the first fireball, if the twitching mass of purple not-light could be described as such at this point, slammed into dragonkin-beam, a keening almost scream filled the air, so sharp that Drayden's slave stumbled back from his position on the side of the field.
Both attacks struggled against each other for a moment, the formless energy that animated both keeping the stitching of their form together as they attempted to overcome the other.
Then, the second ball slammed into the attack, and it shattered like rotten wood, bursting apart into multi-hued embers. The twisted fire at Rin's command swarmed into the absent air left behind; like locusts, they consumed the energy still flickering in the air until all traces of the attack had been obliterated from this world.
Drayden ordered something, but before the swarm of Rin's not-fire washing across the field, all was irrelevant. The fire twisted around the dragon, consuming it in a great whirl of purple inferno, and Kanaye watched with grim satisfaction as the shadow of something terrible shuddered across the fire.
When the attack finally burnt out, the dragon that had so humiliated Mikasa had collapsed, its form covered in bite marks and clawed rivets, both charred over by the awesome power Rin had at her disposal.
Kanaye stared out over the field, his own skin red and ruddy from being so close to the attacks, an arrogant stare clapping onto Drayden's own fierce scowl. If the gym leader wished to dance away from Kanaye's strengths, then Kanaye would show him that his team had few weaknesses to be cowered to.
-
Aidinza ejected the tape; while the rest of the fight was a sight to behold, something told him he had seen what he had needed to see. However, the weight of exhaustion on his mind made it difficult to even articulate what he needed.
He rubs his eyes and glances out the window at the looming dawn light.
"You stayed up all night." Aidinza flinches away from the unexpected voice, feeling light-headed and dizzy as he does so, black spots forming in his vision. When he glances over to the voice, he sees Jha'y'zéča-den staring down at him, a look of both concern and something else on his face.
Aidinza tries for an easy smile but feels heavy against the weight pulling at his eyes, and it only seems to make Jha'y'zéča-den more concerned. "I… yeah." He starts and finishes lamely.
"Aidinza, I know there's a…" Jha'y'zéča-den cuts himself off, blue eyes flicking away from Aidinza for a moment. "You shouldn't skip sleep; it's not healthy, not after what you went through."
"Too much riding on this." The young Ya'an-ah mutters as his eyes slide to the half a dozen boxes of tapes he had been spending the entire night trawling through. Though he doubted that he even managed to watch a full box worth of tapes.
It was mind-boggling just how many fights Drayden had fought. There were thousands of these boxes; it could take someone literally years to watch them all. It would not surprise Aidinza if someone told him that Drayden had spent more time fighting than some people spent eating.
"I wanted to talk to you about that." Aidinza looks back up to Jha'y'zéča-den, his brow furrowing as the other boy does not quite look him in the face.
"About the fight?" There was some level of confusion in Aidinza's voice; he had been talking about the oncoming fight in some way for nearly two full days; there was no reason for Jha'y'zéča-den to be nervous about it.
"About the fight." He confirms with a half nod, still not quite looking straight at him. "I just wanted to say… all this." He trails off, right hand coming up to scratch harshly at his forearm. "Dra'khíza-ide'en is a very experienced trainer."
Aidinza slowly blinked at him, or maybe he fell asleep for a moment, and it took a moment to wake back up; it was difficult for even him to tell. Without a word, he gestures towards the boxes of tapes of literal days of battles that represented a mere fraction of the battles Drayden had recorded.
"I mean, you only have three badges, you've only been training for a few months, and that's really impressive, don't get me wrong, but you haven't eve-" The younger boy started to ramble, his nervous - uncomfortable - scratching becoming more violent. But even Aidinza's sleep-addled mind could tell where this was going.
"I know that I'm probably going to lose." He attempts to put the other boy out of his misery, but if anything, that seems to put Jha'y'zéča-den on an even harsh edge, nails digging into his dusky flesh in a way that made Aidinza uncomfortable to even look at.
"You can win." The other boy says with an almost off-putting certainty and sharp insistence. "I just want you to know that…" Aidinza takes a long moment to study Jha'y'zéča-den as he meanders around whatever point he is trying to get to. The boy looked exhausted, with heavy bags carved under his eyes, his dark hair unkempt, and the shadow of facial hair that Aidinza knew the other boy hated.
Aidinza doubted that Jha'y'zéča-den got any more sleep than he did, and it was not difficult to understand why. As hefty as all this was on Aidinza's shoulders, as frustrated as Aidinza had been about everything regarding Caġaṡakehaƞska Caƞtaƞka…. There was more at stake for Jha'y'zéča-den.
Maybe exhaustion was the reason it took him so long to connect the dots, but it definitely was the bone-deep tiredness that caused him to say what came next. "You want me to know that it's okay to lose." Jha'y'zéča-den stills for a moment, no longer digging into his forearm, as he gives a half-aborted nod. "But you don't want to say it."
"It feels too much like it's inviting defeat." He admits after a moment's pause before running a hand harshly through his hair. "I'm being ridiculous; it's just a gym battle, it's just a pokémon fight, you're… you're not even Pheyan'atho, and you're supposed to be resting. Something like this... it's not meant to be important enough to harm yourself. Right? But I can't just let it go. But it's not fair to not." Blue eyes met green, filled with an uncertain emotion, desperate for direction. "Am I even making sense?"
Maybe to someone else, he would not be. The deluge of words and ideas was coloured with a tired incomprehensibility, and maybe if Aidinza was not in the same state and, in many ways, the same position, he would not understand. But putting himself in Jha'y'zéča-den's position was all too easy. How tightly would his desire to be a good friend clash with the opportunity to set his people right, no matter how slight, or irrelevant, or unhinged from reality that opportunity was?
If Aidinza was standing in Jha'y'zéča-den's shoes, he knew he would be struggling with the same words, unwilling to say anything that would jeopardise whatever this proved to be, no matter how flimsy its effect could be, and he doubted he would be any more eloquent through his own grit teeth. But what he would say in Jha'y'zéča-den's position was not exactly what was important here; rather, it would be what he would want to hear in Jha'y'zéča-den's position.
And that was filled with far less murky, conflicted feelings.
"It's as important as we make it, Jha'y'zéča-den." Aidinza echos the other boys' own words, but where it seemed to have an almost physical impact on Unktehila, here it seemed to relieve Jha'y'zéča-den of the heavyweight sloughing his shoulders. "And I think we can make it worth losing some sleep over."
The other native boy's face splits into a wide grin before he lunges forward, wrapping his arms around Aidinza's shoulders and half dragging him out of the chair in a sharp jerk.
Unfortunately for Jha'y'zéča-den, Aidinza had spent the last eight hours straight sitting down motionless, and as he was dragged up, black spots filled his eyes, and nausea swirled in his stomach.
Or, in simpler terms, for the second time in Opelucid, he vomited on someone's shoes while losing consciousness.
-
Opelucid was both a city of the looming future and the unwavering past. Towering glass skyscrapers entwined with beautifully engraved stonework, paved roads framed by earthworks as old as the league itself. The history of the city was as undeniable as the march of time that was slowly rendering it irrelevant.
Aidinza was not certain how to describe it. Part of him felt like it was a decay, to see grim grey skylines slowly encroach on such a deeply rooted part of Unova's history. To know the constructs that had provided the Pheyan'atho a canvas and shelter both for thousands of years was no longer needed and hardly even desired. But Aidinza was not delusional enough not to see why, as off-putting and at times nauseating, he still found these concrete jungles; there was no denying the improvement of quality of life. To call it decay was wrong, but simply naming it unmarred progress did not sit right with the Naisho'h boy.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
It was only when he laid eyes on the Opelucid City Gym that the word properly came to mind.
It was a massive thing, a sprawling fort in a once-upon-a-time literal name. The first Pheyan'atho redoubt, whose history Aidinza did not need to know to feel thick on the air. Murals lined every inch of the limestone, a tapestry of history and culture just as intense as the Tly'an-yen, if not more so for the permanency in their marking. But more than that was the history of war that the fort told, countless battle scars raked across the surface of the fort, a story of an endless protective vigil, at times turning aside what must have been truly monstrous pokémon attacks, at others crumbling.
Or at least, that was the history that should have been told. Instead, it told a different story, and instead of those proud wounds being allowed to stand in testament of its exemplary service… they were patched over. A patchwork of steel and glass and concrete jut out of those wounds, patching what did not need to be patched. Worse were the entire annexures stabbed into the structure, the modernity bolted onto history, irrevocably changing it.
There was only really one word for it.
Parasitic.
If this was the Relic Castle, Aidinza would have been apoplectic. The safety and history were taken advantage of with no respect for the dignity of a structure that had served well.
Or maybe that was just the exhaustion haunting Aidinza's eyes speaking. He pauses and takes a long drink of the ahwééh that Jha'y'zéča-den gave him, though the bitter brown liquid had nothing on the beverages drip brewed over months by the Dzil'ana. It was enough caffeine to take most of the edge off Aidinza's all-nighter.
It was not enough to not have him baulk at the sheer number of people loitering around the gym. The number here was, in some ways, rivalling the insanity of Nimbasa; hundreds of people lingered outside of the gym, and hundreds more streamed inside in what seemed to be a never-ending tide.
Men and women with cameras and microphones skittered about, at times trying to flag someone's attention at seemingly random or finding some measure of a better vantage point to record.
Some of the people he recognised, more than a few of the people who had been flagged down, were people he had spent the last twenty-four hours pouring over strategy with, and something told him that these were just the stragglers and the mainstay of the Pheyan'atho would already be inside.
That being said, he had no idea why the rest of them were here. Especially at such an awkward time, Drayden had shoved their battle into whatever time slot he apparently had available, half an hour before three. While his Nimbasa gym battle had a crowd of uncomfortable proportions, they were there for Elesa, whose insane cult following Aidinza still struggled to grasp. His battles with Clay and Skyla, on the other hand, were entirely unobserved, and while his battle with Brycen had a crowd… that was the Tly'an-yen being polite.
Though maybe he was being presumptuous about the crowd being here for him, Drayden was the pinnacle of Unovan Gym Leaders, the final stop before the conference for most trainers. Which he was peripherally aware of was considered a big deal, sometimes seeing hubbub on the pokécentre's computer about some trainer or other challenging Drayden while doing his own research.
Regardless, he walks through the entrance of the gym, trying to suppress the shudder that nearly runs up his spine at being penned in on all sides by the crowd. Focusing instead on the automatic door nestled in the cracked ruins of a once mighty set of massive stone doors, so weighty that it would have taken a dragon to even consider shifting it.
The inside of the gym was much the same as the outside, a patchwork of storied stone and featureless steel. There were fewer people here, or rather, the number of people was more dispersed. The door did an adequate job of funnelling everyone entering to the point where half a dozen uniformed trainers could take charge of directing it all into orderly movement.
"Aidinza, I hope you are doing well." In his old age, Unktehila could not be described as towering, but regardless, the Elder carried himself with a certain weight and presence that saw the crowd parting around him.
"Unktehila." Aidinza's greeting was far from his first respectful greeting of the Elder but no longer held an edge of festering resentment in it. The conversation yesterday had been… enlightening as to the sort of person Unktehila was and the role he was playing. It was far from enough for Aidinza to forgive the old man, but it was difficult to actively hate someone who you could understand so easily. "There are more people here than I expected. Is there another battle before mine?"
"Stare at the ground for long enough, and a crowd will form to stare with you." The man glances at the crowds still streaming past the two of them, a look somewhere between disdain and regret in his eyes before he shakes his head. "The Pheyan'atho came to watch their efforts, and where they go, Opelucid inevitably follows, as it always has."
Aidinza feels a heat rising in his cheeks as he realises that the hundreds of people around him were not here coincidentally or for someone else, but in no uncertain terms for him. Something not quite nausea and not quite panic bubbling up in him, heavy on his lungs and squick in his stomach.
But he stomps down on it as best he can. It had been months since the sheer scale of the wider world had overwhelmed him. Months, three gyms, and half a dozen near-death experiences. He had grown, so he takes all that panic and ill nausea and forces it out of his body in a single exhale.
He looks back up to the Elder, who watches him with an indecipherable expression.
"Are you ready?" The much older man does not comment on what he just saw, and Aidinza did not doubt that his trepidation was as obvious as the sun in the sky. For that, he finds some level of gratitude; if Jha'y'zéča-den saw him have that panic attack, then he would worry incessantly.
He did not want to worry his friend any more than his all-nighter already had.
"I am." He nods, forcing himself to feel more certain than he was. Unktehila watches him for a second before nodding and turning, striding deeper into the building. Aidinza follows without a word, being taken out of the main flow of the crowd and through a mess of winding corridors, another odd mirror of Nimbasa. For a single silly moment, he expected Edith to pop out of one of the corridors jutting off the path Unktehila was leading him down, calling him darling and insisting that he allow the tiny woman to make sure he looked his best.
That, of all things, truly calms his nerves. Despite how little time he had spent with her, he could easily imagine her vibrating up and down this dilapidated castle, cawing about how bold Aidinza was and that while Drayden was a mighty dragon, he was nothing in the face of Aidinza's grand oncoming metamorphosis into a daring beautifly.
Skyla would… well, she would have run roughshod over him, dragged him along without giving any mind to his trepidation until he had been dragged straight through it. Forced to confront the fear and danger.
Nah'aa and Da'zhoh, and… the Tly'an-yen would be cheering him on, delighting already thinking up however they were going to tell the story around their fires and amused by the chaos that he had sowed among the Pheyan'atho and Drayden if the stories he heard about how their new trainers would capture Eiscue just to waste Drayden's time were true.
Which, with the Tly'an-yen, was a fifty-fifty.
Brycen would have some wisdom for him, for all his conversation with the Gwee'aa of his cousin tribe had ended in a festering frustration; Aidinza respected the man fiercely. He would know what to do… he would have some other method to achieve what Jha'y'zéča-den needed than pinning hope on a single fight.
Kaine would…
Aidinza's thoughts grind to a halt. It had been a long time since he had thought about Kaine, and the sting of betrayal still burned at him like a festering wound. But now was not the time to unpack that aching hurt, nor was there time to as he and Unktehila crossed the threshold into Drayden's arena.
It was the noise that crashed into him first, not quite the enthralled roar of Nimbasa, at least not yet. It was a dull murmur, a mind-bogglingly weighty and loud noise for all it was just of humans existing. The implication that this was as quiet as it could manage was headier than if he had been greeted by its most raucous roar.
Then it was the light. Most of the corridors that Unktehilia had led him through were dim at best, the torches that had once lit the entire fort clearly too much effort to maintain full time. But that could not be further from the truth for Drayden's arena, or perhaps it was true in a different way. Bolted to the ceiling were massive, jutting floodlights that cast the entire room in a searing bright white.
Then it was the stare. Not the crowds, though Aidinza could hear their notice and feel their eyes turn to study him. But Drayden's stare, the massive man watched Aidinza like one of the dragons his people were so renowned for, with his arms crossed in front of each other, one hand clutching tightly to his bicep. His thoughts were concealed behind that full white beard, but Aidinza could feel a sense of fury from the man.
The gym leader had not grown calmer in the days following Aidinza's return from Caġaṡakehaƞska Caƞtaƞka.
It did not take long for Aidinza to figure out why, as a cheer stole his attention towards the stands, towards Jha'y'zéča-den. The other native boy was all but vibrating in place, nestled amidst what looked like hundreds of Pheyan'atho. Here, in spite of the way it should have been, to support Aidinza rather than their own Itaƞcaƞ wicaṡta otokahaƞ.
Here, together, despite all of Drayden's efforts.
Aidinza can not help the pleased smile that splits his face; even if this was as humiliating as it should be, the fact that Pheyan'atho were here at all, were here together, might be all that needed to happen.
The young Ya'an-ah's pleased smile did not go unnoticed by Drayden, the furious look in his eyes growing all the sharper, and as he uncrossed his arms, Aidinza could see white marks had formed on his biceps even at this distance.
He makes a small gesture, the short movement belying the wild anger in his limbs.
A woman walks out from a side entrance, dressed in a pink shirt with a large pokéball symbol taking up much of her left breast. She barely spares Aidinza a glance; instead, she watches Drayden, concerned.
"This will be a Six on Six standard league rules battle! There will be a maximum of three substitutions, and the Challenger will choose first." Aidinza breathed out slowly; he had been hoping that it would be the other way around. Reacting to Drayden's opening pokémon would have been a distinct advantage for the rest of the match.
But what was one more disadvantage to overcome compared to the mountain already there?
"Challenger, release your pokémon or forfeit the challenge!" The judge presses, and Aidinza gets the impression she would be rather thankful if he did, in fact, forfeit.
Shandíín appeared on the field in a flash of red and a prideful chortle. The crowd cheers for the pokémon, or more likely, for the fact the battle was going to start. Regardless of the reason for the cheers, the fletchinder basked in the attention, stretching out his wings to show off the contrast of rich black and vivid orange in his plumage before it took off, holding to a lazy circle above Aidinza.
Drayden had far less hesitation in releasing his own pokémon. In a flash of red, a bipedal pokémon appeared. It was short, maybe only slightly taller than Shandíín himself, most of its height coming from two well-developed hindlegs that tilted the rest of its body forward in a remarkably aggressive posture. Or perhaps that was just the impression to be taken from the harsh lines of its face, furrowing its forward-facing predator eyes into a belligerent slant. Its white jaw, stark against the grey-brown stain of the rest of its body, cracks open into a soft growl that sounded like two rocks grinding against each other.
Or, more accurately, a yawn, Aidinza realises as its tiny little arms stretch out from underneath the white ruff of feathers collaring its neck, and it smacks its tongue against its razor-sharp teeth.
It was a tyrunt, Drayden's favourite counter to flying types at this level. Shandíín screeches at it, flaring his wings to the side as his feathers puffed out, a common reaction of his to birds that managed to fly under Astazhei's battle radar. The tyrunt, for its own part only blinks at the fire bird sleepily.
"Begin!"
"Keep moving, keep at a distance, Shandíín!" Aidinza knew that he needed to set the tempo of the fight quickly and equally knew that Shandíín had no hope of doing so in close quarters. Tyrunt was a physical powerhouse; its powerful legs made it incredibly agile in short bursts, and its jaws had bite force comparable to some of the younger krokorok Aidinza had known. If that was not enough, the feathers that stretched from its collar ruff to its tail were made of some kind of hardened rock, giving it an extra layer of protection against flying types.
It was a monster through and through, the first of six that formed the mountain that Aidinza had to surmount.
Shandíín crows as he dances into the air in a flurry of blurring feathers, rising high above the arena before accelerating to a dizzying pattern high above, looking almost like a flame carving a mural against the ancient stone of the roof.
For a single moment, Aidinza was mesmerised by his own pokémon, and he took a single steady breath in; as the crowds' awe at the beautiful sight murmured into the air, as Drayden's own voice buzzed unintelligibly, as the tyrunt shifted and cracked at the ground, as the warm colours smouldered against the tiny part of Aidinza still stuck in Caġaṡakehaƞska Caƞtaƞka, wondering if he would ever fully feel warm again.
This was familiar. This was comfortable, for all he did not know when it became so. Even with the hundreds of people watching, even with the ire of a gym leader, even with the weight of expectations on his shoulders.
He breathes out.
"Dodge, there's four." He snaps out as the ground around the tyrunt explodes upwards, and four staggered blasts of rocks rocket towards Shandíín. The fletchinder whistles, and as the first rock approaches, he dives out of the way, letting it shatter into a dozen pieces against the roof.
The next would have cracked straight into the bird if it had just merely dove to avoid the first, but Shandíín had already begun a harsh bank, clearing the rock by what to an untrained eye would seem to be a worryingly slight distance but put him in the perfect position to spin through the next two with indelible agility.
Someone would almost be forgiven for thinking it was practised, but an unfortunate side effect of Aidinza's own impatience was that he had barely a day to prepare. But a fortunate side effect of Drayden's own full-bodied coverage of his battling career meant that despite not being practised, they were definitely forewarned, and if there was any match-up that Aidinza was utterly sure was going to happen, it was this one.
"Ember." There was a moment that Aidinza was worried that Shandíín did not hear him, as the fletchinder barely adjusted his flight pattern; maybe he was being drowned out by the rising clamour of the crowd at the display of acrobatics.
Then a ball of fire crashed into the tyrunt with all of Shandíín’s blistering speed and momentum as the bird's slightest adjustment turned into a deft half loop that left it barrelling straight towards his opponent. The fire splashed across the tyrunt's calcified feathers and spilled across hard, uncaring scales. But the momentum behind the ember sent the dragon-type staggering, awkwardly stumbling over its own powerful hindlegs.
Neither was enough to stop its answering attack, as a silvery orb shimmered into existence at the end of the tyrunt's stubby tail, and the lizard turned its overbalanced stumble into an almost smooth swing, flinging the orb towards the still approaching Shandíín.
Rather than call for Shandíín to move, Aidinza holds his tongue. He watches the orb as it hurtles through the air, eyes straining both to stare at the incredible luminance and keep up with it.
Time almost seemed to slow down as he tracked the blurring attack, the slightest of moments stretching out as adrenaline flooded his veins. It was going to hit Shandíín if Aidinza did not say something, and with the sheer momentum behind the fletchinder, it would swat the fragile bird straight out of the air.
But he continues to hold his tongue, his eyes burning as he forces himself to see something against the mercurous surface of the ancient power. Then he sees it, in a moment that would struggle to fully encompass a second, yet feels like an hour, he sees a spreading crack across the left side of the orb.
"Right." He barks as pure-minded gratification floods his veins, as Shandíín's wing snaps down, and he rolls right as tight as Aidinza had ever seen, slipping past the attack with barely a feather's length between it and him.
Then the attack exploded, bursting into a kaleidoscope of obscuring light and smoke that covered Shandíín utterly.
For a long, heart-stopping moment, Aidinza thought he had made the wrong call as Shandíín failed to thunder out from the obscuring smoke. Thought that he had made a mistake banking on something he had only barely made out on the fuzzy quality of the gym's battle cameras.
Then Shandíín exploded from the canopy with a dramatic spin and a triumphant screech, the smoke trailing from his wing tips as sparks danced across his feathers, and utterly unharmed.
A grin spreads across Aidinza's face as he looks across the field to his opponent, the tall form of Drayden utterly stoic as he stares at the fight, thoughts unknowable behind his stark white beard.
Then he turns back to the fight himself and breathes out slowly. He only needed to do that, however, many more times for something to stick.
"Keep moving, Shandíín." He calls almost superfluously as the bird lets its body stall in the air, lingering in the exaltation of the crowd as their murmurs build to a roar before he dives into a display of blistering speed.
He was coming utterly alive in the attention.
"Six!" Aidinza called as another half dozen blasts of rock rose into the air, flaked out against the air in an array to catch Shandíín more by chance and volume rather than aim. The fletchinder danced through them, yet again making a run on the tyrunt and sending it stumbling before letting Aidinza call how to slip away from the retaliation.
Then he did it again.
Then again.
It was a pattern that differed only in truth by the different moves and tricks that Drayden tried to throw out, each mapped out by a hundred Pheyan'atho minds before the tyrunt had even been released.
It was a winning pattern.
Slow it was, but it was building. Like a sandstorm emerging from a single ruffled grain of sand, the momentum was building. Tyrunt was sturdy, but no pokémon could let another beat on them uncontested and not begin to feel the oppressive grind of attrition. With every ember, the Tyrunt staggered further, as the heat sunk deeper into calcified feathers, and any attempted retaliation grew more and more erratic, giving Shandíín leave for tighter and tighter runs, building up the pressure faster.
Maybe if Aidinza was another person with four badges, Drayden would have let things play out like this. As deeply frustrating as Aidinza found the man, he was never cruel in battle, and while he would never just give someone his badge if they were unworthy, he rarely just outright crushed some hopeful trainer's dreams.
But most trainers had not outright called him a coward and jammed themselves deep in the matters of his tribe.
It was as Shandíín dove past another flakk of rock blasts that Drayden broke the sequence without any warning. It was only because Aidinza was watching the tyrunt so intently to guide Shandíín away from the expected air-burst ancient power that he realised that something was different in the first place. The tyrunt lowered its form, head tilting downwards; at first, he thought it was just trying to better brace for the imminent force of Shandíín's ember until he caught sight of a flickering purple glow spilling out between the dragon's wicked teeth.
"Pull out! Agility." Maybe Shandíín had his own bad feeling; maybe Aidinza managed to convey just how little time and how much danger Shandíín was in because heartbeats after Aidinza called out, Shandíín snapped into a gravity-defying turn as a shudder visibly ran across his body, and his speed doubles taking him nearly halfway across the field in moments.
It was almost not enough.
With a deep, primaeval growl to rival Sandile's, the tyrunt lifts its head and spews out two staggered purple-hewed beams that zigzag across the field with an air-splitting crack, guided unerringly towards Shandíín. They were as fast as Shandíín, even in the throes of agility, faster even, the bird barely having a moment to react even with the forewarning.
Shandíín rolls in the air, for a moment upside down, before beginning a looping descent at a dizzyingly tight angle, letting the beam pass above him to shatter against the wall behind him, sending dust and rock exploding into the air.
But then he was staring down the second beam as it twists and writhes through the air almost as if it was alive, no… almost as if it was hunting.
Desperately, the bird twists to the side, half a bank, half a roll, all lacking the graceful control the fletchinder had demonstrated this entire fight. Only by the skin of his teeth did Shandíín manage to slip past in a miraculously timed zag of the beam.
But he was too close, and Aidinza watched with his heart in his throat as the explosion sent Shandíín crashing to the ground, rolling over and over, bouncing like a rag doll. Already a part of him knew it was over; even if Shandíín was able to keep going, he was in the reach of the tyrunt's overwhelming physicality. The crowd knew it too, the roar that had built in the gym quelling to an oppressive silence.
After a bare beat of two seconds, Aidinza caught in the corner of his eyes as the tyrunt began to charge forward, powerful bipedal limbs pumping as it built up to a shockingly fast sprint. His hand fell to the pokéball at his waist; there was no point in letting Shandíín get torn apart.
"Get back in the skies, Shandíín!" It was little more than an impotent outburst, a frustrated last-ditch effort before his fingers closed around the pokéball, allowing this first bout to slip through them.
But Shandíín's dramatics were not over just yet. Moments before the tyrunt would be on him, the flying type's wings snapped out, and with a mighty flap, he tore himself out of the uncontrolled tumble, slipping past the tyrunt's teeth as they cracked with lightning to the hysterics of the crowd.
"YES!" Aidinza screamed alongside the crowd as Shandíín laps around the field to build up speed or perhaps to just bask in the noise of the crowd. But Drayden was not just going to let Shandíín showboat nor build up speed again; within moments, there were rocks flying through the air. "FOUR!"
Shandíín dove into action once more, dancing between the oncoming rock blasts and beginning the pattern once again. But as he dove past the tyrunt's attempts to swat him out of the sky, beak flickering with flame, the twofold cost of his mad dash became clear. It might not have been an outright defeat, but Shandíín's mad dash retreat had given away all of his momentum, giving plenty of time for the tyrunt to ground itself. Second to that was the use of agility, and his subsequent tumble was exhausting. There was a reason why Aidinza only called for him to use it in such a snap emergency. In the aftermath, he was slower, less nimble, struggling to dance through the air with the same daredevil flair. Either Shandíín was going to have to conserve his energy, or he was going to be swatted out of the sky when he exhausted himself.
Drayden had reset the fight, and the neutral position was losing for Aidinza.
His hand, still hovering over the pokéball at his side, taps along its surface before his gaze drifts away from Shandíín as the bird prepares for another run on the tyrunt, to the tyrunt itself. In a single unexpected move, it had turned the tide of the battle, and if it had been just a fraction of a second faster, it would have been able to end the fight outright. At any moment, it could use it again, and if Shandíín was not prepared, that would be the end of the fight.
Not for the first time, Aidinza marveled at the mountain that was set before him, and this was only the first step.
But no mountain is created without footholds, no peak unweathered by the wind. His mind catches on to the fact that if the tyrunt had been faster, the battle would be over. The tyrunt should have been, Shandíín's descent had not been subtle, nor had his tumble across the field been quick. It had plenty of time to react.
"Left!" Aidinza calls as mind locks on why the move had both been unexpected and why the tyrunt had not been faster. Why the tyrunt, why Drayden, had not used it earlier, nor was he using it now.
Aidinza had heard about moves like this, so powerful that they cost their wielders terribly. He remembers reading about Hyper Beam; he remembers seeing it in at least a dozen of Drayden's fights that he had watched. Remembered seeing Pokémon, who were stronger than Aidinza could grasp, falter under the weight of just using it themselves.
It was a long shot; the young Naisho'h was banking everything on an assumption. But as his eyes strayed back to Shandíín dancing through the air above, the weight of the exhaustion of the fight pulling at his wings, something told him that it was the only option he really had.
If they played it safe and slow, Shandíín would never deal enough damage to put the tyrunt down, and inevitably there would be a lucky hit that takes him out. Even if they set the pace as before, another use of agility would exhaust Shandíín and leave him too slow to continue to the fight afterwards.
He had to bait Drayden into using that move again and take advantage of whatever exhaustion it brought.
This meant that Aidinza could not let Shandíín pull back and conserve his energy. He needed the bird to keep his foot on the gas.
"Keep up the pressure, Shandíín! Let's give them a show!" Luckily, Shandíín was very easy to convince. The bird whistles and lets a flicker of flame dance down his feathers in a mesmerising show to the awe of the watching crowd. Then he dives back towards the tyrunt, a renewed swagger in his form as he slices through the air.
For the next minute, Aidinza and Shandíín burnt the candle at both ends, playing on the same knife's edge that they had been ripped from as they played wimpod with the looming spectre of exhaustion.
Shandíín ducks, weaves, rolls and dives through at least two dozen rock blasts from the tyrunt, bathing the dragon in enough fire that soot had begun to darken the edges of its calcified feathers. He pushed himself as hard as he could under the noise of the crowd, as enraptured by them as they were enraptured by him.
He built up pressure, and speed, and heat, and momentum until the fight was rocketing towards the same equilibrium that had tipped Drayden over the edge the first time. But Shandíín was also rocketing towards exhaustion; it was subtle, half a degree lost on his turn here, a half-second delay on reacting to Aidinza's callouts there.
"Just a little more, Shandíín, just a little more." He mutters to himself; a victory or loss here would set the cadence for the entire battle to come. He needed to overcome this; he needed Drayden to take the bait.
And with a flicker of purple glow, backlighting wicked teeth, he did. "Agility." Aidinza snapped the very second he saw the glow. There was no time to waste; the beams had caught up to Shandíín in the blink of an eye when he retreated from them… "Flame charge." And he was going to have even less time while he was diving straight towards them.
It all came down to these eight metres; either Shandíín would reach the tyrunt, or he would be smashed out of the skies.
Seven metres, Shandíín's body shudders as the agility sets in, pulling deeply on the final reserves of his energy to boost his already absurd speed.
Six metres, the tyrunt shifts its stance bracing, itself as its teeth disappear in a purple glow.
Five metres, Shandíín's beak cracks open, a gout of white flame spilling out the sides as he dove even lower, all but skidding across the ground.
Four metres, the tyrunt's mouth widens, exposing a pool of palpitating energy.
Three metres, the flames spill across Shandíín's form, ripped back by the drag of the wind until it encompasses his entire body in a fiery aura.
Two metres, the energy shifts and spikes; two distinct forms jag out from the pool, orbiting each other in a feral dance.
One metre, the two pokémon regarded each other for just a moment in a still realisation that this was it. The fight, as invigorating as it was infuriating for both, was going to end in this very heartbeat.
Two beams of draconic energy tear out of the tyrunt's mouth with a terrible roar, filled with the kind of power that only the pinnacle of Unova's gym leaders could impart. Fired at point-blank range, the distance between it and Shandíín could only be measured in tongues.
"Acrobatics!"
The fletchinder disappears, flickering away and leaving only an outline of fire that momentum sent crashing against the tyrunt's wide-open eyes, too weightless to harm but well enough to blind.
The beam stabs forward, but in tracing Shandíín's breakneck approach the tyrunt's aim had drifted unerringly towards the ground. The dragonic pulse slams into the floor of the arena, detonating in a wave of force and sending the tyrunt hurtling backwards.
Then Shandíín was on him; the fire bird slammed into its side as it flew backwards, his body still alight with flames stoked by incredible friction. Then he flickers again, the speed of acrobatics, the adrenalin of flame charge, and the overwhelming overcharge of agility combining into something impossible to keep up with at these distances obscured by dust and smoke. The next hit slams into the top of the tyrunt, arresting its momentum brutally and sending it slamming into the ground. Shandíín rose into the air as sparks and remnants of flames danced across his body, his wings stretched out, and his plumage ruffled as he took a moment of glory in the midst of his victory.
Then he dove again, wings hugging his side as the fire burst to life once more like a comet descending from the heavens; he slammed into the tyrunt's head as it weakly struggled to its feet.
"The Gym Leader's tyrunt has been eliminated by knockout! Gym Leader, choose your next pokémon!"
The crowd went wild as if Aidinza had won the entire fight and not just the first bout, the Pheyan'atho incomprehensible in content but utterly unmistakable in emotion. Shandíín screamed his victory as he stood atop his defeated opponent, and then he took off into the air, screaming another challenge, as battle manic as Astazhei in the sway of the crowd.
Once more, Aidinza found himself watching his opponent, the man as inscrutable as ever beyond that all-concealing white beard. However, Drayden had to be troubled, the young Ya'an-ah, and Shandíín of course, had just ground through his hand-chosen counter with grit and temerity. Winning in spite of such a crippling disadvantage.
But as a flash of red light filled the air, Aidinza knew that it was not over yet.
That was just the first step in scaling this mountain.