Chapter 230: Black Rayquaza: I Am Now Invincible Under Heaven!!
"ROOOARR!!"
Kyurem Complete's roar hit the frozen sky and bounced back.
The Shiny Genesect had been a persistent annoyance — darting in, hitting with Extreme Speed, pulling back before Kyurem could respond — and Kyurem Complete had run out of patience with it.
It absorbed one Extreme Speed hit without flinching, then timed the next approach. The moment Genesect committed to its attack vector—
Glaciate.
The cold wave erupted from Kyurem Complete's turbine outward, not targeted but total.
Shiny Genesect pulled back immediately. Not fast enough. The leading edge of the freeze wave caught it, and one second later it was a gleaming insect-shaped ice sculpture.
Kyurem Complete's claw lit with blue-green Dragon energy. Dragon Claw. It drove into the frozen Genesect and sent it arcing downward toward the ruins below.
BANG.
"Genesect—!"
Mammon noted the impact but didn't break focus.
"Rayquaza! Face me!!"
Kyurem Complete turned toward the black dragon, roaring its demand.
Then Sacred Fire hit it from behind.
Kyurem Complete stopped.
It looked at where the fire had come from. The rainbow bird, closing in again.
Again.
Its eyes went very cold.
Its claw came up and tore through the incoming Sacred Fire — opened the fire like a door and stepped through it, dispersing it by brute force rather than dodging.
"SHRIEK~!!"
Ho-Oh's instincts overrode the fear response and she drove forward. If she was here, she was going to be here properly.
"Pathetic garbage," Kyurem Complete said. The mental translation didn't lose much. "A Shiny Pidgeot that doesn't know its limits."
"WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME?!"
Ho-Oh's composure cracked entirely.
A Shiny Pidgeot. Ho-Oh was a Shiny Pidgeot in this creature's taxonomy.
HO-OH.
Have you ever seen a Pidgeot that looked like this? HAVE YOU??
She was livid in a way that was, paradoxically, exactly what the situation required, because livid meant committed, and committed meant she didn't turn back.
Kyurem Complete had already dismissed her and begun condensing ice.
Ice Beam.
Ho-Oh's wings were very good. She weaved around the first, cut below the second, and came in close enough that the third grazed past her tail feathers without landing clean.
"Sacred Fire."
At range, Ho-Oh would lose. At close range, Ho-Oh's evasion was exceptional — her reading of airflow and angle was the result of an existence measured in geological time. Kyurem Complete's raw power was far above her, but it couldn't hit what it couldn't track.
She came in from below and released Sacred Fire at point-blank range upward into Kyurem Complete's chest.
Kyurem Complete didn't dodge.
Let it.
The fire detonated and bloomed across its front, the rainbow coloring of Sacred Fire spreading — and Kyurem Complete's ambient cold went to work on it immediately, the cryogenic aura smothering the fire from the outside in until it had extinguished.
Mammon's eyebrow went up.
Sacred Fire had a high burn probability — it was the whole point of trying multiple times. If Kyurem Complete was going to hard-absorb every hit without flinching, the burn might still land even if the damage was negligible.
But the reason he hadn't switched to Will-O-Wisp was exactly this: Will-O-Wisp guaranteed a burn, but Kyurem Complete would never let it land. Sacred Fire Kyurem was choosing to eat because it could. Will-O-Wisp it would have avoided trivially.
Kyurem Complete stepped forward through the fire's last embers.
Its turbine lit with blue-violet. Freeze Shock ring building.
BOOM.
Freeze Shock caught Ho-Oh mid-maneuver and drove her straight into the frozen ground. Reflect flared visibly on impact — the damage reduction doing real work — but the kinetic force behind it was enough that Ho-Oh went down hard regardless, the ground around her impact point crystallizing.
Kyurem Complete rose above the crater, glanced at the rainbow bird's general location, and turned toward Rayquaza.
In the crater, Sacred Fire was already burning. The pasive healing was immediate.
"Ho-Oh. Status."
"Very bad." The mental contact was unsteady. "Human, I may be approaching my limit."
"If you can transmit that, you're fine. Use Recover."
"YOU ARE A TERRIBLE PERSON!!"
But the white light of Recover activated even as she said it — and combined with Sacred Fire's continuous healing, her condition stabilized rapidly. The ice crusting her feathers began to melt.
This was the thing about Ho-Oh. This was why Mammon had called her specifically. Pokémon with this level of recovery couldn't be taken out in a single sequence. You had to knock them unconscious cleanly. If they had any functioning time between hits, they came back.
"One more thing," Mammon said.
"What now—"
"You really want to be finished off by something that called you a Shiny Pidgeot?"
Ho-Oh went quiet for a moment.
Then: "SHRIEK~!!"
She erupted from the crater, Sacred Fire blazing around her like a second set of wings, and drove directly back toward Kyurem Complete.
Kyurem Complete heard it and turned. Incredulity, visible even across species. It had seriously injured this bird. How.
What kind of bird is this.
Kyurem Complete's roar was impatient now, the turbine charging Cross Thunder.
Sacred Fire — massive this time, Ho-Oh pouring everything she had into it — swept toward Kyurem Complete in a torrent.
Kyurem Complete drove through it.
Cross Thunder.
Ho-Oh couldn't clear it. The lightning ring connected and she went backward with another cry, hit a large piece of ice debris, and the ice shattered around her.
She was buried.
But Kyurem Complete had gone very still.
Its expression shifted. Something internal, something it was suppressing—
And then fire. Blooming from inside outward, searing across Kyurem Complete's frame from the inside.
A burn.
"Got it," Mammon said.
Kyurem Complete's expression went to pure fury.
"THAT BIRD—"
"ROOOARR~!!"
A sound that was not anger but something older and more settled rolled across the ruins.
Black Rayquaza had stopped Dragon Dancing.
It hovered in the sky above, the green light in its eyes very bright, its presence settled around it in a way that had changed — not visibly, but perceptibly, the way a room changes when someone who knows exactly what they're doing walks in.
Kyurem Complete looked at it.
That's different.
"How are you feeling?" Mammon asked.
"This is my prime," Black Rayquaza said, with the uncomplicated certainty of something that has never found a reason to be modest about itself. "I have never been stronger than this moment."
Primal Kyogre, floating at a cautious distance, quietly lowered its position slightly.
Just in case the dragon remembered things.
"Not quite done yet," Mammon said. He looked down at the small creature sitting on his shoulder. "One more push."
"Tini~ Tini~"
Victini blinked its enormous clear eyes and extended both small hands toward Black Rayquaza.
The effect was — not a visible attack. Not a move with a flash or an impact. Just a quality, spreading outward from Victini like light from a lamp but without visible medium, finding Black Rayquaza and settling into it.
The Victory Pokémon was sharing its nature.
Victini was small. Its power, in absolute terms, wasn't competitive with the top-tier legendaries in the sky. But what it was — what the concept of Victory meant when made into a living thing — wasn't about raw force. It was about the condition of the battle when the moment came. And when Victini gave that condition to another Pokémon, it gave it fully.
She pushed nine-tenths of herself into Black Rayquaza and held nothing back.
"Helping Hand," Mammon said. "All of you."
Three separate surges of support energy — Primal Kyogre, Dark Mewtwo, young Rayquaza — converged on Black Rayquaza simultaneously.
Three Helping Hands, Victini's endowment, and six Dragon Dance boosts.
"ROOOARR!!"
Black Rayquaza couldn't contain it.
The sound that came out was not a strategic roar. It was involuntary — the overflow of force demanding expression, the body responding to more power than it could hold in silence. The shockwave from it cracked the frozen ground in a ring around where Mammon was standing.
The green light was everywhere.
Force. More force. Still more force, filling every available space, looking for somewhere to go.
Black Rayquaza had never felt this.
"Rayquaza. How are you."
The black dragon's eyes found Mammon below. Burning. Not with anger or excitement — with something larger than either.
"Human."
The voice came through very clearly.
"I am invincible."
(End of Chapter)
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