Chapter 231: Reshiram: Mammon, I Thought I'd Never See You Again
"I am invincible under heaven!!"
Black Rayquaza's declaration rang out with total conviction.
The power was real — filling every part of it, an accumulation so far past what it normally carried that it was more than it had room for. The feeling of it was something new even for a Pokémon that had existed across geological time.
Mammon's expression was slightly odd.
Invincible under heaven.
Where had he heard that recently.
…Oh. Wooloo was technically above the sky. And in a different dimension.
That's fine then.
"Good. You're fully powered. Go."
Mammon set aside the chain of thought and gave the signal.
"ROOOARR~!!"
Black Rayquaza's cry rolled outward. The long, magnificent black body undulated — unhurried, the way something moves when it knows exactly what the outcome is going to be — and came to face Kyurem Complete across the frozen air.
Kyurem Complete felt it. The change in what was facing it. Its expression went from furious to something more complicated — the specific sensation of encountering power that is objectively beyond yours, which Kyurem Complete had perhaps never experienced before in quite this way.
"RAYQUAZA!!"
Kyurem Complete roared it like a challenge anyway.
The turbine lit with purple-red energy — different from the blue-violet of earlier, a deeper, more concentrated color. A massive sphere built at Kyurem Complete's front, expanding, cooling, the air around it dropping to temperatures that shouldn't exist in summer at sea level.
Ice Burn.
"ROOOARR~!!"
Black Rayquaza's body lit green. It came in clean and straight, accelerating through the dive, the green light narrowing as it went until the entire long body had become one coherent projectile.
Fly.
Ice Burn and Fly met in the air between them.
BOOM.
The impact generated light — actual visible light, the flash of it bleaching the frozen ruins for a half-second before the shockwave followed. The sound came after that, hitting everyone on the ground like a pushed wall.
Then the light cleared, and Fly's green was still moving.
Through the Ice Burn.
Not deflected. Not blocked. Through — the blade of Black Rayquaza's dive cutting the Ice Burn sphere down the middle, cleaving it into two separate arcs that spread harmlessly to either side.
Kyurem Complete registered this approximately two-thirds of a second too late.
The green light was already past the Ice Burn and still going.
It cut through.
Black Rayquaza emerged on the far side of Kyurem Complete's position and the green light went out. For a full second, nothing happened — Kyurem Complete was suspended in the air, its expression unchanged, and then it exhaled a long breath and tilted sideways with a groan that was all pain and no dignity.
"WOW!!!"
Jirachi materialized from somewhere and was immediately vibrating with excitement, both eyes converted to stars.
"That was SO COOL!!"
"TINI!! TINI!!"
Victini was equally incoherent with enthusiasm, small hands clenched in celebration. It had contributed to that. That was its power in there.
Jirachi produced four small red flags from somewhere — origin unclear — distributed two of them to Victini, and they waved them at Black Rayquaza in coordinated small-creature excitement.
"GO RAYQUAZA!! DESTROY THEM!! GO GO GO!!"
"TINI TINI~!!"
Mammon watched this and had to work to keep his expression neutral.
Kyurem Complete wasn't done.
"ROOOARR!!"
It forced itself upright, Ice Beam blasting out from its maw — rapid, continuous, tracking Black Rayquaza across the sky.
Black Rayquaza dodged.
Six Dragon Dance boosts to Speed meant it was moving faster than it had ever moved. The long body flowed around the Ice Beams with a quality that went past evasion and became something like contempt — like these attacks were not quite relevant.
It closed the distance while dodging.
Tail blazing blue-green.
Kyurem Complete brought its claw up to meet it.
Dragon Claw.
"Helping Hand."
Dark Mewtwo and Kyogre sent their support out simultaneously.
The blue-green on Rayquaza's tail flared to something that was almost blinding.
Outrage.
The tail came down and Kyurem Complete's claw was swept aside entirely — the Dragon Claw just couldn't hold against what was behind the Outrage. The claw moved. The Outrage didn't stop. It detonated against Kyurem Complete's chest with the full force of six Dragon Dances, two Helping Hands, Victini's blessing, and the burn's reduction on Kyurem Complete's ability to withstand physical hits.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The energy discharged in sequences, each one rolling the previous one forward, the combined output turning half the sky above the ruins briefly uninhabitable. Kyurem Complete's roar was pain expressed as sound.
Its body went backward through the air and kept going.
"That Rayquaza is going way too hard," Primal Groudon said, watching from the ground with wide eyes, a box of energy cubes held in one claw, one cube halfway to its mouth.
It genuinely did not want to think about what that impact had felt like from the inside.
Good thing it wasn't aimed at me.
"The outcome is no longer in question," Giovanni agreed. He glanced sideways at Primal Groudon, which was now steadily eating through its third box. "You don't need all of those. Nidoking's dinner comes from somewhere."
"I was emotionally damaged by the fat fish and its associates." Groudon's tone was utterly sincere. "This is recovery."
"..."
Giovanni experienced a brief silence.
"Helping Hand."
"Rayquaza — Stone Edge."
Dark Mewtwo and Kyogre sent another support wave outward.
Black Rayquaza came in close, and stones — sharp, dense, multiple — materialized and launched in rapid sequence at Kyurem Complete.
Rock-type. Kyurem Complete had double weakness to Rock as an Ice/Dragon type.
BOOM. BOOM-BOOM.
The strikes landed cleanly. Kyurem Complete went down again, drove into the frozen ground, the impact shaking the rubble in a radius around it, smoke and ice-dust rising.
Black Rayquaza hovered above, looking down.
Wait for it.
"ROOOARR!!"
Kyurem Complete wasn't accepting this. Turbine running at maximum, the cold it was generating no longer localized — it was spreading, the temperature in the surrounding area dropping continuously. Ice spires pushed up from the ground, tilted, reaching. The chill in the air went past discomfort to something that required active resistance.
It was using everything it had left.
"Looks like Kyurem is going all out," Mammon noted.
The blue light condensed from Kyurem Complete's body — total output, everything — and formed the ice ring.
Glaciate.
"Helping Hand!"
"Rayquaza — Outrage!!"
The support wave hit Black Rayquaza.
Black Rayquaza charged.
Green erupted from its entire length — not a focused glow but a total one, every scale alight, the body itself become the attack.
Glaciate and Outrage met at the center.
The cold tried to do what it had done to the Delta Stream Twister earlier — tried to crystallize what it touched, tried to freeze the charging dragon in place.
The ice formed.
The ice shattered.
Instantly. Every time a crystal appeared it was gone before it had finished forming, broken by the force behind the green light.
One second.
Two seconds.
Black Rayquaza tore through the Glaciate ring from inside and came out the other side still moving, still blazing, and drove directly into Kyurem Complete.
CRASH.
The ground announced it before the sound reached anyone. The shockwave after announced it again. Every piece of ice in the ruins in a hundred-meter radius cracked simultaneously. Kyurem Complete went down and the crater it made was notable.
Silence.
Not quiet — not with the wind and the settling debris — but the kind of silence that comes after the loudest thing that was going to happen has happened.
Kyurem Complete lay in the crater.
It was still breathing.
Its eyes were open.
The fury was still there. The pride was still there. But underneath those was something it hadn't expected to carry: the fact of having lost, which Kyurem Complete had perhaps never done before, and which had a specific quality that pride made worse rather than better.
Three dragons unified. The complete form. And still not enough.
It was hard to understand why.
Unless—
But it had never wanted to become the Dragon of Unova again. It was Kyurem. That was what it was. What it had chosen to be.
And Kyurem was not enough.
"ROOOARR!!"
A last attempt. The turbine cycling, cold pouring out—
Black Rayquaza rose above it, watching.
The cold faded.
Kyurem Complete's chest heaved.
Then: from its mouth, two shapes emerged — light, dark, expanding as they cleared the air and dimmed into visible forms.
Zekrom. Reshiram.
Both of them looked at Kyurem Complete with expressions that were complicated in different ways.
Kyurem Complete, without them, shrank. The absorbed power reversing its structural changes. The massive tri-dragon form reduced, step by step, back to ordinary Kyurem's scale.
"YEEESS!! Reshiram is back!!"
Jirachi had been watching and burst into celebration.
"TINI TINI~!!" Victini echoed.
"The critical injury must have destabilized the DNA Splicers' grip," Mammon said, watching this with thoughtful eyes. That was consistent with the game's logic — the matched Pokémon separated when their host's condition collapsed past a threshold.
"Hmm~"
Reshiram oriented. Swept the scene. Located Mammon's position with the certainty of something that knows exactly where it belongs, and flew to him — landing before him with the unhurried dignity it maintained even now, chin up, posture immaculate.
"Mammon!!"
Directly into his mind: "I was so SCARED!!"
"I thought I was going to spend the rest of my existence being squeezed by that ice dragon and never see you again—"
"..."
Mammon was briefly without words.
"That's not going to happen." He found his composure, smiled, and kept his voice even. "I don't give up on any of my partners. Be more careful next time."
"Yes! Yes yes yes!!"
Reshiram nodded with the rapid sincerity of something that means every word of this and is slightly embarrassed about how much it means it. When it had been inside Kyurem Complete, it had genuinely thought the scenario ended there.
Everyone had come through for it.
Mammon glanced at Jirachi and Victini, both still waving their flags.
"Go collect the feathers. Both of you."
Ho-Oh had been knocked around considerably during the fight, and feathers had gone everywhere during the heavier impacts. Ho-Oh feathers were the primary ingredient in Sacred Ash — limited supply, because the supply was literally attached to Ho-Oh and didn't regenerate instantly. This was a significant recovery opportunity.
He watched the two small creatures immediately zip off across the frozen ruins on feather-collection duty.
Then he looked at Kyurem.
Ordinary Kyurem, now. Lying in its crater, diminished. Conscious. Not fighting.
Mammon studied it.
White Kyurem. Black Kyurem. Ordinary Kyurem.
He had Reshiram. He had access to N's Zekrom, presumably. If he could secure Kyurem's cooperation — either through catching it or through some arrangement — the three-form capability was reproducible.
The challenge was Kyurem's personality.
Getting that creature to accept anything from anyone.
He turned the problem over, thinking.
(End of Chapter)
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