"Damn it, you bastard!"
Ash's voice was raw with fury, his teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached. His hands were balled into fists at his sides, trembling — not from fear, but from the helpless, burning rage of someone who could see exactly what needed to be done and was physically prevented from doing it. If it weren't for Mismagius's Psychic binding him and Pikachu in place like insects pinned to a board, Grings Kodai would already be on the ground.
"Is that so?" a calm, unhurried voice cut through the tension like a blade through still water. "You really believe no one will ever find out?"
"Who's there?!"
Kodai spun around, the triumphant composure on his face fracturing for the first time. His eyes swept the courtyard with a sharp, almost hunted urgency — the look of a man who had spent years seeing the future and was utterly unnerved by something that hadn't appeared in it.
Ash's head snapped around too. Then his eyes went wide.
Descending from above — unhurried, almost casual — was a Gengar, its ghostly form drifting through the air like a shadow given weight. Gripping its feet with one hand and landing in a smooth, controlled drop beside it was a familiar figure: dark eyes sharp, posture relaxed, carrying the particular brand of unshakeable calm that came from knowing something everyone else in the room didn't.
"Gary!"
Ash's shock lasted only a fraction of a second before a small, sleepy shape stirred in Gary's other arm — a tiny fox-like Pokémon with a red-tipped tuft and drowsy, half-open eyes.
"Zorua!"
Gary set the little Pokémon down gently onto the cobblestones. Zorua blinked, shook its small head, and took in its surroundings with the disoriented confusion of someone waking from a dream.
Gary cast a quick glance over at Ash and Pikachu, both still frozen in the invisible grip of Mismagius's Psychic — suspended mid-motion, unable to move so much as a finger. Gary pressed two fingers briefly to his temple, his expression somewhere between exasperated and resigned.
Of all the ways to end up, he thought. Caught by a Gym-tier Mismagius. Really, Ash.
"This situation went in circles more times than I'd like to count," Gary said, his voice carrying the dry patience of someone who had been cleaning up other people's messes all day. "You couldn't handle a Mismagius at its level?"
[LV49 Mismagius ♀ / Gym-tier]
Gary's Eye of Insight had already catalogued it the moment he arrived. Kodai's Mismagius was not a weak Pokémon — for an ordinary trainer, it would be genuinely dangerous. But it had plateaued. Its level was its ceiling, and it was nowhere close to being a match for Pikachu under normal circumstances. The fact that it had managed to keep Ash immobilized at all was a testament to how thoroughly the situation had caught him flat-footed.
Gary shifted his gaze to the small figure cradled in Ash's arms — the one Ash had been desperately shielding even while bound.
[LV30 Celebi / Legendary-tier]
Only level thirty. Gary studied the Time Travel Pokémon with quiet concern. Its small body was wrapped in a makeshift bandage, one arm bound with cloth strips that had clearly been fashioned in a hurry. Whatever had happened to Celebi before all of this had begun, it had arrived in Crown City already wounded and exhausted. No wonder it hadn't been able to stop Kodai on its own. At barely a third of what a healthy Legendary-tier Pokémon should be capable of, Celebi had been running on fumes.
"Who are you?"
Kodai's voice had taken on a careful, measured quality — the tone of a man who was deeply unsettled but refusing to show it openly. He watched Gary with narrowed eyes, cataloguing him the way a predator reassesses a situation when an unexpected variable enters the equation.
He's never seen me before. Gary recognized the look. Kodai's ability to see the future had become the foundation of his entire psychology — his identity, his confidence, his certainty. Every plan he had ever made, every crime he had ever committed, had been executed with the absolute assurance that he had already seen how it would unfold. To encounter a person who simply hadn't appeared in those visions was, for a man like Kodai, profoundly destabilizing.
Good, Gary thought. Let him be unsettled.
Since absorbing the power of the time ripples twenty years ago, Grings Kodai had moved through the world with the serene arrogance of a man who believed he could never truly be surprised. Unexpected things were tolerable when they were small — minor deviations, easily corrected. But a person who simply wasn't there in any vision of the future? That was something else entirely. That was the ground shifting beneath his feet.
"You think you've been invisible this whole time," Gary said, his voice flat and unhurried, cutting through Kodai's composure with surgical precision. "You've spent years believing you're untouchable — that your crimes are perfect, that Zoroark makes a convincing enough scapegoat to keep every eye pointed the wrong direction." He took a single step forward. "But right now, from where I'm standing, you look exactly like what you are. A con artist who got lucky once and spent two decades living off the credit. It's over, Kodai. Surrender."
The words landed like stones dropped into still water. For a brief, crackling moment, the courtyard was silent.
Then Kodai's expression hardened back into something approaching contempt. "Nonsense," he said, and his voice had recovered its smoothness. "Nothing is over. I have already absorbed the time ripples. The future belongs to me. Whatever you think you know — you're wrong."
"Is that so?" Gary said mildly. "Then take another look at what's around you."
"Around me?" Kodai repeated, the word coming out uncertain despite himself. He glanced sideways. The garden was as he expected — the stone paths, the ancient trees, the fading violet shimmer of the time ripple source nearby. Everything was exactly—
And then the world flickered.
Like a candle flame caught in a sudden draft, the scene around Kodai trembled, blurred, and dissolved. The carefully constructed illusion unraveled in seconds — shapes bleeding back into their true forms, distances snapping back to their real measurements, the entire false picture of the world Zoroark had woven around him collapsing like wet paper. The mechanical claw device on his wrist — the instrument he had used to drain the time ripples — caught the light differently now. He looked down at it.
The phantom bracelet built into his sleeve was cracked. Damaged. The precision device that had been his key to absorbing the time energy had been quietly, surgically compromised.
Kodai's mind reeled backward. When? How?
The answer arrived a half-second later, surfacing from memory with cold clarity: Zorua, when Zoroark had still been pretending to be restrained. The small fox Pokémon — seemingly limp and helpless in his grip — had bitten down on the bracelet. A small thing. A thing he had dismissed.
It hadn't been small at all.
"Give it up," Gary said. There was no satisfaction in his voice, no gloating — just the clean finality of a door closing. "Every piece of evidence needed to convict you has already been gathered. The law will find you no matter where you run. This is the end of the road."
At that moment, two more figures appeared at the edge of the courtyard — a young boy Gary recognized as Kurut, Karl's grandson, and beside him, a woman moving with the careful, slightly guilty air of someone who had recently changed sides: Kodai's own secretary, Rowena's contact, the person who had known far too many of Kodai's secrets and had finally decided that carrying them wasn't worth it anymore.
Kodai went rigid.
He was a smart man. He had always been a smart man — that was part of what had made him so dangerous. He looked at his secretary's face, and in the space of two seconds, he understood everything: what she had given up, who she had given it to, and how completely the walls had closed around him.
The fury that crossed his features was ugly and brief. Then it was gone, replaced by something colder — the survival instinct of a cornered animal.
His eyes swept the courtyard, calculating angles, measuring distances. The exit was there. It was narrow, but it was there.
He ran.
"Gengar — Hypnosis!" Gary's voice was sharp and immediate, the command cutting the air before Kodai had taken three steps.
Gengar was already moving. The Ghost-type surged forward out of the shadows like a dark tide, crossing the courtyard in an instant — but Kodai was faster than he looked, and he still had one Pokémon left.
"Shuppet — block it!" Kodai barked without slowing his stride.
The small Ghost-type materialized between Gengar and its target, spreading itself wide in a desperate attempt to buy its trainer the seconds he needed.
Gengar didn't hesitate. It pulled back one fist and drove it forward — a concentrated burst of Ghost-type energy, dense and crackling, striking Shuppet square across the face with enough force to send the smaller Pokémon spinning away through the air. Shuppet hit the ground and didn't get back up. Gengar was already past it before the echo of the impact had faded, and it caught Kodai within three more strides — rising up in front of him from the shadows cast by the garden wall, its wide red eyes locking onto his. The hypnotic spiral of Hypnosis unfolded between them like a slow, inevitable tide.
Kodai's footsteps slowed. His expression went slack. And then Grings Kodai crumpled softly into Gengar's waiting arms, deeply, utterly unconscious.
The courtyard exhaled.
"Ash!" Two voices arrived simultaneously from across the garden — Brock and Dawn, sprinting in from the direction of the outer streets, breathless and wide-eyed. They skidded to a halt as the scene resolved itself before them: Ash and Pikachu, now freed from Mismagius's hold as the defeated Pokémon lost its concentration; Gary standing in the center of the courtyard with a sleeping Kodai bundled in Gengar's arms; and the Legendary Beasts — Entei, Suicune, and Raikou — materializing from the shadows of the great trees above in three smooth, powerful leaps, landing in a loose ring around the unconscious man with the quiet authority of elemental forces acknowledging a completed task.
Raikou had been the first to act when Kodai made his run. The electric tiger had lunged from the branches with a sound like a cracking thunderbolt, and its jaws had closed on the extended mechanical claw device with enough force to shear through the metal in a single Crunch. The device had fallen in two pieces to the ground. Kodai had barely registered it before Gary's command reached Gengar.
Brock stared, his mouth slightly open. "Why is Gary here?"
"I have absolutely no idea," Ash admitted, running a hand through his hair with the sheepish energy of someone who had just been dramatically rescued and wasn't entirely sure how to feel about it. "But he helped us, and Kodai's been taken care of. That's what matters."
He pointed to where Gengar held the sleeping villain with the gentle, slightly smug expression of a Ghost-type that had thoroughly enjoyed its assignment.
The chaos had passed. The urgency drained out of the air, replaced by something quieter — the particular stillness that settles over a place after a long-running wrong has finally been stopped.
"The villain's caught," Gary said simply. "Now let's deal with what matters."
He reached into his bag and withdrew three Heal Balls, their pink surfaces catching the afternoon light. He crossed the courtyard to where Zoroark stood — still upright through sheer stubbornness, her dark fur matted with dried blood, her amber eyes burning with a fierce, exhausted defiance even as her legs trembled beneath her.
"Zoroark," Gary said quietly, stopping a respectful distance away and keeping his voice low. He held up the Heal Balls so she could see them clearly. "These are Heal Balls. They'll treat your injuries — yours and Zorua's both. I'm not going to keep you inside them. Once the healing is done, I'll let you both out immediately." He met her eyes directly. "I promise. Is that all right?"
Zoroark was still for a moment. Her gaze moved from Gary's face to the Heal Balls in his hand, then to the sleeping Zorua still curled in the crook of his arm, undisturbed and breathing softly. Something shifted in her expression — the iron-rigid wariness of a creature that had been betrayed and caged and used slowly, carefully releasing its grip.
She lowered her head in a slow, deliberate nod.
"Then come in," Gary said gently.
The Heal Balls opened and closed in sequence, soft pink light drawing both mother and child inside. The healing function activated immediately — Gary could feel the quiet hum of it through the casings, the Balls working steadily to undo the damage Kodai had inflicted over however many weeks of captivity.
When the process completed, he released them both.
The transformation was immediate and striking. Zoroark emerged standing straight, her dark fur clean and her wounds entirely gone, her red mane falling unmatted over her shoulders for the first time in what was clearly a long while. She looked down at herself with an expression of naked disbelief — pressing one clawed hand to her side where the worst of the injuries had been, finding nothing but healthy muscle beneath her fur.
She let out a low, wondering sound, deep in her throat.
Even after everything Kodai put her through, Gary thought, watching her, she never broke. She held on for Zorua's sake the entire time.
"Here," Gary said, stepping forward and carefully transferring the still-drowsy Zorua into Zoroark's arms.
Zoroark gathered her child close instantly, her arms curling around the small body with the fierce, instinctive tenderness of a mother who had been separated from her child for far too long. Zorua stirred against her chest — nosing forward, catching the familiar scent, and going still again with the boneless, absolute trust of a small creature that had found exactly where it was supposed to be.
Then Zorua's eyes opened, slowly, finding Zoroark's face. The little fox blinked once. Then it pressed its small head upward against Zoroark's chin with all the force its tiny body could manage, nuzzling insistently.
Zoroark closed her eyes.
Nobody spoke. Even the Legendary Beasts were still.
Brock was very deliberately looking at the sky. Dawn had both hands pressed to her mouth. Ash was smiling despite himself, bright and unguarded in the way that only genuinely good things could make him smile.
Gary let the moment breathe, then turned and walked across to where Ash stood, still cradling Celebi in his arms with careful, practiced gentleness.
"Your turn," Gary said to the small Mythical-tier Pokémon. "Let me take a look at you."
Celebi's arm was still wrapped in a bandage — cloth strips tied in a loose, improvised manner that suggested they had been put on by someone doing their best with whatever was available. The injury hadn't healed. With the Pokémon Center in Crown City having been effectively shut down in the chaos surrounding Kodai's scheme, Celebi had simply had to endure it.
Gary crouched down slightly to bring himself level with the small Pokémon and asked, gently but directly, "Celebi — do you need treatment?"
Celebi had been watching him throughout all of it. The courtyard confrontation, Kodai's capture, Zoroark and Zorua's reunion — it had seen everything, and it had seen Gary at the center of it, quiet and purposeful and not once acting out of anything except the desire to set things right.
Its large eyes met his. Then, with a small, decisive chirp — "Bi!" — it nodded.