The wall of Heat Wave rolled back across the pursuers like a curtain of fire, cutting them off — a blazing barrier that bought distance in an instant.
Beneath her helmet, Whitney allowed herself a small smile. Her lips curved upward, and she glanced down at the box cradled in her arms, the Rainbow Wing secure inside it. The smile held.
With Salamence as her mount, this was effectively over. Salamence was the undisputed master of the open sky — no one trailing behind her was going to catch up, and even if they did, none of them were going to beat Salamence in an aerial battle. Not unless they were willing to drop their disguises entirely and bring out a family's signature Pokémon in full view of everyone present.
Whitney was counting on the fact that they wouldn't dare.
Then a roar erupted from within the Heat Wave.
The wind picked up — sharp and violent — and a hurricane tore straight through the wall of flame, ripping a gap in the fire wide enough to fly through. Edwin came out of it on Noivern's back, trailing a faint corona of orange light, the passage he'd carved still burning at its edges.
Several other Trainers swept through the gap immediately after, riding the wind tunnel Noivern had created before it sealed behind them.
Whitney watched the group re-emerge, and the smile on her lips cooled.
She shook her head slowly, eyes sharpening beneath the visor. Why were they still pushing this hard?
Something shifted in her chest — a tightening, a restlessness she recognized. Her breathing quickened. Her grip on Salamence's back adjusted. She had felt this before. The helmet had a way of bringing it out, that particular edge, the part of her that had no patience for any of this and even less interest in holding back.
Two versions of herself existed, and she had learned to tell them apart. Helmet off — she was composed, easy, warm. Helmet on — the warmth drained out and something colder and more precise took its place.
Her eyes fixed on the group behind her. Her hand moved to Salamence's flank, fingers trailing lightly against the scales.
"Kill them," she murmured, her voice low and almost gentle. "Salamence — Dragon Pulse. Don't hold back."
"Roar!"
Salamence's response was immediate and enormous. The Pokémon's temper had always run hot, and it wanted no more encouragement than that. Dragon-type energy surged and condensed, firing backward in a concentrated Dragon Pulse that screamed toward Noivern.
"Dodge — now!" Edwin's voice went sharp.
Noivern twisted sideways with everything it had, relying on raw speed to clear the attack by a narrow margin. The Dragon Pulse shrieked past it.
The Trainer positioned directly behind Edwin had no such warning.
A sharp bang. A scream. Then something fell from the sky.
Edwin didn't look back. His eyes stayed fixed on Salamence, his thoughts already moving ahead. The air was the problem. On the ground, or at sea, Whitney would be a different calculation entirely — but up here, in open sky, his options were badly limited. The absence of a powerful Flying-type Pokémon had always been the gap in his team, and he was feeling it sharply now. Noivern was Heavenly King-level at best. Whitney's Salamence was quasi-Champion. The arithmetic was not in his favor.
There was only one path forward.
"Force her down," Edwin said to the Trainers around him, his voice flat and clipped. "We cannot stop her up here. Stop holding back — use everything you have."
A hoarse voice answered from somewhere to his left. "We want to stop her just as much as you do, President Edwin. But everyone here knows what she is. Those two characters in her name mean tiger for a reason. Nobody wants to be the one tangling with the Northeastern tigress face-to-face." A pause. "If you want us to commit, your Noivern leads first. Otherwise, why should we take the damage so you can pick up the Wing afterward?"
Edwin's expression didn't change, but the cold in his eyes deepened. Useless. Every last one of them. If he had any other option, he would have been done with this group an hour ago.
The Rainbow Wing was slipping away, and they were arguing.
He was still turning his options over when he noticed it.
Mist.
It had appeared without warning — thin at first, barely perceptible, but spreading fast. Cold and pale, curling through the dark air around them, thickening by the second.
Everyone noticed it at roughly the same moment.
"Noivern — Clear Smog!"
Edwin didn't wait for discussion. Noivern bellowed and released a burst of Flying-type energy, a powerful gust that punched through the Mist and tore a wide clearing in the fog ahead of them.
It lasted a few seconds. Then the Mist rolled back in and filled the gap as if the clearing had never been there.
"That's not natural fog."
"It has to be Whitney — she's using it to cover her escape."
"We're going to lose her—"
"Wait — why is she slowing down?"
Whitney's silhouette, visible ahead through the thickening white, was decelerating. Not fleeing faster, not banking away — slowing, almost as though she was waiting.
The pursuit faltered. Every Trainer behind her pulled back instinctively, wariness overriding momentum.
A trap?
In truth, Whitney had no idea what they were thinking. The deceleration had nothing to do with them. The fog was the problem — dense, bitterly cold, appearing from nowhere and closing in fast. The temperature had dropped sharply, visibility was poor, and pushing Salamence to full speed through something like this was a risk she wasn't willing to take. She brought Salamence down to a cautious pace and scanned the Mist ahead.
Something about it was wrong.
Behind her, the pursuers interpreted the slowdown as an invitation into a trap and refused to close in. An uneasy standoff formed in the fog, no one advancing, no one retreating.
Then the sound came.
Faint at first — a voice, or something like one, drifting through the white air. Not quite a cry, not quite a melody, but something between the two. The kind of sound that certain Pokémon made.
The cold intensified.
Not gradually — all at once, a wave of freezing air that radiated outward through the Mist with tremendous force, flash-freezing everything it touched. Trees below them went still and white. The fog itself crystallized in places, suspended in the air like glass.
"Ambush — someone's ambushing us!"
"How strong is this attack—"
"That Ice-type energy is approaching Master level — run!"
"Protect — everyone, Protect, now!"
Light shields snapped into existence across the group as every Trainer responded at once, Pokémon bracing behind barriers of energy. The cold tore into them anyway. The barriers held — barely — frost creeping up the edges, the surfaces cracking under the sustained pressure. These were Heavenly King-level and quasi-Champion Pokémon, and the attack was pushing past them.
The shields shattered with a sound like breaking glass, and the damage that came through was severe.
Noivern took the worst of it. Ice-type attacks hit Flying-types hard enough, but Dragon-type added a second layer of weakness — a four-times vulnerability that turned what was already a punishing blow into something devastating. Even with Protect, Noivern was badly hurt, barely staying airborne.
The others had fared somewhat better, their Pokémon absorbing most of the damage, but none of them had come through clean.
Whitney had thrown up Salamence's Protect the moment she felt the energy building, and even her quasi-Champion Salamence had strained against the force of the attack. She had barely held it off.
When the cold finally passed, everyone turned toward the Mist.
A shadow was moving through the white — large, unhurried, growing as it drew closer. The fog parted around it as it came, trailing ice crystals that drifted in the air like snow.
The shape resolved slowly.
A massive body. Ice crystals suspended around it, orbiting it like a slow current. A long, graceful neck — blue, slender, elegant as a Swanna in flight.
The recognition hit the group in waves.
"That's — Giant Lapras!"
"Giovanni!"
"Giovanni is here!"