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Kael slowly raised his right arm, his slender elbow aimed at Basculin in the distance ahead.
Thanks to his exceptional vision in low light, he could clearly make out the other Pokémon's panicked figure even in the dim deep water.
A moment like this, when the enemy's mind was shaken and its focus unstable, was the perfect time to strike.
He did not hesitate.
Hidden in the shadows, Kael's small body tensed sharply. Controlling the flow of the water around him, he lashed his broad, powerful tail through the lake behind him.
Boom!
The sound hit like a heavy war drum.
His nearly transparent little body shot straight toward Basculin like a bullet made of flesh and bone, tearing through the drag of the water and stirring rings of rippling vortices in what had been still, quiet depths.
At the same time, brilliant white light gathered rapidly around the arm he had aimed at Basculin.
In the black water, it looked like a single star burning in the night sky, impossible to ignore, while the pulse of energy rolling from it spread outward.
Kael was no longer worried about the other Pokémon noticing him.
With the extreme agility boost granted by his system equipment, there was no way Basculin could dodge what was coming.
All that patient hiding had only been to weaken the enemy's nerve and break down its mental defenses.
This.
This was the moment he had truly been waiting for.
"Pound!"
The Pound Kael used now was no longer the crude beginner move it had once been. After combining and refining it with the combat experience from his previous lives, he had turned it into a technique perfectly suited to the way he fought now.
Instead of spreading Normal-type energy evenly through his whole arm, he compressed it forward into the front of his hand.
He sacrificed the broader overall power boost for a much more concentrated and extreme destructive force.
Used this way, Pound was clearly weaker in a straightforward head-on clash.
But in ambushes and short bursts, its killing power was far greater than before.
When paired with Kael's absurd agility, it could even become a terrifying move capable of deciding the battle in a single strike.
And right now, against a Basculin already shaken and with its guard slipping, this was the perfect moment to use it.
WHUMM!
White light flashed.
Water split.
Kael's thunderous strike, launched from Basculin's blind spot, smashed into it at a speed no ordinary Pokémon could possibly react to.
As for Basculin, even though it had caught a vague glimpse of Sobble's shadow with the corner of its eye at the very last moment, it was not built for speed. Its muscles simply could not turn fast enough.
It could only take the hit.
BAM!
The violent impact of flesh against flesh thudded through the water, sending waves rippling outward as red blood and shattered dark-green scales burst into the lake.
Basculin's body, over three feet long, spun and tumbled deeper into the water under the force of the blow.
"No."
Kael drew his hand back quickly, surprise flashing through his blue eyes.
"The feel of that hit... was wrong."
Blue Crystal Marine Park might have been a place where the overall level of strength was much lower than in the true wild.
But for a Pokémon that had defeated so many rivals and claimed such a vast lake as its territory, Basculin was no easy target.
Through countless cycles of challenge, defeat, and challenge again, it had grown stronger.
Its vitality was monstrous, comparable to Magikarp in sheer stubbornness. Because it possessed unusually high defensive potential, it had developed a body far tougher than that of others of its kind.
It's rough but has extremely thick scales.
Its dense muscles are as hard as metal.
It has abnormally strong bones.
All of it had pushed its physical durability to the absolute limit of what Basculin could achieve.
Kael's lightning-fast strike had looked devastating.
But in truth, most of the destructive power inside it had been intercepted and absorbed the moment it struck Basculin's scales.
Only a fraction of the damage had actually penetrated through and reached the flesh beneath.
Which meant that even after taking Kael's blow head-on, Basculin's injuries were not nearly as severe as they looked.
It was nowhere close to losing the ability to fight.
That was why Kael's expression had shifted.
He really had not expected the Pokémon in front of him to possess such absurd defensive power.
He gave his right hand a small shake beneath the water, letting the remaining energy residue bleed away.
His eyes stayed fixed on Basculin below him, their expression turning serious.
There was no helping it.
Kael knew the limits of Pound's power well enough.
Yes, after he had refined and optimized it, the move had become much stronger than before.
But at the end of the day, it was still just a very basic starting move. The energy flow and force application were both inherently too rough.
The only reason Kael was even relying on it as one of his main attacks was that his level was still too low, and he simply had not learned any stronger moves yet.
If he had access to something like Dynamic Punch or Mega Punch, or even something as plain as Quick Attack, he would never have bothered pouring effort into developing a starter move this far.
So while he was impressed by Basculin's durability, he was not truly shocked that this strike had failed to deal decisive damage.
The real problem was this.
In attacking, he had exposed the body he had hidden so carefully in the dark water.
His environmental advantage was gone.
Kael understood perfectly well what that meant.
From here on out, the battle would be brutal.
At that same moment, Basculin, which had been tumbling deeper into the lake after taking Kael's hit, finally managed to stop itself through a violent struggle.
The instant Kael saw that, he knew he could not wait.
With a lash of his tail, he used the water around him to rocket forward again toward his enemy.
He had paid for the initiative by revealing himself.
There was no way he was going to waste the opportunity now.
If he wanted to win, he had to make full use of the fact that the rhythm of the fight was still in his hands and pile on as much damage as possible while he still could.
But then something extremely strange happened.
Faced with Kael's aggressive charge, Basculin did not react at all.
It did not dodge.
It did not counter.
It simply floated in place as though time itself had stopped.
And then, even more strangely, it closed its eyes and lowered its head slightly toward Kael.
"This..."
For a moment, Kael's heart filled with confusion.
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~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter
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For early access to advanced chapters on P-atreon:
P-atreon/iamxeno
(Just remove the - hyphen to access normally)
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