Chapter 659: The Sun Rises in the East
Rumble—!
In the central area of the Rocky Mountain range, the four surrounding mountains trembled ceaselessly.
Boulders tumbled down, dust and smoke filled the air, and a heart-palpitating tremor echoed between heaven and earth.
Using the east-west ridge as a dividing line, the world was split in two.
On the four towering mountains facing each other, two massive armies gazed at one another from afar.
In the east.
Stood the current Overlords led by Kazuya: the Dragon Clan.
Their scales shimmered with a cold luster in the morning light, and sparks flew as the members of the Dragon Clan ground their claws and fangs.
Looking across the battlefield, the eyes of the Dragon Clan were filled with absolute contempt, not taking the ants on the opposite side seriously in the slightest.
In the west.
Stood the former Overlords led by Genesect: the Bug-type empire.
The rising morning sun reflected in its compound eyes; it was determined to reclaim the lost glory of the insect swarm.
The chittering of bugs and the buzzing of wings merged together, forming a symphony of death that set one's teeth on edge.
Just as Kazuya had guessed.
The moment that Genesect recovered from its injuries, it immediately launched a non-stop assault.
It probably wanted to exploit the timing, launching a surprise attack while the Tyrantrum was still recovering from his severe injuries.
But it hadn't expected...
That the Tyrantrum would recover so quickly.
And it certainly didn't expect...
That the Dragon King of the Dragon Clan wasn't the former Overlord of the Rocky Mountains, the Tyrantrum, but a Charizard from the southeastern grassland.
Regardless.
The arrow was nocked; it had to be fired.
The war drums had already sounded, and there was no room to turn back.
"Roar—!"
Kazuya's roar tore through the sky.
His dragon cry echoed with an apocalyptic will to fight.
"Roar!"
"Rua-ooh!"
"Garu!"
The flock of dragons roared in response, the soundwaves making the mountains tremble.
The Dragon Clan's grand army pressed forward, surging aggressively toward the insect swarm on the opposite side.
They swore to make the insect swarm understand.
This world had long since ceased to be their domain.
The name of this era was the Dragon Clan!
"Clack!"
The Genesect swung its arms, leading the charge to meet them.
"Bzzzt!"
"Click clack!"
"Swoosh!"
All kinds of Bug-type Pokémon poured into the valley ahead, forming a black tsunami that surged forward darkly.
The first to clash was naturally the aerial battlefield.
King against King.
General against General.
How the other combatants matched up wasn't fixed.
But Kazuya and the Genesect were locked into an unavoidable duel of Kings.
The Dragon King vs. the Bug King.
The blue flames on the black fire dragon's claws streaked across the sky, and a ghostly blue fireball shimmering with rainbow light smashed toward the rapidly approaching giant crimson insect.
The Genesect twisted its body, narrowly scraping past the fireball, crossed its arms, and snipped at Kazuya with its high-frequency vibrating X-Scissor.
Clang!
A Dragon Tail parried the X-Scissor.
The resulting sparks scattered like falling stars, and every clash sent out visible shockwaves.
Neither side gained the upper hand in the first round of collisions.
At the same time.
The powerhouses on both sides initiated their own duels.
Right in the center of the ground battlefield.
The Tyrantrum and an Armaldo were engaged in a brutal, head-to-head clash of pure masculinity.
Every time the two ancient behemoths collided, the earth shook and the mountains swayed. They abandoned all technique, conversing purely through raw power.
It was obvious.
They harbored a deep appreciation for each other.
It was just a pity... that one of them had to die here today.
In the low altitude.
A Hydreigon and a Volcarona passionately blasted each other, turning their sector into a blazing purgatory.
Dragon Breath and Flamethrower bombarded each other frantically.
The stray attacks that occasionally shot into the enemy ranks would trigger explosions that sent countless grunts flying.
At the peak of the clouds.
A Mega Salamence and a Yanmega vanished from the sight of the masses below.
Their battle had escalated above the sea of clouds.
The bloodstained crescent moon tore through the drifting clouds with its wings, while the Yanmega wove through the blades of hurricane winds, dodging every attack. Their battlefield rose from a thousand meters high straight into the stratosphere.
Every fierce clash sent out ring-shaped cloud explosions.
Today, they were determined to fight it out at the peak of the clouds to see who was the true Overlord of the skies.
In the center of the insect sea.
The duel between the Mega Garchomp and the Vespiquen looked more like a hero challenging an evil dragon.
The Garchomp merely stood his ground.
And that was enough to cause endless headaches for the Vespiquen and her Combee army.
With every roar, with every stomp...
The land shark made them profoundly understand the meaning of agony.
His younger brother's opponent was an Escavalier.
The two locked eyes amidst the mountains of dragons and seas of bugs. Gazing at each other from afar, they initiated a knight's duel.
A 'vacuum zone' automatically formed around them.
Any blind fool who dared to interrupt this duel would be torn to shreds in an instant.
Dragon Dad had originally planned to take it easy and crush some weaklings, but unfortunately, a swarm of death-seeking Durant came knocking on his door.
Steel bugs with a 4x weakness to fire, looking for trouble with the former Overlord of the volcano—their fate was already sealed.
The miserable screams from within the raging flames never stopped from beginning to end.
The Durant's carapaces were burned until they glowed red and cracked, filling the air with a charred, foul stench.
Mega Aerodactyl and his opponent, a Ninjask, had turned into blurry afterimages constantly chasing and crossing paths across the battlefield.
Even when they flew right past someone's ears...
They could only hear the howling wind of their flapping wings, completely unable to see their physical forms.
Of course, the Champions weren't the only ones exerting themselves.
Two primal, catastrophic tides crashed into each other in the valley.
The sounds of shattering carapaces and tearing scales instantly drowned out the heavens and the earth.
Every single creature at this moment was but a tiny speck in this vast, epic war.
The multi-dimensional nature of the war was displayed to the fullest.
Regardless of the theater, not a single Dragon Clan warrior was a coward.
The Hydreigon and Salamence had become aerial artillery, dominating the high skies to launch long-range 'firearm' strikes against the ground.
Flamethrower.
Dragon Breath.
Hurricane.
Air Slash.
Any single move was enough to make the insect swarm suffer immensely.
It wasn't that the flying Bug-types didn't try to go up and stop them.
But putting aside whether they could break through the defensive cover provided by the Altaria...
Just facing the hunting maneuvers of the sky Overlords, the Aerodactyl, left them completely overwhelmed and fighting for their own lives.
The ground assault forces used Rampardos as the spearhead, Haxorus as the blade, and Kommo-o and Scrafty formed the flanks, launching a ruthless charge into the insect tide.
The swarm's numerical advantage shattered like dry weeds and rotten wood before them.
Wherever they passed, nothing remained but severed insect limbs and a mix of red and green blood.
The Goodra slowly followed around their companions, like moving fortresses of steel.
Relying on their immovable, rock-solid physiques, they were dedicated to guarding everyone's backs.
Druddigon, Flygon, and Garchomp.
The three factions shifted the battle underground.
The earth trembled and rolled continuously, and muffled, thunderous vibrations echoed from deep underground.
The rock layers surged like ocean waves.
Occasionally, a land dragon would flip over, burst from the soil, launch a Skorupi high into the air, and cleave it in two with the giant scythes on its arms.
In the deep rear of the Dragon Clan's army.
There was even a dark, eerie flower anchoring the formation.
She used a sky full of fluttering black petals to reap the fragile lives of the insects, like an ominous fairy symbolizing destruction.
Yet she also used crisp green vine whips to rescue countless Dragon Clan companions from peril, acting as a Queen of Flowers representing life.
This was a true, all-out war.
From the sky to the underground.
The scent of blood and sweat permeated everywhere.
The roars of dragons and the screeching of bugs wove together into a battle hymn of blood and fire, echoing endlessly among the peaks of the Rocky Mountains.
The sun moved from the east to directly overhead.
Warriors fell with every passing minute and second.
Yet this iron-blooded battle raged on.
"Rua!!"
Kazuya violently flapped his dragon wings, charging forward as a black blur.
His shoulders and abdomen were already marked with several bloody, deep gashes.
This Genesect wasn't much higher in level than the Tyrantrum, but its incredibly tricky speed made Kazuya feel it was much harder to deal with.
The Genesect's compound eyes flashed rapidly.
It was calculating Kazuya's every movement.
Ultimately, it chose not to evade, charging head-on to meet him.
Compared to Kazuya's cuts, Genesect was in a truly miserable state.
Its originally crimson, metallic skin had been scorched completely black.
But even so...
It didn't harbor the slightest thought of fleeing like it had before.
It was a creature that should have died in the previous era; surviving until now was already a stroke of luck.
If it couldn't lead the insect swarm back to their former peak, then rather than eking out a pathetic existence watching the swarm slowly wither away, it was better to die on this battlefield today, waving a grand goodbye to the past.
Going down with the former glory of the insect empire was, at the very least, an honorable death.
Clang!
The flaming fist and the cold-gleaming insect blade clashed fiercely, and the Genesect's body stalled from the massive impact.
A glimmer of light flashed in Kazuya's eyes.
He opened his jaws.
Releasing the blue flames he had been gathering for a long time.
Boom!!
A Fire Blast struck it dead in the face.
The fiery explosion sent both Kings flying backward.
Kazuya flapped his wings to steady himself, sensed the Aura of the retreating figure, and lunged straight toward it.
Dazzling blue flames wrapped around his black dragon body.
In that moment.
Kazuya transformed into a blue-cyan meteor, crashing from the horizon into the retreating giant crimson insect.
The blue flames completely swallowed the crimson figure, driving it like a falling star straight into the mountain ridge below!
Rumble, rumble—!
The top of the mountain peak collapsed violently from the impact.
Dust and shattered rocks shot into the sky, forming a pitch-black mushroom cloud.
The earth shook and the mountains swayed.
Kazuya shot out from the gray smoke.
He intended to head to the main battlefield to support the Dragon Clan.
Just then.
The wind whipped up by the flapping wings of the dragons carried a faint sound to his ears:
Bzzzt...
Kazuya's eyes widened, and he spun his body, turning to the side.
Swoosh!
A pillar of lightning pierced past his ear, shooting into the sky and blasting a hole straight through the clouds.
Kazuya turned around and looked down.
In the giant crater blasted into the mountaintop, the Genesect was kneeling on one knee, raising its head to lock eyes with him.
Once upon a time.
They were the Kings who looked down upon the masses.
The red light in its compound eyes flickered weakly, seemingly full of reluctance.
Why...
Why is it that in the blink of an eye, everyone is gone?
The Genesect staggered unsteadily to its feet from the crater.
The next moment.
A crimson streak of light shot up into the sky.
Its body flickered with a faint, final light—a desperate, suicidal final strike.
That faint glow was like the final musical note of an era, refusing to end, still yearning for the highlights of the past.
The giant black dragon chose to meet the attack head-on.
The blue fireball shimmering with rainbow light was more dazzling than the sun in the sky, as if this world had welcomed its new protagonist.
"The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. This era no longer belongs to you."
Kazuya grasped the fireball and slammed it downward, roaring to set a new definition for this age: "The name of this era, is the Dragon Clan!!"
Hum—!
The invisible sonic boom muted the heavens and the earth.
The Genesect's figure gradually dissipated in the ultimate, blinding light. It turned its head to take one last look at this world.
What flickered in its compound eyes was no longer a cold light, but a trace of exhaustion and nostalgia from a distant past...
And the regret of failing to restore their former glory.
The light faded.
Only a few red fragments remained in the sky, gradually turning into motes of light and drifting away.
They were like withered, blood-red petals.
Slowly falling from the sky.
The pitch-black Dragon King hovered in the firmament, arms crossed, coldly observing the unfinished battlefield below.
The insect swarm was still fighting a bloody battle.
Perhaps they already knew the fate of the Bug King, or perhaps they didn't.
But regardless.
The victor had been decided.
The outcome of the war was set in stone.
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