The guards led Lucien through the city gate and into Laverre City.
The smell reached him first, smoke and dust and, beneath it, the faint ghost of something floral, as though the city remembered what it had been before all this.
Damaged wooden houses, collapsed walls, bloodstains still dark and wet on the cobblestones. Civilians huddled under eaves with hollow, exhausted faces. Only a few scattered flowers along the roadside still bloomed, stubborn and small against the wreckage surrounding them.
Serperior moved quietly at Lucien's side, its emerald body held with that characteristic upright pride, radiating a calm authority that seemed to settle over the street around it. Passersby who noticed it stopped and stared, instinctively stepping aside to clear a path.
"Lord Beast Tamer, this way please. Our lord is waiting at the manor." The guard's voice carried a thread of urgency. "He is in great need of capable assistance."
Laverre City.
Lucien filed the name away and let his gaze move carefully across his surroundings. The grief here was not just in the damage to the buildings, it was in the air itself, in the way people moved and held themselves.
The energy of yesterday's battle still hung over everything, and it wasn't difficult to imagine how brutal the fighting had been.
They arrived at the city lord's manor before long. It stood in the center of the city, marked by scorch burns and the pitting of projectile impacts, but still upright, still carrying a certain dignity.
A middle-aged man in silver armor was already waiting at the entrance. He had a long sword at his hip, a face built by years of difficult decisions, and eyes that assessed Lucien and Serperior in a single practiced sweep.
"Word reached me that a Beast Tamer from distant lands had arrived. I am the lord of Laverre City, Laurent." He stepped forward, and when his gaze settled on Serperior, something in his bearing shifted slightly, a degree more respect entering his tone.
"Thank you for coming to Laverre at a time like this. What brings you so far from home?"
"My name is Lucien. I'm from the Unova Region, a traveling Beast Tamer, nothing more." Lucien kept his voice easy and his identity vague. "I happened to be passing through and saw the smoke still rising over the city. I wanted to understand what was happening in the Kalos Kingdom."
Laurent's expression tightened with pain. He gestured toward the main hall. "Lord Lucien, please come in. You are a guest from afar, and I will not hide anything from you, Kalos is in chaos. The Galar invasion has seen to that."
They sat. Guards brought warm berry tea. Serperior took up a position beside Lucien's chair, still and watchful, eyes half-lidded but missing nothing.
"The Galar army has been advancing south from the western coast, using their Beast forces as their spearhead." Laurent's hands tightened around his cup, knuckles whitening. "They have taken several of our fortresses in succession and scattered countless civilians.
Our soldiers are brave, I will not hear otherwise, but Kalos has never specialized in Beast combat the way Galar has. In the end, bravery alone has its limits."
Lucien took a slow sip of tea. The trajectory of history was holding. The Galar invasion was the seed from which everything else would grow, all the grief, all the destruction, all the consequences that would echo forward across centuries.
"King AZ," he said carefully. "Has His Majesty not led a counteroffensive?"
Laurent's eyes dimmed. He exhaled slowly. "His Majesty has been marshaling forces in the capital, but the Galar assault is relentless. Their beasts are heavily armored, they take to the air, and ordinary weapons cannot touch them. Our defensive lines have been pushed back continuously." He paused. "Several days ago, a Galar Beast corps launched an aerial assault directly toward the royal capital." Another pause, heavier than the last.
"His Majesty's closest Beast companion was killed defending him."
Lucien went still.
Floette was already gone.
He kept his expression composed, but the weight of it settled over him. If Floette was dead, then AZ was already grieving in the royal capital, and a man like AZ, with a mind like AZ's, did not simply grieve. He built. He was likely already working on the Ultimate Weapon.
"Lord Laurent," Lucien said, setting down his cup. "I have no intention of becoming involved in this war directly. But I will not stand by and watch the Galar army oppress civilians without consequence. If Laverre comes under attack again while I am here, I will help."
Laurent was on his feet before Lucien had finished speaking, and the bow he gave was deep and without reservation.
"If Lord Lucien would lend us his strength, the people of Laverre City would be grateful beyond words. On behalf of every soldier and civilian within these walls, thank you."
Then, from outside the city walls, a warning horn split the air.
Followed immediately by shouting.
"Enemy attack, the Galar army is advancing! Beast corps in the air, they're coming again!"
Laurent's sword was in his hand before the echo had faded, his face set hard with grim fury. "Already, how did they regroup so quickly?"
Lucien rose from his chair without hurry. He glanced at Serperior, and something passed between them, a look, nothing more.
"It seems we won't need to wait after all."
"Serperior. Prepare yourself."
Serperior lifted its head and let out a sharp, clear cry. A deep blue energy bloomed instantly across its body, its leaf-shaped crests fanning slightly open. The air in the hall changed.
Lucien walked toward the city's outer walls. Sunlight cast his shadow long and narrow ahead of him on the ground.
Above, the sky was changing. Dark clouds rolled in across the horizon, thickening and pressing lower. The battle cries of the Galar forces grew louder with every second, and then the sky itself seemed to go dark, blotted out by a formation of armored soldiers riding pitch-black, heavily plated Pokémon high above the city.
Corviknight. Hundreds of them, gleaming like iron in the grey light, their riders disciplined and in tight formation. In the Galar Region, they were said to be unmatched in aerial combat, an invincible force above the battlefield.
Lucien looked up at them.
Corviknight as cavalry mounts. Lucien hadn't anticipated that the Galar Royal Family had already organized them at this scale. Standing beneath that darkening sky, he felt it acutely, how differently each region had developed its relationship with Pokémon, and how vast the gap in combat application could be between them.
But he was not afraid.
Laurent was already moving, shouting orders as he climbed the city wall. Soldiers scrambled into position around him, crossbowmen and archers nocking and drawing, the cannons along the ramparts swinging to bear.
Below, in the streets of Laverre City, the elderly and the children pressed together in doorways and alleyways, faces turned upward, hollow with dread. They had survived yesterday's assault.
Looking at the sky now, blackened by hundreds of armored wings, they knew, without needing to be told, that what was coming was worse.
The Corviknight formation descended on the city with a sound like grinding iron, their metallic cries tearing through the air at a frequency that forced the defenders on the walls to clap their hands over their ears.
A Galar rider on the lead Corviknight swept past in a blur, his lance gleaming, and drove it clean through a soldier's chest before anyone could react. The defenders around the fallen man went rigid with horror.
Then two sharp sounds cut through the noise, the hiss of something moving very fast through air.
Serperior's Leaf Blade struck true: both hits landing precisely at the wing joints of the lead Corviknight, the only points where its heavy plating didn't fully cover. A sharp crack, a wretched shriek, and the lead Corviknight spun out of formation and plummeted, crashing hard into the ground beyond the outer wall.
The effect on the defenders was immediate. Shoulders straightened. Grips tightened on weapons. The morale that had been on the verge of breaking held.
But the Corviknight formation responded in the same instant. Every one of them beat their iron wings simultaneously, generating a concussive downdraft, and a volley of arrows rained down toward Serperior from every angle.
"Serperior, return!"
Serperior twisted away and landed clean, breathing harder than usual, its green scales bright against the grey air.
On the wall, Laurent's face had gone pale. His sword hand was shaking. "Lord Lucien, there are too many. We cannot stop all of them."
Below, the civilians had stopped whispering. They simply held each other.
Lucien looked up at the mass of black iron filling the sky. His expression hadn't changed. His hand moved to the second Poké Ball at his side, fingers closing around it, and then he threw it upward with full force.
"Dragonite, go!"
The white light that erupted was blinding. What emerged from it was enormous.
Dragonite spread its wings above the city and the sound it made doing so was like a thunderclap.
Its Dragon Tail swept a wide arc through the open air with a tearing roar. Its eyes, usually warm and bright, had gone cold and absolute. The pressure radiating off its body was of an entirely different order to anything the Corviknight formation had encountered, the kind of presence that didn't need to announce itself.
Dragonite. Dual Dragon and Flying-type. The undisputed sovereign of the Unova skies.
"ROAAARRR!!!"
The roar shook the air. Several Corviknight broke formation on instinct alone, their riders struggling to hold them steady as they lurched backward.
A Galar officer snarled from his mount. "Hold your positions! It's just a Dragon-type, attack in force! Steel Wings, all units!"
The formation surged forward again, hundreds of Corviknight in tight mass, their black armor catching the grey light, iron wings beating in a unified rhythm like a tide of metal bearing down.
Lucien's voice rose clear and steady over the noise.
"Dragonite, no holding back."
"Hurricane. Open a path."
Dragonite's wings snapped wide and began to beat, and the sky answered. A whirlwind of tremendous force tore into existence beside its body, blades of compressed air spinning outward in every direction, sweeping up debris and shearing through the formation like something vast and invisible had swung an axe through the center of it.
The sound the impact made was immense.
Corviknight were hurled upward, spun, and thrown back down. The formation's center collapsed entirely, bodies scattering in every direction, the disciplined structure of the assault dissolving into chaos in seconds. Cries of pain and panic rang out across the sky.
The Galar officers stared down at the carnage, faces drained of color.
"Impossible, what kind of Dragon-type beast is that?"
The remaining Corviknight riders looked at each other, and then down at the solitary figure standing calmly on the ground below. Who was this man?
"No retreat!" a Galar officer bellowed, fighting to hold the formation together. "All units, press forward, together!"
The surviving Corviknight regrouped instinctively, their black bodies pressing together into a dense formation, a falling curtain of iron bearing down on Dragonite all at once.
"Dragonite, Draco Meteor."
Dragonite climbed steeply into the sky, drawing the formation after it.
"Chase it down! We take that beast and Laverre falls, press forward!"
The Corviknight army surged upward in pursuit. Dragonite tilted its head back and roared, and the sky answered. The clear blue overhead darkened in an instant, turning a deep, desolate violet, as though something apocalyptic had been pulled down from beyond the clouds.
Then the meteors came.
Burning projectiles of Dragon-type energy screamed down from above in a dense, roaring cascade, striking the Corviknight formation with pinpoint precision. The explosions were deafening.
Fire painted the sky red. Corviknight after Corviknight was struck and sent spinning downward, losing consciousness before they hit the ground. The formation didn't break, it disintegrated.
What remained of the Galar force lost whatever conviction had been holding them together. Riders yanked their mounts around and fled in every direction, all discipline gone.
"Running?" Lucien's eyes were cold and level.
"Dragonite, Extreme Speed. Finish it."
Dragonite vanished.
An orange afterimage flickered through the retreating formation, there, and there, and there, each pass accompanied by a sharp impact and another Corviknight dropping from the sky. In seconds, it was over.
The armored aerial legion that had terrorized the whole of Kalos lay scattered across the ground below the city walls, a handful of badly wounded Corviknight limping away into the distance without looking back.
The sky cleared. Sunlight broke through the remaining clouds and fell across the city in long, warm shafts.
Silence.
On the walls, soldiers stood motionless. In the streets below, civilians stared upward with open mouths. Even Laurent had gone completely still.
One magical beast.
A single magical beast had just dismantled the Corviknight legion that had haunted Kalos's nightmares for over a year.
Dragonite descended slowly, wings folding as it landed beside Lucien.
Then the city erupted.
"We won, we actually won!"
"Thank you, Lord Tamer! You saved us!"
"Lord Lucien, you saved Laverre City!"
Laurent came down from the wall at a half-run, crossed the distance to Lucien, and dropped to one knee. His voice was thick.
"Lord Lucien... you saved this city. You saved everyone inside these walls. Laurent will carry this debt for the rest of his life."
Lucien reached down and helped him to his feet. He was about to speak when a voice arose inside his own mind.
Something is watching you.
Kyurem's voice.
Lucien stilled. He turned his head slowly, scanning the area without making it obvious. His eyes found it almost immediately, in an unremarkable patch of grass near the base of the outer wall. A small, cell-like creature, easily overlooked amid the rubble.
Zygarde.
The Order Pokémon of the Kalos Region, in one of its cellular forms, had watched the entire battle from beginning to end. It had no physical presence here, only that quiet Dragon-type awareness, taking in everything: the armored legion, the Draco Meteor, and a lone Trainer from a distant region who had stepped between an attacking army and a city full of frightened civilians without hesitation.
Lucien let his gaze move away without reacting. It was simply Zygarde doing what Zygarde did, monitoring the state of the Kalos Region, as it always had. A perfectly ordinary cell.
He turned back to Laurent, who was still red-eyed and upright with effort.
"No need for formality, Lord Laurent." Lucien's voice was calm and direct. "I only did what the situation called for. But the Galar army will not accept this defeat quietly, Laverre City needs to reinforce its defenses in the coming days, and quickly."
Laurent straightened and nodded, jaw set. "We will follow Lord Lucien's word in everything. Every soldier and civilian in this city, you have only to speak."
Around them, the crowd had closed in. Residents pressed forward holding whatever they could spare, bread, berries, water, extending them with both hands, eyes full of gratitude and something close to reverence.
Children peered out from behind adults, stealing glances at Dragonite, then at Lucien, their faces caught between awe and shy adoration.
Dragonite, for its part, let the battlefield intensity drain quietly away. It turned and pressed its head gently against Lucien's hand.
Lucien declined the food with quiet courtesy and spoke to the gathered crowd.
"Your first priorities are your own people. Reorganize, treat the wounded, and begin repairing the walls. I'll remain in the city for a few days to make sure you're safe."
The cheer that followed was enough to shake the remaining dust from the rafters.
For the rest of the day, Lucien worked alongside Laurent, directing soldiers and civilians alike in clearing the battlefield, organizing the wounded, and beginning repairs on the most critically damaged sections of the wall.
Serperior moved rubble and timber with Vine Whip, handling in minutes what would have taken teams of workers hours. Dragonite ranged wide beyond the city in slow circuits, patrolling a radius of over ten miles against the possibility of Galar remnants attempting a secondary strike.
By sunset, the smoke had mostly cleared. The city walls, patched and standing. The streets, quieter. A fragile, exhausted peace had settled over Laverre.
Lucien climbed the wall as the last of the light faded and stood looking out at the darkening horizon.
He was not under any illusions about what this day had accomplished. Routing one Corviknight detachment was nothing in the context of the wider war.
The Galar invasion was still pushing south. Somewhere in the royal capital, AZ was working, driven by grief, by the death of Floette, by a love that had nowhere left to go except into something terrible.
The Ultimate Weapon was being built. And when it fired, it would not distinguish between soldiers and civilians, between Galar aggressors and the innocent people who had simply been born on the wrong side of a border.
One thing still puzzled him, though. In the legends of this era, Calyrex was the King of Galar, a Pokémon of immense wisdom and power, said to have governed the region with care for its people. If Calyrex still held any influence, why had this war been allowed to begin? Had something already happened to it?