The Ice Beam hit clean, and the quad weakness did exactly what quad weaknesses do. Salamence screamed. It had taken hits from both sides throughout the fight, but Torterra had absorbed every counter-attack as a living shield, keeping Blastoise intact long enough to deliver this final blow.
Salamence roared once, defiant, and collapsed.
Two more Salamence dropped from the sky.
Gary and Paul's faces went pale at the same time. The sign at the entrance had laid out every rule of the Dragon Trial: one Pokémon per trainer, no second attempts, defeat the gatekeeper to pass. Nowhere had it mentioned a second wave. If they had to fight again with their current teams, it was over.
But the new arrivals weren't challengers. One Salamence hoisted the fallen gatekeeper onto its back and flew toward the island's interior. The other shook its head at Gary and Paul, then lowered its body. An invitation to climb on.
The two exchanged a glance, recalled their Pokémon, and mounted up.
Less than two minutes later, the Salamence descended into the inner island. Gary and Paul spotted a familiar figure below.
Ash. Standing in a clearing. Talking to a Dragonair.
No, not talking. Teaching it something. He was crouched beside the serpentine Pokémon, gesturing at the sky, miming flight patterns with his hands.
He looked ridiculous.
"Flying is simple," Ash was saying, his voice carrying across the clearing. "You just need to get comfortable with the feeling of open air underneath you, then work with the wind. I know I can't tell you how wind manipulation feels from the inside, but it's supposed to be instinct for your species. If every other Dragonair can do it, so can you."
He stood up. "I can't show you wind control, but I can show you how I fly."
He kicked off the ground.
The air rippled beneath his feet as he stamped downward mid-leap, creating a visible shockwave that held his weight for a fraction of a second. He shifted position, stamped again, and moved laterally through empty air. Not true flight. More like using concentrated impact to bounce and hover, each step creating a platform that existed for the instant he needed it.
"See? Simple!"
He called this down to the Dragonair while making dull thumping sounds twenty feet above the ground, as if running on invisible stairs.
Then he noticed the Salamence hovering beside him. And the two passengers on its back staring at him.
"Gary! Paul! You made it!"
Paul's eyes were wide. He turned to Gary. The look on his face said everything: Is this real?
"You're not hallucinating," Gary said, resigned. "That's Ash. His body is on par with most Pokémon. Flying and burrowing underground are both in his toolkit. He trains alongside his team, and he trains harder than they do. I shouldn't need to spell out what that means."
Paul processed this in silence.
A trainer whose physical capabilities matched his Pokémon's. Who could launch himself through the air using raw leg strength. Who apparently considered this unremarkable enough to demonstrate casually while coaching a Dragonair.
Paul thought back to the Conference. Ash blurring onto the field to catch Infernape before it hit the ground. At the time, the speed had seemed impressive but explicable. Now he understood: that had been restraint.
You came to Dragon Island to catch a Pokémon. And you're spending your time teaching one to fly.
"I will never understand this person," Paul admitted to himself.
They landed. Gary studied Ash with a crooked expression.
"What were you doing up there?"
"Teaching Dragonair to fly. She's got incredible talent but she's never been able to get off the ground. The other Dragonair here can all do it, so there's no reason she can't. She just needs someone to show her it's possible." Ash launched into an animated explanation of Dragonair's situation, hands moving, voice bright with the enthusiasm of someone who'd found a project he cared about.
Gary and Paul didn't care about the Dragonair's backstory. A flightless Dragonair was unusual, sure. A human who could fly was more unusual.
"Have you picked the Pokémon you're going to catch?" Gary asked, cutting to the point that mattered.
"Not yet. But I like this Dragonair. I want to help her fly first, then figure out the catching part."
Paul's brow twitched.
A Dragonair that couldn't fly. Sluggish growth despite living on an island saturated with Dragon energy.
Every observable indicator pointed to a pseudo-legendary with mediocre or subpar talent. Outside Dragon Island, even a weak pseudo-legendary would be a prize. Inside, surrounded by proven specimens with confirmed elite potential, choosing this one was like walking into a jewellery store and picking the one stone that didn't shine.
A dedicated junk collector. That was the phrase forming in Paul's mind. He didn't say it. He turned, picked a direction, and walked away without another word. He had his own Pokémon to find, and the clock was running.
Gary stayed a moment longer. His reaction was different from Paul's, because Gary knew something Paul didn't.
He'd asked Professor Oak once. A quiet conversation at the lab, driven by a question that had nagged him for months: how did Ash keep finding Pokémon with extraordinary talent? Gary had caught dozens of Pokémon across his journey. The ones with genuinely strong potential could be counted on one hand. Ash seemed to stumble into them like he had a compass for hidden greatness.
The answer had surprised him.
Ash didn't seek out talented Pokémon. He sought out the broken ones. The abandoned Charmander. The discarded Bulbasaur and Squirtle. The unruly Pikachu nobody wanted. The Riolu that had been written off as a failure. Chimchar, thrown away by the trainer standing twenty metres from them right now.
On the surface, none of these Pokémon looked like future powerhouses. They looked like charity cases. But in Ash's hands, something happened. Talent that had been buried, suppressed, or mislabelled came roaring to the surface. Pokémon that the world had given up on became the strongest versions of themselves.
The magic wasn't in finding talent. It was in unlocking it. And that was a skill unique to Ash. Put those same Pokémon in anyone else's hands and the hidden potential would stay hidden forever.
Gary looked at the grounded Dragonair. Slow growth. Can't fly. Every visible metric screaming mediocrity.
He's going to turn this one into a monster too.
"I'm going to find my own Pokémon," Gary said. "Take your time here."
"Yeah, go ahead." Ash waved, then paused. "Oh, head east. There's a Bagon near the Salamence clan's territory with the best talent I've seen on the island besides this Dragonair. Whether you can find it and earn the clan's respect is on you."
Gary stared at him. Then a grin broke across his face. "Thanks, Ash."
He took off running toward the east without a backward glance. If Ash said the talent was strong, it was strong. No second-guessing needed. For the first time, Gary understood what people meant when they said connections mattered. Without that tip, he'd have spent his remaining time wandering the inner island and grabbing whatever looked decent before the deadline.
Now he had a target.
Ash turned back to Dragonair. Just the two of them now, plus Pikachu, who had settled into a comfortable spectating position with a fresh batch of wild berries.
The teaching resumed. Ash's method was unorthodox. He couldn't manipulate wind. He had no Dragon-type energy. What he could do was show Dragonair the principle of self-propelled flight through his own body: channel force downward, use the reaction to stay aloft, trust the medium beneath you to hold your weight.
His version used raw physical power against solid air. Dragonair's version would use elemental control over wind currents. The mechanics were different. The core concept was identical. Push down. Rise up. Trust the process.
Something in that demonstration clicked.
Dragonair had spent her entire post-evolution life unable to grasp the wind. Other Dragonair did it on instinct, the way humans breathed. For her, the instinct had never activated. She'd tried to learn it the way they did it. She'd failed, over and over, because she wasn't them.
Ash hadn't taught her their method. He'd taught her his. And somehow, seeing a human do the impossible, for entirely different reasons and through entirely different means, unlocked something in her mind that years of mimicking her peers had not.
She felt the wind.
She rose off the ground.
It was tentative at first. A wobble. A drift. Her body swaying as muscles that had never been used in this way fired for the first time. Then steadier. Then higher. The wind caught beneath her serpentine form and held, and Dragonair climbed into the open sky above the Dragonite clan's territory.
Pikachu stopped chewing and clapped.
Half a day. That was all it had taken. A Dragonair that hadn't flown once since evolution was airborne, gliding through currents she'd spent her entire life watching from below.
Two lines of tears traced down Dragonair's face as she flew. Clear, bright, catching the sunlight as they fell.
She could fly.
She wasn't the broken one anymore.
She descended to where Ash stood and hovered before him, eyes wet, voice soft.
Can I stay with you?
Ash blinked. He'd been planning to ask her the same question. He'd come to the Dragonite territory hoping to find the Pokémon that resonated with him, and he had. He'd intended to help her fly first, then make his case for why she should join his team.
She'd beaten him to it.
Whether it was gratitude for what he'd done, or recognition of what he could do, or the simple, bone-deep understanding that this trainer saw her in a way no one else ever had, Dragonair wanted to follow Ash.
The flight problem was solved, but the growth problem remained. Her strength had stagnated since evolution for reasons no one on Dragon Island could explain. That mystery was larger and harder than learning to fly.
But if anyone could solve it, she believed it was the person standing in front of her. The human who had walked into her life, shown her the sky in half a day, and looked at her like she was worth every second of his time.
She couldn't repay what he'd given her. All she could offer was her strength, her willingness to fight for him no matter what came next.
Ash's surprised expression softened into a grin.
"I was supposed to be the one asking you."