The silence that blanketed the square was deeper now than when Jolteon had fallen.
If the first battle had been Pikachu crushing Jolteon — a Pokémon theoretically capable of absorbing electricity — through sheer, almost brutal electrical force, shattering the first layer of Stonetown's "evolution equals strength" mythology in the process, then this second battle, now about to begin, was unquestionably the last hope the townspeople had left: the hope of salvaging their pride, of proving that "the evolutionary advantage" still meant something.
That fire, to a certain degree, can interfere with and even weaken lightning — this was common knowledge most Trainers knew.
Achi and his Flareon clearly knew it well.
The fiery mane blazing at Flareon's neck roared with heat, and the scorching waves of air around its body shimmered and warped. Those orange-black eyes were locked onto the small yellow figure on the field, battle-lust surging to a boil.
"Flareon, don't give it a moment to breathe!" Achi bellowed, aiming to seize the initiative. "Flamethrower!"
A column of roaring fire shot forward like a dragon unleashed from its lair, sweeping toward Pikachu. The heat was intense enough that spectators in the front row instinctively stepped back half a pace.
Yet faced with this assault, Ash and Pikachu's response remained so composed it was almost unnerving.
"Dodge it — probe with Electro Ball."
Pikachu sidestepped the blazing column with a light, nimble leap, leaving a scorched black streak across the ground where it had been.
Fire and lightning are different.
...Lightning only deals damage when it connects.
...Fire brings searing heat the moment it draws near.
...So playing the grazing-edge game from before simply wasn't an option here.
At the same time, Pikachu's tail rapidly compressed a crackling, densely packed Electro Ball and whipped it toward Flareon.
Flareon twisted away with agile speed; the Electro Ball slammed into the ground beside it and burst into a shower of electric sparks. The few stray sparks that passed through the superheated air surrounding Flareon barely registered as damage.
"Your Pikachu isn't invincible!!" Achi said stubbornly, gritting his teeth.
"Keep using Flamethrower — keep firing, compress its space to move!"
Column after column of fire came in rapid succession, attempting to drive Pikachu into a corner. Heat haze rolled across the field, and firelight danced across the faces of the townspeople as their hope began to rekindle.
Ash continued to direct with perfect calm:
"Keep moving, partner... use Quick Attack to disrupt its rhythm, and gradually keep ratcheting up the power of your electric strikes."
What followed was like a mirror image of the first battle — yet somehow even more suffocating to watch.
Pikachu became a golden afterimage, weaving through the roaring flames, evading each attack by a comfortable margin every single time. At the same time, Pikachu would periodically unleash Swift, pelting Flareon with small sharp stars — not dealing heavy damage, but consistently breaking Flareon's skill rhythm.
The electric strikes Pikachu was delivering, however, were a different story entirely.
At first, only enough to leave a faint tingle across Flareon's body. Then, gradually, enough to leave scorch marks. And later, every hit drew a cry of pain from Flareon, its entire body flame dimming with each blow.
5%... 10%... 15%... 20%...
Pikachu was calibrating its output with surgical precision.
This wasn't a battle. It was a demonstration — a display for everyone present of what an "absolute gap in strength" truly looked like.
The evolutionary advantage? Against a force that so utterly eclipsed the limits of what Flareon could withstand, that supposed advantage was as thin as a sheet of paper.
Flareon's Flamethrower began to falter and sputter, its breathing growing ragged and heavy. The flames it took such pride in looked pale and pitiful against Pikachu's seemingly inexhaustible, ever-escalating electrical power.
Cold sweat broke out on Achi's forehead. He commanded at the top of his lungs, but nothing he called out could stop the battle from sliding, step by step, toward the abyss.
Finally, when Pikachu's cheeks erupted with a surge of electrical brilliance no less intense than what had felled Jolteon — if anything, even more concentrated — Ash spoke with quiet finality:
"End it."
"Pika——CHUUU!!"
A column of lightning, thicker and denser than before, thundered out.
This time, it was no probe. This was the finishing blow.
Flareon mustered every last ounce of its strength and spat out one final stream of fire in a desperate attempt to block it. But faced with that devastating pillar of light, the flames were torn apart and extinguished in an instant.
"BOOM!!"
The lightning connected squarely with Flareon.
When the blinding glare faded —
Flareon lay on the field, its body charred black, utterly unable to battle. That beautiful blazing mane was dark and dead.
Round Two — Pikachu wins!
Once again, through the purest, most overwhelming raw power, a straight-up frontal victory.
Dead silence fell over the field.
If Round One had still left room to discuss type matchups and tactics, then Round Two was an unadorned, no-frills, head-on annihilation.
That last sliver of wishful thinking was completely shattered by Pikachu's devastating, unstoppable triumph.
Only the second of the Eevee Brothers remained now — Mizuki and his Vaporeon.
Every heart in the crowd had sunk to rock bottom.
Water-type versus Electric-type?
That was practically one of the most universally acknowledged type disadvantages in all of Pokémon battling.
Water conducts electricity — even young children knew that.
In theory, pure water doesn't conduct electricity, but there was no way the water currents controlled by Mizuki's Vaporeon could ever be truly pure. Only an exceptionally powerful Water-type Pokémon could pull off something like that — using truly pure water to counter electric attacks and compensate for the weakness.
Mizuki's face had gone pale, and the hands behind his back trembled slightly. He knew that if Vaporeon stepped out there, the result would only be worse than what his eldest and third brothers had suffered.
It was at that moment —
Ash's voice broke through the suffocating silence:
"Partner — great work. Come on back."
To the stunned eyes of everyone present, Ash recalled Pikachu, who was as calm and collected as ever.
"Pika-pi~" Pikachu let out a cheerful sound and trotted over to Ash's side.
Ash turned and smiled at Misdreavus, who had been eagerly waiting her turn for a while now.
"Your turn next, Mengmeng."
"Mew~!"
Misdreavus let out a delighted chirp and drifted gracefully onto the field, her red eyes glittering with mischief and excitement.
Ash looked toward Mizuki and the puzzled faces in the crowd, and calmly explained:
"I'm not here to exploit the type matchup."
"Vaporeon going up against Pikachu is too lopsided — a battle like that serves no purpose."
"So I'm sending Mengmeng in instead."
Those words drew a flicker of something unusual in the eyes of both Mayor Gregory and Captain Iwate.
— This young man isn't just powerful. He has a rare kind of bearing.
— What they didn't yet realize, however, was that sometimes, a "fair" matchup could inspire even deeper despair than a one-sided type stomp.
— Because when it's fair and you still lose, there's absolutely nothing left to say.
"Vaporeon — Rain Dance!" Mizuki seized the opening and issued his command at once. He was trying to shift the weather, boosting the power of Water-type moves.
Vaporeon threw its head back and released an ethereal, resonant cry. As its power reached up into the sky above, dark clouds rapidly gathered, and a light, pattering rain began to fall.
...The Rain Dance only covered a few hundred square meters.
...But that was more than enough to blanket the entire field.
"Mengmeng — Shadow Ball," Ash ordered, concise and clear.
— Giving orders does drag down your Pokémon a little, it's true.
— But today, Ash was at least getting a taste of the game-version Pokémon battle experience.
— Ridiculous.
"Mew mew~" Misdreavus cackled, condensing a mass of dark energy at her chest and flinging it lazily toward Vaporeon.
Vaporeon nimbly dodged; the ground where it had stood was blasted into a small crater.
"Hydro Pump!"
A thick, powerful jet of water fired toward Misdreavus like a high-pressure cannon.
But Misdreavus simply spun lightly on the spot, her form seeming to melt into the falling rain — and the Hydro Pump punched clean through her afterimage.
Water-type Pokémon aren't the only ones who can make use of water. For Misdreavus, the transparent, refractive properties of water made for an excellent medium for her illusory techniques.
"Now — Hypnosis!" Ash commanded.
Misdreavus's eyes blazed with violet light. Invisible psychic ripples spread outward. Vaporeon's gaze went momentarily glassy, its movements visibly slowing.
But it wrenched its head to the side and, through sheer force of will, broke free of the hypnotic pull.
"Oh?" Ash raised an eyebrow, slightly impressed. "Good willpower. Then try this — Confuse Ray!"
A warped, twisting beam of light shot toward Vaporeon. Vaporeon struggled to dodge it again, just barely getting clear.
"Double Team."
In an instant, seven or eight identical copies of Misdreavus materialized on the field, completely surrounding Vaporeon.
"Vaporeon — Water Pulse, wide range!" Mizuki called out desperately.
Vaporeon unleashed a ring-shaped shockwave of water that scattered several of the copies — but the real Misdreavus had already slipped silently behind it.
"Psybeam."
The warping beam connected. Vaporeon finally fell into a state of confusion and began striking itself uncontrollably.
What followed was less a battle and more a one-sided game.
Misdreavus drifted through the rain at leisure. Sometimes she used Shadow Ball to force Vaporeon's footwork; sometimes, just as Vaporeon was on the verge of shaking off the confusion, she'd tag it with another Psybeam; sometimes she conjured Double Team copies to bewilder it further.
Occasionally she would even deliberately leave an opening — and after Vaporeon's attack missed entirely, she'd hit it with a light little Astonish, sending a full-body shudder through the bewildered Pokémon.
...Misdreavus's performance was a level of dominance above even Pikachu's.
...Misdreavus proved that even an unevolved Pokémon could be powerful enough to make you feel completely, utterly hopeless.
She used no single devastating finishing move. She didn't ramp up raw power and steamroll like Pikachu had. She simply wielded a revolving arsenal of status moves and disruption techniques, toying with Vaporeon in the palm of her hand.
...The only problem was that, at this point in time, Misdreavus still hadn't told Ash how many years she had lived.
...Misdreavus, dear little baby, refused to have her age pried into.
Vaporeon was like a puppet strung up on invisible wires, spinning in place, expending moves in futile bursts — unable to so much as graze the hem of Misdreavus's robe.
Its stamina drained at a frightening pace under the relentless attacks and the psychological torment. The certainty in its eyes at the start gave way, step by step, to confusion, exhaustion, and finally the faintest shadow of despair.
The scene struck terror into every onlooker's heart. Losing to Pikachu was a loss of raw power — a clean defeat you could respect and accept.
But losing to Misdreavus... that kind of helplessness — your intelligence and your rhythm utterly suppressed, unable to mount a single effective counterattack — was suffocating in an entirely different way.
It was only now that they truly understood: this Trainer called Ash was formidable in every dimension, across the full spectrum. He didn't just have Pikachu as an absolute frontline ace who could charge and crush head-on — he also had Misdreavus, a bizarre tactician capable of toying with opponents until they broke completely from the inside.
"One against three" had not been arrogance. It had been a statement of fact.
In the end —
Under the relentless barrage of Astonish and Psybeam from Misdreavus, Vaporeon's spirit and stamina were ground down to nothing. With a miserable cry, it crumpled into the puddles on the field and could battle no more.
Vaporeon had been thoroughly, completely broken.
The physical damage on its body was far lighter than what Flareon and Jolteon had taken. But every bit of that missing pain had been paid back in full — in psychological scarring.
— Vaporeon: Someone please mourn for me!
— Vaporeon: Please calculate the area of the shadow on my heart.
Misdreavus drifted back to Ash's side and nuzzled his cheek affectionately. After all, that had just been a fun, easygoing little game for her.
Three battles. Three wins.
Ash had, with indisputable strength, completed the feat of one against three.
...Probably... right?
...Well — it was a bit of a rigged setup, after all.
When Ash thought back on the opponents he had faced before — Pewter Gym Leader Brock, Cerulean Gym Leader Misty, Vermilion Gym Leader Lt. Surge, Celadon Gym Leader Erika, Saffron Gym Leader Sabrina, Fuchsia Gym Leader Koga, and even Viridian Gym Leader Giovanni — then looked at the three he had faced just now...
It was like someone who spent their days grinding through advanced calculus suddenly being asked to do basic addition and subtraction.
The drop in difficulty, Ash thought, was genuinely staggering.
The square stood in silence, broken only by the soft, steady patter of rain striking the ground.
Stonetown's pride lay shattered before this young outsider.
These three brothers were the standout young talents of Stonetown — they wouldn't have drawn Mayor Gregory and Captain Iwate to watch otherwise.
Yet in that silence —
A youthful but fiercely resolute voice rang out from the edge of the crowd:
"Please — wait a moment!"
Everyone turned toward the sound.
There was Taiichi, holding his Eevee, appearing there as if from nowhere.
No —
What he held in his arms now was no longer that little brown Eevee.
It was a Pokémon with a coat of solid black and glowing golden ring-shaped markings, graceful and slender in form — Umbreon.
"Umbreon?!"
"Taiichi's Eevee evolved?!"
"When did this happen?!"
Gasps and exclamations rose up one after another.
Raizou, Mizuki, and Achi — the three brothers — stared with their mouths hanging open.
They could barely believe what they were seeing: their little brother, and the Pokémon in his arms that radiated the very aura of the night.
Taiichi, Umbreon cradled against his chest, walked step by step through the crowd as it parted automatically before him, until he reached the edge of the field. His gaze burned as it met Ash's.
"Mr. Ash!"
Taiichi's voice trembled with emotion, but his eyes held an unshakeable certainty:
"I, Taiichi — as an Umbreon Trainer — hereby challenge you to a battle!"
"Don't be ridiculous!" Raizou was the first to recover, his voice sharp and fierce. "Taiichi, get back here! Even we lost — what do you think you're going to do?!"
"Taiichi, don't do anything rash!" Mizuki pleaded, rushing to dissuade him.
Achi went further — he stepped forward directly, reaching out to grab his younger brother. "So what if it's Umbreon? That Misdreavus is too bizarre — you'll just be humiliating yourself!"
Their reactions made clear the brotherly bond hidden beneath all that stubbornness.
They had pushed Taiichi before out of an unshakeable belief in their own convictions, and the rivalry that runs between siblings. But they would never willingly watch their little brother be crushed in public view, in front of everyone.
— The love between the four brothers was real and genuine.
— The conflict before had only ever been a difference in understanding and perspective.
But Taiichi pulled free of Achi's hand with stubborn force.
He looked at his three older brothers. In his eyes, there was no resentment — only a resolve he had never shown before.
The flame of courage was burning here.
"Brothers — I know you're doing this for my sake."
"But this is my own decision!"
"It's a decision Umbreon and I made together!"
"We want to try — we want to see how far the path we chose can take us!"
He turned to Mayor Gregory and Captain Iwate, and bowed deeply:
"Mayor Gregory, Captain Iwate — please allow me to accept this challenge!"
Gregory and Iwate exchanged a glance. The complexity in each other's eyes was plain to see.
This confrontation had long since exceeded the bounds of the original arrangement.
They both turned their gaze toward Ash, the question in their eyes unspoken. After all — this was already a three-on-one gauntlet run. Adding a fourth battle required Ash's consent, by any measure of propriety or reason.
Ash looked at Taiichi, and at those bright red eyes in his arms that remained clear and shining even through the rain. A warm, approving smile spread across his face.
"I'm looking forward to it," Ash said, his voice carrying clearly to every ear in the square. "Looking forward to what you and Umbreon will show me."
With permission granted, Taiichi drew a deep breath, held Umbreon close, and stepped onto the field.
The rain soaked his hair and clothes through. He didn't care in the slightest.
"Taiichi!" The three brothers moved to stop him — but a single look from Captain Iwate held them back.
The captain of the knights watched the boy on the field who seemed to have grown up overnight, and something flickered in his eyes — a feeling he did not allow to reach the surface.
...Stonetown really had fallen a bit behind the times.
...Said out loud like this, it sounded a bit bleak — it made him think of thirty-odd years ago.
...Back then you could still talk tough. Now, thirty-plus years later, the gap had grown absurd.
...Not that any of them knew Ash was a special case, of course.
...It was like a little goldfish by the side of the road had quietly become a great white shark.
...No one on earth could hold against that.
"Battle — begin!" Mayor Gregory announced once more, his voice carrying a note of complicated feeling.
"Umbreon — let's go!" Taiichi shouted. "Use Shadow Ball!"
Umbreon launched itself upward, condensing dark energy in its chest, and fired it at Misdreavus in the air above.
"Mengmeng — dodge, then use Psybeam," Ash directed, unhurried.
Misdreavus slipped aside from the Shadow Ball with ease, violet light flashing in her eyes as the distorting beam streaked toward Umbreon.
"Umbreon — take it and use Taunt!" Taiichi cried.
[Take it] is not the same as [Protect].
The two are similar, but they are not the same move.
When using [Protect], mounting any other follow-up attack becomes very difficult — it is a purely defensive skill. [Take it] — or rather, enduring the hit — is used to absorb the damage and prepare a counterattack: a defensive-counter skill.
Umbreon neither flinched nor evaded. It absorbed the full force of the Psybeam head-on, its body jolting from the impact. But a ferocious light flashed in those crimson eyes, and it unleashed Taunt.
An invisible force immediately coiled around Misdreavus.
The mechanic of [Taunt] works by flooding the target's mind with hostile energy, filling them with a combative urge — forcing them into a state where they can only use attacking moves for a brief period. However, when there is too wide a gap in mental fortitude between user and target, it tends to fail easily.
Misdreavus had originally been prepared to just tank it — but on reflection...
— Miss Misdreavus: ...Actually, let's not.
"Here's your chance — Quick Attack, close the gap!" Taiichi seized the fleeting opening.
Umbreon became a bolt of black lightning and slammed straight into Misdreavus.
"Mengmeng — Astonish."
A close-range shriek sent Umbreon's body seizing up for a brief instant — but it shook its head and lunged again.
"Now — Foul Play!"
Dark energy surged across Umbreon's body as it turned Misdreavus's own power back against her in a counterattack.
The damage wasn't high — but it connected.
This Umbreon's move proficiency was far too low. It couldn't be helped: it had only evolved the previous night. The fact that it was managing even this much was already impressive.
And even this had only been achieved because of the intensive last-minute training Misdreavus had put it through.
In a sense, this Umbreon could be understood as Miss Misdreavus's personal disciple.
Miss Misdreavus had even used Hypnosis to let Umbreon train inside its own dreams.
TT Umbreon: Weeping.
— Umbreon: Suffering.
"Nice work, Taiichi!" Achi couldn't hold back and shouted from the sideline.
But the gap in strength was ultimately impossible to bridge.
Even under the Taunt condition restricting her options, Misdreavus could still use Shadow Ball, Shadow Ball, and other attacking moves freely.
"Shadow Ball."
"Shadow Ball."
Wave after wave of attacks landed on Umbreon in relentless succession.
Umbreon held on through the onslaught, bolstered by the enhanced durability it had gained from evolution and by the Dark type's resistance to Ghost-type moves.
It did not falter. It did not give up.
Each time it was knocked back, it would immediately pick itself up and charge at Misdreavus again — launching Shadow Ball, Foul Play, Quick Attack, one near-hopeless yet utterly unwavering counterattack after another.
Umbreon's eyes never dimmed, fixed and bright, following Taiichi's commands every moment.
Rain mixed with sweat and mud, soaking into its black fur, and yet those golden rings glowed on stubbornly in the grey, overcast sky.
The toxic fluid flowing through its body should have been its most natural weapon. But against Misdreavus, it was completely meaningless.
The scene was both harrowing and deeply moving.
Everyone could see that Umbreon had no chance of winning.
Yet the unyielding will that Umbreon and Taiichi shared — that spirit of drawing their sword even when defeat was certain — moved something deep inside many of those watching.
And then, finally —
After withstanding more attacks than anyone could count —
Umbreon's stamina ran dry.
It let out one last unwilling whimper, its legs gave way beneath it, and it collapsed into the muddy field, unable to battle.
But those red eyes, to the very end, were looking toward Taiichi.
Taiichi sprinted onto the field and pulled the unconscious Umbreon into a tight embrace. Tears streamed down his face alongside the rain — but he was smiling:
"You did so well, Umbreon... you were amazing... truly amazing..."
Misdreavus drifted back to Ash's side. She looked down at Umbreon and Taiichi below — and every last trace of mischief had vanished from her eyes.
Ash walked to the edge of the field. His gaze swept across the three brothers — Raizou, Mizuki, and Achi, their expressions all complicated — before finally settling on Taiichi, holding Umbreon so tightly.
His voice was calm but carried weight, and it reached every corner of the square:
"Do you see it?"
"This — is the path your brother chose for himself."
"He may have lost the battle. But he won respect. He proved his will."
"He carries a resolve that is entirely his own — one that needs no one else to pressure it into being."
"The bond between him and Umbreon, and the future they chose together, is no lesser a path than the one you mapped out for him — and because it comes from the heart, it is capable of burning even brighter."
Ash then turned his gaze to the full crowd of townspeople, his tone sincere:
"I didn't come here to outright deny Stonetown's tradition of evolution."
"Evolution itself is something beautiful — a sublime moment in a Pokémon's life."
"In the past, facing all kinds of threats in the wild, earlier evolution was genuinely necessary."
"But this is the era of the Pokémon League. The world has changed."
"What the League pursues is a broader horizon of possibility — the mutual growth of Trainer and Pokémon, built on understanding and respect."
"Strength matters greatly — but a will that comes from the heart, and a bond that cannot be broken, can lead a Trainer and their Pokémon to the very summit just as surely."
"I believe that Stonetown's long tradition, if it could unite with the League's ideals and grow with the times, might bloom into something even more brilliant."
And to prove that point, Ash opened the Poké Balls at his belt.
From them emerged Pidgeot, Charizard, and Gyarados.
This made abundantly clear that Ash himself had nothing against evolution.
Ash's words were like a clean wind after rain, dispersing the oppressive weight of defeat that had settled over the square — and planting the seed of a thought in the minds of many townspeople.
— Pure talk rarely hits home.
But knock someone flat with the truth first — then talk.
Those who lost will naturally start turning the words over in their mind, wondering if there was something real to them.
Because a loss is a loss.
A loss means you should think about how to win next time.
And a loss means you should think even harder about how to grow.
And growth almost always means change.
——
Mayor Gregory leaned on his staff. He looked at Taiichi and Umbreon holding each other in the rain. He looked at the three brothers, their faces full of feeling. Then his gaze came to rest at last on that black-haired boy, standing in the soft light — and he let out a long, long sigh.
He knew. It was time for Stonetown to make some changes.
Captain Iwate walked to Gregory's side and said nothing.
A win is a win. A loss is a loss.
The gap between their young generation and the outside world really had grown quite wide.
If they — the old guard — were all gone someday, what then?
____
👻🔥Seek: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: COTE: Confessing to Sakayanagi From the Start
Let's hit these goals:
🎯 100 Powerstones = 1 extra chapter for the public!