"Feng Che actually deployed a Ditto... and this specific specimen has absolutely zero documentation or tracking history within the League's central registry."
Right at that critical juncture, Deputy Chief Aula and Doron stepped out onto the VIP monitoring deck.
"Expunge that moronic angle from your thoughts immediately," Aula replied, his tone chillingly flat. "Even high-order executives like myself command specialized assets that have never been formally registered with the League framework. If your grand strategy to dismantle Feng Che relies on basic administrative technicalities, you are proving to be stupider than a swine."
"Doron, suppress your petty schemes. My objective is to pull Feng Che into our political sphere, not to invite his absolute hostility by having you provoke him over paperwork."
"My, what a rare privilege, Aula," Chief Sky chuckled warmly, his eyes dropping onto the pair as they took their seats. "A man juggling your immense, non-stop executive workload actually managed to carve out a window to monitor a promotion showcase?"
"Haha... Chief Sky, I've merely come to offer a formal gesture of contrition," Aula replied smoothly, submissively lowering his posture before the old Grandmaster. "One of the lower-tier scheduling clerks in my department accidentally assigned an unviable, maximum-threshold proctor grid to Feng Che's itinerary."
"Haha, it's of no consequence, Aula. A punishing crucible is an excellent filter; it ensures the lesser political factions won't have any grounds to murmur about favoritism," Sky noted, his gaze carrying a sharp, knowing intent.
The specific "someone" who had been planning to murmur—Deputy Chief Aula—could only choke on his tongue, his face turning slightly rigid.
"Now that you are here, let us focus entirely on the crucible," Chief Sky continued. "A Ditto... truly a rare commodity on the competitive track. I am deeply curious to see what type of mechanical modifications Feng Che has engineered into this formless specimen."
Down on the turf, Aaron checked his cuffs before barking an order. "Absol, Slash!"
The disaster predator materialized, its sleek bipedal frame covered in a rich mantle of pristine white fur, contrasted sharply by a dark, slate-blue under-skin. Cresting the right flank of its skull was a massive, scythe-like horn designed to track shifting micro-frequencies in the atmospheric pressure.
By decoding subtle alterations across the land and sky, an Absol commanded an instinctual capacity to foresee impending ecological disasters.
"Aaron's Absol has developed its sensory processing to an incredibly high tier—essentially a weaponized Seventh Sense," Aula explained to Chief Sky, acting as a technical commentator. "It can fluidly calculate the precise angle, velocity, and timing of an opponent's incoming vector a full second before the muscle group even twitches. It is the absolute jewel of Aaron's active roster."
"I am well aware of its record," Chief Sky replied, a subtle flash of playfulness crossing his golden eyes. "Its predictive reflex is legendary, but I am also aware that Aaron harbors a far more terrifying asset within his stable."
The old leader's heavy implication caused cold sweat to instantly drench Doron's shirt. The scout knew all too well how Aaron had managed to harvest that hidden monstrosity.
The Eighteen-Winged Shadow
On the field, Absol snapped its scythe-horn forward, unleashing a series of compressed white kinetic energy blades that tore through the frost toward the purple gelatin.
"Ditto, transform—Crobat, Eighteen-Winged Matrix!"
The pink fluid exploded upward, its cellular structure warping in mid-air as it rearranged itself into a colossal, terrifying iteration of the bat predator. This customized model boasted eighteen separate, hyper-aerodynamic wing blades that hummed with kinetic friction, transforming the asset into a blur of violet light.
"Chief! Did you track that cellular compression?!" Julie gasped, her fingers flying across her diagnostic console. "An Eighteen-Winged Crobat format... to think a common Ditto could project a structural modification of that scale!"
"Haha... the Ditto lineage was only isolated by our research divisions roughly fifteen years ago; our institutional understanding of their genetic elasticity remains incredibly shallow," Chief Sky smiled deeply. "For a Ditto to manifest a modified structural paradigm of that complexity... that is a testament to the sheer depth of the boy's internal cultivation."
There was a secondary truth the Grandmaster chose not to vocalize—beneath the violet light of the transformation, his psychic senses had registered a faint, distinct thread of Divinity.
That absolute elemental purity was a signature that typically only manifested when a Pokémon successfully broke through the Grandmaster threshold to touch the border of myth.
If Feng Che could read the old leader's thoughts, he would have smirked and declared: My son, Ditto, possesses the absolute pedigree of an Emperor.
The hyper-extended wing blades of the modified Crobat whistled through the wind, targeting Absol's eyes, only to cleanly retract at a razor-sharp angle a millisecond before contact to execute a feint.
Yet Absol didn't bite. It unhinged its dark jaws, executing a flawless, predictive Bite right through the spatial gap, its serrated teeth snapping shut with absolute torque.
Crunch!
The strike nearly severed one of Ditto's wings, forcing the gelatinous bat back.
"This Absol is the real deal; its predictive algorithms are actively parsing Ditto's structural adjustments," Feng Che analyzed, his expression serious.
The white predator transformed into a streak of pale light, its scythe-horn aligned like a lance as it charged down the center line to impale the bat.
Ditto's cellular boundaries unraveled instantly. It dissolved back into a puddle of fluid, allowing the lethal horn to pass harmlessly through the space it had occupied a millisecond prior.
Absol's forward momentum stuttered, a rare look of cognitive confusion crossing its eyes. Its predictive reflex had failed to register the fluid de-transformation query.
Absol (Thinking): My vision of the immediate future listed a defensive parry... How did the entity simply cease to possess a rigid structural form? Is my instinctual mapping failing me?
Refusing to drop its pace, Absol whipped its head, throwing a secondary wave of kinetic sword-beams from its horn.
The compressed energy sliced directly through the center of the puddle, neatly bisecting the purple mass.
The two pieces of gelatin splashed onto the concrete turf, remaining completely motionless.
Absol maintained a hyper-vigilant posture, its eyes scanning the two separated pools. Its sensory core was screaming that something was fundamentally wrong—this absolute fragility didn't align with the timeline it had glimpsed through its foresight.
The Steel Legend
Right at that exact split-second of hesitation, the two puddles erupted, instantly fusing back into a singular mass as they expanded into a massive, heavily armored insect chassis—Genesect.
"An ancient Mythical like Genesect?! A pure Steel hybrid?!" Deputy Chief Aula blurted out, losing his political composure completely.
The central research laboratories of the World League had spent millions attempting to safely resurrect the fossilized blueprints of this ancient weapon system, yet Aula was currently looking at a pristine, fully operational model manifested by a common Ditto.
He understood the biological laws of the species—for a Ditto to project a perfect, high-fidelity transformation of a Genesect, it meant the asset had to have physically analyzed a living, primordial specimen at point-blank range.
Absol's residual sword-beams struck the metallic hull of the armored insect.
Clang! Clang!
A rain of brilliant sparks cascaded across the field, yet when the light faded, Ditto calmly used its heavy steel claw to scratch its ventral plating—there wasn't even a superficial white scratch left on its armor.
"Absol, Flamethrower!" Aaron ordered frantically.
He was well aware of Genesect's baseline properties—as a dual Bug and Steel hybrid, its structural integrity was exceptionally vulnerable to high-heat thermal allocations.
What Aaron failed to comprehend, however, was that Feng Che's Ditto had perfected its forms through an intense, high-attrition process of Devouring Evolution.
When Feng Che initially engineered this Genesect chassis, he had reinforced the core matrix with the highest-grade, legendary-tier titanium allow armor. A common Flamethrower was completely unviable against that level of melting-point density.
Thick plumes of white steam vented from Ditto's joints as the fire washed over its hull, yet the underlying metal plates didn't even register a crimson heat glow.
Instead, the ancient mechanical insect dropped into a low, stable firing stance, its heavy, sub-zero cannon barrel locking directly onto Absol's chest.
The specialized drive-cannon began actively siphoning and compressing the thermal energy of the incoming Flamethrower, turning Aaron's own attack into a fuel source. Seeing its fire systematically shrink into the maw of the weapon, Absol felt a profound wave of biological dread settle into its core.
Its predictive Seventh Sense had officially gone completely dark.
Absol (Thinking): The timeline has vanished... I can't map the trajectory of the machine!
Driven by sheer survival instinct, the white predator executed an emergency Substitute, leaving a hollow decoy on the spot as its true body threw itself into a desperate, ungraceful roll across the dirt. Its pristine white fur was instantly caked in gray grime.
A twin beam of hyper-compressed crimson plasma erupted from Genesect's cannon, obliterating the decoy and slamming directly into the concrete floor where Absol had been resting.
BOOM!
The sheer thermal intensity of the energy lance instantly liquefied the reinforced bedrock, transforming the center of the arena into a churning pool of molten volcanic slag.
The secondary concussive shockwave rippled outward like a physical wall, catching the rolling Absol and launching its heavy frame across the turf.
The white predator felt as though it had been struck head-on by a high-velocity mag-lev train, its internal organs shifting under the immense kinetic compression as it crashed heavily into the perimeter wall.
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