"The Pokémon under N's command are indeed the most flawless masterpieces ever synthesized in my laboratory," Colress explained to Ghetsis, his tone filled with academic satisfaction. "However, I did not hand these specimens over to N. They chose to follow him entirely of their own volition."
"That rebellious brat... always acting as a magnet for wild beasts. He is nothing but a literal monster," Ghetsis growled, his face contorting with malice as memories of a young N summoning massive legions of wild Pokémon flashed through his mind.
"Glaceon, use Icicle Crash!" N directed cleanly.
A colossal swarm of hyper-compressed icicles condensed out of thin air. Each glacial spike, the thickness of a grown man's arm, plummeted like a high-velocity ballistic volley targeted straight at Alolan Ninetales.
"Alolan Ninetales, use Slash."
Following Feng Che's smooth command, a brilliant white arc of kinetic energy sliced across the frosty atmosphere. Every single icicle breaching Alolan Ninetales's perimeter was cleanly bisected into micro-fragments, leaving perfectly glossy, sheared faces in their wake.
Alolan Ninetales paused to elegantly lick its front paw. Having flawlessly synchronized its movements to conclude the Swords Dance loop, its raw attack parameters had scaled to an terrifying tier.
"Curse it... It still managed to complete the stat-amplification step." N's jaw tightened. "Glaceon, blanket the zone with Blizzard! Close the spatial gap and initiate a direct press!"
A howling, absolute-zero tempest violently erupted across the subterranean vault, massive goose-feather flakes of permafrost blinding the vision of everyone in the arena. The sheer density of the frozen mist made it completely impossible to track any physical displacement.
"I can't even force my eyes open!"
"By the heavens, this blizzard's parameters are far too extreme!"
"How can the match variables be mapped under these conditions?"
"Wait! Look at the display—Alolan Ninetales hasn't shifted its baseline coordinates by a single micro-millimeter!"
The spectator galleries broke into a flurry of frantic murmurs.
Alolan Ninetales stood anchored amidst the driving snow like a pristine, carved ice sculpture. Even the heavy powder accumulating across the floor failed to bury its chassis. It merely unhinged its jaw to let out a lazy, unbothered yawn. Fully saturated under the sub-zero environment, its core combat efficiency had scaled to its absolute apex.
"Superb. Alolan Ninetales, use Disarming Voice!"
Alolan Ninetales opened its muzzle, expelling a sequence of exceptionally elegant, high-frequency acoustic waves that vibrated across the field. Simultaneously, two massive, razor-sharp spires of permafrost violently erupted from the snowbeds, lunging straight toward its underbelly.
"Saturated within a frozen waste of this caliber, every single snowflake operates as a direct sensory asset for my partner," Feng Che remarked flatly.
With a seamless, high-velocity vault, Alolan Ninetales launched itself into the air, landing flawlessly atop the tips of the hostile ice spires to look down upon the field like a sovereign monarch.
"Glaceon, counter with Shadow Ball!" N commanded.
Dozens of negative-energy spheres aggressively burst from the snowbeds, tracing upward vectors.
Alolan Ninetales threw its nine magnificent tails perfectly erect, the plumage shifting into a sleek, silver-grey metallic sheen to execute a brutal Iron Tail. With a succession of heavy clangs, it batted the Shadow Balls cleanly out of the air, sending them detonating across the snowbanks in a series of sharp, thunderous booms.
Flashes of dark, pitch-black kinetic electricity rippled across the frozen floor.
Alolan Ninetales dropped elegantly from its elevated perch, its metallic tails driving a heavy, downward sweep targeted at a seemingly vacant patch of snow.
"Glaceon, match them with Iron Tail!"
A brilliant flash of silver-grey light sliced across the fog as Glaceon materialized to anchor the counter. The twin sets of nine tails smashed together in a brutal physical deadlock, the kinetic friction releasing a sharp, whistling gust of wind.
Glaceon exerted its raw muscular coefficient to forcefully push back the strike, before its physical vessel smoothly dissolved back into the white mist.
Yet, Alolan Ninetales's sensory tracking effortlessly locked onto Glaceon's new coordinates. Snapping its tails around, it delivered another brutal, diagonal cleave straight toward the hidden target.
Forced to reveal its frame, Glaceon scrambled awkwardly, executing a frantic dodge roll across the powder to narrowly avoid being flattened by the metallic clubs.
"Glaceon, use Dig!" N barked.
Glaceon rapidly tunneled into the thick sheet of permafrost, completely burying its chassis beneath the safety of the snowbeds.
"Does it truly harbor the delusion that hiding beneath the powder will stall my partner's tracking arrays?" Feng Che sneered. "Alolan Ninetales, flood the subterranean channels with Ice Beam!"
Alolan Ninetales expelled a torrential stream of crystalline, pale-blue energy from its muzzle. The moment the cryogenic wave grounded, the entire two-meter layer of snow was flash-consolidated into a single, unyielding block of solid permafrost.
"Glaceon, break containment with Ice Blade!" N roared.
A sharp, pale-blue flash of kinetic energy sliced through the frozen floor. Glaceon burst through the permafrost cap, clutching a hyper-compressed blade of solid ice within its jaws.
It launched a relentless close-quarters press, its crescent strikes cutting through the air to leave behind trails of shimmering blue light.
Glaceon: My ice blade is saturated with a lethal, absolute-zero cryogenic coefficient. The exact micro-second it registers a physical touch, the target's neural pathways will instantly freeze, pinning them to the floor.
Glaceon calculated with supreme confidence.
To its absolute horror, however, Alolan Ninetales merely tapped its paw against the ice sheet. Instantly, a succession of dense, towering ice walls rose aggressively from the ground to form an absolute defensive fortress. The crescent blades slammed dead-center into the barriers; though the kinetic trauma successfully fractured the structures into thousands of jagged, web-like fissures, the advance was completely halted.
"Execute Ice Wall Detonation!"
Feng Che directed his partner to unleash a highly specialized, custom optimization loop. When standard species mechanics fell short, custom-engineered techniques were the single finest alternative to bridge the parameter gap. Within the ancient ancestral legacy files indexed inside Alolan Ninetales's mind rested a vast array of unique, self-developed combat forms.
Many of these advanced shapes shared a near-flawless mechanical alignment with Rock-type archetypes. This specialized Ice Wall Detonation operated as a highly optimized, high-velocity variant of Rock Blast.
The fractured ice walls violently exploded outward, sending thousands of razor-sharp, steel-hard permafrost shards shrieking across space toward Glaceon like a localized shrapnel storm.
"Glaceon, retreat vectors immediately!" N ordered.
Glaceon was forced to rapidly deploy Dig once more, burying its frame beneath the deep ice to dodge the shrapnel storm.
As the shards buried themselves harmlessly into the snowbanks, N checked the telemetry, only to find a colossal ring of spinning, hyper-compressed ice blades suddenly materializing around Alolan Ninetales's crown.
"An optimized variant of Stone Edge refashioned via Ice-type parameters?!" N gasped, his brilliant intellect instantly parsing the structural formulation.
"Exceptional deduction. You truly deserve your title, N," Feng Che acknowledged, clapping his hands with an amused smile.
"Glaceon, clear the field with Hyper Beam!" N roared, forcing the issue.
A massive, blinding pillar of absolute white energy violently erupted from beneath the snowbed, filling the immediate atmosphere with a dense cloud of superheated vapor.
Yet, the devastating Hyper Beam failed to yield the operational trauma N had calculated. The spinning ring of ice blades orbiting Alolan Ninetales acted as an automated kinetic shield, systematically grinding down and deflecting the raw energy beam until the payload completely dissolved.
"Phenomenal application... This Alolan Ninetales is truly remarkable."
"To effortlessly neutralize a maximum-output Hyper Beam by leveraging a rotating shield of customized ice blades... I have witnessed this exact mechanical deflection paradigm executed once before—by Sinnoh Champion Cynthia's Garchomp," Drayden remarked gravely from the galleries.
As a legendary figure intimately associated with the upper echelons of the Dragon Clan, Cynthia frequently participated in the grand galas hosted within their ancestral territories. Holding the rank of Grand Master over Unova's division, Drayden was fully aware of the terrifying baseline parameters commanded by the Sinnoh Sovereign. Her underworld title as the Goddess of War was verified by raw, absolute military metrics.
"Glaceon, execute Mirror Coat into Ice Mirror Realm!" N commanded, shifting his layout.
Dozens of massive, hyper-reflective ice mirrors violently crystallized across the snowy floor, every single mirror face flawlessly projecting an illusionary afterimage of Glaceon.
This stood as a specialized, forbidden technique Feng Che had only ever witnessed deployed by high-tier Sky Fiends during past cataclysms. Glaceon held the capacity to seamlessly warp and transition its physical vessel between the mirror planes at a millisecond's notice, a spatial distortion loop closely mimicking a Gengar's dimensional shifting through the spirit world. Furthermore, sustained within the matrix of the ice mirrors, its core offensive parameters would receive a massive, passive amplification.
Feng Che tracked Glaceon's true vessel as it fluidly slipped into the absolute center of a primary ice mirror.
The chimera turned its crown, flashing a deeply confident, mocking smile toward Alolan Ninetales from within the glass. The exact millisecond it secured safe harbor inside the mirror dimension, it would stand as the absolute, undisputed master of that domain.
No... my initial data sweep missed a critical parameter. This Glaceon has also been spliced with the sequenced genetics of Suicune, Feng Che analyzed, his psychic tracking catching the faint, purifying white mist rippling off the glass.
"Flawlessly parsed, Acting Champion. I spliced a highly stable, condensed genetic strand harvested from Suicune into Glaceon's core pathways," Colress unmasked the variable, unable to restrain his own scientific pride. "Though the volume of siphoned divinity injected was minimal—ensuring it retains zero external anatomical markers of the Aurora Pokémon—I explicitly intended to reserve this layout as an absolute, definitive trump card."
"I never expected your analytical tracking to isolate the genetic signature this clinically, Feng Che."
The chief scientist's voluntary confession caused Feng Che's tactical evaluation of the transgenic Glaceon to scale to an even more high-alert tier.
Glaceon's baseline parameters already anchored the absolute peak of the Champion rank; if it could seamlessly leverage Suicune's absolute authority over water purification and atmospheric manipulation, breaking its line would demand an exceptionally grueling struggle.