Gradually, N began to realize that his dependable hound was behaving strangely. Its staggering velocity loops had begun to visibly decay.
This isn't right. Why are Arcanine's speed parameters dropping? It hasn't even breached the absolute theoretical threshold of its transformation timeline yet, N analyzed, his brow furrowing with growing unease.
Furthermore, sustained within Entei Mode, its physical vessel should be completely immune to generic outside trauma.
The sensory anomaly became increasingly glaring, and as Ninetales's relentless artillery press intensified, Arcanine's evasive maneuvers grew more battered and erratic by the second.
Seizing the precise millisecond Ninetales swung its silver-grey Iron Tail down in a lethal arc, N barked an urgent directive for his partner to bridge the distance with Extreme Speed. Yet, the exact second the blazing hound attempted to fire up its cardiovascular cells, its front limbs violently buckled underneath it.
With a resounding crack, the iron-hard tails slammed dead-center into its chassis, launching the massive beast into the high ceiling like a struck golf ball.
Arcanine let out a low, pained whimper before its heavy frame plummeted from the heights to crash ruthlessly into the dirt. It thrashed and struggled desperately across the broken ground for several long moments, but its limbs failed to anchor its weight. Finally, with a sharp twitch of its paws, its vital signs buckled, and it collapsed into a dead faint, completely incapacitated.
"So that was the play..."
The precise micro-second the divine Entei Mode dissolved from Arcanine's frame, N caught sight of the deep, sickly ash-green hue marring the hound's complexion, and the underlying truth of the exchange stood clinically unmasked.
"Every single parameter of this rout was mapped out under your calculations from the start, wasn't it, Feng Che? You deliberately exploited the unique visual properties of the Entei morphology."
"Saturated under that incandescent, white-hot flare, Arcanine's true complexion was completely obscured by the blinding firelight, systematically blinding my tracking arrays from reading the poison indicators."
"That initial physical entanglement... your Ninetales leveraged its constricting tails to quietly deliver a high-lethal Toxic payload right through its skin."
"I recalled thinking that Arcanine had broken out of that tail constraint far too easily—as it turns out, you permitted the release simply because your toxin trap had already cleared the threshold."
"Entei's Flame of Life commands the natural property to aggressively purge foreign contaminants, but you successfully injected the poison directly into its internal bloodstream. The micro-punctures were instantly flash-healed and rendered perfect under the thermal heat, creating an absolute visual illusion that prevented me from flagging the anomaly." N calmly and meticulously piece together the forensic logs of Feng Che's battlefield strategy.
Clap, clap, clap, clap.
Feng Che openly applauded the young king, his tone rich with genuine amusement.
"You truly deserve your title as King N of Team Plasma; your analytical deductions are remarkably precise."
"Precisely mapped. I leveraged the extreme thermal resonance of the Entei form to shield Ninetales's injection vector, seamlessly pooling the neurotoxins into Arcanine's circulation. Ninetales—siphon and absorb the residual magma covering this basin."
Feng Che handed down the utility directive; to ensure the environmental factors did not compromise or skew the baseline metrics of the impending rounds, draining the liquid fire was the single finest alternative.
Ninetales unhinged its elegant jaws, executing a massive telekinetic suction that mirrored a literal whale devouring the ocean. As its jaws snapped rhythmically across the open airspace, the vast, undulating lake of boiling magma was cleanly vacuumed straight into its core, leaving the arena floor entirely bare, cold, and pristine.
"Return, Arcanine. Your strategic execution was exceptionally beautiful."
"Rest your parameters, Ninetales."
Both Trainers concurrently recalled their partners back into their respective capsules. Immediately after, a secondary pair of Poké Balls was hurled into the clearing.
N deployed his Glaceon, while Feng Che countered by releasing his Alolan Ninetales.
Both entries stood as undisputed monarchs within the Ice-type ecosystem, their pristine physical vessels radiating an absolute, drop-dead gorgeous aesthetic majesty.
The Glaceon bore a sleek, fox-like silhouette, its primary coat a delicate shade of soft, pastel blue. Arrayed across its hide was a dense network of hyper-tensile, razor-sharp bristle fur, though the cutting needles were masterfully smoothed to remain hidden from generic visual tracking. Its cranial crest closely mirrored the aesthetic of a double-layered, woven winter parka hood.
Contrasting sharply against its pastel base, Glaceon's inner ears, spine, and heavy tail were marked by a symmetrical series of deep, diamond-shaped sapphire crests. A fringe of long, elegant cerulean fur draped down from its crown like traditional braided tresses, ending in dense, sapphire diamond nodes. Flanking its lower limbs were dark, midnight-blue color blocks that created the distinct visual illusion of wearing sleek winter boots.
A refined Glaceon held the capacity to flash-freeze its outer fur at a millisecond's notice, transforming its tresses into lethal, needle-sharp projectiles closely mimicking a Jolteon's arsenal. Furthermore, by meticulously throttling its core body temperature, it could spontaneously project a localized hail storm around its coordinates.
However, the specific Glaceon N had deployed transcended standard species profiles, heavily saturated with the unmistakable physical traits of an Alolan Ninetales.
It proudly flaunted nine flowing, independent tails from its lower spine, its primary chassis fortified by a shimmering, translucent suit of solid ice armor, crowned by a delicate, crystalline tiara of permafrost nestled right across its brow.
"Tell me, Feng Che—does the visual silhouette of my Glaceon meet your aesthetic standards?"
"Its core cell lines integrate the sequenced genetic legacy of an Alolan Ninetales—the single most breathtakingly beautiful masterpiece cultivated under Colress's hand."
As N's words cleared the field, thousands of pristine, goose-feather snowflakes began to cascade gently from the upper ceiling. This upcoming exchange would undeniably demand a grueling, back-to-back clash between equals.
"A Glaceon spliced and augmented with Alolan Ninetales cell lines... Colress's transgenic engineering loops are remarkably profound," Feng Che murmured, quietly impressed by the sheer quality of the modified beast.
As the heavy sheets of snow continuously fell, they rapidly blanketed the cold bedrock under a dense, thick layer of powder. With a fluid twist of its torso, Glaceon's physical form instantly dissolved into the white environment, vanishing from visual tracking entirely under the passive evasion of its Snow Cloak ability.
"Alolan Ninetales, this particular adversary commands an exceptionally high combat coefficient. Maintain absolute tactical caution," Feng Che directed via the psychic bridge.
His Alolan Ninetales had successfully inherited the ancient ancestral legacy parameters of its bloodline, yet within the power structure of Feng Che's terrifying active roster, its overall standing rested around the mid-to-lower tiers. This engagement presented the absolute finest threshold to permit Alolan Ninetales to engage in a non-stop, maximum-intensity struggle to refine its core mechanics.
If its parameters secured a clean victory against the transgenic chimera, Feng Che would be deeply satisfied. If its line sustained a statistical loss, he would experience zero emotional frustration; he would simply deploy a secondary asset to aggressively reclaim the advantage in the subsequent round.
"Glaceon, use Ice Shard!" N commanded.
Countless goose-egg-sized chunks of hyper-compressed permafrost violently crystallized in the upper atmosphere, screaming downward like a localized ballistic volley targeted squarely at Alolan Ninetales's coordinates.
Alolan Ninetales extended its powerful limbs, executing a series of seamless, exceptionally graceful bounding leaps across the heavy snow to fluidly clear the oncoming projectiles.
"Alolan Ninetales is utilizing those evasive vectors to quietly build momentum for a Swords Dance loop," N's brilliant mind clinically parsed the fox's mechanical pacing within a fraction of a second.
"However, I have zero intention of permitting your line to smoothly ramp up its offensive parameters."
"Glaceon, cut their trajectory with Ice Beam!" N bellowed loudly, the sheer intensity of the deadlock causing the veins across the back of his hands to bulge with taut pressure.
Dozens of pale-blue, crystalline lasers violently erupted from the snowy mist. Yet, Alolan Ninetales's mesmerizing, rhythmic dance steps allowed it to seamlessly twist its chassis, the fluid movements causing the incoming energy lines to miss their marks entirely.
The Ice Beams slammed into the open floor, flash-freezing the powder into a massive fortress of jagged permafrost spires. Within moments, the entire subterranean vault was converted into a desolate, absolute-zero glacial waste.
Further out along the spectator galleries, Vio's Kommo-o—being a species that harbored a severe, biological vulnerability to sub-zero environments—shuddered violently, tightening its metallic armor scales to conserve its core warmth. Tracking his partner's discomfort, Vio smoothly unclipped his heavy master coat and draped it securely over the dragon's shoulders.
"Team Plasma's technocratic capabilities are truly terrifying; within a remarkably brief operational timeline, their labs have successfully stabilized and deployed a massive fleet of these hyper-modified, top-tier specimens," Vio remarked, his tone grave. "However, the residual population of dragon species within our clan's reserves is far too restricted; our bloodlines cannot sustain the grueling cellular degradation of trials like this."
Though he respected the raw efficacy of Team Plasma's transgenic splicing, Vio held zero intention of ever introducing such volatile methods to the sacred bloodlines of the Dragon Clan.
"Agreed. While this technology yields undeniable military parameters, it represents a direct, arrogant challenge to the divine sovereignty of the Creator," Drayden responded, his arms pinned confidently across his chest as he stared into the frozen arena.
"Should Arceus ever break its eternal slumber to audit the current state of the mortal realm, it will never permit a synthetic corruption of this scale to expand across the global order. Left unchecked, a methodology like this would spell absolute, permanent ruin for the natural ecosystem of all Pokémon." Drayden unmasked his core ideological stance.
Meanwhile, back at the command console, Ghetsis leaned forward, lowering his voice to a hushed, conspiratorial register as he addressed the chief scientist beside him.
"Colress, your transgenic architecture continues to manifest spectacular parameters. Tell me—have your primary projects targeting the replication of Legendary deities yielded any fresh breakthroughs?"
"The genetic sequencing data governing a true god is astronomically complex; my quantum mainframes require a minimum of several decades strictly to parse and map a complete Legendary genome map," Colress answered smoothly, his tone flat. "The engineering parameters are fundamentally unaligned with simple replication."
"My current methodology relies strictly on stabilizing a common embryonic clone template, before carefully splicing fractured Legendary gene sequences into its baseline pathways."
"However, the survival metrics governing this process remain exceptionally abyssal. I have coordinated thousands of high-intensity operational trials, yet my hands have only successfully stabilized a handful of viable specimens."
"Furthermore, due to the relentless cellular erosion triggered by the volatile Legendary genes, these transgenic assets carry an exceptionally abbreviated, terminal lifespan." Colress clinically outlined the absolute structural bottlenecks crippling his current research lines.