"Lapras, keep your distance! Hydro Pump!"
The Gym Trainer wasn't entirely sure what to make of Zorua's changed condition. Aura users were uncommon, and while she had heard about them, she had never actually faced one across a battlefield. Worse, the degree to which an Aura user could boost their Pokémon varied enormously depending on the user's strength—there was no easy way to read the ceiling from the outside.
What she could see was that the little fox's energy had surged rapidly, and that alone told her the challenger was no lightweight. She decided caution was the right call. Test first. Push later.
Lapras, reading its Trainer's intent without needing to be told twice, circled smoothly along the outer edge of the pool, keeping itself as far from the central platform as the arena allowed. It didn't attack immediately. It glided, watching—and then, a beat after the command, a blast of Hydro Pump came roaring toward Zorua.
It was a deliberate delay. Lapras was smart enough to know that the moment a Trainer's voice rang out, the opposing side snapped to attention. Pokémon and Trainer alike would tense up, ready to react. An attack timed to that spike of alertness was the easiest to read and the easiest to dodge. But an attack that came half a second after the expected moment—when both had just begun to relax—could land when the other side least expected it. That kind of timing required genuine trust between a Trainer and her Pokémon.
David, however, was not someone caught off guard by clean teamwork.
"Zorua, Icy Wind!"
The choice made the Gym Trainer blink. Icy Wind against Hydro Pump? The gap in raw power between those two moves was obvious. She fixed her eyes on the arena, skeptical but watching carefully.
She had seen enough in the past two rounds to know that this young challenger was not someone to underestimate. His age and his fresh face were misleading. She had internally written off his title as Imperial City Newcomer Cup Champion—there were dozens of Newcomer Cup Champions scattered across the country, and the title's only real distinction was that "Imperial City" attached to the front of it sounded more impressive than it probably was. A genuinely strong newcomer winning a newcomer-tier event told her nothing surprising.
What did tell her something was how he battled.
As for David himself, his reputation at this point in his career was almost nonexistent—and he was fully aware of it. He had only become a Trainer earlier that year. He hadn't yet competed in anything that carried real weight. Most people who recognized him at all did so in reverse order: they noticed the Zorua first—the world's only known Zorua of its particular kind—and then, almost as an afterthought, registered that a Trainer came attached to it. His name came second. His Pokémon came first.
He didn't especially mind. His parents had reputations of their own—his father a Gym Leader, his mother a Pokémon Professor—but announcing that to strangers wasn't something he had any interest in doing. It would have sounded absurd. He was determined to build his own standing, and the high school league was where he planned to start doing exactly that.
The two moves met in midair.
The Hydro Pump never reached Zorua. Caught full in the face by the Icy Wind, the column of pressurized water froze solid several meters out from the platform—a thick spike of ice hanging suspended for a moment before dropping into the pool with a heavy crack. And the Icy Wind didn't stop there. It kept moving, carrying its remaining force all the way across the arena toward Lapras.
Lapras's Ice and Water typing blunted the impact considerably. The residual wind didn't do much.
But the Hydro Pump was a pillar of ice.
"What—how is that possible—"
"Are you serious? That strong?"
Two voices cut through the arena from opposite sides of the stands at almost the same moment, expressing almost opposite things.
The Gym Trainer stared. David stared too, if slightly differently—not in shock, but with the specific expression of someone whose result had come in well above expectations. He had hoped Zorua could freeze the Hydro Pump. He hadn't expected her to do it with force to spare.
He adjusted quickly.
"All right—Zorua, Swift into Sucker Punch, rapid fire!"
"Zorua!"
The little fox's face split into a wide, sharp grin. She had been bottled up on this platform for too long, dodging and deflecting while Lapras dictated the pace from across the water. Now the stopper was off.
Dark purple flames condensed rapidly in front of her and streaked outward in a continuous volley, crossing the pool toward Lapras in quick succession.
"Lapras, dive—now!"
The Gym Trainer recognized those flames. In the previous round, Dewgong had come away covered in something that looked far too much like frostbite—and Dewgong was an Ice-type. She wasn't about to let Lapras take a direct hit if she could help it. Lapras obeyed without hesitation, slipping cleanly beneath the surface.
The pool was built deep—more than twenty meters, specifically designed to give Water-type Pokémon room to maneuver during dives. Most Water-types could use that depth with ease. Lapras among them. Wailord, notably, could not.
What the Gym Trainer didn't know—couldn't have known—was the nature of that frostbite. It had nothing to do with temperature. Zorua's Sucker Punch, after drawing on the dark energy residue stored in the Light Stone, had developed into something stranger. The frostbite it inflicted wasn't physical cold. It was closer to a mental sensation: a deep, bone-level chill imposed directly on the target's mind, one that the body then reflected as real.
David had once come across an account of an old psychology experiment—a condemned prisoner, blindfolded, told a cut had been made at his wrist. A dripping faucet simulated blood loss. The prisoner died, not from any actual wound, but from what his own mind believed was happening. He had never been sure whether the story was genuine, but Zorua's Sucker Punch worked on something close to the same principle. The resentment she carried made it real enough to the target that the outcome was the same either way.
Lapras had dived. But diving didn't help.
"Going under won't save you. Extrasensory—hold it."
Psychic energy reached down through the water instantly, wrapping around Lapras like a net drawn tight, locking it in place. Lapras struggled, but Psychic force didn't care about water resistance or depth. It held firm.
The dark purple bursts of Sucker Punch followed, plunging beneath the surface one after another and connecting cleanly, each one landing with a hollow, reverberant impact that the water absorbed but couldn't block. The frostbite set in across Lapras's body in patches, spreading steadily. Its movements slowed. Its resistance faded.
By the time the Gym Trainer recognized what was happening and reached for the words to concede, Lapras had already been lifted from the pool by Zorua's Psychic and set gently—if firmly—outside the arena boundary.
The match was over.
The last round had gone differently than anyone had expected, but the outcome wasn't in doubt. Zorua had cleared the Gym Challenge.