Sixty seconds.
The number existed not as an abstraction but as a physical presence in Sasuke's awareness, a weight pressing against the bond between him and Zekrom, the Dynamax energy's timer counting down with the precision of a heartbeat approaching its last. Through the shared consciousness, he felt the dragon feel it too. the power that had expanded Zekrom to the scale of a natural disaster was contracting, the reality-warping force that sustained Dynamax form withdrawing by imperceptible degrees, each second pulling a fraction of the enormity back into the mortal dimensions where Legendary Pokémon lived when they weren't reshaping weather systems.
Sixty seconds. One minute to end a conversation that had been building since Sōgen's tower, since Masaaki's tea house, since the moment Sasuke had stopped commanding and started listening.
The two colossal Pokémon circled each other in the storm-dark sky.
The arena below was invisible, obscured by the cloud layer they'd generated through sheer energy output, the magnetic platform buried beneath a ceiling of roiling vapor that flickered with electrical discharge from Zekrom's field and metallic fragments from Skarmory's ravaged plumage. The spectators in the lower tiers could see nothing but cloud from below. The spectators in the upper tiers could see nothing but dragons above. And between the two perspectives, in the contested sky that had become the battlefield, Primal Mega Skarmory and Primal Zekrom orbited each other like binary stars, each one's gravitational influence bending the other's trajectory, the space between them alive with residual energy from the exchanges that had brought them to this moment.
Both Pokémon were wounded. Zekrom's void-dark scales bore the scoring marks of Steel Storm fragments and Max Steelspike penetration, blue-luminous dragon blood still evaporating from three wound sites. Its turbine tail rotated with a slight arrhythmia, the damage from the embedded spear manifesting as a fractional irregularity in the electromagnetic output that Sasuke felt through the bond as a pulse that skipped every seventh beat.
Skarmory was worse. The concentrated Max Lightning beam had left burn patterns across its entire body, the ancient Primal patina scorched away in radiating lines, raw metal exposed beneath, the surface that had once split sunlight into metallic spectra now blackened and dull. One wing moved with visible stiffness, the joint damaged, the feathers along its leading edge partially fused by electrical heat. Its furnace-gold eyes burned with diminished but undying intensity, the eyes of a creature that had taken everything its opponent could deliver and was still, through twenty years of partnership and the stubbornness that only comes from fighting alongside someone you love, in the sky.
Asuma's voice cut through the thunder.
"You know what I respect about you, Uchiha?"
The words carried across the storm-dark space between them with the clarity that only a Gym Leader's voice achieves, amplified not by technology but by twenty years of projecting commands through howling wind and combat noise, a voice trained to be heard in the exact conditions it was being used.
"You came here to learn, not just to win. Most challengers treat this gym as an obstacle. Something to get past. A badge to collect on the way to somewhere else." The dead cigarette was gone, blown from his fingers by his own Pokémon's hurricane at some point during the Dynamax exchanges, though Asuma showed no awareness of its absence. "You treated it as a teacher. And that's why you're still standing."
Sasuke heard him through the bond, not through his ears, which were filled with wind and thunder and the subsonic hum of Zekrom's damaged turbine, but through the expanded awareness that the shared consciousness provided. He heard the words and understood them not as praise but as acknowledgment. one teacher recognizing that a student had learned the lesson, even if the exam wasn't over.
"You taught me that battles are conversations," Sasuke said. His voice didn't carry the way Asuma's did, he wasn't a Gym Leader, hadn't spent decades training his voice against storms. But Zekrom's electromagnetic field carried the vibration, amplifying it through the charged atmosphere the way a speaker amplifies a signal, and the words reached Asuma's platform with the clarity of a bell struck in silence.
"So let me finish what I want to say."
Forty-five seconds.
Asuma moved.
Not with hesitation, not with the deliberate patience that had characterized his approach throughout the battle. With commitment. The expression on his face shifted from respectful engagement to something deeper, the look of a man who had decided that holding back was no longer respectful but insulting, and that the only way to honor what Sasuke had shown him was to bring everything.
"Max Airstream, absolute full power."
The command carried finality. Not the finality of desperation, the finality of a craftsman applying his finest technique, knowing that it represents the complete expression of everything he's learned and everything his partner has become.
Skarmory responded with its body.
The kaiju-sized steel bird arrested its orbit and oriented itself toward Zekrom, not diving, not banking, but hovering in place as its massive wings drew backward, every Primal-Mega feather extending to maximum surface area, the six-meter wingspan of its Mega form now magnified to Dynamax proportions until each wing was a wall of ancient metal that blocked the sky behind it. The damaged wing protested, Sasuke could see the tremor in the joint, the strain of a body being asked to exceed what its injuries permitted, but Skarmory drove through the pain with the particular defiance of a creature that had never in twenty years failed to give its trainer what was asked.
Both wings swept forward simultaneously.
Not a wingbeat. An event.
The air between Skarmory's wings compressed into a density that made it visible, a wall of atmosphere packed so tight that light refracted through it, creating a lens of wind that distorted everything behind it. Then the compression released, and the wall became a tunnel, a focused hurricane of such concentrated force that the clouds it passed through were annihilated, the moisture converted to vapor, the vapor converted to nothing, the nothing replaced by a corridor of absolute atmospheric violence aimed at Zekrom.