The moment Abomasnow set foot on the field, the air changed.
Ice-type energy spread across the arena in a wave. A biting wind scraped low across the ground, and snowflakes began drifting down from what had been a clear indoor sky.
Snow Warning — Abomasnow's ability — had taken effect. The weather shifted to hail.
Under hail conditions, Ice-type Pokémon gain a passive boost to their Defense, and Blizzard — normally hindered by imperfect accuracy — becomes guaranteed to hit.
Nidoking's Poison typing filled in the gap that Ground-type alone couldn't cover. Grass-type moves couldn't deal super-effective damage to him because of it. That left Abomasnow's only real path of attack through Ice-type moves — and with Snow Warning keeping the hail going indefinitely, the field was built perfectly for them.
Nidoking was clearly faster. In most matchups, Nova would open with a poison to start wearing the opponent down. But this time, he didn't hesitate.
"Nidoking, Flamethrower!"
Grass and Ice together left Abomasnow four times weak to Fire. This was the only turn where the full damage was guaranteed — before any shields went up or status conditions complicated the math. Nova wasn't going to waste it.
A jet of fire crossed the field and hit clean. Abomasnow cried out — hail's Defense boost did nothing against a special attack, and the Flamethrower landed at full force.
Fay steadied her partner with a firm word.
"Abomasnow, Aurora Veil!"
A shimmering curtain of light fell from the snow-filled sky, settling around Abomasnow like a veil of frozen aurora. Delicate-looking, but structurally sound — with Aurora Veil in place, both physical and special damage dealt to Abomasnow would be cut in half for several turns.
That was exactly why Nova had chosen Flamethrower first. Throwing away the one turn of guaranteed quad-effective damage in favour of a poison that Aurora Veil would then halve would have been the wrong call. Now that the Veil was up, the right move was to get Toxic in through sustained pressure — let the poison work from the inside while Aurora Veil handled the outside.
"Nidoking, Sludge Bomb!"
Abomasnow couldn't dodge it — not with its bulk and speed — and Sludge Bomb wasn't a move you could simply intercept. Fay already knew this from watching Blastoise try. Even destroying every individual blob of sludge mid-air hadn't stopped the toxic cloud that followed.
Rather than burn a turn trying to block it, she let Abomasnow take the hit behind the Veil.
And then she struck back.
"Abomasnow, Blizzard!"
The ice energy that had been building in the hail-soaked arena erupted all at once. A full-force Blizzard tore across the field — 110 base power, perfectly accurate in the hail, an absolute strike. It hammered into Nidoking with brutal force.
And Nidoking didn't move.
He stood through it. Taking the hit in silence, like a wall that had decided not to fall.
When the storm settled, frost clung to Nidoking's horn and plates. The marks left by the ice were real — the damage was real. But the ten-percent freeze chance didn't trigger. Nidoking let out a low sound, just enough to tell Nova he was still in the fight.
"Toxic Spikes!"
Abomasnow was already poisoned. The Veil halved the damage, but Toxic Spikes applied on top of an existing poison hit twice as hard. The accumulated venom was doing its work.
Even so, Abomasnow refused to go down. It answered with another Blizzard.
And Nidoking answered that with another Flamethrower.
The battle had shifted. Both Pokémon had taken too much to move freely — Abomasnow a stationary cannon, Nidoking running low on stamina after three straight fights. There was no more dodging, no more strategic maneuvering. Every hit landed. The match had come down to one question: who had more left.
Two more exchanges. Then Toxic finally did what it had been doing all along — it ran the clock out on Abomasnow. It tried to answer Fay's call, reached for one more move, and then its legs gave out. It toppled backward, out of its own control.
The hail stopped.
The swirling snow faded, and the arena returned to what it actually was — dry, quiet, still. The frozen tundra that had existed for the last few minutes disappeared as quickly as it had come.
Nidoking stood in the centre of the field, crusted with frost and marked with cuts from the Blizzard's ice shards. He didn't roar. He didn't move. He simply stood there, as though he had been standing there the whole time and intended to keep standing there indefinitely.
Unshaken. Immovable. A ridge that had never once considered stepping back.
The silence held for a moment.
Then, from the side of the field, someone started clapping.
It was the serious-faced trainer — expression unchanged, jaw set — but his hands were moving. Steady, deliberate applause. The heavyset man from Icefield City joined in next, then the man with glasses, then the curly-haired woman. Four trainers, all of them strong in their own right, clapping genuinely and without a word.
Sparse. But it meant something.
There was one more spectator — watching quietly from a monitor in the back room.
Mort sat in front of the screen, and for a moment he forgot he had been planning to go back to sleep. He found himself trying to remember the last time he had watched a battle that looked like that. The Nidoking he'd once kept as an unremarkable Gym Pokémon — overlooked, underused — had grown to this.
He didn't say anything. He just watched.
The applause finally pulled Fay out of wherever she had gone in her head. She had said before the match that if Nova and Nidoking actually won, she would cry.
She had meant it.
She was crying now — not quietly. Full, unrestrained sobs, the kind that come from somewhere genuine. She was still crying as she returned her Pokémon, still crying as she straightened up.
Nova took a step toward her to say something. Before he could, Fay bent forward in a full, deep bow.
"Thank you — truly, thank you so much, Nova. That was the best battle I've ever had."