Charon had no reason to lie about Cynthia and the others. The deception would have lasted exactly as long as it took them to arrive, which wasn't long. And if he had tried to use false news to distract Ash long enough to reclaim the two birds, that was never going to work either.
Mars had fought Ash with two God Level Pokémon behind her. She had lost. Whatever her command failures contributed to that outcome, the raw power gap had to be real. One controlled God Level bird wasn't going to change that equation.
His actual goal was simpler. He was buying time.
Cynthia dropped off Garchomp's back the moment they landed and crossed to Ash's side. She looked at Moltres and Zapdos, unconscious but breathing steadily, their natural colors restored.
"You got them out of the conversion?"
"Both of them." Ash rubbed the back of his neck. "With how Mewtwo and I work together, it wasn't as complicated as it could have been."
He glanced over at the others. Everyone looked intact, just wind-battered and moving with the energy of people who had been running hard for the past stretch of time. The tension in his chest released properly for the first time since the submarine.
The situation had shifted. Two birds were free. The method to break the control was understood. Charon had one converted bird left, and one was a worse position than two had been. The dark shape still hovering near Charon was the remaining unknown, but even accounting for it, Ash's side had the clear advantage.
Cynthia turned toward Charon and Mars, her expression going from warm to flat in the same moment.
"Your plan is finished, Charon. Moltres and Zapdos are free. Lugia won't surface on your terms. You have one converted Articuno and an energy construct running on borrowed power. Surrender now and I'll request leniency from the League on your behalf."
Charon looked at her with something approaching amusement. "Is the Sinnoh Champion asking me to surrender when I can leave whenever I choose? Articuno may not match Mewtwo directly, but it's still God Level. If I want to walk away from this island right now, which one of you stops me?"
Nobody answered immediately, because he was right.
Ash and Cynthia both knew it. A God Level Pokémon with the Psychic type, even a controlled one, could remove people from a situation faster than any of them could respond. Mewtwo would have to be significantly above its current level to forcibly prevent that.
And then there was the dark shape.
From what Cynthia had said in the brief exchange on arrival, it was exactly what Ash had sensed. She had called it Yveltal's Shadow. The Eye of Insight had returned nothing on it, not incomplete data but a complete absence, which fit.
It wasn't a Pokémon in any meaningful sense. It had no life force. What it had was the Power of Death, collected, concentrated, and shaped into something that could hold a form and fight.
Team Galactic had spent years scouring the Kalos region for residual traces of Yveltal's power, the scattered remnants left behind by the God of Death in the places it had passed through or rested. Gathering it all, integrating it into a single coherent energy body, required both the raw material and technology sophisticated enough to contain it.
The reason they had gone to those lengths rather than approaching Yveltal directly was obvious. Yveltal was the God of Death. Walking up to it and asking for a sample was not an option anyone with any sense would consider.
This was all classified at the highest level within Team Galactic. Only Charon and the leader, Cyrus, knew the full picture. It explained why Mars had been completely blindsided when Charon mentioned a reserve. She genuinely hadn't known.
Cynthia hadn't known the origin either. She had heard the name Yveltal's Shadow directly from Charon during their confrontation, and the part about the power being finite and unreplenishable was her own read on what she had observed.
Every strike the shadow threw consumed a visible portion of its energy and nothing came back. The depletion rate was too consistent to misread.
But escape was still on the table if Charon wanted it. None of them had a clean answer to a God Level Psychic-type moving people out of a situation by force.
"Run?" Charon's expression shifted into something satisfied. "My goal has already been achieved." He looked out toward the sea. "Lugia is here."
The water erupted.
A column dozens of meters tall burst from the surface, and a white shape rose through it. As the water fell away, the form resolved itself. Snow-white feathers. Wings built like two enormous hands.
A presence that pressed on everything around it like the world had grown heavier.
The God of the Sea. Lugia.
Ash's Eye of Insight swept across it involuntarily. God Level Peak. All six stats reading S across the board. God Domain over ocean currents. A move list longer than anything he had ever seen, Aeroblast at the top of it.
The closest comparison in his experience was Ho-Oh, and even that hadn't hit him with quite this weight.
Cynthia's expression had gone from focused to confused. "This shouldn't be possible." She was thinking out loud more than speaking to anyone. "The legend says Lugia appears when all three birds are out of control. Two of the three are restored. Why is it here?"
"Because timing matters," Charon said, apparently content to explain now that things were going his way. "When I took Articuno, your two birds were still under control. Ash hadn't freed them yet. All three were compromised simultaneously, even if only briefly, and a God Domain doesn't stabilize the moment a control device is removed.
The elements are still in their most chaotic state right now. That's the condition. Lugia responds to the chaos, not to the current count."
Lorelei kept her eyes on the sky. "So what? Lugia at full strength could end all of you without effort. Whatever you're planning, you're overreaching."
"Are we." Charon raised one hand and waved it forward.
The dark shadow behind him surged.
Lugia saw it coming. Its eyes narrowed and deep blue light erupted from them. Psychic, at God Level Peak. The kind of force that could stop the world.
Time felt like it compressed. The pressure hit everyone on the island simultaneously, a weight that had nothing to do with proximity. Even Mewtwo went still.
"That's God Level Peak," Mewtwo said, her voice carrying something close to awe. "In Mega form, I can't raise my arm against the residual pressure alone. The gap between God Level tiers is not what I expected."
Mars had gone pale. She had been telling herself that Team Galactic's plan made sense, that they had accounted for the variables. Standing in the afterwash of what Lugia had just casually released, she was having trouble remembering why she had believed that.
Charon's smile didn't shift.
In the sky, the Psychic hit the shadow directly. Force enough to freeze space. The shadow didn't stop. It didn't even slow down. It punched through the Psychic entirely and closed the remaining distance to Lugia before the God of the Sea could pull back.
The evil intent poured into Lugia's body all at once.
Lugia screamed.
"Pikachu, Thunderbolt! Mewtwo, Thunderbolt! Cut that shadow off from Lugia now!"
Two bolts of gold lightning tore upward from the island simultaneously and split the dark sky wide open.