Faced with Suicune's challenge, Ash chose Pikachu.
The reasoning was straightforward. Pikachu's Electric typing had a clean answer to Suicune's Water typing. And Pikachu had only just clawed his way back to Elite Four level. A high-pressure fight against a Legendary Beast was exactly the kind of opponent he needed to push past it.
Elite Four was old ground for Pikachu. He'd lived there before. Returning was only step one. The real climb started above.
For most Pokémon, breaking from High Level to Elite Four was a brutal wall. For Pikachu, that first wall was already behind him. Now he was closing on Charizard and Mewtwo again, and this fight could be the breakthrough that put him back in the trio. Maybe at the top of it.
That said, every battle Ash had recently lost had been on type advantage.
Charizard against Glaceon. Pikachu against Togekiss.
Both fights, type advantage on their side. Both losses.
Meanwhile, in reverse-type matchups, he kept winning. If Trainers got titles for things like that, Ash could probably claim "Reverse-Type Master" without much argument.
Today's matchup was clean type advantage again. He'd see if he could finally turn one of those into a clean win and burn that streak off his record.
Pikachu hopped off Ash's shoulder, settling onto the cleared ground in front of him. The yellow sacs in his cheeks crackled to life. Eager. Practically vibrating.
A Poké Ball on Ash's belt popped open at the same time. Mewtwo materialized at Suicune's side of the clearing.
Suicune's fur stood up across its entire body. Pupils contracting, it stared at Mewtwo, and what it sensed off that Pokémon was the kind of pressure that didn't belong in this conversation. This Pokémon has reached the same realm as Lord Ho-Oh.
So Ho-Oh's chosen still had a card like that in his hand. No wonder Ho-Oh had set the three of them up as the test. Anything less wouldn't have qualified.
Suicune had taken one look at Ash when it arrived and thought the boy was too young for any of this. The three Legendary Beasts didn't show themselves in public, but they watched humans, quietly and constantly. They had a clear sense of what a human could realistically achieve at each age.
At Ash's age, even pushing it generously, a High level ace was already enough to call you a prodigy. Accepting a test from the three Legendary Beasts at that point sounded like a daydream.
It turned out the daydreamer was Suicune. The Pokémon standing across from it was strong enough that the three of them attacking together might still not have been enough, let alone one at a time.
But Ash wasn't planning to use that Pokémon. He was using Pikachu.
Suicune's gaze dropped to the small yellow figure in front of him. Compared to the weight Mewtwo gave off, Pikachu's presence barely registered. A Pikachu reaching even this level was, admittedly, a surprise on its own merits. But not enough. Not for this.
Honestly, if Ash had sent out Mewtwo, Suicune would have been the one who didn't qualify.
"Woo-oh~" Chosen of Ho-Oh, you really intend to use Pikachu for this?
"Of course. Pikachu's my partner. And don't underestimate him." Ash flashed a confident smirk at Suicune.
Everyone who'd underestimated Pikachu over the months had ended up flat on the ground. Suicune wasn't going to be an exception.
Ash reached up, took off his cap, and tossed it forward. The cap arced perfectly and settled onto Pikachu's head without so much as a tilt. The moment it landed, the cap and Pikachu seemed to fuse into one.
Partner Form.
Against an opponent of Suicune's caliber, not opening with Partner Form would have been disrespectful.
But Partner Form wasn't the only card.
Aura Resides Within Me.
Two powers stacked at once. The aura around Pikachu mutated in real time. The calm, composed Incarnation of the North Wind stood there watching the "not worth mentioning" electric mouse vault, in the space of a few seconds, to something close to its own footing.
Suicune was, briefly, having a crisis with reality.
What is this thing? Has humanity actually progressed this far without us noticing? This isn't even physically reasonable!
Chosen of Ho-Oh or not, the basic laws of the world still apply! Going from Elite Four to Champion in a handful of seconds? That's the same as a Spearow evolving directly into a Ho-Oh!
"We're ready, Suicune. Let's go. First trial, get it started. Consider this warm-up before we hit town." Ash waved cheerfully, riding a wave of barely contained excitement.
It had been a long time since Pikachu had gone all-out. Recent full-power fights had been Ash directing Mewtwo. Before that, it had been Charizard or Gardevoir. Pikachu had been in recovery mode for most of that stretch. He'd just clawed back to Elite Four level, and he hadn't had a single real battle since. This was his comeback fight.
Through his Aura Power, Ash could read Suicune's data the way another Trainer might read a scoreboard.
Level: Champion Advanced.
Physical, Special Attack, Speed: all S grade. Remaining three stats: A grade.
A spread like that on a regular Pokémon would be exceptional. On a Legendary, it was middle of the road. Ash had seen plenty of Legendaries with four or five S-grade stats, and a handful with straight S across the board. His own Gardevoir capped at all-S.
So Suicune's numbers didn't shake him. Combat-wise, Suicune and the current Pikachu were running close enough to call it even.
Pikachu sat at Elite Four Beginner on his own. Partner Form pushed him to Elite Four Mid. The Aura fusion on top of that lifted him to Champion. Add the Light Ball boost, and a head-on exchange with a Champion High Suicune was no problem at all.
I'll handle the perimeter. The two of you can let loose.
Mewtwo's voice landed inside Suicune's mind and Ash's group's at the same time. A barrier slid up around Pikachu and Suicune, walling off the cleared center of the forest, exactly the size of the open ground the fog had pulled back from.
The top was left open. Some techniques drew power from the sky and the earth. Roof one of them off, and half the moveset stopped functioning.
A God Level Mewtwo could comfortably contain a battle between two Champion Level Pokémon. The barrier was, if anything, overkill.
Even shockwaves from a God Level clash were nothing this barrier couldn't hold. Psychic-types were the most well-rounded type in existence at any tier, and Mewtwo wasn't just any Psychic-type. Mewtwo was a Psychic Legendary at God Level Intermediate. Containment of a Champion battle was the easiest possible job.
Suicune glanced at the barrier and understood, in that moment, why Ash had let Mewtwo out.
Ho-Oh's chosen apparently traveled with his own portable arena on tap.
That was actually a relief. It meant both of them could go all out without holding back. A Champion-level clash without a barrier, if it ran long enough, would level this entire stretch of forest. Even somewhere as far as New Bark Town could end up catching the spillover.
"Woo-ah!!" Suicune opened the exchange first. Its jaws parted and a thick, spiraling pillar of blue water exploded out of its mouth, screaming toward Pikachu. The surrounding humidity in the air spiked the instant the column formed.
Hydro Cannon.
Hydro Cannon. A 150-power Water-type finisher, and at the kind of output only a Legendary could push out.
"Pikachu, dodge it!" Tanking a move like that head-on was something only an idiot would try. Ash made the call instantly.
Pikachu's small yellow body blurred into an afterimage, sparks bursting under his feet as he flashed several meters sideways. The instant he cleared the spot he'd been standing on, the Hydro Cannon hit.
A massive crash shook the ground. The flat forest floor caved in around a crater several meters wide. Mud churned out of the bottom, bushes and saplings on the perimeter were sheared off mid-trunk by the water pressure, and spray rained down across the clearing like a sudden downpour.
Pikachu's reaction time had been enough to dodge cleanly, but the spray still caught him.
"Now! Pikachu, full power Thunderbolt!" Ash caught Suicune mid-recovery from the recoil of its own attack and snapped the order out.
Pikachu had barely landed. The lightning in his eyes surged. The pouches in his cheeks crackled wildly, electricity coiling around his body in thick, braided cables of current. He went from yellow mouse to something that looked cast in solid gold, fur standing on end in jagged spikes, the air around him warping faintly from the heat of the discharge.
"Pika pika piiika!!"
The roar broke at the same time the attack did. A pillar of yellow thunder ripped across the clearing toward Suicune.
The current ate the ground as it passed. Standing puddles flash-evaporated into white steam. The wet mud cracked open from the heat. Spiderweb scorch marks fanned out across the dirt. For a heartbeat, the entire arena looked like a lightning forge.
Suicune's pupils contracted. The energy stored inside that Thunderbolt registered as a real threat. Its expression tightened, and a low cry rolled out of its throat.
"Woo-ah!"
Water vapor in the air around Suicune dragged inward like iron filings to a magnet. The standing water at its feet began spinning, faster, faster, until a deep blue whirlpool several meters across had walled itself up around the Legendary Beast, the current shrieking as it spun.
Whirlpool.
The Water-type counterpart to Fire Spin. The damage on the move itself was nothing remarkable, but the trapping effect made it lethal in extended fights. And used defensively, the spinning water made a wall as solid as armor.
"BOOM!!"
The yellow Thunderbolt slammed into the indigo Whirlpool. The screech of conducted electricity meeting the howl of moving water shook the entire barrier overhead.
For a few seconds, the Whirlpool held. The colliding edge of the two attacks erupted in white steam, the inner wall of the vortex flickering with tiny secondary lightning bolts as the current bled through.
Then Pikachu and Ash leaned in harder. The yellow lightning began eating the vortex. The current wrapped around the Whirlpool's outer wall like a coiled python and started squeezing inward, Pikachu's full output hammering through the center.
A sharp tearing sound. The first crack opened on the vortex wall. The water's spin began to slow. The deep blue color clouded over.
A second later, with a sky-splitting crack of thunder, the Thunderbolt punched clean through.
The yellow current rushed in like floodwater through a broken levee, slammed straight into Suicune's body, and detonated outward across the entire arena.
Suicune cried out and was flung backward several meters, crashing onto its side. Fur smoked faintly along its flanks. Scorch marks darkened patches of its hide where the current had grounded out.
In terms of pure offensive output, Pikachu was the spike of the team. And Thunderbolt was the apex Electric-type move. Even a Legendary Beast like Suicune couldn't stop that move dead with a single Whirlpool.
The arena was wrecked. Standing puddles were boiling. The ground was pocked with charred craters of varying depth. The trunks of the trees around the clearing were blackened. The air was thick with steam and the acrid smell of burnt wood and ozone.
The aftershocks didn't touch Misty or the others.
You can always trust Mewtwo.
"Pikachu's gotten ridiculous." Brock shook his head with a kind of wondering exhale. "Punching through that Whirlpool head-on? Forget about it. A month ago, even with Ash's power layered in and Partner Form active, he wouldn't have cracked that defense."
A month. That was the gap, Brock and Ash had been apart for exactly one month. And in that month, Pikachu had pulled this much further forward. It wasn't a simple promotion from High Level to Elite Four either. Pikachu had landed at Elite Four Beginner and immediately distinguished himself as one of the strongest entities sitting at that tier.
Otherwise, even with all those external boosters stacking him up to Champion, there was no way he'd be punching through a Champion level Suicune's defense. Type matchup or no type matchup, the gap should have been too wide.
"What's Partner Form?" Serena asked, eyes still on the battlefield. "Is it because of Ash's cap?"
This wasn't actually the first time Ash had used Partner Form in front of her, but it was the first time she'd heard the name. The previous occasion had been during a battle with someone called Drake. Her full attention had been on the fight, and she'd missed Pikachu's transformation entirely.
Misty took the explanation. Partner Form was a state unique to Ash's Pikachu. Put the cap on, sync up mind to mind, and Pikachu got both a power boost and access to exclusive moves. In short, hitting the cheat button.
"A hat does all of that?! Is it Ash's hat that's magic, or his Pikachu that's special?"
Misty shook her head with a small grin.
"Neither. The special one is Ash."