The special thing was Ash's hat? Of course not. The special thing was Ash.
If Pikachu had never met Ash, he'd probably have been just another Pikachu in the wild. Their meeting was the chemical reaction that pulled strength and potential out of him that other Pikachus simply didn't have.
The hat worked the same way. The reason this state was called partner form was that the power came from the bond between the two of them. The hat was just a medium. Everything miraculous happening on the field right now had to be traced back to Ash.
"That's right. If it weren't for Ash, none of these strange things would have happened. Ash is amazing." Serena said it with awe.
It wasn't really a question of how strong or formidable Ash was. The right word was simply miraculous. The deeper anyone got to know him, the more they realized how impossible the things he pulled off were. Anything a normal Trainer could do, Ash could do too. Things a normal Trainer couldn't do, Ash could do too.
The longer the journey went, the deeper Serena's admiration ran, and the deeper the adoration underneath it. At the same time, the further away from Ash she felt, because admiration that turns into a dream is also the longest distance between two people.
While Serena was lost in thought, Ash had already launched the next attack.
"Pikachu, Zippy Zap!"
At Ash's call, Pikachu, who had been slightly hunched from the recoil of his last high-voltage strike, straightened back up. A layer of lightning sheathed his body again.
Across from him, Suicune had hauled itself back to its feet. Setting aside the other regional Legendary Pokémon, the sheer endurance of the Legendary Beasts was unmatched anywhere in the world. Whatever the type, they shared one trait. Absurdly thick HP pools.
If that earlier Thunderbolt had landed on a normal High Level Water-type, it wouldn't have just disabled the opponent. It would have left serious injuries.
But here? Apart from a few surface burns and scorched fur, Suicune looked, at first glance, fine. With that kind of physical resilience, you could do whatever you wanted.
As gold lightning crackled across Pikachu's body, Suicune's expression sharpened. This move looked very similar to the one before, but the output was noticeably weaker. What to do? Block again with Whirlpool?
If Suicune had only been reading the surface power, Whirlpool would have blocked it easily. The earlier Thunderbolt had only been a hair stronger than the Whirlpool, and a move at this lower level shouldn't have been able to break through. But something about this strike didn't feel as simple as the surface read. In less than a tenth of a second, Suicune made the call. No defense.
Its body lit with a faint blue glow. An invisible force lashed out toward Pikachu.
Psychic.
A psychic ability. Once it landed on an opponent, it could pin them in place and then grind through the body with mental force, hitting mind and physical state at once. Psychic moves weren't part of a Water-type Legendary's native kit, but Suicune used them more often than its own native moves anyway.
Psychic-type techniques were too useful to ignore, especially for a Legendary at Suicune's tier. They were the closest thing a Pokémon had to a substitute for human ingenuity.
Putting them on display when it mattered was the point.
Suicune's plan was straightforward. Lock Pikachu in place with Psychic. Then pound him into the ground with Hydro Cannon. With that combination, a Pikachu, even this Pikachu, wouldn't get up.
The plan was beautiful. Reality was cruel.
Psychic reached Pikachu in under a second, and the invisible force passed clean through him. Suicune blinked, then realized in a heartbeat. Afterimage. The real Pikachu was already
"Pika pika!" A small, cheerful cry came from above, and the sound put Suicune's fur on end.
Pikachu dropped from above, riding the speed of Zippy Zap, and slammed the strike into the small of Suicune's back. Suicune's body arched downward on the impact. For a single moment it actually felt like its spine had cracked.
The raw output of the move wasn't huge. But it hit a weak point.
Every Pokémon, even the strongest, even gods, has weak points. Multiple ones, in fact. The higher the level, the fewer those weak points become. A god level Pokémon probably had only two or three left on its body, which made hitting one almost impossible by chance.
Once you did hit one, the damage of the move doubled, and every defense the target had stacked up went temporarily blank. Striking a weak point cleanly was a matter of pure luck, almost always.
There were also a handful of moves designed to seek a weak point and guide the attacker's strike into it. Even at Champion level, an unprotected vital was rare. Suicune absolutely had not expected the opponent's second attack to land on one of its.
In an instant, Suicune understood the trick of Pikachu's last move. Speed paired with an increased critical-hit rate. Without the speed boost, leaving behind an afterimage that real wouldn't have been possible. Without the boosted crit rate, landing a clean strike on one of its vital points wouldn't have been either.
The thought had barely finished when Suicune's body slammed straight into the ground. Under Pikachu's downward force, a crater opened up beneath it, several meters deep and dozens of meters across. The entire arena inside Mewtwo's barrier was now one enormous bowl. If not for the size of the barrier holding the blast in, the destructive radius would have been larger still.
This was the kind of impact a Champion-level Pokémon left on a battlefield. It was the reason the League always had a top-tier Aegislash on standby as a defensive measure whenever a Champion-level battle was in progress. With the League's current technology, no man-made shield could reliably contain a Champion-level exchange. Aegislash's shielding was the only thing that came close.
With that one strike, Pikachu had knocked Suicune flat. Using the recoil from the impact, he spun a full three rotations in mid-air before straightening out.
"Thunderbolt!"
Ash didn't waste the opening. Suicune was still reeling, and their window was short. They had to finish the job quickly.
Golden light tore across the sky. The arena flooded with brightness, and even Misty and the others had to squint. Thunderbolt poured down like a marching army of light and slammed into Suicune.
Suicune tried to push itself up and out of the way, but even a Legendary's thick frame couldn't shrug off two consecutive strikes back-to-back, one a high-output Electric move, the other a clean vital-point hit. The combined damage cut more than half of its remaining stamina, and it couldn't take a single step.
Thunderbolt detonated in a heavy boom, smoke billowing out across the arena until the field was impossible to see.
A second later, a column of water tore through the smoke and shot straight up at the Pikachu still hanging in the air.
"Floaty Fall!"
As the water column rose, Ash's call reached him, though Pikachu had already read Ash's thinking before the words landed. An invisible force lifted him out of his downward trajectory and held him in place. His limbs splayed out in mid-air, his entire body floating like a kite. The water column ripped past where he should have been and slammed into the barrier above, sending concentric ripples spreading across the inside surface.
The hydro blast couldn't dent the barrier, but it did clear the smoke. The fog filling the arena dissipated with the shock, and Suicune came back into view, standing motionless on the cracked ground.
"How? Thunderbolt didn't do anything?" Serena gasped.
Even if Suicune was a Legendary Pokémon, Pikachu's power was on the same line. The Thunderbolt was a counter-type move on top of it. How could it have done no damage at all? If Suicune really were that durable, Zippy Zap and the previous Thunderbolt wouldn't have hit it as hard as they did.
"It must have used Protect," Misty said. "Legendary Pokémon like Suicune know every standard defensive move you can think of, and basic ones like Protect are practically a given. In that situation, with no time to set up anything else, Protect would have been the only call."
"There's basically no other way to defend against a full-power Thunderbolt at this point," Brock added, stroking his chin. To take a clean hit from Pikachu's Thunderbolt and walk it off entirely was, frankly, impossible. So the only explanation was that Suicune had blocked the strike outright.
And given Suicune's current state, neutralizing the attack with an offensive move of its own wasn't realistic either. Which left only one answer. Suicune had used the absolute defense move, Protect.
"That makes sense. Protect can block Pikachu's attack and let it counter at the same time. Suicune has serious tactical sense in the middle of a fight," Misty agreed.
In that situation, even with a Trainer calling the shots, working out the right way to neutralize a full-power Thunderbolt in real time without long experience under your belt was rough. Suicune had read it correctly almost instantly. Its battle instincts weren't a step behind an experienced Trainer's.
"But Ash and Pikachu reacted fast too. The instant that water column came up through the smoke,"
"Coming through the fog, Ash called for Pikachu to dodge, but what is Pikachu doing? Is he flying?" Serena blinked up at the small yellow figure hovering in the sky.
Pikachu's posture really did look like flight. Limbs spread wide, body suspended in the air like a kite, no sign of falling. Could Pikachu even do this? He didn't have wings.
"Haha, that's Ash's Pikachu for you." Misty laughed. Ash's Pikachu had a whole catalog of strange capabilities. Flying, teleporting, surfing. Take your pick.
"Pika pika!" In mid-air, Pikachu suddenly tucked himself in tight, then dropped like a shooting star.
Suicune was still trying to wrap its head around the flight. Since when could a Pikachu fly? Before it could finish the thought, Pikachu was already coming down.
The descent slammed straight into Suicune's back. A terrifying crash echoed through the arena, a violent gust of wind flaring out from the impact point, kicking up debris meters into the air and shaking the rim of the crater loose. Suicune let out a long, mournful howl.
Flying-type damage didn't have much effect on Suicune in terms of type matchup, but the kinetic force of the chain of hits had genuinely worn it down. Even a Legendary's stamina ran out eventually.
Suicune felt the impact at its back and tried to summon up everything it had left for one last full-power counter. Then it realized, with a chill, that the strength wasn't there. Something inside it had recoiled, frightened, and refused to come back out.
Was this fear?
What move had a fear effect that actually landed?
"Now! Pikachu, 10,000,000 Volt Thunderbolt!"
Ash's voice cracked through the arena, a sharp glint in his eyes. He had precisely read the moment Suicune froze, and he called for the finishing blow without hesitation.
The final strike.
Pikachu used the recoil from the gentle bounce of his landing to spring lightly back upward, spun once in mid-air, and touched down with his feet planted firm. The instant they hit the ground, his back arched, golden lightning surging around him. High-voltage energy erupted off his body more violently than any previous attack had managed.
This was a gamble.
The tension on the field reached the outside of the barrier. Serena was holding her breath, afraid that even a single exhale might break Pikachu's focus.
Brock's brow furrowed as he watched. "Suicune's locked up by fear. If we can hit it before it shakes that off, Suicune's done."
"And on the flip side, if this attack doesn't put Suicune away, Pikachu's stamina is in real trouble," Misty added.
Pikachu's combat power wasn't far behind Suicune's, but Brock and Misty knew exactly what state Pikachu was actually in. The biggest problem was endurance. Pikachu might look untouched, but his stamina was running on fumes. If this 10,000,000 Volt Thunderbolt couldn't put Suicune down, the recoil from the strike alone would be enough to take Pikachu out.
So they needed to win