"Big Sis..."
Belle's voice, usually brimming with boundless, chaotic energy, was uncharacteristically small. She grasped the back of Blaire's leather jacket, her tiny knuckles turning white as she sat behind her on Charizard's back.
Blaire glanced over her shoulder. "What's wrong, kid? It's not like you to sound so worried."
Belle looked down, her lower lip trembling. The Pikachu in her hood, Sparkles, whined softly, rubbing its cheeks against her neck. "Belle is... she's just... Dad will be fine, right?"
Blaire's heart twisted. She looked up at the apocalyptic sky. Through the translucent black barrier, the heavens were constantly flashing with blinding, cataclysmic explosions. The shockwaves were so intense that faint tremors bled through the spatial lock, vibrating the very air around them.
It looked like the end of the world.
Blaire forced a confident, cocky grin onto her face.
"Hey, don't be like that," Blaire said, reaching back to ruffle Belle's fiery red hair. "He may act like a complete idiot most of the time, but he's very reliable when it matters the most. So stop worrying, Captain of the Belle Pirates."
Belle sniffled, puffing out her cheeks as she instinctively corrected her. "The Great Belle Pirates."
"Haha! That's more like it," Blaire laughed, turning her eyes back forward. "Now let's go and do what we can. Charizard, pick up the pace!"
Outwardly, Blaire acted like the cool, unbothered older sister. She needed to be strong for Belle. Belle was too young when Lisandra died to really understand what had happened. But Blaire remembered. She remembered her mother's warmth perfectly.
Beneath her punk exterior, Blaire's hands were shaking slightly on Charizard's reins. She couldn't go through the agonizing, soul-crushing pain of losing another parent.
'You better be okay... Dad!'
---
Back at Eric's side, Eric ground his teeth slightly in frustration.
"Zoroark, Night Slash! Haunter, keep moving!" Kai yelled, his voice strained.
The battlefield was a chaotic mess. A few dozen meters away, Sebastian and his Gallade were an absolute blur of motion, single-handedly holding the line against three of the woman invader's Advanced-level Pokémon. The sheer volume of attacks flying toward the butler was staggering, but Sebastian's flawless coordination kept the enemies at bay.
Because Sebastian was the primary threat, the woman invader had completely turned her back on Eric and Kai. She stood with her arms crossed, her dark eyes entirely focused on directing her main forces against the Nashville butler.
She had left her Mismagius to deal with the two 'children' autonomously.
And that Mismagius was completely overpowering them.
"Haunter, dodge it!" Eric commanded.
BOOM!
A hyper-condensed Mystical Fire obliterated the stone pillar Haunter had been using for cover. Haunter phased through the ground, emerging a few meters away, panting heavily. The dark, ten-meter artificial shadow spreading from him, the Shadow Domain, was noticeably flickering.
Eric felt frustrated.
Once again, his life was on the line. Once again, he was facing an opponent who far outclassed him. But what frustrated him the most was the sheer disrespect. The woman wasn't even commanding Mismagius. She considered them so beneath her notice that she trusted her Pokémon's raw instincts to kill them.
'Thirty seconds,' Eric calculated grimly. 'Haunter can't maintain the Shadow Domain for much longer.'
Without the domain's mobility, Mismagius would slaughter them in seconds. They had managed to land a few super-effective hits, Zoroark's Dark-type attacks and Haunter's Ghost-type strikes, but it wasn't enough to put an Advanced-level Pokemon down.
"Kekeke..." Haunter laughed, though the sound was ragged.
He refused to give up. He remembered the feeling of absolute powerlessness against Druddigon in Lavender Woods. He remembered Eric spending a fortune on him, trusting him, bleeding for him.
They say that real combat, the kind where death breathes down your neck, is where true talent finally blooms.
Haunter's eyes glowed red with an intense, demonic light.
Eric felt the temperature in the domain suddenly drop. The ghost-type energy radiating from Haunter began to violently compress, condensing inward rather than leaking outward. The air around him distorted.
Eric's system flashed in the corner of his vision.
Energy Grade: Ghost type - Grade 4 (Peak) --- Quasi-Grade 5 (Breaking...)
He was pushing past his absolute limits.
Grade 5. For an intermediate-level Pokémon to even touch that boundary...it was unheard of. But fueled by sheer willpower, near-death pressure, and the impact of the red fragment on his body, Haunter was breaking his limits.
"Kai," Eric said, his voice dropping into a dead, hyper-focused calm. "It's fighting on instinct. It's following a predictable targeting pattern. When Zoroark engages, it always counters with a wide-area attack to guarantee a hit."
Kai, wiping a streak of soot from his cheek, caught Eric's gaze. He instantly understood the play.
"Zoroark," Kai commanded. "Maximum output. Draw its fire."
Zoroark howled, its body erupting in a violent surge of dark-type energy. It leaped straight into the air, completely abandoning all defense as it charged directly at Mismagius.
Mismagius giggled, its gems glowing with a blinding pink light. Just as Eric predicted, it didn't bother dodging. It charged a massive Dazzling Gleam, intending to swat the dark-type out of the sky with a super-effective fairy-type spread attack.
"Now!" Kai roared. "Night Daze!"
Zoroark didn't aim at Mismagius. It slammed the max-power Night Daze directly into the ground between them, creating a massive, blinding shockwave of dark energy and shattered earth that completely obscured Mismagius's vision.
The Dazzling Gleam fired blindly into the dust cloud.
"Haunter," Eric commanded, his voice sharp as a blade. "End it."
Haunter appeared directly behind Mismagius.
The density of the energy in his hands was terrifying. The Shadow Ball's color was so dark that it looked more black than purple, a hyper-condensed vortex of pitch-black void.
Mismagius spun around, its eyes widening in sudden, genuine panic. It tried to use Phantom Force to escape.
But it was too late.
Haunter slammed the pitch-black Shadow Ball directly into the center of Mismagius's back.
KABOOOOM!
The resulting explosion was unlike anything they had produced so far. A shockwave of pure, destructive ghost-type energy ripped through the garden, instantly incinerating the surrounding hedges and leaving a massive crater in the earth.
Mismagius was blasted out of the smoke like a cannonball, tumbling violently across the ruined turf before crashing at the very feet of its trainer.
The ghost-type groaned, its tattered cloak smoking heavily as it struggled to float back up, gravely injured.
The battlefield went utterly still.
Sebastian paused his assault. The two Advanced-level Pokémon facing him backed away, momentarily distracted by the explosion.
The woman slowly turned her head.
Her expression of cynical boredom was entirely gone, replaced by a look of cold, genuine surprise as she stared at her heavily wounded Mismagius, and then at the two boys standing in the clearing.
Eric stood with his hands in his pockets, Haunter hovering menacingly over his shoulder. Kai stood beside him, Zoroark panting but ready.
The woman's eyes narrowed into dangerous slits.
"Well," she whispered, her voice carrying a lethal, icy edge. "It seems I have severely underestimated the rats in the garden."
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