Scorching flames erupted across the field. A violent edge crept into Monferno's eyes as fire coiled around its body, building in intensity.
The Blaze ability was activating, and with it came the familiar war between power and control.
Monferno had triggered Blaze once before, and it had gone badly. Pure rage, no rationality, that only ended when its stamina burned out entirely. Since then, Ash had worked with it relentlessly. They'd mapped the thresholds.
Below fifty percent stamina, Monferno could trigger Blaze voluntarily. Below thirty percent, it activated on its own. The control rates were different for each.
At fifty percent, Ash could use Aura Fusion to anchor Monferno's consciousness and keep it rational through the power surge. The success rate was coin-flip. Half the time it worked. The other half, Monferno lost itself and thrashed until it collapsed from exhaustion.
At thirty percent, the success rate climbed above ninety. Something about being closer to the edge made the Blaze easier to ride rather than fight.
Once Monferno's overall level climbed one more tier, full control at both thresholds should be achievable.
It was a stopgap. Eventually Monferno would need to master this power without Ash's aura propping it up. But for the finals, having access to Blaze at all was better than nothing.
Because without it, Monferno had no business on this stage. Ash's aura enhancement alone wasn't enough to bridge the gap against the opponent. Blaze was the equaliser.
This wasn't practice. It was the Indigo Plateau Conference finals, against Paul. The trainer who'd thrown Monferno away.
Every instinct screamed that losing control here, in front of Paul, on this stage, would be humiliation worse than any defeat.
The fear was real. And it was the fear itself that made the Super Blaze harder to grip.
Then Ash's voice cut through.
The fear didn't vanish. But it stopped mattering. Monferno didn't need to prove anything to Paul. It needed to help Ash win. Everything else was secondary.
Monferno roared. The flames wrapped tighter, spiralling into a vortex that engulfed its entire body. The heat radiating off it was only a fraction below Magmortar's own Flare Blitz.
"Finally." Paul's expression didn't change. "This is the power you're banking on to fight above your tier. Show me how far it goes."
He'd expected this. Without this, Ash would never have put Monferno on the field. But Paul's assessment hadn't changed. This power gave Monferno a present. It didn't give it a future.
"Magmortar, Flamethrower."
Monferno's eyes were still flickering. Violence and clarity warred behind them, the Blaze not yet fully under control. And the attack was already coming.
Twin streams of fire screamed across the field from Magmortar's cannon-arms, converging on Monferno's position.
If those hit now, the stamina Monferno had preserved by triggering Blaze early would be wasted. The entire point of activating at fifty percent was to have more health to work with. Getting blasted immediately after would defeat the purpose.
The violence in Monferno's eyes vanished. A sharp, clear focus replaced it.
Detect.
Monferno's body shifted with impossible precision. It didn't dodge the Flamethrowers. It redirected them.
Palms open, feet pivoting, it guided the first stream past its left shoulder with a subtle push and angled the second past its right hip. The two jets of fire curved around Monferno's body like water around a stone, met behind it, and detonated against each other in a harmless burst of heat and light.
Taiji. Not a Pokémon move in the traditional sense. A martial arts principle Ash had adapted and taught to his team. Use the opponent's force against itself. When one attack comes, deflect. When two come, redirect them into each other.
Detect made it possible. Without its enhanced perception, Monferno couldn't have read the trajectories precisely enough to pull off the deflection. And without Taiji, Detect alone wouldn't have saved it. At this level gap, neither dodging nor blocking would work. Protect would have been shattered by the sheer power behind the Flamethrower. Pure evasion was too slow.
But reading the attacks and turning them against each other? That worked regardless of the power gap.
Paul recognised it. The same principle that Bellsprout had used in Ash's preliminary rounds. He'd dismissed it then as a gimmick. Seeing it on Monferno, against attacks of this calibre, forced a quiet reassessment.
"Magmortar, Flare Blitz." Paul pivoted without hesitation.
Magmortar was a special attacker by nature, but the reason Paul kept using Flare Blitz was to ensure a precise hit on Monferno, just like before.
Ranged fire attacks were useless. Flamethrower, Fire Blast, anything with a trajectory could be read and redirected by Monferno's Taiji technique. Paul had no intention of giving his opponent that opening.
Magmortar ignited. Crimson flames swallowed its massive frame whole, and it launched itself forward like a meteor bearing down on a pebble.
"Monferno, Flame Charge!"
The crowd flinched. Flame Charge was Flare Blitz's weaker cousin. Same concept, a fraction of the power, no recoil. The trade-off was a speed boost on contact. Useful in its own right, but sending it head-to-head against Flare Blitz looked suicidal.
The two fireballs hurtled toward each other. The size difference alone was laughable. Magmortar's blaze dwarfed Monferno's like a bonfire next to a candle.
They didn't collide. At the last possible instant, Monferno shifted its weight, tapped the ground, and slipped past Magmortar's charge by centimetres.
The Flame Charge coating its body shielded it from the ambient heat of Flare Blitz's aura, and it came through the pass unscathed.
Magmortar reacted fast. It detonated the Flare Blitz on the spot, the same trick as before, converting its charge into an omnidirectional explosion. At this range, no amount of footwork should have saved Monferno.
But the speed boost had already kicked in. And Monferno had concentrated every scrap of its Blaze-enhanced fire power behind its body like a thruster. The explosion didn't damage it. It propelled it, launching Monferno clear of the blast radius and across the field.
"Flamethrower, now!" Ash had been waiting for exactly this.
Monferno spun mid-flight, cheeks swelling, and unleashed a torrent of fire back at Magmortar. The temperature rivalled a Magmar's output.
The raw energy still fell short of Magmortar's tier, even with Blaze pushing it, but that didn't matter. Magmortar had just detonated its own Flare Blitz. No protective flames, no guard, completely exposed.
The Flamethrower hit clean. Magmortar absorbed the full blast without a shield to soften it.
Three birds with one stone. Dodge the Flare Blitz, gain a speed boost, punish the opening. Ash had never intended for Monferno to trade hits. The plan from the start was to fight with movement, using Blaze to amplify fire techniques while relying on speed and positioning to survive.
"Flamethrower." Paul's voice betrayed nothing. Magmortar turned slowly, shrugging off the hit it had just taken, and levelled both cannon-arms at Monferno. Twin barrels glowed orange.
"Flame Charge, close in!" Ash called.
"Scary Face."
Magmortar's features twisted into something grotesque. A wave of unnatural dread radiated from its expression, hitting Monferno like a wall. The charging monkey faltered mid-stride, legs locking, eyes widening.
Scary Face didn't just cut speed. The moment of eye contact caused an involuntary flinch, a split second of frozen terror.
A split second was all Magmortar needed. Both cannons fired.
Twin pillars of flame caught Monferno point-blank before it could recover. The fire swallowed it completely.
Ash's jaw tightened. Across the field, Paul's expression remained flat. The flames reflected off both their faces, one pained, the other indifferent.
The fire died down. Monferno stood in the scorched crater, blackened head to toe. Not a patch of unmarked fur remained. For a Fire-type to be damaged this badly by flame showed exactly how fierce Magmortar's output was.
It was still standing. Barely. Its arms hung limp. Its legs trembled with the effort of staying upright. Supporting its own weight was the absolute limit of what it had left.
"A valiant effort, but this appears to be the end of the road for Monferno!" The announcer's voice carried across the stadium, professional and certain. He'd called enough matches to know a finished Pokémon when he saw one. Stamina nearly gone, power two full tiers below the opponent. No combination of guts and talent could bridge that gap now.
Even for Ash. Even for the trainer synonymous with miracles.
"Finish it," Paul said quietly. Magmortar raised its cannons.
"Monferno." Ash's voice cut through the stadium. Not desperate. Not pleading. Burning with the same fire that had carried them this far. "Take those flames and make them yours. All of them. Every last ember!"
The words made no sense to the crowd. Make the flames his own? What did that even mean? Monferno was already at its limit. What power was left to claim?
Monferno raised its head.
Something had changed behind its eyes. The exhaustion was still there, the pain, the damage. But underneath all of it, a fire that had nothing to do with Blaze or ability activations.
Something that had been building since the day Paul had looked at it and decided it wasn't enough.
Sparks flickered across Monferno's body. Small at first, scattered and weak. Then brighter. Then fiercer. The sparks became tongues of flame, and the tongues became a roaring inferno that erupted outward from Monferno's core and flooded the entire arena with blinding crimson light.
Paul's eyes narrowed. 'More?'
The light swallowed everything. Spectators shielded their eyes. The announcer's microphone cut to static for a half-second. Even the Elite Four in the VIP section squinted against the glare.
When it faded, Monferno was gone.
In its place stood something taller, leaner, fiercer.
A crown of fire blazed from its skull. Its limbs were longer, its stance wider, its presence immeasurably heavier. The blackened, beaten body of a moment ago had been consumed and reforged.
Infernape.