Thunder met water. Golden lightning and deep blue streaks scattered across the field in every direction.
"Thunder Punch too?" Lorelei's surprise was genuine. Charizard hadn't used that move in any of its previous battles, yet watching it now, the precision and speed made it clear this wasn't something recently picked up.
It had been trained, refined, and polished over time. She couldn't help but wonder how Ash had managed it. Level, stats, and a full move set, all developed in parallel, all in under a year.
The exchange ended in a near draw, though if anything, Charizard had come off slightly worse. Fine cuts lined its fists where the water edge of Razor Shell had slipped through.
Thunder Punch had countered it, but not cleanly. Cloyster had the level advantage, and Razor Shell was a STAB move. Even with the type resistance, it carried enough force to leave its mark.
Without fire, Charizard couldn't match Cloyster head to head. That was the honest truth. The Champion-level power it was currently running on wasn't truly its own. Ash's Aura had elevated it, but forcibly gained power and earned power weren't the same thing.
Charizard's four combat stats were all solid S-rank, but channeling Champion-level energy was still a struggle. Holding it together at early Champion-level right now was already pushing its limits.
Stack Sacred Fire on top of that and its output surpassed that threshold. Any other move, and it was working against the ceiling.
To make things worse, Cloyster's defense was notorious even on a good day, and Lorelei had already used Withdraw once. A fire-type guerrilla approach would have been the smart play.
Cloyster wasn't weak to fire, but it wasn't resistant either, and Charizard could keep its distance and whittle it down without getting cracked open in the process.
But that wasn't who Ash and Charizard were. Fighting from a distance, chipping away with safe ranged attacks, winning on caution rather than force. Even if it worked, it wouldn't feel like anything worth remembering.
"You still good, Charizard?"
"ROAR!"
"Then let's show her everything!" Ash crossed his arms, and the Keystone on his wrist began to pulse with brilliant light.
"Charizard, Mega Evolve!"
Lorelei froze.
A Mega Stone for Charizard. She hadn't known one existed. Nobody had. Since Mega Evolution had entered the public consciousness, trainers and researchers worldwide had thrown enormous effort into locating every Mega Stone they could find.
Stones for the Hoenn starters, the Kalos starters, Hawlucha, Metagross, dozens more had surfaced. Charizard, despite being one of the most studied and beloved Pokémon in the world, despite research confirming it carried latent Mega Evolution genes, had yielded nothing. Not a single stone, not even a trace.
There were even theories that Charizard's evolutionary path might branch in more than one direction, that it could have multiple Mega forms unlike anything seen before. If that were true, the stone would be worth a fortune. Worth several fortunes.
And yet no one had found it.
Until now, apparently.
Light swallowed Charizard whole. Its silhouette shifted within the glow, proportions changing, edges sharpening. Then the light broke apart.
What stood on the field was something no one in that audience had ever seen.
The Pitch-Black Dragon. Charizard X.
Its orange body had turned a deep, solid black. The cream of its belly had shifted to a cold, steely blue. Its wings had taken on a jagged, irregular shape, and four blade-like protrusions jutted from its forearms like natural armor.
Most striking of all were the flames now burning from its jaws, blue and fierce, shaped almost like fangs, giving the whole form a presence that was rawer and more dangerous than any Charizard that had come before it.
Even the flames on its tail had turned blue. Higher temperature meant a shift in color, the same principle behind Infernape's blue Flare Blitz. But this wasn't a move. This was Charizard X's resting state. Its normal flames burned at that temperature now.
"So this is what Charizard's Mega Evolution looks like." Lorelei studied the transformed Pokémon with open appreciation. "The change is dramatic. When did you find the stone?"
"On one of the uninhabited islands in the Orange Islands," Ash said with a grin. "Just got lucky."
It wasn't a lie, strictly speaking. He had simply left out the part where he routinely swept every uninhabited island he landed on with Aura Power, scanning the terrain for hidden energy signatures.
The range wasn't wide enough to cover an entire island from one spot, but walking the perimeter did the job. That method had turned up all manner of rare natural ores and medicinal herbs over time, the kind of finds that benefited his Pokémon enormously. The Charizardite X had been one of those finds.
As for what Charizard X actually was, the world at large was still in the dark. Researchers knew Charizard's genetic chain pointed in two possible directions, but no one had mapped out what those two paths actually produced.
Charizard X pushed both Attack and Special Attack upward, and paired with the Tough Claws ability, physical moves hit harder than anything else in its kit. Charizard Y went the opposite direction, pouring everything into Special Attack and feeding off Drought to push Fire-type moves to their absolute ceiling.
Neither form was strictly better. It came down to how the individual Charizard had been raised, and which path matched its strengths.
For Ash's Charizard, which had been built around physical combat from the beginning, Charizard X was a perfect fit. It added the Dragon type to a Pokémon that already lived on Dragon-type moves, brought Tough Claws into a close-quarters style, and filled in the one gap that had always held Ash's Charizard back. Its overall combat power had at minimum doubled.
The crowd came apart.
Voices overlapped from every direction, people grabbing each other's arms, pointing at the field. Some declared on the spot that they were going to find a Charmander and raise it themselves.
Others immediately shot those plans down, pointing out that there was exactly one Charizardite X in the known world and it was currently on Ash's wrist. Mega Stones weren't cheap under any circumstances. For something this rare, the price would be beyond imagining.
The idea was easy. The reality was something else.
Lorelei let the noise wash past her. Her attention stayed on the field, on the Pokémon standing across from her Cloyster. Even to her practiced eye, what Charizard X was putting out felt different from the Charizard that had been fighting minutes ago.
The Aura had changed. The bearing had changed. Whatever balance had existed in this battle before, she wasn't certain it still held.
"So this is what you were saving," she said. "Your real trump card."
"Ours," Ash corrected. "Charizard, Dragon Claw!"
Charizard spread its arms wide, roared once to the sky, and a pair of sharp emerald claws materialized across its hands. Tighter than before, more defined, heavier with intent. Then it launched off the ground and crossed the distance to Cloyster in an instant.
The speed alone made Lorelei react on reflex. "Protect!"
The pale barrier snapped up just in time. Dragon Claw crashed into it and ripples spread outward across its surface. Charizard was stopped cold, but it didn't step back. It leaned in, pressing its claw against the barrier, grinding forward with a sound like bending steel.
The barrier held. The claw was pushed back.
But Lorelei didn't feel relieved, because she had noticed from the first strike that Charizard had only used one arm.
The second claw came down on the already-dimmed barrier without a moment's pause.
Protect shattered.
Cloyster took the full hit. Three deep gashes opened across its body, and the sound it made was sharp enough to set teeth on edge across the entire arena.