In the instant Nidoking's Poison Jab was about to connect, the golden figure on the battlefield moved.
Whoooosh—
A vast swarm of afterimages erupted around Ho-Oh, each one refracting the sunlight into a cascade of dazzling brilliance.
No matter how Nidoking lunged and struck, it couldn't land a single hit on Ho-Oh's true body. Every blow connected with nothing but a fading afterimage left behind by Double Team.
Ho-Oh could, of course, be suppressed in terms of raw speed by Giovanni's Beedrill. But that was Giovanni's Beedrill — arguably the single strongest Beedrill that had ever existed in recorded history. Ho-Oh had lived for an unknowable number of years, and it had encountered precisely one Pokémon like that.
But this Nidoking standing before it right now? It needed a few more years of training before it even qualified for this conversation.
—Squawk!
This gaudy gold is so... shiny!
Double Team!
Gary's eyes refocused the moment the afterimages registered in his mind. He'd been momentarily dazzled — he caught on almost immediately.
But then there was no "almost immediately."
The golden shadow materialized beside Nidoking in an instant.
BANG!!
A deep, resonant impact rang out.
Nidoking's enormous, charging body struck something — an invisible wall of finality — and every ounce of its momentum was annihilated on the spot. Its powerful frame, which had been barreling forward with tremendous force, was struck like a high-speed train hitting something from the front. It was sent flying backwards at a speed far greater than it had charged forward.
Nidoking traced a wide arc through the air, smashing through several small trees one after another, before its eyes rolled back in its head and it collapsed to the ground, completely incapacitated.
...Even if Ho-Oh's designated role was "Support."
...With a level gap of several dozen — perhaps over a hundred — tiers between them, the sheer difference in base stats alone was enough to one-shot everything in sight.
...A Level 1 three-body-problem hero with no items cannot possibly trade blows with a Level 15 Support who's been fully itemized. Not even with basic attacks.
...And Ho-Oh had a full kit of skills on top of that.
...It simply hadn't used them in the fights so far.
...During the entire battle with Giovanni's Beedrill, Ho-Oh had exclusively used Sacred Fire — the one technique it could calibrate between inflicting damage and bestowing blessings. Defense moves were irrelevant when you couldn't die. Offensive moves were irrelevant when the opponent moved too fast to hit. That fight only looked bad because the matchup was terrible. It was never a reflection of Ho-Oh's actual ceiling.
...Some champions can walk Garen like a dog. Others just have to accept that it isn't their matchup.
The entire battlefield fell into a dead silence.
Even the wind seemed to stop blowing.
The smile on Gary's face had frozen completely. His pupils had expanded to their absolute maximum. His mouth hung open, slack and unconscious — easily wide enough to fit an egg.
The fangirl squad behind him had collectively lost their voices, like ducks with their throats squeezed shut.
Misty had clamped both hands over her mouth in shock, eyes blown wide as saucers.
Brock, who had seen this coming, still couldn't prevent the violent twitch that ran through the corner of his mouth at the sight of Ho-Oh — still in its "Fearow" disguise — casually dismantling Nidoking with a power that bore absolutely no resemblance to anything a Fearow should be capable of.
Ho-Oh, Your Excellency, Brock thought privately, if you're going to maintain a disguise, could you at least try to make it convincing?
Am I supposed to keep playing blind here? Still blind? Still blind?
Ash's Pokémon, one by one, lowered their heads — some behind their claws, some behind their wings, and some who simply turned their backs entirely — shoulders trembling with the effort of suppressing their laughter.
On the battlefield, the golden "Fearow" elegantly folded its wings back into place and resumed, entirely without shame, the business of preening its own brilliant feathers. As though what had just occurred was a matter of no particular consequence.
Ho-Oh did, however, glance at Gary with something resembling genuine interest.
A curious little brat, it thought.
Ash's voice was full of the most sincere concern — the kind that arrives on the heels of a very successful prank:
"I did tell you. I wished you the best of luck."
Right.
Ash heroically suppressed the urge to add: This was a thoroughly enjoyable duel.
But unlike Ash's quiet amusement, Gary's reaction was something else entirely.
Gary slowly turned his head.
He looked at Ash.
Then he looked at the golden "Fearow."
His entire worldview seemed to shatter and reassemble itself in the span of a single heartbeat.
His mouth opened. When words finally came, they weren't words at all — just a string of half-formed, meaningless syllables:
"That's... that's impossible. What... what the heck even... is...?"
His beloved, carefully-raised Nidoking hadn't even managed to mount a single effective attack against that golden Fearow.
"This is impossible!" Gary's voice carried an almost imperceptible tremor. "My Nidoking can't have — this absolutely cannot be happening!"
He couldn't accept it.
Especially the part where he'd lost to Ash — someone he'd never taken particularly seriously.
And how could a Fearow that was, by all appearances, nothing more than an unusually colored bird possibly possess such terrifying power?
A crushing wave of frustration and defiant refusal to concede surged up inside him. Gary threw his head back, eyes hardening once more — though something fragile flickered in their depths, a hairline crack running through the bedrock of his confidence.
"That round doesn't count!" he declared, volume rising, using sheer force of presence to paper over the cracks within. "A 1-on-1 is too limited — it doesn't reflect true strength!"
He recalled Nidoking in a flash of red light, then raised his voice, pushing past the tremor with bravado.
"Ash! Are you up for a proper 3-on-3? Show me everything you've got!"
The fangirl squad behind him dutifully raised their voices again on cue — though this round's cheer had significantly less conviction and considerably more bewilderment than the ones that came before.
...To be frank, those girls were hired performers.
...Strictly speaking, they were not Gary's girlfriends.
Ash watched Gary's show of bravado with quiet resignation — and a small, private shake of his head.
This is what friends do to each other, I suppose.
But that was only part of the truth. At his core, Ash genuinely wanted Gary to grow.
Ash knew Gary's talent and potential were beyond question. But this excessive outward arrogance, this urgent, anxious need to constantly prove himself — it was precisely these things that were holding Gary back from becoming what he could be.
Maybe this unexpected battle today could serve as the right kind of medicine.
"Sure," Ash said, with an equanimity that was almost insulting. He didn't even bother recalling the "Fearow" still calmly grooming itself in the middle of the field. "Three-on-three. Your call."
Gary's sense of dread deepened considerably at how easily Ash agreed. But he shoved the feeling down by force, drew a long breath, and made himself stay calm.
Rage and impulse solved nothing. He needed to think. He needed to analyze.
Whatever else might be said about him, Gary Oak was still Professor Oak's grandson. He wasn't some ordinary spoiled kid who'd coasted on his name.
At his core, Gary was genuinely a good person — just young, with a temperament that still needed some work.
"First... I need to probe the limits of that golden Fearow..."
Gary's mind was already running at full speed.
"Its speed and reaction time are way beyond normal. Physical attacks are basically impossible to land."
"Then I'll use Special Attacks and crowd-control moves to pin it down!"
A red flash of light, and Gary sent out his second Pokémon — Exeggutor!
The tall, swaying triple-headed Exeggutor radiated powerful Psychic-type energy as it took the field. This was Gary's calculated answer: Psychic-type superiority for field control and long-range offense.
...When in doubt about how to approach an opponent, Psychic-types are often an excellent default.
...Because Psychic-types are genuinely the most universally applicable option in the game.
Exeggutor — don't give it room to dodge! Use Confusion to manipulate the air currents and disrupt its flight trajectory!
Gary directed coolly in his mind while issuing the follow-up instruction.
Then use Psychic to levitate the gravel on the ground and hit it with an indiscriminate saturation attack!
Another advantage of the Psychic-type: you could skip verbal commands entirely. Gary planned to use wide-area disruption and bombardment to compress the Fearow's available space, forcing it to take hits rather than dodge around everything.
Exeggutor's three pairs of eyes lit up simultaneously with a vivid cerulean glow. A tremendous Psychic force surged outward like an invisible tide. In an instant, the airflow above the battlefield became chaotic and violent, forming layer upon invisible layer of binding force — reaching, grasping, trying to entangle and slow that golden figure.
At the same time, the countless pebbles and clumps of earth on the ground seemed to lose all connection with gravity. They rose in a swarm, launching from every direction toward the "Fearow" like a relentless shotgun blast.
It was a genuinely elegant combination tactic. Gary's fundamentals and in-battle adaptability were not to be underestimated.
Against an ordinary Flying-type Pokémon, this approach would likely have created an absolutely inescapable quagmire of a situation.
However. He was facing Ho-Oh.
Which was where things got a bit awkward.
Faced with this seemingly airtight net of an assault, the Ho-Oh disguised as a Fearow didn't so much as blink.
The violent, surging winds that Gary and Exeggutor had whipped into existence — the moment they entered a certain radius around Ho-Oh's body, they simply calmed. Like obedient lambs, they smoothed themselves out and flowed harmlessly around it instead.
I am the God of Atmospheric Currents, Ho-Oh noted inwardly, with infinite patience.
And the psychically-charged gravel, hurtling inward from all sides — upon entering a certain invisible domain, each piece was gently redirected. Subtly. Precisely.
Right.
Ho-Oh did still remember it was supposed to be pretending to be a Fearow. It wasn't about to do anything so blatant as invoke the full breadth of its divine power.
But under the phoenix's exquisite, understated control, every attack that Gary and Exeggutor had invested their greatest hopes in simply... dissolved. Like snow catching sunlight. Melting into nothing before it could ever arrive.
Every effort, every tactic — reduced to a rather boring joke.
This is what it looks like when a god shows up to a pond-fishing tournament. The gap isn't even measurable.
"This... how is this possible?!" Gary's pupils contracted sharply as cold sweat ran down the side of his face.
His entire tactical approach had been dismantled so casually that the opponent hadn't even bothered to get serious.
Before Gary could issue a single follow-up command, the "Fearow" in the center of the field seemed to decide that this particular experiment had run long enough.
Its golden beak parted ever so slightly. A razor-thin blade of compressed air — almost invisible — slid out without a sound.
The Air Cutter was not especially fast. Its trajectory was perfectly legible. But Exeggutor, after the exhausting torrent of Psychic attacks it had just unleashed, was in the middle of catching its breath.
Ho-Oh had read the timing perfectly.
And the level of force it chose to apply was calibrated with equal precision: just barely enough to clear Exeggutor's maximum reaction window.
Exeggutor's three heads simultaneously registered alarm, a frantic, scrambling urgency — but it was too late. It was genuinely, truly too late.
So close!
Just that little bit!
Exeggutor tried to evade. It wasn't enough.
Sst—
A clean, light sound. The Air Cutter found its mark with perfect accuracy, striking Exeggutor squarely through its central trunk.
Exeggutor was sent flying, crashing to the ground, all battle capability gone.
Ho-Oh had maintained strict control over the force applied throughout. Neither Nidoking nor Exeggutor had sustained any real injury — they were simply knocked out. Nothing more.
Another one-hit finish.
Once again, utterly effortless.
Gary stared blankly at the collapsed Exeggutor, and he could feel his entire conceptual framework for how the world worked being dragged across the pavement at speed.
A deep, suffocating helplessness settled over him.
He knew he was going to lose. He knew it was going to be ugly.
But the pride baked into the marrow of his bones would not permit him to surrender like this.
If I'm going down, I'm going down on my feet.
Gary silently recalled Exeggutor, his grip tightening around his last remaining Poké Ball.
This was his first partner. His current strongest ace.
"Go! Blastoise!"
Gary's voice came out slightly hoarse. But it was unwavering.
The massive Blastoise appeared on the field, the twin cannon barrels on its back radiating a heavy, oppressive weight. It sensed the tangled complexity in its Trainer's heart and answered with a low, deep growl — steeling itself, ready.
Gary lifted his chin, meeting Ash's eyes across the field — Ash, who had remained entirely composed throughout — and the golden "Fearow," which he had come to regard as bottomlessly, unfathomably deep.
He took a long breath, and when he spoke, his tone had lost all its earlier lightness:
"Ash. I'll admit it — I misjudged this Pokémon of yours. And I misjudged your strength before today."
"For that, I apologize. It was a failure of my own perception."
The flippancy was entirely gone. There was a rare, genuine seriousness in its place.
"But—!"
His eyes reignited.
"I will not surrender here!"
"Even knowing I'll lose, I'm going to fight to the very last moment alongside my partner!"
"Blastoise, everything we have!"
"Hydro Cannon!"
Gary was completely clear-headed about this: opening with the biggest move you had, going for broke from the start, was objectively not rational play. But given the sheer scale of the power gap he was facing, if he didn't lead with his maximum, he wouldn't get a second opportunity to use it anyway.
It was a foolish choice. It was also the only choice.
He had to gamble on it.
Blastoise roared.
The twin cannon barrels on its back gathered a surging, immense concentration of Water-type energy. Two colossal jets of water — thick as tree trunks, carrying shocking destructive force — erupted like twin dragons leaping from the sea and thundered upward toward the golden figure in the sky.
This was Gary and Blastoise pouring every ounce of faith and power they had left into one final strike.
Facing this all-or-nothing attack, the "Fearow" that was Ho-Oh in disguise let something flicker in its eyes for the first time — genuine appreciation.
Ho-Oh loved seeing this. The brilliance of a true bond.
The real, irreplaceable connection between a human and their Pokémon.
Ho-Oh liked this very much.
This time, it didn't dismiss the attack the way it had dismissed everything else.
With a single powerful beat of its wings, a soft layer of golden radiance began to flow around its body.
Facing the surging torrents of high-pressure water head-on, Ho-Oh neither dodged nor retreated. Like a blade cutting straight through them, it flew directly into the assault.
Brave Bird.
Given who was actually executing it, this was not merely a move name. It was Brave Bird in the most literal sense of the words — a divine bird, soaring fearless.
Before everyone's eyes, the two jets of water — powerful enough to pierce rock and steel — dissolved the instant they made contact with the golden radiance, as though they had found their natural nemesis. They scattered upward, dissolving into a vast, gentle mist that drifted softly down.
And through that mist, unbroken, the golden figure came — its speed undiminished, appearing before Blastoise like a teleport.
A wing coated in soft golden light struck Blastoise across its heavy shell — and in the same moment, a small thread of Sacred Fire was woven into the impact.
Play was play, a game was a game.
Ho-Oh had absolutely no intention of actually hurting this turtle.
Because if it went full force, Blastoise would simply cease to exist. The wing would be the end of it.
"Thud."
A single muffled impact.
Blastoise's enormous body was caught by what felt like an irresistible force — sent skidding backward, carving twin grooves into the earth for more than ten meters before it finally ground to a halt.
No serious injury had been done. But the energy within its body had been thrown into brief chaos, and it had lost all ability to continue the battle.
Just...
Blastoise: Huh?
Blastoise had noticed something strange. It felt... off. But not painful. Not at all.
That shouldn't be right, should it?
An attack that strong, hitting me that hard — why doesn't it hurt?
Blastoise stared down at the two long gouges its feet had carved into the ground, genuinely unable to make sense of it.
The battle was over.
3-0. A complete, total, crushing sweep.
Gary stared blankly at his Blastoise — still standing, but with all the fight gone out of it. Then he looked at the golden "Fearow," which had drifted back down to earth and resumed its insufferably composed demeanor. Then, finally, his gaze traveled across to Ash, who stood there in complete, unreadable silence.
The pride, the confidence, even the forced steadiness Gary had been clinging to — all of it crumbled away at once, leaving behind only a heavy, aching blankness.
He'd braced himself to lose. Knowing it was coming didn't make it hurt any less when it actually arrived.
At the side of the field, Gary's fangirl squad had gone completely quiet — exchanging uncertain glances, at a loss for what to do.
Ash let out a quiet sigh. He walked forward.
There was no trace of a victor's smugness on his face now. His eyes held something more like a rueful kind of care — the concern of someone who was, at the end of the day, a friend.
He stopped in front of the hollowed-out Gary and gave him a pat on the shoulder.
"Gary..."
Ash's voice was quiet. But it carried.
The whole mess in Gringey City had left him in no mood for heart-to-heart conversations for a good while. Now, though.
Now he could finally talk.
Now's the time for words.
"Do you remember?"
"When we were kids, playing together on the hills behind Pallet Town — there was an injured Pidgey you spotted, and you spent an entire afternoon lying flat in the mud chasing it. You were covered head to toe in dirt and you didn't care at all."
"That night, you stayed up holding it, too excited to sleep. You said you were going to become the Trainer in the whole world who understood it best, and loved it most..."
Ash's gaze drifted, traveling through time back to that simpler era.
...Although that particular Pidgey had eventually ended up belonging to Gary's older sister.
...Gary had simply been too young at the time.
"Back then, your love for Pokémon was so pure. There was nothing mixed into it — no ambition, no showing off. Just that love."
The words were a key turning in a lock, and Gary's memories came flooding through the door — images that had been buried behind applause and trophies and cheer squads surfacing, one after another, unbidden.
Ash's gaze traveled to the sleek sports car parked behind Gary, and to the crowd of impeccably dressed girls assembled around it. His voice carried something quiet and hard to name:
"Look at yourself now. You need a sports car to get anywhere. You're always surrounded by people cheering you on."
"That's a spectacular way to live. There's no denying it."
"But it also means you can only travel on wide, smooth, paved roads."
"You've missed the rare Pokémon hiding in the forests along the roadside."
"You've missed the breathtaking sunrises you can only see from the top of a mountain you had to climb yourself."
"You've missed the joy of stumbling across a wild Pokémon by a stream without any warning."
"You've missed the kind of growth that only comes from putting one foot in front of the other and grinding through the hard parts on your own."
Ash paused, and looked Gary directly in the eyes.
"Is the feeling you have for your Pokémon still what it was when we were kids? That purity? That genuine love?"
"Or have winning, and applause, and other people's admiration quietly become more important somewhere along the way?"
Ash found himself genuinely thinking — life really was a strange thing.
Gary traveling everywhere by sports car... does that mean his path through life has, so far, been all wide, easy roads?
Gary really does seem like he's never been properly knocked down by anything.
And while failure is a terrible thing, it's genuinely hard to grow without ever experiencing it.
Though, for what it was worth...
Ash had always felt that "failure is the mother of success" was motivational-poster poison, because it worked on the logic of exhaustive elimination — rule out every wrong answer and you'll eventually find the right one. But... did anyone ever truly have enough time and energy to eliminate every possible wrong answer?
Gary stood there, listening in a daze.
Every word hit him like a hammer.
His mouth opened to argue back. He found there was nothing inside him that had any force left.
He turned over his journey in his memory. And he had to admit it — most of it had been spent chasing faster results, flashier victories, louder applause.
The quiet time. The hours spent alone with his Pokémon, just... existing alongside them, feeling both of them grow. There had been less and less of that.
That wasn't what the younger version of him would have done.
It wasn't what the younger version of him would even have wanted to do.
Gary thought of Nidoking, and Exeggutor, and Blastoise — the way they looked at him. There was dependence there. There was trust. But something was missing — something that had once been there without question, a closeness with no walls between them at all.
A hot, deep flush of shame rose through him, tangled up with the uncomfortable beginnings of real reflection.
For a long moment, Gary said nothing.
Then he turned his head slightly away, and made a small, stiff sound — a quiet, habitual "hmph" — his last line of defense.
"Like it's any of your business," he muttered, voice low, reverting to the only posture he knew. "You talk like you've got it all figured out... I don't need a lecture from you."
That was what he said.
But his eyes were no longer lost. They were full — complicated, churning, but no longer empty.
This was also the reason Professor Oak had never rushed to lecture Gary directly.
Young people need room to play, room to stumble, room to be young. Professor Oak had always believed that. You only get one childhood. The blossoms of youth are brief; life is long but not forever. A child should throw themselves entirely into being a child.
You cannot sacrifice childhood for the sake of the future.
Is a future without a childhood even really a future?
Is a tower with no foundation anything more than a castle in the sky?
Of course, this all rested on the premise that Gary wasn't about to cause any catastrophic trouble, and that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with his character. Which, at bottom, there wasn't.
Gary, at his core, was a good kid. Just young, and with a temperament that still had growing to do. If he truly started going off the rails, it would be better to intervene early. But he wasn't there yet.
Gary silently recalled his Blastoise, fingers resting gently on the surface of the Poké Ball — as if making a promise, quietly, to himself and to his partner both.
He didn't look at Ash again. He didn't spare a glance for the fangirl squad behind him. He just lowered his head and began walking, slowly, in the direction of Fuchsia City.
That retreating figure had lost something of its old swagger. But it carried, in its place, a new kind of weight.
"..."
The fangirl squad fell silent for a moment, then, quietly, got back in the car and followed along after him.
They were hired performers, yes — but you couldn't exactly ditch the client just because he had a bad day. They wore the title of girlfriends; they couldn't actually throw a girlfriend's tantrum.
Ash watched Gary's back until it disappeared, and he knew — his words had landed.
He smiled a small, helpless smile. He genuinely didn't have the heart to roast Gary further for the whole sports-car-and-entourage setup. What was there to even say?
He did think, though — the era of sulky tsundere rivals is really on its way out.
But Ash believed it: Gary was clever enough that the moment he started thinking seriously, he'd find his way back to where he began.
"Alright, let's go," Ash said, turning around to face Misty, Brock, and the partners gathered around him.
At that moment, Ho-Oh sent a quiet pulse of thought directly into Ash's heart:
That child carries a remarkable power — one that helps Pokémon grow.
Hearing this, Ash blinked.
...A Breeder-type? Of all things.
This really was a world that threw everything together in one pot. Who knew what else was waiting around the next corner.
---
My childhood rival, my oldest friend —
From the very beginning, we were each other's greatest competition.
____
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