Wave after wave churned up by the opposing Lapras crashed against the platform, battering Zorua with relentless force.
Had it not been for the small fox's natural quickness—paired with its ability to briefly lift itself using Confusion—it would have been swept into the water long ago. Even so, Zorua was fighting under crushing pressure. One misstep, one moment of lost footing, and the pool would swallow her whole.
David's brow was drawn tight as he watched, working through possibilities in his head.
The arena was the problem. Its layout was simply too restrictive. On open ground—or even if dry land made up half the space—Zorua would have run circles around that Lapras without breaking a sweat. But this battlefield was largely water, and water was Lapras's home. The restrictions were real, and they bit hard.
Still, David understood why the Alliance allowed arena designs like this. The whole point was to train Trainers for the unexpected. Official matches in indoor arenas were only a small piece of what a Trainer's life actually looked like.
Professional Trainers went into the wild. They explored ruins and secret realms. They faced Pokémon that didn't follow rules, didn't hold back, and certainly didn't care about ring boundaries. A Trainer who only knew how to fight on a standard flat court would be completely helpless the moment conditions turned against them.
And beyond battling, Trainers like David—officially registered with the Alliance—carried real obligations. Whenever the Alliance identified an emergency within reach: a natural disaster, a Pokémon stampede, organized criminal activity involving Pokémon, Trainers of sufficient strength were expected to respond. Superior rank and above. Not asked. Expected. Required.
The Alliance's generous treatment of Trainers—monthly stipends, priority access to resources, social standing that most other professions couldn't match—none of it came without strings. Simply clearing the official Superior-rank assessment put a monthly allowance in a Trainer's account that matched the wage of a steady worker. And that was before accounting for everything else.
In this world, no one got to collect benefits without carrying weight.
There's no other way, David thought, watching Lapras rear back for another wave. You've got the terrain advantage. Don't blame me for what comes next.
The standoff was clear now. As long as Lapras stayed at range and kept hurling water-based attacks, Zorua had no clean path to close the gap. If this dragged on, it would become a battle of endurance—Lapras wearing Zorua down with Wave Crash after wave, Zorua dodging and countering, until one side ran dry. David had no interest in that kind of war of attrition.
He made his decision.
"Zorua—Aura Link!"
The moment the words left his mouth, a blue light kindled in David's eyes. A deep, steady surge of Aura rose within him—but unlike before, it didn't erupt outward. No ring of azure light flared around his body. No dramatic glow, no visible display of force.
That was new.
After his maternal grandfather had passed him the Aura inheritance manual left behind by their ancestors, David had spent weeks working through it carefully. The improvement had been slow at first, then sudden. The manual had explained something he hadn't understood before: the blazing azure Aura that used to appear around him wasn't a sign of strength. It was waste. He had been flooding his power outward all at once, letting it scatter in every direction, with less than a third of it actually reaching Zorua.
It had looked impressive. It had felt powerful. But most of it had just bled away into the air.
Now, his approach was different—less like opening a floodgate and more like channeling everything through a narrow, precise stream. His eyes lit with blue flame. That was the only sign. His body remained still. And the Aura that flowed from him into Zorua was focused, clean, and far more efficient.
The result: the link cost him less than half what it used to, and the boost Zorua received was noticeably stronger. Duration and effect had both improved. There was nothing dramatic to see, but the numbers told the truth.
An invisible thread connected trainer and Pokémon. Aura poured steadily into Zorua's body.
In seconds, the small fox's own energy spiked—hard. Her presence sharpened, her stance firmed, and her Aura output climbed until it nearly matched the opposing Lapras, which had reached the upper end of Professional Stage One. That was no small thing.
At its core, Aura was life energy. David's reserves had grown to the point where they eclipsed those of an ordinary Professional Stage One Lucario—not his own Lucario, but the baseline. Pouring that into a Pokémon of Zorua's size produced an enormous effect.
David checked his consumption, then exhaled slowly. Solid. Better output than before, and barely half the drain.
At this rate, he thought, almost to himself, I might eventually be able to run Aura Link and Mega Evolution at the same time.
The thought sat with him for a moment. Lucario with both active simultaneously. He wasn't sure what that would look like, but the idea alone was enough to hold his attention for several seconds.
He shook it off. The battle was still going. Not that it worried him—even before activating the link, he'd been confident Zorua would win. Now the outcome was a foregone conclusion.
Then another thought surfaced, less pleasant.
With my Aura this much stronger now… will the purification go faster?
His expression shifted. His face went a little pale without him quite meaning for it to.
The Light Stone. Every time he helped Zorua filter out the residue of negative emotion trapped inside it, the process drained him completely. Every single time. The first session had hit him so hard he'd spent the entire weekend unable to recover, and when he'd walked back into school Monday morning his face had been so drawn and colorless that someone had actually flagged him—nearly reported to the staff, nearly pulled aside on suspicion of something far worse than overextended Aura training.
Now that my reserves are this much bigger, he thought, I should at least last a bit longer before hitting empty, right?
He said it with the careful optimism of someone who wasn't entirely convinced. A faint edge of guilt sat just underneath the thought, unacknowledged but present.
Across the arena, the opposing Trainer was staring at the battlefield with an expression she couldn't quite put into words.
She wasn't an idiot. She'd known from the start that her Lapras's terrain advantage was the only thing keeping this match competitive. A Superior-rank Pokémon trading blows evenly with a Professional Stage One peak wasn't supposed to happen—and she'd told herself that the arena was the reason, and that on a normal flat battlefield the tables would be turned.
She hadn't been entirely honest with herself about by how much. But still.
She hadn't expected this. Mid-battle, without warning, the opposing Trainer had simply… switched something on. Zorua's energy had changed. The whole feel of the fight had changed. The fox that had been hanging on by a thread moments ago was now radiating force that nearly matched her Lapras head to head.
Is there any fairness left?! she thought, with genuine indignation.
But her feelings on the matter didn't change anything. The little fox, now surging with channeled Aura power, was ready to face Lapras—and this time, the gap between them had nearly closed.