Chapter 638: Shocking! Dragon-type Natural Energy Is Actually...
Another half a year passed by.
The southern grassland.
Surrounded by a pack of Hisuian Arcanine and a massive vanguard of the Dragon Clan, a war to determine the absolute strongest entity of the grassland had reached its climax.
Kazuya, sitting at Lv. 79, had chosen this specific day to formally challenge the Lv. 82 Alpha Arcanine to a duel.
Practically every single Pokémon observing from the periphery assumed this battle was waged to definitively secure the title of the strongest warrior on the grassland. But in reality, Kazuya and Arcanine understood the truth perfectly well.
The script wasn't written like that at all.
Kazuya had possessed the mathematical capability to defeat Arcanine for quite some time now. Even though they had never formally locked horns prior to today, both parties were entirely clear about this baseline reality. Arcanine relied on his primal intuition, while Kazuya relied on rational analysis.
Arcanine couldn't deduce Kazuya's true objective for initiating this duel today. But he firmly believed that Kazuya absolutely wasn't fighting for some hollow title like "the Strongest of the Grassland." If Kazuya were truly someone who coveted empty glory, the widely recognized sovereign of this grassland passed through the word of mouth of the native clans wouldn't be a Florges.
At this exact moment.
The heavily battered and scarred Arcanine pushed his agile legs, transforming into a blurred stream of black and red as he tackled straight toward Kazuya in the sky.
His velocity was unimaginably fast. So incredibly fast that, aside from Kazuya, not a single other Pokémon on the field possessed the capacity to trace his movements.
A Champion-level Arcanine commanding Extreme Speed. That velocity could only be tracked by someone like Kazuya. Or rather, it would be difficult for him not to react.
Fundamentally, Kazuya's baseline speed parameter was already superior to a Hisuian Arcanine of the exact same level. Even with Arcanine holding a two or three-level mathematical advantage, it merely allowed him to forcibly close the gap and equalize their speed stats. If Arcanine himself could process and adapt to that velocity, how could Kazuya, standing at a distance, possibly fail to adapt?
Furthermore, factoring in Kazuya's two hundred years of absolute mastery over the Extreme Speed technique, coupled with an Aura Power he had rigorously polished for over a century... in his eyes, describing Arcanine's movements as "snail-like" was undeniably an exaggeration, but it certainly wasn't much faster. Kazuya could even clearly trace the individual strands of fur on Arcanine's body being whipped back by the gale.
"Wooo!!"
Arcanine threw open his jaws, unleashing a ferocious roar. Regardless of what Kazuya's true objective was, he would confront every single battle with absolute, unreserved commitment.
Facing the charging Arcanine, Kazuya couldn't find a single logical reason to evade the strike. He could dodge it. But there was zero tactical necessity to do so.
He possessed a vastly superior operational choice.
Gurgle, gurgle~
Kazuya's throat and cheeks abruptly expanded. Arcanine narrowed his eyes, fully bracing himself to absorb a torrential Flamethrower or Dragon Breath.
The very next second.
Boom——!
A colossal, high-pressure water column commanding a diameter of over ten meters erupted straight from Kazuya's jaws. Like an aurora tearing across the night sky, it instantly blasted straight through Arcanine's charge.
"!!!"
The entire arena descended into absolute, paralyzed shock.
No one could have ever anticipated this script. A colossal Charizard... instead of breathing fire, had actually blasted out a Hydro Pump!
Suspended in the skywards, Kazuya nodded his head in absolute satisfaction as he watched Arcanine plummet toward the soil with swirling, dizzy eyes: "Mmh, not bad at all."
Truth be told, this specific technique—a genetic cheat inherited directly from his fourth lifetime—was only being deployed for the second time in this current life. Prior to this, he hadn't encountered a single adversary worthy of drawing out this move. In any combat scenario where Hydro Pump could be utilized, he invariably held alternative techniques that offered a superior tactical yield.
But today, facing the Alpha Arcanine... there genuinely wasn't a more flawless tactical choice than Hydro Pump.
After all, the Alpha Arcanine was a Hisuian variant. And the attribute combination of a Hisuian Arcanine was Fire/Rock.
An absolutely atrocious typing configuration.
4x weakness to Ground.
4x weakness to Water.
It was truly a blessing that this was the living, breathing reality, rather than a rigid, turn-based game world. Otherwise, given a Hisuian Arcanine's typing coupled with a base speed stat of a mere 90, outside of the Terastal phenomenon, they would be mathematically unviable in any competitive meta.
If they were cursed with the Flash Fire ability on top of that, their biological existence would be a complete, tragic joke. Fire/Rock already boasted a 4x resistance to Fire; stacking Flash Fire on top of that... the utility of that redundancy was only marginally better than a Mega Sceptile running Lightning Rod. It would truly unlock the ultimate achievement: Flawless aesthetics, absolute tactical uselessness.
Fortunately, in the living reality, relying on techniques like Extreme Speed, an Arcanine's velocity wouldn't be reduced to a fatal vulnerability. Furthermore, Water-type Pokémon were largely segregated far out into the deep ocean; aside from a few amphibious species, Arcanine rarely crossed paths with them. Consequently, leveraging its natural 4x resistance to Fire, securing an Alpha throne within the volcanic mountain range was an exceptionally easy task for a Hisuian Arcanine.
However, returning to the present moment...
It was precisely because of Arcanine's disastrous typing configuration that Kazuya had chosen to deploy Hydro Pump.
A 110-base-power, long-range Water-type ultimate technique, further magnified by Kazuya's integrated Splash Plate and Mystic Water. The combined math yield was more than enough to cleanly defeat the Alpha Arcanine in a single exchange without Kazuya sustaining a single scratch.
Regarding this duel, to claim Kazuya had felt zero pressure would be an unobjective lie. Arcanine was, after all, a Champion-level Alpha Overlord. But the pressure was exceptionally limited. After all, Kazuya had flawlessly calculated this exact outcome from the very beginning.
His historical refusal to duel Arcanine was entirely because there was zero tactical necessity to do so.
As for fighting him now...
Kazuya lowered his head, casting a glance at the numerical values resting on his status panel.
His original Lv. 79... had officially clicked over to Lv. 80.
Kazuya had been bottlenecked at Lv. 79 for a prolonged window—roughly two entire years. That physical sensation heavily mirrored his Piplup era in his fourth life; it felt as though a tangible biological lock was restricting his engine, making it intensely difficult to breach the absolute limit.
Yet Kazuya hadn't felt frantic. Because he could physically perceive that this invisible lock was steadily, continuously eroding.
Just a few days prior, Kazuya calculated that he merely required a minor injection of external pressure to completely shatter the bottleneck. Thus, he sought out Arcanine—a target situated in close geographic proximity whose combat execution he felt absolutely secure engaging.
His primal intuition had been flawless. Following the conclusion of this clash, he had finally secured the level-up.
In his sixteenth year within this brutal, unforgiving era, Kazuya had finally, officially stepped into the Champion level.
Compared to his fifth lifetime, this progression velocity was undeniably much slower. It tracked closer to the timelines of his third and fourth lives. But it couldn't be classified as sluggish anymore.
His third life had been saturated with Celebi's divine blessing, and his fourth life was anchored to the modern, resource-rich League Era. For Kazuya to parallel those progression speeds within the savage, unrefined parameters of the Ancient Era was an absolute testament to the phenomenal biological talent gifted to him by his parents.
The most critical variable was... at identical level thresholds, the raw combat output Kazuya commanded in this life vastly eclipsed the parameters of those two previous lifetimes.
"Phew..."
Kazuya raised his massive arms to stretch his frame, exhaling a long, profound breath. A succession of sharp popping and cracking noises echoed across his entire skeleton.
It felt as though... something was flowing into his physical engine from all four directions.
This was the specific data his Aura Power was actively feeding to his brain.
Kazuya opened his eyes in slight bewilderment, scanning his surroundings.
The members of the Dragon Clan, alongside the pack of Arcanine, were all staring at him in a state of absolute, blank stupor.
Kazuya's face lit up with a surge of joy. He hurriedly lowered his head to inspect himself... and a massive irritation mark (💢) instantly manifested on his forehead.
"What the hell are you all staring at me for?" Kazuya rumbled in profound annoyance, turning his head to glare at the Alpha Rampardos standing nearby.
The way these guys were gawking at him had genuinely tricked his brain into assuming he had spontaneously achieved Primal Reversion for a second. Yet the reality was a complete blank.
"Pruu..." The Alpha Rampardos furrowed his heavy brow in sheer confusion.
He couldn't cleanly articulate the sensation. While from a purely physical perspective, Big Brother's silhouette hadn't undergone any structural modification... the Alpha Rampardos simply felt that Big Brother's presence was fundamentally different.
It was... he felt far more like a true Dragon.
Kazuya's brow furrowed tightly; he couldn't comprehend that abstract description.
But that distinct, buzzing sensation of evolution still lingered. He closed his eyes, sharply compressing the radius of his Aura Power to channel his absolute perception exclusively onto his immediate perimeter.
At that exact split-second, Kazuya perceived a cluster of energy that felt entirely alien, yet profoundly familiar.
Alien... because Kazuya had never once laid eyes upon this specific manifestation of energy before.
Familiar... because the moment his physical frame absorbed this energy, the cellular structures across his entire engine began to violently awaken.
Dragon-type natural energy?!
Kazuya cried out in absolute shock in his heart. How could the specific natural energy he had spent half his life frantically searching for suddenly manifest out of thin air?
Where was the source point?
He hurriedly extended his Aura threads, tracing backward along the trajectory of those energy streams. And as the data fed back to his brain, Kazuya's expression steadily warped into a state of sheer, bizarre bewilderment.
These streams of Dragon-type natural energy... were physically originating from the bodies of the Dragon Clan members.
In fact, Kazuya himself was actively generating this exact natural energy. Yet, instead of bleeding out into the external atmosphere, it was looping directly back inward, flowing toward every single cell across his body.
Why hadn't I perceived this historically? Kazuya's brow locked into a severe frown.
Dragon-type natural energy was fundamentally born from Dragon-type Pokémon. This was a biological reality he had completely failed to uncover in the past.
Analyzing the faint, almost imperceptible energy streams wavering in the airspace, two distinct hypotheses crystallized within Kazuya's mind.
On one hand, he had been entirely too weak in the past. The Dragon-type genes within his biological sequence were heavily suppressed by his dominant Fire and Flying-type genes, rendering him mathematically incapable of perceiving the homologous Dragon-type natural energy. Upon evolving into the Champion level, his dormant Dragon-type genes were finally, aggressively activated, officially granting him the biological capacity to perceive and absorb Dragon-type natural energy.
On the other hand, the historical population of the Dragon Clan had simply been too sparse. The volume of natural energy generated by their meager numbers was entirely too thin; before his physical engine could even register its presence, the energy had already dissipated into the atmosphere.
The probability of the former hypothesis was immense. But the latter was an undeniably factual variable as well. If Kazuya's Aura perception had been even a fraction weaker, or if he had simply kept his eyes open rather than actively sweeping his perimeter, he would have completely failed to detect the existence of this Dragon-type natural energy.
The volume of Dragon-type natural energy generated by a single, isolated Dragon Pokémon... was entirely too faint, and the raw quantity was mathematically negligible.
"Hmm?" At this moment, Kazuya couldn't help but vocalize another rumble of profound confusion.
He abruptly realized a glaring anomaly. He clearly hadn't exerted any active suction to absorb the energy generated by the assembled dragons. Yet, these energy streams acted as though they had locked onto a definitive target coordinate, proactively flowing straight toward Kazuya's silhouette on their own volition.
Furthermore, even from the distant northern vector, several faint energy threads were steadily transmitting over. And that specific coordinate naturally mapped directly to the Rocky Mountains and the swamp.
Kazuya deliberately commanded his physical engine to actively repel these energy streams.
The very next second, the streams of Dragon-type natural energy behaved as though they had suddenly lost their homing signal, aimlessly drifting and hovering around Kazuya's perimeter like lost, homeless children.
A brief moment later, they dissolved completely, fading seamlessly into the atmosphere.
At that exact second, a brilliant flash of ultimate realization tore across Kazuya's mind.
The absolute truth was laid bare.
Dragon-type Pokémon inherently possessed the biological capacity to generate Dragon-type natural energy. However, there existed absolutely no physical matter in this world capable of anchoring or storing Dragon-type natural energy; therefore, it would rapidly dissipate into the void.
Just as Fire-type energy could seamlessly fuse into magma, and Rock-type energy could anchor itself within minerals... Dragon-type natural energy possessed zero external vessels capable of hosting it.
Except for a sufficiently powerful Dragon Pokémon itself.
Furthermore... this specific Dragon-type natural energy operated on the exact same mechanical principles as the natural energy unleashed by a Mega Stone.
They were both inherently directional!
Their trajectory was entirely governed by the emotional output of the biological entity releasing the energy rays.
Just as Shirona could utilize her profound emotional bond to force the natural energy rays of a Mega Stone to lock directly onto Kazuya... the Dragon Clan Pokémon utilized emotions like absolute reverence, loyalty, and adoration to command their generated Dragon-type natural energy to proactively flow straight to Kazuya.
So that's the absolute truth. All natural energy fundamentally operates along the exact same mechanical trajectory.
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