Iron Defence raised Blastoise's physical bulk, but it wasn't Protect. It couldn't negate damage entirely, and Close Combat didn't care about armour when it was thrown with that kind of force.
Blastoise had held out remarkably well. Between the repeated Aura Spheres, the Bullet Punch barrage, and now a full-power Close Combat, the fact that it was still conscious said everything about Mega Blastoise's resilience. But resilience had a ceiling, and Blastoise had hit it.
It lay at Gary's feet, barely moving. A sliver of stamina. Maybe enough for one more move. Maybe not even that.
Ash studied the fallen turtle in silence, then raised his hand. Time to end it.
"Blastoise, Rest!"
The command cut through the rain like a whip. Blastoise's eyes closed, its body went limp, and it sank into deep, instantaneous sleep. The effect was immediate: wounds sealed, fractures knitted, bruises faded. Every injury Lucario had inflicted vanished as if the battle had never happened. Full stamina. Full recovery.
The trade-off was absolute unconsciousness.
Ash blinked. He hadn't expected that. In a situation that hopeless, with one foot in the grave, Gary had found the single move that could buy his Pokémon back from the edge.
"Rest? That's a lifeline, but your Blastoise is a sitting target now." Ash recovered quickly. A sleeping Pokémon couldn't defend itself. Against low-power chip damage, Rest was a viable stall tool. Against Mega Lucario's offensive output, it was an invitation.
"Is it though?" Gary's grin was sharp. "Blastoise, Sleep Talk!"
The sleeping Blastoise rose to its feet like a sleepwalker. Its eyes stayed shut, its body moved on autopilot, driven by whatever move Sleep Talk randomly pulled from its arsenal.
Gary hated this. Sleep Talk was a coin flip wrapped in a dice roll. Blastoise knew dozens of moves. The chances of pulling something useful were slim, and if it rolled something useless, the gamble was over. But without Rest, there was no gamble at all.
Blastoise's cannons rose. Water gathered at the barrels.
Water Pulse.
Gary's heart surged. Out of every move Blastoise knew, Sleep Talk had pulled the one that mattered. Rain-boosted, Mega Launcher-amplified Water Pulse. The odds of drawing that specific move from Blastoise's massive pool were absurd.
The three streams fired toward Lucario, but a sleeping Pokémon's aim was imprecise and its reaction speed nonexistent. Lucario read the trajectories with ease and sprang upward, vaulting over the entire spread with a clean Bounce.
"Sleep Talk, again!" Gary pressed. One more roll of the dice while Lucario was airborne and committed.
Blastoise's body shifted in its sleep. Its cannons rose again.
Water Pulse. Again.
And this time, the streams were aimed upward, directly at Lucario, who was still hanging in the air with nowhere to redirect.
Gary slammed his fist into his palm. "Yes! The luck is real!" Two perfect draws in a row. Even if this volley missed, it didn't matter. Blastoise would wake in roughly ten seconds. At that point, a fully restored Mega Blastoise against a Lucario running on half stamina meant the advantage had completely flipped.
He could actually win this.
"Lucario." Ash's voice rang across the field, cutting through the sound of rain and rushing water.
"Giant Aura Sphere."
High above the arena, Lucario raised both hands overhead. A deep blue sphere of aura condensed between its palms, standard size at first.
Then it kept growing.
Lucario poured everything into it. Raw aura surged from its body in visible waves, flooding into the sphere, and the orb swelled past every reasonable boundary, until it hung above the arena like a small meteor, casting deep blue light across the rain-soaked field and the upturned faces of ten thousand spectators.
Gary's stomach dropped through the floor.
'No. No, no. I've seen this before.'
The final exchange against Mewtwo. The last attack Lucario had thrown in that catastrophic battle above Viridian City. An Aura Sphere so massive it had crushed Mewtwo's own ultimate technique and nearly levelled an entire city block. The only reason Viridian still existed was divine intervention.
'What did my Blastoise do to deserve THIS?'
The Water Pulse reached Lucario. The ascending streams of pressurised water struck the underside of the Giant Aura Sphere and simply... dissolved.
A faint hiss, a spray of evaporating mist, and the attack was gone.
The raindrops falling near the sphere didn't even reach its surface. They evaporated in the ambient energy field, leaving a dry halo in the middle of the downpour.
In the front row, someone grabbed the railing and stood up so fast their chair fell over. "That thing is bigger than my Snorlax!"
Further back, trainers were craning their necks, shoving each other for a better view. The murmurs had turned into open shouting.
"Since when can Aura Sphere get that big?"
"How are you supposed to fight that? Just forfeit!"
"Is that a Mega Lucario thing? Or is it just an Ash thing?"
Nobody had an answer. On the field, the Giant Aura Sphere hung overhead like a second sun, its gravitational pull on the surrounding rain visible to the naked eye. Water that fell too close was blown sideways or vaporised entirely.
The shockwave of displaced air had already drenched the nearest spectators in scattered rainfall, but not a single person moved to dry off. Every eye in the stadium was locked on the descending sphere and the sleeping Blastoise directly beneath it.
With the Water Pulse gone, nothing stood between the Giant Aura Sphere and the ground. It descended with a deep, resonant hum, trailing blue energy like a comet's tail.
The impact shook the stadium to its foundations. A detonation of light and force swallowed the centre of the arena, and a wall of smoke erupted outward, blanketing the field in an impenetrable grey haze. The spectators in the nearest rows felt the shockwave in their chests.
Gary stood rigid, fists clenched at his sides. Even with full stamina from Rest, even with Mega Evolution's stat boosts, Blastoise might not have survived that. The previous Aura Spheres had been dangerous. This one existed in a different category entirely. A one-hit kill was very much on the table.
But if it hadn't been a kill, Gary still had a chance. An attack that massive would have drained Lucario's reserves enormously. If Blastoise was still standing when the smoke cleared, the fight was his.
The haze thinned. The arena emerged in pieces: scorched ground, scattered debris, shattered tile. Then the crater.
Nearly ten metres across. Deep enough to swallow a person. And at its centre, Blastoise lay motionless in its base form. The Mega Evolution had collapsed entirely. Its shell was fractured in multiple places, cracks running from crown to base like a shattered eggshell. For a Blastoise, a cracked shell meant the damage had exceeded its body's absolute tolerance.
"Blastoise is unable to battle. Lucario wins!" The referee confirmed the result and swept his flag downward. "The winner of this match is Ash!"
The stadium erupted.
The final tally was brutal on paper. Ash had won with two Pokémon against Gary's full six. Gary had managed to knock out exactly one of Ash's team members, and even that had been Annihilape burning itself out rather than falling to a direct attack. Ash's two Pokémon had each taken down three of Gary's. By the numbers alone, it looked like a demolition.
But nobody who'd watched the match saw it that way.
Gary had fought brilliantly. His battle instincts rivalled trainers twice his age. The silent Water Pulse feint, the Extreme Speed fusion technique, the Rest-Sleep Talk gamble, all of it had pushed Ash in ways that most opponents simply couldn't. He'd surprised Ash multiple times.
The problem was that Gary had been fighting a force of nature. His tactics could catch Ash off guard. Ash's Pokémon could leave the entire stadium in disbelief. That asymmetry was the whole story of the match.
Even if an Elite Four member had taken Gary's place, the process might have looked slightly cleaner, but the result would have been the same.
The crowd understood that. There were no boos when the result was announced. Only applause. Sustained, genuine applause for a trainer who had given everything he had and pushed the favourite harder than anyone expected.
Gary and Ash met at the centre line. Gary extended his hand, and there was a flicker of reluctance in his eyes, the competitive fire that hated losing no matter the circumstances. But beneath it was something warmer.
"Good luck in the finals, Ash." His grip was firm. "Don't you dare lose to someone else after beating me. The only person allowed to take you down is me."
"I won't lose." Ash shook his hand and meant every word. The finals were one match away. His likely opponent was Paul, the only trainer in this tournament whose roster could genuinely match his own.
It would be the hardest fight of the tournament. And Ash was looking forward to it.
"Pretty sure that counts as raising a flag," Gary said with a smirk.
"The championship is mine. Worry about your third-place match instead."
"Please." Gary released his hand and shrugged. "If I can push you this hard, you think anyone else is going to give me trouble?"
After the pressure of battling Ash, everything below Elite Four level felt manageable. He'd studied the data on Paul's semifinal opponent. As long as Paul didn't throw his match and drop down to face Gary in the consolation round, Gary's odds of taking third place were at least eighty percent.
They left the stage. League ground crews moved in immediately, deploying Ground-type Pokémon to begin repairing the devastated arena. The Giant Aura Sphere had destroyed nearly half the field, and the crater alone would take serious work to fill. The League had anticipated some damage from the Top 4 matches and scheduled a two-hour gap between bouts. They hadn't anticipated this much damage. Fortunately, the repair crew was large enough to finish within the hour.
Ash and his group grabbed a meal during the intermission, then returned to the Indigo Stadium for the second semifinal.
Paul's match began with the expected opener: Torterra. His opponent, a trainer named Travis, had done his homework. He led with Charizard, a clear prediction that Paul would anchor on his Grass/Ground ace.
The type advantage didn't matter. The level gap was too wide. Charizard landed a single Fire Blast that scorched Torterra's shell, and Torterra responded with Rock Slide. One move. Charizard went down.
Travis doubled down on the fire strategy, sending out Magmar and then Flareon in succession, clearly determined to force Paul off Torterra. Facing a third consecutive Fire-type, even Paul's stoic expression tightened with a flicker of annoyance.
He recalled Torterra.
The replacement landed on the field with a heavy thud: Electivire. The recently discovered evolution of Electabuzz, achievable only through trade while holding an Electirizer. First documented in Sinnoh.