Chapter 208: The Strongest Dragon Pokémon — Are We Actually Going After It?
"What do you mean?"
Alder blinked, then refocused. "Explain."
"Your problem with Team Rocket comes down to one thing — fear of Mammon's power." Ghetsis's eyes were cold and distant, fixed on some point ahead of him, as though he could see that black-coated young man standing there. His voice dropped to something quietly venomous.
He was going to make that boy pay.
He'd lost. Lost completely, without a shred of dignity left. His only remaining hope was whether N would eventually come for him. But Ghetsis was not the type to go down without dragging someone else with him — even in defeat, he could still pull Mammon into the wreckage.
"According to legend, when the ancient Dragon of Unova split itself apart, it left something behind. Its body — the vessel that remained after the spirit divided — became a third legendary dragon."
He let the pause sit.
"The strongest Dragon-type Pokémon in existence."
"The strongest… Dragon-type?"
Alder's brow creased deep. He was skeptical — why hadn't he heard of this? He turned to look at Leon, Cynthia, Steven. Their expressions ranged from contemplative to genuinely puzzled.
If the local Champion had never heard of it, they certainly weren't going to know.
The legendary dragon Pokémon — that phrase referred to Zekrom and Reshiram, Unova's paired cover legendaries, collectively. But a third legendary dragon that Alder himself didn't know about?
"Are you talking about Kyurem?"
The question came from an old man with a white beard, voice low and unhurried.
"Heheheh… Of course. Drayden. I thought you might know."
Ghetsis glanced at him — Drayden of Opelucid City, originally the Opelucid Gym Leader who had handed his gym over to his granddaughter Iris, currently serving as stand-in Elite Four while the League was short a member. Worth noting: Drayden was Drayton's grandfather, which made Drayton his grandson.
"Kyurem."
Alder repeated the name slowly.
He did have some recollection of it, actually. He'd spent years traveling through Unova and had passed through Lacunosa Town at some point — the locals there had a legend.
In ancient times, a meteorite had fallen from the sky into Giant Chasm, and from it came Kyurem. At night, Kyurem would emerge on the cold wind and steal people and Pokémon from the town — taking them as food. The residents of Lacunosa had built walls around their town and instituted a curfew specifically because of it.
But that story and what Ghetsis was describing were clearly not the same thing.
"That's right. Kyurem — the strongest dragon." Ghetsis's smile was thin and cold. "Alder, if you can find Kyurem and harness its power, you won't need to fear Mammon at all."
His voice carried absolute certainty.
"Not even Kyogre would be a match for Kyurem."
"Take him."
Alder didn't respond to the claim. He looked toward Looker, who stepped forward and escorted Ghetsis away.
Alder pressed two fingers to his temple. He was tired.
"Drayden." He turned to the old man. "Is what Ghetsis said true?"
"Yes." Drayden nodded once. "Kyurem is indeed the third dragon — the vessel left behind when the ancient Dragon of Unova divided. And its power exceeds both Reshiram and Zekrom."
He hesitated slightly.
"Moreover… Kyurem appears to have the ability to fuse with either Reshiram or Zekrom, if certain conditions are met."
Drayden reached into his pack and produced a pair of wedge-shaped objects.
They were colored in grey, black, and white, with gold tips.
"What are those?"
"The DNA Splicers. My family has kept them for generations. They have a deep connection to Kyurem." Drayden's voice was grave. He held them out toward Alder.
"Take them, Champion Alder. Ghetsis is a cunning man — he almost certainly revealed this information deliberately, hoping you'd go find Kyurem and throw it against Team Rocket."
Even so, Drayden understood the implicit logic. If Alder genuinely decided to fight Team Rocket head-on, Kyurem would be a significant and potentially necessary piece of that fight.
The real question was whether Kyurem would help them at all.
"I understand."
Alder accepted the DNA Splicers and turned them over in his hands, looking at the pair of wedges. Kyurem. The strongest dragon—
"Let's head back to Opelucid first. We'll discuss this properly there."
He looked at Leon and the others. Whether to go after Kyurem was a decision that warranted a real conversation.
N returned to his castle.
His first move upon arrival was to go directly to a specific room.
"N."
"N, you're back."
The two girls inside looked up at him when he entered, expressions shifting to confusion.
They were Anthea — the Goddess of Love — and Concordia — the Goddess of Peace. Both had been taken in by Ghetsis as children. N's sisters, in every meaningful sense of the word.
"Anthea. Concordia." N's voice was quiet. "I need to ask you something."
The two girls exchanged a glance. They could both see it immediately — something in N's bearing was wrong. Heavier than usual.
"What happened, N?"
Anthea kept her voice careful. In all the years she'd known him, it was rare to see N look like this. The only times she'd seen that particular weight in his face were when he was with Pokémon that were suffering — absorbing what they felt.
"Someone told me…" N spoke slowly. "…that my ideals were something Father deliberately cultivated in me."
A pause.
"He said the Pokémon — the hurt ones, the ones I grew up with — that Father deliberately placed them near me. Is that true?"
Anthea and Concordia said nothing.
The room was very quiet.
N looked at them. At their silence. His face went a shade paler.
So it was true.
Concordia's eyes softened with something painful.
They had always known. N's heart was so genuinely, completely pure — and because of that purity, there was nothing in the world quite as beautiful or quite as heartbreaking as what had been done to it. Ghetsis had deliberately filled N's world with wounded Pokémon, let N feel everything they carried — the grief, the pain, the fear, the hatred — and watched an ideal form itself from that accumulated suffering. An ideal for Pokémon's sake.
But was that ideal right? Was the conviction built from that suffering real?
No. Because it wasn't something N had arrived at through his own will. It wasn't the ideal of N the person, formed freely from his own nature and experience. It was a conclusion that had been engineered.
"N." Concordia placed her hands together in front of her and spoke gently, with great care. "It's true."
She knew this would hurt him. But there was nothing else she could say.
The confirmation landed. N's expression shifted into something complicated and grieved. His left hand found the doorframe, fingers wrapping around it — knuckles going white.
"I see."
His eyes went dark again. Emptier than before.
He turned and left without another word. Anthea and Concordia watched him go, and both of them let out a slow, quiet breath.
They knew how much this would be hurting him. N was, underneath everything, a person of deep and genuine feeling. The childhood Ghetsis had engineered had closed most of that off — locked it away until his eyes had lost almost all their light. What tenderness and sensitivity he had could really only be seen in how he was with Pokémon.
All of that was Ghetsis's doing.
And yet even knowing it, N still held something real in his heart — for his sisters, for the people and Pokémon around him. Even toward strangers, he tried not to cause unnecessary harm. The path he'd chosen for his ideal had been the path of Unova's founding legend, its cultural weight, its story — trying to achieve something without war if he could help it.
And now he knew that the man who had raised him had been steering him the entire time. Using him.
It was impossible for that not to hurt.
N walked out of the castle. He stopped and looked back at it — the vast, imposing structure that had always simply been home.
"Zekrom." He exhaled. "Were my ideals… right?"
"That's a question for your own heart, N."
Zekrom's voice was low and steady in his mind.
"Find your ideal. Make it yours. And when you do — I'll be there."
It had been N who awakened it. As long as N's hunger for something to believe in hadn't died — as long as he hadn't given up on it — Zekrom wasn't going anywhere.
Zekrom had been watching N for a long time. It knew what he was. A human of genuine purity. One worth waiting for.
Even now, standing in this confusion and loss, Zekrom believed N would find his way to something real.
"Thank you, Zekrom."
N took a long, slow breath. And then, for the first time in a long time, he smiled — turning it toward his partner, the one constant in everything that had just shattered.
He wasn't sure why, but losing the ideal he'd built his entire life around had left him feeling… lighter. Empty, yes. But lighter.
He still had Zekrom. His best partner, still here. Together, they could find something that was actually his.
"But there's one thing I have to do first."
N looked toward Opelucid City in the distance. Whatever Ghetsis had done — however he'd been used — Ghetsis had still raised him. That wasn't nothing. He needed to see this through to an ending.
He walked.
"Hm. His ideals are already gone, and Zekrom still hasn't left."
Mammon appeared at the castle gates after N had moved out of sight, watching the distant figure with a raised eyebrow.
Had to give N credit for that.
By any normal standard, a Hero of Ideals losing his ideals meant Zekrom should walk. That was how it worked. But N had held onto Zekrom through sheer personal force of character — the bond he'd built with Pokémon over a lifetime keeping the dragon there even after the foundation had cracked.
The game had done the same thing, actually. In the final confrontation between Truth and Ideals, N had lost to Touko, and had confronted the fact that his ideals were wrong. Zekrom hadn't left. It had gone with N — departing together to search for something new to believe in.
"Still need to think about this."
Mammon considered for a moment. The pressure wasn't quite enough yet. He'd apply more later.
For now—
He looked at the castle.
His smile was pleasant.
He took out his phone and called Gladion.
A structure this vast and magnificent was genuinely wasted on Team Plasma.
One day later, Gladion arrived with a team.
The castle that had belonged to N was under new management.
Without any senior executives or a leader on site, Team Rocket walked in without meaningful resistance. The Plasma members inside were rounded up — those who surrendered, surrendered. Those who didn't were put to work in the mines.
Mammon had always believed in humane treatment.
Colress had defected to Rocket. Ghetsis was in a League prison. N was adrift in an ideological vacuum.
Team Plasma was in pieces — or, more accurately, one push away from being a historical footnote.
Mammon provided that push.
"Well hello there, ladies."
He found the two Goddesses' room and knocked on the open door with a cheerful smile, looking in at their thoroughly alarmed expressions.
"This castle belongs to me now. Which means everything inside it belongs to me." He let the pause do its work. "Including you two."
Anthea and Concordia pressed their lips together, faces tight with helplessness.
"I hope you'll be cooperative." His expression was perfectly pleasant, which somehow made it worse. "You wouldn't want anything to happen to N, would you?"
Their expressions shifted.
Whatever else had happened, whatever complicated feelings they had about the Plasma that had shaped them — N was their little brother. That wasn't complicated at all.
In the conference room of the Opelucid League building, Alder and the others were meeting again.
He turned the DNA Splicers over in his hands, thinking.
"Everyone." He looked around the table. "Are we going to go find Kyurem?"
(End of Chapter)
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