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The Shield of Slateport.
"Lucario! Silver! Darkrai! Draco!"
Sam ordered the four Pokémon standing on the beach.
"Keep your focus sharp! Your job is to intercept and eliminate the shockwaves radiating from the Primal Gods' battle! Do not let them reach the city!"
"Lu-cah!!"
As the first Pokémon to follow Sam and the unquestioned leader of the team, Lucario immediately took charge.
He nodded firmly, gesturing for Darkrai, Lugia, and Dragonite to spread out along the defensive perimeter.
"Sam! Leave the southeast to me!" Cynthia called out over the howling wind.
"I've got the southwest!" Sam shouted back, giving her a serious look.
"Be careful!"
"I will!"
Cynthia nodded. With a commanding gesture, she rode Zekrom to her designated position to intercept any incoming threats from the ocean.
Meanwhile, Sam rode atop the majestic White Kyurem, guarding the other side of the coastline.
Sam had no intention of directly intervening in the war between the Primal Twin Gods just yet.
His priority was holding the line.
He would not let the crossfire reduce Slateport City to ash and flooded ruins.
He just had to wait for Rayquaza, the one with power over both of them, to arrive.
Although the Unova Trio possessed terrifying strength, Zekrom, Reshiram, and Kyurem had just concluded a massive, life-draining war of their own.
They hadn't fully recovered their peak vitality.
Throwing them into a deathmatch against two fully-rested, berserk Primals right now was too risky.
"ROOOAAAR!!!" "SHREEEEE!!!"
Out on the boiling sea, the battle between the two berserk Primal Gods had reached a fever pitch.
Consumed by whatever maddening factor had triggered their Primal Reversion, neither side used any tactical strategy.
They simply bombarded each other relentlessly with their most devastating exclusive skills.
As ancient, immortal enemies, they didn't even bother trying to dodge. They used their massive bodies to tank the attacks directly.
Primal Kyogre was struck squarely in the abdomen by a glowing, jagged stone pillar that pierced the sky.
The sheer force of Precipice Blades knocked the Sea God out of the air, sending it crashing violently back into the depths.
"ROOOAAAR!!!"
A moment later, Primal Groudon, who was standing firmly on its newly created obsidian shelf, was bombarded by a concentrated volley of Origin Pulse lasers.
The devastating water-elemental blasts overturned the Continent Pokémon, sending it tumbling backward into a pool of superheated magma.
But the collateral damage from their falls was catastrophic.
As Kyogre crashed down, the displacement of the ocean created a tsunami.
A massive wave, hundreds of meters high, surged forward like an unstoppable sea wall, rushing directly toward Slateport City.
Simultaneously, Groudon thrashed violently as it rose from the magma.
Its massive, flailing arms and legs pushed a massive tidal wave of thick, boiling lava toward the other side of the city's coastline.
"Zekrom! Use Thunderbolt! Crush that wave!" Cynthia commanded loudly from the southeast.
"ROOOAAAR!!!"
The Dragon of Ideals wove a terrifying net of black and blue lightning.
It launched a blinding thunderbolt directly into the surging sea wall.
The immense electrical discharge blasted the tsunami apart, reducing the devastating wave to harmless, falling rain.
Although Zekrom hadn't recovered its peak combat power, intercepting the collateral splash damage of Primal Kyogre was well within its capabilities.
"White Kyurem! Hit the lava with Ice Beam!" Sam shouted from the southwest.
"GRAAAH~!!!"
White Kyurem unleashed a beam of absolute zero, sweeping it across the incoming tidal wave of magma.
The extreme cold instantly froze the boiling rock, rapidly cooling it into a solid, jagged wall of harmless obsidian. It advanced no further.
At the same time, Sam's Pokémon team, led efficiently by Lucario, sprinted across the defense line.
They intercepted the smaller stray waves, boulders, and magma splashes that slipped past the dragons.
Under their joint protection, Slateport City remained safe from the immediate threats. If they could keep this up, they just had to hold the line until Rayquaza arrived.
- - - - -
The Stray Shot.
At the epicenter of the battlefield, the two Primal Gods continued their deathmatch.
Completely numb to physical pain due to their berserk state, they continued to unleash their ultimate attacks.
"ROOOAAAR!!!"
Primal Groudon was the first to recover. Standing up from the lava, it let out a savage roar of humiliation.
Being overturned by Kyogre and losing its footing on the earth was an absolute disgrace to the God of the Land.
Its massive right foot stomped viciously into the ground!
The entire continental shelf whined in protest.
Absorbing immense geothermal energy from the earth, the glowing stone pillars of Precipice Blades exploded from the crust once again.
Because Groudon only had to stand up, its attack speed was a fraction of a second faster than Kyogre's.
Kyogre, having been knocked out of the sky and deep into the water, was a beat slower to recover.
Just as Kyogre surfaced and began condensing the glowing orbs of Origin Pulse, the Precipice Blades struck it from below!
The brutal interruption shattered Kyogre's focus.
Without the Sea God's mental control, the volatile energy of the Origin Pulse fractured.
Three highly condensed, catastrophic lasers fired off completely at random.
One laser shot wildly into the open ocean.
But another laser lost its trajectory entirely and shot straight toward the downtown area of Slateport City!
Right where Officer Jenny was leading a large group of stranded citizens through an evacuation route!
Even though it was only a fragmented, stray laser and not the full power of an Origin Pulse, it would instantly vaporize any mortal caught in its blast radius.
In such a split-second emergency, Sam had no time to think.
"White Kyurem! Go!" Sam screamed.
"Use Dragon Pulse! Intercept that laser!"
"GRAAAH!!!"
White Kyurem lunged forward, tracking the trajectory of the falling blue laser.
It gathered its draconic energy and blasted a concentrated Dragon Pulse into the sky.
The two beams collided perfectly in mid-air, neutralizing each other!
A massive, blinding curtain of steam and water vapor exploded outward, covering the area in a thick white mist.
But just as the mist expanded, a sickening, thunderous BOOM echoed from somewhere else along the defensive line.
It was the third stray laser.
Sam couldn't see through the dense white fog, but his heart suddenly throbbed with a cold, terrifying dread.
"White Kyurem, fly up! Clear the mist!"
White Kyurem flapped its massive wings, blowing the steam away. Sam's eyes darted frantically across the battlefield.
First, he looked southeast. Cynthia was hovering safely atop Zekrom. She was fine.
Then, Sam scanned the beach where his Pokémon team had been holding the line.
He saw a freshly blasted, smoking crater in the sand.
Darkrai, little Lugia, and the giant Dragonite were standing at the edge of the pit, looking down in shock.
Only Lucario was missing from the formation.
Sam's breath hitched.
He strained his eyes, looking deep into the smoking crater.
At the bottom of the pit lay Lucario, his Mega Evolution forcibly broken, his body battered and motionless.
Seeing this scene, Sam felt as if someone had just punched him square in the chest.