The howling night wind swept through Dahara City, shockwaves rolling between the skyscrapers, the lake surface churning under the pressure of so much raw power gathered in one place. The sky above was dense with the presence of Legendary Pokémon, the air itself feeling compressed and unstable.
And then the man on Kyurem's back said hello, and everything stopped.
The enormous Hoopa, consumed by a century of accumulated resentment, went completely still. The citizens mid-evacuation looked up. Ash, clutching the small Hoopa against his chest, looked up. Serena and Bonnie, further back in the crowd, looked up.
"Who is that?" Serena murmured.
Ash looked down at the Hoopa in his arms. "Hoopa, do you know him?"
"Hoopa doesn't know!" The small Hoopa shook its head emphatically. It had never seen this human before.
Ash stared upward. Friend or enemy? He genuinely could not tell.
What had happened was straightforward enough, from Lucien's perspective. When Hoopa had sent him and Kyurem through the ring in that small Kalos town, they had ended up somewhere that seemed to exist outside of normal time and space entirely.
He had been searching for a way out when a large golden light had appeared and pulled them through it, depositing them here, in the sky above a city he didn't recognize, surrounded by five Legendary Pokémon with glowing red eyes and Hoopa Unbound at the center of it all.
He had taken a moment to assess the situation.
Then he had waved.
The enormous Hoopa, the resentment-consumed version of the creature he had met in that small Kalos town, registered the human on Kyurem's back and its eyes went wild. Its body surged with purple aura, its six arms swinging wide, and it roared.
"Attack! Destroy them both!"
The five Legendary Pokémon moved simultaneously.
Dialga's Roar of Time tore through spacetime in a swirling, twisting surge that drove directly at Kyurem. Palkia's Spacial Rend shredded the air itself, unleashing a torrent of destructive light from multiple directions.
Giratina vanished into shadow and reappeared from within the ground in a Shadow Force that carried annihilating force.
Groudon drew up Precipice Blades from deep beneath the earth, scorching lava erupting along their edges. Kyogre unleashed Origin Pulse, the water it controlled transforming into a devastating beam of concentrated energy.
Five ultimate Legendary attacks, all at once, all converging on one point.
The citizens of Dahara City below went white. Ash's group collectively stopped breathing. No ordinary Pokémon could absorb a combined assault like this.
Lucien steadied himself on Kyurem's back and leaned forward slightly.
"Kyurem. Show them what you can do."
"Yes," Kyurem said, low and certain.
The ice-blue light in its eyes deepened. Its wings spread to their full span, and the cold that erupted from its body was not a directed attack but something total, an environmental absolute that froze the howling wind itself where it moved.
Ice condensed from the moisture in the air in dense, sharp formations, torrential and blue. Then Kyurem opened its mouth and released the beam.
The Roar of Time met it first. Time and cold clashed with a concussive crack, the distorted spacetime around the impact point freezing solid, the temporal power diminishing and then stopping entirely.
Giratina's Shadow Force came up from below in the same instant, and Kyurem's tail swept down, ice armor forming across its entire body in a fraction of a second to absorb it.
The follow-through was Glaciate, directly into the shadow, freezing it and forcing Giratina out of its ghost state into solid visibility.
Palkia's Spacial Rend reached Kyurem next and froze before it could connect, the torn space itself crystallizing and holding still.
Groudon's Precipice Blades missed entirely.
Kyogre's Origin Pulse swept in from the side and was met by the residual cold field around Kyurem, the beam dissipating against it without landing.
In a matter of seconds, the combined assault of five Legendary Pokémon had been absorbed, deflected, or neutralized.
The enormous Hoopa stared.
Its blood-red eyes filled with something between madness and disbelief. It roared again, raw and desperate, and channeled everything it had, all six arms moving at once, golden light churning into a single massive beam of concentrated power, the resentment driving it burning hotter than anything it had produced before.
"Destroy it! Completely!"
The beam tore toward Kyurem, joined by the renewed attacks of the five Legendary Pokémon around it. The combined force of all six struck the surrounding buildings like physical blows, the lake surface cracking beneath the shockwaves, frozen fissures spreading in every direction.
Kyurem took it.
It stood in the center of all of it, its icy form surrounded by churning cold air, and did not move backward. It endured every hit without retreating a single step.
Then it rose higher into the air, and went still.
The cold that spread from it this time was different in quality from everything before: not a strike or a blast but something absolute, a stillness so complete that the air itself stopped moving.
Glaciate at its true limit.
The cold hit Hoopa's beam first and froze it solid, the massive surge of power crystallizing in place and shattering into blue ice columns that fell straight down into the lake.
The cold continued outward, reaching Dialga, Palkia, Giratina, Groudon, and Kyogre in a single expanding wave. All five Legendary Pokémon froze where they were, suspended in the air, the resentment controlling them cut off entirely.
The sky above Dahara City went quiet.
Kyurem turned its gaze to Hoopa Unbound.
Hoopa tried to run. The space around it was already frozen. It threw everything it had left into its resentment, fighting against the cold, and the cold was simply greater. Hoopa Unbound's resentment power, enormous as it was, had already met its ceiling. Kyurem had not.
The final beam hit Hoopa Unbound squarely. The massive body was encased in ice in an instant, the purple aura snuffed out, six arms frozen in place mid-motion, the arrogance and fury replaced by nothing but fear and then stillness. The ice spread completely, and Hoopa Unbound fell from the sky and hit the frozen lake surface with a crash that echoed across the entire city.
It did not move.
With Hoopa's resentment gone, the hold on the five Legendary Pokémon dissolved. They hung in the air, suspended in their ice, no longer controlled, waiting.
The sky above Dahara City was completely silent.
Kyurem drifted in the stillness, its ice-blue form catching the dark light, unhurried and entirely composed. One against six. A complete victory, achieved without retreating a single step.
On Latios's back, Ash had not moved. He was holding the small Hoopa against his chest and staring upward, his body rigid, his mouth open, no words coming out. His hands were shaking slightly.
He had seen a great many things in his years of traveling. He had stood beside Legendary Pokémon and witnessed battles that should not have been survivable.
He had never seen anything like this.
That Kyurem. That trainer standing on its back, alone, had just fought Dialga, Palkia, Giratina, Groudon, Kyogre, and Hoopa Unbound simultaneously, and won without retreating a single step.
Ash had traveled through Unova. He had seen Kyurem before. He had thought he understood what it was.
He had been wrong.
The small Hoopa in his arms blinked its wide eyes, looking up at the enormous frozen shape in the lake, then up at Kyurem in the air. Its small face was a study in bewildered awe. It pressed itself closer to Ash's chest and whispered, very quietly: "So strong... even stronger than Hoopa..."
Nearby, Serena had one hand over her mouth. She was staring at the ice-blue form drifting in the sky above, her eyes unable to fully process what she had just watched.
That combined assault from five Legendary Pokémon and Hoopa Unbound at full power, all of it absorbed and answered and then ended, decisively, by one Pokémon and one trainer.
Bonnie had both hands gripping Clemont's sleeve, her face pale, her eyes locked on the sky without blinking. "That Pokémon is too strong," she managed, in a very small voice.
Clemont pushed his glasses up, the lenses catching the faint light coming off the ice. His mind was moving, trying to build a framework that could contain what he had witnessed. It was not working very well.
Latios, Latias, and the black Rayquaza had gone entirely still. They looked at Kyurem with the particular wariness of Legendary Pokémon who have just encountered something that outranks them clearly and knows it.
Their bodies had slowly relaxed as the battle ended, but their eyes stayed fixed on the ice-blue figure above, not quite willing to look away.
Below, the evacuation had stopped. The citizens of Dahara City stood in place, heads tilted back, staring upward in complete silence. T
he screaming had ended some time ago, replaced by the kind of collective stillness that comes when something happens that no one has a word for.
Then Kyurem descended, carrying its trainer, and Ash remembered how to move.
The trainer on Kyurem's back was looking at him with a calm, slightly amused expression. He smiled and spoke first.
"Hello. Sorry to intrude. Could you tell me what year it is?"
Ash answered before he had consciously decided to. "It's year 213 of the League calendar."
The trainer processed this, his expression shifting briefly into something thoughtful. "I see. So I've come through a different dimension and ended up in the future." He nodded to himself, then looked back at Ash with genuine warmth. "Thank you."
Kyurem settled to the ground, and the group came closer. Serena, Clemont, and Bonnie approached cautiously, their faces still carrying the shock, their eyes moving between Kyurem and the trainer standing beside it with open curiosity and residual awe.
Ash recovered himself properly and looked at the trainer directly. The excitement that always lived somewhere near the surface of him was already pushing through.
"Um... where did you come from? How did you end up inside Hoopa's ring?" He was already moving on to the next question before the first one was answered. "And is Kyurem yours? His power is unbelievable!"
The small Hoopa poked its head out from where it had been pressed against Ash's chest, its round eyes fixed on the trainer and then sliding sideways to Kyurem, whose aura was still cool and present, and whispered: "Such a powerful Ice Dragon..."
The trainer rested one hand gently on Kyurem's side. The cold around Kyurem softened somewhat, the Dragon-type pressure that Legendary Pokémon instinctively responded to pulling back to something quieter.
"My name is Lucien. I come from the Unova Region, from the past." He said it without making it sound unusual, his tone calm and grounded. "The Hoopa from my time sent me and Kyurem through a ring into a different dimension. We ended up here."
Ash flinched. "The past? So you actually time-traveled here from... a really long time ago?"
Lucien gave a small nod. His gaze moved to the frozen shape of Hoopa Unbound in the lake. "The resentment has been sealed in the ice. It won't wake for some time. When the ice breaks down naturally, the Legendary Pokémon being controlled will have their own minds back. The danger to Dahara City is over."
He paused, then looked back at Ash. "Ash, I have a question of my own. What is the current state of the Unova Region?"
Ash blinked. "Wait, how do you know my name?"
Lucien smiled. "There are many parallel worlds. Perhaps there's another version of you in one of them."
Ash took that in for a second, and then, given everything else that had happened to him in his years of traveling, accepted it without too much difficulty. He thought back over what he knew of Unova.
"Unova Region... the Champion is Alder. The Elite Four, in order, are Caitlin..."
He ran through what he remembered. Lucien listened, and as he did, something in his expression shifted slightly. A small frown.
This was not his Unova.
He turned it over carefully. Hoopa Unbound had looked at him with no recognition earlier, as though it had never seen him before. And now the structure of the Unova League Ash was describing didn't match what he knew from his own timeline.
A quiet suspicion took shape.
He had not traveled thousands of years into the future. He had passed through a dimensional boundary and arrived in a parallel world. A different world, running alongside his own, where the same names and places existed but history had taken different shapes. An anime world, perhaps.
"What is it, Mr. Lucien?" Ash was watching his expression with curiosity.
"Nothing important," Lucien said. "I was just working something out."