The altar had to go. Both of them knew it, and neither of them needed to say it.
As long as the restoration field was running, the Commander's Sharpedo was a closed loop. Garchomp had just put a Dragon Claw across its back deep enough to leave marks in bone, and thirty seconds later, the wound was smoothing over under the altar's green light like the hit had never happened. That wasn't a resource you beat through attrition. You destroyed the source, or you lost.
The Commander was laughing.
"Doesn't matter how good your Sub-Legendary is," he called over the combat noise, his voice carrying the particular confidence of someone who believed the situation was structurally in his favor. "She can spend all day hitting that thing. As long as the altar holds, you're just running down the clock."
He wasn't wrong, which was why Sieg had already moved.
The Haze had bought him two minutes. Zorua had bought him the rest. Somewhere below him, the decoy was standing in his approximate position, wearing his approximate face, doing the approximate nothing that a trainer did when they were waiting for an opening rather than actively commanding. It would hold unless the Commander paid real attention to it. The Commander had two Sub-Elite Four Pokémon and a full tactical floor to manage. Real attention was in short supply.
Sieg reached the altar.
Three shards, each one sitting in a carved socket at one of the triangle's corners. The ground pattern beneath them was Team Aqua's iconography reduced to its simplest form, water-drop shapes that doubled as something between a skull and a key, worn smooth by whatever ritual use had been made of this surface before tonight. The shards themselves gave off a faint blue-white light, quiet but continuous, the energy they were outputting visibly flowing in a stream toward the Sharpedo below.
He picked up the nearest one.
The stream narrowed immediately. Not cut, one of three sources removed, two-thirds of the flow remaining, but the effect on the Sharpedo was visible even from up here, the latest wound on its flank staying open rather than closing over.
He moved to the second one.
"That's him."
The Commander's voice had changed register. Not loud, not panicked, the specific tone of someone who had caught a discrepancy and processed it fast. Sieg looked up and found the Commander already moving away from the tactical floor, his eyes fixed on the altar, the expression of a man who had just realized what was actually happening and was not pleased about it.
"Get away from those shards. Those are not yours to touch."
Sieg put his hand on the second shard.
"Drop it right now, or I will-"
Sieg pulled the second shard from its socket.
The Commander cleared the last of the steps between them in a rush, and Sieg had the knife out before the distance closed. Combat stance, weight forward, the posture that the months of training in the factory before the Raikou operation had drilled into him past the point where it required thought. The Commander pulled a set of brass knuckles from somewhere in his kit with the practiced motion of a man who had used them before.
For a moment, they both held position.
The Commander had four or five inches on Sieg and probably forty pounds. The knuckles closed his effective reach. Neither of these facts particularly worried Sieg, because reach worked in two directions.
The Commander threw first. A solid, direct hook, built on the assumption that size was the deciding factor.
Sieg stepped inside it, let it pass his shoulder, and moved the knife.
The first exchange left the Commander with two shallow cuts on his forearm. The second left one on his wrist that was considerably less shallow. The brass knuckles clipped Sieg's jacket on the third pass and found nothing useful underneath.
Sieg controlled the distance. This was the thing the factory training had actually taught him, not how to be stronger, but how to make strength irrelevant by keeping the geometry wrong for the person who had more of it. Reach was reach, and the knife had more of it than the knuckles. As long as he stayed at the range where the knife worked, and the knuckles didn't, the Commander's size was background noise.
A feint, a step right, and then the knife flicked across the Commander's wrist, the hand holding the brass knuckles, with the specific control of a cut designed to hurt enough to matter without being deep enough to be the last word.
The sound the Commander made was less a word than a statement of intent about how much pain he was in.
His hand opened. The knuckles hit the floor.
Below them, the situation had changed.
Krokorok had emerged from somewhere in the fog. Sieg hadn't commanded it; it had simply registered that its trainer was being attacked by a person and acted on that assessment independently, and was currently running Thunder Fang through the small collection of low-level Water-types the Commander had released in desperation. They were catches meant for the market, not combat. Krokorok dealt with them in sequence with the thoroughness of a Pokémon that had something to prove and had found a suitable venue.
And on the main floor, Cynthia had noticed the altar's output dropping.
The restoration field was running on one shard's worth of power now. The Sharpedo was fighting without its safety net, and the damage that Garchomp had been accumulating on it across the entire engagement was suddenly staying. Garchomp pressed. Dragon Pulse, Dragon Claw, the full sequence without holding anything back, because Cynthia had established by now that the platform was not going to complain about the load.
The Sharpedo went from fresh to visibly struggling in under a minute.
The Commander's Crawdaunt, without active direction from a trainer who was currently bleeding on an altar platform, had stopped running the tactical read it needed to maintain pressure on three Elite-rank opponents simultaneously. Honchkrow was still in the air, still evasive, still finding the gaps. Crawdaunt and Sharpedo were still working the angles. The Crawdaunt was running on its own instincts now, and its own instincts were conservative; the Endure decision had already told that story. It bought time rather than pressed advantage, and time was not what the Commander's side had to spend.
Sieg looked at the Commander, who was holding his wrist and breathing in a specific way, and then looked at the third shard.
He picked it up.
The restoration field went dark. Below, the Sharpedo's last wound stayed open, and Garchomp hit it again, and this time it didn't answer.