Chapter 53.2- Oak

I closed my eyes in victory and waited for her next pokemon. She’d shown off three against Sabrina, and as she was a gym leader, I didn’t have the required clearance to just check up her trainer profile for the rest of her team. I mean, I could have studied her previous matches, but what’s the fun in that? Janine was cunning, but she didn’t have the power to roll with the big boys. Igneel was going to sweep her entire team and not even break a sweat doing it.
Of course, she had to introduce complexity. She sent out a Nidoking from her ball. Wait, is that a Nidoking? Which one was purple again? I mean, wasn’t Nidoqueen the purple one and Nidoking the blue one? Well fuck. Let’s keep my inability to identify a pokemon native to Kanto away from Oak, shall we? He’d have me in remedial lessons for fucking ever.

The Nidomonarch took the field with a flourish and Igneel’s roar was every bit as anticipatory as it was warning. My battle hungry dragon could already tell that this would be fun. I even had some trouble holding him off from attacking until the battle officially started. His previous battle and just spending so long standing around doing nothing was making him a bit restless, and he’d soon become ungovernable.

When the board finally flashed, he moved with the force of a ball shot out of a canon. Flame armour surrounded him as he moved through the air and collided with the power poison type. Nidomonarchs tended to have the ability, poison point, so we had to be careful not to get poisoned. Hopefully, the fire would burn out the poison before it entered him, but even if it didn’t, we were raising his body temperature even higher than usual. His body would burn the poison out of his system in a few minutes even if he did get poisoned.

A powerful tail lashed out at him as he dove in, but ducking under the appendage was child’s play. Igneel was built of nothing but muscle. Gravity training and a good diet ensured that. He was more built than any charizard I’d ever seen, even lacking in that customary bit of gut they all had. He was just pure muscle. In melee range, he used all his advantages as best as he could. Moving around Nidomonarch’s attacks like he could see them coming from a mile away, and punishing it whenever it overextended. He’d rolled up his claws and was attacking fists instead. After their first few exchanges, it wouldn’t have taken Ino to figure out that his claws were not going to make it through his adversary’s armour.

Janine whistled, and a cloud of purple smoke exploded from Nidomonarch. It took the opportunity and disappeared into the crowd. “Hurricane” I ordered with a carefully blank face. No need to show the disappointment I felt at her resorting to the same tricks and expecting to beat me. The smog disappeared as the winds picked up and coalesced into a hurricane that travelled along the arena. The move gathered all the gas and funnelled it right into the air, dispersing it thinly and cleanly. I smiled at Igneel and shot him a thumbs up for the well executed move. His power and muscles weren’t the only things growing it seemed.

Nidomonarch was nowhere to be found, so I made the obvious judgement and had Igneel take to the skies. Of course, that’s what Janine expected. The moment Igneel began to ascend, Nidomonarch appeared out of the ground, to the left and tossed a massive rock right at him. Igneel was able to react, shattering it to a thousand pieces with a fist surrounded by flame. I just stared at Janine, wondering if that was the entirety of her strategy. I mean it wasn’t very likely to work, was it?

The field began to visibly vibrate and develop cracks. I doubted using earthquake was very effective when one’s opponent had already gone airbourne. The entire essence of her strategy seemed to be to confuse me as much as possible. With any other trainer, I’d assume them to be an idiot and move in for the kill, but this was Koga’s daughter. I’ve only battled the man once, but even in that battle, he’d been a crafty bastard, with a trick up his sleeve for every situation. I found it difficult to believe that his chosen heir and daughter would be any different. There was a trap here. An angle was being played. All I had to do was fucking find it.

“Stealth rock” She commanded and multiple pieces of stones from the ground rose up and surrounded Igneel’s position in the sky. He tested the trap by moving a bit to the left, and the rock closest to him exploded, scuffing his scales a bit. I ‘hmmed’ at the move choice. Igneel could probably just force his way out of the encirclement, but that would damage him needlessly, and besides, we had some long-range training to do, either way. This was good for us. We had allowed Igneel’s skills at long range go ignored for a while since it became so easy to just wrestle anyone into submission with explosions and a body made of flame. Igneel was pure hax like that.

He took a deep breath and spat out a sea of flames right at Nido Monarch. A flash of blue from within the fire told me it was using protect to guard itself. Good. It would have been too easy if that did it.

“Let’s do something new, shall we?” I whispered to myself, connecting Igneel to me even deeper, by opening up our aura bond further. I considered the options and decided that since Nidomonarch was a ground type, merely making the flames hotter would have no effect. It was going to survive most of what we threw at it unless we chose to get ridiculous. But I still had an idea. Igneel had spent months turning swift into the phoenix flame jutsu, and turning flame wheel into flame armour, or turning his body’s natural processes into explosion. When it came to purely original moves, Igneel was far and beyond the most talented of my pokemon. Ino could match up to his learning pace with psychic cheatery but that was different.

‘I have an idea, bud’ I told him, communicating the basic idea behind the Rasengan to him, but repurposed to work with fire type aura, and to work in the context of how he understood his power. Instead of chakra, we’d be using Normal Type energy as the basis of the move, adding the flames later on when we managed to get this down. Wisps of blue light gathered around Igneel’s hand as he stretched it out in front of him. My mind melded with his as we started the move together. I had no idea how aura let me do shit like this, but that was a matter for later consideration. Rotation, I focused first. We were going to get the move to work by using the shadow clone technique with no actual shadow clones. I would be the shadow clone, focusing on rotation and containment while Igneel focused on providing the power and helping me out when I lapsed.

I rotated Igneel’s energy around his palm, allowing it to gain speed by virtue of the rotation itself. Spin created spin, as the normal type energy began to form into individual threads that span all together. Igneel increased the power, and I added it to the existing threads, and then focused on containing all of it into a sphere. Fuck, this was hard. I was moving around power that wasn’t mine in a body that wasn’t mine. Very fucking hard. I looked down with Igneel’s eyes and found Nidomonarch staring right up to me. Some part of me wondered why Janine was just letting me obviously prepare a move but I tossed it aside. When the Rasengan was complete, I considered adding a spark and igniting the entire thing, but I honestly doubted I’d be able to control the move if it came to that. It took all my energy to prevent it from collapsing in on itself or exploding. Unlike the actual jutsu, this move could not just sustain itself once given a power source. I had to focus on maintaining the rotation and concentration while Igneel provided a constant stream of power. We shot straight out of the encirclement of rocks, allowing them to explode around us and ignoring what little damage they did. I’d overestimated the move’s ability to damage Igneel apparently. As we got closer, I noticed something. Nidomonarch’s fists were vibrating with the energy of an earthquake, but that wasn’t the terrifying bit. That honour went to the hyper beam it had been building up in its mouth the whole time.