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"...Hah."
A harsh, steady light flared in Kael's crimson eyes as he opened his narrow, fang-lined mouth and exhaled long and slow.
The clash with Nidoking had lasted only two moves, but it had been enough. Enough to bleed off that swelling, restless excess of power inside him—the kind that had nowhere to go unless he broke something.
Now only one Nightmare Pokémon remained.
And Kael decided he'd handle this one differently.
For a moment, the clearing felt… heavy. The air held still under the pressure of Kael's presence, as if the forest itself had learned not to breathe.
Then—
A wind stirred.
It was pale and faintly luminous, carrying a soft blue sheen almost like transparent silk drifting through the air. It didn't lash or howl. It simply arrived, quiet and smooth, circling Kael as though the world had decided to move around him instead of against him.
The oppressive tension from earlier didn't vanish, but it changed.
The battlefield took on an eerie calm.
Under the influence of the aura, everything felt gathered. Focused. Settled. Like a lake holding perfectly still before something monstrous surfaced.
And then the Psychic force hit.
BOOM!
A flood of pink psychic energy slammed into Kael's pale-blue aura wind, and a thunderous roar cracked across the sky.
But the aftermath was… wrong.
There should've been devastating shockwaves ripping trees apart, debris exploding outward—
Instead, the clash produced almost no outward blast at all.
The psychic torrent struck Kael's aura field and split cleanly, like a violent tide crashing into a cliff face forced to peel away to the left and right, frothing as it was redirected.
Kael stood at the center of it all.
An eye in the storm.
A circular veil of soft-blue aura expanded around him, shielding a wide patch of ground.
Inside the field: stillness.
Outside it: chaos.
From a distance, Grumpig's dark eyes widened in disbelief.
It didn't make sense.
It had been charging that Psychic attack, building and compressing power, preparing to crush Kael in one overwhelming burst—
…and Kael had blocked it like it was nothing.
"No—!"
Panic surged through Grumpig. It unleashed more power, dumping everything it had into the attack. The black pearl set into its chest trembled under the strain, vibrating as it might crack.
Kael only shook his head.
Then he stepped forward.
One step.
Then another.
The soft-blue aura field moved with him.
Grumpig's psychic wave crashed against it again and again, but the barrier didn't budge.
From above, it looked like a small boat pushing upstream slowly, maybe, but driven by something unbreakable.
Kael kept walking.
His right hand lifted slightly to the side.
He made a simple motion almost lazy—
And closed his fingers.
WHUMP.
The air popped, like a sound being crushed in a fist.
The gentle aura that wound around Kael snapped from calm to violent. It churned, spiraled, and surged outward like it had heard a battle horn.
That same moment—
Grumpig's mind stuttered.
A wave of strange dissonance rolled through its thoughts. It's already panicked energy flow, already unstable, broken rhythm, completely like a musician losing the beat mid-performance.
The pink psychic stream in the air wavered.
It thinned.
It became uneven, struggling to sustain itself.
Aura and psychic power overlapped in function, but they weren't the same.
Psychic excelled at force-grabbing, crushing, and tearing matter apart.
Aura excelled at intent reading, responding, and shaping the battlefield through will and spirit.
Kael didn't just block the attack.
He touched Grumpig's emotional state through aura, fed the fear, deepened the instability, then watched its control slip.
He could've ended this instantly the same way he ended Nidoking.
Rush in.
Close distance.
One blow.
But he didn't.
Kael had only just evolved. He needed to learn what his body could do now how each part of him worked, how each new edge of strength felt.
So after the first opponent that truly enraged him—
He decided the rest would be practice.
Kael planted his right hand near his waist, fingers curling inward, forming a loose cup aimed at the floating Grumpig.
A clean, crystalline hum rang out as polished stone struck against stone.
HMMMM.
Blue light flared into existence, thickening and gathering in Kael's palm. It swirled like a whirlpool, as if the sea itself had been compressed into a single point.
Wind spiraled inside the glow dozens of shimmering currents, layered and rotating.
Slowly, a sphere formed.
A bright, azure orb alive with rotating streams of aura.
A technique Kael had only rarely seen taken seriously in the old world's games—
Now revealed its true brutality in real life.
Aura Sphere.
Across the field, Grumpig's skin prickled.
Something invisible locked onto it, cold and absolute, like a targeting system snapping into place.
Every instinct it had screamed at once:
Move.
Now.
Get out of the way.
Grumpig's eyes filled with dread. It forcibly cut off its Psychic attack pain lanced through its skull, nausea and vertigo flooding in from the sudden interruption.
Even without Teleport, Grumpig still had one advantage:
Precision psychokinesis.
It could move its own body through the air with delicate control zig-zagging unpredictably to dodge most special attacks.
So it did.
It jerked and darted in jagged patterns, erratic and fast, refusing to follow any clean line.
Normally, that would've been enough.
But this wasn't a normal attack.
Aura Sphere didn't rely on sightlines or guesswork.
It wasn't thrown.
It was guided.
Every living being has a unique aura signature, impossible to perfectly replicate.
Kael had already marked Grumpig's.
And the moment he released the sphere, it would follow that signature like a guided missile.
To dodge it, brute movement wasn't enough.
You needed space manipulation a clean displacement.
Teleport.
A phasing strike like Phantom Force.
Anything that removed you from the attack's tracking path entirely.
Wild evasive movement?
It looked flashy.
It looked smart.
But against Aura Sphere—
It meant nothing.
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~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter
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