During the more than half a year they had spent together, Ash and Ashtwo had not interacted much. However, by sheer coincidence, Ash had made an astonishing discovery about his inexpensive junior brother.
Ashtwo actually possessed Aura Power.
And not just any Aura Power—it was Aura Power of the same origin as Ash's.
Ash's cheap father had died young. Furthermore, from what his mother Delia had told him, she and his father had been deeply in love, and his father's character had been unanimously affirmed by both Delia and Professor Oak.
Therefore, Ash could basically rule out the possibility that Steyn was his cheap father's illegitimate son.
Yet Ash had always felt an inexplicably familiar and intimate sensation whenever he was around Steyn.
Combined with the fact that their Aura Power came from the same source, and recalling the conclusion he had previously reached regarding the origin of his own Aura Power, Ash eventually arrived at an answer.
His inexpensive junior brother, Steyn, and Steyn's family were most likely descendants of Sir Aaron, the legendary Aura Guardian from a thousand years ago—just like Ash himself.
After all, Sir Aaron had lived more than a thousand years ago.
Over such an enormous span of time, there was no way his bloodline could have continued through only a single branch.
Once Ash realized that Steyn was most likely a descendant from one of Sir Aaron's bloodlines, the knot in his heart was surprisingly untangled.
He finally understood why Steyn always seemed so familiar to him, and why he instinctively felt such a strong sense of closeness toward him.
Everything came down to the fact that the two of them possessed Aura Power of the same origin.
Or perhaps, more accurately, there was an extremely faint bloodline connection between them.
They shared the same distant ancestor.
However, this familial blood relationship was simply too ancient and too diluted.
Ash didn't take it particularly seriously.
Instead, after figuring out the secret behind his inexplicable sense of familiarity and closeness toward his junior brother, Ash became even more indifferent toward Steyn.
The inner conflict he had once felt toward him disappeared completely.
Now that Steyn was about to leave—or rather, now that his cheap teacher deliberately intended to separate the two of them because he didn't want Ash learning too much about Steyn, the super-talented prodigy Team Rocket had secretly cultivated—Ash wasn't disappointed in the slightest.
After all, his apprenticeship under Giovanni had always been a transaction.
The two sides were simply using each other.
Ash himself didn't want to become too deeply entangled with Giovanni, Ashtwo, or Team Rocket behind them.
After all, he had already been designated by the Kanto League as its number-one seed talent.
Even if he didn't care about the trust the Kanto League had placed in him, as a protagonist blessed by the world's destiny itself, Ash could only firmly choose to stand on the side of justice and light.
"Junior Brother Steyn, don't worry. The congenital hereditary disease in your body has been completely cured by your senior brother. Now that you have a healthy body, I believe that one day you'll become an outstanding Trainer capable of standing shoulder to shoulder with—or even surpassing—Teacher Giovanni."
"Although the two of us won't be able to study together anymore from today onward, you still have to work hard after you return home."
"I'll be looking forward to the day we meet again."
Looking at his inexpensive junior brother, Ash politely offered a few conventional words of encouragement.
Having become a famous celebrity Trainer, frequently surrounded by enthusiastic fans and interviewed by television media, Ash had long since become extremely skilled at handling situations like this.
"Mm-hmm~"
Hearing Ash's words, Ashtwo gently nodded.
Earlier, it had been said that Ash's feelings toward Ashtwo were complicated.
But how could Ashtwo's feelings toward Ash be any less complicated?
From the moment he gained consciousness and was born inside the New Island laboratory, Ashtwo had known that he was a cloned copy of another person.
When he had first been born, Ashtwo had been completely lost.
He didn't understand why he had been created and brought into this world.
He didn't know what value or meaning his existence held.
He had no father.
No mother.
No relatives.
No family.
No friends...
When Ashtwo first entered this world, his heart was not only filled with confusion but also overwhelming loneliness.
Before long, however, he was given a name.
Ashtwo.
Once he learned his name and understood the meaning contained within it, Ashtwo also learned the purpose and meaning of his existence.
He had been born to surpass Ash—the original.
Once he understood the value and meaning of his existence, the confusion in Ashtwo's heart disappeared.
And before long, he gained a teacher in Giovanni.
With someone he could regard as family, he was no longer lonely.
He began following the path Giovanni had carefully designed for him, constantly working toward a single goal:
Surpass Ash, the original.
Everything seemed to be proceeding according to plan.
Everything seemed to be moving in a positive direction.
But then one problem after another emerged.
First, before his birth, Ashtwo had been injected with an excessive amount of growth hormones, causing the development and aging of his body's cells to accelerate abnormally.
Second, there was the Viridian Power that Ash—the original—possessed.
No matter how hard Ashtwo tried, he simply couldn't awaken it.
Fortunately, not long afterward, Giovanni took Ashtwo away from the New Island laboratory and brought him to Viridian City in the inland region of Kanto, where he began receiving his teacher's instruction at the Viridian Gym.
It was also there that Ashtwo made another astonishing discovery.
Ash—the original himself—was actually Giovanni's first disciple.
In other words...
Ash was his senior brother.
And to make matters even more complicated, Ash was already a household-name genius Trainer throughout Kanto.
When Ashtwo learned the true identity of his original self, he had no idea how he was supposed to interact with Ash.
Ash was a legendary genius Trainer known throughout the Kanto region.
At an incredibly young age, he had already accomplished things that ordinary people could never hope to achieve.
And what made his achievements even more astonishing was that Ash had come from an ordinary civilian family.
After learning about Ash from Giovanni, as well as secretly investigating and gathering additional information himself, Ashtwo became extremely curious about his original self.
At the same time, a feeling of admiration and even worship gradually began to emerge in his heart.
Furthermore, when Ashtwo had first been born, Giovanni hadn't told him much about Team Rocket, the Pokémon League, or the conflicts of interests and opposing factions between them.
Although the meaning hidden within his name had already planted a seed of competition and confrontation in his heart, it was still only a seed.
At the beginning, Giovanni hadn't been in a hurry to brainwash Ashtwo or deliberately sow discord between the two of them and turn them against each other.
And because Ashtwo's identity as a clone had never been exposed to Ash, the relationship between the three of them—
Ash → Ashtwo → Giovanni
—was actually quite good in the beginning.
Although Ashtwo's goal was to surpass Ash, his original self, and although the fact that they came from the same school naturally created a competitive relationship between the two senior and junior disciples, their relationship hadn't yet reached the point of hostility.
Especially after Ash began using his Viridian Power to treat the accelerated aging of Ashtwo's body cells, Ashtwo's feelings toward Ash—the original, his senior brother—became increasingly tangled and complicated.
Of course, all of that described only the situation at the beginning.
Just as Ash had eventually found his own way of dealing with these tangled emotions, Ashtwo would gradually do the same.
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T/N:
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