The combat deck was already in a state of organized chaos when Sieg cleared the hatch. Moves were crossing the air in multiple directions, and the trainers who had come up expecting a manageable skirmish were discovering that the reality was less comfortable than the announcement had implied. A number had already retreated toward the interior, and several Pokémon lay unconscious on the deck planking, eyes spiraled, the fight taken cleanly out of them.
Sieg read the situation in a single sweep.
The attacking group was large but structurally limited by the ship's height. For most of the wild Pokémon in the water below, the hull was simply too tall a barrier. They could throw attacks at it and accomplish nothing more than scoring the paint. The real threats came from two sources: Pokémon with enough raw power to project attacks up and over the rail from a distance, and Pokémon with flight capability who could bypass the hull entirely and land directly on the deck.
A Remoraid cleared the waterline in a rising arc, its round body rotating smoothly as it crested the rail height, the two antennas above its head twitching as a Water Pulse condensed and dropped toward the deck below.
Sieg had Honchkrow out before the pulse completed its descent.
"Honchkrow. Drill Peck. Destroy that Water Pulse. Do not let it reach the deck."
Honchkrow emerged with a harsh, ragged cry that sent the nearest trainers stumbling back a step, the sheer energy radiating off it hitting them before they had processed what they were looking at. A dark shape blurred across the airspace, and the Water Pulse detonated on contact, scattering into harmless spray that pattered across the deck like rain.
The Remoraid that had launched it came down shortly after. Not gently. It hit the deck surface already bearing the kind of damage that made it very clear the encounter had been entirely one-sided, its battle cry replaced by something considerably more plaintive, and lay still with eyes spinning. A level thirty Pokémon that had left every other trainer on deck without a viable answer, handled in the time it took most people to register, there was a problem.
Honchkrow was already moving to the next one.
The pattern that followed was not a battle in any meaningful sense. It was closer to a controlled exercise in repetition. Remoraid, Wingull, the occasional higher-level flier that had managed to reach the rail — each one encountered Honchkrow at the peak of its arc and came back down considerably worse for the meeting. The intervals were short. Every few seconds, another Pokémon dropped from the sky in a state of complete defeat. The trainers watching from the deck, who had spent the opening minutes struggling to hold the line, stood quietly and watched it happen with expressions that ranged from relieved to mildly unsettled.
Sieg watched with open satisfaction. This was exactly the kind of opportunity he had been waiting for. The situation had handed him a continuously resupplied training environment for Honchkrow's Overconfident ability, which was not something you could manufacture on demand. The ability fed on victories, drawing something from each one and building it into something cumulative, and Honchkrow was accumulating fast. The energy coming off it now was visibly different from what it had been twenty minutes ago. Every takedown added another layer to something that had already been considerable to begin with.
"Come on then!" Honchkrow screamed at the sky in its own language, wheeling hard to intercept a Wingull that had broken through the outer line, dispatching it with brisk efficiency and then pulling up sharply to survey the airspace for the next target.
It was not the only thing worth watching in the sky.
On the opposite side of the deck, a Pokémon that looked, at a distance, like something between a large white aircraft and a living creature moved through the airspace with a quality of flight that was different from Honchkrow's aggressive, direct style. Broad triangular wings, immaculate white plumage, a shape that ancient illustrations had rendered as angelic and that the real thing, seen at close range, did nothing to dispel. The old accounts were consistent on this point: Togekiss appeared only in times of peace, was regarded as a creature of blessing and good fortune, and went out of its way to avoid places of conflict and strife.
Currently, it was cutting down attacking Pokémon with repeated Air Slash and showing no apparent difficulty with the contradiction.
Cynthia directed it with the same economical focus she brought to everything, and Togekiss answered each command by sweeping its great wings in a motion that produced blades of compressed air in clean, fast arcs. Whatever its ability was, the flinch rate on those strikes was not what the base move warranted. Either Serene Grace or something adjacent to it was active, because the secondary effects were landing with a consistency that went well beyond probability.
Sieg watched it for a while, turning the stats over in his mind. Base total of 545. Higher than any fully evolved starter. The physical attack stat was low enough to be effectively wasted, but everything else on the line was load-bearing. A Pokémon built to be genuinely useful in almost any configuration, as long as you were not asking it to win a fistfight.
He pulled his attention back to the airspace.
The sky above the Chansey had divided itself cleanly. On the port side, a creature of absolute black moved in tight, aggressive lines, intercepting and dismantling anything that entered its range. On the starboard side, something white and wide-winged swept back and forth in longer, more deliberate arcs, turning the air into a hazard for anything trying to cross it. Between them, the airspace was managed. Nothing was getting through.
Every few exchanges, Honchkrow would bank hard after dropping an opponent and direct one sharp, proprietary look across the deck toward Togekiss. Togekiss, when it landed its own, would angle its head with an expression that communicated awareness of the scoreboard and quiet intent to maintain its position on it. They were not cooperating. They were competing, using the same crisis as a venue, and both of them were performing better for it.
On the far side of the deck, Cynthia had noticed Honchkrow. Sieg could tell by the quality of attention she was giving it, which was different from the tactical monitoring she was giving everything else. She knew what Honchkrow was. The Johto regional origin, the Dark-type, and the specific way it moved. It interested her, and the interest had a particular shape that Sieg had seen before on people who were building toward a challenge request rather than just watching.
Not now, he noted. She knew it herself. The ship was still under active attack, and there was no appropriate window. But the intent was forming, and he filed it for later.
The defense held. Under the captain's direction, the security teams and the volunteer trainers on deck had established enough collective coverage to keep the hull-level attacks from escalating, and the air was being managed by two Pokémon who were, between them, overqualified for the work available. The situation was under control, and the mood on deck had shifted from urgency to managed effort.
Then the sky changed.
It came from the east, where the horizon met the water. A mass of dark cloud that moved against the wind rather than with it, rolling in fast and low over the surface of the ocean, and within thirty seconds of first appearing it was directly overhead, blotting out the morning light and dropping the temperature on deck by several degrees.
The sound that followed came from inside the cloud.
A low, resonant roar that vibrated in the chest rather than the ears, the kind of sound that communicated size and power before the source was visible.
The cloud churned.
Something uncoiled from within it.
The Gyarados was enormous. More than ten meters of scaled, serpentine body caught the grey light as it emerged, moving with the slow, coiling authority of something that had nothing in the ocean to be afraid of. It looked down at the ship with red eyes that carried no particular emotion about what they were seeing.
Then its tail swept.
The motion started at the tip and traveled up the length of its body in a single fluid rotation, and where the tail broke the water's surface, it dragged the sea up with it, seawater twisting into a rotating column that built and widened as it crossed the gap between the Gyarados and the hull. The waterspout hit the side of the Chansey with a force that rocked the entire vessel sideways, and the waves that radiated out from the impact crashed back against the hull in successive surges that made the deck pitch underfoot.
People grabbed railings. A few went down.
Every attempt to intercept the attack with individual Pokémon moves failed to find enough combined weight to break the momentum before it arrived.
Sieg made the calculation quickly and did not hesitate.
Two Poké Balls left his hands simultaneously.
Sharpedo and Crawdaunt materialized at the rail.
Any consideration of keeping his team's full capacity discreet had just been outweighed by the more pressing consideration of not being capsized in open ocean. The Elite-rank restriction from the tournament was not relevant here. This was a different kind of problem.
The math was simple enough. Even with Honchkrow, Umbreon, and whatever help the other trainers on deck could provide, a Gyarados of that size and level operating with whatever had stirred it to this level of aggression was not something you talked down with a conservative approach. And the ocean beyond the rail, vast and unbroken to every horizon, was not somewhere Sieg intended to find himself unless it was a deliberate choice. He had water-type Pokémon and a flier. He would probably survive. Probably was not a word he built plans around.
He preferred his survival to be something he controlled directly.
"Both of you," he said, looking at Sharpedo and Crawdaunt, the water already rising around the hull in the Gyarados's wake. "Everything you have."