"Murkrow, Sucker Punch!"
Sieg's voice snapped out fast. Murkrow reacted instantly. A dark blur crossed the field and hit Dragonite hard in the stomach, the black wings cutting into it like a blade.
Thud.
The impact sent a deep boom rolling through the arena.
Dragonite was launched backward, dark energy still crackling along its abdomen where the strike had landed.
"Dragonite, Thunder Punch."
Dragonite recovered fast. Those chubby fists clenched tight, arcs of electricity exploding between its knuckles as it swung in rapid succession, bolts of lightning detonating across the air.
Murkrow twisted just barely out of the way.
Sieg had caught something in that exchange. What Dragonite had done wasn't simple physical acceleration. Mid-flight, over a short distance, it had used Extreme Speed.
A pseudo-Elite Four Dragonite that had mastered Extreme Speed to the point of weaving it naturally into its movement. Not just in dedicated bursts, but woven seamlessly into ordinary flight, even in the thick of an intense battle.
"And even with Murkrow running both Speed Boost and Tailwind together, it can barely match up on speed?"
Sieg couldn't help but feel it. Extreme Speed really was something else.
He wasn't about to sit back and take it, though.
"Taunt. Then go straight into Night Slash."
Murkrow fixed the Dragonite with a gaze dripping with contempt. The challenge was impossible to miss, and it landed.
Null had been about to call Dragon Dance. The words didn't make it out of his mouth.
And Dragonite, for its part, had a flicker of genuine anger cross its usually mild expression. Taunt had gotten under its skin.
Murkrow folded its wings and shot toward Dragonite through the air. The moment it closed the gap, one wing shifted and deflected Dragonite's incoming Thunder Punch at a sharp, awkward angle. Then, spinning with the motion, the other wing came down in a single diagonal slash driven by Dark-type energy, Night Slash connecting cleanly with Dragonite's arm.
The hit landed critically.
"It actually critted?"
Null murmured it under his breath, genuinely surprised.
Sieg wasn't surprised at all. If anything, he let himself smile just slightly. The two items he had stripped from that Team Aqua grunt had been a Scope Lens and a Mystic Water. Cynthia had taken the Mystic Water. That left the Scope Lens sitting right in Sieg's pocket.
Scope Lens raised the critical hit rate of the holder. Night Slash already had a naturally elevated crit rate built in. Stack the two together, and critical hits stopped being a lucky outcome and started being an expectation.
On top of that, Murkrow had been given a reaction speed supplement a while back. Corvid Pokémon were naturally gifted at reading opponents and finding weak points. Between the item, the drug, and Murkrow's natural instincts, the combination was borderline unfair.
"Night Slash again."
A gleam of sharp satisfaction passed through Murkrow's crimson eyes. It spun back around, wings gathering that dark, brownish-black energy again, and came down hard.
Null's brow was tight. He was starting to realize he had underestimated Sieg. This Snatch system Sieg had developed was letting an elite-level Murkrow genuinely contest his Dragonite, at least in the short term.
"Not bad," Null said. "Let's see if you can handle this one."
"Dragonite, Dragon Rush."
Dragonite's face changed. The mild, dopey expression it usually wore was gone, replaced by something sharp and aggressive. A surge of pure killing intent swept through the arena, heavy enough to feel it on the skin.
The Dragon-type energy condensing around it took shape, a massive phantom dragon rising up behind Dragonite, silent but furious, enormous. Next to it, Murkrow looked tiny.
Dragon Rush. The Pokédex description for this move: Releases a terrifying killing intent, while intimidating the target and charging straight through them.
What Dragonite was showing right now made it clear the move had been mastered far beyond anything the description captured.
Sieg felt his blood start moving faster. His eyes lit up.
"Murkrow, Brave Bird!"
That crimson gaze blazed with fighting spirit. A faint blue flame wrapped around Murkrow's entire body, each feather catching the light like it was burning. A proud phantom eagle materialized at its back, smaller than the dragon it faced, and utterly unafraid.
Like a streak of blue cutting straight through the sky, it launched upward.
BOOM.
The collision hit like a thunderclap, and the shockwave tore through the arena in every direction, the force of it expanding outward and leaving the floor and walls completely torn up.
"Dragonite, push through!"
The phantom dragon roared and dove, the energy clash intensifying, neither side giving ground.
"Murkrow, Swallow Counter!"
Sieg kept his eyes fixed on the shapes in the smoke and dust. Lightning flickered through it. The sounds of a close-range fight were carried out.
When the smoke cleared, Dragonite was standing where it had landed. Scales had been knocked loose across its body, and injuries were visible, the worst of them along its stomach, where a jagged wound was actually dripping blood onto the arena floor.
For a Dragon-type with that kind of vitality, it clearly wasn't serious enough to register as real pain. But it was there.
Murkrow was pressed against the upper half of Dragonite's body, wings and talons moving constantly, intercepting every Thunder Punch Dragonite was trying to swing.
Both of them had just thrown out their hardest moves. Both had taken damage. Neither had run out of steam. They had gone straight from the clash into close-range combat without missing a beat.
Swallow Counter's individual strikes looked almost gentle on the surface, light and quick. But the way Murkrow used it was anything but. Every hit was aimed at something specific. The stomach. The joints. The eyes. Every single strike was aimed to kill.
"Dragonite, break away and get airborne!" Null called urgently.
Dragonite had a size disadvantage in close quarters. It could either take hits or try to shift its bulky frame out of range, while Murkrow's small body made slipping out of anything a much simpler proposition. A prolonged stamina battle at this range was going to favor Murkrow all the way.
But Dragonite was finding that harder said than done. It felt completely locked in place. No matter how it used its arms to block or how it tried to twist away, Swallow Counter kept finding it. The hits just kept coming, and every one of them left a mark.
Meanwhile, every Thunder Punch Dragonite managed to throw back was dodged clean.
Sieg watched his side actually holding Dragonite down and couldn't stop the rush of excitement that came with it.
Swallow Counter had been built for raptor Pokémon. The entire point of it was exactly this: locking the prey down and refusing to let go. Most wild birds and raptor Pokémon used some version of it when hunting.
And Murkrow was not letting him down. Beak, talons, wings, every part of its body that could attack was in use. Each hit flowed straight into the next without a gap, no recovery time, no opening to interrupt. The wing would land before it had even fully pulled back, and then the beak was already following through.
Sharp eyes. Sharp movements. A merciless machine pouring everything it had into the fight.
The strikes were coming so fast that they were past the point of being visible. The only way to track them was by the sharp pops of air pressure snapping with each hit.
And Dragonite, looking deeply aggrieved, could do nothing but raise its arms and block.