"Legends never die—they reincarnate in lightning and vengeance."
---
The ground beneath the ruined Spear Pillar quaked as the ancient winds howled through the shattered columns. Snow swirled with ash. Time itself felt like it had slowed for the return of something thought lost.
Pikachu stood before Auron—scorched, breathing heavily, fur slightly matted, but very much alive.
Ares took a step back.
"No," he whispered. "I watched you die. I killed you."
Pikachu's cheeks sparked. The red circles on his face pulsed with a divine glow—an unnatural kind of electricity, not born from nature but from something more… primal. His eyes locked onto Ares with the kind of fury that could only come from love lost and vengeance remembered.
Auron knelt beside him, his voice caught between grief and awe. "You came back."
Pikachu looked up, and in his eyes Auron saw the reflection of Ash Ketchum—the same resolve, the same boundless spirit.
It was him.
Not just a resurrection. Not a clone. Something more. The final gift from the fractured heart of Arceus, a divine anomaly in a world that had strayed too far from balance.
"You were never just a Pokémon," Auron whispered. "You were family."
---
Ares broke the moment. His voice rose like a snarl. "You think some rat can change fate?!"
He flung his arm forward, and a wave of black distortion energy surged across the battlefield, warping space as it moved. Trees bent. Stone withered.
But Pikachu met it head-on.
With a roar that cracked the sky, Pikachu vanished—a lightning bolt incarnate—and reappeared in front of Ares mid-air, delivering a Thunderpunch so infused with sacred energy that it shattered Ares' armguard on impact.
The god-blooded warrior staggered back.
"You think you've won something?" Ares growled. "He's just a ghost. I'm evolution. I'm war perfected."
Pikachu landed beside Auron, growling.
"No," Auron said, his eyes burning gold now, "you're a mistake."
Together, they moved—trainer and partner, forged not by capture, but by shared blood and memory. Auron channeled the last of his Aura into his blade. Pikachu's body became a living conduit for divine electricity.
They were the storm.
---
What followed was not a battle—it was a requiem.
Pikachu surged in arcs of golden lightning, striking faster than sound. Auron clashed with Ares blade to blade, their weapons singing with fury and sparks. Every blow was a memory. Every dodge, a loss remembered. Every scream, a vow.
"You left nothing!" Auron screamed as his blade sheared through Ares' corrupted pauldron. "You took her from me! My mother—my home!"
"You were never meant to exist!" Ares bellowed, countering with a spear of pure dimensional rift energy. "You're an afterthought!"
Lightning met shadow.
Steel met darkness.
And then—Pikachu leapt into the sky, channeling every storm that had ever graced this world.
The clouds tore open above him, forming a divine insignia.
A bolt fell.
Not thunder.
Judgment.
It struck Ares dead center, launching him into the air, armor shattering piece by piece. Screaming.
Auron followed. The sky around him shimmered as he ascended. His sword now fully lit with Ash and Cynthia's combined resonance—his final inheritance.
He drove the blade into Ares mid-air. It sank deep, not into flesh—but into existence.
Ares howled.
The sky fractured.
And then he vanished in a burst of black dust and screams.
---
Silence.
Pikachu panted beside Auron as they landed. The sky, for the first time in weeks, was still.
Auron collapsed to his knees, exhausted.
Pikachu nudged against him, warm, solid, real.
Oak stumbled toward them from the edge of the crater. "It's over…"
"No," Auron said quietly, staring at the sun breaking through the clouds. "It's just begun."
And behind them, the wind whispered her name—Cynthia.
---