This is the third of four chapters today.


All right, go, Mewtwo said.

His hand swept across, englobing the Megarig, Ho-Oh and Charizard in a bubble of psychic energy, and Charizard followed up by focusing his strength.

A salvo of Dark Pulses flashed out at Charizard, who spun in mid-air and evaded most of them. Only one managed to score a hit, colliding with his wing, but a quick Steel Wing denied it the ability to do much damage. Grunting a little from the impact, Charizard finished his turn and exhaled a cone of shimmering blue gas.

It hung in the air for a fraction of a second, then exploded. The blast acted like an enormous shaped-charge, firing a jet of incandescent plasma at the Megarig's shields at the same time as Ho-Oh used Sacred Fire on them, and Mewtwo joined in by hammering it with the most powerful Psychic he could manage at the same time.

The shields glowed as they shed heat, their griseous pattern becoming more apparent, then a patch of local failure appeared as the stress got too much. Mewtwo teleported closer, firing a Flash Cannon through the gap, and it passed through thin air as the Megarig dropped into phase – the last flicker of visible movement indicating that it was rotating, as well, to confuse the issue of where the shields had been stressed.

How are you holding up? Mewtwo asked, turning his attention to the Fire-types as they all waited for the Megarig to return to tangibility.

"I'm having a bit of trouble using Blast Burn so much," Charizard admitted.. "It's kind of a psychological thing, partly – it's really inculcated into us that it's powerful enough you have to be wary of using it, so using it this much against a single enemy..."

"I'm doing better, but Sacred Fire is too short range," Ho-Oh said candidly. "It's my best attack, but it's just not got enough range unless I set the sky alight – and that has obvious problems here."

I see, Mewtwo replied, then turned to look in the direction of one of the floating islands – which held the closest blind spot for himself and the two Flying-types, given where they'd been when the Megarig became intangible.

There was a sudden flash.


Latias blurred ahead, moving at full speed towards the Megarig as it began to appear. It had picked one of the slightly less obvious spots than the one she'd already been hiding in, but it was still close enough for her to reach quickly – and she was pushing hard, already charging up a Mist Ball as she bored in towards the Megarig.

Then she waved her hand, and the Pokémon on her back opened fire.

Dexter was first, his combat projection distorted enough that it looked like an old-style raygun, and he fired a Zap Cannon attack directly at the shield. It went a little off target, but it did hit the shield – and the moment it did, Pikachu supplemented it with a paired Volt Crash powerful enough it made Latias' tiny feathers all stand on end.

The triple blow of the powerful Electric attacks produced secondary discharges all over that half of the shield, and Latias side-slipped smoothly through the air to keep the damaged patch of the shields in her line of fire.

Her Mist Ball flicked out next, a deceptively small ball of white light which exploded violently on contact with the Megarig's energy shield, and she adjusted her angle just a little.

Lucario and Kari used Sacred Sword, and the beam of brilliant blue energy made contact – with the shield, this time, not with the Megarig itself. The impact was enough to produce a momentary patch of localized failure, and Kari blurred out of Lucario's paws to cut a second slash at right angles to the first – right across the failure patch.

A gap opened that was just about big enough, and Latias pushed her shields to maximum power and hammered into them. The two opposing sheaths of protective energy clashed with a flicker of violent light, then Latias broke through – going quite a bit too fast.

Kari shot back to Lucario's paw, and he scooped up Pikachu and Dexter in his other arm before jumping off Latias' back as they got close to the Megarig. Slamming Kari's tip into the flying machine, he skidded along the whole of one spindly 'wing' before finally coming to a bruising halt against the main body of the Megarig itself.

"Let's do that again," Pikachu commented dryly, as Lucario tugged Kari free again and observed the long gash of ripped metal they'd left behind. "I wonder if that's broken anything?"

The Megarig twisted suddenly, nearly throwing Pikachu off before Lucario grabbed him, and a half-dozen Shadow Balls flicked out of the nearest projector. Lucario blocked them with two sweeps of Kari's blade and a Night Slash as Pikachu blew the weapons module to bits, then the Steel-type reversed his teammate and used her to cut a triangle shape into the Megaig's hull.

Kicking it hard enough to dent it, he slipped inside with the others – then the world around them faded like mist, leaving only the Megarig.

It seems the cooldown time of the phasing engine ran out, Dexter observed. Let's see…

A screen lit up, showing Infi. "Leave."

"After all the effort it took to get in here?" Lucario asked. "And while you're causing this much damage? No, we're staying."

Infi's expression shifted a little, becoming more determined. "Then I will make you."

The whole ship shook again, a sudden jolt caused by a course-change attempt to try and throw them out of the open gap, but both Pikachu and Lucario were using Aura to hold themselves down now and nothing happened.

Interfacing, Dexter reported, then emitted a sigh of electronic hash as the image of Infi vanished. I have been physically cut off from the systems.

One of the nearby doors opened, and a pair of Magneton attacked – exerting a powerful magnetic force on Lucario, trying to pull him from the floor and throw him out the hole he and Kari had made. A floor tile gave way, letting them pull him into the air, and he twisted to spread himself across the triangle and avoid simply being hurled out the 'window'.

Pikachu darted forwards and punched one of the Magneton hard enough to dent the wall it hit, then hit the other with a bolt of Thunder which interrupted its electromagnetic effects. That freed Lucario, and he twisted in place before slamming a Low Kick into the second Magneton and knocking it out.

"Let's get going!" he said. "She can't cut the whole ship off from itself, so there's got to be somewhere Dexter can plug in!"

"That or she'll break enough of the ship that Mewtwo can sort it out," Pikachu agreed. "I like this plan."

He looked back out of the hole as they dropped back out of phase, spotting Latias some distance away. "Pity Latias didn't get in before it phased again, though..."


"I lost him, where did he go?" Giratina called, looking around.

Ash checked with one eye closed, and pointed. "That way! But he's moving really fast – faster than I think you can!"

Giratina began to surge along in that direction anyway, body undulating as he swam through the air of the Reverse World.

"Wait, I have an idea," Ash added. "You can make yourself lighter, right?"

"Well, I'm a Ghost type, so sort of… why?"

"Pidgeot, over here!" Ash called.

The Flying-type banked around in a tight circle and came over. "What is it?"

"Can you give us a tow?" Ash asked. "Giratina's not fast enough."

Pidgeot nodded, falling into formation with them, and slid over so she was about a foot over Ash's head. Her feet extended down to meet him, and Ash grabbed hold – staying on Giratina's back at the same time with Aura.

Conjuring two massive wings of air, Pidgeot began to pull. Mega Latios joined in, lending his telekinesis to evenly distribute the force on Giratina's body, and Shaymin joined the formation a moment later – though she couldn't really offer anything to help Giratina move faster, apart from moral support.

"How fast are we going to go?" the Grass-type Legendary asked. "And I – whoah!"

Pidgeot summoned a Tailwind that engulfed the whole formation and made them accelerate swiftly, steering them in a wide arc around a pair of mountains joined at the peak, until the odd landscape of the Reverse World was blurring by.

"Are we on target?" Pidgeot called.

"I think so," Ash replied. "It looks like we're pretty close, anyway – and he's not getting any further away, I can still see him!"

Pidgeot's wings beat harder, and a shock of white broke around the bubble of moving air she was maintaining as the whole ad-hoc team went supersonic.

"I see him as well," she reported, as they shot past a forest growing in all directions from a collection of floating cubes. "I think we can catch up – hold on!"

"This feels strange," Giratina muttered.


"Giratina and accompanying team approaching," Infi warned, and Zero examined the screen she brought up for him.

"So I see," he said, after looking for several seconds at the closely grouped Pokémon. "Ash Ketchum's team is indeed very impressive – it's a pity that he isn't listening to me, really, and that we'll have to resolve this with violence."

He turned his attention to the area they were flying over – a distorted city-scape, with houses floating in mid-air or tesselated together to form giant walls and arches. It was like looking at a half-finished construction site with houses instead of bricks, and like much of the Reverse World had a surreal beauty to it.

"Is it likely this area corresponds to a city?" he asked.

"Confirmed," Infi agreed. "Probability high but not certain."

"That should mean they can't use most of their more powerful attacks," he decided. "Take us through."

Infi nodded, and a portal opened in front of them – snapping open and then closed in less than a second.

Zero examined the terrain, then brought his Mecha Giratina around to hover over the main park – a little way from the crowded Baccer stadium.


"We're about to reach where he jumped!" Mega Latios called.

Ash let go of Pidgeot, and the tailwind collapsed around them. That left Giratina a lot of velocity to shed, which he began doing straight away as Ash sent out Meganium and she gave Shaymin a top-up.

"Ready!" Shaymin announced a few seconds later, and fired out a Seed Flare. It detonated with a wham, tearing the sky asunder, and Giratina looped around to pass through along with the others.

"It's a city!" Pidgeot warned, just before Ash could do the same, and both she and Mega Latios immediately pulled up to get clear. Shaymin did the same, and Giratina looked around – mildly puzzled – as he shifted to Altered Form and landed on all six legs.

"We need to get somewhere where there's no people, in case Zero attacks us here," Ash explained. "I… wait, is this Crown City? Okay, um… there's a park about half a mile that way!"

A blast of Thunder suddenly shot from the ground nearby, in about the direction Ash was pointing. Pidgeot took a glancing blow along her flank from the attack, then dove towards it – taking another hit – and vanished from sight.

There was a sound like tearing silk, and the red beam of an Aeroblast flashed up at a low angle.

"Nice work!" Ash said, switching to Aura sight again to monitor what was going on through the clutter. "She got low enough so there was only the sky behind him!"

Giratina broke into a run, jumping right through one of the nearby buildings to head towards where Ash had indicated. "I hope he stays still long enough that I can go after him – hold on!"

The Legendary vaulted across the main river running though Crown City, and accelerated towards the scene of the fighting.


Grings Kodai closed the blinds on his apartment window.

He wondered why he came back to Crown City at all, sometimes. The place was clearly getting more ridiculous every time he visited.


"How much more of this is there going to be?" Misty asked. "Absol, any idea?"

"Not much of one," Absol replied, her breathing a little laboured. "There's been a lot of them, and it's been exhausting because they only show up on my radar a few seconds before they actually happen here in the normal world."

Misty nodded. "Right – I didn't realize that was going on. You've been doing great so far."

She looked around Gracidea. "Despite appearances..."

Absol had to chuckle, as the valley looked terribly badly damaged. Most of the steeper mountainside slopes had already crumbled into the valley centre, and there was everything from a stalled glacier to several large scorch marks showing how much of the side-effects from the battle in the Reverse World had leaked through.

"The better news is really that everything outside the valley has been caught as well," Absol said then. "Though there's been fewer things total… not sure why."

She froze for a moment, and Misty tensed. "What is it?"

Absol held up a paw for a moment, concentrating, then turned sharply to the Pokémon acting as her messengers.

"Warn Squirtle and Muk!" she called.

Misty did a double-take as Swellow rocketed off, but then felt an odd greasy feeling on her skin.

She looked up, and saw an enormous weather system congealing out of thin air overhead – forming before her eyes, swelling and blackening and swirling all at once.

Reaching for her belt, Misty got ready to send out Seaking – only to realize the Water-type in question was already at the lakeside.

Then she saw a bright flash from where Swellow had gone.


"Ready!" Squirtle called.

"I've got the Key Stone here-" Ivysaur began, then stared as Squirtle very deliberately slammed his homemade Squirtilite against his shell hard enough to crack it. "What did you just do?"

"Just get that Key Stone working!" Squirtle replied, and Ivysaur complied as he felt the electrical charge building up in the air. The Key Stone flashed, then so did the damaged Squirtilite, and the two flared brightly enough to leave spots dancing in Ivysaur's vision.

Water surged out of the broken Water Stone, all of it glowing with a multicoloured light as all the Infinity Energy flowed into it instead of Squirtle, and the slightly-crazy Water-type took control of it with a gesture before forming it all up together into a single liquid mass – which rapidly took shape, forming an enormous Vaporeon shape over the course of only a few seconds.

An enormous stroke of lightning blazed down through the water construct into the ground, turning a chunk of it to steam, but Squirtle's control of the water was good enough to prevent it simply exploding outwards and instead there were visible bubbles held entirely within the artificial Vaporeon – frozen in place by the mass of the Infinity-infused water all around it, containing all the violence instead of letting it out to harm any of the nearby Pokémon.

Squirtle reached down with one paw of his construct, and picked up Muk. The water flowed around him, moving the Poison-type to the nose of the artificial Vaporeon, and Muk launched a barrage of Electric-type attacks at the cloud. The electrical potentials elsewhere in the cloud began to dissipate, all the energy drawn towards Squirtle's giant Vaporeon, and he flexed the tail up into the air to form a lightning rod – which began to discharge the cloud, absorbing several lightning bolts a second and sending little bursts of steam in all directions as they overwhelmed his containment field.

Not to be put off, Squirtle began to use Rime to cool the construct down again – preventing it from getting dangerously hot – and shifted himself so he was sitting roughly between the 'eyes' of the giant faux-Vaporeon.

"This raging storm won't overcome the depth of my soul!" he declared. "No natural force, no matter how strong, can overcome the heart of the badass Squirtle of the Squirtle Squad! And whether you bring fire, ice or lightning, you can't compete with the passion of three Pokémon working together as one!"

Ivysaur decided he was probably the third Pokémon Squirtle was talking about, then noticed something odd about the cloud.

"...Squirtle!" he called. "It's about to hail!"

No sooner had he said it than the blaze of lightning bolts stopped – replaced by enormous hailstones, at least two feet across, which began to fall all over Gracidea.

Attacks lanced out to stop them from all the Pokémon who still had energy to spare, reducing them from highly dangerous masses of falling ice to large quantities of snow, and Squirtle's construct brought down its tail to shield Ivysaur from attack.

"Fire attacks!" Squirtle called, and Muk complied – resulting in Squirtle's increasingly-bizarre artificial Vaporeon firing a jet of flame into the clouds. A jet of flame that went on and on and on, interspersed with occasional blasts of air or beams of psychic energy, but overwhelmingly made up of the Fire-type attacks Squirtle had called for.

Fire Blast after Flamethrower after Incinerate detonated in the interior of the evil-looking black overcast, heating it and turning the giant hail into slush and then into a warm rain.

Then Squirtle's construct crouched, and leapt into the air with a push-off from both paws and the thick piscine tail, rising to the height of the cloud – and exploded.

Water went rushing outwards in all directions, physically forcing away the combination of air currents and particles which had created the seething cloud overhead, and as it left a moment of clear sky Muk pulsed out the most powerful Sunny Day he could manage.

Water fell all over Gracidea, lit by the sun, and finally Muk landed with a splatch right next to Ivysaur.

Squirtle did four backflips, and stuck a three-point landing right in front of his friend. "Oh, yeah!" he announced. "It worked!"

Ivysaur gave him a very severe look.


"Well, I guess that… solved that," Misty admitted, getting a towel out of her bag. "How did you know they could pull that off?"

"I knew that if I asked them to help it would go better than if I didn't," Absol replied. "I didn't know what they were going to do either."

She shook the water off her coat, then looked around. "Good, Karen and Sidney are both here. Can you please tell their Absols to take over? I'd quite like a bit of a rest now..."


Within the computer systems of the Megarig, Infi felt a rising sense of emulated frustration.

The Porygon2 was surprisingly good at coding ways around her anti-intrusion software, and his own ICE was easily refined enough to stop her doing the same. Though she tried fighting him every time the intruders got into a new area, if for no other reason than to give her time to direct the defences to try and get rid of the whole group, she was still having to excise connections as they became possible attack routes to try and shut her down.

Twitching a circuit, she sealed a dozen blast doors in the path of the Pokémon fighting their way towards anything they could find that was part of the ship's vital systems, then appeared on the wall by one of the guard posts.

"The intruders are at junction 34-S," she stated, watching them on her cameras. Even as she spoke, she slammed one of the other blast doors as the Pikachu was passing through – only for him to twist and hold it open with a grunt of effort, which stalled it for long enough that the Lucario could force it back into the housing with a protesting whine as the motors burned out.

Returning her attention to the Magnezone, she continued. "Get rid of them. All of them, if possible, though any one will do."

The Magnezone and their Magneton sidekicks buzzed out an affirmative, and floated off down the corridor. As they did, Infi spared a thread of attention to check on the ship status – making her wince.

The damage was definitely having an impact on her ability to fight properly. She could compensate, changing the movements of the Megarig to avoid exposing the vulnerable surfaces as much, but if this kept going then even without a successful hack attempt the damage would increase to the point that she couldn't hold off the collection of powerful Pokémon outside – currently biding their time, waiting for their boarding attempt to succeed.

If the flying Pokémon outside were less mobile, she could have tried to use the presence of the boarders as a sort of shield by making high-risk high-reward attacks, but both Psychic-types were blisteringly fast and the Ho-Oh kept doing some kind of boost move she'd never seen before. Even the Charizard – the slowest Pokémon out of the whole group – was annoyingly fast and alert, evading attack after attack no matter how cunningly Infi tried to box him in.

Surging current through another connection, she burned it off, then turned to a hardened camera to watch as the Steel-type security Pokémon reached the boarders.

One of the Magneton emitted a powerful electromagnetic field, aiming it directly at the enemy Pikachu, and a cloud of static blasted out around them as Pikachu countered with a kind of enveloping shield made up of dozens of little recirculating lightning bolts. The shield spun three times, then halted and focused to a point – blasting an attack in turn out at the Magneton, which struggled briefly as Pikachu trapped it in an inverted electrical shield.

Pikachu darted forwards and spun, tail shimmering a silvery blue, and knocked the Magneton out the side of the ship with a kerrunch of mangled metal.

As Pikachu landed, Lucario lashed out with a spinning kick – taking a powerful blast of electrical energy from the Magnezone, but knocking it sideways into the wall and sending a pulse of extra electrical energy through the systems of the Megarig. The surge protectors caught it, but Infi's view of the area fuzzed for a moment.

It only returned for a second before the camera failed again, but in that second she saw the Lucario wielding a completely-on-fire Honedge with no visible sign of discomfort. The impact knocked both Magnezone and the remaining Magneton out of the Megarig through the same hole – making it larger – and part of the surge of flame coming off the sword hit the camera, rendering it non-functional.

Infi cued up another trick, preparing to blow one of her own bulkheads up to try and knock them out into the void of the Reverse World, and waited for the Honedge to begin slicing through the blast door between the room they'd been in and the room she'd readied as a trap.

They seemed to be taking quite a long time.


"Two more, over there!" Charizard called, wings flaring, and twisted around to match speeds with the nearest Magneton. There was a crackle of static as he got closer, making him wince, and he gained a little more distance so the electrical charges wouldn't hurt him just from being nearby.

"Just so you know, I'm going to Flamethrower you unless you come quietly," he explained seriously. "Are you going to come quietly?"

The Magneton considered that, then neutralized the charge with a fat pop and a smell of ozone.

Charizard grabbed the Magneton, slowing it and bringing it to rest on a nearby island, then took off as Ho-Oh brought the Magnezone over as well.

"Wonder if all that static's having an effect in the real world," he said.

"I don't really know how we might tell," Ho-Oh replied with a winged shrug. "The only thing here that can create portals is the Megarig, and I think it's best to avoid any portals it might generate."


"We're cut off, right?" Pikachu checked, his voice barely audible over the buzz of the static hum he was generating from his ears.

Correct, Dexter confirmed. The cameras are all destroyed or disconnected and I have not located any surviving audio links. The white noise should keep us from being overheard.

He turned his attention to Lucario and Kari. My best prediction for our location relative to the important areas of the Megarig is that we will need to move as follows, taking our current facing as towards the bow. Down, down, port, forwards, port, down and then we will be there. This is one of the two primary control bus locations – it has a redundant spare, but that is why I have given Pikachu his own instructions.

He paused. Understood?

Lucario and Pikachu nodded.

"For certes, yes," Kari agreed.

Taking Kari's hilt once more, Lucario summoned up a swirling cloud of blue Aura.

He nodded to Pikachu, then used Extremespeed and sliced through the floor. Once, twice, three times, then a handspring off the ceiling and he kicked a huge chunk out of the floor.

Pikachu darted through, cloaked in Agility, and set off to starboard – hammering through the nearest dividing wall with an Aura Sphere and a Force Palm, making a gap just big enough for him to slip through, and vanishing from Lucario's view as the Fighting-type blew a hole in the next floor as well.

Their next target was tougher, a full bulkhead forming part of an internal structural girder, and Lucario smacked it with a Fire Punch to heat it and compromise the integrity of the metal. Turning with the recoil from his powerful punch, he kicked the bulkhead low down as he swept Kari through high up, then flicked his own Sacred Sword through top-to-bottom as he brought Kari back up into a ready position. Using Aura for grip, he shoulder-charged through the wall and backhanded the two startled Magnemite in the room before they could react.

A tremble ran through the ship, and the lights flickered for a moment – indicating Pikachu had done his job, and taken out the reserve data bus.

The unfortunate thing was that now the AI in charge of the ship would be able to work out what their objective was… but it would still take time to do anything useful with the information.


Fascinating, Mewtwo said. So your research derived from discovering natural portals between the normal world and the Reverse World?

"Yes, though of course it transpired that they weren't natural at all," Newton explained.

He watched as Mewtwo batted away two Ancientpower attacks, both of them aimed squarely for his torso, then teleported two feet to the left to let a Ghost-type attack hiss past.

"Is the fighting going on up there under control?" he asked. "I don't really get involved in Pokémon attacks much, but it looks like you're getting the upper hand..."

I think we are, though a lot of that is dependent on the success of the group of Pokémon we got aboard, Mewtwo said. They're very effective Pokémon, though.

"Glad to hear it," Newton said, then blinked as Mewtwo vanished.

"Er… hello?" he called, looking around.

"Sorry, I think he's busy," Latias called, pausing briefly next to him before zipping past.

Newton looked up, and did a double-take as he saw the Megarig firing on the nearby islands – each attack being stopped by Ho-Oh, or by Mewtwo, or now by Latias as well.

"What did you do to poor Infi, Zero?" he asked. "Why is she acting like this?"


"Well, we're here," Lucario said, examining the door before giving the housing a swift kick – enough to make it seize up, without compromising it as an obstacle. "What now?"

Now place my projector in this housing unit, Dexter directed, creating a hologram to show what he meant, and Lucario duly placed the combat projector where he'd been directed. Interfacing… please ensure that I am not moved from this position until the interface process is complete.

The door clunked as Infi tried to open it, but it stuck on the jammed housing.

"All right," Lucario said, taking a stance. "You're sure she won't just disconnect this?"

If she did she'd lose access to half the weapons, Dexter replied. I'm not sure which half, it depends where her physical centrum is, but there's only two high capacity data links and Pikachu broke the other one.

The door creaked, then ripped halfway open as four Magneton combined their force, and Lucario reached out a paw. Kari smacked into it without complaint, and he swung her up to block a powerful Charge Beam attack which flashed through the open door.

A second one came in through the gap, higher than the first, and he twisted Kari to block that one as well. When the third came along, Lucario used his free paw to catch the attack – trapping it in a glowing ball of Aura as the energy built up, then firing it back into the room on the other side of the hole.

There was a crash, and the electrical attacks stopped for a moment. Then Sonicboom attacks replaced them, pulses of powerful sound, and Lucario put a Protect screen across the door.

"Hey," Pikachu called, sliding through the same gap Lucario and the others had entered. "How's things?"

"Not too bad, though there are loads of Magneton out there," Lucario said, indicating the direction with a vague wave of his arm. "They seem upset."

His Protect shield began to waver under the bombardment, and Pikachu peeked through to get an idea of what was on the other side.

"Yep, they look angry," he agreed. "Hey, Kari, how much more than me do you weigh?"

"I am a well balanced arming sword, not an iron bar," Kari chided him. "I probably weigh less than you do."

"Fair enough," Pikachu replied. "Should still work… mind if I borrow you for a moment?"

On Kari's agreement, Lucario passed her over to Pikachu.

The Protect shield went down, and Pikachu darted out into the larger room on the other side of the door – holding Kari's sheath in his tail, using her as both a counterweight to change direction at need and as a weapon. Sonicboom attacks exploded around them both, some going right through Kari's blade, and Pikachu hammered one Magneton with a burst of electricity powerful enough to override its levitation. Jumping over it as it slammed to the floor, he did a forwards flip and brought Kari's blade down for a Sacred Sword on a Magnezone just as it floated into the room.

Two more Magneton combined their efforts to catch Pikachu in an electromagnetic bottle, and he surged electricity through both himself and Kari before flicking her around in an arc – getting them both out of the area of the bottle, and giving him enough space to throw out a barrage of Aura Spheres.

To show he was still taking part, Lucario reached out through the gap, grabbed a Magneton by one magnet, and threw it through a wall.

"I'm not sure whether this place is impressively fragile or impressively sturdy," Pikachu commented, throwing Kari with a flick of his tail so she could attack a trio of Magnemite. "We're making a lot of holes in it, but it is still functioning..."


As the battle continued on the Megarig's main deck, a wholly different kind of war raged in the circuitry of the main systems.

Dexter used all the tricks and little bits of software he'd written for exactly these kinds of situations, overwhelming individual network nodes and subverting them, and kept control of the ones he'd already managed to snag by multithreading his own attention so each one was under continuous supervision.

Infi had considerably less experience or skill at cyberwarfare, which was the main reason Dexter had been able to start so well – but she was learning by experience, and still controlled the majority of the computing hardware on board the Megarig. Every improvement she implemented pared away at Dexter's opening advantage, working out counters to his best methods of attacking or defending the nodes.

Commands, instructions, spoofed signals, worms and junk data flowed back and forth through the Megarig's main circuitry, and Dexter began innovating as well – coming up with new ways to manage the silent warfare, from deriving one of Infi's internal encryption keys and using it to take a dozen nodes at once to a more outside-the-box approach where he infiltrated a key communication link for the whole of one of the Megarig's star-shaped arms and burned it with a current surge. Infi lost all the rest of the nodes in that part of the ship, reducing her botnet, and Dexter took advantage of it by leapfrogging a little further forwards.

It looked like winning this was going to take something else, though, and Dexter began putting together something entirely different.

He'd already managed to disable or subvert enough of the specialized projectors that it was no longer possible to phase the entire Megarig… but there might be an opportunity there, as well…


Almost all of her attention on the cyber battle, Infi's focus on actually fighting with the Megarig had been reduced to such a slender thread that she was barely aware of the environment at all. The subroutine operating the weapons was as simple as she could get away with – just targeting nearby islands and firing on them, to keep the other Pokémon busy – but already that was being affected, as one of the weapons fell out of operation from the efforts of the infuriating Porygon2.

Then a whole swath of her internal schematic lit up, indicating serious heat damage, and she hesitated – losing another weapons projector and two engines as Dexter capitalized on her momentary pause.


Ho-Oh launched another blast of Sacred Fire through the hole he'd melted, wings glowing a brilliant rose-gold as they reflected the flames of his attack

"Thanks!" Pikachu called, from the corner he'd darted into when Ho-Oh arrived. "Nice timing!"

Ho-Oh nodded and exhaled a third blast, driving about every still-conscious Magneton and Magnemite away from Pikachu and Kari, then dropped away from the gap.

It had been more than a little painful to force his way physically through the shield, especially with a rocket-jet boost to give him the momentum, but it had been nothing that wouldn't heal.

Ho-Oh was good at healing.


Here goes… Dexter muttered to himself, and activated the new subroutine he'd written.

For this one, he wasn't using any of the capability he'd captured and turned against Infi – except indirectly. The computing capacity that he'd been providing with his projector had been replaced bit by bit over the last minute with nodes he'd captured, but their capture had been performed through a back route after he'd cut them off from the last connection they had with the section of the ship Infi still had access to. So if she was keeping track of his available resources, his projector proper would still look fully utilized… as, indeed, would everything else, as he began mounting a brute-force attack on a key switching node. She could probably handle it, but it would take all her effort – and if she couldn't, well, that would just result in his winning anyway.

The subroutine, meanwhile, connected his core projector directly with one of the phasing modules he'd isolated and reprogrammed. It spread a very peculiar spatial skew field around his projector, not impinging on it directly but still quite present.

After a pause to confirm everything was as he was expecting, Dexter projected his combat form into the skew field. All the feedback he was getting from his sensors went bananas, but in about the way the electronic Pokémon was expecting – so he completed the process, then quickly sped forwards while he hung a breath out of phase with the physical world.

His projector was still solid, and his body wasn't… until it got the right distance away, where it began to drop back into reality.

Just where he wanted.


With the bare fraction of her attention that was involved with what was going on in the physical world as opposed to cyberspace, Infi winced internally.

The files she had on the abilities of Ho-Oh were clearly incomplete, and reviewing the camera footage back she could see that it hadn't been a sustained shield bombardment like it had been with the boarding party – Ho-Oh had just rammed into the shield at blistering speed, torn right through the violently clashing energy patterns, and regenerated all the damage in a flash of golden-rose flame that lasted less than two seconds.

Rolling the ship to try and throw off Ho-Oh's attacks – more in the hope that the inherent inaccuracy would make the phoenix reluctant to send attacks for fear of hitting his teammates, than anything – Infi triggered a barrage of electrical attacks, only to find out that several of the weapon projectors had been quietly shut down by her digital opponent earlier in their battle.

Then a blizzard of hostile code spilled into her systems – from a completely unexpected direction, and one which shut her out of the main navigational systems before she could react. Panicked, Infi burned half the links leading into the newly attacked area and pulled other computing clusters out of resisting Dexter's main attack to meet the new threat.

In her haste, she judged wrongly. Working with excellent coordination, Dexter's detached segment forced her to devote more and more attention to it until his main attack could break through into the rest of the ship. In the process, he captured one of her main databanks completely intact – and once he had her internal codes, it was over in less than a second. The entire Megarig went into complete lockdown, the shields shut off, and she watched powerlessly as Mewtwo levitated over to begin collecting up the last remaining Magnemite and Magneton in the security detail.


Phew, Latias sighed. Brother, I think we're wrapping things up here.

Good, we still need help over here, Mega Latios replied. A blur of impressions came with the mental contact, and Latias stared for a moment – her jaw dropping open.

"Is something wrong?" Newton asked, looking up at the Dragon-type who'd been protecting him from Infi's attacks.

"The other fight's going on in a city!" Latias told him, shutting her mouth with a snap. "Giratina can't fly in the real world, and my brother's busy blocking attacks which might hit the city so Zero's winning..."

"He can't..." Newton repeated, slowly. "But Giratina's natural form can certainly fly, why wouldn't he be able to – wait a minute..."

He took his backpack off, and dug out a complex machine built around a sealed vacuum chamber.

"I was using this to analyze the portals, to find out if there was a way to replicate them without draining Giratina's power," the scientist explained. "I was making some progress, but if Giratina can't fly in the real world then that suggests he's been weakened somehow anyway."

He fiddled for a moment with a spanner, then pointed at his Shieldon. "This is taking too long – headbutt it!"

Shieldon complied, smashing into the vacuum chamber, and it made a small bang sound as the air pressure equalized. One of the seams failed from the trauma, and Newton took the contents out.

A small yellow crystal, looking a lot like a piece of Giratina's armour.

"If my suspicions are right, Giratina deserves to have this back," Newton explained.

"Right!" Latias agreed, picking it up. "Sorry, got to go!"

She felt for the direction of her brother, updating him on the situation, then felt a faint tug appear – apparently the direction of a portal Giratina had just opened.

Not wasting any time, Latias rocketed off in that direction – speeding the yellow crystal back to the Pokémon who needed it.

"So..." Zorua asked, getting Newton's attention. "Where should I put all these Magnemite and stuff? We're going to need to take them home too, right?"

"Yes, good point," Newton agreed. "Hold on, I have a tent somewhere..."


AN:


Zero is a bit mentally inconsistent, and almost completely unconcerned with collateral damage.

Crown City is also developing a bit of a reputation.