Pokemon: Reborn as a Pokemon

Chapter 329 329: 329. The Choice

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The dark brown, dried-out earth was instantly shredded by the crushing wind pressure, breaking into countless fine particles that mixed with green grass seeds and whirled wildly through the air.

The terrifying blade of compressed air released by Talonflame tore through the forest with overwhelming force, moving at a speed far beyond what most could imagine as it hurtled straight toward the oncoming stream of water.

"RUSHHH!"

There was no flashy clash.

Under the devastation of absolute power, the Water Gun Kael, which had pushed to nearly its maximum strength was sliced apart as easily as soft tofu, torn to pieces before it could do anything at all.

Crystal droplets burst across the air in every direction, glittering beneath the brilliant sunlight filtering down through the forest canopy.

And through the blurred veil of scattered water, one could just barely catch sight of those blue eyes behind it.

Kael had expected a gap.

But what he had not expected was for Talonflame, who had looked almost helpless under Castform's pressure moments ago, to be this overwhelmingly strong when facing him.

His attack, which had gathered nearly all the power he could summon, had not even managed to cross the distance between them before it was destroyed with ease.

The gap between him and Talonflame was simply too great.

This was the kind of difference that belonged to two completely separate tiers of strength. No amount of technique could truly make up for it.

Perhaps Kael, with the experience of having once lived several lives as high-level Pokémon, held enormous advantages over ordinary Pokémon in battle sense, timing, and energy control.

Those things gave him the ability to fight above his level to a certain extent.

But against an opponent with such overwhelming raw strength, those advantages had clearly been reduced to almost nothing.

Ahead of him, Talonflame's Air Slash plowed straight through the shattered remains of the Water Gun without losing any momentum at all.

With unstoppable force and razor-sharp killing intent, it screamed toward Kael.

I'll die.

The warning blared madly through his mind.

And Kael made his choice instantly.

He did not waste even half a second dwelling on the fact that his Water Gun had been effortlessly destroyed. Faced with death, he immediately cut off the flow of energy still gathering from throughout his body toward his throat.

Power exploded through the muscles of his legs.

With a dull, violent thud beneath him, his small blue body shot from the ground like a fleeting phantom, escaping the attack radius of Air Slash in the blink of an eye.

Talonflame was mildly surprised by the sudden speed Kael managed to unleash in that instant.

Still, even though the attack itself had failed to hit, Talonflame felt no disappointment. Its objective had already been achieved.

That hastily released Air Slash had been meant, first and foremost, to block Kael's rushing stream of water.

Of course, if it had managed to kill him at the same time, that would have been even better.

But even without that, Talonflame was already satisfied with the result.

The breathing room created by Air Slash had bought it exactly what it needed: enough time to gather power and prepare its next strike against Kael.

And besides, it was not the only Pokémon on the field that had already decided Kael had to be eliminated immediately.

Talonflame was certain that the Castform nearby, whose strength clearly surpassed its own, would not simply float there and watch in silence.

And that was exactly what happened.

The instant Kael leapt from the ground, Castform, which had been silently observing until then, moved.

"SSZZT!"

Scorching flames erupted in a roaring burst, and in an instant, the entire open clearing was swallowed in a hellish crimson glow.

The terrifying blaze, hot enough to burn branches and leaves to ash in moments, churned and twisted through the air under Castform's control as if it possessed a mind of its own, scattering waves of blistering heat in every direction.

"Heat Crash... no."

No.

This was not a simple fire blast.

A huge mass of flames took shape in the sky in the form of a giant character-like cross, unmistakably forming the blazing outline of a Fire Blast as it lunged toward Kael so quickly that the eye could catch only a scarlet trail.

Scorching.

Violent.

Kael's tiny body was still moving upward at an angle through the air, propelled by the explosive force of his leg muscles.

His once-calm blue eyes were now drowned in an aggressive red reflection.

Castform's timing had been viciously precise.

The moment that the inferno erupted was exactly the moment Kael had just launched himself off the ground, suspended in midair with no foothold and no way to generate force.

For an ordinary Pokémon, faced with an attack launched at such a mercilessly chosen instant, there would have been no time to react at all. It would simply have been swallowed by the crimson flames and burned into a dried-out corpse.

But Kael, clearly, did not belong in the category of ordinary.

The giant flaming symbol rushed closer and closer. His blue body, still carried by inertia, kept drifting toward the very direction from which the fire was coming.

There was no panic in him.

No confusion either.

Over the course of his many lives as a Pokémon, he had faced dangers far worse than this more times than he could count.

The situation before him looked hopeless.

But hopeless was not the same thing as impossible.

Calm.

Composed.

The resilient soul that had been tempered by the river of time now revealed the brilliance that belonged to Kael alone.

A will of steel.

Then, in the next instant, the broad, cotton-soft tail behind him snapped violently to one side, and his waist twisted at a grotesque angle that looked almost wrong to the eye.

"KRK!"

A sharp crack of bone rang through the air, followed by the tearing rasp of flesh grinding against itself.

"Ungh..."

A muffled groan of pain escaped through his clenched mouth.

The agony from his abdomen flooded his entire mind in an instant.

At the cost of injuring part of his body, Kael forcibly twisted himself from facing the flames head-on into a sideways position.

And he did not stop there.

Because he knew that if he truly wanted to evade Castform's killing strike, then this was only the beginning.

The pain in his midsection was so violent it felt as if his body were being torn in half.

Yet somehow, it only made him calmer.

Sharper.

Grinding his teeth together, Kael's blue eyes flashed with a savage ferocity that did not belong in such a small body.

His right leg bent sharply upward under precise control of nerve and muscle, gathering all the strength in his body into a single point.

Like a spring compressed to its absolute limit.

Release.

Launch.

"SHHK!"

"BOOOOM!"

The air was ripped apart.

Some invisible barrier shattered.

A piercing sonic boom exploded outward.

The terrifying force of his body.

The absolute speed of that kicking leg.

And the catastrophic overload they placed on his flesh.

A cloud of blood, mixed with pale splinters of shattered bone, burst into the air like a savage, tragic flower.

The small blue figure that had been rushing forward stopped dead in midair, as though some second force had erupted from within him and hurled him violently in the opposite direction.

At the cost of nearly destroying his right leg, Kael avoided the fatal strike that would have killed him.

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~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter

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