The Pantheon

Top Coordinator

"Flygon, Sunny Day—full output."

Light broke through the cloud layer not in a clean beam, but in a forceful expansion that pushed against the condensed moisture from within, heat flooding upward as Flygon forced the temperature to spike in a way Vulcan hadn't, not controlled and layered, but direct and overwhelming, and the effect on Altaria was almost instant as the water clinging to her wings began to evaporate under the pressure.

Ashley's eyes narrowed slightly as she watched it happen.

"Right," she muttered under her breath. "You're not going to make this easy for me."

Altaria lifted again, slower at first as the last of the weight left her wings, then smoother as she regained control, rising back into position beside Flygon as the two of them re-synced midair, the sunlight breaking apart what remained of Mercury's storm.

"Altaria, Dazzling Gleam—spread it wide."

The light gathered around her, shimmering outward in a layered glow that caught along the edges of the air currents Flygon was still controlling, and before Ashley could even fully parse what was going on—

"Flygon, Draco Meteor—feed it through."

The meteors didn't stay whole when they hit Altaria's field. They broke apart on contact, the energy spreading through the light she'd set up and then pulling back together into smaller chunks. Each piece kept spinning as it dropped, throwing light around the way disco balls do, scattering it across the space instead of holding it in one place. It wasn't one big hit anymore, it was a spread of smaller ones coming down in set paths, still controlled, just split up instead of all at once.

For a second, Ashley just stared.

"...Why the fuck didn't I think of that," she muttered, half under her breath, already seeing it in a completely different context. "That would be an excellent combo for Chione and Apollo..."

She scoffed, shaking her head as a grin tugged at the corner of her mouth despite the situation. "Yeah, I'm stealing that later."

Her focus snapped back into action, because once she actually watched the way the meteors were falling instead of just reacting to the light show, an excellent idea for a counterattack occurred to her.

Cash leaned forward slightly like he was waiting for her to try something and try something she did.

"Vulcan—Pandora."

Vulcan moved immediately, and instead of trying to meet the meteors head-on where they were strongest, he went for the ground first, Bulldoze breaking it apart in a wide wave that loosened everything under the falling pattern, because if those hits landed the way they were supposed to, they'd carry all their force straight through a stable surface, and Ashley wasn't about to give them that.

The follow-up came right after, Iron Tail slamming down into the broken terrain and sending chunks of rock upward into the same space the meteors were dropping into, not neatly, not in some perfect formation, but enough of it that the clean paths Altaria had set up started getting interrupted.

That was where it started to fall apart.

The first few meteors clipped against the rising debris and you could see the difference right away, the way their spin broke just a little, the way their path shifted off what it had been a second ago, and once one went off, the ones behind it didn't have the same space anymore, so they started bumping into that disruption too.

"Keep going," Ashley added, already watching the chain reaction start. "Don't give them room to fix it. Burn it through!"

Fire Blast surged upward into that mess, and now everything in that space was interacting at once, the rising stone, the falling meteors, the heat wrapping around all of it so nothing kept its original shape for long. Some of the fragments cracked outright when they hit, others lost their spin and dropped wrong, a few collided into each other midair where the pattern had broken just enough to mess with the spacing.