Chapter 90: The Thousand-Year Lucario (Patreon)

Lucario's eyes seemed to have been hurt, and they were squeezed tightly shut.

Unlike in the Aura Braver movie, no one in the room shared Aaron's Aura this time.

So although confusion and bewilderment flickered across the Pokémon's face, it didn't fall into hysterics.

In fact, it seemed fairly calm.

Riley, Ilene and Misty held their tongues for the moment.

They were clearly stunned by what had just happened before their eyes.

Renan was the first to move. He hesitated for two seconds, then raised his right hand and hit Lucario with a Heal Pulse.

He had specifically learned the move after coming to the Pokémon world. Its effect was similar to the Fairy-type Moonlight, but since he was a psychic, using it in public wouldn't raise anyone's suspicions. It saved a lot of unnecessary trouble.

[Thank you.]

Lucario's telepathy sounded in their minds. Then the Aura Pokémon tried opening its eyes.

It swept its gaze around the room, and when it saw Riley and Ilene it visibly froze.

Riley especially. He was a descendant of Aaron's brother, and going by looks alone, he was easy to mistake for the portraits of Aaron hanging all over the castle.

Queen Ilene was much the same, looking almost exactly like Queen Rin of the distant past.

Still, Lucario had already sensed the Auras of everyone present and knew they weren't the people it had once known.

So once its initial shock passed, it used Telepathy again. [What are you to Aaron and Queen Rin?]

Riley and Ilene exchanged a glance, then answered in turn.

"Lord Aaron was my ancestor's brother."

"Queen Rin is my ancestor," Ilene said, then added, "Lucario, you were Lord Aaron's partner, weren't you? After Lord Aaron brought the war to an end, Queen Rin sent people to search for him and for you. But only Lord Aaron's Braver's Staff was ever brought back, carried by a Pidgeot. Counting it up now, nearly a thousand years have passed."

At those words, Lucario's expression visibly locked up.

When it was released from the Braver's Staff, it had already faintly sensed that the age had changed.

But it had clung to a one-in-ten-million chance that its senses were simply wrong.

Now that Ilene had said it aloud, even someone as powerful as Lucario instinctively took two steps back.

Still, Lucario had weathered plenty of storms at Aaron's side.

After a deep breath, it composed itself again, and said something that surprised Ilene, Riley and Misty. [Lord Aaron ran away.]

"???"

Seeing that Ilene didn't believe it, Lucario went on. [Lord Aaron told me so himself. He said he was going to abandon the royal city!]

By the last word, Lucario's tone had turned sharply agitated. It had looked on Aaron as its teacher, its partner and its master, and yet in the course of stopping the war, it had been betrayed by the other side.

Misty, an outsider here, nudged her traveling companion, who was also just watching the show, with an elbow and muttered, "Doesn't this feel like the opposite of the image Aaron and Cameran Palace have always promoted?"

Renan answered, "Maybe there was some misunderstanding between him and Lucario."

He kept his voice low, but that was no use against a Pokémon that wielded Aura. Its level fell short of the Clefable elder he'd met at Mt. Moon, but it was at least Elite Four class, or rather, close to Elite Four strength.

So when Lucario heard Renan's guess, the canine Pokémon immediately snapped back. [There was no misunderstanding!]

[Lord Aaron sealed me inside that staff precisely because he meant to abandon the royal city.]

[Otherwise... otherwise...]

Ilene suddenly stepped forward and gently embraced Lucario. "Whatever Lord Aaron was thinking back then, it's all in the past now."

Lucario fell silent at her words.

She was right. Whatever Lord Aaron had actually done no longer mattered, either to Cameran Palace as it stood today or to Lucario, freshly released from the Braver's Staff.

The League and Queen Ilene couldn't strip Aaron of his title as the Aura Braver on the strength of a few words from Lucario, then issue an announcement and rewrite a bedtime story that had been told for a thousand years.

Lucario was sharp-minded and understood this perfectly well.

But the resentment in its chest wouldn't vanish because of it.

Ilene spoke again. "Lucario, if you're willing, you can stay in Cameran Palace. I'll have the room you used to live in cleaned out for you."

She may well have made the offer because Lucario had nowhere else to go.

But to say there was no other motive behind it would be a plain lie.

The stronger a Pokémon, the longer it lives.

The so-called great families of the League had endured for hundreds, even thousands of years. Besides using their influence to draw on resources that sped up their growth, they each had at least one Elite Four-class Pokémon standing behind them.

And the reason Cameran Palace had always kept its autonomy and stayed out of the League came down to one thing: it lacked the depth. It feared that once it joined, the other old, long-established families would treat it like a fat sheep and swallow it whole, skin and bones.

But with Aaron's Lucario on its side, everything would naturally be different.

Riley and Renan exchanged a look. They had clearly seen through the game Ilene was playing.

But neither of them moved to stop her.

Renan was an outsider, and Riley's family of Aura Guardians had a rather good relationship with Cameran Palace.

Lucario, fresh out of the Braver's Staff, was obviously still in a muddle.

After hearing her out, it fell silent for a moment, seemingly torn.

Ilene struck while the iron was hot and switched to a gentler pitch. "You've been dropped from your own era into the present with no warning. There must be a lot you'll struggle to adjust to. Why not stay with me for a while first?"

In Queen Rin's day, Lucario had lived in Cameran Palace the whole time, and its social circle was extremely simple. Before the war broke out, all it did was follow Aaron to train its Aura abilities, and sometimes head out on missions at Queen Rin's command.

It could be said to have a high IQ but quite ordinary emotional intelligence.

How could it possibly match Ilene, the current queen of Cameran Palace, a woman who could cross swords with the League?

With just a few words, it was already won over. It opened its mouth, seemingly about to accept.

Watching this, Renan actually breathed a sigh of relief.

He'd genuinely feared that Lucario might get some idea in its head to go investigate the truth of a thousand years ago at the Tree of Beginning, and that Queen Ilene would grab the nearest person on the spot and hand him a mission to accompany Lucario.

Like he always said, nobody likes doing something with nothing in it for them.

But just then—

—BOOM!