Orion caught the drone mid-arc and put it down before it finished its dive, Pikachu's Thunderbolt splitting the air a half second behind him and turning the thing into a smoking husk against the outer wall. He didn't have time to watch it fall. Three more were already peeling off from the formation overhead, angling wide toward the east fence line.
"Pikachu, with me."
"Pika!"
They cut across the courtyard together, past a scorched patch of grass that used to be somebody's favorite picnic spot, and Orion felt the whole shape of the fight settle into place the way a well-read Pokédex entry settles into memory. Twelve drones, maybe fourteen, arriving in loose waves instead of one coordinated push, the kind of pattern he'd have expected from something sweeping a grid instead of hunting a specific target. Whatever was running this didn't know what it had found. That was the only mercy in it.
He didn't have the luxury of finding that comforting right now.
Latias broke off from the west perimeter in her true form, wings cutting a tight turn as a Dragon Pulse tore a gap clean through the second wave. Two drones went down trailing smoke. A third slipped the blast and kept coming, and she was already shifting mid-flight, human silhouette folding out of the draconic one before her feet touched ground, close enough that Orion could hear the last of the wingbeat settle into footsteps.
"East fence is thinning," she said. "Zygarde's holding it, but not for long."
"Send the Core word. Pull two Formes off the gate and put them there instead."
"And the gate?"
"I'll cover it."
She didn't argue. She never did when the math actually worked, and right now it did, if only barely, airborne again before he'd finished the thought, human shape unspooling back into feather and scale.
Orion swung his cane up and let a drone crack itself open against the head of it before its momentum carried the pieces past him. Old habit. The cane had never been decoration.
Beyond the fence, the street was still full of people who hadn't figured out yet that standing in the open was the worst decision available to them tonight.
He caught the shape of it in one look, the crowd bunching up at the main gate instead of moving through it, half of them frozen and the rest shoving without getting anywhere. A woman had a toddler clamped against her chest and was staring at the sky like it might start explaining itself if she waited long enough.
"Zygarde." He didn't shout it. Didn't need to.
Two of the Formes broke from the fence line at once, low and fast, scales flashing green-black under the drone fire lighting up the yard. They hit the crowd's edge and started working it the way they'd worked the poachers years ago, precise, unhurried, hands and shoulders finding people and turning them bodily toward the open gate, panic reshaped into motion without a word needed for any of it.
The woman with the toddler broke first, a Forme's hand firm between her shoulder blades leaving her nowhere else to go, and the rest of the crowd followed her the way crowds always did, one person's decision standing in for everybody's.
Orion held the gate open with a hand on Pikachu's shoulder and a Thunderbolt aimed at anything that came within thirty feet of the opening.
He almost missed the boy.
Twelve, maybe thirteen, still out past the fence line chasing after a dog that had bolted the second the sky lit up, and Orion felt his stomach drop the exact instant a drone banked hard and locked onto the easiest target left standing in the open.
"Celebi!"
She was already moving, small green shape blurring past him in a streak that scattered light off her wings, and the drone's targeting scrambled the second she crossed its path, whatever it was using to lock onto heat or motion suddenly reading three ghosts instead of one. It fired anyway, wide, and the shot went into the pavement instead of the boy.
Orion didn't breathe again until the kid cleared the gate, dog under one arm, Celebi weaving a lazy, satisfied loop over his head like she'd known the whole time it would work.
It cost something, though. He heard it before he saw it, a Zygarde Forme taking a hit meant for a straggler near the back of the crowd, the sound of it going down hard enough that he felt his jaw tighten without deciding to.
"Report."
The Forme was already back up, favoring one side, still herding.
Good enough. Not perfect, but enough, and that distinction was going to have to carry him through the rest of tonight.
The last of the crowd cleared the gate a minute later. Orion sent Pikachu after Latias, one glance enough to know the west line needed the weight more than he did standing here now that the gate itself was clear, and allowed himself exactly one breath before something in the sky changed shape in a way that had nothing to do with drones.
He knew it before he had a reason to. Something about the plating, the way it fell instead of flew, told him what it was before his mind finished the sentence.
It hit the ground just outside the gate hard enough to crater the pavement, throwing up a wave of dirt and grit that made three drones bank away on instinct. The impact rattled through the soles of Orion's boots. The suit didn't move again after it landed. Whatever had been running it had already spent the last of itself getting here.
Sparkplug tore free of its dead grip before Orion had crossed half the distance to it, claws scrabbling loose in the dirt, and the sound coming out of him wasn't fear. Orion had heard fear plenty of times. This was something closer to the ground, something that had already burned through fear on the way here.
Aura hit Orion a half second before his eyes did, a raw, ragged thing pouring off the little Larvitar in waves that had nothing organized about them, grief tangled so tight around fury that you couldn't have pulled one loose from the other with both hands.
"Hey." Orion dropped to a crouch in the dirt. "You're safe. You made it."
Sparkplug didn't answer that. He looked past Orion instead, toward the fence, toward the city beyond it, like some part of him hadn't accepted yet that he'd stopped moving toward it.
Latias landed and shifted in the same motion, kneeling on Sparkplug's other side, and something about her being there loosened whatever had been holding him together on the way down. Pikachu was on his own out on the west line now, cheeks lit steady against the dark, and Orion filed that risk away without letting it reach his face.
"What happened?" Latias asked, gentle as she ever got.
It didn't come out clean. Orion hadn't expected it to. Sparkplug's account arrived in pieces, out of order, half of it delivered to the dirt instead of to either of them, and Orion pieced the shape of it together the way he'd pieced together worse things before. The Tower had lit up wrong, and the Legion suits had stood between him and everything else, taking hits that were never meant for them to survive. A voice arrived and filled the room before its owner ever did.
"He talked like he already won," Sparkplug said, and his claws dug two furrows into the dirt. "Like I was just, I don't know. A thing he was deciding whether to bother with."
"And Tony?"
Sparkplug went still at that. Whatever came next cost him something to say.
"He came in fighting. He was losing, I could tell, I've seen him fight before and I've never seen him lose like that." His voice cracked somewhere in the middle of it and he pushed through anyway. "He told them to get me out. I didn't want to go. I tried to stay, I fought the suit the whole way, and the last thing I saw was drones closing in and him not getting back up."
He didn't say the word capture. He didn't say the word worse, either. Orion understood, watching him, that Sparkplug hadn't decided which one it was, and wasn't ready to.
Latias put a hand flat against Sparkplug's back, and Orion let the silence sit there instead of filling it with something that would have been more comfort to himself than to the Larvitar shaking under both their hands.
Somewhere behind him, Pikachu's cheeks flared with another Thunderbolt, and a drone screamed apart against the west wall. The fight hadn't paused for any of this. It wasn't going to.
Orion looked down at Sparkplug, still trembling, still watching the fence like Tony might come through it any second, and felt the two halves of tonight pulling in opposite directions with him standing exactly in the middle of both.
He didn't have an answer for either one yet.
***
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