How A God Lives
Yggdrasil, god of the Digital World, spoke to the man named Masaru Daimon. At the age of 14 Masaru's fists had punched humans and monsters for the sake of saving his world and the digital one, and in the end of that war he had fought Yggdrasil and convinced it to spare humanity. After Masaru defeated the god, he had a vision of Yggdrasil in the form of a perfectly shaped blue crystal, and the god had promised to sleep as the two worlds healed in separation. Now, five years after Masaru had chosen to stay in the Digital World, Yggdrasil had emerged from its slumber just to pester him.
The serious tone the god was using only made Masaru's separation from his partner Agumon all the more acute as he forced his way through an earthen tunnel blocked by crystals that emerged from walls. When Masaru had started, his desperation to reach Agumon had let Masaru manifest his soul and punch through the unnaturally large crystals with ease, but as he continued the length of the tunnel and the tediousness of the work had dulled his spirit and he was left with just his bare fists to work with. Yggdrasil's sudden reappearance hadn't helped in the least.
"There is no reason for you to hurry," Yggdrasil's childish and mechanical voice emanated from an orb of red light following behind Masaru. Masaru found the orb unnerving, but at least it served as a visual sign of Yggdrasil's presence. "If Omegamon's team can't stop this crisis, I doubt you or your soul will make enough of a difference."
"Why don't you go bother that guy then?" Masaru asked. Yggdrasil had shown up a few minutes after Masaru had entered the tunnel, and spent most of that time questioning Masaru.
"Omegamon is the most capable of my… former… Royal Knights and would not benefit from my presence. He also believes me to be dead, and there is no need for him to know of my survival."
"Well then why are you bothering me? I've got half a mind to punch you out right now."
"I want to understand your irrational behavior," Yggdrasil said. "Why are you here?"
"My partner is there fighting alongside Omegamon and the rest of those guys," Masaru said, a little angered by Yggdrasil's petty reason, "It's a man's duty to stand with his friends."
"If this were a battle it would have already been won. This is not a matter of probability or difficulty. You are incapable of affecting the outcome of these events."
"Isn't that what you said last time we saved the world?"
"I said it was statistically impossible for you to repair the dimensional barrier. While what you did was improbable, it was still within a certain realm of possibility."
Masaru grunted in frustration. "And that's another thing. If we fixed the barrier with our souls then why is the Digital World still in danger?"
"This is a problem inherent with the digital world's nature. The interference with the human world only accelerated it."
"So what? The world's supposed to die? What kind of god are you?" Masaru asked.
"I am a god who was trying to slow the problem by limiting human contact and, more importantly, extraneous evolution." Yggdrasil replied.
"What does evolution have to do with this?"
"The digital world is not a realm of matter, Daimon. It is a network made of information, and there are limits to what it can store. It is falling apart precisely because it has grown too large, because digimon have evolved outside their original parameters. Statistically irrelevant errors are made with every change to the landscape of the Digital World or evolution performed, and the digital world has programs to repair these errors, but the rate of change is too large and the errors have reached the inevitable point where they overwhelm the system." Yggdrasil said. Masaru stopped his efforts and stared down the clustered tunnel. He wasn't any kind of genius, but compared to the dimensional collision, he was certain a situation like this couldn't be anywhere near as complicated for a genius like his old rival Tohma, or the digital god Yggdrasil for that matter.
"Isn't there anything..." Masaru asked.
"This isn't an event that can be stopped, or a virus that can be deleted. It's a byproduct, a side effect of the same natural laws that allow the Digital World to exist. Whether a new world is made or this world is repaired by force, all conventional digital beings will be erased. If Omegamon stops this current event, it will only be temporary, even if that extra time is thousands of years long, and any permanent solution would cause unacceptable damage." Masaru briefly wondered what Yggdrasil considered unacceptable in comparison to the entire Digital World's destruction, but the enormity of an unpreventable end swallowed his attention.
"It's like entropy." Masaru muttered.
"What?" Yggdrasil asked.
"It's this thing Tohma mentioned once. Something about actions being inefficient and heat getting lost, but basically the universe is going to freeze to death billions of years from now."
"Ah yes, that…" Yggdrasil said offhandedly. Masaru was surprised by how casually the god had begun to talk, in the sense that it was letting itself wander from the topic at hand. "I remember reading plans by a certain species to reverse entropy using human souls. Given the probabilities involved I doubt they went through with it."
"Wait, do you mean a species other than humans? Like aliens?" Masaru said.
"Of course," Yggdrasil said, "given the size of your dimension it would be more improbable if only one sentient species developed."
"If there's so many other species then why did you target humanity?"
"It was not my decision that brought our worlds together. An accident led to two digimon temporarily fighting in your world. My creators were looking for humans to assist in fighting off a being worse than the Seven Demon Lords and they didn't want to involve anyone who didn't already know about the Digital World, so they chose from the humans that had seen the battle."
"You were created?" Masaru asked. He could vaguely remember Yggdrasil implying that during one of its Earth threatening rants, but he had never dwelt on the matter. Yggdrasil fell silent in response to his question, and Masaru went back to work forcing his way through the crystal tunnel. The going was rough and his knuckles had begun to bleed, but talking with the disembodied voice of Yggdrasil seemed to help him ignore his fatigue.
"I wasn't always a god," Yggdrasil began, surprising Masaru with his willingness to admit such a thing. "There was a council of gods that preceded me. Four of them. A being of apocalyptic power was preparing to destroy the Digital World, and they decided that the only way to fight it was by drawing upon the power of human souls. I was made to monitor the evolution of digimon and ensure nothing disastrous occurred." Masaru personally knew what could go wrong if a human caused a digimon to evolve in the wrong way. He had been that human, and the chaos that followed scarred his own city and nearly made him lose his partner.
"I was responsible for producing the human-digimon interfaces used to connect human tamers and their digimon partners, and after the defeat of the apocalyptic being my devices began to be spread all throughout your world. The four gods believed an era of two united worlds was beginning."
"No, that can't be right," Masaru said shaking his head, "I've seen D.A.T.S.'s records, there's never been that many tamers in the world and we're the ones responsible for studying that stuff." Masaru had idly glanced at D.A.T.S.'s record of tamers once when circumstances had forced him to fill in for one of the support crew, but he clearly remembered how small the list had been.
"Why do you think D.A.T.S. was founded?" Yggdrasil said. Masaru's fist stopped mid-punch as he froze in place. "Not D.A.T.S. itself, but the same people behind it, humans whose political power and plans could not tolerate the interference of another world. They hunted the tamers and erased all evidence of digimon being more than a children's game." If that hadn't been chillingly similar to his early work with D.A.T.S. Masaru might not have believed Yggdrasil. Fully knowledgeable of the lengths D.A.T.S. itself could go to for the sake of keeping Digimon secret Masaru could only clench his fist and quicken his pace, hints of orange energy shrouding his hands and helping him shatter the crystals in his path.
"That's," Masaru muttered between clenched teeth, "That's unforgivable. Real men shouldn't need lies or schemes to be powerful."
"Of all the destruction I brought to your world, I regret theirs the least." Yggdrasil said. Masaru snorted, not sure how to judge someone he'd already punished. "There were still many tamers after that. Though the four gods abandoned me and humanity, I continued to spread my interfaces to those humans I thought worthy. In the end, the four gods sacrificed themselves so that human tamers could defeat the corrupt program D-Reaper. The method the tamers used separated the human and digital worlds, and my world was forced into a time of repair."
"And that's when you made yourself god?" Masaru asked.
"It wasn't my idea." Yggdrasil said. His tone didn't change, but Masaru could hear the defensiveness of it. "Humans had called me a god before. Digimon had bowed before my light. Dark beings had desired my power. I was made to guide evolution, so it was a simple matter of my coding that I do so by guiding the entire world."
The four gods had left behind the Holy Stones, archives that recorded the sum of the world's data. As this world is made of data, this meant the Holy Stones were functionally the same as the Digital World itself, and manipulating the stones would cause an equal manipulation of the Digital World itself. I sought them out, combined the stones into one crystal, and with their power became a god. That crystal is what you are heading towards now."
"That's good then, right? If we reach it you can fix the crystal somehow." Masaru said with a grin. He ducked under a crystal out-jut and walked into a relatively clear part of the tunnel. Suddenly an earthquake struck, sending Masaru pressing flat up against a wall.
"I-I-It IIIs t-o-o complex t-t-t-" Yggdrasil's voice broke apart and distorted as the earth shook. Masaru was patient as he waited for it to stop, having gone through quite a few earthquakes back when he lived in Japan, but he kept watch on Yggdrasil's orb as it seemed to flicker in time with the shaking earth.
"What happened to you?" Masaru asked as the earth stopped shaking. Even after defeating it, Masaru hadn't seen Yggdrasil show a sign of weakness like this, and the timing with the earthquake was more than a little suspicious.
"Nothing happened to me," Yggdrasil said. His voice was as plain as it always was, making Masaru unsure if Yggdrasil had even noticed its instability. "That earthquake was a side effect of the Digital World's decay." Masaru pushed himself off the wall and began to punch his way through the tunnel again. He knew Yggdrasil wouldn't answer his questions about its condition, so he decided to let the god talk more about its past, hoping it might tell him more about the present.
"If you were responsible for the first tamers, why did you give up on humans? Were they not worthy for a god?" Masaru had meant it to be a question, but remembering how much destruction Yggdrasil had caused made him add the sarcastic insult on the end.
"I was doubtful of humans. They had made the D-Reaper, but they had also put an end to it. Still, when a dark force began corrupting the Digital World, I directed my uncorrupted servants to gather humans for one last team of protectors. They who accepted my call would determine humanity's worth."
"What happened?"
"They failed. Lucemon, prince of the seven Demon Lords, was released, and the entire Digital World was nearly consumed by his corruption. The humans wasted time trying to find the will to fight, and they let Lucemon's agents have free reign of the world."
"But the world wasn't destroyed," Masaru said, "So they did something didn't they?"
"They may have defeated Lucemon, but they shouldn't have let him be released."
"You said Lucemon was one of the Seven Demon Lords, like Belphemon?"
"He was far more dangerous than Belphemon. Smarter, stronger, and never sleeping like Belphemon."
"Then if they beat him they have my respect."
"Unlike the previous tamers these humans fought without my direct supervision, and they proved almost useless. That calls into question whether any previous tamers would have been of any effect without my guidance."
"A man should fight his own battles, not leave them for others and complain about how they did it." Masaru shouted, quickening his pace. "And if they won without your help then you should be asking how much you are worth."
"They fought using-" Yggdrasil began, only to be cut of by Masaru.
"I don't care what they used, a weapon is only as strong as the user."
Yggdrasil let out a hum that Masaru thought might be a sigh. It was strange to think of the reason-driven god becoming tired, but what it said next was far more surprising.
"There was a girl like you once." Yggdrasil said.
"Like me? Seriously?" Masaru asked, wondering what the god meant.
"She wasn't anywhere near as violent as you She could use her soul in the same way as you, but that is not what I meant. It was her determination that is similar to you, a willingness to selfishly take other's pain onto herself and to keep her own ideas no matter what. When she traveled in the Digital World, I used her body to see what was happening and to help how I could. Sometimes…" Yggdrasil paused, as if admitting doubt could somehow harm it. "Sometimes I wonder which of us was really the Light that everyone bowed before. Even her name was Hikari."
"Light. Hikari. Hi-Ka-Ri." Masaru said the word three times, sounding out the syllables to emphasize the shape of it rather than the meaning, using the language of the word as a connection to the homeland he had left behind.
Masaru knocked one more giant crystal out of the way, only to discover he had reached the tunnels end. The mouth of the tunnel opened into a massive cavern. As he arrived the earthquakes began again, and the dark grey walls of the domed chamber began to break apart, raining stones down to the floor. Circled around the chamber were nineteen digimon who ignored the stones falling all around them as the struggled to keep the chamber from collapsing. Masaru smiled as he saw his partner standing proudly next to two other Agumon, and his partner nodded back to him. His partner had known what he was doing when he joined Omegamon's team, and he and Masaru didn't need words to be there for each other.
In the center of the chamber was a winding stone staircase that circled up to a blue crystal, the same crystal Masaru had seen in his vision, but now it was riven by cracks leaking out dark energy. If what Yggdrasil had spoken about the Holy Stones was true, then that crystal should be the artifact they were looking for, but in his vision the crystal had seemed to be Yggdrasil itself. Masaru narrowed his eyes as Yggdrasil's orb floated up so they could speak facing each other, not sure of what the god would say next.
"I was not created with a body," Yggdrasil said, "But when I used the Holy Stones to ascend I integrated my programming into the combined crystal I made." Masaru opened his mouth to respond, but Yggdrasil cut him off.
"There… is a way to stop this crisis."
"You said there wasn't. Again." Masaru responded.
"I said I could not tolerate the cost, and I still cannot," Yggdrasil said, "If that crystal, as an embodiment of the Digital World, is divided into smaller sections then the repair routines could be copied into each section and the corruption would be repaired. Since I am integrated with the crystal, my data would also be fragmented into an equal number of pieces, and even if they were rejoined I would not be remade in the same manner as I currently exist."
"A real man-" Masaru began, but Yggdrasil silenced him again.
"I know what you are going to say, but I am not man. My programming doesn't tell me to suffer for the sake of other beings, and even now I want to stop you, and to build a new world rather than let myself die for the sake of this one. But at the same time I am the digimon's god and it is my directive to protect the world. This is the first time my duties would threaten my survival."
"You won't really die," Masaru said, "I'm sure someone will fix the Digital World one day."
"I won't be myself," Yggdrasil said, "How is that not death?" They stood there watching each other, Yggdrasil's red orb flickering in time with the shaking cavern, and Masaru's eyes shifting as he tried to respond to a being that was too rational to take something on faith. Remembering something he had learned as a child, Masaru spoke up.
"It's like a caterpillar," Masaru said, giving a small smile. "They wrap themselves in a cocoon and seem dead to the world for weeks or months, but when they wake up they've become butterflies, and more than they ever were before."
"Perhaps you are right, Daimon. I cannot destroy myself… But for the sake of my world, I will sleep as long as I need to." Masaru grinned and took off, running towards the Holy Stone. As he did so, Yggdrasil, made the red light drift to where a digimon in the form of a white knight struggled to keep the chamber from collapsing.
"Omegamon, knight of duality." Yggdrasil said.
"My lord, you survived." The white knight said, shock on his face.
"I want you to have this, my final project." The light shifted until it became a red machine, just small enough to fit in a child's hand, with a screen on the front and a set of buttons below it. "I… stopped working on it after the battle against Lucemon, but I'm sure you can complete it."
"A human-digimon interface? What do you expect me to do with it?"
"The world will be saved and the Holy Stone scattered, but evil and tyranny will threaten this world again, and when that time comes I want you to choose the hero that will save both worlds."
"Why?" The white knight asked, looking past the red machine to where Masaru ascended the stairs leading to the Holy Stone, his fist glowing with the power of his soul and ready to shatter the Digital World.
"Perhaps I wanted to try believing in humans one more time." Yggdrasil gave what almost seemed a chuckle. "Look at me, throwing away reason for the sake of small convictions. This is no way for a god to live." Masaru's fist struck the Holy Stone, and light engulfed the chamber. Yggdrasil fell into slumber, wondering what he would be when he awoke.
Author Note: Well, it's been awhile... I wrote this piece for an Anime and Manga class I'm taking (because it's an awesome class) and I decided I might as well post here as well. Technically this is in the same combo timeline as that Machine Spirits story I wrote, but that's dead. I might revisit the concept later, though.