A/N: The fruits of CampNano.I'm hoping to finish writing this month…but not necessarily posting. Editing and all. :D


The Bee and its Stinger
Chapter 7 – Forgotten Legends

The children were frightened. It showed in their trembling liquescent bodies, in their opaque wide eyes. And Elecmon could not blame them; he was scared as well, scared enough that his usually smooth fur spiked as it did in a lightning storm.

But there was no lightning that day in Primary Village, just a burning sun that seemed to expose every bit of data in their body: a bright sun that teased them, that said there was no-where left to hide when their doom came.

And their doom would come. File Island was out of the way of the chaos spreading in Server, but anyone could travel to it in a week or so and he'd heard it was a dragon. A dragon could fly to the island in less, and the island itself was small but valuable, and not a place anyone with ill intent could just leave be. It was an unfortunate place to raise children outside times of peace – but, Elecmon reflected, they were too used to the Chosen saving their worlds when things god bad.

The trouble was, things had to get really bad before the Harmonious Ones could be convinced to call the children. They were stubborn that way, and it wasn't necessarily wrong. It was the Digital World after all; they should be able to survive independently of the humans…and yet, when their world spat up some enemy they couldn't defeat, it was the humans who came to their aid. Like Devimon and how he had waged war with the black gears. Or the Dark Masters when they had remade it with the rest of the world. They'd gone out of their way to destroy the Primary Village then, because that was the one place in their world where freedom could not only be made, but born.

It was ironic to think that babies were such a threat, when they had fighting capacity, no way of defending themselves. But it wasn't just the babies, even if destroying enemies before they rose was a habit the evil ones of them often partook in. Perhaps they thought that, by removing the resistance during their more vulnerable times, by the time the eggs were recycled through the Data Stream, their hold over the Digital World would be too powerful to break.

Sometimes though, Elecmon wondered if it wasn't merely because the Primary Village existed on File Island that it was a target. Because the babies of the Digital World were its future, yes, but they were babies. It would take decades before they would grow into a threat, and the Dark Masters had rewritten the basic structure of their world in less. There was something else of value on File Island: something of more immediate importance. And that was knowledge. Knowledge of the Chosen that had come before, the powers that greeted them, the enemies they'd defeated and the secrets they'd uncovered. And there were other records there as well: records that countless Digimon had found and written down, that told of a past that none of them remembered any more, or of secrets that seemed important to no-one.

But they were important. Knowledge was power, and power was the thing that evil coveted, and feared. They sought to either take that knowledge or destroy it, so no-one could use it against them. And sometimes they were damaged so badly that it took millennia for the records to be restored to a readable state. Elecmon knew that, for now, several vital records about the Chosen and their Digimon were missing, in the Data Streams, and due to that the Harmonious Ones were unable to call anyone new to the world. They were even having difficulty in reaching the old Chosen, the ones that had fought against the Dark Masters and Apocalymon. And of the two that had handled Myotismon, one was missing, so that only left Ken.

Elecmon sighed. That kid wasn't much older than Takeru the first time they'd met, and just as innocent. More innocent, in fact, because Takeru quickly lost those bright little eyes that looked as though they hadn't seen anything more dangerous than a soft squishy toy. Ken hadn't seen anything like that though, even if Ken had fought just as much as Takeru. But Ken's battle had been very different; not so much focused on defeating opponent after opponent, but collecting the Digimental of Desire for Ryo who faced down their one and only enemy.

And what Ken had seen of that sort of battle had been lost in sickness and pain – but he was better now, Elecmon reminded himself. Ken, with Wormmon, had come to play with the babies. Quite recently, in fact. But that was still before the news of the Koromon Village's destruction reached File Island.

The Koromon Village was the nearest village to the port, and from there it was a straight sea route to File Island. Still, none of them knew what exactly was carving this path of destruction; they simply knew it was a flying beast weaving havoc. And a flying beast would be upon them in a matter of days. Today, even, since it'd been almost a week since Nanomon and the Hagurumon had transmitted the news.

The babies hadn't explicitly heard the news, but they could feel something bad was coming. And Elecmon could feel it coming too, coming closer –

A sharp wind washed over him suddenly, and the babies screamed and scattered, leaving him, fur spiked and cacking with electricity, alone at the edge of Primary Village to greet the intruder.

'Leave!' he shouted, gritting his teeth against the wind that battered him and straining to see the shadowy winged shape drawing closer. 'The Primary Village is not for villains like you! Leave!'

If his shouts carried over the wind, the flying beast ignored them, simply drawing closer with every beat-like motion of his wings.

'Leave!' Elecmon shouted again, quivering as he stored up electricity in his fur. If it came to it, he'd blast the storm. If it came to it, he'd blast the entire village and himself, so long as it meant his babies would be safe. They were the important ones, and they'd fled from the village the moment the danger had approached. Hopefully they'd fled to the river like they'd been taught, where Whamon could take them to safety.

They weren't in the village anymore anyway, which was the main thing. They wouldn't be in harm's way from this assault.

The beast grew nearer, and Elecmon bared his teeth and let loose the electricity he'd held inside. It, as he'd hoped, torn through the mayhem of wind and hit the beast full on – and, in the moment before it engulfed the other, Elecmon was able to red devil like wings, a blue body and a small figure that was either an oddly shaped tail or totally separate from the flying beast jumping into the air –

And then the beast, or pair, were swallowed in white, and the shockwave knocked Elecmon into an empty crib. The wind returned with a gusto, pushing him and the crib even further back and overturning other things: cribs, blocks and even taking the roof off one of the buildings.

And by the time Elecmon had struggled onto four paws again, the beast, now painfully indefinable as a dragon, had touched down to earth.

'Don't – ' Elecmon wheezed, before collecting himself. 'Don't you dare take another step!'

'You won't be able to stop us,' a voice replied quietly to his demand. It didn't come from the dragon; the dragon's lips hadn't moved, nor had his eyes, staring unblinkingly at his prey.

And, when the speaker stepped out from the dragon's shadow and make himself apparent, Elecmon couldn't believe his eyes. 'You – ' he began, 'Ken was worried.' It seemed like such a pathetic thing to say, but that was all he could manage.

'Ken was worried,' the boy repeated, lips twisting into a smile. 'How sweet; that boy really is too innocent for his own good. Except he's not here.' There was amusement in his tone as well, but it didn't touch his eyes: two stones of brown. 'How about you, Elecmon? Weren't you worried about me?'

'Of course we were worried.' Elecmon stood, carefully, on his two back paws. 'And I'm sorry for attacking you and your – partner? – and all, but there's something dangerous coming right now, and –'

'There's nothing else coming,' Ryo interrupted him. 'There's just you, the village, your precious eggs and us.'

The eggs! Elecmon thought in panic. He'd been so focused on protecting the children after the fiasco with the Dark Masters, he'd completely forgotten to come up with a contingency plan for the eggs.

'You've forgotten me.' Ryo was frowning, and Elecmon found he could make no sense at all of what was happening.

'Are you even Ryo?' He narrowed his eyes, charging his fur with electricity again.

Ryo – or the Ryo look-alike closed his eyes. 'Yes, I am,' he said, putting his hands into his pockets – and, apparently, that was some sort of signal to the dragon, because it charged. 'And there's something I need to do – and those eggs are in the way.'

The dragon snarled and slashed, and Elecmon screamed in pain as he felt his data try to fix the tear the claws tearing into his skin left behind. The dragon roared over the scream, as though it was a tiny and insignificant thing, and Elecmon's own voice died as the dragon slashed again and again and again.

He thought he heard Ryo mutter "sorry" as the claws stopped, but the Ryo he'd met with sweet little Ken was so different from this one, he'd probably been imagining it.