Get ready for a surprise this chapter. *Cues devious, evil laughter.*
I do not own Digimon.
Chapter 7
…And Nightmares.
Wizardmon looked upon the screaming humans as if they were mad.
Really, just a simple explosion, and that was cause for panic? How…odd.
If it were the Digital World, they would not have run and cowered in fear. They would not have showed such blatant weakness. Those in-training might of, that was understandable. But even some of those digimon would not have run. If anything, they would have fought. Bravely. Honorably. Viciously. Just as they were born and bred to do. Just as the great order of their world expected them to.
But not here.
Here, you preserved your life as long as possible. Even if it meant displaying weakness, you did whatever you could to live another day. They had no concept of dying with honor, because they had no concept of honor. They only knew of dying, and in this sad, grey world, dying took much longer than just the scanning of data and being reborn. It was significantly much more painful, he noted.
Take the human who was struggling under the weight of red stones, for example. Lying on the ground, with various protrusions and bruises on her body, she let out a red liquid from her body instead of revealing data. Blood, it was called. Similar to data, it was the thing that gave humanity life. Unlike data, however, it could not be taken so one could become stronger. And because there was no digi-egg to be reborn, no new chance at life, humans often died in excruciatingly exquisite pain.
Wizardmon looked upon the dying human (because isn't that what happened to humans who let out too much blood?) with a twisted, if not misguided, curiosity. He had heard how they died and some of his comrades had described so in rather vague detail. He, himself, had never seen a human, in general, up close, much less one who had a foot in the grave.
He would never admit it, but he actually felt sorry for the girl. He wasn't meaning to kill anyone. He just needed to lure out that Strabimon character. Oni-sama had ordered it, after all. As such, Wizardmon had theorized that another explosion caused by non-human means would coax out the wolf warrior. He had just wanted an explosion large enough to attract his attention. Hurt humans, he was willing to do. Scare them, yes. But, though he knew that it would eventually cross his path, death was not something he would intentionally wrought.
Then again, he supposed, with Oni-sama's true endgame, it would require the deaths of a large number of humans.
It didn't mean he necessarily liked it. It was just a necessity for the greater good.
But, perhaps, he could at least alleviate this one girl's pain.
"I didn't mean to cause you harm," he began, "Not to anyone here, really. I just needed to get someone out of hiding."
The girl, whom, Wizardmon realized, had odd blue lines within her black hair, looked at him from her place on the ground as if she didn't believe her. He didn't blame her.
Wizardmon continued.
"Nevertheless, I'm sorry. You're here while others are running. Your friends probably won't realize that you're missing until it's too late. You're bleeding on concrete and you are dying. I can't let you tell anyone that you saw me, so I have to let you die. But I am sorry."
The girl now stared back at him in confusion and, it seemed like, empathy, on a certain level.
"At the very least," he began to raise his wand, "I can make it quicker."
But Wizardmon never managed to do it.
Because Strabimon, the very digimon he was seeking out, had tackled him to the ground. And he did not look particularly happy.
Kaya Sanders, at this point in time, concluded that the universe and God hated her guts and decided to amuse themselves by making her go insane or killing her as painfully as possible.
Because really, what other person could say that they had been almost killed by three monsters, who may or may not have been real or a figment of her imagination, lied about said incident, and just when they felt safe, be attacked again by another possibly crazy mind induced monster and be trapped under a pile of bricks, while bleeding and quite possibly dying? In the span of a freaking week?
After getting all of the bricks off of her body, Kaya made it a priority to get herself out of there. Like now.
At least, she had, until she saw the wolf monster. The same monster whom she had encountered on Monday, with the whole evil sludge monster incident.
Was it real? Did that actually happen? Was she actually crazy? And why were those monsters, if they were real, even here? What, in the name of God, were they? What did they even want?
Whatever those answers were, she was going to get them. And she was going to start with that wolf creature.
Strabimon had been rather unoccupied when he had heard the explosion a couple of blocks down. He was traveling by way of shadows and alleys, searching the city for any rogue digimon. Joltmon hadn't come due to the injuries she had suffered a couple of days prior, so she had stayed behind in the warehouse.
When he had gotten to the source of the explosion, a mass of humans were running for their lives, a building was partially damaged, and a Wizardmon was apparently talking to a pile of bricks.
However, when he got closer, he saw that he was conversing with a human girl under that pile of bricks. A bleeding human girl. With blue streaked hair.
As soon as he saw that Wizardmon was about to kill her, Strabimon attacked him.
By now, he had been edging Wizardmon away from the area for a good 5 minutes. The less people knew about this, the better. And the last thing they needed to know was the existence of another, completely alien race.
As Strabimon fought the mystic type digimon, he felt it was a good a time as any to ask him some questions. After all, these occurrences had been going on for months and without any discernible reason. It couldn't be a coincidence.
He had finally managed to hit Wizardmon with his Light Claw, injuring him enough to reveal his fractal code. Keeling to the ground, Wizardmon looked at Strabimon with disdain. Strabimon, in the meantime, wasted no time in getting to the point.
"Why are you here?"
Wizardmon feigned confused. "I don't know what you mean."
"The attacks. For several months this has been going on. Digimon showing up in the human world may be one thing, but solely to cause harm? And immediately after one another? That's not a random happenstance. That's a planned assault."
"Come now. You have to know what we're doing here. You can't be that naïve," Wizardmon responded. From the look on his face, he truly thought that the answer should have been obvious.
Several beats passed with the two digimon glaring at each other. Finally, realization slowly came upon Wizardmon.
"You…you really don't know, do you?"
At this, Strabimon raised an eyebrow. Why would Wizardmon think that he knew about all this?
Sighing, Wizardmon shifted so that he was sitting with his legs in a pretzel.
"What a shame. You seem to be an intelligent fellow. And considering that a rookie such as yourself defeated a champion level digimon, you would be an invaluable confederate to Oni-sama."
Oni-sama?
"Who is-"
But before Strabimon could even fully form his question, Wizardmon waved his wooden wand and let out a cloud of blue smoke, disappearing.
Kaya had been hiding in the opposite alleyway on the other block when all of this occurred. And she had heard everything.
And at this point, she was more disturbed than ever.
So, was that why all of these attacks were perpetrated? It was part of some sort of strategy? But for what? And who the hell was Oni-sama?
The blue streaked preteen faintly remembered that oni was Japanese for a demon or evil spirit that caused you trouble and misery, due to reading some books of Mali's containing Japanese myths. Some of these oni did more than that, often causing a person to go mad and lead them to their, more often than not, bloody and horrific deaths. Whether or not this Oni-sama one of these demons, Kaya hadn't a clue. Either way, she was willing to bet that whoever they were, they weren't particularly peace loving or friendly.
Apparently, the wolf creature didn't know much about this guy either, considering he was the one who was asking the questions. And the Harry-Potter knock off was clearly not giving him any answers.
She was leaning forward to hear more of the conversation, but for some reason, it stopped. Then, a low growl.
"Damn it…"
Kaya recognized the voice belonged to the wolf creature. From what she could make of it, Harry Potter had somehow escaped. But to where?
She got her answer faster than she would've liked.
The very next second, blue smoke materialized in front of her. Kaya began to cough. She stopped immediately after what she saw.
Harry Potter had teleported out of there. And right into here.
He looked bruised, tired, and thoroughly shocked as he stared right back at her. He apparently wasn't planning on this either.
They kept up this staring contest for a good 10 seconds, until Harry Potter slashed his wand into the air. It turned from a stick of wood into a blade of medal in the time it took to snap one's fingers.
Oh hell…
Kaya began to make a break for the other direction, but he grabbed a hold of her shoulder and jerked her back. In the process, he had stabbed her left side.
"Ow! Goddamit you jerk!"
With that, the preteen proceeded to knee said jerk in the stomach. The Gryffindor alumnus look alike recoiled with a small groan. However, he was not giving up any time soon, as he used his knife to cut her arm, leaving a very deep wound.
Even before she had come to the alley, Kaya had felt dizzy. She attributed this to the blood she had lost and massive headache she gained from being trapped under a ton of bricks. The fact that Harry Potter was attempting to kill her was only aggravating all of this.
Now that he had cut her arm, she was losing more blood. Meaning she felt all the more dizzy and disoriented, beginning to lose perception of what was ground and what was sky. Only faintly did she acknowledge that, if she didn't get out of here and get help soon, she was going to die.
Kaya reached for his arm and twisted as far as he could, making him drop the knife and howl in pain, a data like ring showing up around his body. He was obviously injure enough to the point where he could be close to death. Good. Let the bastard feel how she did.
As she began to edge the knife toward her with her foot, she suddenly felt all too weak. All of her body felt like it was made of Jell-O and she couldn't hold his arm firmly.
. Not now. Just couple more minutes, seconds, anything. Please, I just need more time.
Harry Potter had taken note of her sudden weakness, and took the opportunity to wrench his arm out of Kaya's grip. He then grabbed the preteen's throat with both hands and squeezed.
She couldn't breathe.
She couldn't fight.
She could barely feel her own limbs.
Harry Potter looked at her with a sad, tired glance.
"I'm sorry. But I can't let you live, having seen what you've seen."
As the life was being squeezed out of her, Kaya could feel her head get lighter and lighter, and the blood draining from her entire body.
Looking up into the night sky, she saw a thousand stars in a sky full of black. Briefly, she wondered how those kind of lights survived and refused to be swallowed by the darkness.
She looked at the very person choking her to death.
Fight.
She balled up her left hand, and clawed her right.
Fight.
She let out a war cry…
Fight.
…And took a hold of the circle of data surrounding him.
Fight, Kaya.
Strabimon didn't know where Wizardmon had ran off to. Until he heard a very loud howl of pain.
"Ow! Goddamit you jerk!"
He immediately ran to the source of the noise, finding a rather odd and disturbing sight.
Wizardmon was trying to kill the human girl, choking her and holding her against the brick wall. She was bleeding and writhing in his grasp, very clearly dying from the blood loss and the pressure to her throat.
Strabimon made his way to stop Wizardmon, but the girl beat him to the punch.
She grabbed a hold of Wizardmon's arm with one hand, jamming a knife into it, and with her free one, grasped his data ring.
Wizardmon was, quite clearly, disturbed by the girl's actions and tried to break away. However, whether it was from the adrenaline or sheer will, the girl wouldn't let go.
The blue streaked human let out an ear piercing cry all the while she was doing this. Wizardmon joined the chorus by screaming in horror as his data was being taken away from him, still attempting to stop the human girl he now viewed, Strabimon imagined, as completely and utterly mad.
The girl had a death grip on Wizardmon's data and, inadvertently, pulled towards her as she struggled to plunge the knife further into his arm.
Soon enough, Wizardmon himself was beginning to disassemble into nothing but data. The girl paid no mind to this, still fixated on surviving this whole ordeal, and continued to hold Wizardmon and his data towards her, preparing to stab him in the gut. But she never got the chance.
Wizardmon, or rather, his egg, fell to the ground with a loud resounding thump, leaving his left over data in a large, messy pile. The girl, still unaware of this, simply pulled the data even closer towards her while trying driving the knife further into what she assumed was Wizardmon's arm.
The data seemed to gain mind of its own after that, immediately surrounding the blue streaked human and entering her body through the various gashes and wounds on her body. In that instant, her injuries healed almost spontaneously, and the blood ceased to course outside her body. Her eyes instantly shifted colors, from their usual black, to amber, to red, to blue, and black again. They finally seemed to settle on a glowing amber, before reverting back to black. The data, still winding itself around her, began to seep into her fingers until it was completely absorbed into her body. All that remained was a digi-egg and a shocked human girl in an alley, who seemed to be more terrified than when she was at Death's Door.
Strabimon began to believe that she truly had become insane, until he saw her close her eyes and cover her ears, as if the sights aggravated her eyes and the sounds were at a deafening decibel. This wasn't normal, not for a human. They could take such a wide decibel range that the human world emanated.
But not digimon. At least, not digimon who had gone from in-training to rookie. Heightened sense were often the side effects of this shift in age. The wolf digimon himself could remember when he had first experienced this. He had locked himself in his room for a week before he felt at ease with these new resonances and enhanced images.
He had locked himself in his room. And he had stayed in a corner, crouched, trying to keep the world out. He had covered his ears. He had closed his eyes. He looked his psyche was about to ompletely shatter. Just as what this girl looked like now.
It was impossible, logic dictated. It had never happened before in the history of this world, or his. It just could not happen, his consciousness told him.
But, despite his outward denial, inwardly, he knew the truth.
This blue streaked human girl was now half digimon.
So yeah...surprise!
