Standard Disclaimer: This work is a non-profit derivative work. I claim no ownership to Digimon or its characters.
Through the Forest of the Night - Part Two - Burning Black
Hikari woke up face down in the dirt.
Her eyes fluttered open, she climbed up on hands and knees, and a moment later she cried out.
It was gray, it was all gray. Gray in every direction.
She was back in the Dark World. Beneath her was gray soil, and around her were the gray trunks of gray trees. The spotty patches of grass poking out of the ground had only the barest hint of green in their sickly blades. The whole forest stank of saltwater undercut with the scent of seaweed that had washed ashore and begun to rot.
"Tailmon?" Hikari begged feebly, but her Digimon wasn't there. "Takeru? Daisuke? Kou-" she had to stop herself from her last call, after all what could he do?
Hikari turned around and around and around looking for, well anything, but there is nothing to see. Just more trees, just more grass, just more dead forest.
She swallowed. The creatures from this world were going to come for her, right? I mean, why else would they have called her? They wanted her for… Something. And Hikari had no interest in finding out what grisly thing they wanted from her. She shook her head and began to walk, glancing about nervously.
It was surprising, actually, that they hadn't come already. Had she managed to get away from them somehow? Maybe when she was, when she had- How had she got here in the first place? The last thing she remembered was seeing Lowemon and running away from him and then, and then what? She remembered being afraid and running and going into a dark room, but trying to remember anything more than that just rewarded her with a splitting headache.
It felt like she had just fallen from the sky, but a tiny little voice inside of her said it had probably been even worse. However she'd been dragged and pulled out of the Digital World must have been horrifying.
However it had happened, maybe something had gone wrong and she'd gotten a head start on the creatures? All the more reason to hurry, they were probably after her already.
"I can't get a response from either Hikari or Takeru," Iori said. He looked up from his D-terminal to gaze at the looming gray forest stretched out in front of him, "but it stands to reason that the two of them are somewhere in there."
"This place gives me the creeps," Armadimon provided in a helpful tone. "You think we should go in Iori? We might get lost…"
"I think..." Iori looked down, off in the distance waves crashed against an unseen shore. "I think we may already be lost."
"Whadya mean?"
"I mean I can't get in touch with Daisuke or Miyako or Ichijouji either. I think we were pulled in as well."
"Yeah, everything went funny there for a moment. What happened? How did we get here?"
"I don't know, for a moment I," Iori swallowed, "I thought I saw a graveyard, the one with my family's burial plot, but there were more headstones there... And I saw, I think I saw Mr. Oikawa's grave."
"You all right Iori?" Armadimon's big green eyes were almost painfully worried.
Iori nodded slightly, "it only just for a second. I'll be fine. I don't like it, but I think we should go in. I don't think we'll find anything good just waiting around."
"Hikari! HIKARI!" Takeru shouted her name into the void. "Hikari! Are you there? Where are you? Hikari!"
Takeru kept shouting. He kept shouting as the world looped. He kept shouting as the forest closed in.
"Hikari! Where are you? Tell me where you are Hikari! Tell me so I can save you Hikari! I have to save you Hikari!"
Takeru kept shouting. He kept shouting no matter how many trees he passed. He kept shouting even though nothing replied to his desperate words, not even the wind in the trees was there to reply to him.
"Hikari! Is this HIS fault Hikari? Is he why this happened Hikari? Is he there Hikari? I'll find you Hikari! I'll find you and when I do I'll stop him Hikari! I'll take you away from him! I'll get rid of him forever Hikari!"
Takeru kept shouting. He kept shouting even though he was all alone. He kept shouting into the black, shouting over the squelching of his footsteps as he tracked inky water behind him.
"Hikari! Where are you? I have to-"
When Hikari heard the waves she began to run.
For what felt like only a few vanishing moments when she'd started walking this world hadn't felt like the place from her nightmares. It had been dreary and sad and somehow cramped, but her fears had started to run down a tiny bit. But that was over with.
Now she was running.
From the first step Hikari had felt wrong; she felt exhausted before she even began. Only fear kept her going after about the twelfth step. It was fear that kept air choking through her ragged lungs, fear that pushed one strung out leg after another, fear that kept her eyes focused through the throbbing pain in her forehead.
It was fear that pulled her forward when she stumbled over an exposed root, fear that pushed her to dash past the first line of misshapen shadow things, and fear that let her find the strength to pull away from one of them when it grabbed her arm.
And it was fear, ultimately, that cut the legs out from under her and paralyzed her when the creatures finally penned her in after her muscles finally gave out after minutes of frenzied, panicked struggling.
Once again Hikari found herself surrounded by the empty creatures with their gangly arms and pot bellies and sunken-in eyes and choking fish stench. Once again they crowded in around her, reaching out for her.
And once again the sky fell.
"Schwarz Donner!"
It was more than one meteor this time, black thunderbolts hurled themselves down through the air sending grass and soil and inky black water splattering everywhere. In seconds an entire line of black creatures was gone, destroyed utterly.
There was shrieking, crashing, slamming, mechanical clacking, and a great roar from above as a great black beast hurled itself through the trees ripping through the shadow monsters like a cannonball. The creature landed, slid sideways, and then immediately leapt forward with golden claws outstretched to tear through another cohort of watery things. It pounced again, claws gleaming crimson, and then again through another rank of the shadows, and then once more.
Finally, the great black lion landed and paused. There were no more of the creatures to kill. It slowly turned to look down at Hikari, still lying frozen on the ground in a ring of spilled black water. Its brown eyes surveyed her. There was a clear intelligence behind its eyes, a focused and powerful one which was considering her carefully. There was the glimmer of instinct in them, the sheen of a hunter that was sizing up its prey, but even deeper than that the eyes carried, what? Triumph? Conviction? Maybe even concern? Whatever there was, they saw right through Hikari like she was made of glass.
Hikari slowly climbed to her feet despite her muscles aching and protesting. The Digimon remained completely still.
Looking at it now that it was stationary, there was no doubt the Digimon was a lion, one carved out of gleaming obsidian and detailed with golden filigree. Its body was punctuated with the metal rivets and mechanical parts that were so common to Digimon, and deep crimson gemstones were set into the armor of its forehead, chest, and legs. In different circumstances a world away Hikari might have called its body pretty, even artistic, but here what stood out over everything else was that it had color. This armor, a true black rising and cutting through the darkness, it was the same armor that flickered at the edge of recollection whenever she tried to remember the dream that had started this all.
"You're- are you, who are you...?" Hikari couldn't find the words, and what was supposed to be a question ended as something like a plea.
"Kaiser Leomon," the Digimon said with a firm voice. He turned his body and lay down. He looked back at Hikari, "get on. We're going."
"Where?"
"Out from here."
Hikari blinked, and for a moment allowed herself to stare. A black lion, this Digimon had to be... After all who else? Coincidences happened, sure, but not like this, no way. That meant... But he had come for her, right? When she'd cried out, called out even though she hadn't meant to, and this Digimon had come. It had torn through the shadows, a darkness that severed the night, and now it was here waiting for her.
Her heart was still pounding with anxiety and adrenaline and mismatched emotions when Hikari walked to the side of Kaiser Leomon and gingerly climbed on to the back of the black Digimon. To her surprise the mechanical body of the Digimon transformed itself to accept a passenger. Stirrups rotated out to hold her legs, and clasps for her hands quietly slid out of his shoulders. Beneath her, the black metal gave slightly to cushion her, at least a little bit. She'd barely gotten seated when Kaiser Leomon set off at a trot that quickly became a run.
Hikari had had a bad feeling when she'd woken up that morning, but this was far beyond anything she could have imagined. This all felt like another bad dream, but every time her steed hit a rough patch or made a sudden turn his metal body shook and her muscles protested in turn with aches and pains that were all dreadfully, painfully real.
All around her the sickly forest shook. Stale wind rushed past her face, the taste of salt caught her tongue. Even as it rushed past her the world felt still, maybe even frozen.
Hikari and her mount didn't pass unnoticed either. More of the shadows emerged from here and there, be they lurking just behind the trees or peering out from the shade cast by the jagged branches, but none of them dared come within reach of Kaiser Leomon's claws.
For his part the black Digimon paid them no mind. He must have seen them, but he dismissed them as he thundered onward through the blank forest. Kaiser Leomon moved with complete confidence through the forest, his powerful strides never hesitated.
His darkness completely eclipses theirs, the thought came in a flash. Here in the dark, he could be a king. Hikari shivered. What was she riding on? Where was he going? And what did he want with her? But it had to be better here than there, right? So once again her fear held her down.
As he ran Kaiser Leomon would turn, seemingly at random. To the left, the right, straight, a wide looping hairpin, an S shape. Over roots, under branches, through sickly bushes and barren shrubs. The world around Hikari seemed even less real from her perch.
Up above the sky remained gray, sunless, moonless, and starless, a splattering of paint blotches. Hikari shook, her throat was dry and her arms felt wooden. "Out of here" he'd said, but could he take here there? Was there an out of here? The darkness stretched out forever, and would the black king beast even let her escape from the dark?
Kaiser Leomon turned ninety degrees to the right and ran forward. Only a few moments later he spun and doubled back.
"Where are we going?" Hikari asked at last. Her throat was dry and voice shook.
"Out," said Kaiser Leomon.
"But you just-"
"There are no straight lines here," the beast interrupted. "This world is like a mirage or an optical illusion. It looks like it goes on forever, but that's just a trick. This forest, this world, is actually tiny, like a town in a snow globe – but if you don't know the way you'll end up going in circles. That's why they could find you, no matter how far you ran you never went anywhere."
Hikari stared around her. Every tree branch, every leaf, every gray blade of grass looked exactly the same. "How can you tell where you're going?"
"The shadows."
Hikari stared around again. Every dismal shadow in this dead place also looked exactly the same. It was infinity. "How-"
"No fake shadow can hide true Darkness," Kaiser Leomon said, his voice suddenly passionate.
"But this world is-"
"Just a mirage like I told you," he said, cutting her off. "I would have thought the Warrior of Light would know the difference between the shadows of this place and real Darkness. I guess I was mistaken," he sounded not so much angry as, disappointed?
"But, the darkness, I," Hikari shook, "I'm scared of it." it felt shameful to say for some reason, especially to him.
"You've never understood it," Kaiser Leomon's voice was definite.
"How could I?" Hikari's voice sounded feeble even to herself, "How can I when I'm supposed to be, supposed to be…"
"Do you want to?"
"Understand it? How can I?"
"It's easier than you think. Close your eyes."
"What?"
"Close your eyes, and look forward. What do you see?"
"Nothing!"
"No, not nothing. That's Darkness. It's not some distant thing either, that darkness has been with you your entire life."
"But that's different, that's not what I'm talking about at all!"
"What's different?"
"That darkness is just there, it didn't come from something," Hikari protested.
"Yes it did, it came from you," Kaiser Leomon said.
Hikari tried to protest. She wanted to explain what was different, how it was different, to talk about the enemies they had fought, the power they'd had to oppose, but the words just didn't come to her. Instead she just swallowed. She had a queasy feeling the Digimon beneath her knew more about the dark than she could imagine.
Left turn. Right turn. Right turn. Left turn. On and on. Still Kaiser Leomon kept moving tirelessly and Hikari had the curious thought that maybe the Digimon could run forever, as long as it was here.
Eventually, something changed - for the worse.
The first sign was the sound. Everything sounded slightly wrong in this world, noises all sounded like they came from slightly too far away, or were slightly muffled, or echoed in a way they shouldn't. As Kaiser Leomon ran the whipping wind had whistled in that way that was just a little bit wrong, a bit too shrill, but as he turned a corner suddenly it was gone, replaced with the sound of flowing water.
His footsteps also changed, instead of thundering on dirt and grass they started to squelch like the forest floor had turned to mud. Then they started to splash, throwing up the scent of salty brine. When Hikari leaned to the side to look she gasped, the forest floor had vanished under a layer of black water.
The shadowy things had also emerged in force, at first Hikari had seen only one or two every so often, but now as the water rose there seemed to be one beneath every tree. And still they did no more than watch. Their jaundiced yellow eyes stared out with a blank expression of, what? Hunger?
Kaiser Leomon slowed to a halt and growled. "I had a feeling it would be like this, but I was hoping I was wrong."
"What? Why are they all here?"
"The path through leads to the tide's highest point. I imagined all of this was some kind of desperate ploy, but I didn't give them enough credit. They were planning this."
"Planning what? What's happening?" Hikari asked as she turned her head around desperately, but even as she asked those words the cold tingle at the base of her neck signaled that she knew the answer already. Something very bad was happening.
All at once the shadow creatures raised their long arms and began to chant. Their words weren't Japanese, or English, or any language Hikari had ever heard. In fact, these words didn't sound like the speech of humans or Digimon at all. The voices came from every direction, their cries were guttural, not so much sung as croaked. The strange words echoed from every direction, hanging in the air in choking blanket of sound.
The water began to vibrate. Waves rippled inward, converging in on a single point straight ahead.
The voices rose, the shadows' cries reaching higher and higher into a mad crescendo, until finally all of them cried out in unison, one word over and over and over again:
"Dagomon! Dagomon! Dagomon!"
"The one that's closest to being real is coming," Kaiser Leomon said softly.
The waves rose higher. The dark water turned blacker. A vast shadow blanketed the gathered water.
"It's huge," Hikari whispered.
"No," Kaiser Leomon corrected, "just deep."
The creatures continued to chant and cry, so loudly Hikari pulled her hands from the grips to cover her ears and cower.
"That won't help you. It's coming if you look at it or not, and it's worse if you try and turn away." Kaiser Leomon said knowingly. His voice had a strange tenderness to it, but Hikari could feel the Digimon's body tense up beneath her as he took a step back.
The desperate wailing coming from the shadow things had hit a fever pitch, voices rising, voices crying, voices begging, pleading, screaming…
"Dagomon! Dagomon! Dagomon!"
The waves were sucked in slightly, they fell back for a moment, then it emerged. The black waters of the Dark Area erupted in a volcanic spray, rising high into the air as an enormous shape rose out of the darkness.
Only the top half of the horrid creature had pulled itself out of the depths, a misshapen mountain dripping with black water. Like the rest the world the shape was colorless, but instead of gray like its worshippers the being was a dingy, matte black. Its head was bulbous, its face a mass of tentacles, and its shoulders had spikes or teeth or maybe more jagged tentacles emerging from them. Its long arms had the consistency of frayed ropes tied over and over each other in weathered knots, but they bulged and writhed like trapped snakes. Chains or beads or something stranger dangled from its body and along its slithering arms, barely visible against its imposing silhouette. Tattered leathery wings emerged from its back looking pathetically minute compared to its massive ungainly bulk. The only sign of intelligence on the enormous monster were its eyes which gleamed a deep, true, violent crimson.
"That must be their old god," Hikari said, remembering the words of the shadow creatures from a year ago. The advent of the creature had stripped away her fear, after all what use was it? In front of it the whole world felt cold. All that was left after that was resigned numbness.
Kaiser Leomon's body suddenly crackled with heat. A piston at his back slammed down over and over.
"Schwarz Donner!"
The Digimon opened fire, launching bolts of black and gold from its mouth at the huge shape. The thunderbolts hit the thing like stones striking a pond. Kaiser Leomon's attack blew holes through it splashing water in every direction, but the god's silhouette merely flowed back over itself closing up the damage in mere moments. Kaiser Leomon growled.
"It's no use," Hikari had to fight the strange urge to laugh. "There's nothing we can do."
"No? I heard you fought to protect the Digital World, did you get this far by giving up?"
"No, but that's-!"
"Just another shadow that's a little more solid than the others," Kaiser Leomon said. His confidence still stunned Hikari, how could stare at the abyss without blinking?
The shadow began to move, its right side writhed and undulated, squirming itself into the shape of a grasping hand.
Hikari winced and looked away, the way the god's tentacles moved was nauseating and her eyes watered to look up at the thing. "What are you going to do?"
"There's a way through this, but it depends on you," the Digimon said quietly.
"Me? How can it?" she cried.
"I have another technique, but uses my whole body. To use it with you on top of me you'll have to join with my darkness."
"I can't!" Hikari practically screeched, "if you need me to get off–"
"Don't! The water is a lot deeper than it looks," Kaiser Leomon warned.
"Then I, I can't!"
"I know you can."
"How? How can you know?"
"Another Warrior of Light did it once before." Kaiser Leomon said with a voice heavy with recollection.
"How? But I'm not, I can't be her," Hikari squeaked.
"I know, you aren't him, and that's fine, but I know you can do this."
Up above the god had begun to move in earnest, the long twined arm began to reach down towards Hikari and Kaiser Leomon, like a curious child reaching for a particularly interesting insect.
"I don't know how," Hikari said helplessly.
"Do you want to?"
"If it will... Yes!"
"Then start by closing your eyes. Have you done that?"
"Yes but how-"
"Now, what do you see?"
"Nothing-!"
"But there is something there, you know that even if you can't see it. As long as you keep your eyes shut anything in the world could be out there in front of you. Anything you can imagine, good or bad, could be there. Until you open your eyes to let the Light in all that there is is you, your mind, and your heart. That space between you and the rest of the world that could be anything or everything, that's Darkness," Kaiser Leomon's voice had changed somehow, not how it sounded but how it felt. With Hikari's eyes shut the Digimon seemed different. Younger, closer perhaps, and familiar from a place outside of her dream. His voice sounded like an invitation, like he was a friend from a long time ago who was eager to share something important he'd learned that he was passionate about.
The salty, fishy stink was getting closer, the great deep thing's hand was still reaching out.
"Darkness accepts everything and allows anything. It's the soil of worlds, the backdrop of dreams, the start of ambition, and the beginning of ideas. You don't have to like it, you don't have to submit to it, you don't have to give in to it, you just have to accept it," Kaiser Leomon said softly.
"I can't," Hikari said.
"You don't know that."
"But, the darkness is evil."
"No, that's just what you expect it to be."
"I'm supposed to represent Light."
"You still cast a shadow."
"I'm afraid of it."
"Everyone's afraid of the unknown, but we have to reach for it anyways. Please trust me Hikari, even if it's just this one time."
Hikari heaved a deep breath. "What do I have to do?"
"Keep your eyes closed, but stay looking forward so you don't get lost. Don't be afraid if you see yourself, your reflection is also your shadow. Remember there's nothing in your darkness that didn't come from you, and nothing will happen in there until you do. If you need me, I'll be there for you. Now, on the count of three. One... Two..."
Kaiser Leomon's body vented darkness in every direction, blotting out the world. The ruby gems on his body began to glow. Hikari felt her body start to dissolve in a strangely painless way, though her mind remained solid and her sight, if that was even the word with eyelids shut, stayed steady even as the rest of her disappeared. The dead god reaching for them from up above hesitated for a moment mere inchs from Kaiser Leomon, but that moment was one too long.
"Three! Schwarz Koenig!"
Polished darkness in the shape of a black lion surged forward like lightning and struck Dagomon with a roar.
And a splash.
The ocean was old before it was young. It was dying before it had even been born. So much fell into it from the long shadows cast on it from a world away, but it had nothing, not even shadows to its own name. It wanted and it took but it never received. It wasn't cold because it had never been warm. There was no grand design here, no deeper meaning, no vast conspiracy; it simply was, if just barely. It was a land of twilight, lacking light but therefore only almost dark. And at its depths was the creature that the voices had called for, the one shaped like something impossible and unknowable. What better shape was there for a world so thin that even death could die?
Dagomon, the thing from the deep, had spotted her and it turned and threw a tentacle upwards reaching after her, but it was so, so far away. As it clutched and grasped and lunged from the depths up at her she felt a strange emotion well up inside her. It wanted her light and it would do anything to have it and consume it and that thought should have terrified her, but looking down into the abyss of the outer dark all she felt was a kind of pity, and even stranger a sense of disappointment. She shook her head.
"Let's go." She felt a hand extend out from behind her as she heard his quiet voice. She nodded and turned to take it, letting it take her out from the false shadows in the depths and into the darkness.
For a moment, she saw infinity. All that there was, all that there ever could be, would be, it was all here in the dark. Everything she feared was here, so was everything she fought, but so was everything she loved, everything she believed in, everything she dreamed of. That perfect vision of hope and understanding she'd always struggled for was here, it was the perfect dream of harmony and brotherhood she held to even as it was tarnished by sad understanding and lived disappointment. But now it was here before her, free from the cruel chains of light, free to be what she wanted it to be. If she could just grab onto it…
"It's not real until it casts a shadow," came the voice from her side, gently guiding her onward past utopia. She felt her tears fall away into the black waters beneath the two of them.
"But it's there! It's really there!" She laughed even as she cried, the black-painted world suddenly shining brilliantly without light.
"It's really there."
Kaiser Leomon crashed through the form of Dagomon like a cannonball blasting a hole through the lumbering shape. Water splattered in every direction, the waves rippled and shook as the beast screamed horribly. Its shadowed body once again tried to regenerate and patch the massive wound that had been blown through it, water flowed in backwards filling in the missing part of its chest, but then it froze and shuddered.
The black Digimon paused and looked back over his shoulder at Dagomon. "Time's up, the tide is going out."
And, like a fountain turning off, Dagomon dropped straight down through the water and vanished.
Satisfied, Kaiser Leomon once again began to run through the forest. "Are you okay?" He asked, "you did have to take a dive into the deep end just now."
"I think I'm okay," Hikari said. "It's just, that was a lot." Her eyes were still closed.
"It was. That was everything all at once."
"You saw it too, right?"
"It's what I'm fighting for," his words didn't surprise Hikari at all. His darkness had been so warm...
"Can it happen? Can we make it happen?" Hikari asked.
Kaiser Leomon didn't respond at once. "I don't know. But it's there, that means it must be possible. And if we don't do it, who will?"
Hikari rode in silence for a minute more, then, regretfully, she opened her eyes. She was still here in the forest, still here in this grayscale world. Hikari looked forward through gloom.
Left.
Kaiser Leomon shifted and turned to the left.
Right, then right again.
Kaiser Leomon turned to 2 o'clock, then a few moments later turned more sharply to the right to weave in between two trees.
Hikari blinked. How in the world had she not seen it before? The path was staring her right in the face all along! She raised an arm to trace it with a finger, but then she stopped and just stared. As usual in the Digital World she was wearing her gloves, the long, pink fingerless gloves she usually wore in the spring with the back of the hand open to help the fabric breathe. Long, fingerless, pink. Pink.
Hikari looked down at herself in disbelief, she had color.
"What? How?"
Kaiser Leomon nodded slightly as he ran. "If you look into the abyss it looks back into you, right? Having color here is proof you've been accepted by it, like I said there's a difference between shadows here and real Darkness. Once you can see that, things change."
"It does feel different now," Hikari said, craning her head from side to side, "was it always this empty? It's like the backdrop on a stage."
"I don't know. Maybe it was something more, once. But I know one thing," Kaiser Leomon went on, "this forest is done for. Pretty soon there won't be anything left of it."
Hikari turned to look over her shoulder. When she looked at it now it seemed like the whole forest was shrinking away like a deflating balloon. "Is that, the big one, is it gone?"
"You mean 'did we kill it?' No, it's still alive. And this isn't over yet, they're still going to be coming after you for little while longer at least. I think that big one, Dagomon, will be the last one left at the end."
"That's..." She started, but Hikari couldn't find the right word for it. Was she afraid? Yes, she was still afraid of the creatures here, but there were so many other emotions she couldn't pull them apart much less explain them. Disappointment, frustration, guilt, indignation, pity, resignation, weariness... It made her head spin trying to keep up with everything she could see and feel now.
"Easy now, I told you that you dived into this headfirst. You don't have to rush it, your shadow isn't going anywhere." Kaiser Leomon paused for a moment. "You know, I think yours really likes you."
"...That's a good thing, right?"
"I think so, but I'm biased. The Darkness gave me everything I ever wanted and then some, and even now I get so much from it."
"Will it have something for me?"
"Haven't you already gained something from it?"
Hikari thought to respond, but thinking back on what she'd seen filled her stomach with butterflies all over again and she choked up. Another emotion rolling around in her chest was elation, elation and liberation. All of a sudden she felt like she could do something again. She felt like she could dream again.
"What now?" she asked.
"We leave," Kaiser Leomon said.
The first change once again was the sound. All of a sudden Hikari could hear birds chirping. A moment later a gust of warm wind blew. Leaves rustled, proper leaves properly rustling unlike the dried sandpaper of the Dark World. And the scent was gone, instead of stale seawater the wind carried the invigorating scent of the forest. Finally, almost as an afterthought, as Kaiser Leomon turned a corner and came into a clearing the world was suddenly in color again. The Digimon came to a halt and settled down in a grassy clearing shaded by a deep green canopy.
Looking down at her mount now, Hikari could see that the shadows of the forest clearly adored him. The long shadows of the tree limbs all seemed to gently brush the mechanical lion.
Hikari climbed down from Kaiser Leomon's back, unsteadily. The moment her feet touched the ground she suddenly felt her exhaustion come back with a vengeance. She stumbled, but managed to keep on her aching feet.
"Thank you, for... Everything" she could only end lamely. Kaiser Leomon seemed to shrug. Hikari hesitated for a moment before asking, "you are, him, right?"
Instead of answering her, the black Digimon was suddenly wrapped in a cocoon of shimmering barcodes.
"Kaiser Leomon, Slide Evolution! Lowemon!"
As the DigiCode receded, Hikari just nodded. "I knew it." She felt herself smile.
"Be careful Warrior of Light, this isn't over."
"Are you going to stay?" Hikari's voice was hopeful.
"I'll be here until the end of this, but for now I have to go. Your comrades are coming and I don't want to get into another fight with them."
"Wait, please! You should stay and meet my friends, it'll be better if we can all work together," Hikari reached a hand up towards him. Lowemon's eyes flickered with, what? Regret? Frustration? Sorrow?
"It's too late for that," he said quietly.
"I know that they think you're a bad Digimon, but if I can just explain things I'm sure they'll understand!"
"I want to-" but Lowemon suddenly leapt backwards.
"Silver Blaze!"
Pegasmon's attack crashed down where he had been standing barely a second before.
"Get away from her!" Takeru yelled out from above on his partner's back.
"Hikari! Are you okay?" Tailmon had dropped down from next to him and ran to her side. Hikari stared as Lowemon leapt high up onto a tree branch and then vanished into the forest's shady canopy.
"We have to go after him!" Takeru shouted.
Pegasmon shook his head. "It's too late, he's already gone Takeru." The blonde haired boy swore.
"He won't get away next time, I'll make sure of that."
Hikari shook. For a moment she wanted to scream, to rage and yell at Takeru for ruining everything, but his determined face staring off into the forest ended that impulse as soon as it began. It was rare that the Chosen Child of Hope's eyes blazed like that. Hikari sank down, falling on her knees. She simply didn't have the strength, Light's Chosen Child was utterly exhausted.
"Are you okay Hikari?" Takeru had also dismounted his partner and come to be by her side, his shadow falling away from her, cast as it was by the summer sun shining down behind her. Hikari followed it with her eyes stretching out from behind his back down to the soles of his shoes. Then she looked down, at her own shadow spread out like a tapestry across the grass.
It was still there, her very own darkness. For a moment, Hikari imagined she could see it smile.
With a Herculean effort Hikari managed to tilt her neck back and look up at Takeru. "I'm okay," she said.
And for the first time in what felt like an eternity she didn't have to force herself to smile.
It's been interesting reading other stories as I write this just because I keep stumbling on stories with ideas similar to my own like a kind of literary convergent evolution. There's a couple of stories that have been fascinating to look at because they have concepts weirdly close to mine, and one with a plot turn that feels like was plucked out of the future of this particular fanfic, but of course they always veer away eventually. That one particular, inadvertently prescient one for instance has a central plot premise that I find head scratching and kind of frustratingly objectionable, but at the same time that's why I'm writing my own story after all. When I first published a couple of years ago I said one of my motivations was because I never did find a fanfic that perfectly matched the ideas I'd like to see explored, and so I had to make it myself.
And speaking of which, yeah this took a little while. Part of that is the infinity of vagaries that is IRL, but part of that is also the prominence of this chapter. This is a big deal, important chapter and I put a lot of work into making it and in trying to convey all the important points and all the character turns, and the intrinsic hell of it is that I'm still not sure I got there. Or, to put it another way, the barometer for whether or not I succeeded has a little bit to do with you in the audience reading this story. I'd love to hear your thoughts; be it yay or nay I'd like to hear if I got close.
And speaking of reviewers, thank you so very much to Blackdrake on FFN, my various guests, ElaineBlueville and DraconicMistress on AO3, and everyone else who favorited, bookmarked, or left a kudos. You all mean a lot, and I'd love to hear from you again.
To Be Continued