Disclaimer: I do not own Digimon so please refrain from suing me for writing fan fiction. Thanks and enjoy!
Fate—Chapter 11
Jyou was getting a little nervous. Not only was it extremely hot in the tiny tunnel-like ventilation shaft, it was pitch black. The walls were so close on either side of him he would have been unable to turn around if he had wanted to.
He stopped crawling down the shaft for a moment to wipe a film of sweat off his forehead. How long have we been in here? He wondered as he followed Takeru around another bend in the shaft.
"Sora, I think we might be close to the end," Ken stated, his voice tinny from resounding off the metal walls. "The air current is much stronger. We should probably go down the next junction."
Sora nodded, then realized Ken probably couldn't see her in the dark so said aloud: "OK." She had found that the junctions came at about every ten feet on either side of them. The next junction should be close, she thought. And it'll probably be on the right because the last one was on the left.
She felt along the wall with her right hand, to make sure she didn't miss the junction. And second now, any second…. The junction wasn't there. Sora felt frantically on first the right, then the left, thinking that maybe she'd managed to miss it. But no, the walls were solid.
"Why are we stopped?" Iori demanded.
"I can't find a junction," she responded, crawling a couple more feet forward and feeling along both walls. I should have found one by now, she silently added. Something's not right.
"Sora, maybe we should go back to the junction we passed a minute ago," Takeru suggested. "Maybe it was the last one."
"Wait, wait just a second," she muttered, crawling a few more feet ahead. And then she screamed as her hands were met with nothing to support them. She flailed madly, trying to move back to where the ground was solid, but found that she was stuck hanging haphazardly from a drop.
"Sora, what's wrong?" Jyou shouted.
But she was too panicked to reply other than to shriek in fear as she felt herself slipping.
"Hold on!" Ken shouted above her screaming. He crawled forward only to receive a kick in the face. He cried out in pain and his lip began to bleed.
"What happened?" Iori questioned.
Before Ken could answer Iori's question, Sora screamed again and shouted: "someone help me, please! I'm slipping!"
He crawled toward Sora again and narrowly missed getting kicked a second time. "Sora, I'm going to help you. But you've got to quit kicking your legs first."
Immediately Sora stopped flailing. Ken wished he could see in the tunnel and reached out for Sora's now unmoving leg and caught her by the ankle. "OK, I've got you," he said. He noticed that his voice sounded strange in the tension of the moment.
The next few things that happened were swift and unclear to him. He heard Sora slipping off the edge of the drop. She cried out in fear and instinctively kicked her legs, making Ken lose his grip on her ankle. He made a desperate lunge for her as she fell off the edge, and caught her again. But he had horribly misjudged the force of his jump and found himself also falling from the drop.
He cried out in surprise and let go of Sora's ankle, then hit a hard cement floor. The sudden impact left him stunned and for just a moment his vision went blurry. It took him a moment to realize that his other friends were asking if he and Sora were all right.
Painfully, he got to his feet and noted with relief that Sora was also standing up. "We're fine," he answered as he looked around the room. "And I think we've found the way out," he added, resting his eyes on a door to the outside world….
~*~
Miyako panted as she ran down the forest trail behind Hikari. She along with Daisuke, Taichi and Hikari had been running for the past hour, trying to keep the Ghoulinthians from finding them.
"Are…they still…behind…us?" she gasped.
"Yes," Daisuke replied from behind her. "And they're getting closer."
Miyako concentrated on taking deep breaths in and out, picking up one foot and putting it in front of the other and not on how tired she was. She heard the footsteps behind them growing louder and louder…and then they began to fade away.
After a couple more minutes, Hikari stopped running and exclaimed: "they've stopped chasing us."
"But they had
us! Why would they just stop?" Daisuke wondered aloud.
After a minute of silence in regard to
Daisuke's question, Taichi muttered: "I think I know. Look through those ferns."
Miyako, Daisuke and Hikari looked in the
direction Taichi had told them to and gasped in surprise. Somehow, they had managed to stumble onto
the Droglidite base….