Disclaimer: I don't own Digimon.
Episode XI
A Beacon in the Darkness
"Good
morning ladies and gentlemen. I am glad you could attend this one final
meeting."" Gennai, still wearing his gray and brown robes, sat down, narrowly
avoiding banging his head on the hilt of the sword slung over his
back.
Ken watched in awe as the others around him sat themselves down. Oikawa was there, looking lighter and full of color like he had in those moments before he let his life force run forth. BlackWarGreymon meticulously polished his claws on a white cloth. A small, pink Digimon that Ken did not recognize sat on one corner of the table. A few humans sat around the table, but none of them bore faces he could recognize. When he tried to focus on them they slipped away, almost as if they were painted on soap bubbles that burst whenever he examined them too closely.
"As you know, we expect full-fledged war on the frontiers soon. If that happens the support we've been lending the Digidestined will disappear. It will be up to you, and those like you, to continue supporting them in their endeavors. Now, we do have some contingencies built in, but we don't know if they will be enough. The true test will not begin until such time as they attempt to utilize or discover the true power of the crests. We hope that we will be able to guide them in this hour, but if not, it will be up to you."
The image flickered and faded as Ken woke up, the now familiar black bracelet glowing fiercely. But the question still rang in his mind. What were the powers of the crests?
"I'm beginning to hate mornings." Ken muttered to nobody in particular as they walked through another wisp of fog rolling over the hillside.
"I'm still ahead of you. I've always hated mornings." Davis swung his walking stick around and everybody ducked instinctively. The first time he had done that he had almost taken off Yolei's head, the second time he had almost given TK a black eye, and once he had even started a two hour fight with Veemon. Now everyone was used to this quirk, just like they were familiar with all of their other traits.
It was still morning, but they had left Babamon's over an hour before, and had worked hard on putting distance between themselves and what was behind them. Everyone was in a better mood, now that they had three Ultimates to protect them, the same team that had almost brought BlackWarGreymon to his knees (this was Davis' interpretation of events. Kari and Ken tended to view it as the team that had temporarily halted the Mega's rampage). With those three in their back pocket, they all had started to feel confident that they were ready to continue on against their opponents. TK was still in a bad mood, but he seemed to be feeling better.
"I feel exposed on these hills." Kari muttered under her breath.
"We are exposed, but at least we should be able to see anyone who's trying to sneak up on us." Gatomon looked around a little anxiously. "It should give us enough of a warning that we should be able to get out of their way."
"Hmmm…you may be right." Kari returned, but she hardly looked reassured.
"I know what. I'll take a quick flight and see if anything's around." Before anyone could say anything else, Hawkmon was aloft, heading skyward to gain a better vantage point. After a few moments of spiraling he returned to the ground, just as the last remains of that particular wisp of fog had passed over them, giving them a view of only partly clouded skies. "There is something out there chaps, on the other side of that big hill over there, all in a line. We'll have to go look at it to get a better idea of what it is."
"Should we run away?" Cody asked from the rear of the group.
"No." Ken returned. "We might as well at least know what we're up against before we start running from it."
It took them about half an hour to creep through the long grass to the top of the next hill, where they all sprawled out in the dark, polished rocks on the top of the mound. For a moment they sat and regained their bearings. To the direction that Ken thought of as north, simply by assuming the sun rose in the east and set in the west, there was a chain of mountains running like a vast arm from a higher Range they could see in the distance over to one side. Westward stretched a vast plain, moving toward the horizon in an interwoven tapestry of green and brown, here and there crossed with the lighter brown of roads and the muddy blue of rivers that led to some distant ocean. Off to the east there were higher hills, rising up enough to block all attempts to see further in that direction, but from what Ken had analyzed earlier, they led only to the sea. On the ground to the northwest there ran a large road, made of dry-packed dirt, and on it they could easily spy movement.
"What is it?" Davis hissed after a moment of being completely unable to resolve any sort of coherent image from the distance.
Ken yanked out the scanner and quickly set it up, running a brief diagnostic check. After a few moments he set it into SCAN mode, and let the machine do its running for him. There were a few subdued flashes of light, and then more images appeared on the screen, spreading out to illustrate his targets.
"Okay, we seem to have a group of Monochromon pulling a set of carts. There are some Woodmon around, maybe as guards, but I'm really not sure what they're doing. They appear to be going down the road."
"So we should leave them alone?" Wormmon asked.
"Maybe, maybe not Wormmon. That road curves up after the next hill. It starts going in the direction we want to go. Maybe we should follow them while sticking to the hillsides. That way we could see if they're going anyplace we want to go, and if they could make our lives easier."
"Sounds like a plan to me." Veemon raised both arms in another pose from televised wrestling. Gatomon just sighed.
"Let's go then." Ken pointed.
Moments later, only the disturbed earth marked where they had just passed by.
"I wonder who used to live here." Yolei shuddered as she walked under the overhanging veranda that stood above them, now an imposing structure instead of a gentle green one.
"I don't know. There was a whole city like this under Machinedramon's rule back in the Digital World once." Kari looked around. "It was just as empty, and we never found out the purpose of that one either. I was sick most of the time so I don't remember much of it, but Tai told me later that it was huge."
"Well, those words describe this one all right." Hawkmon noted clinically. "Huge and empty."
All around them they were surrounded by buildings. This was a city, like the ones in Japan, only bearing a mysterious air around it. There was no noise anywhere save the various chirping of assorted birds and the rustle of the wind as it spread through trees and vegetation. Three and four story buildings surrounded them, rising harshly into the sky, their right angled walls and corners cutting off observation, windows gleaming dark and empty. Off in the distance they could see skyscrapers, rectangular obelisks much like the structures back home, cutting into the sky as they pronounced their unnatural origin to all viewers. Asphalt and concrete paved the way in front of them, leading past large windows, sometimes filled with faded signs and sun-bleached goods, sometimes empty or broken.
Closer examination revealed that the city was empty, and had been for some time. There was no wholesale destruction, no evidence of some great war, pestilence or famine, simply a vast emptiness, as if the denizens of the city had evacuated, and never come back. In the buildings that they had already broken into they had found no personal goods, except for some few trinkets left behind, no edible food, nothing of great use. Yolei had remarked that it just looked like everybody had up and left, and everyone else agreed with this assessment, although it did not make anything less creepy at all. In fact, the emptiness increased that feeling of loneliness that dwelt around them.
It was the presence of everything that made it feel so darn creepy, as Ken had noted. Everywhere things were perfectly laid out for human habitation, as if the inhabitants were only away for a few moments. The patina of age overlaid on the city only refined that impression, as if everything were waiting for the return of their owners. At any moment they expected to be hailed or greeted by a shopkeeper coming out of their shop, or a passerby wandering through the city streets. They expected to be beset by the steady sounds of traffic and the cheerful yelling of young children. A part of them waited for the inevitable good-natured cursing of the gardeners as they sought to control the outbreaks of weeds and uncontrolled vegetation throughout the cityscape. Silence, thick as a down comforter, felt uneasy and out of place in such a city, and had become especially unnerving.
"Well, I guess nobody does live here." Veemon looked around another time and shrugged.
"Great. That means that we get the whole place to ourselves. I get dibs on anything good." Davis looked around as if he meant to loot the stores right then.
"Davis!" Cody exclaimed, looking rather startled.
"He does have a point." Ken noted. "Whoever lived here obviously hasn't been here in a long time. We might need some of these things more than they do, and we can only hope that we find something good."
"Somebody does live here." Kari pointed out rather quickly. "We saw that convoy pull in here, and they haven't come out yet. That means that somebody is here, probably downtown. We should go take a look, it should be easy in this mess."
"Over there." TK pointed. Everyone stared at him. He had not been saying much all day, lost in brooding over some internal war. It seemed that he had been losing. Now there was a different light in his eyes, but they all recognized that the shadow that had been steadily overcoming him was still there, and only had changed a little.
"Where?" Patamon asked. "I don't see anything." He continued, trying to draw his partner out, arouse his interest in something.
"Through the buildings. They look connected. Try to stay off the streets and out of the open to keep from getting seen. Too much clutter inside for then to keep track of, too many hiding places for them to search. Stay in the shadows and keep out of sight." Having released his barely informative statement he once more lapsed back into uncharacteristic silence. Everyone exchanged brief looks.
"Right." Davis responded first after a moment of quiet thought. "We'll sneak through the buildings if we can and stay out of sight. That way we can observe whatever's going on without being seen ourselves."
"Sounds like a plan." Gatomon looked back over her shoulder at Patamon, who was shifting around, as if trying to get TK to respond. It was hard to tell if TK even realized that he was still carrying his partner around on the top of his head. Kari sighed once, and Ken looked distinctly pained.
"So how do we do this?" Davis asked after a moment as they peered through the doorway into the nearest building, which appeared to be the ground floor of some sort of apartment complex.
"I go first." Ken looked back over his shoulder. "I've seen the rest of you try and sneak around, and although you aren't bad, I'm best cut out to go first. Cody can follow with the rest of you." With barely another word he was off, his black form blending almost effortlessly into the shadows created by walls. After a few moments, Cody shrugged and the rest of them followed.
Ken slipped through buildings like a quiet shadow, carrying Wormmon quite comfortably in a backpack he picked up in the first store they wandered through. His eyes pierced the shadows, but they rarely found anything of real interest, and his main job was to warn those who followed him of dead ends and unsteady floors. The rest of the group spread out, sometimes stopping to see if there was anything worth taking around, sometimes just following mutely. They wandered through a network of apartments and small family-type stores, most of whom had lost anything they had a long time ago.
Then, slowly, the landscape changed. A large building loomed ahead of them, and after a few tense moments crossing an empty street and yard, they burst inside. Immediately, thanks to the layout and the rooms, everyone recognized it as a school, something that brought a few tears of homesickness to various eyes. Schoolrooms, long without any students, brought a few moments of consideration, and Ken picked up a few disk-like objects in one room that looked like they might fit in one of the scanners many drives, but otherwise there was not much around. Veemon found a set of bathrooms and showers, but the water had long ago ceased functioning, and they were denied even the pleasure of cleaning up.
After that there were a few more blocks of apartment buildings, but these apartments were much bigger. Stops were made often, and Davis crammed his Mobius Box full of a variety of small items that he picked up here and there, marveling at its unlimited carrying capacity. Yolei figured out the potential of that particular item, and soon they were carrying blankets and bedclothes and cooking gear as well. After awhile though they got tired of raiding the apartments and stopped, feeling as if they had been, in some way, stealing from the tombs of the dead.
By midday they were all very subdued and were eating their lunch of dried fruits and other goods carried from the forest in the middle of what must have been, at one time, a fairly expensive lounge. Everyone was a little afraid of the shadows, and when Veemon and Hawkmon accidentally knocked over one of the large, stuffed, armchairs the resulting bang sent everyone running for cover. It took awhile for everyone to creep back into the middle of the room, and they were all feeling a little timid.
After that they entered an area that was mostly office buildings instead of apartments. The landscape was less crowded, so there was more of a break between buildings, but at one time it must have been the rage to plant oak-like trees in rows, and now they were able to run from the shade of one tree to the shade of the next tree. This still lead to a lot of tense moments, because by now everyone was seeing shadows everywhere. Ken and Davis insisted on exploring some part of every office building, looking for something of interest or importance, but only found numerous documents in languages they could not read, and the hollow shells of computers long since dead.
However, several office buildings from the beginning, they did find out, at least in some part, why the city was deserted.
"Come look at this." Hissed Gatomon from where she had bounded down a stairwell, to the rest of the group, who were looking around on the first floor.
"What is it Gatomon?" Kari asked, interested in whatever her partner was interested in.
Gatomon simply shook her head and bounded back upstairs. The rest of them followed until they found the white cat sitting in front of a large window several floors up, looking toward the center of the city, her white tail twitched anxiously. Ken, who reached the window first, squinted at the city and then gasped.
Looking out the windows they could see down a straight, wide road that ran from the foot of the building they were in down to the center of the city. From this point they could see that the office building they were in, a plain rectangle of concrete, glass and steel, was actually a monument of sorts, placed on top of a hill overlooking city center. Down below them was a huge asphalt circle, and then a road that was at least as wide as a ten lane freeway would be back home. The next row of buildings in front of them was in the same shape that all the other buildings they had passed through had been, but the ones after that were ruffled, dirty and almost ruined. Gradually, as the buildings approached city center, they got more and more destroyed. Gaping holes in the concrete walls revealed structural steel, bent, twisted and half-melted by whatever had happened there. Vehicles that looked vaguely like cars, except a lot more angular, had been dragged around at impossible angles to create little clusters on many of the roads that Ken could see. Huge holes had been blasted in pavement and dirt alike, reaching down out of sight, many of them now sporting small outgrowths of plants. Off in one direction, over a set of low buildings, they could see a park filled with greenery, but there was an odd pattern to the trees, as if a forest had been reduced by blasts of fire, until the remnant was riddled with huge tree-less holes. Windows, gleaming in the waning sun, revealed huge shatter marks and what could have been bullet holes through many of them. Magnificent as the skyline must once have been, it was now marked by buildings that had obviously been reduced in size, many of them missing what looked like entire floors off of their tops.
"Someone fought a war here." Gatomon remarked quietly.
"What do you mean by that?" Yolei asked.
Gatomon turned upward, some painful elder memory lurking in her deep eyes. "When I worked for Myostismon, he used to make me come along as he did his petty deeds. There was a small city, run by mostly Agumon and such in the ends of his domain that resisted his rule. He came upon them with his army and destroyed the entire city, but the Agumon fought back with great skill along with the other Digimon in the city. Myotismon won in the end, but the city was in ruins. And it looked a lot like this, only this is much, much bigger.
"I don't think these were the inhabitants Gatomon." Ken seemed to be deep in thought, the wreckage and destruction he was facing was clearly influencing his thinking. "I think all of the citizens themselves got out safe. These were the soldiers of two armies that were fighting here."
"Why do you say that Ken?" Davis asked after a bit.
"Because we haven't seen any signs of struggle elsewhere. Do you think the inhabitants would have surrendered that easily if they fought this much? I think they were evacuated first, and then the two sides fought it out here. I think the city's side lost though, or else they would have come back."
"Probably." Yolei agreed.
"How sad." Kari remarked after a bit, still staring out at the city, whose ruins had a mesmerizing effect in the sun. "To have their entire city like this destroyed, it must have been horrible. And to fight for a dead city, that must have been horrible too."
"I think this is part of how the Dark took this world over." Ken remarked to nobody in particular. "They must have fought wars like this all over."
"It's horrible." Kari whispered again after a moment.
"That's why we're here." Patamon spoke up unexpectedly. "To stop things like this from ever happening on Earth."
"I agree." Even Davis sounded subdued.
"Look, what's that?" Cody, who had remained silent in the face of the destruction, suddenly thrust out his arm at a few specks turning into the road. They were far away, but the gait and the pace made them much easier to identify.
"It looks like those wagons that we were following earlier. I wonder what they're doing here." Hawkmon noted.
"Let's follow them." Veemon suggested.
"Better idea." TK mumbled, as if speaking from a great distance away. Everyone turned to look at him again. "Wait here, rest until dark. Sleep in couches over there. Follow them when it's dark. Nobody sees us."
They all exchanged glances and shrugged. Ken and Davis both nodded, and a few moments later they were solidly enclosed by a little fort of cushions ripped off of sofas and chairs throughout the building, basking in the warmth of the sun.
"Brrrrr. It's cold out here." Yolei noted.
"Duh. It is night after all Yolei." Davis responded as his usual disrespectful self, but even he was having a hard time keeping from shivering in the sudden burst of cold. Still it was easier for the group to creep through the ruins unseen at night than it was to sneak through them in broad daylight. Even now they were approaching the city center.
It appeared that their secrecy had been merited. Patamon and Gatomon, who had the best ears, reported the sounds of moving Digimon at several times during the night, each time leading to a sudden freeze in activity. Armadillomon had felt several different strange tremors reach up to him from beneath in the earth, each time sending little shivers over his spine. Ken once caught a glance of a pair of Monochromon stalking up one street in the moonlight, disappearing around a corner. It appeared that this place, ruinous as it was, remained inhabited in some shape or form, but in a manner which they had yet to determine.
So, when Patamon, his huge ears extended, suddenly froze up, everyone stopped along with him, and when he whispered hurriedly to them that they had to hide, everyone stared at him for the briefest of moments before dodging behind furniture or under desks that were all around the former office complex, on what must have at one time been a carpeted floor. Everyone was trying to avoid breathing when there was a sound from outside, and then a pair of Mushroomon walked in through the door, heading right past their hiding places.
"All I'm saying." One was telling the other as they walked through the doorway. "Is that the Lady ain't gonna like it if the Captain doesn't figure out a way to keep them outta here."
"They can't be too tough. I heard they're just a bunch of kids and rookies." One Mushroomon leaned idly on a desk that Cody and Armadillomon were hiding under.
"Yeah, well I also heard they beat a Phantomon down south somewhere, and that they took out SkullGreymon's place with him in it. You can have them if you want."
"The Lady seems to think that our troops can handle them, but I think she would be really upset if they got into the Pit."
"Yeah, well the Captain told me they might show up this week sometime."
"I hope so, things have been a little boring lately."
"Man, things'll never get that boring." The two of them left the room.
After a few minutes the group clambered out from under whatever they had hid with.
"It looks like we're expected." Veemon noted.
"Yes, but it leaves a good question." Kari pointed out.
"Indeed." Ken had sunk back into thought again. "What's the Pit?"
"That answers one question." Yolei noted, staring through her glasses. "But raises another. What's it for?"
Once there must have been a park in the center of the town, but now there was only a huge piece of torn earth, a pit, dug from the topsoil by the hands of hundreds of workers. Here and there the glint of machinery and the foul smoke of various mechanical implements gleamed in the darkness, giving the whole place an eerie feeling. Even now, late at night, there were still a handful of workers laboring under artificial lighting, dragging what appeared to be wheelbarrows into and out of the hole in the ground. The Pit was five or six stories deep, but the sides were filled in with long sloping ramps, and those ramps mounted small floodlights, just like a night time construction project back home. Everywhere they looked they could see piles of earth and rock and rubble from the project, marking the landscape like a giant pox.
"It looks like another mining operation." Ken peered over the windowsill in the small, wrecked room that they were crouched in, adjacent to the Pit. "But in the middle of a city?"
Yolei for a moment looked like she was on to something. "Patamon, Gatomon, Wormmon, you've been in the Digital World for a bit, right?"
"Well, yes." The three responded. "Why?"
"When you were travelling all over the Digital World, do you remember seeing a lot of mines? I certainly don't remember any, but maybe I just went to all the wrong places."
The three Digimon exchanged quick, confused, glances, and then shook their heads at the question. Gatomon spoke up for all of them. "No, I've never seen too many mining operations. It just isn't something that happens. I've seen one or two, and heard of some others, but they were there to build homes for Gotsumon really. I don't know why there would be more."
"Hmmmm…so I'm right."
"I think I see where you're going, but you better continue." Ken told her.
"Well, the way I see it, the Digimon really don't do that much. Oh sure, they make nice houses and stuff, but the way I was told, they can do that with their own skills. They don't use metal money, and they don't have that much interest in building huge ships and the like, so what do they need with a mine? It just doesn't make any sense."
"Humans use mines." Patamon pointed out.
"Yes." Ken sounded like he was brooding over something. "But humans can't cut down trees with their breath and can't shape farms with their bare hands. Digimon can, since they have enough power. And given the fact that we haven't seen huge metal-using factories or anything, there is a question. What are they doing?"
"What happened here that they had to open a mine in the middle of a ruined city. Obviously it's something that only appears here." Yolei continued thinking.
"It's not a mine. It's an excavation." Ken exclaimed.
"What does it matter?" Davis asked suddenly.
"Why do you run an archeological dig?" Ken asked him, still thinking to himself.
"Exercise?" Davis suggested, and then saw that Ken was not joking.
"Because you're looking for something. What are they looking for?"
"I don't like this." Yolei noted, but she whispered it instead of shouting it out loud, as she was wont to do when frustrated.
"I know, but we don't have a better way to do this." Kari looked back down into the Pit, which was barely visible from their position on top of one of the piles of dirt that seemed to be in some disuse. "If we want to find out what's in there, we'll do a better job when we're all split up than if we all stick in one place."
"I agree with this, but it seems to be making us a little too vulnerable."
"Just stay quiet and don't worry about it."
"Okay."
Kari, from her vantage point, and with her knowledge of what was going on, could catch occasional glimpses of TK and Cody as they worked their way around the edge of the Pit in the darkness. She could see nothing of Ken, but Davis stood out a lot more in the various openings along the way. Inside the Pit all she could see were crowds of Gotsumon, Numemon and Drimogemon endlessly shoveling dirt out of the way, where it was carted back up the surface, and taken away by Monochromon. The operation took place under the supervision of a handful of different Digimon, a squadron of Ogremon and Gardromon staring down into the Pit. Each of the worker Digimon had a dark ring placed around them somewhere, but Kari was unable to see any sort of control device anywhere.
"So what are they looking for?" Yolei asked after a moment.
"I can't tell." Kari whispered back.
Some of Ken's magic kicked off at that moment, and their D3 crackled just a little, enough to let them know it was there. He had rigged up the communication system some time ago, but this was the first real field test of his programming, and they were all hoping that it would prove more than enough.
"Kari, Ken here. I can't see them assembling anything special that they're trying to take out or something. I mean, you would think that if they're digging something up that they would be assembling it right now, but I can't seem to find it." Ken's voice was a little scratchy, but it seemed clear. "Can either you or TK see anything?"
"I see nothing like that. I don't know what they're going to take out of here." Kari replied, looking a little closer, but still seeing nothing.
"I see nothing." TK still sounded a little out of it.
"Right, so what does that mean?"
"It means," Yolei interrupted the conversation. "that they might be looking for something specific. If it isn't that common, it will take a lot of work to find it."
"I wonder how special it is?" Ken asked.
"Very special." Kari replied.
"Can you get a little closer?"
"I think we can, how about you guys TK?"
"Possibly…no, we better not." Cody spoke up this time. "They're some guards heading off over here."
"Wonderful." Kari whispered as she slipped down the side of the dirt mound. Her legs wobbled a little, but they held, and the dirt did not rush away in torrents to reveal their location. Yolei, Hawkmon and Gatomon followed quickly afterwards.
It was a nervous climb. Every moment they tried to hold their breath, hoping that nobody would discover them, standing conspicuous on the hillside. Whenever a work party headed near them further down the slope they stopped dead, waiting with wide and frightened eyes until the work group trekked farther on. Guards wandered below them at random intervals, and every time that happened all four of them froze up, hoping that there was not a single piece of dirt that would roll down the hill, a single pebble that would reveal their location. But somehow they managed to stay fleet footed enough to avoid all those entanglements, and eventually reached a place deep inside the Pit unseen and relatively unscathed.
"So now what?" Hawkmon asked, but the others were already down and looking in. Kari had to agree with Ken, there did not seem to be any point in the mining. The workers continued working, they were too set on their ways to do anything else, but all their work seemed to be centered on digging out dirt. There was no shout of excitement or discovery, nothing that was dug out that seemed to be anything other than dirt. There was nothing that could have been interpreted as the foundations for a building of any shape or size or consequence. Everything appeared to be completely without point.
"I don't see anything Ken. This doesn't make any sense." Yolei was whispering into her D3. Gatomon seemed to be evaluating the possibility of freeing the slaves that were digging, but from the look on her face, the prospects were grim. Kari was trying to interpret the sudden rush of feeling in her hand.
Suddenly, her gaze dropped to the ivory ring that she was still wearing. It glowed, just a little in the darkness, not enough to reveal their location, but enough to reveal that there was indeed something of interest here. For a moment it just sat there, glowing, with Kari staring at it, and then the ring seemed to jump on her finger, pulling her off toward one side. Following the gentle tug on her arm, she plunged her hand into the dirt nearby, and surprisingly found it soft, unlike the harder material that they walked on to get to where they were. For a moment it felt like the ring was melting the rock and dirt away from it, and then Kari felt it jerk a last time. Her hand moved almost of its own accord, and her grasping fingers closed around something hard, cold and smoothed, like polished glass. Yolei and Hawkmon were still staring down into the pit, but Gatomon was watched, and she and Kari both gasped as what she had found was pulled into the light.
It was a crystal, polished so that it gleamed even in the faint light of the stars above, reflecting that light and only that light, not the glare of the nearby work lights. It was cut so that it resembled nothing so much as two elongated pyramids, placed base to base. From the color and the transparency Kari normally would have described it as some variety of diamond, except for the fact that the middle of the crystal looked inherently suspicious. Glowing in the middle seemed to be something like a small star itself, glowing with silver twinkling light at the human who had come to claim its allegiance. All in all the jewel was magnificent, a treasure that would appease any royal princess with its perfection. It was also about the size of Kari's arm.
"What is it?" Gatomon asked quietly, almost reverently. In response to the noise Yolei whipped around and the gem began to emit faint motes of light that swirled and danced in the air, giving Kari the impression that the crystal was singing in its own peculiar way.
"I think…" she responded, very slowly. "that this is what they've been looking for all this time."
"I suggest that we get out of here." Yolei whispered to them. She was gaping at the crystal.
They had barely made it to the lip of the Pit, scrambling hurriedly upward, when there was a disturbance at the bottom. Something so black that it blotted out the light behind it, making it stand out against the night, descended from the sky, completely without the motion of any wings or such. Nothing moved unexpectedly, there was no rush of wind, like there was from some of their higher speed re-entries, but there was a wave of silence that reached out from it, something that was much more worrisome.
"I feel it." A familiar voice called out of the gloom. "It grows close to the surface, or perhaps it already has reached the light of the stars. It must not be allowed to escape. Do you understand me?"
"LadyDevimon." All four of them muttered at the same time.
"Wait, it breathes starlight and moonlight. It has arisen. There must be intruders here, in the Pit, to expose it so readily. Quickly, move and seal this place off. Go, go!" LadyDevimon soared upwards as the sudden tramp of feet announced the arrival of black ringed workers at the top of the pit, glaring down into the depths at the darkness in which the four of them were trapped.
"We need a diversion." Yolei whispered into her D3.
"Maybe if we freed the slaves." Kari thought out loud.
"Yeah, but we can't. Remember?" Gatomon was sounding really anxious now, and looking it too.
But Kari ignored her feline companion, staring down at the crystal in her hand. Break the dark rings, she thought frantically, you must break the dark rings. Break. Break. Break!
Suddenly the crystal in her hand flared up like the noonday sun. For a moment, the light shone, but not blindingly, at least not to them. And in that moment they were silhouetted so well that someone standing on the other side of the city could probably pick out who they were from the vast shadows that went streaking up to the sky. All thoughts of concealment were abandoned before that dreadful light.
And then every dark ring in the Pit shattered.
There was a moment of stunned silence, and then everything turned into a mass of confused faces and sudden battle. Monochromon, Gotsumon and Drimogemon turned on their guards with a sudden savageness that astonished their captors. However, their former guards quickly sensed that only one side would survive this particular battle, and they quickly returned as good as they got. LadyDevimon seemed unconcerned by this sudden outbreak of hostilities, and swooped down on the four of them like the fallen angel she was.
"How rude you are, trying to steal the treasure I've worked so hard to find. I'll have to give you a piece of my mind over this. A painful piece."
"Maybe you should go trim your nails. Hawkmon, go!"
"Hawkmon digivolves to….Aquilamon."
"Aquilamon….digivolves to….Silphymon!"
"So, that's it. You think this chicken footed freak can scare me away?" LadyDevimon snorted at them.
"Mind if we join in?" Paildramon dropped out of the sky directly behind Silphymon.
"Maybe you would appreciated picking on somebody ten times your size." Shakkuomon loomed against the city background, blotting out significant portions of the sky with his bulk.
"Think that scares me? Darkness Wave!"
"Static Force!" "Desperado Blasters!" "Harmonious Spirit!" The waves of bats exploded back into LadyDevimon's face as the attack was blasted away by three different Ultimate level Digimon.
"You guys go and help the slaves, we'll hold LadyDevimon here." Kari shouted, gesturing wildly to the others. Paildramon and Shakkuomon exchanged quick glances and then lumbered off into the raging fight that had begun below.
"Well really, now that was foolish." LadyDevimon leapt forward, only to be met by Silphymon in midair. Quickly, the two were embroiled in a fantastic aloft combat as they twisted and turned around each other, punching and kicking out at each other with lightning quick blows.
For a few moments it looked like Silphymon had the upper hand, and then LadyDevimon swung her massive clawed hand down, and the Ultimate slammed hard into the ground. With one opponent temporarily out of the battle, LadyDevimon began to glare evilly at Kari, who still held the crystal in one hand.
"No!" There was a shout and then a blur of motion. TK sprang over both of the girls' heads in a flying kick, doing little damage, but getting LadyDevimon's full and undivided attention. He then proceeded to do the most insanely dangerous thing that Kari had ever seen in her life, bouncing off of LadyDevimon's body, from clawed hand to shoulder to knee, always lashing out with his staff, striking again and again. Every movement was as controlled and precise as it was desperate, each strike rolled out like a hammer, retracting with the speed of a striking snake. His hands and his eyes flashed in deadly synchroneity, and his whirlwind attack would have felled a lesser Digimon.
"Digivolve!" Kari screamed, nearly out of her mind, at Patamon, who had flown up behind them.
But Patamon just shook his head. "I can't. TK isn't giving me the right kind of energy, and I can't take it without killing him now. I'm sorry, I can't help you."
But LadyDevimon was powerful as well, and with one hand, she moved suddenly, crunching his body so hard that Kari thought she could hear bones breaking. Then, with great force, the fallen angel slammed him into the ground, sending him sprawling into a limp, boneless heap. Kari leapt forward to stand in front of him, her feet moving without her conscious mind's command. Every muscle in her body strained in focus, concentrated on saving TK at any cost. And then, as LadyDevimon stared down at her, she could feel her chest catch fire.
"Gatomon…digivolves to…Angewomon!"
For a moment there was stillness again, and then the blonde angel slammed into her opponent like a storm itself unanchored. One hand drew back and momentarily blazed with glorious pink-tinged light, and then delivered a crushing blow to LadyDevimon's jaw. LadyDevimon responded by trying to rake Angewomon painfully with her razor sharp claws, but a white gloved hand caught the deadly blows in the midst of their plunging. For a moment the two of them stood, facing each other in a silent parody of some statue in a museum, and then LadyDevimon kicked out, hitting Angewomon squarely in the stomach, and sending her twisting backwards. The angel reeled, but twisted and caught her opponent across the jaw with a buffet from one of her steadily glowing wings.
Disengaging, the two combatants circled each other warily, and then struck back into the middle of combat. Blows were quickly intercepted, and in a matter of moments, they represented statues again, straining in their immobility in a fierce struggle, before breaking back into a continuing whirlwind of motion.
"Darkness -!" LadyDevimon began, when Angewomon kicked her solidly in the stomach, apparently driving the ability to launch the attack right out of her. Angewomon looked like she was about to mouth out one of her own attacks in response, when LadyDevimon struck her back across the face with her claws in revenge. Angewomon, jerking back in sudden pain, kept enough wits about her to drive her knee deep into her opponents chest. Then they were at it in a blur of hands that nobody could keep track of, darting and weaving in and out.
Finally, there was a break. LadyDevimon managed to shake Angewomon off for a moment, sending her careening to the ground, and immediately stomped downward with a flurry of kicks. Angewomon was not completely out of it at this point though, and a shield of pink light speedily appeared around her, causing the incoming attacks to slip and slide off, or be harmlessly absorbed by the glowing wall. This stalemate only lasted for a few moments before Angewomon launched out with both legs in a tremendous kick, but LadyDevimon merely slid out of her opponent's reach.
Then, so fast that later Kari could not credit it, Angewomon surged upward and made her move. The pink ribbon that Kari had always thought as merely decorative snaked out at an incredible speed and wrapped one end around LadyDevimon's clawed hand, and pulled back quickly. A trick that simple could never have moved the Ultimate far, but it put LadyDevimon off balance for a bit too long. Angewomon surged up suddenly, an avenging angel once more, grabbing LadyDevimon's now outstretched arm and continuing the downward pull, slamming her dark opponent into the ground and dropping on top of her.
LadyDevimon mouthed something horrible, and tried to escape the weight pinning her down, but it was no use. Then the dark angel moved the only claw that still had purchase and raked her new captor down the leg with those long talons, leaving bloody trails in their wake. Angewomon screamed at the pain, but brought one white-gloved hand down onto LadyDevimon's throat and managed to get out two words. "Heaven's Charm". Immediately, a blast of pink light reached down from her hand into LadyDevimon, and the evil Digimon was suddenly a blast of disintegrating data.
"Quick, help the others." Yolei screamed, and a recovered Silphymon, and barely limping Angewomon soared off to finish off the guards. Kari, however, stayed put, frantically looking into TK's eyes, which now seemed empty and dead.
"I can't believe you did something so stupid TK!" Davis raged afterwards. The whole group was sitting, exhausted, on a mountainside some distance away from the ruins of the city, courtesy of Paildramon and Silphymon. TK had not said a single word since leaving the city, but he seemed to accept the fact that he had accomplished very little in the battle. Everyone else being mad at him for risking his life in such an insane manner seemed only incidental to that. Kari had not said a word to him, still recovering from the awful fright he had given her.
"He's right." TK mumbled, so softly that nobody but Patamon heard. "I can't do this without Hope. I wish I had it back."
"You were pretty reckless, and you didn't exactly help Patamon to Digivolve." Ken sounded upset, but not as angry as some of them.
"Darn right he didn't." Davis was still on the warpath.
"They have a point." Yolei conceded.
Cody still said nothing.
"I failed everybody." TK muttered again, and this time Patamon shot a worried glance around, but only Gatomon was paying any attention to him, and her eyes were just as wide with confusion. Something had been wrong with TK, and Patamon was beginning to wonder what it was, something about those dreams was weighing so heavily on his mind that he was beginning to forget who he was.
"TK, what you did back there was terrible. You didn't help Patamon digivolve at all, you risked yourself horribly, and you almost got Kari and Angewomon killed trying to protect you!" Davis spoke the last part in a rising growl. "With your Digimon unable to digivolve when we need it, you're the riskiest member here. If you keep this up, you're going to kill everyone on the team!"
But something in what he said had finally gone to far, pushed TK through the last barrier that had been blocking him. His eyes came up, and something was burning in them that nobody could name, an emotion so deep that is shook everyone to their core. The entire grove fell silent, even the crickets in the bushes seeming to catch the mood and toning down their incessant noise a notch. While Davis tried to stammer something out, and everyone else just stared, TK got up slowly and moved to the center of the circle. With a trembling hand he plucked the D3 from his belt and stared at it for a moment, his eyes full of broken dreams and lost memories and stories that he had never told. And then, one great tear welling up in one eye, he dropped it in the dirt. There was a poof of dust as it hit the ground, and a dull thunk, but no other reaction. The light had gone off inside.
"Patamon." Even his voice was brittle now, tired and lost. "Help look after the others while I'm gone. Okay?"
Patamon looked around frantically, but he could see neither a sign of hope or deliverance from his awful dilemma.
Then TK smiled sadly, as if bidding them all a final farewell, and walked off into the woods, swiftly disappearing from sight, as everyone stared after him for a moment. Then Davis broke the strange freeze that had gripped him.
"TK! NO, I didn't mean it! Come back, we need you, come back!" he broke off suddenly, and now tears were running down his cheeks. "Why did I do it? Why did I do it? TK!"
But his only answer was the whistling of the wind through the branches.
A Beacon in the Darkness
Ken watched in awe as the others around him sat themselves down. Oikawa was there, looking lighter and full of color like he had in those moments before he let his life force run forth. BlackWarGreymon meticulously polished his claws on a white cloth. A small, pink Digimon that Ken did not recognize sat on one corner of the table. A few humans sat around the table, but none of them bore faces he could recognize. When he tried to focus on them they slipped away, almost as if they were painted on soap bubbles that burst whenever he examined them too closely.
"As you know, we expect full-fledged war on the frontiers soon. If that happens the support we've been lending the Digidestined will disappear. It will be up to you, and those like you, to continue supporting them in their endeavors. Now, we do have some contingencies built in, but we don't know if they will be enough. The true test will not begin until such time as they attempt to utilize or discover the true power of the crests. We hope that we will be able to guide them in this hour, but if not, it will be up to you."
The image flickered and faded as Ken woke up, the now familiar black bracelet glowing fiercely. But the question still rang in his mind. What were the powers of the crests?
"I'm beginning to hate mornings." Ken muttered to nobody in particular as they walked through another wisp of fog rolling over the hillside.
"I'm still ahead of you. I've always hated mornings." Davis swung his walking stick around and everybody ducked instinctively. The first time he had done that he had almost taken off Yolei's head, the second time he had almost given TK a black eye, and once he had even started a two hour fight with Veemon. Now everyone was used to this quirk, just like they were familiar with all of their other traits.
It was still morning, but they had left Babamon's over an hour before, and had worked hard on putting distance between themselves and what was behind them. Everyone was in a better mood, now that they had three Ultimates to protect them, the same team that had almost brought BlackWarGreymon to his knees (this was Davis' interpretation of events. Kari and Ken tended to view it as the team that had temporarily halted the Mega's rampage). With those three in their back pocket, they all had started to feel confident that they were ready to continue on against their opponents. TK was still in a bad mood, but he seemed to be feeling better.
"I feel exposed on these hills." Kari muttered under her breath.
"We are exposed, but at least we should be able to see anyone who's trying to sneak up on us." Gatomon looked around a little anxiously. "It should give us enough of a warning that we should be able to get out of their way."
"Hmmm…you may be right." Kari returned, but she hardly looked reassured.
"I know what. I'll take a quick flight and see if anything's around." Before anyone could say anything else, Hawkmon was aloft, heading skyward to gain a better vantage point. After a few moments of spiraling he returned to the ground, just as the last remains of that particular wisp of fog had passed over them, giving them a view of only partly clouded skies. "There is something out there chaps, on the other side of that big hill over there, all in a line. We'll have to go look at it to get a better idea of what it is."
"Should we run away?" Cody asked from the rear of the group.
"No." Ken returned. "We might as well at least know what we're up against before we start running from it."
It took them about half an hour to creep through the long grass to the top of the next hill, where they all sprawled out in the dark, polished rocks on the top of the mound. For a moment they sat and regained their bearings. To the direction that Ken thought of as north, simply by assuming the sun rose in the east and set in the west, there was a chain of mountains running like a vast arm from a higher Range they could see in the distance over to one side. Westward stretched a vast plain, moving toward the horizon in an interwoven tapestry of green and brown, here and there crossed with the lighter brown of roads and the muddy blue of rivers that led to some distant ocean. Off to the east there were higher hills, rising up enough to block all attempts to see further in that direction, but from what Ken had analyzed earlier, they led only to the sea. On the ground to the northwest there ran a large road, made of dry-packed dirt, and on it they could easily spy movement.
"What is it?" Davis hissed after a moment of being completely unable to resolve any sort of coherent image from the distance.
Ken yanked out the scanner and quickly set it up, running a brief diagnostic check. After a few moments he set it into SCAN mode, and let the machine do its running for him. There were a few subdued flashes of light, and then more images appeared on the screen, spreading out to illustrate his targets.
"Okay, we seem to have a group of Monochromon pulling a set of carts. There are some Woodmon around, maybe as guards, but I'm really not sure what they're doing. They appear to be going down the road."
"So we should leave them alone?" Wormmon asked.
"Maybe, maybe not Wormmon. That road curves up after the next hill. It starts going in the direction we want to go. Maybe we should follow them while sticking to the hillsides. That way we could see if they're going anyplace we want to go, and if they could make our lives easier."
"Sounds like a plan to me." Veemon raised both arms in another pose from televised wrestling. Gatomon just sighed.
"Let's go then." Ken pointed.
Moments later, only the disturbed earth marked where they had just passed by.
"I wonder who used to live here." Yolei shuddered as she walked under the overhanging veranda that stood above them, now an imposing structure instead of a gentle green one.
"I don't know. There was a whole city like this under Machinedramon's rule back in the Digital World once." Kari looked around. "It was just as empty, and we never found out the purpose of that one either. I was sick most of the time so I don't remember much of it, but Tai told me later that it was huge."
"Well, those words describe this one all right." Hawkmon noted clinically. "Huge and empty."
All around them they were surrounded by buildings. This was a city, like the ones in Japan, only bearing a mysterious air around it. There was no noise anywhere save the various chirping of assorted birds and the rustle of the wind as it spread through trees and vegetation. Three and four story buildings surrounded them, rising harshly into the sky, their right angled walls and corners cutting off observation, windows gleaming dark and empty. Off in the distance they could see skyscrapers, rectangular obelisks much like the structures back home, cutting into the sky as they pronounced their unnatural origin to all viewers. Asphalt and concrete paved the way in front of them, leading past large windows, sometimes filled with faded signs and sun-bleached goods, sometimes empty or broken.
Closer examination revealed that the city was empty, and had been for some time. There was no wholesale destruction, no evidence of some great war, pestilence or famine, simply a vast emptiness, as if the denizens of the city had evacuated, and never come back. In the buildings that they had already broken into they had found no personal goods, except for some few trinkets left behind, no edible food, nothing of great use. Yolei had remarked that it just looked like everybody had up and left, and everyone else agreed with this assessment, although it did not make anything less creepy at all. In fact, the emptiness increased that feeling of loneliness that dwelt around them.
It was the presence of everything that made it feel so darn creepy, as Ken had noted. Everywhere things were perfectly laid out for human habitation, as if the inhabitants were only away for a few moments. The patina of age overlaid on the city only refined that impression, as if everything were waiting for the return of their owners. At any moment they expected to be hailed or greeted by a shopkeeper coming out of their shop, or a passerby wandering through the city streets. They expected to be beset by the steady sounds of traffic and the cheerful yelling of young children. A part of them waited for the inevitable good-natured cursing of the gardeners as they sought to control the outbreaks of weeds and uncontrolled vegetation throughout the cityscape. Silence, thick as a down comforter, felt uneasy and out of place in such a city, and had become especially unnerving.
"Well, I guess nobody does live here." Veemon looked around another time and shrugged.
"Great. That means that we get the whole place to ourselves. I get dibs on anything good." Davis looked around as if he meant to loot the stores right then.
"Davis!" Cody exclaimed, looking rather startled.
"He does have a point." Ken noted. "Whoever lived here obviously hasn't been here in a long time. We might need some of these things more than they do, and we can only hope that we find something good."
"Somebody does live here." Kari pointed out rather quickly. "We saw that convoy pull in here, and they haven't come out yet. That means that somebody is here, probably downtown. We should go take a look, it should be easy in this mess."
"Over there." TK pointed. Everyone stared at him. He had not been saying much all day, lost in brooding over some internal war. It seemed that he had been losing. Now there was a different light in his eyes, but they all recognized that the shadow that had been steadily overcoming him was still there, and only had changed a little.
"Where?" Patamon asked. "I don't see anything." He continued, trying to draw his partner out, arouse his interest in something.
"Through the buildings. They look connected. Try to stay off the streets and out of the open to keep from getting seen. Too much clutter inside for then to keep track of, too many hiding places for them to search. Stay in the shadows and keep out of sight." Having released his barely informative statement he once more lapsed back into uncharacteristic silence. Everyone exchanged brief looks.
"Right." Davis responded first after a moment of quiet thought. "We'll sneak through the buildings if we can and stay out of sight. That way we can observe whatever's going on without being seen ourselves."
"Sounds like a plan." Gatomon looked back over her shoulder at Patamon, who was shifting around, as if trying to get TK to respond. It was hard to tell if TK even realized that he was still carrying his partner around on the top of his head. Kari sighed once, and Ken looked distinctly pained.
"So how do we do this?" Davis asked after a moment as they peered through the doorway into the nearest building, which appeared to be the ground floor of some sort of apartment complex.
"I go first." Ken looked back over his shoulder. "I've seen the rest of you try and sneak around, and although you aren't bad, I'm best cut out to go first. Cody can follow with the rest of you." With barely another word he was off, his black form blending almost effortlessly into the shadows created by walls. After a few moments, Cody shrugged and the rest of them followed.
Ken slipped through buildings like a quiet shadow, carrying Wormmon quite comfortably in a backpack he picked up in the first store they wandered through. His eyes pierced the shadows, but they rarely found anything of real interest, and his main job was to warn those who followed him of dead ends and unsteady floors. The rest of the group spread out, sometimes stopping to see if there was anything worth taking around, sometimes just following mutely. They wandered through a network of apartments and small family-type stores, most of whom had lost anything they had a long time ago.
Then, slowly, the landscape changed. A large building loomed ahead of them, and after a few tense moments crossing an empty street and yard, they burst inside. Immediately, thanks to the layout and the rooms, everyone recognized it as a school, something that brought a few tears of homesickness to various eyes. Schoolrooms, long without any students, brought a few moments of consideration, and Ken picked up a few disk-like objects in one room that looked like they might fit in one of the scanners many drives, but otherwise there was not much around. Veemon found a set of bathrooms and showers, but the water had long ago ceased functioning, and they were denied even the pleasure of cleaning up.
After that there were a few more blocks of apartment buildings, but these apartments were much bigger. Stops were made often, and Davis crammed his Mobius Box full of a variety of small items that he picked up here and there, marveling at its unlimited carrying capacity. Yolei figured out the potential of that particular item, and soon they were carrying blankets and bedclothes and cooking gear as well. After awhile though they got tired of raiding the apartments and stopped, feeling as if they had been, in some way, stealing from the tombs of the dead.
By midday they were all very subdued and were eating their lunch of dried fruits and other goods carried from the forest in the middle of what must have been, at one time, a fairly expensive lounge. Everyone was a little afraid of the shadows, and when Veemon and Hawkmon accidentally knocked over one of the large, stuffed, armchairs the resulting bang sent everyone running for cover. It took awhile for everyone to creep back into the middle of the room, and they were all feeling a little timid.
After that they entered an area that was mostly office buildings instead of apartments. The landscape was less crowded, so there was more of a break between buildings, but at one time it must have been the rage to plant oak-like trees in rows, and now they were able to run from the shade of one tree to the shade of the next tree. This still lead to a lot of tense moments, because by now everyone was seeing shadows everywhere. Ken and Davis insisted on exploring some part of every office building, looking for something of interest or importance, but only found numerous documents in languages they could not read, and the hollow shells of computers long since dead.
However, several office buildings from the beginning, they did find out, at least in some part, why the city was deserted.
"Come look at this." Hissed Gatomon from where she had bounded down a stairwell, to the rest of the group, who were looking around on the first floor.
"What is it Gatomon?" Kari asked, interested in whatever her partner was interested in.
Gatomon simply shook her head and bounded back upstairs. The rest of them followed until they found the white cat sitting in front of a large window several floors up, looking toward the center of the city, her white tail twitched anxiously. Ken, who reached the window first, squinted at the city and then gasped.
Looking out the windows they could see down a straight, wide road that ran from the foot of the building they were in down to the center of the city. From this point they could see that the office building they were in, a plain rectangle of concrete, glass and steel, was actually a monument of sorts, placed on top of a hill overlooking city center. Down below them was a huge asphalt circle, and then a road that was at least as wide as a ten lane freeway would be back home. The next row of buildings in front of them was in the same shape that all the other buildings they had passed through had been, but the ones after that were ruffled, dirty and almost ruined. Gradually, as the buildings approached city center, they got more and more destroyed. Gaping holes in the concrete walls revealed structural steel, bent, twisted and half-melted by whatever had happened there. Vehicles that looked vaguely like cars, except a lot more angular, had been dragged around at impossible angles to create little clusters on many of the roads that Ken could see. Huge holes had been blasted in pavement and dirt alike, reaching down out of sight, many of them now sporting small outgrowths of plants. Off in one direction, over a set of low buildings, they could see a park filled with greenery, but there was an odd pattern to the trees, as if a forest had been reduced by blasts of fire, until the remnant was riddled with huge tree-less holes. Windows, gleaming in the waning sun, revealed huge shatter marks and what could have been bullet holes through many of them. Magnificent as the skyline must once have been, it was now marked by buildings that had obviously been reduced in size, many of them missing what looked like entire floors off of their tops.
"Someone fought a war here." Gatomon remarked quietly.
"What do you mean by that?" Yolei asked.
Gatomon turned upward, some painful elder memory lurking in her deep eyes. "When I worked for Myostismon, he used to make me come along as he did his petty deeds. There was a small city, run by mostly Agumon and such in the ends of his domain that resisted his rule. He came upon them with his army and destroyed the entire city, but the Agumon fought back with great skill along with the other Digimon in the city. Myotismon won in the end, but the city was in ruins. And it looked a lot like this, only this is much, much bigger.
"I don't think these were the inhabitants Gatomon." Ken seemed to be deep in thought, the wreckage and destruction he was facing was clearly influencing his thinking. "I think all of the citizens themselves got out safe. These were the soldiers of two armies that were fighting here."
"Why do you say that Ken?" Davis asked after a bit.
"Because we haven't seen any signs of struggle elsewhere. Do you think the inhabitants would have surrendered that easily if they fought this much? I think they were evacuated first, and then the two sides fought it out here. I think the city's side lost though, or else they would have come back."
"Probably." Yolei agreed.
"How sad." Kari remarked after a bit, still staring out at the city, whose ruins had a mesmerizing effect in the sun. "To have their entire city like this destroyed, it must have been horrible. And to fight for a dead city, that must have been horrible too."
"I think this is part of how the Dark took this world over." Ken remarked to nobody in particular. "They must have fought wars like this all over."
"It's horrible." Kari whispered again after a moment.
"That's why we're here." Patamon spoke up unexpectedly. "To stop things like this from ever happening on Earth."
"I agree." Even Davis sounded subdued.
"Look, what's that?" Cody, who had remained silent in the face of the destruction, suddenly thrust out his arm at a few specks turning into the road. They were far away, but the gait and the pace made them much easier to identify.
"It looks like those wagons that we were following earlier. I wonder what they're doing here." Hawkmon noted.
"Let's follow them." Veemon suggested.
"Better idea." TK mumbled, as if speaking from a great distance away. Everyone turned to look at him again. "Wait here, rest until dark. Sleep in couches over there. Follow them when it's dark. Nobody sees us."
They all exchanged glances and shrugged. Ken and Davis both nodded, and a few moments later they were solidly enclosed by a little fort of cushions ripped off of sofas and chairs throughout the building, basking in the warmth of the sun.
"Brrrrr. It's cold out here." Yolei noted.
"Duh. It is night after all Yolei." Davis responded as his usual disrespectful self, but even he was having a hard time keeping from shivering in the sudden burst of cold. Still it was easier for the group to creep through the ruins unseen at night than it was to sneak through them in broad daylight. Even now they were approaching the city center.
It appeared that their secrecy had been merited. Patamon and Gatomon, who had the best ears, reported the sounds of moving Digimon at several times during the night, each time leading to a sudden freeze in activity. Armadillomon had felt several different strange tremors reach up to him from beneath in the earth, each time sending little shivers over his spine. Ken once caught a glance of a pair of Monochromon stalking up one street in the moonlight, disappearing around a corner. It appeared that this place, ruinous as it was, remained inhabited in some shape or form, but in a manner which they had yet to determine.
So, when Patamon, his huge ears extended, suddenly froze up, everyone stopped along with him, and when he whispered hurriedly to them that they had to hide, everyone stared at him for the briefest of moments before dodging behind furniture or under desks that were all around the former office complex, on what must have at one time been a carpeted floor. Everyone was trying to avoid breathing when there was a sound from outside, and then a pair of Mushroomon walked in through the door, heading right past their hiding places.
"All I'm saying." One was telling the other as they walked through the doorway. "Is that the Lady ain't gonna like it if the Captain doesn't figure out a way to keep them outta here."
"They can't be too tough. I heard they're just a bunch of kids and rookies." One Mushroomon leaned idly on a desk that Cody and Armadillomon were hiding under.
"Yeah, well I also heard they beat a Phantomon down south somewhere, and that they took out SkullGreymon's place with him in it. You can have them if you want."
"The Lady seems to think that our troops can handle them, but I think she would be really upset if they got into the Pit."
"Yeah, well the Captain told me they might show up this week sometime."
"I hope so, things have been a little boring lately."
"Man, things'll never get that boring." The two of them left the room.
After a few minutes the group clambered out from under whatever they had hid with.
"It looks like we're expected." Veemon noted.
"Yes, but it leaves a good question." Kari pointed out.
"Indeed." Ken had sunk back into thought again. "What's the Pit?"
"That answers one question." Yolei noted, staring through her glasses. "But raises another. What's it for?"
Once there must have been a park in the center of the town, but now there was only a huge piece of torn earth, a pit, dug from the topsoil by the hands of hundreds of workers. Here and there the glint of machinery and the foul smoke of various mechanical implements gleamed in the darkness, giving the whole place an eerie feeling. Even now, late at night, there were still a handful of workers laboring under artificial lighting, dragging what appeared to be wheelbarrows into and out of the hole in the ground. The Pit was five or six stories deep, but the sides were filled in with long sloping ramps, and those ramps mounted small floodlights, just like a night time construction project back home. Everywhere they looked they could see piles of earth and rock and rubble from the project, marking the landscape like a giant pox.
"It looks like another mining operation." Ken peered over the windowsill in the small, wrecked room that they were crouched in, adjacent to the Pit. "But in the middle of a city?"
Yolei for a moment looked like she was on to something. "Patamon, Gatomon, Wormmon, you've been in the Digital World for a bit, right?"
"Well, yes." The three responded. "Why?"
"When you were travelling all over the Digital World, do you remember seeing a lot of mines? I certainly don't remember any, but maybe I just went to all the wrong places."
The three Digimon exchanged quick, confused, glances, and then shook their heads at the question. Gatomon spoke up for all of them. "No, I've never seen too many mining operations. It just isn't something that happens. I've seen one or two, and heard of some others, but they were there to build homes for Gotsumon really. I don't know why there would be more."
"Hmmmm…so I'm right."
"I think I see where you're going, but you better continue." Ken told her.
"Well, the way I see it, the Digimon really don't do that much. Oh sure, they make nice houses and stuff, but the way I was told, they can do that with their own skills. They don't use metal money, and they don't have that much interest in building huge ships and the like, so what do they need with a mine? It just doesn't make any sense."
"Humans use mines." Patamon pointed out.
"Yes." Ken sounded like he was brooding over something. "But humans can't cut down trees with their breath and can't shape farms with their bare hands. Digimon can, since they have enough power. And given the fact that we haven't seen huge metal-using factories or anything, there is a question. What are they doing?"
"What happened here that they had to open a mine in the middle of a ruined city. Obviously it's something that only appears here." Yolei continued thinking.
"It's not a mine. It's an excavation." Ken exclaimed.
"What does it matter?" Davis asked suddenly.
"Why do you run an archeological dig?" Ken asked him, still thinking to himself.
"Exercise?" Davis suggested, and then saw that Ken was not joking.
"Because you're looking for something. What are they looking for?"
"I don't like this." Yolei noted, but she whispered it instead of shouting it out loud, as she was wont to do when frustrated.
"I know, but we don't have a better way to do this." Kari looked back down into the Pit, which was barely visible from their position on top of one of the piles of dirt that seemed to be in some disuse. "If we want to find out what's in there, we'll do a better job when we're all split up than if we all stick in one place."
"I agree with this, but it seems to be making us a little too vulnerable."
"Just stay quiet and don't worry about it."
"Okay."
Kari, from her vantage point, and with her knowledge of what was going on, could catch occasional glimpses of TK and Cody as they worked their way around the edge of the Pit in the darkness. She could see nothing of Ken, but Davis stood out a lot more in the various openings along the way. Inside the Pit all she could see were crowds of Gotsumon, Numemon and Drimogemon endlessly shoveling dirt out of the way, where it was carted back up the surface, and taken away by Monochromon. The operation took place under the supervision of a handful of different Digimon, a squadron of Ogremon and Gardromon staring down into the Pit. Each of the worker Digimon had a dark ring placed around them somewhere, but Kari was unable to see any sort of control device anywhere.
"So what are they looking for?" Yolei asked after a moment.
"I can't tell." Kari whispered back.
Some of Ken's magic kicked off at that moment, and their D3 crackled just a little, enough to let them know it was there. He had rigged up the communication system some time ago, but this was the first real field test of his programming, and they were all hoping that it would prove more than enough.
"Kari, Ken here. I can't see them assembling anything special that they're trying to take out or something. I mean, you would think that if they're digging something up that they would be assembling it right now, but I can't seem to find it." Ken's voice was a little scratchy, but it seemed clear. "Can either you or TK see anything?"
"I see nothing like that. I don't know what they're going to take out of here." Kari replied, looking a little closer, but still seeing nothing.
"I see nothing." TK still sounded a little out of it.
"Right, so what does that mean?"
"It means," Yolei interrupted the conversation. "that they might be looking for something specific. If it isn't that common, it will take a lot of work to find it."
"I wonder how special it is?" Ken asked.
"Very special." Kari replied.
"Can you get a little closer?"
"I think we can, how about you guys TK?"
"Possibly…no, we better not." Cody spoke up this time. "They're some guards heading off over here."
"Wonderful." Kari whispered as she slipped down the side of the dirt mound. Her legs wobbled a little, but they held, and the dirt did not rush away in torrents to reveal their location. Yolei, Hawkmon and Gatomon followed quickly afterwards.
It was a nervous climb. Every moment they tried to hold their breath, hoping that nobody would discover them, standing conspicuous on the hillside. Whenever a work party headed near them further down the slope they stopped dead, waiting with wide and frightened eyes until the work group trekked farther on. Guards wandered below them at random intervals, and every time that happened all four of them froze up, hoping that there was not a single piece of dirt that would roll down the hill, a single pebble that would reveal their location. But somehow they managed to stay fleet footed enough to avoid all those entanglements, and eventually reached a place deep inside the Pit unseen and relatively unscathed.
"So now what?" Hawkmon asked, but the others were already down and looking in. Kari had to agree with Ken, there did not seem to be any point in the mining. The workers continued working, they were too set on their ways to do anything else, but all their work seemed to be centered on digging out dirt. There was no shout of excitement or discovery, nothing that was dug out that seemed to be anything other than dirt. There was nothing that could have been interpreted as the foundations for a building of any shape or size or consequence. Everything appeared to be completely without point.
"I don't see anything Ken. This doesn't make any sense." Yolei was whispering into her D3. Gatomon seemed to be evaluating the possibility of freeing the slaves that were digging, but from the look on her face, the prospects were grim. Kari was trying to interpret the sudden rush of feeling in her hand.
Suddenly, her gaze dropped to the ivory ring that she was still wearing. It glowed, just a little in the darkness, not enough to reveal their location, but enough to reveal that there was indeed something of interest here. For a moment it just sat there, glowing, with Kari staring at it, and then the ring seemed to jump on her finger, pulling her off toward one side. Following the gentle tug on her arm, she plunged her hand into the dirt nearby, and surprisingly found it soft, unlike the harder material that they walked on to get to where they were. For a moment it felt like the ring was melting the rock and dirt away from it, and then Kari felt it jerk a last time. Her hand moved almost of its own accord, and her grasping fingers closed around something hard, cold and smoothed, like polished glass. Yolei and Hawkmon were still staring down into the pit, but Gatomon was watched, and she and Kari both gasped as what she had found was pulled into the light.
It was a crystal, polished so that it gleamed even in the faint light of the stars above, reflecting that light and only that light, not the glare of the nearby work lights. It was cut so that it resembled nothing so much as two elongated pyramids, placed base to base. From the color and the transparency Kari normally would have described it as some variety of diamond, except for the fact that the middle of the crystal looked inherently suspicious. Glowing in the middle seemed to be something like a small star itself, glowing with silver twinkling light at the human who had come to claim its allegiance. All in all the jewel was magnificent, a treasure that would appease any royal princess with its perfection. It was also about the size of Kari's arm.
"What is it?" Gatomon asked quietly, almost reverently. In response to the noise Yolei whipped around and the gem began to emit faint motes of light that swirled and danced in the air, giving Kari the impression that the crystal was singing in its own peculiar way.
"I think…" she responded, very slowly. "that this is what they've been looking for all this time."
"I suggest that we get out of here." Yolei whispered to them. She was gaping at the crystal.
They had barely made it to the lip of the Pit, scrambling hurriedly upward, when there was a disturbance at the bottom. Something so black that it blotted out the light behind it, making it stand out against the night, descended from the sky, completely without the motion of any wings or such. Nothing moved unexpectedly, there was no rush of wind, like there was from some of their higher speed re-entries, but there was a wave of silence that reached out from it, something that was much more worrisome.
"I feel it." A familiar voice called out of the gloom. "It grows close to the surface, or perhaps it already has reached the light of the stars. It must not be allowed to escape. Do you understand me?"
"LadyDevimon." All four of them muttered at the same time.
"Wait, it breathes starlight and moonlight. It has arisen. There must be intruders here, in the Pit, to expose it so readily. Quickly, move and seal this place off. Go, go!" LadyDevimon soared upwards as the sudden tramp of feet announced the arrival of black ringed workers at the top of the pit, glaring down into the depths at the darkness in which the four of them were trapped.
"We need a diversion." Yolei whispered into her D3.
"Maybe if we freed the slaves." Kari thought out loud.
"Yeah, but we can't. Remember?" Gatomon was sounding really anxious now, and looking it too.
But Kari ignored her feline companion, staring down at the crystal in her hand. Break the dark rings, she thought frantically, you must break the dark rings. Break. Break. Break!
Suddenly the crystal in her hand flared up like the noonday sun. For a moment, the light shone, but not blindingly, at least not to them. And in that moment they were silhouetted so well that someone standing on the other side of the city could probably pick out who they were from the vast shadows that went streaking up to the sky. All thoughts of concealment were abandoned before that dreadful light.
And then every dark ring in the Pit shattered.
There was a moment of stunned silence, and then everything turned into a mass of confused faces and sudden battle. Monochromon, Gotsumon and Drimogemon turned on their guards with a sudden savageness that astonished their captors. However, their former guards quickly sensed that only one side would survive this particular battle, and they quickly returned as good as they got. LadyDevimon seemed unconcerned by this sudden outbreak of hostilities, and swooped down on the four of them like the fallen angel she was.
"How rude you are, trying to steal the treasure I've worked so hard to find. I'll have to give you a piece of my mind over this. A painful piece."
"Maybe you should go trim your nails. Hawkmon, go!"
"Hawkmon digivolves to….Aquilamon."
"Aquilamon….digivolves to….Silphymon!"
"So, that's it. You think this chicken footed freak can scare me away?" LadyDevimon snorted at them.
"Mind if we join in?" Paildramon dropped out of the sky directly behind Silphymon.
"Maybe you would appreciated picking on somebody ten times your size." Shakkuomon loomed against the city background, blotting out significant portions of the sky with his bulk.
"Think that scares me? Darkness Wave!"
"Static Force!" "Desperado Blasters!" "Harmonious Spirit!" The waves of bats exploded back into LadyDevimon's face as the attack was blasted away by three different Ultimate level Digimon.
"You guys go and help the slaves, we'll hold LadyDevimon here." Kari shouted, gesturing wildly to the others. Paildramon and Shakkuomon exchanged quick glances and then lumbered off into the raging fight that had begun below.
"Well really, now that was foolish." LadyDevimon leapt forward, only to be met by Silphymon in midair. Quickly, the two were embroiled in a fantastic aloft combat as they twisted and turned around each other, punching and kicking out at each other with lightning quick blows.
For a few moments it looked like Silphymon had the upper hand, and then LadyDevimon swung her massive clawed hand down, and the Ultimate slammed hard into the ground. With one opponent temporarily out of the battle, LadyDevimon began to glare evilly at Kari, who still held the crystal in one hand.
"No!" There was a shout and then a blur of motion. TK sprang over both of the girls' heads in a flying kick, doing little damage, but getting LadyDevimon's full and undivided attention. He then proceeded to do the most insanely dangerous thing that Kari had ever seen in her life, bouncing off of LadyDevimon's body, from clawed hand to shoulder to knee, always lashing out with his staff, striking again and again. Every movement was as controlled and precise as it was desperate, each strike rolled out like a hammer, retracting with the speed of a striking snake. His hands and his eyes flashed in deadly synchroneity, and his whirlwind attack would have felled a lesser Digimon.
"Digivolve!" Kari screamed, nearly out of her mind, at Patamon, who had flown up behind them.
But Patamon just shook his head. "I can't. TK isn't giving me the right kind of energy, and I can't take it without killing him now. I'm sorry, I can't help you."
But LadyDevimon was powerful as well, and with one hand, she moved suddenly, crunching his body so hard that Kari thought she could hear bones breaking. Then, with great force, the fallen angel slammed him into the ground, sending him sprawling into a limp, boneless heap. Kari leapt forward to stand in front of him, her feet moving without her conscious mind's command. Every muscle in her body strained in focus, concentrated on saving TK at any cost. And then, as LadyDevimon stared down at her, she could feel her chest catch fire.
"Gatomon…digivolves to…Angewomon!"
For a moment there was stillness again, and then the blonde angel slammed into her opponent like a storm itself unanchored. One hand drew back and momentarily blazed with glorious pink-tinged light, and then delivered a crushing blow to LadyDevimon's jaw. LadyDevimon responded by trying to rake Angewomon painfully with her razor sharp claws, but a white gloved hand caught the deadly blows in the midst of their plunging. For a moment the two of them stood, facing each other in a silent parody of some statue in a museum, and then LadyDevimon kicked out, hitting Angewomon squarely in the stomach, and sending her twisting backwards. The angel reeled, but twisted and caught her opponent across the jaw with a buffet from one of her steadily glowing wings.
Disengaging, the two combatants circled each other warily, and then struck back into the middle of combat. Blows were quickly intercepted, and in a matter of moments, they represented statues again, straining in their immobility in a fierce struggle, before breaking back into a continuing whirlwind of motion.
"Darkness -!" LadyDevimon began, when Angewomon kicked her solidly in the stomach, apparently driving the ability to launch the attack right out of her. Angewomon looked like she was about to mouth out one of her own attacks in response, when LadyDevimon struck her back across the face with her claws in revenge. Angewomon, jerking back in sudden pain, kept enough wits about her to drive her knee deep into her opponents chest. Then they were at it in a blur of hands that nobody could keep track of, darting and weaving in and out.
Finally, there was a break. LadyDevimon managed to shake Angewomon off for a moment, sending her careening to the ground, and immediately stomped downward with a flurry of kicks. Angewomon was not completely out of it at this point though, and a shield of pink light speedily appeared around her, causing the incoming attacks to slip and slide off, or be harmlessly absorbed by the glowing wall. This stalemate only lasted for a few moments before Angewomon launched out with both legs in a tremendous kick, but LadyDevimon merely slid out of her opponent's reach.
Then, so fast that later Kari could not credit it, Angewomon surged upward and made her move. The pink ribbon that Kari had always thought as merely decorative snaked out at an incredible speed and wrapped one end around LadyDevimon's clawed hand, and pulled back quickly. A trick that simple could never have moved the Ultimate far, but it put LadyDevimon off balance for a bit too long. Angewomon surged up suddenly, an avenging angel once more, grabbing LadyDevimon's now outstretched arm and continuing the downward pull, slamming her dark opponent into the ground and dropping on top of her.
LadyDevimon mouthed something horrible, and tried to escape the weight pinning her down, but it was no use. Then the dark angel moved the only claw that still had purchase and raked her new captor down the leg with those long talons, leaving bloody trails in their wake. Angewomon screamed at the pain, but brought one white-gloved hand down onto LadyDevimon's throat and managed to get out two words. "Heaven's Charm". Immediately, a blast of pink light reached down from her hand into LadyDevimon, and the evil Digimon was suddenly a blast of disintegrating data.
"Quick, help the others." Yolei screamed, and a recovered Silphymon, and barely limping Angewomon soared off to finish off the guards. Kari, however, stayed put, frantically looking into TK's eyes, which now seemed empty and dead.
"I can't believe you did something so stupid TK!" Davis raged afterwards. The whole group was sitting, exhausted, on a mountainside some distance away from the ruins of the city, courtesy of Paildramon and Silphymon. TK had not said a single word since leaving the city, but he seemed to accept the fact that he had accomplished very little in the battle. Everyone else being mad at him for risking his life in such an insane manner seemed only incidental to that. Kari had not said a word to him, still recovering from the awful fright he had given her.
"He's right." TK mumbled, so softly that nobody but Patamon heard. "I can't do this without Hope. I wish I had it back."
"You were pretty reckless, and you didn't exactly help Patamon to Digivolve." Ken sounded upset, but not as angry as some of them.
"Darn right he didn't." Davis was still on the warpath.
"They have a point." Yolei conceded.
Cody still said nothing.
"I failed everybody." TK muttered again, and this time Patamon shot a worried glance around, but only Gatomon was paying any attention to him, and her eyes were just as wide with confusion. Something had been wrong with TK, and Patamon was beginning to wonder what it was, something about those dreams was weighing so heavily on his mind that he was beginning to forget who he was.
"TK, what you did back there was terrible. You didn't help Patamon digivolve at all, you risked yourself horribly, and you almost got Kari and Angewomon killed trying to protect you!" Davis spoke the last part in a rising growl. "With your Digimon unable to digivolve when we need it, you're the riskiest member here. If you keep this up, you're going to kill everyone on the team!"
But something in what he said had finally gone to far, pushed TK through the last barrier that had been blocking him. His eyes came up, and something was burning in them that nobody could name, an emotion so deep that is shook everyone to their core. The entire grove fell silent, even the crickets in the bushes seeming to catch the mood and toning down their incessant noise a notch. While Davis tried to stammer something out, and everyone else just stared, TK got up slowly and moved to the center of the circle. With a trembling hand he plucked the D3 from his belt and stared at it for a moment, his eyes full of broken dreams and lost memories and stories that he had never told. And then, one great tear welling up in one eye, he dropped it in the dirt. There was a poof of dust as it hit the ground, and a dull thunk, but no other reaction. The light had gone off inside.
"Patamon." Even his voice was brittle now, tired and lost. "Help look after the others while I'm gone. Okay?"
Patamon looked around frantically, but he could see neither a sign of hope or deliverance from his awful dilemma.
Then TK smiled sadly, as if bidding them all a final farewell, and walked off into the woods, swiftly disappearing from sight, as everyone stared after him for a moment. Then Davis broke the strange freeze that had gripped him.
"TK! NO, I didn't mean it! Come back, we need you, come back!" he broke off suddenly, and now tears were running down his cheeks. "Why did I do it? Why did I do it? TK!"
But his only answer was the whistling of the wind through the branches.