Digiegg 1.3
Anxiety, my old friend, crept itself back into my mind as our pleasant conversation turned serious.
Wormmon had luckily heard of the thing burning the forest down, but still had no idea how to stop it.
Meramon was something of a guardian of the forest, as much of a guardian a sentient humanoid flame monster can be. Concerningly, it had lived in the clearly very flammable forest for years with none of the smaller creatures ever questioning it before, suddenly, going on a mad rampage today.
Wormmon described Meramon as "something of a strong champion level", which I didn't understand much beyond the fact that his Breaker Blaster package could laugh in the face of the most common ways of attack. Obviously, Meramon was immune to regular fire, and his "physical form" was minimal even discounting the fact that any incoming materials were likely to be incinerated without even touching him. For Wormmon to not immediately recognize Meramon as strong was chilling, because, from the description I got, Meramon might very well be immune to Lung. Plus, since Digimon were clearly as bullshit on principle as capes were, Meramon just lived his life as a seemingly-invincible ball of fire.
Again, luckily, Wormmon claimed only one Meramon lived in the forest. If the concept of Digimon wasn't already bullshit enough, multiple Digimon could be in the same species and have the same exact powerset. I was growing more aware of how insane even Wormmon was, and nothing was stopping a band of them from grouping together. Just the fact they were capable of producing silkworm thread incredibly wide and rapidly was an incredible ability.
It approached.
I had pulled my mites inwards a while ago, but I didn't need my bugs to tell that it was getting significantly hotter in our little cove. Whether Wormmon was just very nervous too or had a lower heat tolerance than I did, he had been sweating for a while. My previously comfortable sweatshirt became suffocating so I wrapped it around my waist.
"Wormmon," I tensed as the heat increased, "we have to run."
"I know."
It made sense that Wormmon would understand just how outclassed we were. The only reasons we hadn't taken off already were that everything was on fire and the only batch of phantom trees was in the direction of Meramon.
Wormmon pulled on my pant leg to keep my attention.
"Taylor, I, uh, could get us to the treetops…"
Bullshit. No logical way the silk he could make could ever pull that much weight to the top. No way something so small could produce enough silk to reach the top.
Of course, this was just the kind of bullshit I was sure would work.
I had disregarded my power's frankly inane judgement on how much silk Wormmon could make, but I was slowly adapting to how Wormmon's pseudobiology worked and this was precisely the kind of cape bullshit in our favor.
Wormmon began to fire enough ropes of silk to outfit an old ship, pulling himself up to branches before firing more silk to pull me up. We continued up and up, making it almost to the canopy when a sharp updraft hit me in the leg.
Meramon was surprisingly dim for a walking fireball. I would have thought the fire would be so bright that it would look like a vaguely human blot of fire, but rather it was easy to look at and clearly recognizable as human-like. Even from a distance, its "eyes" and "mouth" were both clearly recognizable. Its heat tangibly beat upwards despite that same distance though. I held my breath. Unless he had some way of sensing me, there were no jarring colors that would give me away. After all, I was in brown and black and Wormmon was dark green. We could have just been part of the branch. But...
It stopped.
Motionless.
A pin could have dropped.
Explosively crackling, Meramon snapped its body around while firing a stream of fire at the base of a tree. It spun, spreading smaller fires all around. Almost primal in nature, blind fury led to a massive fireball shooting in every direction.
With an oddly feminine shout of "Magma Bomb!", it, or should I say she, launched something like a mortar shell upwards. The fire itself didn't harm our tree, nor could it reach us, but I some of the shrapnel must have. Pain vaguely danced up my forearms as Wormmon winced, blinking rapidly.
Holding your breath did not work like those Young Adult Novels made it seem like it did. My concentration broke just a little from the pain, and all the sudden I was gasping for air. The heat only made it harder to breathe… I sacrificed some mites and had the more valuable insects take shelter in the wayward water droplets of my basically empty bottle. Wormmon wasn't holding up as well as I would have hoped either, if this came down to a waiting game, we would suffer a casualty much before Meramon left.
"I can smell you, hu-mon."
Practically a growl rose out of her throat as a wave of intense heat also hit me.
Something had to be done. The problem was with what? My opponent knew the terrain better, vastly better, and all the fire she threw around made it so there was nowhere to run or hide. Her range was decent enough that if I had a way to hurt her, which I didn't, there was no way I would be able to get close. Insects and silk, including Wormmon's, couldn't hope to make an impact. The flames licked at the not-trees but didn't burn them, so dropping a branch was an idea, but I lacked any way to break an unnaturally strong branch right now.
Meramon grumbled unintelligibly to herself below me. Seeming to walk away at first, she pivoted and kicked the trunk of the nearest tree in a huff before beginning to pace around the grove.
From through the treeline, I could vaguely make out someone running toward our location. Somehow they were warding off the flames, making steady progress all the while. I stood no chance with all the fire around, and Wormmon was similarly useless, but whoever this person was seemed capable of at least extinguishing some of it.
They approached, and it was definitely a duo now, a girl and a small little ball thing, and I lost sight as they came within a tree length of the grove.
I learned a long time ago not to rely on other people, and here I was, desperately wishing for them to save me.
If they knew me, would they still come? She seemed confident, but when she saw Meramon, would they run? They surely must have felt the heat by now, plus the very real danger practically hanging in the air.
There was no way they could see me, sure, but still, someone was coming to help Taylor Hebert.
I honestly had lost faith that anyone would ever help me like this again.
Something must be seriously fucking wrong with this world, for me to make a friend and get lucky in the course of an hour. It felt like a day, not just an hour, but this morning I showed up to Winslow and disappeared, and here I was, being saved while trapped in a tree.
They arrived with a shout, too quiet to be parsible.
Meramon meanwhile flinched backwards as it seemed a bucket of water was thrown at her. Into the grove ran a small green and orange sphere, followed closely by a girl who might have been my age. The girl seemed human, so unless these digimon had some sort of stranger ability to disguise as humans, I wasn't alone here. Meramon began to recover, but a shining light bore out from the new duo.
"He's digivolving…", Wormmon muttered from on top of my head.
Wormmon vaguely mentioned digivolution while we were talking earlier, but it sounded like a coming of age, a gradual change. He compared himself to being childlike, undergoing metamorphosis, and becoming an adult. For most caterpillars, that was a month long endeavor.
For whatever this thing was, it took all of 3 seconds.
Leaping from the shine came a metallic fish digimon, screaming "Variable Darts" before launching a burst of water-knives. I couldn't make out too much detail from my height, but the fish definitely didn't lack any luster. It didn't move particularly fast or gracefully, but it was able to shoot multiple water-based projectiles and effectively shut down the enemy pyrokineticist.
I couldn't parse the reasoning behind them calling out attacks. Every attack had a name, and they insisted on repeating them over and over. It was clear the name wasn't crucial to them, multiple rounds of fireballs went perfectly unannounced. If I heard the fish scream "Water Brick" one more time...
Wormmon and I decided to risk beginning our descent. The silk still hung from the branch, just bundled up, so, making sure Wormmon wasn't passed out, I began to rappel our way down the trunk.
"Variable Darts!"
Ah. Instead of water knives, like what happened every other volley between Meramon and the fish, this time the fish just sliced Meramon across the chest with his massive claws. All of the calling out had conditioned Meramon to countering with his "Magma Fish" attack, but his Blaster ability took time to charge. The new two took advantage of the gap and went for the kill. Meramon staggered backwards from the hit, indeed, and then began to disintegrate as he died.
As the last of Meramon's corpse disappeared, I was close enough to the ground to speak normally. My plan was to play up the "Taylor Hebert is not a cape no-siree" angle strongly here.
"Hey," I called out, "thank you for saving me. My name is Taylor."
The girl appeared to be around my age, not nearly as tall as I was but considerably more fit. Built more like a farmer than an athlete, she wore light reddish clothing in contrast with her dark hair and complexion. As she began to speak, she punched her words with an obviously foreign accent, but I couldn't quite pin down where it was from.
"Hello Taylor, I'm Mori, and this," she gestured with a device in her hand to the fish as the fish glowed and… morphed back? As it transformed into what was the round looking fish monster from before, she finished her statement, "is my partner, Betamon."
"And I would be-ow!"
Betamon energetically fit his mouth on Wormmon's head, much to Wormmon's displeasure. Abashedly, Wormmon managed a trailing, "I, am, umm, Wormmon."
Mori smiled and waved at him politely before turning to me. "Did you just land? You don't seem well acquainted with the digital world."
"Yes, I just got here before the fire started. It's a far cry from the city…" I trailed off, not knowing what else to say.
Her ears perked up as I ended.
"You come from a city? I've never seen one."
"I'm from Brockton Bay, it's on the coast of Massachusetts."
"Massachusetts? Is that near New York?"
For our intents and purposes, it was close enough. I didn't really want to keep the topic of conversation on myself when there were so many questions I had about my newfound acquaintances. Firstly I was suspicious of them, if only because Mori was the first human I've seen in… I guess it was only two hours. Still, it reeked of all kinds of improbability that someone would run into the burning forest, fight the fire monster, and then not flinch at all when a total stranger and foreigner climbed down from a tree. Secondly, I was curious, if only because of their confidence in a totally alien situation. Mori made it seem like she had been with Betamon for a while, and her unfamiliarity with the states connoted that she was probably from a ways away.
"Yes, it's a bit north of there. How about you? What brought you here?"
Surprisingly, it wasn't Mori who spoke first. I took Betamon for somewhat of a dunce at first, but he stopped gnawing on Wormmon's head briefly to explain.
"We're hunting for more," pausing to nibble more, "Gate Pieces. If we can find enough digivices we should," an increasingly uncomfortable Wormmon flinched as Betamon bit hard and fast, "be able to open a gate to the Human World. Mori can track the Firewall Digimon who in turn track the hu-mons with digivices and their partners."
"Digivice?"
My question got an answer as Mori held out the small, roughly cross-shaped piece of obvious Tinkertech.
"This, it works to register and track partners and do a myriad of other things. If Meramon was able to track you, then you probably have one."
I feel like I would have recognized a piece of Tinkertech suddenly on my person, even if it was that small.
"I think it was coincidence; we got penned in by the fire and Meramon knew Wormmon escaped from him earlier. Where did you say you were from?"
I tried to turn the dial back on the other two, if only to have to share less. Wormmon shifted in position without an accompanying chomp from Betamon, almost as if he had something to add. Since I didn't sense he was comfortable saying it, I gestured him to hold it and waited for a response.
"Oh, I'm from a small town in Ghana," Mori offered, "nowhere significant. We got run over by the Ash Beast once, but other than that we lack anything the warlords want other than land, food. Living is living though, and home is home. I'll get back there as soon as I can."
I suppose that would explain why she hadn't seen a city. World Issues, back when I had tried paying attention, had a chapter on Africa's warlord dynamics, and, while fairly vague, the warlords generally were known to be quite paranoid and authoritarian. One does not simply visit a city without paying for safety in some way, most of which involve sacrifice or conscription, so not ever seeing one as a small farmer made enough sense.
"Well, Taylor, Wormmon, would you like to travel with us? I know we want to return different places, but there's safety in numbers."
One of us would die if there was any teen drama. I didn't have any water left though, and Meramon proved that there were some threats I would need a team to deal with. Maybe this would serve as good experience for when I went out in costume back in Brockton actually now that I thought about it. Working with Digimon, each basically a parahuman in their own right, and fighting my way back home wasn't too far off from heroics. I took a knee and addressed Wormmon directly
"Wormmon, would you come with us?"
"Of course."
We shared a mutual nod before turning to Mori. Betamon even stopped chewing on Wormmon, opting to gnaw on Mori's ankle instead.
"Let's go together."
As they turned around and Wormmon made his way to sit on my head, I began to let my fliers back out of my backpack, fanning out to restore my bug sense. Knowing my backpack was hot and stuffy somehow really didn't help me, so they set out to locate food and water for themselves and us. It felt like I reopened my eyes as we set off after our new traveling companions.
AN: Down to business, yes, I know Meramon is quoted as saying Magma Fish. That was a typo of "Magma Fist", but my bad sense of humor, combined with the fact she was fighting a fish, made me keep it. Also, I'm not a huge fan of big OC's, but I needed one. Just one though, and you'll understand why eventually. If this chapter felt a little forced, ooc, or just generically rushed, please comment where. I felt it was a little shaky, but I want to get to the main villain times for the arc or at least a presentable time for an interlude so I can hint what happened to literally the rest of the world sans Taylor, or at least an interesting part of it. All comments or reviews are appreciated and read.
