The Phantoms of their Second Battlefield
4. Yamato
It makes sense that he is ice, when Taichi is fire. Taichi is always in the lead, anyway. The one who blazes the trail and Yamato's the one who reigns him in sometimes and enables him otherwise.
That's fine. That's the sort of fragile balance they fell into in the digital world, and now he has a power that can be run right over by his ice.
But there are other ways to douse fire that isn't stealing oxygen or soaking in water. Other ways to make Taichi stop and think for even a moment longer than his otherwise would. Sometimes it's just playing devil's advocate. Sometimes it's punching (or even slapping) him across the face. Sometimes it's hitting him with a blast of ice when he gets too hot-headed. Sometimes it's trying, in vain, to stop his fires from getting out of control.
Sometimes it's even making a snowstorm when Taichi's worn himself out or fire's just not stopping their enemy in their tracks. And the new team doesn't have nearly as much firepower as the six of them, though with Daisuke's thunder, Miyako's gales and Iori's earth power, they manage well enough. Not perfectly, but well enough. And they have the advantage of mentors on two fronts, and enough experience to (hopefully) not repeat the same, near-fatal mistakes.
Though their original team never had a Digimon Kaiser to deal with. And he's certain he's never been quite as socially awkward as Ken (and neither as Koushiro, but combined they probably have enough comparable stories). None of them have that sort of mental ability, either. They'd been so sure it'd be the dark spore if anything, but it wasn't. Not quite. One can even say it was the guilt personified.
Jyou, funnily enough, deals with it best. Because his powers – memory retention and projection – were the closest. But Yamato couldn't help but wonder if he'd had something like that instead of plain old ice: powerful, but simple clay he could craft into whatever he liked. It was kinder, almost. Not like Takeru and his ability to basically bring hope alive. Not like Hikari and Sora and their healing powers. Not like Jyou. Those mental abilities depended far more on emotions, on control and keeping calm in the eye of the storm.
And Yamato wonders if that means his demons aren't comparable to them… But then again, he knows Sora's demons well, and they've all got pretty brutal demons of their own even without the digital world and not all of them have psychic powers. Coincidence, perhaps. They didn't all follow their affinities in the digital world, at the end. They didn't need to, either. They were two solid teams. They were miracle workers when they were together, still fighting to save the world.