88

Web

"I struggled and turned but the web grew tighter; it was over us – all around us, drawing, pressing us into each other's arms until we lay side by side, bound hand and body and foot, palpitating, panting like a pair of netted pigeons." – Robert W. Chambers, "The Maker of Moons"

Sora had been walking a long time now. She didn't know she was dreaming. The thick clouds above had grown darker the farther down the path she went, but there was no rain yet. The atmosphere was heavy and humid; by this point, rain would almost have been a relief. Sora was supposed to meet Piyomon here, but her partner was nowhere to be seen. They could have chosen a more pleasant place to rendezvous. Besides the wide, empty dirt path, the locale was little better than a jungle. Dense, broad-leaved trees lined the path on either side, with equally dense shadows huddling beneath them.

Sora was tiring. Athletic though she was, the combination of the long walk and the oppressive atmosphere had begun to tell on her. Her head drooped, and her eyes watched the dirt of the path as she walked it. If it did happen to rain, the path would probably turn to mud, which wouldn't be very good for her shoes. She smiled a little at the thought. Back when she had first come to the Digital World, such a little thing would never have bothered her. At some point, her conscious attempt at being more feminine had become automatic. She wondered whether that was a good thing. She was a lot different from what she had been.

She wondered, not for the first time, if Yamato cared much whether she was feminine or not. Maybe it was a dumb thing to wonder about. Maybe she should ask him outright. But no, she knew she wouldn't. It occurred to her that she had been thinking a lot about their relationship recently, for some reason. Well, that isn't too weird, is it? she thought. To think about the person you're dating? But she wasn't thinking about Yamato himself so much as the relationship, that nebulous concept that bound him to her.

And whenever she thought about that, she had to think about Taichi, whether she wanted to or not. Over half a year had passed since she began dating Yamato, and the guilt she felt over her choice still hadn't entirely disappeared. She had expected to get over it quickly. After all, what did she have to feel guilty about? At times she had looked at Taichi in a romantic light, and she knew that he had thought about her that way as well. But he had always been her best friend, and that had tempered her feelings somewhat.

They were still friends, and she didn't owe him anything other than that friendship. She remembered how he had risked his life in Nanomon's pyramid to find her, but did that obligate her to him? Every one of Chosen Children had risked his or her life on that adventure. And Yamato had saved her too, hadn't he? Taichi had come for her in the pyramid, but it had been Yamato, when she had sunk into her own despair, that had pulled her out of the dark.

The first raindrop fell, solitary but fat, and landed on her hair, pulling her out of her reverie. She looked up again to see if more would follow, and in doing so she noticed something strange. Above her, a little farther down the path, something was stretched from one wall of trees to the other. At first glance, it looked like a tennis net.

She slowed her pace as she got closer to it. She could see now that it was nothing as mundane as a tennis net. If anything, it bore an unsettling resemblance to a monstrous spider web. A few more steps, and Sora was certain that that was exactly what it was. It hung motionless in the windless air, an ugly gray network of ropey threads, perfectly positioned to catch anything that happened to be flying through – insects, birds…

Sora looked into the shade of the trees, more searchingly and nervously than before. Not just any spider could spin a web like that. She remembered that one of the most hideous Digimon they had encountered on the 1999 adventure was Dokugumon, the venomous, bloated guardian of the catacombs beneath Vamdemon's castle. This was just the kind of web such a monster might construct, and she did not want to meet it alone on this path. She couldn't see the web's weaver lurking in the trees, but that didn't mean it wasn't there, concealed in the darkness.

Could it be away for some reason? Still keeping an eye on the tree line, Sora resumed her walk forward, hoping to pass under the thing and get away down the path without being detected. More raindrops were beginning to fall, but Sora, intent on possible danger, hardly noticed. She did lift her eyes as she walked under the web – it was obviously unoccupied, but she still imagined something silently descending upon her while she wasn't looking.

Then she was on the other side of it. Her pace had begun to pick up again. She wanted to put as much distance between her and the danger point as possible, though she knew that she would take many a backwards glance in the process. The path through the trees was no longer simply uncomfortable; it had become menacing.

She had left the web a few meters behind her when she heard her name called from that direction. It was Piyomon's voice. When Sora turned around it was just in time to see her partner, who had been flapping through the air to meet her, notice the trap stretched in her way. Piyomon tried to reverse her momentum, but she had seen the web too late to avoid running right into it. The adhesive strands bulged outward at first, but then snapped back into position, leaving Piyomon spread-eagle, pulling at the webbing but unable to break free of it.

"Piyomon!" Sora called. She was running back towards the web, unsure of how to help her partner but determined to do so, when a new movement among the treetops stopped her short with horror. It came scuttling out of the leaves, moving quickly and surely along the web on its six hind legs. It wasn't a fully grown Dokugumon – it was one of the spider Digimon's innumerable children – but it was still as large as or larger than Piyomon.

Before Sora could think of anything to do the thing had reached Piyomon. Without hesitation it straddled one arrested wing and bent its head towards the bird Digimon. Sora couldn't see what was happening from that angle, but she heard her partner scream, and saw the blood spilling to the ground, its sound distinct from the patter of the raindrops.

"Piyomon!" Sora cried again. She was making to move forward in an effort to rescue her partner, but was again stopped in her tracks as the leaves of the trees and the grasses at their base began to rustle loudly. The KoDokugumon emerged from the shadows in a mass. Some made their way down the tree trunks, while others simply dropped to the forest floor with soft thuds. Soon a small army of them had gathered on the path, each monster with its eight beady eyes locked on Sora.

Sora knew the danger she was in, but still her gaze found her wounded partner. She made no move to retreat, though dozens of the spider monsters stood between her and the web in which Piyomon was caught. As she hesitated, Piyomon's closed lids flickered open.

"Run, Sora," was all she said. Then her eyes closed again, and she evaporated into data.

Sora's head shook slowly back and forth in disbelief. Through rapidly watering eyes she saw the thing that had killed her partner jump from the web to the rain-spattered dirt of the path, turning to face her like the others of its kind. The blue beads of their eyes began to vibrate in their heads, and a chittering sound arose, as if they were laughing at her pain. But she knew that it was really a sound of excited anticipation. They were hungry.

Finally, she turned and ran, and she could hear them following behind her. The rain was coming down harder than it had been, and her white shoes made splashing sounds in the mud. She had no idea where she was going, or how long she would be able to run for. She could see through her tears that the path was curving.

In another minute she could see that it was not merely curving. It was ending, growing narrower and trailing off into the jungle. The spiders were still behind her. She could sense them, and saw them as she looked back over her shoulder. She had no hope of losing these creatures of darkness in the trees, but there was nowhere else for her to go, and she plunged into the forest without hesitating.

Needing to dodge between trees, which was no easy task in the dark, she could no longer run at top speed. The KoDokugumon were in those shadows with her. She heard the rustling of their bodies, though she couldn't determine how close behind her they were, or whether they were gaining. Almost all of her attention was turned ahead of her.

Suddenly she passed through something – a tickling sensation that clung tenaciously to her face and hair. In a panic, she recognized it for what it was. She tried to clear it off of her with wild motions of her hands, but it was no use, and she gave up almost immediately, knowing that everything depended on her maintaining speed. The disgusting tickle of the web stuck with her as she ran, a constant reminder that there might be other webs in this jungle, perhaps intended for much bigger prey. If one was in her path, would she be able to avoid it in time? Or, like poor Piyomon, would she…

Her thoughts were interrupted as the trees unexpectedly thinned, and there was a hint of lightness in the air as rifts in the leaves revealed the cloudy skies and let down the fat raindrops. Trees dotted what would otherwise have been a wide clearing. She could now see her surroundings more plainly, but what she saw horrified her. On every hand were nightmarish webs, stretched from tree to tree both vertically and horizontally, their dust-gray strands thick as ropes. Worse, two of the webs were occupied, but not by spiders.

A pair of human figures hung suspended in the webbing, wrapped up from chest to ankle like doomed insects. They were Yamato and Taichi. Yamato was looking at her. She knew that he could see her, because his head had turned slightly when she made her appearance, but he said nothing. Taichi was mute as well. He wasn't looking at her, instead staring vacantly at nothing in particular. He was very, very pale.

Sora came forward, aware that the KoDokugumon were still somewhere behind her, but more concerned now with helping her friends. Boyfriends, she thought, with a sudden flash of embarrassment. Yamato's mouth was moving, but she didn't hear him speaking. He looked as scared as she felt, and she wondered if fear had taken his voice. It wasn't until he began frantically shaking his head that she realized he was mouthing a warning.

But she understood too late. The weaver of the webs knew she was there. It came crawling out of the shadows onto one of the largest and highest webs – a fat, furry Dokugumon. With one of its forearms it reached out and grabbed hold of a particularly thick cord of webbing, and began to pull. At the other end were the strands trapping Yamato, who was now slowly being dragged from the web that supported him, up towards the waiting fangs of the Digimon.

"Yamato!"

"Sora! Get out of here! They're coming!" he shouted back, but she didn't listen. By the time she had reached him he had been pulled free of the web, and was hanging in midair as the Dokugumon pulled the gray rope up with both hands. Sora reached up and caught hold of his shoes, pulling downwards, putting all her weight into it. But the strength of the Dokugumon and its webbing was unbelievable. Before long, Sora herself was on the tips of her toes, holding on but losing ground.

"Sora!" she heard Yamato calling from above, "Please! Run! Taichi, he's – he's gone, and I'm…"

"Shut up!" was her response. She redoubled her efforts, but it was no use. Her feet had left the ground entirely. For a moment she was rising…and then one of Yamato's laceless shoes slipped off in her hand. Caught by surprise, she couldn't recover in time to keep the fingers of her other hand from losing their grip as well. She was falling. The ground shouldn't have been more than a few inches below her, but she fell past where it had been, and saw the walls of earth rise above her. When she did land, it wasn't mud that broke her fall.

Her back, her limbs, even her hair stuck fast to the web that caught her as it might catch a fly. Raindrops were falling on her face, but she could still see the earthen lip of the pit above, and the shapes that swarmed there. The spiders made their way to her. Most crawled down the walls towards the web, while others, more eager, leapt from above. She couldn't turn her head much, but she knew they were all around her. And as Yamato screamed somewhere above, one of the KoDokugumon clambered onto her thigh to take the first bite.