126
The Merge
"And there are strange voices in the wind, and alien roarings upon the sea; and the walls quiver like a thin veil in the black breath of remote abysses." – Clark Ashton Smith, "The Double Shadow"
The Chosen Children looked at each other. They were at a total loss. Takeru, with Poyomon bouncing at his side, had only just now finished making his way slowly down to join them. He was pale, with a look in his eyes that bordered on haunted. He said nothing to his friends, but periodically his gaze was drawn, like theirs, to the nearly motionless form of Sato Katsu. The man's eyes remained closed, and his breathing was both shallow and audibly labored.
Sato was by now nearly lost to the world. The pain engendered by his fall and the reopening of his previous wounds had largely begun to subside, replaced by a numbness not only of body, but of mind and soul as well. He supposed he was dying, and he didn't care. The last sleep would come to him soon. Had he been certain it would be a sleep free of dreams, he would have welcomed it.
Standing about him, the Chosen Children knew that they were witnessing the closing of a tragedy. Iori believed that nothing could justify Sato's crimes, and yet he realized instinctively the truth of Sato's assertion, that there was some sort of logic hidden in Sato's life that Iori could not grasp. Thankfully, the courses of their lives had been too vastly different.
Takeru did not make eye contact with his friends. For the most part his gaze remained on the ground. He wondered if any of the others had seen what had almost happened back up on the cliff. Did they realize that the weapon had been in his hand, that if it weren't for Daisuke's rash action he would have pulled the trigger, and probably taken a human life? True, Takeru could think of no human being that deserved death as Sato Katsu deserved it, but the decision to fire had come so easily that it frightened him.
He remembered now the last words he had spoken to Sato in his cell. "I'll kill you," he had said, and he had meant it. Sato Katsu was an unrepentant agent of the Darkness. He had used it to achieve his insane ends without compunction or any hint of regret. In short, he was the embodiment of everything Takeru most hated. Takeru had noticed Hikari's sad expression as she watched their fallen enemy. Perhaps she was good enough to pity, even to forgive, Sato Katsu, but Takeru could never forgive him.
And yet, now that the danger seemed past, Takeru began to wonder if he could forgive himself for what he had intended to do. He realized now, for the first time, that if fear and hatred were manifestations of darkness, in the intensity of his own hatred he had unwittingly allowed the darkness he despised to seep insidiously into his heart.
Opposite him, Miyako held Pururumon close in her arms. Though they kept returning to it, her eyes often left Sato's prostrate form. Like most of the Chosen Children, she had been in the near presence of an approaching human death once before. She had wept when Oikawa died, but had taken comfort in his sacrifice. She would not weep for Sato, but his end seemed to her more terrible – both his gruesome injuries and the bleak purposelessness of it all would forever set it apart in her memory.
The Digimon were as silent as their partners. They could sense the Chosen Children's awed horror, and it had taken them in thrall as well. So when Sato Katsu ceased to breathe, all present knew it.
In his house under the lake, Gennai stood watching the large screen in perplexity. Relief and anxiety contended within him.
"I've never seen anything like it," Ilya said. "Have you?"
"I can't say that I have," Gennai answered. "I suppose that we should be glad, but – ah! They're gone again!"
A few minutes ago the six missing Chosen Children had suddenly reappeared on their system, though the signals had been faint and ghostly. But at irregular intervals the signals would be lost entirely; the Chosen Children would vanish, only to reappear later. Even more strangely, their exact location in the Digital World could not be pinned down. And, which was more troubling, the system was experiencing other anomalies as well. It seemed to be interference of some kind. All they could be sure of was that the distortion was steadily growing worse in all quarters.
Gennai wondered whether he should try to contact those Chosen Children sleeping in the human world, but at the moment he had no idea what to tell them. Neither the problem nor its source could be identified at the moment. He had been unable to issue instructions even to his fellow Agents beyond advising them to stand by.
Ilya's voice recalled him to the room. "Gennai. It appears that the human world is experiencing worsening earthquakes as well. By now the phenomena is more widespread there than it is in the Digital World." A minute of silence fell, broken only by the clicking of Ilya's keyboard. "The world's seismologists can't explain these earthquakes. In fact, they don't seem to be true earthquakes at all."
"If only we knew how it all tied together," Gennai said. He pondered a moment. "I suppose it can't be helped. See if you can make contact with the Chosen Children. Maybe they're awake by now."
"What should I tell them?" Ilya asked, still typing. Gennai had to think long and hard before replying.
Tokyo's fitful sleep had begun to come to an end. In another hour, two hours at most, the sun would rise, and many would wake to reports of new destruction. Emergency crews were still at work in the vicinity of Tokyo Tower, and those already awake dreaded whatever might happen next.
Perhaps it was only this oppressive atmosphere of paranoia that lent the most ordinary things an aura of strangeness and anomaly. The dark, featureless sky had the aspect of a roof lowering over the world, and the waves appeared to take on strange patterns in Tokyo Bay. Many people noticed what seemed to be an unusual number of problems with their electronics – phone calls being dropped, digital clocks losing the time, even lightbulbs burning out and vehicles being difficult to start.
And some people began to notice the subdued, continuous trembling of the earth.
The Chosen Children had been moving for some time before they reached the other end of the valley and found their way to the top of another ridge. Sato Katsu's body they had left where it lay, its face turned up to the endless gray skies of the Dark World, and all had breathed an inward sigh of relief when it had been lost to sight somewhere behind them.
Now the group stopped and caught their breath yet again. No one showed any sign of continuing on anytime soon; from this height they could see only the lifeless plateau of Leng stretching off towards the horizon, now veiled in mist. Daisuke was the first to speak.
"Is there a way back to our world? Or the Digital World?" he asked, addressing no one in particular. The way he said it implied that the uneasy thought had just occurred to him that he might not like the answer.
"Are the worlds really going to merge?" Miyako wondered. "Or was that just a lie? I don't really see any difference here…"
It was true that there didn't seem to be signs of any cataclysmic change – except perhaps that low, continuous rumble. But hearing Daisuke's question, Ken was struck with an idea. How stupid not to have thought of it before!
"Remember when we first met Demon?" he asked the others. "I was able to open a gate to this world with my D-3. I wonder if I can open a gate from within. The gate point at Hikarigaoka was sealed, but…"
"It's worth a try," Iori said.
Ken raised his Digivice, but within a minute or two it became clear that they could expect nothing to happen. From the perspective of nearly all of them, the only discernible change was a thickening of the mist in the distance.
Hikari thought that perhaps she felt something out of the ordinary, but that suspicion had begun before Ken's attempt to open a gate, and she couldn't be sure that it actually meant anything. If it objectively existed, she believed it had something to do with the other self that had last manifested itself on the cliff before Sato. It was waking again.
In a way it frightened her, having this unknown thing inside, even though it had aided them many times since Anubimon had dissolved the walls of her black prison. She tried to set her apprehensions aside. That the alien personality opposed the powers of darkness she could at least be sure of. If she could somehow focus herself on it, perhaps she could just manage to discover the meaning of its inaudible whispers. She closed her eyes. To the best of her ability, she shut out all external sounds, and listened.
"Hikari?" YukimiBotamon asked a few moments later. The other Chosen Children paused in their fruitless discussion and looked in her direction. Hikari said nothing.
"Hikari-san?"
"I think I understand," she answered at last, eyes still squeezed shut. "The darkness is growing…" She shuddered. "…but as the worlds meet…they can use what little they have left… Ah!"
She opened her eyes as she and the others were illuminated by a wide beam of pale light. Tinged with pink, it seemed to have fallen upon them from the sky. Those Digimon held by their partners jumped to the ground as if by reflex. The light remained only a moment before faltering and fading out, but it had done what it could. No longer Baby-level, the partner Digimon had returned to the forms they had achieved naturally in the days before meeting their human friends. Though surprised by the sudden transformation, the Chosen Children greeted their partners with gladness, feeling in a way that they had only now been truly reunited.
"Thank you, Hikari," Tailmon said, standing on her hind legs and smiling at her partner.
"I'm not sure what exactly I did," Hikari answered with a faint smile of her own, "but you're welcome, Tailmon."
The other pairs of partners greeted each other as well.
"Back to V-mon!" Daisuke whooped, and his partner nodded enthusiastically.
"We should be able to Armor evolve now," Takeru said, the elation of seeing Patamon again having brought him for the moment out of his funk.
"It's a fighting chance," Iori said, stooping down to hug Armadimon.
"But what do we do now?" Miyako asked.
"This fog seems to be getting thicker," said Hawkmon.
"Do you have any idea, Ken-chan?" asked Wormmon.
Ken raised his hand to his mouth in an attitude of thought, but the next instant had jerked it away as a violent shaking began under his very feet. A nearer, louder rumble could be heard over that continuous disturbance in the distance, and the Chosen stumbled about in the confusion of the first earthquake they had felt since their arrival in the Dark World. Small fissures opened in the rocky surface of the ground, and a gust of wind, wet with spray, swept through the group.
It was as the commotion subsided, and everyone began to regain their equilibrium, that the wind began to disperse the gathering fog, sweeping it from the horizon. When Hikari heard the sound of waves, terror clutched her, but upon turning around she was as astounded by what she saw as everyone else.
Where the plateau of Leng had once stretched on forever, a huge body of water now rolled. And there, one or two kilometers distant, its waves lapped what could only be the shores of Odaiba.
Hikari's first thought was that she had wandered back into a dream, that she was seeing an illusion, a false vision of the well-known island, such as that whereon she had fled a terrible thing in the stolen shape of her brother. But then a different thought struck her. Sato Katsu had said that the various worlds would soon become one. She had been informed by another, stranger source that this was indeed the case. Could the process have already begun, leaving Tokyo Bay and the black plateau directly adjacent?
"It's Odaiba!" Daisuke exclaimed. The other Chosen Children were too astonished to speak.
"Should we go, Takeru?" Patamon asked.
It was then they noticed that not all evidences of Leng's topography had disappeared in that direction. To the northwest they could see a kind of shore leading off in the direction of mainland Tokyo, the towers of which could be made out dimly in the distant mist.
"Let's go," Takeru said, finding his voice and answering his partner. "Nii-san and the others may be there."
Ken nodded. "We need to meet up and explain as best we can what's going on."
"But what will happen next?" Miyako wondered. "We don't really even know what's going on."
"We'll figure it out," Daisuke asserted. "Let's get going!"