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Chapter 23

The Final Threat

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Three Months Later

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Coyomon had a reputation among the tamers and other digimon as having terrible timing. That was because he carefully picked his moments to pull off a stunt or crack a joke and he always did it at a time that he thought was perfect. Perfect for him. Not many others agreed.

Yamaki and Riley certainly didn't. They had been sharing a very intimate-- and vigorous-- moment in the bedroom of their apartment when Coyomon quietly phased in, leaning against the door frame. Unseen, he watched them for a second or two before commenting, "Damn, Riley, you have got a really nice ass! You must work out."

Riley screamed in surprise and she must have dug her nails pretty hard into her partner because his yell conveyed a good deal of pain as well as surprise. She rolled off of him, spun and grabbed the coverlet, and held it up to her neck as she backed up against the headboard. Yamaki pushed himself to a sitting position and it took him a second to realize what was going on.

"GET OUT OF HERE!" he screamed at Coyomon.

"But I took so much trouble to get in here." Coyomon replied with wide-eyed innocence.

Yamaki fumbled at the bedside table for something for a few seconds and then ripped open its drawer. Coyomon strolled over to the other side of the bed as Yamaki continued to frantically search.

"Listen, sweets," he leered down at Riley, "if you ever get tired of this jerk, just give me a whistle." It took Riley a couple of startled seconds to realize what Coyomon was saying and then she gasped and her face flushed an attractive pink. "Seriously--" he leaned down and curled his long tongue around his muzzle, pulling it upward nearly to his eyes. If a golden retriever had done it, it would have looked comical. Coyomon made the motion perfectly obscene. "--once you go digital, you'll never go back."

"Get away from her!" Yamaki bellowed, abandoning his search.

Coyomon graciously stepped back from the bed and a now bright red Riley leaped up and fled from the room. The coverlet she was holding against her did nothing to hide her retreating bottom and Coyomon watched her go with a smile. "Yep-- good butt on that girl." He sighed a bit wistfully, "too bad she hasn't got a tail."

"You perverted monster!" Yamaki growled at him.

"And you evil genius!" Coyomon said in a cheerful tone of voice, turning back to face him. "And why we talk like Tarzan now?"

Yamaki sputtered for a bit, completely flustered by the digimon's seeming irrationality. "Why are you here?" he finally asked as he grabbed a pair of pants from the back of a chair and slipped them on. "If you're going to kill me, get it over with. I don't find this banter amusing in the least."

"Kill you?" Coyomon asked with ridiculously feigned surprise. "Buddy, I'm here to help you!"

Yamaki made a surreptitious search of his pants pockets as he frowned at the digimon. "Explain yourself."

"You're wearing yourself out with all this HYPNOS stuff! How many days off have you had in all the time since we got back from the Digital Dimension? Do you enjoy having all those government ministers screaming at you all the time? Do you look forward to being crucified in the news every time some Wild One breaks a few store windows or causes a fender-bender? Wouldn't you like to get away from all that?"

"So-- what-- you're offering to fight the Wild Ones for us? You do that already-- you enjoy it!"

"Sure we do," Coyomon grinned at him. "That's why the damage is so limited. Heck, the tourist trade is booming because of it! Watching digimon slug it out on the streets of Tokyo has become the first extreme spectator sport. There are hundreds of smart guys out there making money off the whole thing."

"So just what do you propose to do to 'help' me?"

"It's like this, pal--" Coyomon put an arm around Yamaki's shoulders as if he had been his best buddy. The Director of HYPNOS angrily shrugged it off.

"I'm not your 'pal'! Just spit it out, already!"

"Okay, okay! Sheesh! What I've done is helped you into a new career." Coyomon smiled at the dawning look of horror appearing on Yamaki's face. "Or, more accurately, helped you out of your old one."

"What did you do?" Yamaki gasped at him.

Coyomon made a sweeping gesture toward the apartment's living room. "See for yourself."

Yamaki ran out of the room and found Riley, still wrapped only in the coverlet, frantically stabbing away at her laptop. She looked up as he entered the room and said, "We're cut off. The landline is dead, I can't find my phone and I can't connect to the internet."

"Yeah--" Coyomon drawled as he strolled into the room after Yamaki, "-- an elecmon owed me a favor. Your building's phone and wireless systems are going to have to be replaced, I'm afraid. I respect your skills, Yamaki, and I didn't want to take the chance you might be alerted in time to do anything stop my little plan. Fortunately, you were way too busy with Ms. Buns-of-Steel here to--"

"What did you do?"

Coyomon just pointed. Yamaki and Riley turned together to look out the window of their apartment. In the distance the Tokyo City Hall building was just visible in the darkness. Bright, irregular flashes of light lit the interior three-quarters of the way up the left-hand tower. The humans realized immediately that the flashes were coming from the HYPNOS control center and offices.

"Don't worry," Coyomon said cheerfully into the shocked silence, "It's looks a lot worse than it is. Nobody's in danger. We scared everybody off of the HYPNOS floors before we let our wrecking crew loose on your equipment. Yuggoth-- Juggernaut-- Ragnarok-- some pretty nasty code you guys had up your sleeves, that's for sure. And here we thought you were on our side-- all grateful because we'd saved the world-- both worlds, in fact." He shook his head in mock sadness. "At first we thought that you guys were just writing code that would fling us back into the Digital Dimension and seal it off-- which is bad enough-- and then we stumbled onto the really nasty stuff."

Yamaki had turned away from the window and was now facing a very angry Coyomon. The digimon had dropped his joking manner and couldn't keep his teeth from showing. "Would you really have killed all of us? Is that why you asked if I was going to kill you? Is that the way your pulpy little meat-mind works?"

"Ragnorok was a contingency plan." Yamaki growled back at him. "We wouldn't have used it if the enhanced Juggernaut had worked."

"Is that supposed to make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside? Should I be happy that mass murder was just your backup plan?"

"You're monsters! You've invaded our world! What do you think we were going to do? Let you things take over? It wouldn't be murder, it would be pest control!"

Riley lunged and grabbed Coyomon's upraised arm, screaming, "No, no! Please don't hurt him!"

Coyomon peeled her off his arm and pushed her away. He took a deep breath. "I'm sorry, I forgot myself for a second there."

"So now what?" Yamaki asked, also becoming calmer. "Even if you destroy all copies of the development system and code--"

"Oh, we're doing exactly that right now," Coyomon assured him. "In fact, that reminds me--" He turned and gestured with one hand toward Riley's laptop. Red blazing particles jetted from his hand and tore the computer to shreds, along with the end of the table it was resting on and a large swath of floor. "The 'Monster Makers' are being visited tonight, too-- along with anybody we know of who's ever done programming for HYPNOS."

"That won't stop us," Yamaki said coldly. "We can start again. We can recreate the programs, rebuild the equipment. We won't let you monsters win."

Coyomon shrugged and reached into his vest portal. He pulled out two cell phones and an unusual-looking PDA. The phones both began to ring and the PDA gave off a loud alarm signal. "I believe you were looking for these earlier?"

Riley took one phone and Yamaki grabbed the other two instruments. Riley glanced at her phone's screen and then turned it off. Yamaki dropped his still ringing phone and began rapidly tapping at the PDA's screen. After a second he pointed the instrument at Coyomon and pressed the large button near the base. Whatever he expected to happen failed to occur. He glanced at the screen and tapped out the sequence again. His second try produced nothing more than his first.

"My elecmon pal fixed that nasty gadget, too. I was really hoping you wouldn't try and use it." Coyomon heaved a heavy sigh. "Oh well-- you failed the test and that means--"

"What-- what are you going to do?" Yamaki asked, still clutching his useless weapon.

Coyomon took a step forward and Yamaki took two backward. The digimon glanced down at the phone that was still chirping out its ringtone and put one paw on top of it. With a slight press and a twisting motion, he crushed the phone and the ringing stopped. "I don't like destroying things," he said quietly, "but that was becoming a real nuisance."

"Please!" Riley said, stepping between the two. "Please don't!"

Coyomon's eyes narrowed and began to glow. He lifted his arms and flung them outward. The humans' hair began to lift with the rising energy growing in the room. Coyomon grew taller until his ears were brushing the ceiling. His body became more powerful-looking, his vest flowed outward until it became a full suit of buckskin clothing, and a magnificent pair of wings unfurled from his back, sweeping outward until they touched the opposite walls of the room.

"Please!" Riley begged as the transformed digimon lowered a gleaming golden spear until it was pointing at Yamaki's chest.

"Stand aside," Yeii Coyomon ordered her.

"I won't let you kill him!" Riley actually tried to swat the spear aside. Yeii Coyomon moved the blade out of the way. It would have cut her hand in half if she had touched it.

The Mega level digimon grinned at her. The sight of all those razor fangs was not reassuring but his next words were. "I don't intend to kill him but I have to make sure he will never be able to attempt the destruction of my people again."

"Then what--"

"There is a place where he can never touch a computer again-- a place that has no software because it is the ultimate evolution of software itself. He will be banished there."

They both stared at him. "You're sending him to the Digital Dimension?" Riley gasped.

"That's right-- along with any of the others we find to be unrepentant." He chuckled, "And Shibumi. He actually volunteered to go. Now move your cute rear-end out of the way, Riley. Portal magic isn't a precise art and I don't want to accidentally drop you in with him."

Yamaki stiffened and stood up straight, raising his chin and pushing Riley away from him. Riley glanced between digimon and man and then grabbed Yamaki's arm and pulled herself to him, holding on tightly. "Riley, you can't stop him--" Yamaki began but she interrupted him.

"Don't be stupid, I'm coming with you!"

Yamaki gaped at her in surprise.

"Hah," Yeii Coyomon chuckled, "Loyalty and bravery as well as impressive physical charms-- that's quite a girl you've got there, pal."

Yamaki started to say something else but Yeii Coyomon had become bored with pretentious blustering and flicked the point of his spear at the floor beneath the couple's feet. It dissolved into a haze of black and white pixels and they dropped from sight without a sound.

Yeii Coyomon turned to the window as the dimensional portal evaporated. The lights in HYPNOS headquarters had died down to dim flickers, the last of the computer equipment fragmenting into hot silicon dust.

The door to the apartment banged open and an elecmon scampered in from the hallway and bowed to him. "Did it go as planned, my Sovereign?"

"Even better," Yeii Coyomon smiled down at him. "You did your job very well, thank you. You can return to your tamer now. Remember-- don't tell Jeri anything about this." The elecmon smiled with pride, bowed once more, and ran off.

Yeii Coyomon thought about resuming the disguise of his own Rookie form but then decided against it. It was a fine night for flying. He walked out onto the balcony and stood looking out across the blazing lights of Tokyo for a moment. He lifted his nose and closed his eyes, drinking in the night air, catching the scents of all the life and energy that flowed through the city-- his city-- his realm. He would visit the Digital Dimension again soon; Yamaki and the others would need some looking after and he couldn't trust Kayamon-- bless her chaotic little heart-- to really understand the wants and needs of humans. Someday he wanted to see the great desert across the Pacific where his first tamer's family still lived and try the fry bread that Danny had so often talked about. It would be fun to visit a place where coyotes were a part of the mythic landscape-- the opportunities for entertaining mischief would be endless-- but this place was his home now-- his responsibility.

A digignome flew down out of the night and settled onto his shoulder, softly trilling a message. Yeii Coyomon smiled and thanked it, stepping up onto the railing of the balcony as the little glowing creature glided away. His beloved Renamon had finished her part of the operation and was waiting for him.

He spread his wings as wide as possible, judging to a fine degree the strength and direction of the wind that swirled around the apartment tower, and waited for the perfect moment to leap.

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Author's Notes:

Thank you for reading.

Thanks, also, to all my reviewers, in particular NKC, who besides being a dependable reviewer who got a lot of the subtleties I strove for, is a damned fine writer, too.

If you liked this story, please think about giving it a review-- even pointing out errors is fine-- I'm more than willing to go back and fix stuff. Any private questions or comments-- feel free to message or email me.

But the best thanks you can offer is to write and post more of your own work-- I just love a good story.

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