Thank you to everybody who read this story.
Chapter 10: Departure
Day 1: I've established myself in the mountain where the disappearance cases have occurred. According to the data, this place used to have a gate to the secret sanctuary once used by the Demon Lords as base. I believe this might have something to do with the curse he used against Barbamon as an ultimate revenge. It's about time to find out what this curse is exactly, how he gained such power and why hasn't he killed Barbamon when he had the chance.
Day 2: I found a sealed digitama in this mountain and I believe it may belong to one of the Demon Lords. This creature might bring great disaster to the Digital World if it is ever reborn, so I'll try to exterminate it with a code I'm studying.
Day 23: My plan didn't work out and the creature was born and began to evolve. I managed to stop the evolution at child level. He had no memories at all. Afraid of what could happen if this creature ran away and regained his memories, I convinced him to stay with me and become my apprentice. It was a desperate act and I feel disgusted at myself for living with such a pest.
Day 59: Impmon is not like I thought he would be.
Day 73: This may be my greatest error, but I'm starting to believe this Demon Lord can become a good Digimon under my guidance. I investigated his evolution line and came to the conclusion that he must have been the Demon Lord of Gluttony, Belzebumon.
Day 75: He can't become that slaughter maniac again. I won't let him become that.
Day 82: I'm being irresponsible, I should kill Impmon, but I can't find the forces to do it. I'm putting his life above the Digital World. I'm so pathetic!
Day 90: I found out a way to go to the sanctuary.
I don't understand anything anymore. What is this nonsense about giving Barbamon a chance to escape? Didn't he hate him? What the hell is happening? I'm going to die if I don't prove that I'm wiser than that Demon Lord, but how could I be wise? I let another Demon Lord become my apprentice! I even began to love him!
Impmon ran away. He loves me. How can he love me so much? I'm so ashamed of everything. I don't think I deserve his love.
He came here, I should refer to him as Merchant from now on. He's nothing like what was told to us. He surely pursues a dark objective. Someone has to stop him, and someone has to stop Barbamon. I failed at everything and now all what I can do is protect Impmon the best way I can. If only I haven't loved him… I'm so scared. I don't want to die.
Is it more important to be wise or to love? I was happy to love and to be loved by him. Maybe in the end I chose the wrong way to protect him.
It's too late now. Sorry, Impmon.
"Something happened," Barbamon noticed. Koushiro had calmed down. "What is going on with him? I should check."
She didn't realize something that was right in front of her. It was so obvious, so painfully obvious. Nobody had realized it. Neither I had… I had to see someone else taking that path to notice it. So ridiculously obvious!
And then a purple light came from Koushiro's crest and the darkness was destroyed. Barbamon saw, astonished, his whole dimension crumbling down.
"IT'S KOUSHIRO! AND THERE'S SOMEONE ELSE!"Yamato screamed. The strong purple light spread in the saloon. The giant door was destroyed. When the light became less intense, the fourth grader was seen standing in front of a big digimon who had a hole in his chest. Koushiro no longer had the shinigami's mark.
"How did this happen?" Barbamon asked, looking at his wound in horror.
"As I thought, when you were imprisoned, you were at the verge of death, Barbamon." Koushiro commented without joy.
"Barbamon?" Impmon questioned in shock. "THAT BASTARD IS BARBAMON?"
The old Demon Lord looked at Impmon and felt a light spark passing through his soul. I never thought I'd see him again.
"The code was a way for you to avoid death. You had your time frozen and if you had devoured 100 souls you could have saved your life." Koushiro said. "But now that I defeated you, your time is running again and you're going to die."
"How did you figure this out? My wound wasn't cof… cof… visible in that dimension." Barbamon questioned, coughing. He was visibly dying.
"All the Demon Lords died. You said yourself that Lucemon was the leader, but he died too. You couldn't be stronger than him, but you had a lot of knowledge; I bet you had enough to escape from death, so you prepared all this."
Barbamon laughed viciously, startling everybody. Yamato and Takeru, unconsciously, stepped back a little.
"Onii-chan, it's over, right? Then why isn't that digimon dead already?" Takeru asked, afraid, but Yamato didn't have an answer. Meanwhile, Impmon stared at Barbamon with ferocity and Tentomon was heading towards Koushiro.
"All my friends died." Barbamon said. "I was the brain of our group, Lucemon's right-hand man, but I couldn't save any of them. Even if I wasn't supposed to save anyone, I felt despair. I was alone, I had lost my purpose and I was dying. You were wrong in one point, though. I didn't do this to myself. I merely was pathetic enough to grab the hand of my enemy; to accept the help of the one who killed my dearest friend and stole his Omniscience Mask. I knew he hated me and wanted to make me suffer, but I didn't care. I lost myself at the time of my death, I betrayed everything in what I believed and the ones I loved because of my fear. All the 99 who had come before had lost themselves either. Even if in the beginning they believed they were better than me, at the end they were desperately afraid of dying and willing to do anything to avoid it; or questioning everything in life. I almost got you, but you escaped at the last second."
"If I was going to die for something as subjective as the sake of the world, I would end up failing. You could show me all my faults and I would doubt everything. It wasn't a matter of how much knowledge or logical reasons someone had. Nothing of that comes to mind when you face death. I needed a honest reason." Koushiro explained.
"And that would be?" Barbamon questioned in a weak voice.
"I want to live to be with the ones I love and help them, and I had to do everything I could to achieve that. I just decided that after reading a diary. You, by the other hand, don't really have the desire to live. You have no friends and no purpose despite the knowledge you have. You're just being moved by the fear of death." The boy continued.
"You didn't know me at all. Your only plan was to do all you could to stay alive." Barbamon stated.
"I didn't need any other plan than that. I could only find an answer by facing the problem directly." Koushiro concluded with a small smile. Surprisingly, Barbamon smiled too.
"That sounds right. I'll tell you something before I disappear… the one who did this to me and is now known as Merchant… in reality he is a former-"
Red chains came from Barbamon's wound and involved him, vanishing right after. Without warning, the Digimon went berserk. He tried to attack Koushiro, but Tentomon evolved just in time to grab the boy and fly with him to where his friends were.
"What happened to him?" Yamato asked, trying to understand.
"It must be the Merchant' doing." Koushiro replied, serious. Everybody noticed something different in the boy's eyes as he saw Barbamon coming after him again. "Impmon, please take my friends out of here."
"You can't fight him by yourself!" Yamato protested, but Koushiro was determined.
"It must be me, Yamato-san. Kabuterimon, let's go." He said, climbing on his partner's head.
Yamato tried to stop Koushiro, but Impmon didn't let him do so.
"It's his battle now."
"I'm going to stay here." Yamato stated. Takeru grabbed his brother's hand.
"It doesn't feel like the battles we're used to have. It's different, Onii-chan."
"Yeah," Yamato replied. In the end, nobody left.
By now, Kabuterimon was right above Barbamon. Koushiro grabbed his glowing crest as he looked down to the Demon Lord.
It's odd to feel empathy for you now. You've done so many atrocious things and didn't show any sign of regret. You're only sorry for betraying your beliefs. You thought you were right almost the whole time, didn't you? I wonder what your motivations were. No, there's no point in doing this now. All I can feel now is some level of respect; all what I can do is to free you. The rest is pointless.
Kabuterimon evolved to Atlurkabuterimon and attacked Barbamon with his horn right in the demon's fatal wound.
I really hope you can have peace.
Flash-Back:
It was back when I was a child that I met that child angel called Lucemon.
"What do you want with me? Are you going to kill me because I'm a virus?" I asked.
"Don't compare me with those foolish Vacines and Datas. I came here to ask your help." He replied.
"My help? What are you talking about?" I inquired. Lucemon showed me a mask he was holding.
"This is one of the great treasures in the Digital World, given to me by a Sage, it allows me to know things about the future and other universes. I even found out about a fool who's the weakest of six gods who've discovered how to break the space-time continuity. Someone intelligent like you could develop this knowledge and even discover a way to control time."
"Why would I do that?" I asked. Lucemon gave me a beautiful smile and said:
"I want to save this rotted world where Digimon fight Digimon because of an attribute. For this, I must kill almost all the population in this world and modify the memory of every individual to prevent the nonsensical hatred to spread."
"Wouldn't they just start hating each other again after being reborn, anyway?"
"No, they'd have a real enemy to hate, an enemy who'd attack without distinction. Also, they would be saved by heroes from another world, so they can't classify them in attributes. A few Digimon, good-hearted ones, will be left to tell the story about the heroes who saved the world. We're going to be the enemies who'll be destroyed for the greater good. Once we're reborn, we won't remember anything."
"What makes you think I'd agree to die for the sake of others, Lucemon?"
"What would you like to have?"
"I want everything! I want great power and all the knowledge in the world! If I had those things, I'd die happy!"
"I'll give you those things and also the ones you seek the most."
"Heh, and what would they be?"
"Comrades who'll care for you and for whom you'll care about and eventually someone who'll really understand you."
End of flash-back
"To think it would be a human brat… an enemy… but I feel I understand you too." Barbamon suddenly spoke, looking in Koushiro's eyes and smiling, while fading away. "We both did the best for our idiotic friends… it wasn't a total waste of time… to wait this long to meet you."
Nobody said anything else.
After that, they returned to the hut and rested. Hours later, Yamato woke up.
"Maybe Taichi and Jyou are already waiting for us now, we should go." Yamato said as he and his brother, along with their partners, were preparing to leave the hut. "Where is Koushiro now?"
"He said he had something to talk to Impmon, they're at the base of the mountain already." Tentomon informed.
Takeru frowned lightly. "Koushiro-san is going to be okay, right?"
"Of course," Yamato stated, "and we'll be there for him any time, just in case."
Koushiro and Impmon were staring at the desert.
"So you're going to look for the Society?" The boy asked.
"I have to know everything... since my duty here is over, it's time to go." Impmon replied darkly.
"You haven't said anything since you read her diary again. Are you alright?" Koushiro asked in concern.
"She wasn't perfect as I imagined, but somehow I feel a little better by knowing that. The important thing was that she loved me, I guess."
"What about the other thing?"
"Are you asking me if I'm okay to know that I was a Demon Lord in the past? That I was the thing I've despised the most in my entire current life?" Impmon asked surprisingly calm. "I don't have an answer for that. Maybe I'll just pretend this is a lie; maybe I'll grow wiser and accept this without taking the wrong path; maybe I'll eventually lose my mind and become a slaughter again and you guys will have to kill me in the future."
"You don't need an answer right now; I just thought you had the right to know the truth." Koushiro said.
"As a chosen child, you should kill me here and avoid the worst scenario where I'd destroy the Digital World." Impmon pointed out.
"I prefer to have faith in you and see what happens." Koushiro said that with a smile.
"You're such a fool." Impmon concluded. He grabbed the bag where he had put everything he owned and walked into the desert.
"He's leaving already? I wanted to say good-bye." Takeru said when he and the others met Koushiro at the base of the mountain.
"I hope we'll see Impmon again; he was a nice guy in the end." Tentomon commented, landing on his partner's head.
"Let's go meet our friends now." Yamato said, looking at Koushiro's thoughtful face.
"Yeah." The redheaded boy agreed.
At a different place, in a carriage, the Merchant studied a digitama on a wooden table, next to a glass of wine.
"I finally got my revenge against you, Barbamon, though I expected you to have a more miserable death. And I finally got to know what kind of person Koushiro is... or what he used to be."
The Merchant remembered the day when he was left completely alone, when most of the Demon Lords were dead and the new strongest digimon had turned against his group. He had been found by Lucemon, who took him to his palace only to give him a mask and commit suicide in his front. Confused, the boy put the mask on and saw him.
A child with red hair close to his age, who was chained to a chair and was drenched in blood.
"Who are you?" He asked, afraid. The other looked up to him and smiled wickedly.
"I'm the beginning and the end of the Digital Worlds. I have te power to bend reality itself. I'm known by different names, mainly Homeostasis. But I was once called Koushiro."
"Are you like a God?" He inquired.
"I'm nothing but an unlucky child." The other contested.
"But you said you had power! Can you bring Onee-chan and the others back to me?" He pleaded.
"I could. But I don't want to do that." The other had a taunting tone. "I enjoyed seeing them being betrayed by their friends and being murdered."
His hatred was greater than anything he had ever felt. At the same time, lots of information entered his mind, including the location of an almost dead Barbamon.
"What is happening to me?!" He asked, afraid.
"The so called 'omniscience mask' you're wearing is deeply connected to me. Because of that, it gives you access to all the knowledge I've accumulated in the different universes I've lived. You might even find out how to control me." The bloody child explained.
"I'll certainly do that! I'll acquire all the knowledge of the world and I'll use it to dominate you! I'll force you to bring Onee-chan and my friends back to life!" He promised.
"I'll be waiting for that." The other chuckled. "Let's see who will subdue the other."
The Merchant always went back to revisit that memory. He had hated Koushiro since before he had known the chosen child with that name. The man took off his mask and saw his reflex on the glass of wine nearby. He had a cruel look on his young face; his eyes were like ice and his hair was gray like his soul.
"Every sacrifice I'll make will be worthy. Enjoy your pathetic existence while you can, Koushiro."