A/N: Same challenges as last time, except now week 2 for the Endurance Challenge.

One more chapter left. Enjoy!

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Afterlife Programme

Chapter 2
how the moves were read

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Ryuugi Hikaru's first impression of the Afterlife was that that this whacked out dream ranked right up there with the Digital World one, at least when it came to weird dreams. Or nightmares.

Probably nightmares. Dreams tended to factor out reality – like how getting tackled to the ground to avoid being touched by one of those shadowy creatures actually hurt. And how the hand gripping his arm to help him up hurt as well – and actually felt like a hand. Sometimes his dreams were weird and distorted things. Sometimes everything felt the same, but the hand felt like a hand and the grave that had cut into his palms and knees felt like gravel and that was all so exact.

And in front of him was a guy he'd never met before. Or, at least, he was pretty sure he'd never met before. Random guys didn't tend to appear in dreams. Normal dreams anyway.

Then again, there was the Digital World with had been a dream but not a dream. Something that had pulled his soul out of his body but left a connection behind and that, in going back in the state he'd been in after all that, meant he'd infected his human body with something that didn't belong in it.

And there was no way to explain that to the adults. No way to work out how to fix it themselves, either. They hoped the Digital World would contact them again: Dorumon or the Royal Knights or someone but no-one did. No knight in shining armour raced to save him like he'd raced to save Dorumon and the Digital World.

No knight in shining armour raced to save Kiyoshi when she died, either. And that had shocked them badly. Shocked them badly because they'd been watching and waiting for him to die – he, Hikaru, not Kiyoshi – and then one day Kiyoshi was just…dead. Unexpectedly. Without a goodbye or a reason. Hit by a car – or was it a truck? He couldn't even remember – and then…gone.

And now he was in this weird dream and the guy fighting off shadows called it the Afterlife… Did that meant he'd died?

This was death?

He'd sooner believe it was something not unlike the Digital World.

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Otonashi Yuzuru dispatched of the shadows quickly. He'd had immeasurable experience against them, after all. And sometimes it seemed there was something else protecting him as well. Not like the NPCs that were entirely ignored. Something else. Maybe it came from being the Student Council President. Or maybe it was because he was an anomaly in this world. Because he hadn't died with regrets but found his way here to alleviate somebody else's regret.

Kanade…

But he wouldn't meet Kanade again unless he left the Afterlife, or unless she returned. And he didn't want her to return because that would mean she'd died with regrets again and it wasn't fair to die twice like that. Wasn't fair to die once like that either but life wasn't always fair. It was the whole reason the Battlefront had existed. Why Yuri and the others had fought so hard, refused to let themselves be happy in this new world even though they'd been sacrificing their reincarnation to do so.

But they hadn't known that. Not then. Cute silly socially-awkward Kanade…

But Yuri and Kanade were both on earth, reborn. And he was in the Afterlife, looking after the new people who came through.

Like this one. He offered him a hand, then smiled apologetically at the red smears on his knees. 'Sorry about that,' he said. 'These shadow things enjoy welcoming people to the Afterlife – but get swallowed by them and you lose your chance at getting reborn. As I said earlier, rule number one is not to get swallowed by those things.'

'Don't get swallowed by shadows.' The boy swallowed himself. 'Right. That sounds easier said than done.'

'It'll come,' Yuzuru said kindly. 'There are lots of ways to fight and protect yourself here. Enhancements. Weapons. And we've got a few people who can teach you hand to hand if that interests you…' He was babbling a little and he knew it, but he also knew most newcomers didn't process much at the beginning so that was fine. Wasted words got wasted like they should. It turned out to be very efficient in the end.

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Later, they sat in the council room. 'I'm Otonashi Yuzuru,' Yuzuru said again. 'I'm the school council president here.'

'The Afterlife is a school?' the other repeated. 'This really is a whacked up dream.'

'Not a dream, I'm afraid.' And his face drooped with sympathy. 'You died down in earth, and died with regrets. That's why you're here.'

'I've dreamt I've died before,' the other countered. 'I've also dreamt quite long dreams – where I go on an adventure and sleep and wake up and eat and do all those normal things and a few abnormal ones – and then wake up the next morning in bed for real.'

Yuzuru smiled a little. 'That makes things a little difficult,' he admitted. 'But I might have a counter for that as well. But could I get your name?'

'Oh.' The boy looked abashed. Perhaps he thought he should have been polite even in a pseudo-realistic dream. 'Ryuuji Hikaru.'

'Ah.' And Yuzuru's smile is full-blown. 'I definitely have a counter.'

'For my name?' Hikaru stared, agape.

'For proving this isn't a dream,' said Yuzuru. 'And be grateful Kanade is no longer the president. She had a tendency to do it by killing you. Though you'd wake up afterwards completely healed.'

'…oh.' And the boy just blinked.

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Hikaru decided that the dream was starting to surpass the Digital World one. Waking up from lethal blows? And the afterlife was a school? That really sucked. But he might wake up in the real world again – just like he'd woken up from the Digital World and it wasn't like the Digital World didn't exist. They'd proved it, what with all of them remembering the dream they'd shared.

Yuzuru had wandered off. Gone to collect his proof, he said. And to give Hikaru a bit of time to let things sink in.

Yeah, that was a little troublesome. Should he believe himself to be dead or not? And did it really matter? He was stuck there either way. Stuck there until he awoke or – got reincarnated? Was that what Yuzuru had said?

And why did getting gobbled by shadows nullify that when dying by other means did not?

Then again, Masuken was the thinker in their little group, so maybe he'd just missed something painfully obvious.

But then he forgot that entirely when a girl walked into the room. Wearing the same uniform as Yuzuru, but otherwise familiar. Painfully familiar.

'Kiyoshi!'

The chair he'd been seated on tilted and fell behind him with a crash.

Kiyoshi – but Kiyoshi was long dead.

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Kiyoshi had expected Hikaru would show up in the Afterlife eventually. Perhaps she had even hoped it – but how could someone wasting away so slowly not die with regret?

Still, that didn't prepare her for the reeling shock that came with the realisation that he was dead.

She ran to him. She caught him around the middle and hugged him tight and until he squeaked. 'Kiyoshi!'

'I'm so sorry,' she sobbed into his shoulder. 'I wish – I wish you could have lived longer.'

Hikaru hugged her back. 'This…isn't just a nightmare.'

'It's real,' she sobbed sadly. 'We're dead and we're chock full of regrets and we're here.'

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Yuzuru watched them both. He'd talked to her already. They'd worked out her regret and why she was stuck, stuck waiting for Hikaru and stuck even longer than that, long enough for them to live a happy life together. That would take time. It wasn't like Kanade's case at all, when she could have left with just a few words but she'd clung to them as long as she could bear. They needed the time to actually live together and that mightn't be enough. There'd been four friends, drawn close together by an experience nobody else could understand. It could take all four of them to be free – but it was also possible the other two would die with the same regrets.

Time was strange in the Afterlife. There'd been Shiina, born far before any of them. There'd been Kanade, born after him and yet he'd arrived in the Afterlife a long time after her. There were possibilities. He'd discussed a few with Yuuri. The simplest and most likely – Occam's razor, really – was that time held no meaning in the Afterlife. The other possibility was that he'd lived and died again but that made little sense in retrospect. Yuuri never did find out his heart was beating inside Kanade's chest. Or had been. It had come back, presumably when she'd been reborn back on earth.

And he didn't need to cut his chest open to know that. Which was a nice side-effect from his first aid training. And being able to save all those people when the train got tunnelled in was what had allowed him to die without regrets. Who cared if he never became a doctor? What he'd set out to do was save people's lives, so they'd smile when they were reunited with their families. Sure he didn't seem most of those reunions in the end. Some came by to see him in the few days he'd had left after they'd been rescued. Igarashi had been an idiot and stayed till the very end.

He was grateful to Igarashi, for staying with him that long. Even if most of him hadn't been there. Because he died accomplished, and not alone. What better death was there?

And if he hadn't said goodbye to everyone – Kanade and Yuuri and all the others – then he could have gone on living here just fine as well.

Funny how his regret hadn't been born until he was trapped here.

But he didn't want it to end with Kanade coming back. That wasn't fair on her.

There had to be another way to end the Afterlife Programme.

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Unlike Kiyoshi, Hikaru was a fighter. And fairly experienced, too. Said he was out of practice but that didn't matter at all in the Afterlife where Yui who'd been completely paralysed was able to move just fine. So Hikaru was more than a match for the shadows when he wasn't in shock at being thrown headfirst into the Afterlife. And that left Yuzuru a little freer, because after Yuuri was gone, there hadn't been many good fighters who could hold down the fort without him.

Not that he was anything spectacular, but he'd been in the Afterlife far longer than the rest. He knew the ins and outs. He knew how to enhance himself. Just hadn't managed to figure out what would be effective against them and didn't really have the time to try.

Now he tried in earnest, and Kiyoshi helped. They dove into every book they could get their hands on, every avenue they could explore.

They didn't make a breakthrough though until Kiyoshi created an odd fox-like creature after HIkaru mentioned missing a "Dorumon".

And when Hikaru saw the creature and yelped that same name, Yuzuru assumed the little fox-like creature was Dorumon. Or as close to Dorumon as could be created.

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Turned out Dorumon was Dorumon – or at least, Dorumon as far as Hikaru and Kiyoshi both remembered him. But Dorumon was not human, nor a teenager, and Yuzuru could not fathom how it – he – had wound up in the Afterlife.

Then again, the shadows weren't human but had wound up in the Afterlife as well.

He went back to first principals. They knew very little about the Afterlife in the end. Just that it seemed to exist on a floating timeline, that their minds and the imagination housed within it were their most powerful weapons, that it had once been a computer programme set to immortalise one woman and had somehow expanded into this – this school for dead teenage souls with regrets. To fight against God, Yuuri had said. To live a normal life, was Kanade's idea. And then there was his own, which seemed to be working just fine and better than the two girls': to alleviate those regrets they'd died with.

Then again, some of those regrets were pretty complicated.

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Kiyoshi somehow managed to bring Dorumon to the Afterlife. Hikaru could have kissed her. Actually kissed her, to be honest, because he was a teenager and hormones and emotions mixed together make for an awkward force. But she didn't seem to mind too much, aside from going beet red. 'It's okay,' she'd mumbled, before he could apologise.

He apologised anyway. And now there was a whole new problem to deal with. Did he like her? As in like like her?

And Dorumon – how was it really Dorumon, with all the memories from the Digital World? How had he wandered into the Afterlife?

Masuken would've had theories. Hikaru just had questions – and relief and strength from having Dorumon there, by his side.

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Yuzuru had been getting pretty good with computers, thanks to the Afterlife. He analysed Dorumon with them. Realised Dorumon was made entirely of data, just like the world. Made entirely of data and yet he couldn't be reproduced, couldn't be recreated and seemed to remember things from a time in another world.

They were data too, but there was something about their souls that couldn't be mapped.

There must be something about the Dorumon like that as well.

And it took him a while before he found it. The noise. The blank space that must have been his soul.

Hikaru affirmed it – that orb inside Dorumon's chest – and called it a "digisoul".

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Everything had its pattern of zeroes and ones. Some things were simple. The NPCs that looked so much like humans were more complex. So were the shadows.

The teenagers who retained their souls and Dorumon were even more complex. And they couldn't replicate. Just appeared and disappeared. The shadows replicated. The NPCs replicated – and then merged together if there wasn't enough space for them and the souls. Or the shadows swallowed the souls.

Sometimes, it seemed like the shadow was just creating space. But they were too hostile for that.

Since Hikaru had appeared, the shadows had pretty much left the others alone.

It was a good thing Hikaru (especially with Dorumon's help) could more than hold his own against them.

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He couldn't replicate souls, but he could create a signal close enough to act as a space-filler. It was useless in anything but an academic sense, but that was all he needed it for. Shadows had to be from somewhere, something. He could use this to find its origins.

He tested it on known things first. A table sung with the once soul of a tree. Clothes sung of sheep and cow and plants. The NPCs sung with the name of the teen whose image they lived on in. Some names he knew. Some he didn't. He didn't touch the friends he knew he'd failed.

The shadows sung like Dorumon – similar, but different. Same species, but different individuals.

'Other digimon,' said Kiyoshi, when he told her. 'Are they the dead as well, or have they bent sent?'

'Sent,' Yuzuru replied. He remembered Yuuri telling him that. And she'd been sure. She'd had proof. 'They're here to accomplish something.'

They attacked Hikaru now. Only Hikaru.

'Could it be…MetalPhantomon?'