Play of Spirits
Chapter 22 – Rain the Flood (Junpei)
Grumblemon appeared so suddenly, right at the climax of Junpei's tale. Togemon, ever the diligent teacher, was the first to spot the water leaking into the school.
It was Neemon's shriek of "oh, it's that earth spirit again!" that got them moving. And Neemon was right. It was Grumblemon labouring through the fields.
That didn't explain the water though. Until Togemon shrieked: 'river'.
Neither Junpei nor Izumi had come across the river, but the child digimon panicked. 'Our school will flood!'
Well, Junpei certainly wasn't going to stand for that. And from the look of anger that had crossed Izumi's, neither was she.
He flew out. She tripped her way through the grains but he saw it first: Grumblemon striking the ground again and again, and the water spilling past the river-bank as it cracked. It would break entirely soon enough. Then the fields and the school both would be swept away. And those tiny child digimion wouldn't be able to stand up against the onslaught of water that was coming.
Unfortunately, neither of them were built to withstand hits from a hammer either. And lightning might do more harm than good with an entire river involved.
'Any ideas?' he asked Izumi, before realising she hadn't caught up yet. 'Drat.' He frowned in the air. Well, that's one advantage…
It wasn't a very good one, but whatever worked. 'Hey!' he yelled, louder. Grumblemon looked up. 'Yeah, I'm looking at you, you cast-off!'
And then he flew out of reach of the hammer, glad that part of the plan was going smoothly. Now to keep up the annoying bee act…
It was harder than it sounded, especially since humans weren't built to fly but that was becoming more and more natural. Blitzmon just fit him in a way Grumblemon never had, even with the addition of wings. There was something about the thin armour coating his body, the wings buzzing behind him like lightning waiting to strike, the hum of electricity under his skin… He'd never had any of that back in the human world, but at the same time it felt like he was exposing something from within himself, something whose existence he hadn't been aware of until now.
Maybe that was what Ofanimon had decided for them, when she brought them into this game of destiny.
Whose destiny? He wondered.
How had he never thought of that before? How had none of them ever thought of that before?
That thought brought him up short. It also left him open to a blow from Grumblemon's hammer, sending him crashing into the water.
Izumi arrived at that moment, whipping out a retractable arm to drag him out.
He spluttered on the banks, there, as Grumblemon brought down his hammer on the opposite bank –
Before the earth spirit paused to smash fire darts out of the sky instead.
'Hey!' Takuya's voice yelled. Junpei squinted.
A toy aeroplane?
And it was Ranamon and Agunimon in the toy aeroplane, along with the pilot who dropped the warriors off and then zipped away.
Agunimon sent more fire darts, and the pair of them were suddenly locked in a parry while Junpei shook his wings out and Takuya whipped out a rain cloud. 'Back away!' he yelled finally, and Agunimon leapt across the bank as the rain descended.
It stayed on the other side of the bank, thankfully, and Grumblemon howled and swung his hammer blindly.
Unfortunately, the water softened the banks as well, and the water gurgled over.
'The river's already flooding,' Izumi snapped.
Takuya swore and stopped his rain cloud. Grumblemon struggled up. The other warriors took stock of the situation, muddy and soaked and a hindrance to pretty much all of them.
It was Izumi who came up with the solution, in the end, crossing the bank and dragging Grumblemon further back. Junpei and Tomoki dashed over to help, since both of them were useless when it came to stopping a flood.
Really, anyone but the spirit of water was useless, in a sense. It was almost a pity the spirit of earth wasn't on their side anymore… but if this was how they were going to act, it was probably for the best.
It didn't occur to him that they were still missing Kouichi until after they were well clear of Takuya and the river, and the surrounds were cackling with electricity and flying fists as they tried to crack Grumblemon's clay armour. Grumblemon parried them, but he was sluggish and finally, finally, his earth body was beginning to crack.
He hadn't used his beast spirit though. That would be a whole other problem to deal with.
For some reason, he didn't, still. Even when he stumbled away from them and they followed. Even when thin cracks began to run down his abdomen. Why? Junpei wondered. Why had he hammered away at the banks until they broke? Why hadn't he transformed into something stronger when he was getting pummelled?
Why had he come there to begin with, when he'd sent them flying in different directions. Surely, if Tomoki and Takuya had already been on their way, then Kouichi on his own was the most vulnerable one?
Had he been thinking of type match-ups? Or was he chasing Junpei specifically, because Junpei had been the one to wield those spirits that were now Grumblemon and Grumblemon alone? There was no way to know in that instance. Not unless he escaped and gave chance and escaped again, but that cycling would cause so much damage, if this scene was anything to go by…
In the end, he didn't transform. He simply fled.
And that was another thing. How could they fight something they knew nothing about?
.
They went back to the river. It was completely dry and they thought, for a moment, that the water had flooded out into the fields before they realised the fields were dry as well.
They found Takuya and Tomoki a little further away… and Ranamon, with blistered skin and howling and summoning a rain cloud bigger than anything Takuya had ever managed to call forth.
Takuya and Tomoki were, in comparison, both drenched and both very human.
'What in the world happened?' Junpei asked… though he could guess. It had happened to him too.
'Takuya stopped the flood,' said Tomoki, because Takuya was on his knees and looking too tired to form the words. 'Sent all that water into the clouds – and then Agunimon's leaving my D-scanner and jumping into his, and Ranamon pops up, screaming like she's been burnt and looking the part.'
They'd missed the screams. But considering it would have been more likely to be friend than foe, it was a good thing they had.
Ranamon, at least, was an easier problem to deal with. Junpei charged at her, electricity tingling within his horns. She dove into the dry river to escape him, scrambling in the mud. He chased her easily. She was fast, but so was he (though the sudden humidity, courtesy of Takuya, was slowing him down). It would rain soon, and that rain would favour Ranamon, but until then she was slowed by her blistering skin and the lack of river water, and he was bolstered by the conductivity before it became too dangerous again to let an electrical charge loose.
She didn't have time to summon rain clouds escaping him, and Takuya had never revealed any non-water based powers.
She shot a jet of steam at his wings. He hissed and landed, flapping hard to rid himself of the sudden pain.
By the time he was back in the air again, she'd escaped and rain, natural rain, was pouring down from the sky.
.
They took shelter in the school, mercifully undamaged except for the water that had soaked into the floor. 'Oh,' said Togemon, sounding both relieved and delighted. 'There are more of you.'
Bokomon scanned them. 'No Kouichi?' he asked.
'The ToyAgumon are looking,' Tomoki replied. 'There's a whole army of them, you know. And they keep tabs on pretty much the entire Digital World.'
'Useful,' said Junpei, appreciatively. 'If we had a way to contact them, we could keep tabs on all our enemies. Though I guess that's dangerous thinking, too,' he added as an afterthought. 'So I guess we find Kouichi, then continue heading to the Venus Rose. Or just head there, since Kouichi was the one who wanted to go in the first place and he's surely not going to go in another direction to look for us unless he's sure we're there.'
'I don't know about the rest of you,' Takuya groaned. 'But I'd like a nap first. A really long nap.'
That… actually sounded like a brilliant idea. 'After a good sleep,' Junpei agreed. 'Oh, I've got chocolate for everyone too.'
And it wasn't just his pockets that felt lighter when he'd handed those out (with a bar broken into smaller pieces for the child digimon, and another split between Bokomon and Neemon). There was just one bar left in his pocket now, for Kouichi whenever they found him.
And now there was both Grumblemon and Ranamon on the loose. And while Wolfmon didn't have any particular weaknesses to either of them, he wasn't exactly strong against them either.
It occurred to him a little later, as he lay in one of the little huts in the field, trying to sleep, that that wasn't quite true. He may have no particular weakness or strength against Wolfmon, but he had several weaknesses against Ranamon. Water reflected light, after all, and Kouichi was particularly sensitive to that (even if he wasn't walking around with his eyes completely covered anymore). And then there was the issue with the rain and Kouichi relying more on sound than sight to fight. It worked when fighting in the tunnels. It would work fighting spooky ninjas too, probably, if they came across any such thing in the Digital World (and why not? With all the different sorts of digimon they'd already seen…). It wouldn't work so well with the rain as a distractor. And there was also the fact that Wolfmon shot lasers out of his eyes, putting one of his two known attacks out of commission.
And considering his own spirit in the same out of the box manner, he wasn't as strong against Ranamon as he'd liked to think. Ranamon was smaller, and faster, and could control the humidity of the atmosphere (and so had more control over the weather than he did). Water conducted electricity, but she could easily create a setting in which it would be too dangerous to unleash a torrent of electricity. And changing the moisture in the air changed the water lightning travelled, which meant he had to take more care. Blitzmon wasn't used to fighting in the rain, so Junpei had to do all the thinking.
He took that thought and processed it. Blitzmon was a spirit, like Grumblemon and Ranamon. That meant that, judging from the other two and how they'd jumped out of the D-scanners with minds of their own, the spirits all had some level of independent thought.
But they'd been lumps of something or other when they'd first found them. So they'd been asleep? Or dormant? And being with them, or in their D-scanners, had woken them up. At some point they left… and was it a lovely coincidence it was when the spirits better suited to them accepted them, or was that on purpose? Was acceptance rejection in reverse?
He didn't think that was the case though. It wasn't until Takuya controlled a flood that he lost Ranamon, and if that wasn't gaining some sense of synergy with the water spirit, Junpei wasn't sure what would qualify. And then there was his own circumstances, though they weren't as ground-breaking. He'd just felt a sense of finding his role, his place in a team and that had always been important to him but also something that had mostly eluded him. He'd found it then, though, when he'd smashed the locks with a hammer nobody else could wield, with a precision he'd been trusted with while everybody else were occupied in the roles they had to play…
He'd found his place, and then suddenly it had changed. At least it hadn't pulled the rug out from under his feet entirely. That would have sucked. Blitzmon was an upgrade, not a change. Or should have been. Grumblemon attacking them threw a wrench in that idealistic interpretation.
Which brought him back to that issue, of Grumblemon and, now, Ranamon as well.
Maybe turning the chessboard would work here. Because if he could find weaknesses against Ranamon, he could find strengths against Grumblemon.
In terms of pure strength, Grumblemon was stronger, but Junpei wondered if he hadn't developed some upper body strength when swinging that hammer around himself. It was possible. Either that or Blitzmon had some decent upper body strength as it was, because his attacks involved electrically charged punches and upper-body tackles.
So, upper body strength. Grumblemon couldn't do much without the hammer, at least. There was that. Which changed if he turned into that other guy, though. The one who'd sent them all flying.
Exhibit two was electricity versus earth. Earth didn't conduct very well, but they'd proven on two occasions that it wasn't completely useless. Sadly, both of those had been with the help of Ranamon, and they no longer had the water spirits. Still, there was mother nature, rivers, the ocean…. Plenty of sources of opportunistic water, if only the opportunities were on their side.
Exhibit three was flight, and that was one advantage he clearly had. Which he'd used to his advantage on the river bank. But he had to be careful to not get distracted, because distraction hand him pummelling into the river.
Izumi pulled him out this time, but that wouldn't happen all the time, and could Blitzmon even swim? Though he supposed that didn't matter. He could swim, even if Grumblemon had negated the need to do that the last time they'd been faced with a huge body of water. Or was it the time before? They'd found the ice spirit no-one could move the last time, hadn't they?
How long had they even been in this world?
His light pockets suddenly felt too light. He slipped his hands in and felt the last bar of chocolate and his stomach growled.
No. I'm saving that one for Kouichi.
And the sheer unfairness of it if he ate it himself kept him from taking the packet out.
It was his own fault though, really. He brought chocolate bars with most of his pocket money, and the reasons were two-fold. Everyone loved chocolate, so naturally he could offer it to his friends. Except it didn't always work, and when it did, the effect of it didn't last very long. They'd thank him, eat the chocolate, and then move over to other people and he'd be wondering where he'd gone wrong.
He knew now. He'd been trying too hard.
And the second reason was more anxious eating. Whenever his thoughts started going in circles and he felt like he'd be crushed by the weight of it all. His mother told him he might want to lay off a little, and exercise a little more. He only did the latter: rode a bicycle a lot but that didn't trim down the fat he'd put on over the school years. His doctor was less nice about it. Told him kids like him got diabetes and heart problems and all sorts of other nasty things. Told him kids like him turned into those couch potato adults who busted their kidneys and their veins and their nerves and their heart and brain and died while their parents were still fit.
That didn't make him feel better about himself, though.
Except these guys never said anything like that. They didn't comment on his weight at all. Didn't comment on why he was carrying so much chocolate around. They commented instead on other things. Like his words. Like the spirit he'd picked up. Like his story-telling skills (and Izumi, at least, was suitably impressed) and he hadn't really been trying, here. He wasn't sure why he wasn't. Maybe it was because they had to work together. Maybe it was because they were all younger, and he didn't know them, and none of them really knew each other so they were all in the same boat: confused and lost. He didn't have any niches he had to break into. There wasn't a way he was expected to behave, or a way he was expected to look, or be. He could be himself, and by letting him be himself, he could find himself. And that journey had led him from earth to lightning being chased by earth.
And now I have to do something about that…
He laughed quietly to himself. He was thinking too much again, when he wanted to sleep. But at least these thoughts would be useful. Constructive thinking. Problem solving. Grumblemon was a puzzle they needed to work out, and work out fast. Ranamon was the next, and if Ranamon had popped up, who else would wind up being added to the crew? Not Agunimon…
And what did that mean for Tomoki, who suddenly found himself without a spirit and a way to defend himself?
A little selfishly, he counted himself lucky he wasn't in a circumstance like that. Feeling powerless was never a pleasant thing.
Was that, then, the struggle of Grumblemon and Ranamon? Were they afraid they'd stop existing, now that they'd been cut loose? Was it impossible to manage two conflicting spirits together? Or was there something else, something connecting all the dots, that they were yet to come across?
Post A/N: That was two chapters in a row for the Izumi/Junpei team, and now two chapters in a row for the twins. Granted, they're in two completely different locations at the moment so it's not quite the same thing, but still, say goodbye to all the characters in the last three chapters because they won't be showing up until two chapters from now. :) Which, thanks to the lack of internet on the coast, means they'll pile up anyhow. So I guess this note will turn out to be redundant. Oh well…