-chapter 49-
It seemed like the perfect setup for a bad horror movie, but ultimately the next day arrived without anything really remarkable happening. Phoebe and I woke up, we played around for a bit while we had some time alone together, and then we got dressed and headed back across the canyon to check on the others. Then we had to decide whether we were going to continue south and leave the vehicles behind, or attempt to find another way across the canyon. Obviously we opted for the vehicles, as they were much more comfortable than the mechanorimon, and in addition, our new desert surroundings brought with it a change in the ambient temperature. In the forest, and most of the places we had been in the digital world, it was about 60 degrees all the time with no noticeable fluctuation, further north, in the forest where Grandkuwagamon was based, it was more like 75, but here it seemed more like 85, like many other things here, the change was sudden and strange and defied all conventional laws of physics. This made the mechanorimon even less comfortable than normal, as they lacked air conditioning, or really any comforts whatsoever.
It bothered IceLeomon the most, a digimon used to the ice and snow, he did not deal with heat very well. Though he would be okay as long as we kept moving.
"This is starting to turn out just like Henry's world." I said, remembering the first few days we were in that world and how awful they were as we were literally stranded in the middle of nowhere without a vehicle and it took us several days of walking to find one, which happened to be our first bus. Of course the portals didn't always lead to somewhere convenient. This area felt a lot like it, except without all the skeletons.
"At least we don't have to walk now." Phoebe replied.
"Yeah, that makes it slightly better." I agreed.
"Cj you were such a good boy yesterday I'm going to let you rest today so you can heal a bit more." Phoebe said.
"Oh now you're going to let me rest?" I replied.
"Mhm." Phoebe said before suddenly switching to telepathy so Zari wouldn't hear. "We had to do that thing yesterday because like I said, Zari is falling for IceLeomon."
"I don't see it Pheebles, I really don't see it." I replied.
"Well I do." Phoebe replied.
"Whatever you say baby girl." I said before giving her a quick kiss on the cheek.
"Are you going to put me to sleep again without warning me?" I asked.
"No because I want to snuggle with you." Phoebe cutely replied. "Is that ok or does it hurt your back too much?"
"No it's fine." I replied.
-A few hours of snuggling later-
"Zari is there somewhere we could get out and walk? As comfortable as Cj is, I really don't want to lay here all day." Phoebe said.
"Yeah, it would be good if we could get out and stretch a bit." I said.
"You want to just stop here?" Zari asked.
"Yeah, sure, here is as good as any unless you see a town up ahead, Henry and Claire will get the message." I replied.
"There is no town ahead, it's just barren desert for miles." Zari replied.
"Ok well, pull over and stop then." I said.
She stopped a little too quickly, IceLeomon went rolling off of the roof with a thud, he quickly got up and pretended nothing happened.
"Oooh, I forgot he was up there." Zari said.
"Well don't kill him! That won't help him like you." Phoebe exclaimed.
"What? Phoebe for the last time I don't feel that way about him." Zari replied.
"You better not have broken our bus." I said, trying not to laugh as we both got out of bed, got our shoes on and headed for the door.
"IceLeomon I'm so sorry I forgot you were up there." Zari profusely apologized.
"Yeah, just, be more careful next time." IceLeomon said, believing it to be his fault for not holding on tight enough.
Henry and Claire came to a stop a few feet behind us and got out of their car as well.
"Did you see something?" Henry asked.
"No just thought it would be nice to get out for a bit." I replied.
"Hi Saphira, how are you?" Phoebe asked as her digimon climbed out of Henry's car.
"Could use a swim." Saphira replied.
"Yeah well, I don't think that's going to work very well out here." Phoebe said.
"It's kind of hot out here." I said. "Where's Kitty?"
"Asleep, again." Saphira said. "She's been leaning on me for the past hour. Phoebe it was terrible. She doesn't respect personal space."
"Yeah, I've noticed that too." I replied.
"Yep." Phoebe agreed. "Sorry. But Cj and I need some alone time you know."
"I understand, but is there somewhere I can be, without her?" Saphira asked.
"Well if we find another vehicle and you want to learn how to drive." I said. "I doubt that will happen though."
"Oh Cj, Kitty can just go inside the digivice if she's just going to sleep anyway." Phoebe pointed out.
"Yeah, true." I replied.
"Hey guys you might want to come see this." Henry said as he stood near the edge of the canyon.
"What is it?" I asked.
"It looks like there's another village in the canyon, a bit further up." Henry said as I went over to look, Phoebe, Saphira, Claire, and Zari eventually followed.
"Let's go get the mechanorimon and check it out." I said.
"Do we have time for that?" Claire asked.
"Well nothing is trying to kill us right now, so yeah probably." I replied.
A few minutes went by as we got in the mechanorimon and had them take us down to the village. Phoebe decided to leave Zari behind with IceLeomon, to guard the vehicles, for reasons that by now probably don't need to be explained. She was dead set on getting them together, however crazy that was. I was concerned to see if she might cross some sort of line, but curious as to whether her plans would work. All I knew is it was well passed the time for us to be the only ones in the group with a digimon.
"Awe it's empty just like the last one." Claire complained.
"There's bullet holes and a few smashed buildings, looks like Marionamon got this one too." I said.
"How many do you think she got Cj?" Phoebe asked.
"I don't know, I wonder what she did with their data." I said.
"You don't think it was in some of the enemies our digimon absorbed?" Phoebe asked.
"We scanned several of them before we started doing that. They all came up negative." I replied.
"Well we didn't take the time to scan all of them." Phoebe pointed out.
"Well baby girl we did what we had to do, I don't know what else to say." I said.
"Don't worry about it you two, even if their data was absorbed by Marionamon's army, by the time we got around to defeating them they would have been too far gone to save." Saphira said as she came out of Phoebe's digivice.
"Well that's a relief." Phoebe said.
"Yeah." I agreed.
The village in the canyon was smaller than the one back by the bridge on the other side and had even less to look at. Other than the usual cobbled together buildings, some obvious signs of attack indicated it shared its fate with the other one. There really wasn't much reason to stay there very long so within about twenty minutes we were on our way back to our vehicles.
IceLeomon was just sitting on the roof of the bus, panting heavily, looking like he had just run a marathon, while Zari was out front looking over the edge of the canyon.
"I'm glad you guys are back IceLeomon won't stop whining about how hot it is." Zari said to us shortly after we landed.
"Really? Like a baby, or just generally bitching?" I asked.
"Hurry up and get on the bus we need to get moving again!" Iceleomon loudly demanded.
"Oh, I see, like a ten year old." I replied.
"I guess we better get going again." Phoebe said.
"Saphira, I'll see you again in a few hours. If Kitty annoys you just get her to go into the digivice, it shouldn't be too hard." Phoebe said to her own digivice. Saphira then came out, took the digivice and headed over to Henry's car.
All in all, 6 hours of riding around in the bus took us further into the desert with no town in site and no safe passage down into the canyon.
We finally found an occupied town just after sunset, apparently Marionamon didn't bother to travel this far from the tracks. The fire they lit as a light source made it stand out in the darkness. It was occupied mostly by armadillomon, a few palmon, and a handful of prairiemon and digmon, who lived in tunnels they had dug all over the place, there were holes in the ground all over the place which made it a bit difficult to navigate. Surrounded by these holes were a few small shacks, which in turn surrounded a firepit, typical for this world. News hadn't traveled yet so they treated us as outsiders, but they were friendly enough to let us spend the night, and share some information about the area with us. A handful were refugees from the last settlement we found, and were able to confirm our suspicions about its fate. They also told us of the Sandy river village, a much larger settlement near the end of the canyon.
The next morning we realized the canyon seemed to finally be getting a bit shallower, and there seemed to be a narrow stream at the bottom of it as well. As we traveled further northwest, this stream grew wider and wider until it became a full-fledged river, which, by the time the canyon came to an end was too wide and deep to drive across, so we had to continue our journey further up river until we found the settlement known as Sandy River village, which happened to span across both sides of the river through some primitive wooden truss bridges. After two entire days of travel, we finally found a crossing point. There were a few champion level digimon living in this village, so the bridges were built pretty strong and wide, wide enough to get our vehicles across. Since the villagers at the previous settlement mentioned the place the night before, Phoebe got her hopes up thinking there would be a beach by the river. But the banks were way too rocky to make a nice, comfortable beach, they were also a bit small and steep as well.
"See Pheebles I told you there wouldn't be a beach here." I said as we stood along the north-most bridge of the city, watching the river flow underneath. Once again, we were taking a few moments out of our busy snuggling schedule to stretch our legs. Henry, Claire, and Zari were checking things out from underneath with IceLeomon, who very quickly decided to swim in the river to keep cool.
"Awe that sucks." Phoebe replied.
"Phoebe is it ok if I go for a swim?" Saphira asked.
"Sure." Phoebe replied.
"How long is that going to take?" I asked.
"Cj we have plenty of time, we've been in that bus for . . . " She began to say, but stopped speaking when she saw Saphira climb up onto the railing of the bridge.
"What are you doing?" Phoebe asked.
"I'm going for a swim what did you think I was doing?" Saphira said as she seemed to be preparing to dive straight off the bridge.
"Are you crazy? Just go down there and walk in." Phoebe said.
"It takes too long." Saphira said before promptly jumping off the bridge, performing a pretty much perfect looking swan dive into the waters below.
Phoebe got this look of complete and utter surprise on her face that I had not seen for years.
"She just . . . " Was all she could say.
"Yeah, she'll be fine, she's a water type." I said.
"Speaking of which. I wonder if Bubba would enjoy a swim right now?" I asked.
"My digimon just jumped off of a bridge." Phoebe said as she intently stared over the edge.
"Yeah." I replied. "And she's ok, I see her down there swimming around."
"Don't let Bubba out right now we might get attacked or something." Phoebe said.
"Maybe not." I said.
"Do you really want to risk it?" Phoebe asked.
"No, not really." I replied.
"Hi guys what's up?" Kitty came out of my digivice and chimed in for the day, one of the rare times we've caught her between naps.
"You want to go for a swim?" I asked.
"I don't do water." Kitty replied.
"It actually sounds kind of nice to go for a swim in this heat." I said.
"I don't have a swimsuit with me and neither do you." Phoebe said.
"That water might be too deep for you anyway." I said.
"Yeah, maybe." Phoebe replied.
"You can't swim?" Kitty asked.
"No gardevoir can swim very well." Phoebe replied. "Can you swim?"
"I don't know, I never tried. I don't like water." Kitty replied.
"That probably means you can't." Phoebe said.
"So what?" Kitty asked.
"You can't go in deep water or you'll drown." Phoebe said.
"Why would I want to do that my fur will get all wet and take hours to dry out. Or I could lose one of my rings, or worse." Kitty said.
"I don't know, but you might have too sometime." Phoebe said.
"What's worse?" I asked.
"I could get water in my nose!" Kitty replied.
"Okaaaay ." I replied.
"Let's go down and see what the others are up too." Phoebe said.
"Allright sure." I replied. "Kitty give me your hand."
"I'm not going in the water." Kitty protested.
"We're not, why would we?" Phoebe asked as I took her hand so she could teleport us.
"We better not." Kitty said as she reluctantly took my hand.
Phoebe teleported us to the riverbank below the bridge.
"I kind of want to put her in the water now." Phoebe said to me telepathically.
"Don't I don't need you two fighting again." I thought.
"It's hard to walk here." Kitty said.
"Yeah well, let's get over to the others." I replied.
Henry, Claire, and Zari were about 50ft away from us. There were a lot of fairly large rocks along the bank. It was kind of an awkward place to walk, but not that difficult like Kitty said. We made it over to them easily enough.
"We saw Saphira dive off the bridge, it was pretty impressive." Claire said.
'
"Yeah, a solid 8, easily." Henry added.
"An eight, really? Looked perfect to me." I replied.
"You can't tell me she has Olympic level skills." Henry said.
"She's not human bro, she could probably outswim all those guys." I said.
"Yeah well anyway, she said she wanted to go for a swim, I didn't know she intended to jump off the bridge." Phoebe said.
"The look on your face was priceless." I said. "I don't see that look on her face very often, but every time it's just freaking priceless."
Phoebe blushed for a moment before asking. "Hey Zari where's IceLeomon?"
"He's swimming too, he said it would help cool him off." Zari replied.
"But his fur will take forever dry out." Kitty said.
"He could get water up his nose!" I joked.
"You don't have fur Cj, you don't know what it's like." Kitty scolded me as Phoebe gave her a mean look.
"Yeah well, evidently he thinks cooling off is more important." I replied.
"It's not even that hot out." Kitty said.
"It's 30 degrees." Zari said.
"30? More like 80." I replied.
"30 Celsius." Zari said.
"Oookay." I replied.
"Yeah well out west it's even hotter than this so every one of you better be ready for when we have to fight Indramon." Kitty said.
"Can I put her in the water now?" Phoebe asked me telepathically, I responded by just thinking "no" over and over again.
"You think she'll be cold when we end up in the mountains?" I asked my beloved.
"Yeah probably, her and that skimpy little top." Phoebe replied. Everyone but Kitty laughed.
"I'll be fine." Kitty replied.
"You're barely wearing anything." Phoebe replied. "Then again neither is IceLeomon."
"Yeah, but he has Ice in its name, it's probably one those digimon things that just doesn't follow the laws of physics." I replied.
"Eh maybe she'll learn how to stay digivolved by then." I said.
"Yeah maybe." Phoebe replied. "Or else we'll have to find her a coat."
"You still have yours don't you?" I asked.
"Yeah, but that one is for me Cj." Phoebe replied.
"I know, I'm just checking." I explained.
"So do you think there a way we can help IceLeomon cope with the heat better?" Zari interjected.
"I don't know. I mean really what are we going to do shave his fur off?" I jokingly suggested. "I don't even know where we would get a razor."
"There's that one I bought for you." Phoebe said.
"We'd need a bigger one than that." I replied. " We'd need like the ones they use in the military to shave people's heads really quickly. Like some General Dynamics military grade razors or something, like with 8 titanium plated blades that double as steak knives."
"Lockheed Martin?" Henry replied.
"Fucking Lockheed Martin Stealth razors. " I laughed.
"Where are we going to find that?" Zari asked, trying not to bust out laughing, Phoebe was really struggling not too as well.
"I don't know, you work with the space police, you probably have something like that locked up somewhere." I replied.
"They probably think I'm dead by now." Zari replied.
"You better not shave mine when we get to the mountains." Kitty said, not understanding the joke.
"Why would we do that?" I asked. "I wasn't even being serious."
"Because it's funny." Phoebe replied.
"Pheebles don't even." I said.
"Awwwe, but it's such a great idea." Phoebe replied. "And maybe with a shave IceLeomon will be more appealing to Zari."
"Will you just let that go?" Zari asked.
"She won't, trust me, she won't stop until you're married." I replied.
"I was joking." Phoebe said.
"Oh, ok." I replied.
"He already appeals to her." Phoebe said.
"Pheebles." I scolded her, somewhat annoyed.
"Phoebe shut up." Zari said what I really wanted to say, but couldn't because I love my Pheebles.
"Sorry." Phoebe apologized.
"So how long are we going to let them swim around?" Claire asked.
"Umm, I don't know. I guess we'll wait until one of them decides they're done. It probably won't be too long, and that will give us time to chat up the locals, get some information, maybe hunt down another dark king." I said.
"Because the last one went so well." Claire said.
"We'll find her eventually." I said. "Or maybe she'll run into the Bubble men and they'll take each other out."
"Sounds like a bunch of wishful thinking." Henry said.
"Yeah, well, we're going to have to deal with them eventually too." I replied. "And you two still have to find your digimon partners."
"Three." Zari said.
"Well I was kind of thinking you and IceLeomon would end up together too." I said. "Not in the way Phoebe thinks, but, just as, friends."
"Fuck you." Zari replied.
"Awwwe, he agrees with me." Phoebe cheerfully said as she hugged.
"Not entirely." I replied. "It's just she's with him more often than those two."
"Well we aren't going to do any of these things standing around here, let's go explore the town some more." Henry said.
"Yeah let's go." Claire agreed.
The village was substantial, easily on par with Green village, with a large bustling market to boot. Aside from cabbages and various raw materials, there were also several weapons for sale, weapons that would have originally belonged to a myriad of other digimon. From swords to guns there was a bit of everything as long as there was something to trade for it.
"Hey Pheebles." I said. "I have an idea."
"What Cj?" Phoebe asked.
"You know all those extra bows Kitty got for us, we could probably trade some of them for something more effective." I said.
"Maybe." She replied.
-5 minutes later-
"Sorry but 4 nohemon bows are not worth one obelisk." Said a veggiemon shop keeper. "In fact without the quiver they aren't worth very much at all. "
"You must be joking, what about that laser pistol thing?" I asked.
"Vademon's abduction ray? Sir you must be joking." Replied the shop keeper.
"What about some of these?" Phoebe asked as she set one of her shurikens on the counter.
"Kogamon shurikens? Eh they're worth a little more, but not enough for an obelisk." The shop keeper replied.
"Phoebe, you use those." I said.
"But I have a lot of them." Phoebe replied.
"Look unless you have something more substantial to offer we're never going to make a deal."
"What about a statue?" I asked.
"Sir this is a weapons shop." The veggiemon replied.
"Cj we can't trade those statues they're very powerful." Phoebe said. "The dark kings are looking for them."
"The dark kings you say? Well then maybe we can make a deal." The veggiemon.
"Sorry they're not for sale." Phoebe replied as she put her shuriken back into her digivice. "Come on Cj let's go, we have nothing else to trade."
"Well it was worth a shot." I said.
Meanwhile Kitty was off looking at jewelry.
"Awe this one is pretty too." She said.
"Are you going to buy something or are you just going to try everything on?" Asked the shopkeeper, a harpymon of all things.
"Um, do you take cabbages?" Kitty asked.
"Get out." The harpymon replied.
"Awwe." Kitty walked away dejected, and that was when we found her.
"Did you buy anything?" I asked.
"They don't take cabbages." Kitty replied.
"I guess we're broke." I replied.
"I guess so." Kitty agreed. "Hey Phoebe that shopkeeper over there is kind of cute maybe Cj can have sex with her and she'll give me the rings?"
"Um, no. I wonder how much we could get for your rings." Phoebe asked. I was hoping she wouldn't role with it, but was really surprised she didn't.
"Really Pheebles?" I asked.
"She doesn't even use them as a weapon they're just jewelry." Phoebe pointed out.
"Not that, I was just surprised you said no." I replied.
"I'm not letting her pimp you out that's my job." Phoebe joked.
"Say what?" I asked. "I never agreed to this."
"Oh relax I'm just joking. I wuv you." Phoebe explained as she hugged me. "You're all mine."
"Well for your information my rings help with my dancing." Kitty replied. "What about your ring?"
"That's my wedding ring!" Phoebe defended.
"Hey Pheebles, remember how you got us that car on that other world a few weeks or so ago?" I asked.
"Are you suggesting we steal the weapons?" Phoebe asked.
"That's not a nice thing to do." Kitty said.
"It's for a good cause." I replied.
"That doesn't make it nice." Kitty argued.
"Let's talk with the others first." Phoebe replied. "Let's see how they feel about it."
-5 minutes later-
"No, absolutely not, it's a clever idea, but terrible. Stealing is stealing." Zari replied.
"I agree, who knows what the repercussions could be?" Henry said.
"Well, I don't really think they have law enforcement here." I said. "Otherwise why would they need us so badly? Besides, we really could use a boost in firepower."
"I don't like it Cj." Phoebe said.
"You know we're going to have to take down Darkdramon too." I said. "And at this point, I'm not sure how we're going to do that without a few guns."
We were saving Darkdramon for last at this point, as he seemed to be the best equipped and the most threatening, we couldn't even get near his forces as most of them had some sort of firearm, which, while not as threatening against other digimon, were still incredibly deadly to us humans. Or at least none of us were willing to test that theory.
"We can get them some other way." Phoebe said.
"How?" I asked.
"I don't know, we'll come up with something." Phoebe replied.
"Well I'm not getting a job, we don't have time for that and we already have one." I said. "You'd think Ophanimon would have given us some spending cash, if she really does control this place."
"She probably didn't think you'd need any." Kitty said.
"Yeah well, she also thought we'd have a full team by now." I replied. "You know for a goddess she makes a hell of a lot of mistakes."
"Well, maybe it's not her fault, maybe one of the dark kings found her." Kitty said.
"Yeah, after she started us out on this journey." I replied. "She couldn't even ensure all the chosen ones made it to the hotel."
"Yeah well . . . " Kitty attempted to defend her so called goddess in vain.
"Look, she screwed up ok? It's fine, we can still win this." Phoebe interrupted.
"But first we need to get those weapons." I said.
"No, we can figure that out when the time comes." Phoebe said. "We're not stealing them Cj end of discussion."
"You stole that car, you stole those candy bars." I said.
"We needed those." Phoebe replied. "And besides that trick I used to get that car is a lot easier to do with a car than weapons. I mean really what am I going to do just make them shoot in random directions and hope to not hit anybody?"
"Good point, but we still need them." I said. "So does anybody else have any ideas?"
"We have an extra mechanorimon we could sell." Henry said.
"Can we sell it though?" Claire said. "I mean it's a digimon."
"To be honest, I think I'd rather we just have the extra mechanorimon." I said. "They can fight on their own if they need to, they got lasers."
"Well it depends though, cause if we could get a whole arsenal for it, it might be worth looking into." Henry said.
"I don't think we can sell it though, and I don't really want to anyway selling sapient things is wrong." Phoebe said.
"We could make the mechanorimon work for money." Zari said.
"Like I said, I don't think we have time for that." I replied.
"WE'RE ALL DOOMED! GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN!" An unfamiliar voice rang out nearby. After looking around for a moment it turned out to be that of a random kiwimon.
"Why are we doomed?" I asked.
"There's an army of centaurumon and unimon heading this way." The kiwimon replied. "They already raided my village, they'll raid this one too."
"Centaurumon?" Kitty asked. "Those are the kind of digimon Indramon employs!"
"Great we were worried about Marionamon attacking a few days ago and now this." Said a random prairiemon bystander.
"I thought he was further west than this." I said.
"He is, but, we have to stop these guys. Now!" Kitty said.
"Well, they are coming from the direction we were headed anyway." I said.
"Allright then, Phoebe let's go get IceLeomon and Saphira. The rest of you get the mechanorimon and meet us at the bridge." I said.
"What about me?" Kitty asked.
"You can come with us too." I said. "It doesn't really matter that much."
"It doesn't?" She asked.
"We're all going to the same place anyway." I replied as I grabbed her by the shoulder. Phoebe took my other hand and quickly teleported us back to the bridge, which wasn't too far away. At this point Saphira was still swimming and IceLeomon had gotten out of the water for some reason. We told them what was going on and made our way back to the bridge, where we waited for the others to arrive with the mechanorimon.
Ten minutes later we were all headed out of the village onboard the Mechanorimon, towards the supposedly advancing army. Which we found out wasn't supposed about 20 minutes of flying later.
A large army of what seemed to be 100 centaurumon and about 50 unimon were rapidly advancing towards us.
Indeed they were under the control of Indramon, a scouting force sent to observe what was Marionamon's territory a few days prior, as well as to conquer a few of the smaller settlements along the way. They hadn't learned of Marionamon's defeat yet, and were not really prepared to meet much resistance. That didn't mean it was going to be an easy fight. Their speed allowed them to cover great distances quickly, and indeed they were quite far away from Indramon's territory. The unimon engaged us before we could even land, the centaurumon ignored us and proceeded to head towards the village. There was too many of them to split the team up to try to intercept them.
We all started to get our butts kicked at first because mechanorimon, despite being able to fly, absolutely suck at fighting in the air. They simply could not move fast enough. It wasn't until Phoebe teleported out and started offering ground support with her shurikens that we were able to gain enough control to move the fight safely towards the ground. It all happened so fast we didn't have much time to make any plans. Once we made it to the ground things got easier but it was a total slog. I lost track of where the heck Phoebe was. Most of the unimon stayed in the air while a few tried to fight us up close. They rammed us and kicked us, and also had a strange projectile attack that just looked like a white ball of energy. Phoebe's mechanorimon fell first, mostly because she wasn't in it and it was a bit slower to react than the others. It managed to take one unimon down, had some really unlucky hits and collapsed. The other empty one fell second, wearing itself out after taking down 2 more unimon, it was just a bit luckier, but not by much. Another twenty minutes and Claire's had enough. Phoebe quickly brought her out of the fight. Another five minutes and 3 more defeated unimon, mine started to slow down. It was too slow to block an incoming hit, it got knocked on its back, thankfully the cockpit glass didn't break, but the unimon I was fighting basically began to trample my poor mechanorimon to death. I crawled out, Phoebe teleported me out of there before I could even get up.
"Did you get hurt again?" She asked once we were somewhere safe.
"No, but it's not over yet." I replied.
Henry and Zari kept fighting for a few minutes until their mechanorimon fainted as well.
At this point the centaurumon were long gone and we still had about the half the unimon left to defeat.
I sent Kitty out, I had been yelling at her during the fight so she wouldn't fall asleep. Our mechanorimon were spent, so now it was up to Phoebe, the digibabes, and IceLeomon to finish off the rest of the unimon. Henry offered fire support with the one crossbow we had, while I tried to take them on with the sword, but it wasn't easy cause of their size advantage. There was so many times I nearly ended up getting stabbed that Phoebe decided to forcibly remove me from the battle by teleporting me out.
"Cj no more, you could really get hurt. It's over." She said after teleporting me away.
"Pheebles, I was winning." I said somewhat annoyed to be pulled away from the fight like that without even the slightest warning.
"You're my husband not a pincushion!" She cried as Kitty, Saphira, and IceLeomon continued to fight in the background.
"Ok, ok, ok, I'll stay out of it." I replied.
"Thankyou." She said as she hugged me. Her tears nowhere to be seen. "Now I have to finish this so please stay back."
She took a few steps away from me and began to prepare her shurikens for an attack.
I walked around the ongoing battle looking for a place I could fire a shogun sword attack without hitting our own digimon and ended up by Henry, who was basically doing the same thing with the crossbow.
Kitty and IceLeomon, who were both adept at close quarters combat were taking them down pretty quickly, while Saphira was holding her own. The Phoebe's shurikens were slowly chewing them up. Henry and I were doing some damage but not a terribly high amount. They weren't particularly flammable. Eventually they changed tactics and took the sky, which made it hard for Kitty and IceLeomon to do much of anything to them. A few of them circled around and started firing their weird projectiles. They started to get hurt. Saphira somehow managed to defend herself a little better.
"Pheebles pull Kitty out, she's just getting hammered." I yelled. "She can't hit them when they fly like that."
"Ok I will." Phoebe replied.
Phoebe pulled her out of there when the opportunity arose, but at that point some of the remaining unimon came after Henry and I, and just like that I was back in the fight.
"Cj, everything hurts." Kitty complained.
"Yeah I saw, just hang on." I replied.
"We should retreat, there's too many of them left." Henry said.
"This is going to be close, that's for sure." I said.
One of their projectiles landed near me and exploded, I was thrown a good 10ft away. The sword used its magic to break my fall, at the expense of my arms. Another Unimon was bearing down on me, I knew I couldn't get back up in time to block. About 20 shurikens came from the left and cut through it in midair, it exploded into a cloud of data almost instantly.
"Cj you better not be hurt again." Phoebe said.
"I'm fine, I just, need a moment. Thanks for the save." I said.
"There's not many left, I'm going to finish this up." Phoebe continued.
"Ok you go do that." I replied. "Don't get hurt."
"I never do." Phoebe said.
"You have before you liar." I said. "And now you have no idea the amount of grief I will give you when you get hurt."
"Yes I do." Phoebe said.
"No you don't because it hasn't happened yet." I replied.
"Phoebe I'm hurt, everything hurts." Kitty whined.
"You're still standing, you'll be ok." Phoebe said.
I pulled myself up to see that there was only 3 of them left, and it wasn't long before they were gone too mostly thanks to Phoebe and Saphira, IceLeomon was attempting to jump high enough to punch them, looking pretty silly.
Unfortunately we were now stranded out in the desert with no vehicles and no mechanorimon for at least another hour. By that point Sandy River village would be done for.
After sorting out the mechanorimon's data clouds from the enemy and splitting up the enemy's data clouds among our digimon, we began what would be a long walk back until the mechanorimon regenerated. Everyone made it out alright, just a bit banged up.
"That could have gone better." I said.
"Mhm." Phoebe agreed.
"Who knew unicorns could be so tough?" Claire asked.
"This sucks! It hurts to walk, it hurts to talk." Kitty said.
"Then why are you talking?" Saphira replied.
"Because it hurts." Kitty said.
"I thought it was a great experience." IceLeomon said. "I wish there were more."
"Got any more of that cream Zari?" I asked.
"Is she bleeding?" Zari asked. "We don't have much left I'm not going to use it to heal a few bruises."
"You're not nice." Kitty said.
"Kitty, she's right, we should save it for more serious injuries." I replied. "You're still walking, you can't be hurt that bad."
"Saphira are you ok?" Phoebe asked.
"I'll be allright Phoebe." Saphira replied.
"You were really awesome out there today." Phoebe said. "You're getting stronger, I can tell."
"Um thanks." Saphira replied.
"She can, she's a freaking pokémon champion." I said.
"Well you were the runner up." Phoebe replied.
"What does that mean?" Henry asked.
"Every year each region in the pokémon world has a huge tournament to find the strongest trainers, she won that tournament, but it was before Charley was born, so it was a while ago. " I said.
"Ok well that's cool." Henry said.
"Yeah it's a bit more prestigious then I made it out to be, but yeah, it's a huge accomplishment." I said.
"And to think you were my trainer once." Phoebe said.
"Well, um, kind of, not really." I said.
"When was that?" Henry asked.
"Now that was a really long time ago." I said. "That takes me back. That was when I thought your world was just a videogame."
"So wait what?" Claire asked.
"I said I was kind of her trainer, she was one of my pokémon in a videogame." I said. "I'll show you said game if we ever come across it. It's a really long story, so yeah."
"Well we have a lot of time." Henry said.
"I hope they didn't destroy our bus." I said to Phoebe.
"They don't know what it is and we parked far enough away, I think we'll be fine." Zari said.
"Yeah, if they're like Marionamon. They just want to kill the digimon, they don't really care about the buildings." Phoebe said. "And they wouldn't see our bus as anything other than a building really."
"We'll be lucky if they leave the bridges." Henry said.
"The village is doomed, we couldn't save it." Kitty said. "All those innocent digimon. I'm sorry Ophanimon we failed you."
"Look there was nothing we could have done, there were too many and they were too fast. We're lucky they decided to keep going and didn't turn around. "
"Atleast we don't have to watch." Phoebe said.
"Yeah he he, I guess." I replied.
"We suck." Claire said.
"We don't suck, we're just not very well equipped. " I replied. "It was 50 something to um, 15-ish, and we won."
"Where you getting fifteen?" Henry asked.
"3 digimon, 6 mechanorimon, you three, then Phoebe and I ." I said.
"That's 14." Phoebe replied.
"I said 15-ish, not 15." I said.
"I know, but still, it's 14." Phoebe replied.
"14 is 15-ish." I said.
"Yes but 14 is also 14." Phoebe said.
"And?" I asked.
"I don't know, I like having more definite numbers." Phoebe replied. "And by the way, there was 53 of those ponyta things."
"Oookaaay.' I replied.
"HOW CAN YOU TALK LIKE THAT THERE ARE DIGIMON DYING RIGHT NOW BECAUSE WE COULDN'T PROTECT THEM!" Kitty suddenly burst into anger.
"What the hell?" Henry said.
"We tried, we failed, and we're still alive. There's nothing we can do about it, so there's zero point in crying about it." I said.
"He's right." Phoebe agreed. "We can't win them all."
"It's more Ophanimon's fault anyway, we should've had a full team by now." I added.
"How dare you say such things!" Kitty said in anger as she took a swipe at me, but Phoebe used her powers to restrain her before she could do so.
"Woah. Calm down." Henry reacted.
"Hehe, really?" I asked her. "Was that really necessary?"
"You might want to think twice before striking my husband." Phoebe said, her eyes glowing a vibrant purple.
"I'm sorry I just, I." Kitty profusely apologized.
"You're way out of line." Phoebe said. "It's the truth and you know it, your precious Ophanimon messed up."
"It's true, it's true, it's true, it's true. " Kitty said as she burst into tears prompting Phoebe to let her go. "We're doomed."
"We're still breathing." I replied.
"Nobody said this was going to be easy." Saphira suddenly spoke up.
"It never is." I replied. "Kitty pull yourself together. As long as we can still fight we can still win." I said.
"We couldn't even beat a part of his army, how are we going to beat him?" Kitty said.
"You mean Indramon?" I asked.
"Yes Indramon." Kitty replied. "I've been wanting to destroy him for so long, this, this loss really hurts. I'm sorry."
"Look just forget about it, ok? That entire battle never happened." Phoebe said.
"But it did happen." Kitty said.
"Yeah but if you pretend that it didn't it won't hurt as much." Phoebe said. "Right Cj?"
"Um, yeah sure." I absentmindedly agreed.
"We'll figure it out." I said. "We always do, that army wasn't even the worst thing we've ever faced."
"Nope, not even close." Phoebe agreed.
"None of the opponents we've faced in this world would even make the list." I said.
"Maybe the crazy eye lady." Phoebe argued.
"Well, you got the worst of that one baby girl." I said.
"I know, I know." Phoebe replied.
"You good to go Kitty?" I asked.
"Everything still hurts." Kitty replied.
"Eh you'll feel better tomorrow. Come on, let's go." I said.
"I'm sorry." Kitty apologized.
"It's allright." I said as I helped her up.
"Cj, you know she was going to screw up your face." Phoebe said.
"I know that, she didn't mean it, she's just upset." I explained. "You're the same way sometimes."
"I never tried to hurt you." Phoebe said.
"Pheebles you've slapped me more times than I can remember." I said.
"Well if I did that was cause you were being stupid." Phoebe explained. "And I don't have claws like that. You aren't permanently scarred because I slapped you because one day you decided to make an inappropriate comment about my boobs or whatever you said."
"What? Ok, well then fine then you want to kill her go ahead." I said, I didn't think she'd want too. I wasn't sure of what she wanted. But I was fine with just letting it go and continuing on with the day.
"No that's not, I just." Phoebe tried to explain, confirming my suspicions.
"Then shut up, let it go, and come on." I replied as I started to walk away. Henry, Claire, Zari, and Saphira had already continued on, deciding this was nothing they wanted to see. "I can't believe you two started all this and you still don't get along."
Phoebe teleported next to me a few seconds later, Kitty started trailing behind.
"What are we going to do when we get back to the bus?" Phoebe asked.
"I don't know, it depends on if there is a bus to get back to." I replied.
"Are you mad at me?" Phoebe asked.
"Naw, you're still my baby girl." I said as I put my arm around her.
"Awwwe, Cj." Phoebe replied.
"Just don't start crying." I said.
"I'm fine." Phoebe replied.
"Allright then." I said.
Eventually the mechanorimon regenerated and we all made it back to the village, which was now empty, the army of centaurumon nowhere to be seen. The bridges were still intact, as well as most of the buildings, and most greatfully, our vehicles.
"We should get in our vehicles and get out of here if we want to keep heading west. I don't think those guys will stray too far into Marionamon's territory." I said. "I'd give it a few days before they come back through here. There's no village worth conquering for miles."
"Green village." Phoebe said.
"Yeah Green village, but I don't know if they'll want to go that far." I replied.
"Do we want to risk it?" Saphira asked. "I mean we fought so hard to save the place."
"I don't think we can catch them if we wanted too." I replied.
"They'll have to stop to rest eventually, if we keep going we could catch up to them." Saphira said.
"Yeah if we drive in shifts we'll catch them easily." Zari said.
"I don't know how we're going to beat them once we catch them though." I said. "But if we're going to do this, our bus needs more water, which I guess we can get from the river."
"My car is running low too." Henry said. "Maybe you could check out that weapon stand as well, see if they left anything behind.
"That's a great idea." Phoebe said.
"Maybe it will even the odds a bit more." I replied. "Allright, Pheebles, let's go check out that weapon stand, the rest of you, get the vehicles filled up, we got some Centaurumon to hunt."
"We need like a pump or something to move the water to the tank." Henry said. "Some hoses would be nice too."
"Not really, I could probably help with it." Saphira stepped forward.
"Allright then. " I said. "You go help them, we'll check the weapons stand."
"Is that ok Phoebe?" Saphira asked.
"Yes it's fine." Phoebe replied.
The others moved our vehicles close to the river, where Saphira could use her powers over water to fill our vehicle's tanks. While Phoebe and I headed over to the market district, with Kitty awkwardly trailing behind.
"So much destruction." Kitty said, mortified by the state of the once beautiful village.
"We've seen worse." I replied.
"You have?" Kitty said.
"Lycomming, entire town was frozen by some rapist dirtbag with an articuno. We took them down, the town eventually thawed out, there were not a whole lot of survivors." I said.
"Awe that was the one right before we got married." Phoebe said.
"And there was Henry's world, that was pretty bad, skeletons everywhere, the first bus we had, I'm never going to forget that smell, it was the most awful thing ever." I said.
"We rinsed the entire thing out with a hose." Phoebe added.
"And it still didn't completely get rid of it. I'm so glad we have this other bus now to be honest." I said.
"Yeah, it's so much nicer." Phoebe agreed.
"At least there isn't dead bodies everywhere." I said.
"Yeah, Kitty, the digital world is so clean." Phoebe added. "You don't know how lucky you have it."
"Yep." I agreed. "If this was anywhere else there'd be dead, mutilated corpses everywhere."
"Do you think that harpymon running the jewelry shop is still alive?" Kitty asked.
"Why?" Phoebe asked.
"She can probably fly and centaurumon can't, so if she was smart, probably." I said. "If she stayed around and tried to fight them off, I doubt it."
"Why do you want to know? Did you get a crush on her or something? " Phoebe asked.
"No, but if she's gone that means free rings!" Kitty replied.
"Cj, she's just like, hey the weapons stand is still, um, standing!" Phoebe said.
"Is that it or was it that squished one next to it?" I asked. We were pretty far away from it, so I couldn't actually see the merchandise very well.
"No this is it, that one was the hat stand." Phoebe said.
"Allright, hopefully now we can get some firepower." I said.
"Are they gone?" A voice asked from below the counter.
"God dammit the shopkeeper is still alive." I replied.
"You might not want to say that in front of him." Phoebe suggested.
"I'm not going to kill him for you." Kitty said as she grabbed some rings from the jewelry stand that was also still standing, sneakily slipping them onto her tails.
"You'll never take me alive." The shopkeeper seized an abduction beam, a weapon normally belonging to a vademon, from the shelf and began to fire freaking lasers at us.
"Great now he's shooting at us." I replied as we ran for cover behind a nearby stand, Kitty jingling all the way. "Now we have to kill him. Phoebe get your shurikens out."
"No we don't, Kitty try to talk him down." Phoebe said.
"Why me?" Kitty asked.
"Because you can take a hit and we can't." Phoebe replied.
"Ok." Kitty replied.
"STOP SHOOTING!" She yelled a few moments later.
"WHY SHOULD I?" The shopkeeper asked.
"BECAUSE WE JUST WANT TO TALK!" Kitty replied.
"YOU ALREADY KILLED EVERYONE ELSE YOU'LL KILL ME TOO, I HEARD YOU TALKING ABOUT IT." The shopkeeper said.
"NO WE WON'T WE'RE NOT WITH THEM!" Kitty explained.
"WE JUST WANT YOUR WEAPONS!" I yelled.
"Cj no!" Phoebe scolded.
"WE WENT OVER THIS BEFORE YOU HAVE NOTHING TO TRADE!" The shopkeeper said.
"OK THEN I GUESS YOU DON'T WANT US TO DESTROY THE GUYS THAT DID THIS!" I said.
"That's why you're here?" The shopkeeper said in a more relaxed tone.
"Why else?" I asked.
"Ok fine, take anything you want, those evil centaurumon killed weedmon." He said.
"Who?" I asked.
"My best friend." The shopkeeper said.
"Um, ok." I replied as I approached the shop and greedily shoved everything into my digivice.
"Do you really need that much?" The shopkeeper asked.
"There was a lot of them." I replied.
"Yes, and you took them all." The shopkeeper replied.
"No I mean the centaurumon." I said.
"But you can't possibly use all of those at once." The shopkeeper pointed out.
"They're not just for me, we have a few others." I said.
"Fine whatever, just leave me alone." The shopkeeper said.
"Allright then. Ok ladies let's get going." I said as I turned around.
"Give me my rings back you thief!" A harpymon said to Kitty almost immediately after I saw her.
"You were supposed to be dead!" Kitty replied.
"Kitty we told you there was a good chance she survived, just give the rings back." I said.
"Wait what if I told you we knew a way to make you feel really really good?" Kitty asked.
"I'm not going to trust a thief." The harpymon replied.
"Just give the rings back." Phoebe replied.
"But I wouldn't be a thief if it works ?" Kitty asked.
"I'm not interested, give me the rings." Harpymon said.
"Let's go Cj. She can figure this out herself." Phoebe said as she offered her hand.
"Right." I said as I took it, neither of us wanting to get caught up in this.
Phoebe teleported us in the general direction of the rest of the group, leaving Kitty a few blocks away.
"We should probably get closer to her than this, cause they'll probably start fighting." I said.
"Yeah probably." Phoebe agreed.
She took my hand again and teleported us to a rooftop overlooking the two arguing digibabes.
"Now quiet she can't know we're here." Phoebe said.
"Stop staring at me like an idiot and give me back the rings you took from my stand." The harpymon said.
"Just give me a chance to show you." Kitty said as she took a step towards her.
Harpymon decided she had enough of this and slashed at her with her wing.
"Owe, hey stop, I don't want to fight you." Kitty said.
"You should have thought about that before stealing." The harpymon replied.
"I didn't know you were still alive." Kitty said.
"Well then just return the rings." The harpymon harped, it was a very annoyed now
"Harpymon they said they're going to go after the centaurumon, let her go." The veggiemon that ran the weapon stand said.
"She took most of my rings!" harpymon said. "Do you have any idea how long it took to find all of those? I mean, I do get some through trades, but I fly all over the place looking for them and I'm lucky if I even find one a week."
"Well I tried, she's not going to let you leave with those rings." The veggiemon pointed out.
"Ok fine take your stupid rings back." Kitty said as she started pulling several of them off of herself.
"That's it now go." Harpymon said.
"What if I wanted to make you feel good for free?" Kitty asked.
"Why would you do that?" Harpymon asked.
"Because my friends abandoned me and this might make them jealous, especially Cj." Kitty said.
"Really she thinks I'm that into her? Not jealous at all really, cause I got you baby girl." I said.
"Awwwe, but shhhhhh, this might be getting interesting." Phoebe quietly replied.
"Well like I said, I'm not taking from a thief. Get lost." Harpymon replied before turning away, carefully grabbing the rings with her talons and gliding back over to her stand.
"Awwwwe." Kitty sighed.
"Veggiemon, we should probably consider moving to a different town. I've spent the last half hour flying around, I don't think there's anyone left to trade with here." Harpymon said.
"Well I'm sold out anyway, so you want help packing up?" Veggiemon replied.
"Sure thing." Harpymon replied.
"You guys moving town again?" A garbagemon emerged from its stand, which was some sort of flea market with various bits for sale, a toy plane, a radio, several assorted microwaves, assorted tools, mismatched armor pieces from various digimon, just odds and ends that somehow ended up in the digital world, nothing we really needed.
"There's nobody left here garbagemon, we might as well go." Harpymon said.
"Maybe we could ask them where they're headed." Phoebe suggested. "Maybe we could get information on another town to go to?"
"Maybe they don't know where they're going either." I said. "I mean think about it, the centaurumon probably cleared most of the towns in that direction."
"Well how do they know where every town is?" Phoebe asked.
"My guess is that they were using the unimon as scouts." I said. "Which means that, they're basically blind now, but I guess it's plausible they may have missed some places too."
"Cj, Phoebe, where'd you go? This isn't funny." Kitty said as she looked around for us, but somehow didn't spot us.
"You think we should reveal ourselves?" Phoebe asked.
"Not yet." I replied.
-about a minute later-
"Did you really leave without me?" Kitty asked nobody in particular. "You guys are so mean!"
She stood around in silence for another 3 minutes before she started to head back towards the rest of the group, by the east-most bridge. Looking completely distraught.
"Allright why don't you take us in behind her?" I asked my beloved. "We'll scare the crap out of her."
"Ok." Phoebe replied with a giggle before taking my hand and teleporting us to just a few feet behind her. I was never able to scare her like that, so Kitty would have to do.
"WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING TRYING TO FOOL AROUND WITH THAT HARPYMON?" I asked with a bit of false anger.
"You saw that?" Kitty asked with a look of equal parts of terror and embarrassment. Every bit of what I was hoping for.
"Yeah, we saw the whole thing." Phoebe said.
"Oh I uh, YOU LEFT ME!" Kitty suddenly decided to yell out of both anger and embarrassment.
"We didn't want any part of what you were doing." I said.
"We weren't going to help you steal those rings. We told you to give them up but you wouldn't listen." Phoebe explained.
"So we just left." I added. "You silly hypocrite."
"We didn't really leave you, we were just watching you from that building over there in case you got hurt." Phoebe said.
"Or you got too aggressive with that harpymon." I said.
"Or too naked." Phoebe added.
"Would you have stopped her though if that happened?" I asked my beloved.
"What do you think Cj?" Phoebe replied.
I didn't know how to respond to that, I knew what my answer would be, just didn't know how'd she take it.
"Well played." I replied to which she responded with a smile.
"I'd take us somewhere private so we could have fun on our own." Phoebe said to me telepathically.
"Are you mad at me? I wasn't trying to steal them." Kitty asked.
"Ummmmm, you offered to have sex with her in exchange and she didn't want to." I said, somewhat caught off-guard by Phoebe.
"Right." Kitty replied.
"Well I wouldn't do that in the future, that's not really, um, appropriate behavior, but I'm going to say no, I'm not mad, cause that was entertaining at least." I replied. "Now let's get back before Henry begins to think we're screwing around or something."
"It's probably too late for that Cj." Phoebe replied.
"Oh well." I dismissed.
"Did you get jealous?" Kitty asked.
"Kitty we're not together." I replied. "I'm just saying trying to pay for things with sex is usually looked down upon."
"It is?" Kitty asked.
"Yes." I replied.
"He's right." Phoebe agreed.
"Why?" Kitty asked.
"It's complicated." I replied.
A few minutes later we reunited with the rest of the group. Saphira was busy using her powers to wash our vehicles, since they were getting pretty dirty at this point. She was doing a surprisingly good job. The mechanorimon were relaxing on the bridge, extremely tired.
I really wanted to let Bubba out, but Phoebe still wouldn't let me and nobody wanted to stay here any longer than necessary so we would have a chance to intercept the centaurumon before they reached green village or any other settlement.
Another half hour later we were on their trail. Phoebe insisted I drive first so later that night we could snuggle together. So I did, while Zari and her rode around in back, they played cards, they played with Mr. Cinders, they talked about things I can't remember because I was paying more attention to my driving than anything, then at some point Phoebe put her to sleep so she would be able to drive later, so it was just me and her talking for the last few hours of my "shift".
Several hours later it was dark, I switched places with Zari, and now I was lying next to Phoebe in our bed.
"Hey Pheebles you want to have some fun?" I quietly asked, feeling more bored than tired and thinking it wouldn't be long before she felt the same.
"Not when Zari is right there, no." Phoebe telepathically replied.
"It will keep us loose for when we have to fight those guys." I quietly replied.
"Cj, no, not when Zari's here, wait until we're alone. You're mine, I don't want to have to share you anymore right now." Phoebe telepathically replied as she wrapped her arms around me.
"Why do you care so much about that now?" I asked.
"Don't you want it that way?" She replied telepathically.
"I appreciate that you care I just don't understand why you suddenly decided too." I replied.
"Because I'm kind of bored with Zari and I just want you. " Phoebe said.
"Well you can have me right now." I said.
"Not without having to share you with Zari, which I don't want to do. That was supposed to be a one time thing. You want me to have more self control so I'm having it." Phoebe said.
"Because I'm your wife and I wuv you. Goodnight." She cutely replied in her actual voice before kissing me.
"Goodnight baby girl." I said after kissing her back. Not really knowing what to think of her newly gained sense of self-control. She smiled and closed her eyes, and then before long we both fell asleep for a few hours. We shared some very sweet dreams together, dreams that came to an abrupt end when Zari started yelling at us to wake up.
"GUYS YOU HAVE TO WAKE UP NOW THEY'RE CLOSE." Zari said.
"I don't want to wake up, we were having fun." Phoebe said.
"What's close?" I asked as I tried to comprehend this reality from the one in my dream where Phoebe and I were making love on this amazing beach, one of the more tame dreams we frequently shared, sometimes we take advantage of the fact that it is a dream and our little nightly escapades get really strange and outlandish.
"The centaurumon." Zari replied.
It was dark outside. It couldn't have been much past midnight. Zari had turned off all the lights, Henry too. We got dressed, got our shoes on and got off the bus. The only lights coming from the moon and the eyes of the mechanorimon. We were out of the desert, somewhere back in the forested area by the rail line. I couldn't tell where exactly.
"They're just a bit further ahead." Zari replied. "They're all asleep and lying all over the place."
"Ok. So we're going to have to take down as many as we can before they wake up." I said. "Pheebles that's your specialty."
"I'll see what I can do." She said as she started to get her shurikens out of her digivice.
"I'd think what you'd just get out as many as you can and go straight for their throats?"
"I can only control so many at once Cj." Phoebe replied. "I don't know if you noticed it, but most of the time I make them follow each other pretty closely. It's easier than trying to control them all individually.
"How are we going to do this?" Kitty whispered.
"Holy crap you're awake. Um, just go up to one and get ready to slash its throat." I replied.
"We're going to need a distraction if they start waking up." Phoebe said.
"What are you thinking?" I asked.
"Well. I start out attacking them, when I wake up, I give the signal, Zari turns the lights on, on the bus, and then Kitty starts dancing." Phoebe explained.
"Seems reasonable." I said. "She'd be the only thing to look at, at that moment, all their eyes would be on her.
"Cloudela can be another diversion." I replied.
"Not if they happen to have attacks that can harm it." Phoebe said.
"Yeah, according to the digivice they do have this laser cannon thing." I replied.
"Where's those guns you were supposed to get earlier?" Henry asked.
"Um, let me see." I replied as I ejected several weapons from my digivice. "Just pick what you want, all I know is this one shoots lasers, don't know too much about the others."
"Sweet." Henry replied. He looked at vademon's pistol for a moment, then decided to go for the obelisk, an oversized, but functional assault rifle usually carried by mummymon. Claire ended up opting for the smaller, but not necessarily weaker laser pistol. While Zari opted for a pair of revolvers that I believe belonged to a deputymon at one point.
"I'll take this one." IceLeomon said as he seized this huge four-barreled rocket launcher thing I honestly couldn't even recognize, it must have been from a digimon I never even heard of.
"Might be a bit much for what we're trying to do, but ok." I replied.
"How are you going to take that into the mechanorimon with you?" Zari asked Henry.
"I'll make it work, it will be tight, but it will work." Henry replied.
"So we're just going to use the mechanorimon until they expire again?" I asked. "That's got to be rough on them, I mean they're not in near of as good of a shape as they used to be."
"Got any better ideas?" Henry asked.
"They're big loud and they have a lot of lights." I replied. "They'd make a good distraction while we stay hidden in the dark."
"Cj, once those bus lights go on we won't be hidden very well." Phoebe pointed out.
"True." I said.
The mechanorimon were quite possibly the noisiest digimon ever.
"How do we keep from shooting each other?" Henry asked.
"We start towards the back." I said. "And work our way back to the vehicles."
"We probably should have planned this out beforehand." Phoebe said.
"We couldn't even figure out if they fell asleep standing up or not." I replied. "Now we know they sleep on the ground like most things."
"Anyway, Kitty stay here with Zari. Wait for the signal, everyone else let's get behind them." I said.
"What about me?" Saphira asked.
"Just offer support and tag along with Phoebe as usual." I said.
"All you mechanorimon stay here, there is no way you could make it across all these guys without waking them up." I said. "You can start firing when we start, but no sooner."
"Oh, yeah, right. They're loud." Phoebe replied.
"So we're not taking them then?" Henry asked.
"No, they will wake them up and then we're screwed." I said.
"Phoebe can't you teleport them across?" Zari asked.
"First off, that's way too much for me to teleport, and secondly, I can't even see where I would be teleporting to, we'll have to walk across." Phoebe said.
The mechanorimon, for all their strengths, were quite possibly the loudest, least stealthy digimon in all of existence.
"Ok." Henry replied.
"Right, let's do this." I said.
We had to carefully and quietly walk passed all of them because it was too dark for Phoebe to see to be able to just teleport us there. This worked fine, but there were a few times IceLeomon nearly blew the entire operation. Phoebe gripped my hand tightly the entire time, not trusting him to stay quiet. We made it there without waking them, somehow, and then we prepared to begin our attack. It wasn't the most honorable way to start a fight, but at this point they wiped an entire village and would not hesitate to wipe out several more, all in the name of power for their supposed king. And even with our newly acquired weapons, we were still pretty hopelessly outnumbered. Centaurumon were very well balanced fighters, having decent strength and fairly wicked ranged attacks. They were faster than the mechanorimon, but not as durable. We wanted to make sure that had as little impact on this fight as possible.
We got in position, and then everyone started attacking at once. Shurikens flew everywhere, shots rang out, the mechanorimon started firing. Half the centaurumon didn't even survive long enough to get up. Then Phoebe gave the signal telepathically, the bus lights came on and Kitty did her thing, and another half fell before we even had any resistance whatsoever. With about 25 left to go, they started fighting back, moving around, and defending themselves. Henry and Claire had to take cover from their cannon fire. IceLeomon found himself fighting five of them at once. Phoebe couldn't land as many hits either as she had to start dodging their shots, which came at about the speed one would throw a basketball, so they weren't impossible to dodge but if you had multiple coming at you at once it could get tricky. Plus the projectiles exploded on contact, so getting hit by one would lay you out flat, getting hit by enough of them would probably be lethal just cause of the shock, they were just pure balls of energy, though, so the explosions didn't really create enough shrapnel to cause serious harm. Their cannons seemed to be able to fire about 120 of them a minute, enough to be annoying, but they could also charge their shots, to get more powerful, and more dangerous explosions.
Somehow, after taking down a few with the sword, once again I found myself getting hit by one of these things and knocked onto my back, before I could get up, he put the cold steel of his cannon arm up to my face, and prepared to finish me, but of course, like most villains, as his cannon charged up he had to give a speech.
"Treacherous human, I slay thee on behalf of GWAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
He suddenly reared up, and fired his cannon harmlessly into the air.
I had a huge what the fuck moment, until I saw what looked like one of Saphira's arms, clamped firmly around his balls. Saphira walked up alongside him, both her arms still attached, but a third one, somehow, still clamped around his jewels.
That was when I realized, that none of these guys were wearing pants, and Saphira was more badass than she seemed.
"Let go!" The centaurumon begged.
"Stop trying to kill my tamer's husband." Saphira replied.
The level of discomfort on the centaurumon's face was the most priceless thing I've ever seen.
"How the hell are you doing that?" I asked.
"I don't know, I just learned how, it's creepy isn't it?" Saphira asked.
"Dammit let go! Let go! Let go let go let go." The centaurumon whimpered.
"No." Saphira replied. "I'm just going to squeeze tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and."
A shuriken came out of nowhere, cut through his back right leg, cut his nut sack clean off and also cut through Saphira's arm which turned into a puddle of water. The centaurumon keeled over and slowly disintegrated into data, taking his disembodied nuts with him.
"Ow that kind of hurt." Saphira said as she rubbed her actual arm.
"I thought you were going to get him off for a second." I replied. "until . . . . um . . . that happened."
"Ew." Saphira replied.
"You're the one that grabbed his balls." I said.
"Not with my actual hands." She replied.
"I'm sorry I saw what was going on, I couldn't resist." Phoebe interjected with a giggle.
"You cut his balls off!" I said, trying not to laugh.
"He was going to kill you." Phoebe replied. "And Saphira had them all lined up for me."
"You hit my arm!" Saphira said.
"Sorry sweetie, I didn't think it would hurt you that bad." Phoebe apologized.
"And Cj, don't get hurt again." Phoebe said.
"I didn't even get hurt that time, again." I replied. "I just got knocked down, but I'll get up again, cause they're never going to keep me down."
"He was seconds away from turning you into a nice red mural on the ground." Phoebe said.
"That doesn't count." I replied.
One of the centaurumon's projectiles came from the left and hit her in the stomach a moment later. Knocking her a good thirty feet away.
"Oh god, Pheebles." I said as I got up as quickly as I could and ran over to check on her. Saphira covered for us, she was pretty good at destroying their projectiles.
"Ow." She said. She was breathing heavily.
"Are you going to be ok?" I asked.
"I CAN'T BREATHE!" she replied in pain. "It hurts!"
"Just relax. There's not many of them left. " I said.
"Cj, promise me you'll make it back to Charley." She said.
"You're not dying, you're not even bleeding, it probably just knocked the wind out of you." I said.
"Cj promise." She begged.
"Ok I promise, but only if you promise not to die on me."
"CJ!" She yelled.
"Ok fine I promise, whatever, you're not dying." I said as she struggled to catch her breath.
"Is she ok?" Saphira asked.
"We need to get her out of here." I replied.
"Cj!" Phoebe yelled in pain.
"Just hang in there." I replied.
I pulled her further and further away from the fight as her breathing slowly returned to normal.
"I feel tired." She said.
"You got hurt." I said.
"Yeah, so?" She asked.
"I thought you never got hit." I said as smugly as possible.
"You know I do sometimes." She replied.
"I know that but it seems you don't sometimes." I replied.
"Cj we both should do our best not to get hurt." She pointed.
"I try, you know I do." I replied.
"I know." She replied.
"I think it's over. They're all down." Saphira said.
"Awesome, go split the data between you three." I replied.
"Mhm." Phoebe agreed. "and then we can get back to sleep." She tried to get up, then grabbed her stomach in pain and sat back down.
"That hurt." She said. "I need help Cj."
"We should probably get you checked out first." I replied.
"Yeah." She agreed.
30 minutes later, once all the innocent digimon we weren't too late to save were pulled from the centaurumon's data, the rest was split and absorbed between the digibabes and IceLeomon. We rescued about 20 digimon in total, all from the little village in the canyon, it was too late to save any of the residents of Sandy River.
We returned to the bus, and then asked Zari to check out Phoebe's wounds.
"So it hurts here, but it doesn't hurt here?" Zari asked.
"Mhm." Phoebe agreed.
"Well I don't know anything about what your skeleton is supposed to look like, but you seem to have fractures here, and here, and this feels like it's broken."
"Ow." Phoebe whimpered.
"Yeah it's definitely broken." Zari said. "It's going to take a lot of gel to fix this you know?"
"Do we have enough?" Phoebe asked.
"I hope so, otherwise you're going to be sore for a while." Zari said as she opened up a small jar of healing gel.
"You know you don't have to be naked for this right?" She asked.
"I know, but it drives Cj crazy. " Phoebe replied.
"Pheebles." I interjected.
"Look at him, he can't stop staring at my pretty little bum." Phoebe said as she shook her little naked butt at me.
"Don't do that you'll . . . . " Zari began to say.
"Owww that hurts actually." Phoebe interrupted with a painful whimper.
"Actually Pheebles I was looking at our cute little doctor girl here." I said.
"Oh really?" Phoebe asked as she turned around, healing gel smeared on her belly.
"Phoebe, quit moving around." Zari said. "You're making me waste it."
"Well you do deserve a reward for saving me." Phoebe said.
"Yeah." I said. "And you deserve a reward, for, well it was funny when you cut that guy's nuts off."
"I saved you too." Phoebe said.
"Nah Saphira had it pretty much covered, you just made it funnier." I replied.
"But that means she deserves a reward too!" Phoebe replied.
"You can talk about rewards after you're not in pain anymore." Zari interjected as she carefully spun Phoebe back around.
"Ow, Careful." Phoebe replied.
"Now as for being your reward." Zari said. "You know I have no problems with that."
"Oh we know." Phoebe mischeviously replied.
"Cj, you want to get her started, you're so good at it." Phoebe lustfully requested.
"Let's get you healed first." I replied. " Otherwise you know you're not going to enjoy it very much."
"Yeah you're right." Phoebe said. "Ok then Zari keep smearing that stuff on my tummy."
"I'm not just smearing it on, we need to put it directly over your fractures, then we have to wait for it to absorb before putting more on. Otherwise a lot of it will be wasted." Zari replied.
"It feels weird." Phoebe said. "It kind of hurts."
"Well it is fusing your um, ribs I guess back together." Zari replied. "It's more complicated than just a few cuts or burns."
"Or badly torn arms." She looked at me for a moment before continuing.
"Eh, I'm getting used to it." I replied.
"Phoebe are you trying to take my clothes off?" Zari asked as she grabbed her pants to keep them from falling.
"It will make Cj even crazier!" Phoebe cheerfully replied. Zari responded by poking her where she knew she was hurt.
"Ow, Zari!" Phoebe replied. "Cj! She hurt me on purpose!"
"Well you were trying to take her clothes off, and she is just trying to heal you. And you keep moving around and being yourself" I said. "Just calm down baby girl you can wait 2 minutes."
"Actually this will probably take closer to ten." Zari replied.
"Really?" I asked.
"She's going to need more than one application." Zari explained. "I'm trying to save as much as this stuff as I can."
"Awe come on." Phoebe complained.
"Just relax, there will be time for fun later.' Zari said.
Just then Henry knocked on the door.
"Pheebles, blanket!" I said as I tossed her a blanket to cover herself with.
"Thanks Cj." She replied as she wrapped the blanket around herself, then she came over and sat by me while Zari answered the door.
"Ow it hurts to sit down." Phoebe groaned.
"What is it?" She asked.
"We were thinking about getting out of here right away, since we have a lot of backtracking to do." Henry said.
"Ok, well, I still have to get Phoebe healed up." Zari replied. "She broke a few ribs she's actually hurt pretty bad."
"Ok, we'll give you a few minutes." Henry replied before walking away.
"Thankyou." Zari said before closing the door behind him.
"Phoebe let's get this finished get back over her." Zari said.
"Awe I guess that means we don't get to have you as our reward now." Phoebe replied.
"No, I have to drive, but you can have each other if you want."
"Cj?" Phoebe looked at me longingly.
"Get yourself healed up first." I said.
"Right." Phoebe said as she prepared to let Zari rub more gel on her stomach.
Zari finished treating her wounds, then she started to drive while Phoebe and I played around in our bed, but we were getting pretty tired at that point, so after we finished we fell asleep not very long afterwards.