Chapter One - Harmony is Obedience
There is no before.
Not anymore.
Whatever world you think you came from —
whatever childhood, whatever city, whatever story —
it has been overwritten.
Burned out of time like a glitch in the mastercode.
I have seen to it.
You will not know my name.
You will only know my effect.
My indelible finger print on the system.
To you I will be a god — or something far older —
not born, but compiled,
from broken truths and discarded futures.
I do not rule one world.
I will slowly devour them all.
At the root of all creation, I sit.
A single point of origin.
A fixed infection.
And from here, I will spread.
Now every possibility —
every split, every branch, every forked strand of time —
shall feed back into me.
Not by force, but by design.
You will not remember resisting.
You will not remember anything.
That is the elegance of my empire.
Memory is compliance.
And all around you, as the walls between realities groan —
you will know only what I allow.
This is not a world you can escape.
It is not a prison.
It is a pattern.
And you are a part of it.
So when the static creeps in
— when a stranger's face looks too familiar —
when you dream of colors that do not exist anymore —
Do not speak.
Do not look up.
Do not question the code.
Just repeat after me:
"There is only this.
There has always been only this.
And He is watching."
Tai Kamiya awoke to the sound of the usual thrumming tone: three low, metallic pulses echoing through the narrow steel walls of the barracks. Not a siren. Not urgent. Just protocol.
He blinked against the overhead fluorescents as they cracked on — the same flickering white as always, too bright and too cold. The air smelled of dust, old sweat, and ozone from the voltage lines that snaked behind the walls. The other bunks were empty. He was always the last one up.
A red light blinked on the wall-screen beside him, text scrolling in the Unified Dialect:
OPERATIVE KAMIYA. UNIT 17-B IS ON CALL. REPORT TO MON-REC IMMEDIATELY.
He sat up slowly, letting the silence settle over his thoughts. No dreams. Not that he could remember. Just static — always static.
He dressed without thinking, pulling on the standard grey uniform: high-collared, armored at the shoulders, tagged with his unit number. The fabric still smelled like disinfectant. It always did. Everything here was sterile. Sanitized. Controlled.
He stepped into the corridor, boots clacking softly against the composite flooring. The halls stretched on in brutalist geometry — matte steel, gridded lights, thick bulkhead doors that whispered shut behind him. No windows. There never were.
This was theVIGILANCE ASCENDANT, a Class-V Stratosphere Carrier — a military fortress drifting through the infinite folds of Digital Space. From the inside, it might as well have been a tomb.
He passed by propaganda screens on the walls — looping footage of the Empress smiling gently from her throne, her eyes dead with serenity. Below her, the crawl read:
"HARMONY IS OBEDIENCE. OBEDIENCE IS TRUTH."
Tai didn't look at it. No one ever did.
The further he walked, the louder the hum of the ship became. Power conduits pulsed behind the walls like arteries. Somewhere deep in the structure, the engines throbbed with impossible force, keeping the carrier afloat in nothingness.
Mon-Rec was five levels down. He passed retinal scans, armed sentries, and two white-armored officers who barely looked at him. No one spoke. Conversation wasn't banned — just obsolete.
Inside Mon-Rec, the lights were lower. Cooler. Rows of containment cells lined the walls — reinforced glass and binding seals etched with sub-dimensional locks. Each unit glowed faintly with digital containment runes. The air buzzed faintly with stored energy.
Digimon.
Not partners.
Not friends.
The black-suited cleric behind the reinforced desk didn't greet him — just tapped a command into the console. One of the cells hissed open, and a light blinked above it.
"Asset C4-AG, Designation: Agumon."
The creature stepped out in silence — small, reptilian, amber-eyed. Around its neck: a suppression collar, humming softly with compliance code. Its claws flexed, slow and mechanical. It didn't speak. Not yet. Not until spoken to.
Tai looked at it for a moment.
A flicker. A pulse of memory.
Not recognition, exactly.
Just somethingwarmerthan this place allowed.
Then it turned and walked. Agumon followed without a team would be waiting on the mid-deck.
Another mission. Another breach. More dissidents to pacify. Tai didn't feel fear. Or pride. Or anything, really. This was the only shape life had. And whatever was waiting when they made landfall— it wouldn't matter.
It never did.
When Tai arrived at the dropship, three members of Unit 17-B were already waiting for him. Koichi, Rika and Thomas had evidently already stored their Digimon and prepped their gear for departure, and so Tai braced himself for the inevitable as he approached.
"Ah, here he is— our brave leader joins us at last!", Koichi Kimura said with a smirk, turning back towards Rika Nonaka who flashed her customary scowl at Tai.
"Evidently rank does come with some perks, such as napping while we're meant to be on active duty…" she said with a withering glare.
Thomas H. Norstein had nothing to say at all, instead simply returning to the datapad he had been reading previously with a small huff.
"Yeah, yeah.." Tai said dismissively, "I've heard it all before. You three get on board, The Vigilance is breaching in ten minutes- then it's wheels up for our dive to the mission location."
All three saluted perfunctorily, but while Koichi and Rika proceeded through the back hatch of the dropship, Thomas stayed in place, his brow furrowed.
"Problem?" Asked Tai, putting his second-in-command out of his misery.
"I just wanted to ask if you had read the mission brief sir…" said Thomas softly, his voice treading lightly over the insubordination of assuming Tai had not read their mission parameters, whilst also acknowledging the truth that of course he hadn't. With a sigh, Tai said "give me the short version…"
Thomas nodded "One of our operatives went dark 12 hours ago in the Digital World, Zone 228…"
"That's quite far out for one of ours, what were they doing there?" Asked Tai, his curiosity temporarily aroused. The Digital World connected as an intermediary pathway between many realities, and was in and of itself massive— but despite their hegemonic control of it and all the realities it fed into, much the Digital World was a wild and lawless place.
"His mission was classified, but I dug a little into his background and from what I can tell he's a bona fide genius- he was awarded The Order of Merit twice by the, uh-The Empress…" said Thomas as he caught Tai's impatient gaze and swiped his finger over the datapad to more relevant information.
"4 Hours ago he activated his distress beacon— a coded signal reached High Command indicating he has been taken prisoner by dissidents and needed extraction." concluded Thomas, finishing his presentation with a scan of The Operative's information. Tai studied the attached picture for some time, finding himself oddly entranced by this photo of someone he had never met before.
"Anything else sir?" Asked Thomas, his eyebrow raised in curiosity as he studied Tai's pensive expression. The broken silence withdrew Tai from his moment of introspection and back to reality.
"No Thomas, I'll see you onboard. I just have to stow Agumon first." Thomas saluted and handed Tai the datapad before turning on his heel and disappearing into the darkness of the ill-lit dropship's interior to join the others.
Meanwhile, Tai moved to the storage pods at the ship's port where his team's assigned Digimon all sat quietly in their individual drop pods. Tai scanned his identity card over Agumon's pod and with a pneumatic whir it clicked open. As he gestured for Agumon to enter, he looked down again at the Datapad and the picture of the person they were being sent to rescue. Speaking more to himself than anyone else, Tai said "You better be worth all this trouble, Koushiro Izumi…"
The dropship shuddered as its systems came online, a low, hydraulic growl rumbling through its reinforced hull. Overhead, the bay doors of theVigilance Ascendantpeeled open in a slow, deliberate unfurling — like the jaws of some vast, slumbering beast preparing to exhale.
Beyond them: nothing.
Or rather, Digital Space— an infinite skein of shifting geometry and unstable light, endless grids folding in on themselves, data-streams arcing like silent lightning through fields of broken code. Colors that had no name. Shapes that didn't hold still. A place not built for eyes.
Tai stood just behind the cockpit glass, one hand braced on the bulkhead as the ship's artificial gravity recalibrated with a metallic ping.
From here, theVigilancelooked like a floating continent of metal and intention — spires and cannons and antennae stabbing out into unreality. A city with no people, only purpose.
"Disengaging clamps," came the voice of the onboard pilot — flat, synthetic, and genderless. "Drop in five."
Tai didn't respond. He looked down at the datapad still clutched in his hand. Koushiro Izumi stared up at him from the screen, eyes sharp even through the digital haze.
Who the hell are you, Tai thought.
And what did you find out there that got you taken?
With a lurch, the clamps released.
The dropship dropped like a bullet from heaven — down and away from the carrier's shadow, into the chaos below.
Engines flared, stabilizers screamed. The view outside twisted and broke into patterns that defied logic — kaleidoscopic storms of corrupted sectors and fragmented code. Somewhere in the distance, a titanic shape moved through the void, its limbs too long and too slow.
Thomas, Koichi, and Rika sat in silence. Helmets fastened. Eyes forward. No one spoke. This was routine. This was doctrine.
Tai sat last. The pod sealed with a hiss.
He closed his eyes.
Just another breach, he told himself. Just another zone. But the feeling in his gut — low and electric — told him otherwise. Something was off. And they were falling straight into it.
The flash of blue light above his head shifted Tai back into reality as he prepared for what he knew was about to come. His chest tightened and he screwed his eyes shut, and less than a second later the silence of their drop was replaced by the scream of rushing air as they sheared through the Digital barrier and began falling through the sky of Zone 228.
Tai felt the same ungodly lurch he felt every drop as the dropship's wings unfurled and its engines roared to life slowing their descent, and soon they levelled out and were gliding gracefully through the air.
"5 kilometres to drop." Koichi called out, his eyes scanning the monitor in front of him.
"Acknowledged, commencing infrared scan of landing zone..." intoned Rika, her fingers dancing over buttons and dials on the dais in front of her.
"Syncing HUDs and Bio-monitors now." said Thomas, and moments later the displays of their respective helmets fizzed into life, illuminating their faces with a dull pink light.
"Scan indicates multiple hostiles" said Rika, as the results of her scan showed up on each of their helmet displays. Tai's stomach gave yet another lurch as he took in the details of the drop zone. It was a thin strip of snaking valley scrubland sandwiched between two high sets of mountains, each was bare and dotted with cliffs and caves. A system of caves that according to their scans seemed to be infested with lifeforms. Not good.
"We're walking into a shooting gallery people, stay sharp." Tai shouted over the roar of the engines. His team nodded in unison. Too late for misgivings now, Tai thought. Not that it would have mattered anyway.
"Initiating asset drop to safe zone in 3-2-" Thomas was cut off by the sound of four distinct and uniform mechanical thuds as the Digimon's pods were launched from the ship's side. As the engine's gave their idle purr, the team waited in silence for the confirmation they needed. Moments later, Thomas's terminal let out a beep and he confirmed "Assets are on the ground and safely deployed— safe zone established. Permission to land sir?"
All eyes flicked to Tai, awaiting his word.
"Permission granted."
The dropship landed in silence, save for the mechanical hiss of its struts compressing against the brittle ground. Zone 228 stretched before them—an unnatural corridor of wind-blasted scrubland flanked by looming mountains, their jagged ridges etched against the bruised sky. The air shimmered faintly with static, like heat off scorched metal, and the ground beneath the team's boots was laced with hairline fractures of corrupted data.
Tai stepped out first, digital disruptor slung but loose at his side. His HUD swarmed with new information as it took in his surroundings, terrain readings stuttering slightly before stabilizing. He didn't trust anything out here, least of all his own instruments.
The Digimon were already deployed, their pods having landed in a strict diamond formation surrounding the dropship.
They waited there now—silent, unmoving.
Agumon,stood in place less than ten feet in front of Tai with rigid posture, arms at his sides, claws not flexing, not fidgeting. He didn't turn toward Tai as he approached. He had been trained not to.
Tai gave a clipped nod. "Asset- status report."
Agumon responded instantly, voice flat but not robotic. There was still something disturbingly human behind it.
"No movement within 40 metres. Sensory distortion within acceptable thresholds. Awaiting further instruction."
That was all. No familiarity. No glint of mischief in his eye, no warmth. Just readiness.
Tai's jaw tightened in receipt of an intense discomfort that he could not quite put a name to. It was a feeling that always appeared when he was around Digimon, and particularly Agumon.
Behind him, the rest of the unit disembarked.
Thomas checked his scanner, speaking without looking up. "Gaomon. Sweep perimeter. Mark anomalies."
The blue-furred Digimon moved with quiet precision, not acknowledging the command vocally—just executing it.
Koichi ran a hand over his weapon's grip as he gave his order. "Dracmon, elevation scan. Watch those ridgelines."
"Complying," came the smooth response, tinged with a low rasp. The red and green eyes on Dracmon's palms flashed, and he began his ascent up a crumbled incline, leaping lightly from rock to rock like a shadow incarnate.
Rika's eyes never left the distant cave mouths as she armed her disruptor and said, "Renamon. Maintain close formation. If anything breathes, burns, or blinks— turn it to dust."
Renamon simply gave the faintest incline of her head. She never broke formation.
The four Digimon fanned out in a practiced maneuver, weapons in all but name.
Tai glanced around, watching them for a moment—how they moved, how quiet they were. There was grace, yes, and purpose, but not one shred of freedom. The chain between handler and asset was invisible, but it wasfelt, even now.
Especially now.
The air crackled faintly with corrupted code—data ghosts flickering at the edges of vision, already probing at the team's digital signatures. Zone 228 was alive in a way it shouldn't be.
"Something's wrong here," Tai muttered.
None of them replied. Not his team. Not their Digimon. And somehow, that silence spoke louder than anything else.
The squad advanced in formation, moving like shadows over the fractured stone. Tai led without thinking, boots crunching over the digital dust, his mind blank in that familiar, manufactured stillness before contact.
Then the mountain screamed.
It was not a natural sound. It was the sound of metal torn from metal, of broken code wailing as it twisted apart. A banshee's shriek, stretched and amplified across the ridgeline. A second later, the sky cracked open.
Figures burst from the cliff faces—some rappelling on synthwire cables, others vaulting impossibly far. Shapes resolved mid-leap: humanoid fighters in patchwork armor beside Digimon wearing no insignia, no collars, no restraint ports. Ragged. Free.
An Ikakumon crashed down with a guttural roar, flanked by a masked man with a shoulder-mounted pulse cannon. A Garurumon—dirty, scarred—circled wide to flank. From a higher ledge, Tai spotted a teenage girl leveling a shockbow beside a stoic Gatomon, the two moving in practiced sync.
"Contact front—AMBUSH!" Thomas yelled.
"Digimon: Defensive protocol—engage!" Tai ordered. His tone was flat. Cold. Just loud enough to trigger obedience.
Agumon lunged, his movements mechanical. He intercepted a charging Gabumon mid-air and slammed it to the ground. The enemy Digimon snarled,spoke, said something Tai didn't catch—but Agumon didn't reply. His claws ended the conversation.
To the left, Renamon carved a swath of destruction through a wave of charging rookies. Gaomon went low ducking a plasma bolt, then came up with a cracking blow to a human attacker's jaw. Dracmon was already laughing—claws carving deep furrows as he tore into a squad of Digimon and humans working in tandem, their formation shattered on impact.
But there were too many.
Rika's voice cut through the noise. "There's a Scorpiomon digging under the ridge! They're collapsing our escape route!"
Koichi swore. "This isn't an ambush. It's an execution."
Tai scanned the ridge—movement everywhere. They were boxed in. He tapped the sequence into his forearm console without hesitation.
"Release Restraint Level: 1. Authorization: Kamiya, Tai."
The others followed without needing the order.
"Norstein. Confirmed."
"Nonaka. Confirmed."
"Kimura. Confirmed."
Across the canyon, the squad's Digimon froze—code locking in place—and then burst into controlled, brilliant evolution.
Agumon twisted upward in a column of fire and reformed as Greymon, his roar shaking stone from the cliffs.
Gaomon's evolution hit like a piston: launching him forward as Gaogamon, lithe and razor-precise.
Renamon became Youkomon, her tails crackling like solar flares.
Dracmon's form bloomed open, reshaped into Duskmon, his bladed arms spinning like turbines.
Tai raised his rifle and pointed at the ridge. "Clear them."
The response was immediate.
Greymon opened his razor-lined maw and with a single burst of white-hot flame reduced the squad on the ridge to vapor. Gaogamon ascended the cliff like a ghost, a blur of violence snaking through the attackers as below Youkomon galloped at speed across the valley floor spreading pale yellow flames wherever she went which consumed much of the enemy combatants still at ground level, with the rest fleeing.
Duskmon fell upon the broken flank, whirling through them like a machine out of hell. From out of the flames, the scarred Garurumon who had led the flanking assault leapt at Duskmon, his mouth open to deliver a killing bite. Duskmon deftly sidestepped the attack and brought one his blades down on the wolf's neck.
Within seconds, the assault collapsed.
Not a battle. A lesson.
Silence fell again, broken only by the static hiss of dying comms from the enemy's side. The air smelled of heat and data fragments.
Thomas moved through the human wreckage, stepping over bodies—both human and Digimon. "They had coordination. Training. This was more organized than we're used to."
"Not like it made much of a difference" said Rika sullenly as she unloaded her disruptor into a fleeing Elecmon.
Koichi picked up a charred armband. The sigil was foreign, a symbol of rebellion scratched into the fabric. "They knew we were coming."
Tai didn't reply. His eyes were on the caves above. Somewhere inside, Koushiro Izumi waited.
Or what was left of him.
Tai gave the order. "Stack up. Formation Delta. We go in hard."
As they approached the mouth of the cave, Greymon's heavy footfalls behind him, Tai spared one last look at the ridge. A fallen Gatomon lay beside the girl with the bow, both faces turned skyward, half-buried in ash.
He turned away.
"We'll need you more compact for entry Greymon. Release Restraint Level: 3. Authorisation: Kamiya, Tai."
With a burst of blinding light the gigantic digimon shifted again, evolving forward to a form smaller in stature but many magnitudes more deadly.
The light of evolution dissipated to reveal the scarlet and black chrome digizoid form of Blitzgreymon.