WoS Ch11 - Part 1

The story so far: Five children have come to the Digital World under mysterious circumstances. Their quest is to reach the Forest Terminal. Aiding them along are the Spirits of the Ancient Warriors which allow them to turn into digimon. There exist two kinds of Spirit for each element though: the reliable Human Spirit and the strong but uncontrollable Beast Spirit. Tommy, the only one with a Beast Spirit so far, already lost control over it once with disasterous consequences. One of which resulted in team leader Kei losing herself to her fear, ending with resident loner Kouji being forced to stop her rampage. In the process, they at learnt something new about their transformation devices (D-Tectors) and also realized that the origin of all the corrupted digimon they've faced so far is Cherubimon, the last remaining leader of the Digital World. A friendly Bakumon left them with a swirling ball of good dreams before scurrying away to fight off Cherubimon's corruption elsewhere.



Chapter 11 - A New Perspective (Part 1)

-Kouji-

Izumi had put the ball of mist in the middle of the campsite where it pulsed gently. It was only half as big as when she’d first showed it to them, slowly losing its potency. While the others slept soundly around it, Kouji remained stubborn. He sat at the edge of the clearing and stared into the darkness, trying to think of nothing.

Someone had to keep an eye out. Make sure that nothing like this happened again. Kouji shifted uncomfortably.

It had been his watch.

He closed his eyes and snapped them back open again, tapping his fingers against the grip of his D-Tector. He couldn’t forget his fight against Anumon. Being forced to scan Keisaki so she’d stop shooting people. That empty look in her eyes… He closed his fist around his D-Tector, squeezing.

Keisaki was strong enough to take a beating, he knew. Yet he still had a bitter taste in his mouth.

Kouji gritted his teeth. He also knew that he shouldn’t care about the group. Attachments would only cost him later. Maybe, he’d have already reached the Forest Terminal if he’d ditched the others. If he’d followed his first plan.

What was he doing here, really?

“Kouji Minamoto,” a soft voice called out, and he rose to his feet. From the display of his D-Tector shone a familiar circle—much like Izumi’s symbol of Wind earlier. This time, it belonged to the woman that had called them into this world.

“What do you want?” he demanded. If she was ready to communicate now, he could press her for information. She’d been silent for too long.

“Your Beast Spirit awaits you. But before you can find it, you need to undergo some more growth,” she revealed, symbol already fading. That was all? No comment on their progress? Nothing? Lovely.

The intel itself was good. The Beast Spirit had to be close, or she wouldn’t have bothered to check in. Hopefully, it would match Gigasmon in strength.

Kouji walked a few steps away from the tree to check the sky. There was no glimmer of dawn; it was still the dead of night. He glanced at the stopwatch, abandoned next to his tree. It had already reached its hour maximum. He’d forgotten to restart it after everything that had happened.

The forest around him was quiet. A faint breeze rustled through the leaves and somewhere far away a nightbird squawked. It had been like that the entire time. Kouji was tired but not too tired. His Beast Spirit was close.

Kouji grabbed the stopwatch. Looked at it. Looked back to the others.

Next in line was Keisaki. She’d raise a fuss. He could wake Junpei instead who wouldn’t care. Kouji was aware that the older boy didn’t like him, and the feeling was mutual. Junpei would be happy to have the group to himself.

Kouji could just leave. He’d thought about it before. It had been on his mind ever since Frozen Mountain. The Beast Spirit just gave added incentive.

On his own, he would set the pace. No more complaining, no one holding him back. No one to worry about or disappoint. No more safe nights. A good night watch went a long way. Someone to rely on.

Kouji started the stopwatch again. Keisaki was injured, and so was Junpei. He’d trade with Izumi in the morning.

Morning came with bright sunlight. Kouji got maybe two hours of sleep and ignored Izumi’s curious glances. She’d been surprised when it had been him that woke her up. Thankfully, she left it uncommented.

Mainly because she and Keisaki had other things to announce. Over a breakfast of their remaining packed food and meat apples, they spoke about Cherubimon. And how he had the power to corrupt digimon. They were both fired up and ready to take Cherubimon on, their way of fixing the situation.

Kouji wasn’t too sure. If that was the case, why were they sent to the Forest Terminal? Cherubimon was waging war on the Metal Continent, wasn’t he? That’s what all the digimon said. According to Izumi and her book knowledge, the Metal Continent was an entire ocean away.

No, this wasn’t why they were going to the Forest Terminal. Something else waited there. Something with answers. Again, Kouji had the feeling that they should hurry up and get there already.

As if the Cherubimon situation and their impending food shortage weren’t problematic enough, Keisaki had even more bad news.

Over the night, her right wrist had swollen to alarming proportions, and she cringed with every breath. “Ow. I didn’t know why I expected that to heal overnight!”

Junpei gave her a weird look.

He never broke eye contact and stood up with ease, shaking the leg that had been shot yesterday as if to prove a point. “I healed just fine.”

Kouji took a closer look and noticed that even the hole in the fabric of his jumpsuit had vanished. Come to think of it, as digimon, they usually gathered a lot of bruises and injuries that were gone in a matter of hours. Anumon’s Critical Shot had gone straight through Lobomon’s shoulder while Kouji had ended up with nothing but a light bruise. The only injury carrying over to human form had been Dobermon’s Black Beam.

Keisaki herself had recovered over the course of an afternoon from Grumblemon’s attack. So what had changed?

She slowly got to her feet and shook her D-Tector. Kouji didn’t know what she was trying to accomplish until she slumped forward. “Still not working.”

“You still can’t digivolve?” Izumi reacted aghast and prompted a row of similarly spirited responses.

Keisaki held up her D-Tector displaying static. “My Spirit is gone.”

With an eerie feeling, Kouji took his own D-Tector and stared at its display. He... had scanned her yesterday. It seemed impossible; surely he would have noticed—

Then he realized. He’d been thinking about removing the threat and restoring her to how she was. Anumon had been that threat. Alongside the sinking realization, the symbol of Fire popped up on his display. He’d accidentally taken Keisaki’s Spirit! (And he’d almost wandered off with it, too.)

Now that was awkward. The group still hadn’t figured it out. Kouji coughed lightly to catch their attention and held up his D-Tector showing the incriminating evidence. “It appears that I have your Spirit.”

“How?” she asked and walked over to examine the glowing symbol.

“When I purified you yesterday,” he mumbled, feeling like a thief. How had he not noticed that? ...Or maybe, on some level, he had and just focused on removing the danger she posed.

“Maybe that’s why you haven’t healed?” Junpei offered. If he had any hard feelings over Anumon flipping out and shooting him, they were mollified now that his injury was completely gone.

Keisaki nodded slowly and turned to Kouji. “Can I have it back now?” She sent him an awkward grin. “I promise I won’t snap again.”

It took a while to figure out how to hand over the Spirit, since he’d taken it largely by accident.

“Maybe you should try calling out to your Spirit?” Izumi offered helpfully while stepping over a huge root. They had begun walking towards the Forest Terminal. “That’s how I got mine.”

Kouji had the feeling that that was how everyone got theirs. Behind them, Junpei successfully stumbled over the huge root and complained accordingly.

Keisaki was ready to try anything. “Spirit, come to me!”

The symbol of Fire flared on Kouji’s D-Tector again, but nothing else happened. Kouji pressed a few buttons and was taken back to when he tried to digivolve for the second time. The buttons seemed to be important, but that wasn’t all. For a successful Spirit digivolve... there had to be intent too! He checked that his path was clear and closed his eyes.

He could feel Lobomon’s familiar presence. It was a part of him whether he was digivolved or not. The Spirit brought a cold, calculated feeling that waited for him to call upon it and become the Warrior of Light. But now something was marring their harmony. He took a moment to isolate and examine the foreign feeling.

Warmness, passion, fire. He’d found Anumon and this deep in thought, the correct button presses came to him without conscious effort. A red stream of light emitted from his D-Tector and connected to Keisaki’s. Her Spirit’s glowing orb travelled over the band to reunite with her. The symbol of Fire lit up on her display.

While Keisaki hugged her D-Tector in an unnecessary show of affection, Kouji wondered about the spiritual element of their, well, Spirits. This world was called the Digital World, and everything consisted of data. A device for transforming them into some digital spirits seemed straightforward. Yet they needed to be in a certain mindset to digivolve, completely unrelated to the mechanical notion of pressing buttons. Plus, in order to exchange them, they needed to search deep within themselves for something that didn’t belong.

Much to Kouji’s surprise, Junpei put his own thoughts into the recent developments. The heavy-set boy figured out how to activate the phone function with minimal button mashing, and the Thunder symbol began glowing from Keisaki’s D-Tector.

“You know, this only works if you think about the person you want to contact,” Junpei stated, waving the blue and yellow device.

“So you thought about me?” Keisaki teased, still floating happily on her cloud of ‘I have my Spirit back’. She was breathing easier already.

Junpei gave a squawk of indignation. “You already had your D-Tector out! Zoe’s the only girl for me!” Which prompted Izumi to clobber him.

Tommy didn’t want to miss out on the fun (especially since he’d slept through the function’s reveal), and his tri-form symbol began glowing from Kouji’s display.

Alright, this was getting out of hand, and it started to irritate Kouji. It just reminded him that he could leave at any moment without losing touch with the group.

He hadn’t forgotten that his Beast Spirit was close. It would be useful if they could figure out how to summon the grid map that led him to his Human Spirit. Actually, this seemed like a worthwhile pursuit while they were approaching the forest’s edge. …Would it even make sense to detour for his Beast Spirit when their destination was coming up? None of the other three had gotten any update on their own Beast Spirits nor were they informed if they even needed them. They only seemed to provide extra fire power.

Past the forest came a grassy plain littered with rocks. In the distance, another strap of trees blocked the view to what appeared to be a group of gigantic, reddish-brown termite nests.

 “How long until we reach the Forest Terminal?” Kouji asked, if only to make the others shut up about their great discovery.

 “Well, if those mountains over there are the village I think they are, then we should be there in less than two days,” Izumi answered, one hand raised to shade her eyes against the morning sun. Kouji distinctly remembered her saying that it would take three days to cross the forest—and that that had been over a week ago. He chose not to comment on that.

The weather was fine, and the few white clouds didn’t make any effort to blot out the sun.

“A village sounds great,” Keisaki proclaimed. “We really need to restock supplies! Hopefully, we’ll find a Trailmon to take us a little further!”

Kouji doubted that. From their vantage point, he couldn’t see any train tracks.

A small hill led from the forest to the plain, and the closer they got, the higher the grass appeared. When Kouji reached the hill’s base, the thick grass reached his shoulders, and he sighed about the Digital World’s continued ridiculousness. Moving through it proved to be a pain which prompted a row of irritating complaints from Junpei.

-Zoe-

Kouji spent most of the way to the village wearing his standard expression. That is to say, frowning menacingly at the grass and rocks we passed. I still didn’t know how he could keep up this constant sour mood but I’d long since decided not to pry into his business.

Now that we had reached the edge of the forest, I could reorient myself. The Forest of Dreams had certainly felt endless… And, we’d also got all turned around, veering widely off course. If I interpreted the map correctly, we were coming up at a coastal village, far west from where we started.

I was still confident that we could make it to the Forest Terminal in two days. We just had to head northeast from now on

It didn’t take long to leave the tangle of restrictive grass behind (though long enough to make my arms stiff from exertion) and we passed through the tree line leading to the village. It consisted of four jagged mountains that reminded me of the ShellNumemon homeland, only much smaller, and I had a bad feeling. We hadn’t been able to protect the ShellNumemon because our teamwork was lacking. I shook my head to clear it from the depressing thoughts.

Grumblemon wouldn’t be able to stop us the next time we ran into him. Even without Blizzarmon, we should be strong enough to defeat him now.

A series of well-travelled paths swung around the mountains’ bases. While they were tall, I thought them to be no higher than twenty meters. Evenly-spaced holes spiralled along their outsides, like windows. That meant the rocks were hollowed-out which explained why there were no houses. Some greenery clung to the red stone, and here and there wooden fences surrounded carefully arranged flower gardens. Despite that, a desolate air hung over the expansive village. No one was on the streets and most flowers looked wrinkled with a layer of dust over their shrivelled leaves. One of the mountains had large portions of its side missing and there were huge holes in the streets. It was as if the village had been under constant attack.

The skin on the back of my neck prickled and I whipped around. A pair of simmering yellow eyes widened and ducked back behind one of the windows.

“Where are all the people?” JP asked uneasily. A breeze kicked up a tiny dust devil and carried it across the broken street.

I simply pointed to the empty window. “They’re hiding inside.”

Not letting the absence of a welcoming party disturb her, Kei marched into the indicated direction. Since we hadn’t seen anything resembling a door, she shouted upwards, “Hello! We’re travellers looking for information! Is there anyone here? Sorry for the disturbance!”

After a moment of silence, an entrance appeared in the mountainside right in front of us. Actually, a boulder melted out of the wall, and two rock digimon shoved it aside to allow us a look inside. The pair had a humanoid shape with overly large heads. They were almost as tall as I was and completely made of fused grey stones. On top of their heads were two little rocks that resembled ears. They looked at us with large, yellow eyes full of suspicion. The colour stood out even more, as the white of their eyes was actually black.

It would be nice to be greeted by smiles and sunshine for a change, but considering the state of their village, their unfriendly attitude probably had a good reason.

“Hi,” Kei repeated, setting up her friendliest, most nonthreatening smile.

“What brings humans into our village?” one of the walking stones asked wearily. Now I could see that their rock bodies were clipped and discoloured in some areas as if they had been injured in a fight. Despite the rigid nature of their skin, their faces looked sunken and gaunt.

“We’re actually just passing through,” Kei explained ruefully. Since we had a map and a clear path, we had no need to ask them for directions. It didn’t look like they would appreciate the shock value of the Forest Terminal anyway.

Our valiant leader struggled to phrase what we actually wanted. Finally, she said, “We’re looking for somewhere to buy supplies.”

Well. It was possible that these digimon were hiding huge stashes of food inside, but the state of the village said otherwise. They might not even be interested in our money (of which there was not much left). Maybe they could sell us a compass. That alone would help.

“What happened here? Why is your village looking like that?” Tommy was a lot less restricted and voiced exactly what he found troubling. Admirable quality. His question was met with stunned silence. He awkwardly shifted his weight.

Finally, the digimon on the right said, “Fine, come in and we’ll see what we can do for you,” and waved us inside.

He introduced himself and his people as Gotsumon. This gave me the opportunity to introduce our group as well.

It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the calming darkness inside the Gotsumon Mountain. It mainly consisted of long tunnels that seemed to spread far under the village proper. Everywhere, tiny ceiling lights let in filtered sunlight from above. We didn’t head up the stairs I spotted at the far end of the tunnel. Instead, the digimon ushered us through an open doorway into a wide room. Like the tunnel, it had a ceiling that wouldn’t be high enough to let Mom or Dad cross it without hitting their heads, but it had a stone table and some more desolate Gotsumon looking at us with disinterest. Real great atmosphere. As instructed, we pooled around the table and one of the stout digimon gave us stone cups filled with water.

Their health situation put me on edge, and I repeated Tommy’s question, “What is happening to you?” The last time we met digimon that downtrodden, we blew up a factory to save them. I was pretty sure I could convince Kouji to stay and help here too.

“It’s very simple,” one of the Gotsumon said, nursing her water cup. She wore a necklace with the kanji for family on its pendant. “Our village is under attack. We’re trying to get by as best as we can.”

“Cherubimon’s forces?” Keisaki deduced, sounding vexed and angry. “We keep running into them too!”

Gotsumon nodded curtly. There was an angry flame in her yellow eyes. “It’s actually just one fighter, but he’s very strong. His name is Grumblemon.”

“Grumblemon!” half of us managed to shout in unison. Then we looked at each other in various stages of determination. Kei looked like she wanted to leap up and fight the bastard immediately, Tommy looked very ill, and JP had furrowed his brows in anger. I couldn’t decipher what Kouji was thinking, since vague annoyance was permanently etched into his features. On an educated guess, he was calculating how to best make us forget about this place and continue to the Forest Terminal.

Before he could mention his preferred course of action over the support Kei was already pledging to the village, more Gotsumon joined us. One them walked to our table and said without preamble, “So I understand that you want to restock for your journey?”

Since Kei was occupied with shifting gears from rousing speech to mundane task, I took over and said, “Yes, we’d like to do that.”

“’Fraid we don’t have much to offer. I talked to the village council; we need most of our supplies for ourselves, sorry,” he informed us gruffly.

“That’s just because of Grumblemon, right?” Kei asked, and I didn’t like that look she had in her eyes. I was also all for beating Grumblemon and felt confident that we had a chance, but I’d thought we’d have some more time before tackling him again!

Kei’s words were met with a general consensus of nods.

“Keisaki—” Kouji started in warning.

But she just ploughed on ahead, “What if we could get rid of him for you?”

I totally caught Kouji’s drift, and he sat too far away to give Kei a good whack on the head. I didn’t go for that and instead leaned towards her and hissed, “Remember last time when we promised a village we would get rid of Grumblemon?”

She turned to me, and her expression shifted from grey-faced guilt to firm determination in a matter of seconds. “That won’t happen again. This time, we’re all functional.” That reminded me to check on the injuries I’d caused during my nightmare. She didn’t look like breathing caused her any trouble, and her wrist was normal-sized. Amazing, what difference a Spirit made.

“You don’t look like you could handle someone like Grumblemon,” the Gotsumon with the necklace said sceptically. “We’re not in the habit to let children fight for us.”

For some reason, this prompted Kouji into action. “Is Grumblemon here because of a Spirit? Is there… I don’t know, maybe a temple of light around?”

Why would he ask that? Was Kouji fishing for information on his Beast Spirit?

The general mood around us dropped steeply.

“A Spirit?” the Gotsumon to my left said, rolling his eyes. “So that’s the real reason why you’re here?”

Wait what? Did Kouji know something that we didn’t? Could he maybe feel the presence of his Beast Spirit?

“There’s really a Spirit of the Legendary Warriors around here?” Kei asked for clarification, mouth agape.

Gotsumon just scoffed, “You fell for a stupid rumour, just like Grumblemon! That’s why we’re in this mess!”

“A rumour?” Kouji asked, and I didn’t know why he sounded so disappointed.

A mass of agitated voices rose from the populace now.

“Yeah, there’s no Spirit in our village!” “Just because one nutjob started spouting this crazy theory, Grumblemon showed up here!” “Grumblemon would’ve ignored us if it wasn’t for that stubborn runt!” “That maniac just can’t prioritize!” “Always puts his own needs in front of the village! He can’t work with others!”

A lot of frustration spoke here. There was always someone else who had a new complaint about this guy, and they came almost alive with their collective anger.

Kouji didn’t look happy, but Kei saw her chance to propose fighting Grumblemon again. I could see a tactics meeting coming.

The Gotsumon with the necklace and the fire in her eyes was oddly silent throughout.