The God-Slaying Peace-Keeper
Chapter 5

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In the end, it feels like they hadn't waited long enough. Not long enough to confirm anything, anyway. Not long enough to prepare. It's only a few days after Masaru goes back to the Digital World, as though he's left a slipstream behind him. And maybe he has.

And if he has, Kurata is one of the few people tenacious enough to latch on to it from black space.

Yggdrasil is aware of him quite suddenly – and so Alice and Dobermon become aware of him quite suddenly as well. They are back at the Server Tree – and it's lucky they are, because they can send Sleipmon off to warn Masaru and Agumon, and Craniummon to call the rest of the Royal Knights together.

After all, Kurata has been floating around in black space for over five years. He can't have any weapons except what he vanished with, and he'd exhausted that against DATS.

Except they're wrong. He still has his space-oscillation devices, buried in his body and merged with him until they've taken the place of his lifeblood. He could go between the human and digital worlds, once he'd stumbled into one of them. Before the Royal Knights could close in on him, he was gone. And each time he crossed the worlds, the barriers crumbled once more.

The stage is being rewritten. Back to that last, desperate battle. But this time, Yggdrasil won't be there to interfere. She's sworn it. She's sealed herself away from it.

Can humans and digimon save the world together a second time?

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Chaos is quick to erupt. Digimon fall into the human world. Humans fall into the Digital World. Masaru has to double-task: breaking up digimon versus digimon fights as well as digimon versus human ones. He sets up the stray humans in the mansion and the dojo, making sure any scientist is in the former where the computers are, and anyone who's managed to stumble onto a digimon friend is in the latter where they can train their digisoul (even if he has no idea how to get digivices for them until he can get into contact with his father and DATS). And it takes a few weeks before they can get into conscious contact with Satsuma on the other end.

By then, they have some idea of what's going on. Kurata's space-oscillation devices are familiar to all of them, after the chaos it caused, but he's clever in hiding them. He can't hide the disappearances though. He can't stop them either – and maybe he doesn't want to stop them.

Things progress a whole lot faster than they had fifteen years ago. It took Kurata ten years, then, between the gates opening up initially and his final move with Belphemon. Now, it's a matter of weeks before the governments panic, before the Digital World has more humans than it can comfortably fit into the only human establishment it possesses, and even what scientists have managed to stumble into the Digital World and help them out, they're quickly becoming overwhelmed.

Their battle isn't just with humans in a new and unfamiliar world, or with digimon lost on the other side and held at DATS. It's with new viruses that Masaru and Alice are both immune to, but the other humans aren't. And there's no more vaccines. Keenan and Yoshino had used the last, and the scientists have to scramble to make it up from scratch.

They can't scramble fast enough. Three children and four adults die before they have a passable cure and vaccine, and more adults because their bodies are too old and weary to recover. And their absences weigh heavily on those who witness it, even when the space quickly fills up again.

Meanwhile, in the human world, there are other problems. Human microorganisms can't seem to latch onto digimon, but that doesn't stop the digimon from rampaging. As soon as there's conscious contact between the two worlds, Satsuma demands the DATS partner digimon (except Agumon), to return to the human world. They do so, but Suguru and Yushima (along with Kamemon) decide to go to the Digital World to hold the fort with Masaru. And that works fine because Suguru is the expert on digivices and Yushima's a little too old to be fighting in another war.

Masaru takes advantage of the veterans taking hold of the fort to set out travelling again, with only Agumon by his side. There are probably a lot of stray humans wandering around, and a lot of missing digimon, now that the DATS digimon are no longer around to help run inventory.

But Masaru and Agumon are used to doing things with just their two person team now.

And they can hunt Kurata while they're at it, too.

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Alice and Dobermon meet them at the Server Tree. 'Kurata?' she asks.

'He's a slippery devil,' Masaru mutters, annoyed. 'You wouldn't have a better way to track him or keep him tied down, would you?'

She shakes his head. 'Is it a good idea, anyway?'

Masaru has to pause at that, before he realises what she means. 'No choice,' he says. 'I can't sit around. And I'm not one for organising chaos. That's 'tou-san and Yushima-san and Satsuma-san and Tohma… Agumon and I are for action. Going out and doing things with our fists and our mouths.'

'You won't even try to avoid a confrontation that may destroy you?' she asks.

'No way.' He shakes his head.

She wonders if Takato and Guilmon would have responded in kind, if they'd known what awaited them.

Then again, hindsight was a cruel, cruel thing.

'What about you?' she asks. 'Will you and Dobermon fight?'

'Yggdrasil won't interfere,' she answers distantly.

'Not Yggdrasil. You.'

She doesn't know. She's never so blatantly gone against Yggdrasil before. 'I'm a researcher,' she answers finally.

He shrugs. He doesn't seem to disappointed in her answer. 'Compare notes with Tohma and my father some time, okay?'

He leaves the Server Tree after that, and never returns to it.

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They play tag with Kurata for quite a while. He seems content to hide in the shadows and unleash chaos on both worlds but that's a far cry from his plans before.

'How does he expect to take over both worlds if he hides like a coward,' Masaru pants, as they labour up Infinity Mountain towards the latest sighting.

'Who knows,' Agumon pants, alongside him. 'Kurata's always been a nutcase.'

Masaru's father doesn't agree with that, of course, having known the man a good deal longer and back when he didn't hate digimon so much, or the Daimon family name. But they're too far gone for words to have any effect. They were too far gone five years ago.

'He can't literally pop up from anywhere,' Agumon says, after a pause, 'right?' 'I mean, no-one ever show up at the dojo or the mansion directly – except the DATS guys and their supplies and your mother's fried eggs –'

'Enough with the fried eggs,' Masaru laughs, though it turns into a cough with the high altitude. 'But you know, I never thought of that. But surely Tohma and everyone will have thought of it.'

'Maybe not,' says Agumon. 'They do tend to get tangled with the complicated stuff.'

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It turns out Agumon is right and Masaru is wrong. They hadn't thought to look at where Kurata had never been and when they did, they realised it covered all DATS emergence points and thensome. On that vein, they checked all of Kurata's previous emergence points and realised none of them repeated either – had digimon or humans stumble one way or the other, but never Kurata himself.

Which meant he has to make a new hole every time, as opposed to him doing so to mess with them. And that narrowed down their search quite significantly.

It also meant Masaru and Agumon couldn't run double duty any more, but by then those humans who'd found partners after coming to the digital world and mastered their digisouls enough to evolve their digimon to the Adult level, were sent out to cover the known rips on patrol.

And Masaru and Agumon hunted the rest for Kurata, never once thinking what would happen when the two of them met face to face.

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They meet, eventually. The place is called Chaos Brain and Masaru and Agumon both consider the oddity of that name before they discard the thought. More important is Kurata in the centre, looking even more like a madman. And seemingly without protection.

Masaru falters there. What is he supposed to do now? Punch him?

Well… That's always worked before.

There's a black shadow rearing in front of him before he can reach the other though, and then he's pulled back by smaller hands, human hands.

Alice…

And Dobermon's chest has three green slashes in it, where the rest of him crumbles.

'That's not the space-oscillation device,' Alice frowns. 'We were wrong. We missed it entirely, because it seemed to function the same.'

Agumon steps up to flank Dobermon, letting loose a Petite Flame that doesn't push Kurata back at all.

'What are you doing here?' Masaru asks in shock. 'You're a researcher, aren't you?'

'What's the point of research if it comes too late?' Alice replies. 'The others are coming too. It'll just take them a little longer.'

'Too late,' Kurata cackled, 'but I am glad you made it here at least, Daimon Masaru.'

'Meaning what?' Masaru snaps back, before Dobermon's howl in pain snaps both his and Alice's attention away.

He twists and crumbles. Not like Merukimon when he disintegrates but something…else. 'Virus,' Alice hisses, and her face is suddenly anguished as she rushes to her partner.

Masaru lets her. He turns on Kurata instead. 'Explain yourself!'

He doesn't. He just cackles instead.

So Masaru's mind jumps to stepping stones on its own. Virus, Alice had said. So Kurata has infused his own body with a virus as well as the space-oscillating devices? When did he find the time to do that? Or maybe it's from the black space nobody knows anything about and they just assumed it was empty.

Maybe that's the virus from the mansion, too, and why the old research had been no good whatsoever.

But there's something else at play. Kurata's been waiting for something. A wait that's over. Why is it over now of all times? What's different?

Us. Here. He realises it. But what –

But then Dobermon is a purple blob and Alice stumbles back, shrieking in pain as it clomps onto her chest. He tries to pull it off but his hands burn as well. Agumon's Petite Flares do nothing.

'Evolve me!' Agumon cries.

He tries. It doesn't work. Kurata cackles again. 'It's over, Yggdrasil. I win after all!'

And he doesn't get it, but he also kind of does. When he defeated Yggdrasil, he took a part of Her. Or maybe it's her gift in his father. Or both. But there's a bit of Her in him. And there's a bit of Her in Alice and Dobermon as well. And Suguru, and the egg that's who knows where that will one day become BanchoLeomon again.

And then he laughs. His father and BanchoLeomon are still okay and Kurata's cackling too early.

'Agumon!' he calls. 'Lets do this the old school way!'

'Ready when you are, boss?' Agumon agrees.

They lay Alice down and rush at Kurata together.

At the end of the explosion, there's only a purple floating blob behind.

And the remnants of Yggdrasil where Kurata had forgotten about them. And the other humans he dismissed.

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Post A/N: Alice wasn't originally going to be in the final scene, but Chaika the Coffin Princess influenced that a little. She was almost like a good version of Guy, hehe. And Masaru and Agumon's curse of Fenrir turned out to be powering Grimmon (and Alice and Dobermon got swept into it as well, simply because Alice decided she didn't want to be on the sidelines again). Grimmon is the main antagonist from Digital World Dawn/Dusk. And with the sudden influx of humans into the Digital World, why not have them build CITY and Night Claw and Light Fang? XD It does break DS canon to do it, but that's part of FFN author liberties. Surprised it stayed in Tamers and Savers canon, actually. But 9-10k isn't a whole lot of wriggle room to work in.

As for Kurata's role, personally I think he's the only enemy who can beat Masaru, because their strengths and weapons are so different. It's similar to the rivalry of Masaru and Tohma – they're so different, so things can go either way depending on the context. The same is true of Masaru and Kurata, except there's a deeper hatred in there. And five years wandering the Digital World with nobody but Agumon by his side, he essentially went into that battle alone. Which works out because the others have worked out the whole virus mess and can plan against it, and Kurata has, like Masaru and Alice and their digimon, also been absorbed into the virus to power it up (kind of like food powering humans.) But Masaru is the type of guy who has to do something, and in his mind, punching Kurata is a pretty good way to go. As for Alice and Dobermon, they'd had too long a life at the end. Good for them in that sense as well. But you can't have all the main characters die at the end and not call it tragedy, right?