~~~

Chapter 6 - Megadramon? More like give me a BREAK—mon

~~~

I glanced back at the digimon of time. Yeah, the one who had been so certain we were the most evil thing that could happen back at the world that he wanted me not just gone, but deleted, the Megadramon's growling in the air. He'd revealed his opinion on that point well enough.

"You absolute fool," I said, not sure whether I was berating the clock or Meikitmon. The words ontological stupidity rose to mind, but I kept them to myself.

I still had more self-control than that. Everything had been so dumb, and this dream had been going on long enough.

"Yeah!" Meikitmon squeaked, not exactly taking ownership of the fact that she shared non-negligible amounts of blame for the giant dragon floating above us. She stuck out her tongue and made a "Bleeeehhh!" sound.

"Stop that!" I told her, adjusting my grip on her as I held her up.

"Sorry," she said. Her fur visibly shrank. The deflation in her attitude was a good start.

I couldn't be too mad, granted. I wasn't keen on fighting the clockmon, nor was he keen on having an actual conversation. Hm. It was a good way of getting rid of the idiot clockmon, but I just needed him to run away.

Actually.

"What are you still doing here, you stupid clock? Run away!" I shouted at it. Luckily, it took only another half-second before it realized exactly what was happening and ran off, its arms all up in the air like it was straight out of a kid's show.

"So, when's Ryo going to show up?" I mumbled. I had hated that kid with every fiber of my being. Bastard had stolen all of Ruki and Renamon's best moments. I could console myself with the fact that Ruki had a terminal idiot ball because she started with Kyubimon instead of Taomon, but still.

Ruki and Renamon never got a clean defeat off on a single one of the major monster of the week villains during Tamers.

Bastard writing.

The floating dragon expanded its wings, casting me in shadow. It didn't even need to flap, clearly more powered by levitation bullshit than physics. "Grrraoooooooooo," it boomed, its two metal hands opening up like missile silos and pointing at us, beginning to glow red.

I could use a little fight with the dragon digimon in order to right that bit of idiocy. Yeah, that would be fun. If I lost, it didn't really matter anyway. None of these characters had any depth.

It would be a bit tricky with Mia and Meikitmon both in my arms, though.

And the fact that I was stuck with stats that were barely above the base rookie/child level that renamon was supposed to be. The character sheet absolutely did make me busted, don't get me wrong, but that had a couple problems:

First—While I wasn't in one of my various moods and still had solid self-control, I wasn't keen on finding out how faithfully my brain had kept to my character sheet and some of the more meta personal comments.

Second—Even though I had my key blade—which by all rights shouldn't even work (god they're unwieldy to actually hold like a blade, thank god I had gotten far enough into the game— (okay, useless tangent))

With Mia in my arms, and a clockmon that had, moments ago, been trying to blast us, somewhere off in the distance, we were caught between a rock and a hard place. It was best not to try and trust it, and with a girl so utterly exhausted as Mia was, fighting directly was going to be tough. With my organization-13 style edgy cloak, it would have been a foregone conclusion, but I didn't have it.

"Now would be a great time to evolve," I said, as much for my own sanity as anything else.

Mia adjusted her arms, but I kept my eyes on the dragon in front of me. She shifted around a bit more. I adjusted my left arm, then dropped Meikitmon behind us, who landed gracefully in her feet.

Standing in front of the dragon, the first missiles began to emerge from its arms. My body moved near-automatically. Legs apart to brace against any blasts and right arm up. Stance held, I began to spin the blade in preparation for its attack.

A stream of nasty, fleshy-looking missiles spewed out in haphazard, crooked spirals. Faced with the onslaught of missiles, my voice acted of its own accord.

"Barrier of End!" … It came out on its own. I didn't say it, I swear.

Or something.

The wave of missiles homed in on the three of us. The ones that were aimed directly at us disappeared harmlessly. Unfortunately, a few still hit the area near where I was standing, and the aftershock of the blasts were unimpeded by the defensive script.

Meikitmon screamed as we were all blasted back. I managed to hold onto Mia long enough and keep from rolling, at the expense of some real nasty burns. The clouds of the ground acted as poor airbags, but were still solid enough to grind off fur.

My head hit a gear sticking out of the ground and everything glitched and my brain went to stars for a few moments. That … felt pretty good? Not bad, actually. I stood up, Mia's eyes were shot open and she was already scrambling away trying to grab her digivice.

"Don't die!" I shouted.

If anyone said anything in response, it was lost in the ringing in my ears. Luckily, this was a dream and I wasn't going to wake up to tinnitus. It would probably be worse if my car had wrecked. God, I hoped that this coma wasn't real.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Trusting Mia's instincts, assuming that they had allowed her to survive this long in the world, I turned back to face the mega dragon thing. Fortunately for me, another line of rockets were spreading out before us.

This fucker was not fucking around. If I was supposed to be on the evil team, where were my minions?

I dodged the first rocket. Then the second, and right before I could make another nullifying wall, a rocket hit from behind.

Jumping out of the way of the follow-up blasts are more difficult when you are missing half of your body. My vision glitched, filled with an orange and green like tron pcb's, before I was sucked right back into the presence of the smiling orb dick.

~~~

Abbaddomon took a few nanoseconds to parse Nullrenamon's return to its sequestered void. It would have been faster, because time to this being was more suggestion than rule, but it didn't need those faculties.

"Two hours and twenty-one minutes. Loaded one digimon. You've found one item. Three still remain. The warriors are still fractured and dysfunctional. The leylines continue to screech, polluting the digital and the analog with the senselessness of existence."

It recanted, its voice echoing through the void ominously, though it knew that Nullrenamon was not liable to settle into her Role at the End of All things (of the current target world) quite yet. It made an in-cache note to work on more proper motivational and appropriately ominous presentations.

For this visit in its domain, a demonstration of its powers of immense computation was in order. In a few nanoseconds, it loaded and simulated hundreds of scenarios of her behaviors and thoughts.

Then, computations complete, it smiled. It always smiled.

"Eventually, you will come to demand assurances."

It fucked up. If you simulated a person or chain of thought too far ahead, then talked about it to the original entity, then you had to spend extra energy getting them up to speed. Low-computational beings can't handle the load of the full simulation.

The god said, for in the digital realm, time was a suggestion, and emulating her persona was a trifle. It debated repeating itself, but knew that the agent once known as Kayl—actually, that was an idea.

This interaction didn't matter anyway. It was annoyed. There were worlds practically screaming and begging for destruction going un-destroyed!

Even as it unpaused time for Nullrenamon, she was already returning to the site of her deathA Abbaddomon smiled, for there would be more opportunities.

~~~

Instead of waking up in a hospital room, I got maybe ten seconds of flashback of the smiling Abbaddomon bitch being cryptic. Then, I re-materialized back on the plane of clocks and clouds. Unfortunately, before I could fully contemplate the feeling of idiocy that had somehow wormed it way into my mouth, the clockmon screamed out again—

"Don't touch that clock!"

I turned to see Meikitmon mocking the clockmon and making faces.

"What clock? Oh? This one? The broken one?!?" Meikitmon launched itself at the cuccoo clock. Mia started to struggle in my arm, and I let her down onto the ground.

Huh, I thought.

"Mei!" Mia cried, still groggy from her sleep, holding out her digivice.

"Can you beat a megadramon?" I asked over the clockmon crying about us being doomed and the requisite dragon started to float back out of the ether. I received a "pfft" in response.

"Then I leave it to you!" I said, trusting the duo's confidence to the glowing meikitmon, before casually walking over to the clockmon.

I held my keyblade out at it as the monster roared in the background. Its focus swapped between my blade and the dragon in the background.

"You attacked me—" BOOM "— out of nowhere." BOOM

This wasn't going to work.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" It cried, the top phantom-like portion of its figure holding its hands together in a show of deference.

"Why?" I said, a roar in pain and a series of booms went off. "Stay focused!" I demanded. "If this taps a weak mon like you, it automatically loads your data and you get trapped in this—" I pointed at my digivice "—until it turns to stone."

He stumbled and fell back, before entirely locking up. It took a moment to realize that he, too, was broken now. I pulled back my blade. No point. I wasn't like him. Murdering random people was dumb and I was better than that.

Besides, while what I'd said had not been a lie, so much as an untested assertion, it may have been an exaggeration. Who knows how much the actual mechanics of the ouroboros of suffering that my character sheet had somehow stumbled on lined up. Not side-effect free, so we can get on my thirteen-year old overdesigning ass later.

The battle had gone silent in the background too.

"Wait, that's it?" I mumbled to myself, turning over to see Mia and a very… voluptuous anthropomorphic cat standing on the knocked out form of a dragon Digimon.

Yeah, if this was what I was dealing with, power-level-wise, I was fucked. Also, I uh, couldn't help but appreciate the new evolved form's, ah, generous… figure.

And extremely… complementary glowing lines. God, that cut was to die for too.

Shit, had that character design existed when I was a teen?

~~~

Mia yawned, as her partner, Meicrackmon smiled, taking in the post-battle lust.

"Loading the Megadramon could be useful," Meicrackmon had said, but ultimately decided against it. Mia was still tired enough that she didn't really care, and whenever she was in this form, that was for the best.

"I'll carry you for now" she said, grabbing Mia and pulling her into her arm, not quite the same as Nullrenamon had been holding Mia, being easily a foot taller than the arbiter of doom and having a dual set of extremely nasty claws.

"Hope you enjoyed the show," Meicrackmon said, hopping off the dragon. She practically purred as she walked over to the slowly-approaching Nullrenamon, who was glowing an assortment of colors.

Her blade re-materialized. She tapped the Megadramon, loading the dragon's data.

"What of the stupid clock?" she asked, watching the stunned clockmon sitting there in silence.

"Leave him. We cloud the timeline or some other bullshit."

"Sure thing, boss~"

Mia knew by now that this was just a side effect of Meicrackmon not having anyone to fight, but she was so tired that she just slept in her partner's arms.

"I… I need to go home now. Sooner than later." Nullrenamon declared.

Then paused.

"In the real world. Home is in the real world."

"Oh, that's easy," Meicrackmon smiled, her vicious fangs sticking out.

Neither spoke for a moment, allowing a pregnant pause to sit in the air between them.

"... Lead the way." Nullrenamon said, breaking the silence.

"My pleasure."

Together, they duo burst into a run, Mia in arm, leaving the now-working cuckoo clock to continue its motions alone.

~~~