To that, I have no answer, so I give none. For a few seconds, Bukamon simply stares at my back. Then he swims a bit further away. “I-, I’m not going to stop you or anything, but… But I just can’t watch,” he whimpers. And then, he swims away. I don’t watch him leave, but I can imagine where he’s going. Popping all the fish takes a few minutes, and by the end of it, I feel beyond full. Stronger. Faster. Bigger.

Since I can’t just leave the fishnet lying around, I remove the stones and tie it around my neck. This way, it can act as both convenience and a form of camouflage. Perfect.

And with that, I head for Bukamon.

Once I get to the salt pillar, actually finding him isn’t difficult at all. All I have to do is follow the sniffles, which leads me to a little opening just beneath the pillar. There, in a little bundle, lies Bukamon. He would’ve been better hidden if his flame didn’t keep the surroundings alight. Not that I’m complaining or anything.

He looks up at me through a gap in his flippers. “I-, Innomon?...” He rolls over, hiding his face from me. “Go away, virus,” he mumbles. He really is acting like a child, but, then again, he is only a few weeks old. And, as you do with children, I do the very opposite of what he asks, pressing my way into the little space and taking a seat right next to him. He sniffles again. “Virus types shouldn’t hang out with data types.”

I have no idea what either of those mean, so I can neither agree nor disagree.

And for a while, just a little while, neither of us say anything. I physically can’t, but even if I could, I would probably have let the silence go on. That’s what Bukamon needs right now, at least.

“Elecmon told me,” Bukamon says after a long while, “that virus types are never born. If you pick up a little Baby digimon, it won’t eat anything but milk. But he never said why a Baby might become a virus.”

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Bukamon, in congruence with every single other child on planet Earth, seems to have a penchant for asking questions that I can’t answer and saying things I can’t understand. Nodding, shaking my head, tilting it… In this situation, none of these reactions would work. I don’t even know if I’m a ‘virus’ to begin with, so trying to say I am one, or that I even started out as one might be a bit ignorant.

Otherwise, I can say with full confidence that babies can definitely eat meat. Assuming jelly counts as meat, at least. Oh, but I also ate that fish. So, yeah, I call bullshit.

Bukamon wipes his face. “But, I think, just because you’re a virus type, we can still be friends. It doesn’t change anything, does it?”

I shake my head.

Finally, Bukamon smiles again. “Then, everything’s all right!”

And, I guess, that it was. I can’t say exactly how long time passed since I haven’t got a calendar (making marks on the cave walls might worry Bukamon), but it felt like weeks. Unlike what I would have expected, the bottom of the sea wasn’t a very tumultuous place. I saw bigger digimon at times, but they just sort of floated by. And, as you might expect, I ate a lot of fish. You get tired of the taste eventually, but since I didn’t have to chew or anything, it didn’t feel too bad. Just pop and they disappear. Easy as pie.

Bukamon still wouldn’t acknowledge my fishing, but he stopped minding it as much as he did at first. Luckily, the fish never seemed to run out, even though I realistically ate over a hundred. Apparently, my presence didn’t completely wreck the local ecosystem. Then again, since this isn’t technically a real ecosystem, there’s a chance that the fish just respawned as they needed, so my presence is completely superfluous. Who knows?

Either way, the days passed pretty quietly.

When we weren’t eating or sleeping, Bukamon demanded that we play various games. Hide and seek, catch, tag… Almost anything you can think of, alongside a billion games I’d never thought of. At first, I could barely even chase his shadow, but as I ate more fish and became stronger (and bigger), I was eventually able to catch up to him. I can’t say for sure if I eventually surpassed him, and this is really only because I never tried. Playing is supposed to be fair, so dunking on him wouldn’t have been right.

It was easy living. I got very used to being underwater, all things considered, even though it barely feels like being underwater at all.

It is, god forbid, nice.

Until this moment, at least.