As the crystal at the eye of the storm in time and space set itself to its metamorphosis, each of those consigned to their mental prisons before it took to their situation differently.
___
Helplessness was what ate away at Examon.
He found himself collapsed onto the ground, wounded and unable to move. Above him, the sun was setting, the darkening orange sky above almost seeming to join with the scorched, bloodstained ground around him. The corpses from the battle had dispersed into data long before then, but that only served to make the scene more nightmarish; he could see for himself how few of them remained.
Besides a handful of Knightmon and other troops, many missing limbs or more, the only survivors on his side were Gallantmon and MachGaogamon, who themselves seemed worn down and battered. The Armoured Duke seemed to have a broken arm and several punctures in his armour, whilst Examon’s Captain was carefully nursing a long and jagged open wound in his chest that was plainly visible through his destroyed makeshift breastplate; Examon himself didn’t need to look at himself to know what had him down on the ground, as the sensation of the giant spear rammed through his abdomen spoke for itself.
The other survivors were not of their own ranks; a gaggle of Angels and Demons, too wounded and outnumbered to put up a fight against the Knight survivors as they were taken prisoner.
But they wouldn’t stay outnumbered for long.
“I know how you feel, but we can’t stay and mourn, even for a second.” MachGaogamon’s voice was little more than a growl as he abandoned formality to talk directly to Gallantmon; not from frustration or impudence, but from the sheer pain of the opening in his chest. “The only reason we won is that they didn’t have any of their leaders with them, and with the racket we kicked up, I doubt that’ll go for whatever comes to finish us off. Gankoomon and Hackmon’s sacrifice won’t mean anything if we don’t move and get the rest of the men back at camp out of here as soon as possible!”
Gallantmon began to respond, but Examon’s focus was already fading; both the Examon at that point in time and the one who felt chills cut through him as he remembered how this ended. He survived, as did Gallantmon and MachGaogamon when the situation pushed him to a miraculous Digivolution; but their hesitation and his wounds cost their men dearly, and mere tens of men escaped with their lives out of the thousands who’d ventured out to try and attack an apparent weak point of the enemy stronghold.
Gankoomon and the bright young Digimon he’d had so many hopes for had given their lives to buy them time and the chance to make it back to base. And because he’d been unable to fight alongside Gallantmon and MirageGaogamon, that sacrifice had gone to waste as far too many good men died to the savage monster that served as Captain under one of the rebel Seraphimon.
He wanted to scream, to get up and yell at himself and the others to run and stop the horrors that were coming: but it was hopeless. He felt even less control over his body than he had then; and he felt even more helpless as he realized what would soon result of the bloody battles with the rebel celestials.
This is where it all began. Old, deep wounds were opened once more, and Examon realized how little their victory over Imperialdramon had mattered.
The Knights had become worse than the rebels that would become the Demon Lords, and he’d been helpless to stop it.
___
Rank despair and terror was what met Siggy.
Unlike Examon, he wasn’t dragged towards any one place in time, or even a single continuity of events. No, what he saw as his mind’s connection to time unravelled around him was of countless futures, each one worse than the last.
He hadn’t realized it at the time, but Dirk’s death had affected him greatly. One wound amongst countless others, going untreated until it was too late. Now that was the cornerstone of what he saw. Once the initial thousand visions of Moon=Millenniummon’s victory and the wiping of his consciousness faded away, the thousand visions that came next offered nothing better. With Dirk gone, their numbers and morale were down: and so defeating the abomination came at too high a price.
One after another, he saw his friends cut down. BanchoLeomon was the most vulnerable to attack once he was deprived of his power: the Gakuran he wore prevented the crystals from making it all the way through his body, but did nothing to prevent them from effortlessly puncturing his chest, smashing through his sternum and killing him instantly as his organs were shredded. UlforceVeedramon was hardly any safer: though his armour protected him on all sides, a single well-timed crescent at a moment of mental vulnerability shattered his consciousness beyond repair, and a rain of countless crystal spires similarly rent his body. Rodendramon risked all in a life-or-death charge against the monster; and found himself rewarded with something far worse as it ripped open a window to a distant hellscape, banishing him to a place beyond words where he would be lucky to starve. Dynasmon’s vicious assaults on Moon=Millenniummon warranted particular attention; once he was finally depleted of the strength to use the Wyvern, the monster turned his sight upon him and gave him a slow and painful death, dissolving his entire body byte by byte beneath the harsh light of his spectral glare until only a red core remained, only to be similarly immolated. Dorugoramon was granted perhaps the worst deaths of all; fighting to her very last, Millenniummon blasted her from the sky with sheer overwhelming firepower, ruining her wings and body and sending her crashing down into the waters of the bay to drown and die in the panicked despair of a broken bird as it turned its attention back to the others. He and Examon died too many times to count; whether it was through being blasted into atoms, shredded beneath a rain of crystal or left to bleed out from myriad wounds, more often than not he was catapulted to the next timeline by a premature demise.
But it was not just the toll of lives that was terrible. The toll taken on their minds was worse. Timelines seemed to exist where Moon=Millenniummon fell. Whatever relief that fact may have offered was reduced to nothing as he saw what those worlds had waiting for the survivors of the battle.
Loss stripped Lucas of whatever was left of his restraint. The only survivor besides his friend, Siggy could do nothing to stop him as he threw himself with self-destructive abandon towards the cause of stopping continuing conflict between the two worlds. Even the interventions and efforts of the Sovereigns failed to save him from himself. Within a few years, he and Leomon fell down on another battlefield, fighting yet another group of humans who exploited Digimon for their own purposes.
Broken at last, Elle seemed to waste away as slowly and painfully as she did in the timelines where she died in battle with Moon=Millenniummon. When the dust cleared and all but Siggy and her were left as mutilated corpses in the ruins of Tokyo, crippling survivor’s guilt developed into outright psychosis and shut her out of the world around her. This time, Wizardmon’s words could do nothing to rouse her; and once again Siggy could do nothing to help as she spent the rest of her life locked up in her own mind.
Leon’s passions turned on the other survivors after the battle concluded. The same sense of responsibility that had nearly turned him on the others after the early incidents in Tokyo returned with a vengeance. As the awful wreckage of the battle saw the death toll reach into the hundreds of thousands, and as Elle and Dynasmon gave up their lives to protect him and the wounded UlforceVeedramon from the final attacks of Moon=Millenniummon, he cursed out and swore off the other survivors, and the Digimon whose powers had led to this outcome. When the next war came, and the Digimon left in the other world found their lives at risk, a broken Leon ranked amongst those who fought to imprison and destroy them.
Jordan seemed to undergo the most drastic transformation of all. The feelings of responsibility and survivor’s guilt brought him low as they did Lucas, Elle and Leon in the other worlds, but seemed to drive him almost wholly mad. Disappearing into the aether mere hours after the conclusion of the disaster, Jordan returned to the world several weeks later in the visage of a man possessed by a demon of conquest; with the Digital World itself as his prize. This time, the Sovereigns were as blindsided as Siggy himself; Shrewmon was nowhere to be found, and Jordan’s conquest seemed hinged on some external force. But despite his best efforts to discover and come to terms with what had happened to Jordan and his pleas to the Sovereigns to detain him rather than kill him, the sheer body count and number of captives that Jordan racked up in his mad crusade to obtain the Digital World and its secrets twisted their hand. Siggy could do nothing as Jordan was put down by the Sovereigns, judgement rendered beneath the wrath of Baihumon.
But perhaps worst of all was how it affected Zei.
Siggy had seen for himself how badly Dirk’s death at the hands at Takada had affected her, how it transformed Dorumon and her into a rampaging engine of destruction. But when the dust cleared and she was returned to her individual form from the biomerge, things only worsened.
He found himself sitting in a hospital waiting room, frozen in place by helpless fatigue. “We won’t be able to release her for a while,” he heard someone say. He was stuck looking at the floor, unable to even look up. “Besides the fact she lost a lot of blood, we can’t risk her being left to her own devices again.”
At this point, Siggy wasn’t even certain what had happened to Zei. At this point, it was far too much to bear thinking about, possibilities too horrible to entertain. His mind, however, connected the dots: an attempt at suicide seemed like the obvious conclusion, the inevitable endpoint of their awful journey. And as before, he’d been completely helpless to stop it. Unable to help her. Unable to keep their victory alive as their worlds fell apart around them even with Moon=Millenniummon defeated.
He didn’t know how many of them had survived in this world. In a way, he didn’t want to know. Regardless of what happened, they were all doomed; whether by the hands of Moon=Millenniummon, their own demons or their sheer futile helplessness, inevitability coming rolling down like a boulder to crush them.
___
Parasimon, however, felt something else.
The visions of his past did little to set doubt in his mind. For better or worse, he’d accepted his path, resolving himself to doing what he could to make amends by fulfilling the duty he’d long claimed to carry out. Those visions did little but reassure him of that resolve.
But as those long, dark years faded away, the future was laid bare before him.
He saw himself cut down in one well-placed attack by the fully-formed abomination that emerged from Moon=Millenniummon. The single strike painlessly rendered him down into atoms and bytes of data that were scattered across the universe in an instant, and the world of that timeline went dark.
Some amount of time passed as he reeled from the shock. His senses were suddenly restored to him as he was catapulted into another world. Even before he could comprehend what this one bid for him, his senses told him all he needed to know. The all-encompassing, icy void of space was all around him, and he looked down to see the whole of the earth beyond ruined, split apart like a glass orb that had had a hammer brought down upon it. The oceans and seas had been vaporized and the atmosphere blown apart by the sheer power that had torn it asunder. Worse yet, the red-hot glowing innards of the planet spilled out into the vacuum, illuminating all kinds of nightmarish debris as it spread out across the void; and behind the ruined world, the sight of his own torn asunder was visible through a wound in space and time, the escape route of an abomination starved for destruction.
The sight was enough to make even his stomach fill with ice-cold dread, and the sheer horror sent him catapulting into another timeline. This time, he felt himself stretched out across the ground; and also felt his entire body burning as if it had been devoured by the flames of the Lord of Wrath. His vision failed him- his eyes were clouding over and all he could perceive was the light of the sun pressing down on him- but his hearing worked well enough to inform him of the situation.
“If this is a victory-”
“It’s all our fault- if only we’d given the operation more time-”
“Damn it, you can’t go now! Come on, stay with us, you bastard!”
His senses cut out, and he felt darkness overcome him and his body waste away down to nothing once more.
The experience continued, and much as before. Timeline after timeline, it was the same over and over. In some worlds, Parasimon died in an instant against Moon=Millenniummon or the monstrosity that emerged from the terrible cocoon it had formed. In others, efforts against Moon=Millenniummon cost him his life, but seemed to clinch the victory that spared both worlds. But most terrifyingly, all the ones where he survived to see what lay beyond the battle bore the same result.
Both worlds in ruin, and countless billions dead. An abomination of unfathomable power let loose on the various worlds that lay beyond theirs, leaving a pitch-black, desolate void with all but a few survivors left to starve or die of the cold.
His comrades and their futures boasted countless terrible outcomes, an unfolding kaleidoscope of death and despair. For Parasimon, however, there were only two possibilities: and the conclusion that they offered was clear.
It was him or the world.
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Izurich
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anothered
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