The morning air of the Calm Belt was thick and humid, but for the first time in three weeks, the clearing felt like it belonged entirely to us.
Gammamon stirred on his side of the camp, letting out a low, disgruntled groan as the first rays of dawn pierced the canopy.
He rubbed his eyes with his small white paws, his tail twitching irritably.
“I was swimming,” he mumbled, his gravelly voice thick with sleep.
“It was a sea of strawberries.
There were strawberry boats.
Why did you wake me up, Victor?”
I stood by the fire pit, rhythmically slicing a pile of wild, oversized berries with a small hunting knife.
“Because if you sleep any longer, the actual monsters on this island are going to eat our breakfast.
Go wash your face in the stream.
We have a lot of work to do today.”
Gammamon grumbled, dragging his feet toward the nearby riverbank.
When he returned, the cold water had done its job.
His yellow eyes were sharp, the lethargy replaced by a bright spark of curiosity.
He sat cross-legged across from me, popping a massive berry into his mouth.
“So,” Gammamon said, chewing thoughtfully.
“The loud lady is gone.
What are we going to do now?”
“Now,” I said, setting my knife down, “we catch up.
For the first week she was here, we could sneak off and train to our limits.
But once she started following us, we had to put the limiters on.
You couldn’t show her your digivolutions, and I couldn’t use half my arsenal.
That’s over.”
Gammamon stopped chewing, a fierce grin spreading across his reptilian face.
“Will we go all out?”
“All out,” I confirmed.
“I need to see exactly where your evolved forms stand, and I need to test my absolute limits.
Eat up.
We’re going to the secondary clearing.”
We didn’t leave a single scrap of food behind.
Once the camp was pristine, we walked to a wide, circular clearing a half-mile away.
The ground here was scorched from our early days on the island, a perfect arena for the violence we were about to unleash.
We took our positions on opposite ends of the dirt circle.
I raised my left wrist, angling the screen of the Digivice.
Taking a deep breath, I felt the reservoir of kinetic energy humming in my cells.
I placed my right index and middle fingers against the screen, channeling my stored Fa-Jin directly into the hardware.
Across the clearing, Gammamon closed his eyes.
I could feel our connection flare to life.
He drew upon his internal digital energy, mixing it with the Fa-Jin I was feeding him.
The air between us began to shimmer.
The two energies collided, sparking a brilliant explosion of crimson light.
The shockwave flattened the grass in a fifty-foot radius.
When the light faded, the small, white dinosaur was gone.
In his place stood BetelGammamon.
He was a bipedal powerhouse, standing nearly as tall as my chest.
His scales were a deep, armored crimson, rippling with dense, combat-ready muscle.
His claws were dark, metallic, and sharp enough to cut stone.
The blue scarf still hung around his neck, the only soft thing left on a creature designed purely for destruction.
A latent aura of heat radiated from his body, turning the air into a mirage.
I reached into my pocket and willed the Jade Wings into existence.
The metal flowed into two sharp, jade-green daggers connected by a short, heavy black chain, a chain that I could telekinetically extend up to five kilometers in an instant.
I picked up a loose stone from the dirt.
“Ready?”
BetelGammamon dropped into a flawless Muay Thai stance.
Small jets of flame licked across his knuckles.
I tossed the stone high into the air.
We watched it arc against the blue sky, our guards raised.
The stone hit the earth with a soft clack.
BetelGammamon vanished, the sheer explosive force of his Soru leaving a crater in the dirt.
He reappeared instantly in my guard, a flaming knee driving upward toward my chin.
I channeled Fa-Jin into my reflexes, shifting my left dagger into a broad parrying hook to catch his thigh, while snapping my right wrist forward.
The right blade morphed into a wicked karambit, slicing a shallow, sizzling gash across his ribcage.
BetelGammamon ignored the pain, pivoting mid-air to deliver a spinning back-fist coated in fire.
I ducked, the heat singeing my hair, and telekinetically whipped my chain around his planted ankle.
With a sharp tug, I swept his leg out from under him.
As he fell, he fired a compressed Air Shigan from his tail, grazing my cheek and drawing first blood before twisting like a cat to land perfectly on his feet.
That was merely the first ten seconds of a battle that would consume the entire day.
By midday, the sun was a blister in the sky, and our bodies were slick with sweat and blood.
We clashed in the center of the ruined clearing, trapped in a breathless, hyper-technical brawl.
BetelGammamon pressed the advantage in close quarters, launching a flawless flurry of Muay Thai elbows and knees.
I met him inch for inch, shifting the Jade Wings into twin trench knives for brutal infighting.
He threw a flaming left elbow aimed at my temple.
I slipped inside the strike, driving my right jade blade into his shoulder, but he used the trap to his advantage.
He clinched the back of my neck with his good arm, pulling my face down into a devastating rising knee.
I blocked it barely by crossing my jade blades over my forearms, feeling a hairline fracture radiate through my radius from the kinetic transfer.
Using the momentum, I drove the pommel of my left dagger into his floating rib with a burst of Fa-Jin.
We broke apart, gasping.
My arms were bruised black and blue beneath the cuts, and his crimson scales were chipped, bleeding warm, digital sap.
By three o’clock, sheer exhaustion had forced distance between us.
The clearing was a cratered wasteland.
From fifty yards out, BetelGammamon took to the sky using Geppo, kicking off the air to gain altitude.
“Betel Flame!” he roared, unleashing a rapid-fire volley of basketball-sized fireballs.
I planted my feet, transforming the Jade Wings into a massive, double-bladed glaive.
Gripping the center, I spun it like a helicopter rotor, batting the fireballs away into the treeline where they exploded in showers of sparks.
As the last fireball cleared, he followed up with a sweeping Rankyaku from his leg, a massive crescent of compressed air screaming down at me.
I answered in kind, channeling Fa-Jin through my black chain.
I whipped the metal forward in a cracking arc, launching my own Tempest Chain vacuum-slice.
The two projectiles collided in the center of the clearing, creating a concussive shockwave that ripped the remaining trees from their roots and sent us both skidding backward through the dirt.
As the sun began to dip below the horizon, painting the sky in bruises of purple and red, our stamina was pushed to its absolute breaking point.
From the sky, BetelGammamon dropped like an anvil.
His right leg was drawn back, coated in superheated flames and compressed air.
He snapped his leg forward, unleashing a master-level Rankyaku.
The flaming vacuum-slice was massive, tearing a trench through the earth as it bore down on me.
I had no time to dodge.
I willed the Jade Wings to shift, morphing my left dagger into a thick, brutal tower shield.
The flaming Rankyaku hit the shield.
The jade held, but the kinetic transfer was devastating.
I heard the sickening snap of my left forearm breaking under the pressure.
Pain flared like white lightning, but I bit down on my lip, tasting blood, and used the pain to focus.
I unleashed a massive Fa-Jin pulse into my legs, using Soru to close the distance instantly with my shield arm hanging uselessly.
Simultaneously, I willed the short chain to extend.
It shot out like a viper, sending the right dagger whistling toward his exposed back.
BetelGammamon sensed the chain.
Spinning in mid-air, he ignited his index finger with a blinding concentration of fire and compressed air, a flaming Shigan.
He aimed it directly at my chest to stop my advance.
I made a split-second, brutal calculation.
I didn’t dodge.
I twisted my torso, taking the flaming Shigan directly through my right shoulder.
The fiery claw pierced my flesh, the heat cauterizing the wound even as it tore through the muscle.
BetelGammamon’s eyes went wide with shock as his hand sank into my shoulder.
I had anchored him.
“Got you,” I whispered, blood spilling from my mouth.
With his arm trapped in my flesh, he couldn’t use Soru to escape.
I funneled every remaining drop of my Fa-Jin into my telekinesis.
The black chain whipped around us.
In less than a second, it extended and coiled, wrapping BetelGammamon from his neck to his ankles in unbreakable alchemical steel.
I swept his legs, crashing him into the dirt, and drove my knee into his chest to pin him.
The fight ended with BetelGammamon encased in chains, gasping for air, while I sat heavily on his chest, the edge of my right jade blade pressed lightly against his crimson throat.
For a long moment, the only sound in the ruined wasteland was our ragged breathing.
I was bleeding from my pierced shoulder, my left arm was hanging at a grotesque angle, and several ribs were fractured.
Beneath me, BetelGammamon was covered in deep lacerations from my blades, his scales chipped and broken, his chest heaving under the weight of the chains.
The flames on his knuckles flickered and died.
He looked up at me, a wild, exhausted grin on his face.
“I yield,” he rasped.
I let out a breathless laugh, the adrenaline finally crashing.
I retracted the Jade Wings, the chains shortening and dissolving into the black disk, and rolled off his chest into the dirt.
“Good fight,” I groaned, staring up at the darkening sky.
“I almost had you,” BetelGammamon panted, trying to sit up.
“If you hadn’t taken the Shigan…”
“If I hadn’t taken the Shigan, you would have taken my head off, with a kick” I admitted.
I forced myself to sit up, my vision swimming.
I reached over with my good hand and grabbed his shoulder.
I began the agonizing process of pushing Fa-Jin into both of our bodies.
The healing process was violent.
I gritted my teeth as my left forearm forcibly snapped back into place.
Beside me, BetelGammamon let out a sharp hiss as the deep cuts on his scales sealed shut and his own fractures reset.
As the healing finished, his digital energy depleted.
The crimson light washed over him, and he devolved, shrinking back down into the familiar, white form of Gammamon.
He flopped onto his back, completely spent.
“That…
hurt,” Gammamon mumbled.
“Always does,” I said, offering him a hand and pulling him to his feet.
We didn’t say much as we limped toward the river.
We stripped off our ruined, blood-soaked gear and waded into the cold, fast-moving stream.
The water washed away the dirt, the soot, and the dried blood.
The sting of the cold water against my newly healed skin was incredibly grounding.
Gammamon floated on his back, letting the current wash over his scales.
“It felt really good, Victor.
Fighting for a whole day.
Not holding back.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, scrubbing the soot from my face.
“It felt like we were finally breathing again.”
I waded out of the river, feeling the familiar hum of passive kinetic energy beginning to refill my reserves.
Walking over to our supply stash, I grabbed a fresh set of clothes.
I pulled a clean, woven canvas shirt over my head and fastened a pair of durable trousers.
They fit perfectly, a perk of having a Jade Clone patterned after a Zone 3 Silk-Spider that could weave incredible, lightweight fabrics while I slept.
I looked past the tree line, toward the dense, imposing foliage that marked the border of the inner rings.
“Your Betel form is incredible,” I said, buckling my belt.
“The integration of Muay Thai and the Rokushiki makes you a nightmare.
But we’re going to need more.”
Gammamon waded out, shaking himself dry like a dog.
“More?
We leveled half the forest.”
“And that was just Zone 4 terrain,” I pointed out.
“Zone 2 is filled with monsters that use their abilities flawlessly.
And Zone 1…
Zone 1 is a different world entirely.
We start pushing the borders tomorrow.
We take our time, map the territories, and find out what the inner beasts can really do.”
Gammamon’s tail wagged, the exhaustion already fading.
“We conquer Zone 2 next?”
“We conquer Zone 2,” I confirmed, tying the black disk of the Jade Wings to my hip.
“And then, we find out what’s hiding in that lake.”
Word Count: 2156
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