The invisible pressure forcing us into the crater floor didn’t disappear, but in the exact millisecond the Gravity-Crag Gorilla’s fists descended, it hit a wall.
A concussive, invisible shockwave of sheer, unadulterated Will erupted from both me and BetelGammamon simultaneously.
It wasn’t a technique; it was a violent, psychic rejection of our own deaths.
The air distorted with a deafening CRACK, physically pushing the heavy atmosphere of Zone 2 away for a vital fraction of a second.
The Gorilla’s dull golden eyes widened, its downward strike freezing as the Conqueror’s wave washed over it.
In that moment of absolute clarity, the dense, suffocating air around my hands shifted.
A dark, liquid-black sheen flowed rapidly across my knuckles and the surface of my jade daggers, mirrored perfectly across BetelGammamon’s surviving claws.
Armament Haki.
We didn’t know how to wield it, but survival had forced the door open.
“NOW!” I screamed, the metallic coating vibrating with kinetic tension.
I didn’t try to stand.
I stayed on my back, funneling every drop of Fa-Jin and this newly awakened Will into the Jade Wings.
I telekinetically whipped the right dagger upward in a vicious, blinding arc.
The Haki-blackened jade sliced through the Gorilla’s descending right arm like a hot wire through wax.
The limb severed cleanly at the bicep, a geyser of thick, dark blood spraying across the dirt.
Simultaneously, BetelGammamon roared.
He drove his blackened, flaming claws directly into the left arm that was raised up.
Shigan!
The compressed digital fire, now wrapped in the impenetrable density of Armament, detonated inside the titan’s obsidian plating.
The Gorilla’s arm shattered into a dozen jagged pieces.
The beast let out a roar that physically shook the crater, stumbling backward.
It was down to two arms.
“We got him!” BetelGammamon gasped, spitting blood as he tried to push himself up on a fractured leg.
“No, we didn’t,” I choked out, my brief triumph turning to ice.
The Gorilla didn’t fall.
It planted its feet, its golden eyes burning with a terrifying focus.
Its massive, ten-foot frame began to violently shudder.
The sound of grinding rock echoed as it compacted its muscle mass, its height shrinking down to a dense, horrifying seven feet.
And from the bleeding stumps of its severed limbs, pale pink flesh erupted, hardening in seconds into fresh obsidian plates veined with glowing purple Haki.
It was smaller, denser, faster, and fully healed.
“Retreat!” I bellowed.
This wasn’t a fight anymore; it was an execution.
I gave the mental command.
From the thick brush surrounding the crater, my Vanguard clones, the Sonic Tiger, the Exploding-Antler Stag, and the Phase-Wolf, launched a suicidal charge.
The Tiger’s sonic roar slammed into the Gorilla’s flank, while the Stag detonated its antler’s point-blank against the beast’s chest.
“Return!” I yelled to BetelGammamon.
He didn’t argue.
His form dissolved into a stream of crimson data, shooting back into the Digivice on my wrist to preserve his life.
I put two fingers to my mouth and whistled.
A split second later, the jade-green blur of HoHo, the Phoenix-Peacock, banked hard out of the clouds.
I triggered Soru with my good leg, launching myself into the air just as the Gorilla ripped the Sonic Tiger clone in half.
I grabbed HoHo’s cold jade talons with my left hand.
With my right, I flicked my wrist.
The telekinetic chain shot out toward the crater floor, wrapping tightly around a heavy, bleeding mass of obsidian-plated meat lying in the dirt.
I yanked it up to me just as HoHo pulled us into a steep, vertical climb.
Below us, the Gorilla let out a shockwave roar that sheared the tops off the cedar trees, but we were already in the clouds.
The flight back to Zone 4 was agony.
Every time one of my clones was destroyed by the Gorilla, I felt a sickening tug in my gut as my Fa-Jin reserves were siphoned to automatically repair them, only for them to be destroyed again.
By the time we crossed the border out of Zone 2, my energy was critically low, and the clones had shattered completely, returning to the black disk.
We crash-landed in the center of our camp.
HoHo dissolved back into the disk, and I hit the dirt hard, my dislocated right shoulder screaming.
Gammamon materialized beside me, clutching his shattered ribs, looking pale and utterly spent.
For a long time, the only sound was our ragged, wet breathing.
“We…
we’re insects, Victor,” Gammamon finally whispered, staring at the canopy.
“We threw everything we had at it, and it just grew its arms back and got stronger.
How are we supposed to beat things like that?”
I groaned, rolling onto my back.
My chest felt like it had been run over by a train.
“We can’t.
Not as we are now.
Our stats are too low.”
“So what do we do?
Stay in Zone 4 forever?”
I gritted my teeth, forcing myself into a sitting position.
I reached over to the heavy, bloody bundle I had dragged back with the chains.
“No,” I said, a dark, bruised smile cracking my face.
“We do what any self-respecting gamer does when the boss is too hard.
We grind.”
I pulled back the chain, revealing the Gorilla’s severed upper arm.
It was massive, heavy as an anvil, covered in those impenetrable obsidian plates.
Gammamon’s jaw dropped.
“You…
you stole its arm?!”
“I didn’t want to leave empty-handed,” I wheezed.
“Look at it, buddy.
There’s more than enough blood in this chunk of meat to forge a clone.
We couldn’t beat the master, so we brought the master home with us.”
Gammamon blinked, wincing as he shifted.
“But if it’s our clone, it fights for us.
How does that help us beat the real one?”
“Have you ever seen Dragon Ball Z?” I asked.
“What’s a Dragon Ball Z?”
“Never mind.
The point is the ‘Gravity Chamber’ method.
If we can successfully forge this clone, we don’t use it to fight our battles.
We use it to train.
We command the clone to use its Gravity Well on us right here in camp.
We train under two times gravity, then three, then four.
We break our bodies under its weight, and we use my Fa-Jin to heal the damage instantly.
We force our muscles and our Haki to adapt to the pressure of Zone 2 without actually being in danger.”
Gammamon’s yellow eyes widened as the realization hit him.
“We make our own Zone 2!”
“Exactly,” I said.
“But first, we have to forge the bastard.”
I gripped one of the Jade Wing daggers with my good hand and plunged it deep into the severed arm.
Instantly, the jade began to glow with a sickly, pulsing green light as it drank the blood.
I braced myself, instinctively opening the floodgates to transfer my kinetic energy into the weapon to fuel the alchemical process.
I expected a drain.
I didn’t expect a vacuum.
The moment the transfer started, my Fa-Jin reserves vanished.
Completely.
It was like pulling the plug on a bathtub.
The energy required to forge a Haki-infused, Vice-Admiral tier beast was astronomical.
My vision blurred.
A cold, terrifying emptiness settled into my bones.
For the first time since I woke up on this island, my tank was at absolute zero.
And the blades were still thirsty.
With no Fa-Jin left, the Jade Wings began ripping raw physical stamina directly from my cells.
My heart fluttered, and black spots danced in my eyes.
“Victor!” Gammamon yelled, seeing me go pale.
“Energy!” I gasped, my voice barely a squeak.
“I need…
friction.
Movement!”
I forced myself up.
It was the most agonizing thing I’ve ever done.
With cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder, I started doing frantic, uncoordinated jumping jacks.
“One!
Two!
Three!” I grunted, tears of pain leaking from my eyes as my shoulder joint ground against itself.
I started shadowboxing the air with my left hand, hopping side to side like a deranged rabbit.
“Come on, physics, work with me!”
“I’ll help!” Gammamon shouted.
He hobbled over, grabbed my head with both paws, and started violently shaking it back and forth.
“Stop shaking my brain!” I yelled, batting him away mid-squat.
“You’re giving me a concussion!”
“I’m generating kinetic friction!” he argued defensively, hopping on his good leg.
“Move faster!”
It was a ridiculous, pathetic sight two severely injured, bleeding idiots doing aggressive aerobics in the middle of a jungle clearing.
But as I pushed through the blinding agony, forcing my muscles to contract and heat up, I felt the faintest trickle of Fa-Jin return.
The Jade Wings instantly sucked it away.
I kept moving.
Squats.
High knees.
Shadowboxing.
Blood pounded in my ears.
I was operating on pure, desperate adrenaline.
Just as my knees gave out and I collapsed face-first into the dirt, a sharp, crystalline CLICK echoed clearly in the center of my mind.
I looked up, panting like a dying dog.
The severed arm was gone, reduced to a pile of fine, gray dust.
“We did it,” Gammamon cheered weakly, collapsing next to me.
“We got the gravity monkey.”
“Yeah,” I wheezed, staring at the sky.
“Let’s…
let’s see him.”
I tapped the black disk.
“Summon: Gorilla.”
Nothing happened.
I tapped it again.
Still nothing.
I stared at the disk, the realization hitting me like a wet towel.
“I’m completely empty.
I don’t even have enough kinetic energy left to summon the damn thing.”
Gammamon looked at me, a mischievous glint returning to his tired eyes.
He slowly reached his paws out toward my head.
“Touch my head again,” I warned, my voice raspy and deadpan, “and I swear to God, I’m finding out what a Digimon clone looks like.”
He quickly pulled his paws back.
“Alright,” I sighed, groaning as I forced myself back onto my feet.
“The grind starts now.”
I spent the next twenty minutes doing the most miserable, slow-motion yoga and stretches of my life, dragging my broken body through the motions just to generate a baseline of kinetic energy.
The moment I had enough, I didn’t summon the clone.
I grabbed Gammamon’s shoulder and flushed the Fa-Jin into his system, listening to the crunch of his ribs snapping back into place.
Then, I did it for myself.
My shoulder popped back into the socket with a sickening crack, and I breathed a full, pain-free breath for the first time in hours.
I did a quick sprint around the clearing, letting the wind resistance and friction top off a fraction of my tank.
I walked back to the center of the camp, Gammamon standing eagerly by my side.
I tapped the disk.
The air in the clearing suddenly grew heavy.
The light warped, and a massive, hulking figure materialized from the alchemical green mist.
It was the Obsidian-Jade Gorilla.
It stood seven feet tall, carved not from the mossy green stone of my other clones, but from pitch-black, polished obsidian.
Faint, purple veins of Haki-infused energy pulsed lazily beneath its rocky skin.
It didn’t move, but just standing near it made the hair on my arms stand up.
We stared up at our new, terrifying personal trainer in absolute awe.
“Well,” I said, a genuine, excited smile breaking across my face as I cracked my knuckles.
“Welcome to the Gravity Chamber, buddy.
Let’s get to work.”
Word Count: 1889
For more chapters