Two times gravity doesn’t sound like a nightmare until you try to lift your head off the dirt.
The first week was a masterclass in absolute humiliation.
We didn’t fight the Obsidian-Jade Gorilla, we fought the floor.
I had commanded the clone to maintain a constant, localized 2x gravity well over our camp.
The moment it activated, it felt like a physical blanket of lead had been dropped over my skeleton.
My blood pooled heavily in my legs, the capillaries in my eyes throbbed, and drawing a single breath felt like trying to inhale wet cement through a straw.
Gammamon spent the first two days completely flattened against the earth, letting out pathetic, high-pitched whines every time he tried to lift a single white paw.
“Victor,” he groaned, his face smushed into the mud.
“Tell the monkey to turn it off.
My strawberries are being crushed.”
“No,” I grunted, my face equally buried.
“We stay…
until we can stand.”
But within that agonizing, paralyzing pressure, I found the loophole that would save us.
Fa-Jin is generated by kinetic friction and movement.
Under intense gravity, every single microscopic muscle contraction required exponentially more force.
Just trying to drag my body an inch across the dirt generated massive amounts of kinetic energy.
I became an infinite kinetic energy generator.
Whenever a muscle tore or a bone developed a hairline fracture under the sheer weight, I dumped the rapidly generating Fa-Jin into healing us.
We tore our bodies to shreds, healed them, and tore them again.
By day five, the cycle became so continuous that we stopped sleeping entirely.
There was no point.
The Fa-Jin erased our physical fatigue the moment it peaked, leaving us trapped in a 24/7 hell loop of endless, waking pressure.
By the second week, the Gorilla instinctively dialed the gravity to 4x, and the training evolved from surviving to fighting.
We weren’t just standing anymore, we were throwing punches.
But the Gorilla was an unfeeling, relentless warden.
It swung its heavy obsidian fists with terrifying speed.
We spent days just trying to dodge, and we were failing.
BetelGammamon, while a powerhouse of close-quarters combat, was a singular blunt instrument.
In 4x gravity, his fiery Muay Thai strikes were too heavily telegraphed.
We needed versatility.
That’s when we realized Digivolution was linked directly to the frequency of the Fa-Jin I fed him.
Betel was forged from explosive, aggressive kinetic buildup.
But what if I changed the wavelength?
I focused on speed, sharp, vibrating, high-frequency kinetic energy generated by short, rapid twitches rather than heavy blows.
When I pushed it through the Digivice, the crimson light fractured into a blinding azure.
Gammamon’s form shifted into sleek, aerodynamic blue armor.
KausGammamon.
He gained the ability to manipulate the heavy air currents around us, gliding through the crushing gravity with fluid Kami-e movements and delivering slicing, high-speed kicks that the Gorilla couldn’t track.
Then, I tried the opposite.
I took a direct hit from the Gorilla as inspiration, absorbing the slow, incredibly dense, compacted kinetic energy of the blow, and funneled it straight into the Digivice.
The light turned a volatile, heavy green.
His body expanded outward into a bulky, quadrupedal, triceratops-centaur form.
WezenGammamon.
He was slow, almost immobile under the gravity, but he was a walking tank equipped with twin heavy artillery cannons on his back that fired devastating blasts of compressed energy.
We spent the rest of the week seamlessly shifting between Betel’s brawling, Kaus’s aerial strikes, and Wezen’s artillery, forcing the Gorilla onto the defensive.
At 6x gravity, our bodies hit a biological wall.
Healing wasn’t enough anymore, our bones were snapping the exact moment the Gorilla landed a punch.
To survive, our bodies were forced to adapt on a subconscious level.
We had to consciously recall that terrifying millisecond in the crater, the primal, Conqueror’s refusal to die.
Every time the Gorilla swung, I forced that “Will” to the surface.
It wasn’t a magic spell, it was a physical clenching of the spirit.
It started as a faint flicker beneath the skin, but under the constant, grueling threat of death, my skin began to instinctively coat itself in that dark, liquid-black metallic sheen.
Armament Haki.
But armor wasn’t enough.
With four fists coming at us in hyper-gravity, our eyes simply couldn’t track the movements fast enough.
I realized that reacting to physical motion was a trap.
We had to react before the motion began.
I ordered BetelGammamon to close his eyes.
I did the same.
We let the punishing gravity ground us, forcing our minds to reach out into the heavy atmosphere.
At first, it was just darkness and pain.
But slowly, the darkness gave way to a “spark”, a sharp, electric premonition of the Gorilla’s hostile intent.
Observation Haki.
The moment the Gorilla decided to throw a left hook, a phantom echo of the punch rippled through my mind a fraction of a second before it physically happened.
We learned to weave, to slip, and to counter blindly, trusting our senses over our sight.
By the end of the third week, my jade chains and KausGammamon’s blue blades were not only permanently blackened with Armament upon striking, but we were moving with a terrifying, precognitive fluidity.
The clearing was a cratered wasteland.
The Obsidian-Jade Gorilla, fully expanded to its ten-foot, titan form, roared as it brought its fists down in a crushing hammer blow.
The gravity in the camp was dialed to ten times normal, a pressure that would have instantly pulverized a Marine battleship.
To me, the air felt like a cool, gentle breeze.
I didn’t bother to dodge.
I didn’t even need to look.
My Observation Haki mapped the exact trajectory of all four fists.
I simply raised my left forearm, a dark, pitch-black sheen of Armament Haki instantly coating my skin and shirt sleeve.
The impact of the obsidian fists cracked the earth for fifty yards in every direction, throwing up a massive cloud of dust, but my arm didn’t even tremble.
I looked up at the towering beast, flashing a dry, feral grin.
“Too slow.”
I shifted the Jade Wings into a heavy broadsword, coated the edge in thick Haki, and swung upward in a vicious arc.
The blunt force of the flat blade caught the Gorilla directly under the chin, the kinetic transfer lifting its multi-ton body completely off the ground and into the heavy air.
Before it could reach the apex of its arc, a blur of crimson light materialized above it.
“My turn!” BetelGammamon yelled.
Mid-air, the red digital light shifted violently, expanding and hardening into the bulky, artillery-focused form of WezenGammamon.
The gravity well dragged him down instantly, but that was exactly what he wanted.
His twin back-cannons glowed with blinding, volatile green energy.
He fired a point-blank, concentrated energy burst that slammed into the Gorilla’s chest, rocketing the titan back down into the dirt with the force of a meteor.
As it bounced off the cratered floor, I telekinetically whipped my Haki-infused chains around its massive ankles.
I anchored my boots into the stone, twisting my hips to spin like a hammer thrower.
I dragged the beast through the dirt, uprooting the remaining trees in our camp, before releasing the chain and hurling the titan directly into the nearby cliff face.
The stone wall shattered upon impact, burying the clone under tons of rubble.
The Gorilla let out a final, distorted groan before its form destabilized, dissolving back into alchemical green mist and returning to the black disk at my hip.
The instant the clone was defeated, the 10x gravity field snapped out of existence.
The sudden release was euphoric.
The crushing weight that had been our entire world for thirty days vanished.
I felt like I was made of feathers.
I took a normal step forward and accidentally launched myself twenty feet into the air, landing softly on a high branch.
Every muscle in my body was hyper-dense, perfectly tuned, and humming with absolute, unchained power.
I dropped back down to the ground, landing silently beside WezenGammamon, who was casually stomping a boulder into dust just to feel the lack of resistance.
“We did it,” I breathed, looking at my hands.
They were calloused, scarred, but overflowing with energy.
Then, the adrenaline crashed.
We didn’t celebrate.
We didn’t cheer.
With the immediate threat gone and the gravity normalized, thirty days of continuous psychological and physical stress suddenly hit us like a tidal wave.
Gammamon devolved back into his base white form and immediately face-planted into the soft grass, snoring before he even fully hit the ground.
I managed to drag myself to my bedroll, collapsing onto the mesh, and fell into a deep, black, dreamless sleep.
We slept for a full twenty-four hours.
When I finally woke up, the sun was high over the canopy.
The camp was a disaster zone of shattered trees and craters, but I had never felt so rested in my entire life.
My body felt entirely different, lighter but impossibly durable.
I spent the next hour gathering wood and hunting down a massive Zone 3 boar that had wandered too close to the camp.
I didn’t even use the Jade Wings, a simple, Haki-coated punch to the skull dropped it instantly.
By the time Gammamon woke up, rubbing his eyes and stretching his tail, I had half the boar roasting over a massive bonfire.
“Food,” he mumbled, his eyes widening as he scrambled over to the fire.
We ate like starving wolves.
We didn’t talk much at first, just savoring the taste of roasted meat and the glorious, weightless feeling of 1x gravity.
We needed this break.
The crucible had forged us into weapons, but we needed a moment to remember we were still people or, at least, a person and a Digimon.
As the sun began to set, casting long orange shadows across our ruined camp, I pulled out my scrap of slate and a piece of charcoal.
“Alright,” I said, leaning back against a log.
“The tutorial is over.
We have the Gorilla, which means we have our Tank.
But the rest of our slots are pretty empty of powerful beasts.”
I tapped the charcoal against the slate.
“We know we need a flyer for our transport.
Aerial dominance is non-negotiable.
And then …”
“A sniper,” Gammamon piped up, tearing off a piece of meat.
“Something that can help us from long range.”
“Right.
A sniper,” Something like that could help us with long distance recon and crowd control if used properly.
“That covers our long and mid-range destructive power.
But that’s only three slots.
Any ideas?”
Gammamon scratched his head.
“What about that giant toad that spit acid?”
“Too gross, and its mobility was garbage,” I countered.
“What about the six-legged panther we saw?”
“Too fragile.
The Gorilla would have squashed it.”
We sat in silence for a moment, staring at the fire.
We had observed a lot of monsters, but deciding which ones had the right synergy for the Grand Line was difficult.
The truth was, we were completely unsure of what our final lineup should look like.
“We don’t have to figure it all out tonight,” I finally said, tossing the slate aside.
“We’ll explore Zone 1 and 2 until we find what we need.
For now, we need a test target.
Something to prove the gravity training actually worked outside of this camp.”
Gammamon’s yellow eyes narrowed, a competitive spark igniting in them.
“I want the spider.
The Widow-Maker.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“The one that nearly took our heads off?
Why?”
“Because it’s a hunter not a fighter,” Gammamon grumbled, crossing his arms over his chest.
“It doesn’t fight face-to-face.
It hides in the dark and uses tricks, invisible strings to trap things that are stronger than it.” He held up his small white paw, turning it a polished, metallic black.
“Plus…
if our new haki can break its strongest thread, we’ll know for sure we’re ready for anything else.”
I looked at him, impressed by the tactical, prideful logic.
It was a far cry from the Digimon who just wanted to eat strawberries.
“The Widow-Maker it is,” I said, a slow, dark smile spreading across my face.
“But we aren’t going to sneak up on it.
We’re going to use its own traps against it.”
I quickly sketched out a tactical formation in the dirt.
“The spider relies on predicting movement and setting invisible snares.
So, I’m going to walk right through its front door and trigger every trap it has.
I’ll be the bait.”
Gammamon looked at the map, then at me.
“But it will try to cut your head off.”
“It’ll try,” I corrected, tapping my Haki-blackened knuckles against the dirt.
“While it’s focused on trying to slice through my neck, you’ll be set up a quarter-mile away in your Wezen form.
The moment it reveals itself to execute me…
you turn it to ash.”
Gammamon’s grin matched mine, showing a row of sharp, carnivorous teeth.
“I like this plan.”
The next day Zone 2 didn’t feel oppressive anymore.
As we walked past the invisible border, the “Atmospheric Wall” of Haki still existed, pressing down on the environment.
But this time, we weren’t suffocating under it.
We were pushing our own dense, unyielding pressure back.
The apex predators hiding in the brush didn’t stalk us, they sensed the violent Will rolling off us and scrambled out of our way.
We navigated the dense redwood canopy in total silence until we reached the exact clearing we had fled from a month ago.
“Hold position here,” I whispered, patting KausGammamon, who had glided us up to a high ridge overlooking the spider’s territory.
“Shift to Wezen and wait for my signal.
Don’t fire until it’s locked onto me.”
He nodded, the blue light shifting into heavy green as the massive artillery form took shape, his cannons tracking the canopy below.
I dropped down into the center of the clearing.
I didn’t hide my presence.
I snapped dry twigs under my heavy boots.
I whistled a tuneless, annoying melody that echoed through the ancient trees.
High above, nestled perfectly in the shadows of the redwood bark, the Silken Widow-Maker sensed the prey.
It didn’t hesitate.
Recognizing me from a month ago, it dropped a single, nearly invisible, Haki-coated thread directly across my path at neck-height.
A month ago, I wouldn’t have seen it until my head was already rolling in the dirt.
Today, my Observation Haki practically screamed the thread’s exact molecular location into my brain.
I could feel the tension of the silk, the hostile intent of the spider pulling it taut.
I didn’t stop walking.
I didn’t duck.
I stepped forward, purposely allowing the lethal thread to catch me right across the throat.
In the microsecond before contact, the skin of my neck flashed a brilliant, polished metallic black.
SNAP.
The Haki-coated thread, able to slice through the steel mast of a galleon, shattered against my throat like a brittle piece of dry pasta.
In the canopy, the massive spider froze, its eight eyes locking onto me in sheer, unadulterated terror.
The feedback from the shattered Haki thread told it everything it needed to know.
It realized its fatal mistake.
It realized it was no longer the hunter.
I looked up slowly, finding the spider perfectly hidden in the shadows, and flashed a dark, feral smile.
I pointed a single finger directly at its head.
“Light it up.”
From a quarter-mile away, nestled on the ridge, WezenGammamon’s twin cannons roared to life.
A blinding beam of highly compressed, green artillery tore through the forest.
It was a shot packing enough destructive force to rip straight through the reinforced hull of a Marine Headquarters warship and incinerate the Commodore inside.
The emerald beam atomized the redwood trunk, the spider’s invisible web, and the canopy above in a deafening, cataclysmic explosion.
The hunters had returned to the Grand Line.
Word Count: 2654
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