The scent of roasting meat was a thick, fatty perfume in the humid air of the clearing.
Gammamon sat by the fire, his movements methodical as he rotated a spit-roasted bird a creature from the island’s third ring that looked like a prehistoric cross between a turkey and a raptor.
He watched the fat drip into the flames with a focus that bordered on the meditative, occasionally poking the embers with a stick.
Nearby, I was in a state of perpetual motion.
I moved through a series of explosive squats, lunges, and rapid-fire shadowboxing, my muscles snapping with a percussion-like rhythm.
Every jolt of my frame, every drop of sweat that hit the forest floor, was a deposit into my kinetic energy bank.
It had been almost two months since the day I first appeared in this world.
Sixty days since we stepped into the shadows of this emerald crater.
To the world outside, it was a blip.
To us, it was a lifetime of calculated violence.
The first few days were a blur of blood and adrenaline.
We had entered this forest as amateurs and were immediately treated as prey.
Everything in this forest was trying to kill us, and for a long time, most of those things were significantly stronger than us.
Gammamon was a Rookie Digimon with more heart than experience, and I was a man who had only just received his powers, trying to find his footing in a world that didn’t believe in mercy.
We had to fight tooth and nail just to see the next sunrise.
There is a unique, brutal logic to this island, every animal within a species possesses the some supernatural ability.
If you encounter a wolf that can turn invisible, every wolf in that pack can turn invisible.
On this island, a shift in ability marks a shift in species.
This was a boon for the Jade Wings, but a nightmare for our survival.
For the first four days, we didn’t find a place to sleep, let alone something to eat.
It was a ninety-six-hour gauntlet of fighting every creature that laid eyes on us.
Tigers, wolves, oversized deer, gigantic spiders, and bees the size of cats, all of them massive, all of them lethal, and all of them ready to fight to the death.
They were relentless.
The only reason we survived was my ability to sustain us on kinetic energy and the terrifying efficiency of my healing factor.
The carnage we left behind and the amount of blood that soaked the earth in those first four days is the only reason the creatures of the outer rings don’t bother us now.
They’ve learned that the “man with chains” and his white partner are a calamity.
We didn’t just survive the outer zone, we conquered it.
That first week cost us more than I can put into words.
We discovered the true nature of our healing during a clash with a pack of Phase-Wolves, beasts twice the size of a man with the ability to flicker out of sight.
I lost my right arm protecting Gammamon from a flank attack, I felt the bone snap and the muscle tear as the alpha’s jaws closed on my shoulder.
Gammamon fared little better, losing a leg and having his tail severed twice in that single, frantic hour.
Later, we faced a swarm of Flesh-Eater Bees.
Their wings produced a low-frequency humming noise that shattered our equilibrium, making the world spin until we couldn’t stand.
Gammamon lost an eye in that swarm, and I was poisoned so many times my veins looked like black ink beneath my skin.
But the “Truck Tiger” was the true crucible.
It was a beast the size of a semi-truck with the ability to produce a sonic scream.
The first roar ruptured our eardrums and launched us nearly a mile through the canopy, shattering trees like they were toothpicks.
We almost died three times in that fight.
It was the toughest encounter we’d faced, pushing Gammamon so far past his limits that he finally figured out how to digivolve, bursting into the crimson form of BetelGammamon.
Even then, the fight was a desperate struggle of inches.
I had to fire raw kinetic beams at point-blank range and use the black chains to restrain its massive throat just to keep from being bitten in half.
By the time the tiger fell, Gammamon had devolved from sheer exhaustion.
I was lying in the dirt, my heart failing and my brain hemorrhaging from the sonic trauma.
The worst part was that even after all that, we couldn’t collect enough blood for a clone.
The BusoRenkie info dump made blood collection sound easy, but the reality was a mechanical nightmare.
To create a Jade Clone, the blades need a significant volume of fresh, untainted blood.
If I tried to absorb blood during a fight and accidentally nicked a second creature, the “data” in the blades would corrupt, and I’d have to purge the reservoir.
We tried two methods, the “Live Drain,” where I had to restrain a thrashing monster with chains while the blades siphoned its life, or the “Post-Mortem Harvest,” which required killing the beast so cleanly that the blood didn’t drain into the dirt.
After that first week of death-matches, our “army” was pathetic.
We managed to scrape together three slots, a Phase-Wolf Alpha for stealth, an Exploding-Antler Deer for area damage, and a gigantic Hummingbird that moved at subsonic speeds.
These three puppets were our only guards while we lay in the dirt, recovering from wounds that would have killed anyone else.
And it was while I was slowly dying from the tiger’s injuries that I figured out the most terrifyingly useful part of my power, Fa-Jin is a passive ability.
Even when I’m unconscious, if my body is moved even for example by Gammamon dragging my limp form, my muscles accumulate energy.
That energy then automatically triggers my healing factor.
As long as there is movement, my heart will restart.
I cannot stay dead.
Once the initial “death-march” ended, I began to study the island’s layout.
I mapped it into four distinct rings of escalating horror:
Zone 4 (The Outer Rim): This is our camp.
The creatures here are roughly equivalent to “Paradise” level pirate captains.
They have physical strength but lack Haki.
It’s the “tutorial,” though it can still kill a normal human in seconds.Zone 3 (The Wilds): This is where the Cockatrices live.
The monsters here have strength ranging from Marine HQ Captains to New World rookies.
Some possess basic Haki by instinct.
The Sonic Tiger was a high-tier resident here.Zone 2 (The Forbidden Groves): This is where the air starts to feel heavy.
The beasts here are equivalent to Marine Vice-Admirals.
They use Haki as naturally as humans use their hands.
Fighting them requires a tactical mind and a will that won’t break.Zone 1 (The Central Lake): The “Admiral” tier.
We have only seen the shadows of the things that live there.
They are titans, beasts that could likely trade blows with the likes of Akainu, and live to tell about it.
We stay away from the lake.
In two months, our growth has been explosive.
We fell into a fixed routine, exercise and drills in the morning, hunting or foraging in the afternoon, and practicing new moves in the evening.
I used my background as a former amateur boxer to train Gammamon in close-quarters efficiency, running him through sparring matches where we used no powers at all.
We also spent those months reverse-engineering the Marines’ Rokushiki techniques from my memories.
Both of us can now perform Soru (Shave).
We don’t “disappear” entirely, but we can boost our speed at certain intervals to become a blur.
Shigan (Finger Pistol) was even more successful.
Gammamon perfected it to the point where he can fire pressurized air bullets from his claws, his feet, and the tip of his tail.
He’s a more precise shot than I am.
I focused on Rankyaku (Tempest Kick).
Not only can I perform it with my legs, but I figured out how to use the Jade Wing’s chains as a conduit.
By whipping the chain at supersonic speeds, I can create a “Tempest Chain” that carries the destructive power of a vacuum-slice over massive distances.
Over these two months, I’ve filled all six of my Jade Clone slots.
I replaced the early “duds” from the first week with much more powerful specimens from the deep sections of Zone 4 and Zone 3.
I now walk with a small, stone-green army that makes us nearly untouchable in the outer rings.
As the night fell, the forest changed.
The birds began to scream.
Thousands of them rose from the canopy, blacking out the moon as they fled in a frantic wave toward the island’s center.
“Victor,” Gammamon said, his voice dropping an octave.
“Something is wrong.
They’re running away from the sea.”
I stopped my drills.
In my old world, I knew animals didn’t panic like this without a reason.
In the Calm Belt, there are no storms or shifting tides.
If the birds were abandoning the coast and heading for the dangerous Zone 1, it meant that whatever was coming from the ocean was more terrifying than the monsters at the center of the island.
“We need to check the edge,” I said.
“If something is coming, I want to see its face.”
We sprinted to the cliff’s edge.
Below us, the sapphire silence of the ocean had been replaced by a nightmare.
A humongous wave, a wall of black water 150 meters high, was screaming across the horizon, pushed by some unseen force.
“Back to camp!” I ordered.
We raced back, and I used the Jade Wings to form a dome.
I commanded the chains to weave into a tight, ten-meter basket-weave, doubling the layers and creating a reinforced floor.
We climbed inside, a small, dark sanctuary of alchemical metal.
Thirty minutes later, the wave hit.
The island groaned under a magnitude-four earthquake.
I heard the terrifying roar of the sea cresting the 250-meter cliffs.
The force shattered trees and drowned the outer rim in seconds.
Through the chains, I felt the water rushing in, two feet deep on the South Side, one foot at our camp.
But inside my dome, Gammamon and I sat in dry, silent safety.
The next morning, the island was a graveyard of driftwood and salt.
I retracted the dome, the chains snapping back into the black disk with a metallic click.
I was about to wake Gammamon when I caught a flash of orange in the branches of a shattered tree nearby.
Hanging from a thick limb was a woman.
She was wearing an orange polka-dot shirt, a dark blue tie, and a tattered Marine “Justice” coat.
Her blonde hair was a matted mess of salt and blood.
Her left arm was clearly broken, and her other limbs were bent at angles that suggested her bones had been turned to gravel by the force of the water.
She looked like a high-ranking Marine officer.
I stared at her.
Two months ago, I would have rushed over.
Now?
I saw a political disaster.
If she lived, she was a threat to our secrecy.
If she died, she was a waste of information.
I nudged Gammamon with my boot.
“Wake up, buddy,” I said, my voice cold and focused.
“We have a guest.
And she looks like she’s had a very long night.”
Word Count : 1921
For more chapters