Digimon Story: Rainbow Traverse -- Chp 22

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Sprinting towards his partner, Al managed to angle himself behind Magatsurimon. What distance remained between them shrank the moment he hopped off the ground, letting the vortex do the rest. Mag cocked her brow as Alemana made contact, glancing down at the teen as he clung to her. More and more, the wind buffeted the pair, smoke and ash funneling in alongside loose pieces of scrap from all over. No matter their size, the moment they entered the Avernian gate was the moment they disappeared inside it. Thoughts of larger appliances crashing into them raced inside Al's head. Even if Mag tried to shield them, her tailmaws were locked in place, still sinking their teeth deeper into the enemy. It was getting harder to breathe...

Then, as fast as it had come, the wind died down to tepid breeze. A pulse echoed out over the sound of crunching, slobbering. Alemana opened his eyes. There, looming over him and Magatsurimon, the hooded horror was webbed in a latticework of blood-ink, pulsing, pumping like the varicose veins of living flesh, despite the metal it was affixed to. But the source of the pulse wasn't coming from the hulking brute, no, it was coming from the tailmaws, each swelling and contracting as Mag pumped something through them, and into her victim.

"Blotting Stroke!" snickered Mag, her eyes wide as she flashed her teeth. "Thought my blood ink was just for show? You were so busy trying to fill your stomach, I thought I'd lend you a hand!"

Paralyzed on its feet, the aberrant creature trembled in place, its newfound veins twisting, squeezing into the outlines of a rampant, nine-tailed fox.

"Can you feel it now?" asked the vulpine. "My attack rewriting your sensory input? Even a corpse can feel raw pain when exposed to my brushwork!"

Clutching tightly to that leg, his cheek all but buried in the fur of her thigh as he held on for dear life, feeling the air grow thinner as the vortex roared around them. A moment later his eyes met with Magatsurimon's, and he almost shank back as he tentatively tried to touch her mind with his ("What are you looking at me like that, for..?") he asked, his tone wary, but still defensive. Just when it felt like all the air around them would be sucked away it suddenly stopped.. and he would dare to look at the hulking golem of trash and grave-dirt. "My god.." he whispered: both in awe and in slight fear at the grotesque display.. it was like her brush strokes were painting veins of poison onto the beast.

Al's inner quandary only found answers of static noise, yet as he stared back at his partner, the vulpine licked her lips. At first, she held back a giggle, shoulders bouncing in tandem, then she started to laugh; covering his eyes with a hand, she threw back her head as she cackled to the heavens, her body writhing as her tails fed more and more of her ink into the foe. Through a gap in her claws, her glowing irids bulged as she fell into a fit whose chill no fire could assuage. It was all that saved Al -- distracted as he became by the sight -- that he did not see it when the hooded horror's back burst, the color of its new veins racing into the darkness behind it as the painting of the nine-tails took to the sky; just as it had during the battle with Varamon so long ago. A shriek like that of metal being serrated and torn apart in a landslide followed in its wake, and, as the enemy digimon glitched and fragmented, it shattered into shards of digital light.

But the cloud of binary did not disperse. Instead, all of it flooded towards the center of Magatsurimon's chest, her arms spread wide as she basked in it all.

"Magnificent...!"

He didn’t see it, but he didn’t have to put two and two together to know that she had destroyed the Digivolved Gorgemon. “Okay you won! You had your fun so why don’t you go back to sleep.. what are you doing?” He asked, seeing those pixels of light then get drawn towards Magatsurimon like a magnet, drawn inside herself.

“What are you doing?! Stop!” Al said, his eyes now somehow even wider than they were before as he smacked her leg with his hand. “No, no Magatsurimon!”

The mad fox made no motion to either stop herself or Alemana. The only change that came took the form of crimson holo-screens -- blinking into existence in rapid succession till they formed a ring around Magatsurimon. On every one of them, digicode and binary scrolled at incredible speeds. Arcs of electricity surged between them, and in the foreground faded in and out a symbol Al recognized: it was the same one he'd seen in Renamon's eyes when she threatened to go berserk on Keilani, no longer green, but neon red.

"++Admin privileges transferred++" came a voice. "++Access node uplink successful. Standby for full system rewrite++"

Beyond the confines of the circle, rocks tore themselves free of the earth, rising even as their textures glitched into wireframes and back. The dimensions of the junkyard shifted, the sky turning scarlet as clouds parted to reveal a hunter's moon.

CHAPTER COMPLETED

Marching Towards Nightfall! +3 EXP +2 DP
Auto Despair! +1 EXP +2 Inspiration
Haunted by Friends! +1 EXP +1 Inspiration
Chaining the Beast! +2 EXP +1 DP
The Price of Self-Sacrifice! +1 EXP +1 DP

Total: 8 EXP, +4 DP, +3 Inspiration!