As the gunfire-esque sound split the air and shook his eardrums, Dante stopped in his tracks, falling behind Rubani. 

The child hadn’t noticed the two of them yet. Dante, however, was quick to notice the glint of silver that suddenly appeared next to him as the ground shook slightly, as if a great deal of force had suddenly been buffered into the ground through his body. 

What was that? Where had it come from? Now that he got a chance to take a look, he could make out that it wasn’t a bullet, but some kind of knife: and judging by the fact that it was sticking out of the child’s arm, it most likely didn’t belong to him. That led to one clear conclusion-

“We’re not alone.” Dante’s voice was quiet, a whisper too low to be heard, but it carried a palpable sense of hope. Whether the child was playing or actually unable to directly hurt them, their chances of successful escape against his powers seemed slim. But a powerful distraction, if not an outright ally coming their way; that was a different question entirely. For a moment, Dante allowed himself to hope for the best. 

That sense of hope grew as the sound of increasingly heavy footsteps rang out from the clearing, shaking the ground as the impact of the dagger had done before. 

And then, in a single moment, that hope fell apart. The creature that emerged from the clearing- the blindingly fast humanoid feline- was almost laughably futile in its charge towards the child. A brief but ill-fated struggle might have provided a moment’s opening: instead, the child sidestepped the creature’s attack as if it was no more threatening or pressing a concern than a fly buzzing around his head. 

“... Let’s get out of here.” Reduced to stating the obvious at no-one in particular, Dante’s voice would have sounded entirely flat with despair if not for the undercurrent of fear that cracked it. With his sinking heart beating out in increasing panic, he began to move after Rubani again: with all hope of rescue dashed in a mere instant, the only choice that presented itself was to bank on the possibility that the child couldn’t hurt them, and all the terrifying uncertainty that it offered.
---
Unable to articulate beyond growls of frustration, Astamon clenched his jaw as he saw NecroWisemon effortlessly block his attack.

This was it, then. After years of clawing his way up from the gutter, after all he’d forced himself to endure, this was how it ended. Dying with empty hands and a mangled body, unable to defend himself. Unable to fight to his last breath.

[i]Unable to protect his allies or avenge the one who’d taken him in in the end.[/i]

The thought, and the knot of anger that it tightened where his stomach should have been, spurred him into action. The aura that he had pooled into his dagger, the dark qi that gave him his terrible might, flared into life again and enveloped his whole body. Like black fire, it hissed and ate at his myriad wounds, once again making him wish for an opportunity to disable his pain receptors: but he knew that there was no time to waste. 

An arm of qi reached out like incendiary lightning and dived down at the splinter that Astamon was skewered on. With a single fluid motion, the black energy ate through the wood, scorching either side of the wound the same dark colour as itself as the splinter broke and sent him falling gracelessly to the hard ground below. 

Failing to land on his shaky feet but preventing himself from collapsing entirely with an aura-empowered arm against the forest floor, Astamon looked around him. Besides reinforcing his body, the qi had allowed his vision to regain focus. Now, he could clearly see Baalmon and Flaremon in the clearing with him: and like him, they were struggling back to their feet, however precariously. Baalmon seemed the most stable of the two: there was no mistaking the poor state that Flaremon was in, organs barely remaining in their proper place despite his attempts to stand. 

More importantly, however, Meicrackmon was nowhere to be seen. Either she’d already passed or, more likely, she’d been the one he’d seen moving whilst impaled and had already leapt back into action. More than wanting to assume the latter, Astamon banked on it: if Meicrackmon was capable of fighting alongside him and making good on her cantankerous behaviour, maybe they could turn this around and buy time for Baalmon and Flaremon to withdraw. 

Strength returning to his legs as he pushed himself up with his arm, Astamon rose back to his feet. His gun was still broken, and now even his dagger was out of the question. All he had left was the strength in his body and whatever was left of his aura. Without a moment’s hesitation, he dived forwards-

And barely a second later, ground to a sudden stop as he got a better look at what laid beyond the mouth of the clearing. Meicrackmon was down again, seemingly for the count this time. That was chilling enough to chip into his resolve by itself, but then he dared to look to the side. 

Astamon had heard stories of these beings, but only now was he able to see one with his own eyes. At a glance, they could have passed for a Digimon akin to himself or Baalmon. But with the otherworldly sensation that filled the air about them as if they’d been superimposed onto the space that their bodies inhabited, and the way in which their outlines fizzed and hissed at a scarcely perceptible level, there was no mistaking that they were anything but: nor was there any mistaking what they actually were. Humans. Honest to God humans. 

And they’d been drawn right into the line of fire along with their doomed selves. The last obstacles to NecroWisemon’s rampage, all gathered like eggs in a basket and ready to be smashed. Thoughts of fighting to the death abandoned Astamon in that moment, and black flame swarmed and raged around the chunk of wood still stuck in his chest as he opened his mouth to scream out at them. 

But he didn’t get the chance. He felt himself burning: not from the flames, but from his core’s exposure to the world around it as it was torn from his body, his senses degenerating into a black miasma of pain and terror as his gutted body collapsed into countless fragments.
---
Dante didn’t get a chance to react as everything went to hell. Mere moments after he picked up his feet to go and help Rubani and the others, the child made his next move: at first, all he could comprehend was the feline creature seeming to disappear from his peripheral vision. And then, from the other side of that vision, something came flying towards him. 

And as it entered his body, the world around him seemed to give way. 

The sensation wasn’t quite as before, when he’d woken up. Rather than the dreary, inebriated state he’d awakened into, he now felt as if he was falling in place, completely weightless against an intangible rush from below. A strange sense of calm overcame him and his prior terror, anxiety floating away as if it were as weightless as himself. 

His senses weren’t quite absent. Whilst his vision was blurred beyond any ability to see what was happening to him, and his hearing was overwhelmed by sound of screaming winds assaulting him from every side. He felt nothing of those winds, however. Instead, as the weightlessness began to abate, he felt as if he’d been hollowed out: and as if his body and limbs were being pulled at either end by extreme force. Yet it felt nothing like it should have. Rather than stress as bones readied to break and joints threatened to dislocate, Dante only felt discomfort creep up on him as his form seemed to adopt the consistency of rubber, stretching along with the force pulling it rather than being torn apart by it. 

It was only when whatever was happening claimed his head that that discomfort blossomed into pain, and the pain back into renewed terror. This time, he couldn’t help but cry out in a harsh shriek of pain as something [i]erupted[/i] from his skull, the bone warping and taking on a new form unlike the familiar humanoid build that Dante’s body had been stretched out into. The process seemed to be nearing completion, and he felt something pour into his body as his head continued its painful distortion: Dante may well have thrown up at that very moment, if not for the seeming absence of organs to respond to the nauseating panic he was experiencing.

Of course, throwing up wasn’t all that may have happened as the sounds of wind abated to give way to the unfamiliar, roaring screams of pain that rattled his body from within.