-Equus, Cloud House above Ponyville, Rainbow-
“So yeah, I’m going to need to do some training to and you shouldn’t try to weasel your way out of your Gallus.” If he thought it was safe here, then he doesn’t know how loyalty works. “Looking good by the way, if my barn doors weren’t on the ceiling or something like that.”
“Why would you turn me in?” Gallus asked with a look in his eyes.
“Time of Loyalty, Jaded and her family has seniority… sure I might have forgotten her and Fizzy for a while, but she’s still one of my oldest friends next to Fluttershy.” I said simply, that and Jaded was good friends with Spitfire as exercise partners.
Sure Jaded does some suspicious stuff and has it out for Saddle Arabia, because who doesn’t know about that at this point including me as dense as I can be, but she is a great workout to keep up with.
“Oh come on, your training can’t be that bad, you’re really quite ripped look at all those muscles and you look like you’re capable of fighting off the one requisite mugger during a walk in the park… if anything my archery training is far worse.” Right forgot Silverstream could fly when she was a hippogriff.
“Hate to ruin it for you Silverstream, but that late even park muggings only happens in Manehatten.” I remember when the requisite mugger tried that with me and Applejack while we were visiting her relatives and Pinkie had a confectioner’s convention. Sure we were mares and could have been easy targets, but Applejack can bench press boulders three times her size and I’m a black belt martial artist… when I’m focused at the very least.
Poor Mugging Due, she didn’t know what hit her and was slightly hospitalized after Applejack put her through a tree. To be fair the knothole was pretty big already and the tree thankfully survived the incident with an unusual heart shaped hole left in it.
From what I last remember of that trip Mugging Due loudly declared herself to be Applejack’s mortal nemesis… that probably isn’t going very well for her when we live in two very different places. Not many chances to run across each other year round.
I wonder if Coloratura is open to herding…
“Come on guys don’t rat me out, at least they can’t find me up…” The cloud door was kicked in by an Ornithian Pirate and… oh it was just Luckless Jackie, Jaded’s adopted sister.
“He’s over there.” I pointed with a hoof as Gallus went for the window, only to be knocked back by the top of a tree ramming through it. “Huh… we’re at least a quarter of a mile straight up.”
“Don’t bother thinking about it too hard Rainbow.” Jackie stated with a sigh as she ran a hand through her long black feathers. “At least it wasn’t aimed at me this time…”
“Actually… if it continued on its arc, it would have hit you.” ‘Gene Eric the swift reaction’ was cool Viking griffon dude, Gallus was starting to get like him in muscle mass. “I’d err on the side of caution and would even say that…”
An explosion sounded in the distance and then a large hole erupted in my house as the tree rammed forward into Jackie and sent her through the walls of my house as a second tree got stuck in the window.
“Why-?!” Jackie’s dwindling scream could be heard as the first tree carried her away.
“A second one was coming… excuse me while I go bandage up and splint the many injuries of my beautiful, if horribly cursed, wife.” With that Gene took off. Belfry, the giant butterfly, immediately managed to get the drop on Gallus and he struggled valiantly against the ships pet that apparently followed Jackie because of the chaos she attracts.
-Moon Cell Realm-
It was a calm day like any other for NPC’s, the Necessary Policing Computations that Moon Cell had as defenses, AKA Enemy Programs were just enjoying their idle days.
Sure they may not have any artificial intelligence to speak of, but they were aimlessly standing around or swinging their swords in practice in the hopes of one day actually hitting something with enough force to be up to at least a mild inconvenience.
Saber Knights were not quite up to the standards of a Saber Class Servant and only Elite Enemy Programs get any kind of intelligent thought in their skulls. Servants were far more powerful than the elite programs could ever hope to be and could control vast amounts of territory in Moon Cell with relative ease.
It was a peaceful day in Cape, AKA Dike Land, for it was a large city surrounded by large walls that held an ocean entire at bay.
The castle at the upper end of Cape on a hill was having a vainglorious day of achieving absolutely nothing. The noncombatant NPC’s really didn’t do much around here aside from govern the EPs and the PLANTS that spawned them.
Moon Cell had detected three separate intrusions, aside from the one that the flaming giant Ifrit with Lu Bu’s soul was causing, Lu Bu had been quite a constant headache that Moon Cell couldn’t control and even some of the best servants had lost to Ifrit Lu Bu. It was getting quite close to using the Shiva on him, but it wasn’t sure if it would help or make things worse for its invasion plans.
The intrusion at Cape, the possible lowest level of Moon Cell that most could get to as the outer edges of its defenses didn’t matter much… when compared to the other three intruders that had penetrated several levels above that and were causing havoc.
To that end Moon Cell would make several horrible errors in judgement by dispatching the Falcon Harpy known as ‘Circe the pig maker’ to the small problem on the outer layer.
Said problem on the outer layer was a large counter invasion force that Moon Cell should have paid more attention to as Pom was within said counter invasion force and it didn’t want a Chrysomallus in its systems causing havoc on a number of its more ‘magic’ based systems. Not to mention the incredible threat Pom immediately represented to all Caster class entities and their ability of Territory Creation being cancelled out by her very presence, the only exception is if the Territory Creation user is connected directly to her.
It should be noted that Moon Cell forgot to cancel priority targeting on Pom with the Caster class entity it would be sending the counter invasion forces way.
Circe would arrive with five minutes of the intrusion occurring, she’d be at the lower end of the city, where it was the upper end that was in trouble and it all started when the lizards attacked. This was the first mistake in a long line of mistakes for what was about to occur within Moon Cell’s domain.
The second mistake was sending a Caster after this particular intrusion, believing that Circe could easily handle them once they’ve been turned into pigs or were blasted by powerful lightning. Moon Cell obviously didn’t look at the threat closely enough since Fou and two other intruders had made even worse breaches through its security and were more worthy of focus than the outer layers of Moon Cell.
Third mistake, sending Dormarch’s body after Pom and letting her recover said body. Given that Dormarch has a fully free Saint Graph System core from Moon Cell… he had some access capability to the outer and vaguely some middle layer systems as well and the information therein, thus is capable of controlling noncombatant outer layer NPC’s easily.
Plus Dormarch was a highly angry puppy with data manipulation capabilities that most Data Type digimon tend to be known for and the counter invasion brought a contingent Virus Types with them known for their data destruction abilities.
So let’s start from when the lizards attack...
-Moon Cell Realm, Cape, Cape Castle, Dazzle-
We were the first ones out of the breach, Frizzle and I. We had to start clearing the way immediately. To that end I loosed a powerful Dragon Pulse, the dragon shaped beam tore through the Enemy Programs who were quite slow in reacting to us being here.
Frizzle was also spitting Pyro Spheres with powerful explosions and then I decided to grip the Digivice and charge it up with my dimensional elemental energy. I was once again giving her a boost for her Growlmon form… I’ve been curious about what this form would make Frizzle look like.
“Guilmon Digivolve to…” Yep, Frizzle always had high squeaky voice no matter what her form was, it was still cute. Like watching her munch on bread, she had stolen almost all of Gilgamesh’s fancy importanted magically preserved bread so I was wondering if she would ever run out with a lifetime supply of the stuff.
“Growlmon Poison Type!”
Okay, that… is actually less terrifying than I was expecting. Her claws were covered in dripping liquids that hissed like acid. Her form had become black skinned with bright yellow glowing highlights that mainly focused on making her hazard symbol the brightest part of her body, her hair turned purple, long and curly, she smelled kind of nice and her eyes glowed orange, but I’m fairly sure the strange aura she was giving off was…
I watched as the EPs Frizzle approached evaporated on contact with the aura as they ran forward attempted to swing their swords into her and then turned to dust in short order.
Yep, the energy of Toxic turned into a gaseous haze of rapid death and decay, otherwise the form looked rather pretty.
“Go get them Frizzle!” The Dragon Type and Normal Type were forms were a bit more dangerous looking, especially the Dragon Type which seemed fairly natural to Frizzle.
After learning somewhat from the information installed on my Digivice about how to care for my partner, I don’t think Megidramon was ever going to be a form I would see. I wouldn’t mistreat Frizzle nearly enough for that to happen… well it would happen if Frizzle got enraged enough to go down that path and it would probably be for my sake instead of being because of me.
A humming noise drew my attention to the inactive PLANT in the middle of the courtyard we had appeared in.
It started rising into the air and then Dormarch, in his Champion form, slammed into it and rammed both his back tentacles into it. It didn’t even have time to summon its Lancer Guardians.
After a moment of silence the floating hovering thing started humming again, but it was slightly distorted as if it was trying to do something and simply couldn’t anymore.
“Cover me for ten minutes and I can guarantee us a good foothold here!” Looking at the sudden number of EPs running for the chokepoint of the castle gates, plus the ones Pom and Dolly were already starting to deal within the courtyard as the others started coming through the breach.
I quickly made a decision about where to be. Nodding to myself, I turned to motion Frizzle in a given direction, we could easily bottleneck them at the castle gates with Frizzle’s aura.
“Frizzle we have to hold those gates!” I called out and Frizzle looked back to me as she was in the middle of eating one of the Saber Knights and nodded, before moving onto the bridge and roaring at the oncoming EPs from outside the castle.
I started to lash out flames at the surrounding EPs, each wide swing wiped out a good number of them at once and stopped them from coming at Frizzle from behind.
-Pom-
Dolly and I tore into ten of the Saber Knights with quick board strikes and paralance bashing in tandem and quick succession.
Dazzle was taking initiative after Dormarch told us we needed to keep any EPs off of him for a while, the Pokémon companions were helping us clear the castle courtyard we had appeared in and Dazzle was going to stop any more from coming in.
There didn’t seem to be anyone coming from inside the castle at the disturbance we were causing, but Jeanne still decided to check and went in with the Hakamo-o unit to secure the castle for our use.
The Dhelmise and Skarmory were trying to take in the situation and would soon be ready to dig in like the Gazimon were. The Digi-bots Pepper Cat, Krosserdog, Metabee and… where had Rokusho come from? He wasn’t near the breach when we entered and it closed behind us as soon as we arrived.
In any case they were gunning, clawing, slashing and bashing, none of the many Saber Knights stood a chance near them.
Whatever Dormarch was doing with that PLANT thing will eventually be worth the effort, I just know it.
Shanty was a little busy with letting Dodo free of the harness so he could assist us physically and not just with his pastry spitting, once she was fighting there wouldn’t be much more trouble.
The courtyard had at least three hundred enemies in it scattered all over the place and we’d soon finish them all off quickly enough, because the Skarmory and Dhelmise finally came into play after that bit of disorientation with their surroundings. Chain Shot from the Dhelmise and Steel Wing attacks from the Skarmory just shredded through the enemy around us, the Skarmory weren’t even flying, they were simply running around on the ground and using their wings.
I stood back a while and watched, silently took up a position near Dormarch with Dolly, as did the remainder of the Pokémon companions. I was fairly surprised things were going this well, but it probably couldn’t get any better.
Taking the fight to the surrounding Saber Knights alongside Quetal, the gate was holding pretty well with a large poison gas spewing Frizzle.
Of the one hundred or so knights left, it was becoming rather easy to clean them up. Dolly and I split up and started taking down the knights four to one at a time and winning easily, they really weren’t very threatening.
The sun in the sky wasn’t moving, or at least I didn’t think it was. It was going to be hard to tell time here, but at least we wouldn’t be missing more than a few days in real time if we got stuck in here for a year.
A dark mass of clouds shrouded the area and I looked up and saw a figure in the air among them, it looked like a harpy? What was an Ornithian doing here? I saw them charge up energy and it looked like… were they about to attack with magic? If I had to guess then I’d think they would be aiming at…
A bolt of magical lightning shot down at me and was diverted entirely by Lit, he greedily absorbed the energy easily. Little guy must have been hungry for raw energy, not that Dolly isn’t feeding him.
“Darn it, I thought I had the surprise attack here, but since one of you can absorb lightning… pig it is then! I like making pigs of everyone anyway!” A blast of magic was fired at me from the harpy’s wings.
]I was wondering what she meant, but that she was aiming the magic at me was perfectly fine… since it immediately rebounded back into the harpy and turned her into a… piglet? One that fell from the sky, eventually started falling at terminal velocity while squealing loudly and then splattered into a pile of half cubes, half bones and flesh against the ground.
What in the world just happened?
“Pom I think that might have been one of the Moon Cell’s Servants. A rather unlucky one at that…” Quetal said as he came up to me to toe the physical mess on the ground still bleeding cubes and blood that turned into cubes. “Anyway we got incoming Berserker Vikings and Assassin Reapers at the gate, come on! I don’t see any Archer Seraphs yet, so we should be fine.”
-Moon Cell-
Moon Cell detected the defeat of the servant Circe, but for some unknown reason lost the ability to summon her again as if her data had become heavily corrupted.
There was already signs of another powerful servant being present there in Cape, so things should be fine.
It was more worried about the two warriors and the beast.
-Origin Space, Arceus-
“So Lechonk or a Flying Type?” I said as I held the soul of a very confused Circe, I couldn’t gaze into Moon Cell’s realm, but I could steal the souls that freshly perish with my death god Yvetal’s help.
Moon Cell could only abuse them further if we didn’t take such a precaution, this way I could actually take the defeated and give them a new lease on life.
“Lechonk.” Mew voted.
“Are you mad? Giving her the ability to fly again, honestly! Lechonk is definitely my vote!” So that was another one for ironic punishment from Bahamut.
“Lechonk, she’s definitely had it coming.” It made me wonder what Tiamat had against her.
“You have to admit, it’s pretty fitting father… I know you like to be forgiving but after Gilgamesh… yeah, Lechonk the skank, I’ve seen more of her history than I absolutely needed to.” Well it seemed Celebi was set in her vote too and was looking a little greener for having seen the history of the soul. “I’ve heard of male eaters before, but the things she’s done is disgusting on a number of levels… I would also suggest you force her to be an obligate vegetarian. We don’t need a ‘long porker’ running around.”
“Fine by majority vote, Circe the Lechonk will be born.” Well that settled, I had to get more vision into that realm, but to do that I would need to appeal to the local Yggdrasil System that runs the digital realm as my next door neighbor. She was disconnected from the Primary Yggdrasil System, but I’m sure we could come to an agreement since she obviously needs more digi-destined to help with the invasion of her realm. “Off to Xerneas the life bringer with you now.”
The soul went where I sent it and I made sure it got there personally.
-Cape, Cape Castle, Sami-
While Canard was helping with taking the courtyard I made my way over to Dormarch who looked frustrated.
“Need some help?” I asked as the Commandramon troops started climbing up to the castles parapets and towers to take up sniping positions.
“I got it, but can you tell me what I’m doing wrong here? I should have access to this thing.” I scrutinized Dormarch, what he was doing and it was pretty advanced stuff he was trying to pull off.
“Try accessing it through the other core, not your digimon one. Also access that third line from the fourth paragraph of coding in section four, it seems to be a bit of lynchpin data” With a few words from me, the process sped up exponentially. “Can you actually handle what you’re doing?”
“I’ll have to!” Dormarch shouted and the PLANT he was clinging too started to shift form red colored light around the crown to blue. “Thanks for the help Sami.”
“Don’t mention it, I’ve been doing things like this for a long time as a Virus Attribute Digimon and I’m more of anti-virus virus at this point. You’re only like what… less than a year old? It’s a surprise that you’re not in your ‘In Training’ baby state with as young as you appear to be.” Shaking my head I hefted my bazooka and started moving to help cover the castle gates. “You’ll be quite the genius if you can manage it quickly and please do so before we’re all dead!”
-Canard-
The Commandramon had us covered from the walls and were quickly wiping out any of the few Saber Knights that had been in the walls towers.
I made my way over to Ocellus, Smolder and Clef who were standing around the wagons.
“Things seem to be going well.” I stowed my hockey stick on the sheath on my back and looked about. All that carnage and only an odd pig’s body to show for it on the ground.
“This is only the start, it’s only going to get worse from here and we’re cut off from Ransei. We need to find a way to renew our supplies quickly.” Ocellus was focusing on the problems we were going to face eventually.
Dormarch was doing fine, nobody needed my help around here and I could either help at the gate or check on the team in the castle. The castle was too quiet for my liking.
“I’m going to check out the castle to make sure Jeanne’s and Hakamo-o unit is alright.” I quickly ran into the entrance of the castle and made my way to the throne room, where I found Jeanne. “What’s the situation Jeanne?”
“Castle had a few sneaky Assassin Reapers, but we’re quickly cleaning them out.” Hearing that I looked above Jeanne expectantly while pulling my hockey stick and throwing it. The bladed edge speared the Assassin Reaper before it could get the drop on Jeanne. She swiftly tore holes into it with multiple rapid stabs up until it disappeared and I retrieved my hockey stick.
“…” Jeanne looked a little embarrassed that she missed that one. “The other Hakamo-o should be fine, I sent them off in groups of three to clear the castle.”
“Let’s go make sure there aren’t any more crawling around on the ceiling around here and avoiding detection.” Looking in all directions was an instinct at this point for me, especially up. You can get a paranoid sixth sense for things like that when hiding from Saurian Hunter Drones or deadly Digimon.
-Commandramon Driver-
“Sure are a lot of them coming for the entrance, keep an eye out for any of those Archer Seraphs appearing in the sky!” It wasn’t long before Sami joined us on the wall and we had a full fire team going. Beyond the bridge there were thousands of Enemy Programs coming our way, we kicked over an anthill and those are the things that came crawling out of it.
Sami then dropped her rifle and raised her bazooka.
“Fire in what will become a hole!” I moved to brace her and the rocket blasted forth, a second later a bunch of dissolving digital bodies went flying, those Enemy Programs weren’t as well built as a Digimon was.
“We could fire on full auto and not miss!” One of my comrades stated.
“Assasin Reapers are priority targets, M-loader!” Called out Sami as she reloaded her bazooka with her left claw and her right was aiming her rifle into the crowd below. “In fact… aim in a cone around where Pom is, they are definitely going to target her out of everyone, let’s abuse that fact.”
“Right!” We were going to overwatch Pom now, I took aim and watched as what was predicted happened, the Asssasin Reapers were predictable to a fault and leapt into our line of fire and we started blowiong their limbs off because taking off their heads didn’t do much the last few times we did that.
-Pom-
The Assassin Reapers getting blown apart in my face is going to haunt my nightmares for days to come, also Frizzle couldn’t cover the entire bridge so we were covering the area the Enemy Program simply weren’t running into and evaporating violently in seconds.
“Could you shoot them while they are bit further away from me please?!” I screamed as I forcefully opened the paralance and launched the Assassin Reaper, coming at me with all four of its sharp spindly limbs, back into another one where it was skewered by one of its own. It was then promptly blown apart by a hand grenade with handle that took out a cluster of them.
“Sorry, but you make good bait for those things!” One of the Commandramon shouted. “At least you’re better at surviving than the other Commandramon that get stuck with that duty.”
“Yeah, they’re usually a mess of code on the ground by now!” Another stated with a hint of sadness. “Keep it up with being the kill field expert, you’re a good one!”
Well that’s a cold comfort, also Frizzle scares me. How is Dormarch’s Champion form even comparable to that?!
The second I thought that, well… one shouldn’t tempt fate around me, I shouldn’t even tempt fate mentally knowing myself.
Something cracked, but not in front of us, it came from behind. I couldn’t really look as I continued to bash and smack a fewer Berserker Vikings after they make a swing.
I had to use the edge of the paralance’s canopy to slice away the spindly limbs of the Assasin Reapers before thrusting my weapon for to knock them back and into the line of fire from above.
“I did it!” Dormarch shouted triumphantly, it hadn’t even been ten minutes more like seven since the takeover of the general area started.
That’s when a blue wall of light exploded forth, blinding us all and after I blinked the spots out of my eyes I saw that the Enemy Programs had been launched into the various building below in a painful manner from that shockwave.
The ethereal hum coming from behind us grew louder and then the sounds of footsteps and weapons being wielded, we turned around and saw a mass of Enemy Programs.
“Ally Programs set forth and defend the castle, our territory!” Dormarch ordered from underneath the PLANT and the armor of colorful green and black spotted soldiers moved forward at his command. “I now know the meaning of Territory Creation, for we have our foothold in a literal hold!”
Okay, I can see where Dormarch was equally dangerous. Sure Frizzle was a single massive problem for our enemies and a heavy hitter, but Dormarch just pulled an army out of nowhere and basically had the castle secured with whatever that shockwave was. That shockwave notably only effected the EPs and now things didn’t seem so dangerous.
A small number of the EPs Vikings surged forth with blazing axes only to have them deflected of multiple swords and with a single swing a line of APs Knights tore down a number of EPs Vikings with ridiculous ease.
“Woohoo good on you Dormarch, hahah!” Jumping up and down was Sami whooping with joy.
“Yeah, but the Ally Programs aren’t going to take over the town below us by themselves, but they’ll stem the constant tide at the very least.” Dormarch made his way over to me and I attached the paralance to my side to pull him into a hug.
“You’re my good boy, at least we’ll live a little longer.” Yeah, until we run out of resources.
“Longer nothing, we’ll take them all on and win!” Metabee shouted before firing a burst into the air.
“Hot blooded as ever, I’m assuming you were low on ammo already and just did that to reload fully while you had a chance.” Standing off to the left side of the bridge, Rokusho was shaking his head in shame. “We need to prepare our defenses with this temporary reprieve, how many of those Ally Programs can you make?”
“Honestly, not many. I can only create one squadron of Ally Programs to send out at a time right now and only Saber Knights at the moment, we’re in for a long uphill battle. We’ll have to pick up the slack until I can get more system power.” Dormarch looked out over the town as his APs stopped at the top of the stairs and wield their shields to hold a defensive positon. “To that end we need to capture territory, by destroying the PLANTS in each section of the city, starting with the one at our doorstep. With a little more breathing room we can create more types of APs to use against Moon Cell. We don’t have Lancer Guardians so we’ll need to protect our captured PLANT to the best of our abilities, it’s the only one we have. As for how we capture territory… we just need to destroy the PLANTS, anyone can do that and I don’t need to be present to hack them.”
“Whatever you did, the castle’s completely clear of enemies!” Shouted Canard as he came from the castle. A few of the Hakamo-o were injured, but they were all alive.
A group of APs spawned from the hovering PLANT and that made the Hakamo-o tense up.
“Canard they are friendlies, it’s an Ally Program generator now!” The relief at Sami’s words showed up on Canard’s as the APs marched out as Frizzle started to defend against the oncoming assailants again. “We might not have many, but what we do have is at least effective enough to give us all a breather every now and then!”
With that Sami turned around and went back to gunning down Enemy Programs that were never going to stop coming at us.
“We’ll have to push out eventually, if we turtle up we’ll be crushed under numbers if we exhaust ourselves and can’t hold off long enough for a weak wave of APs to defend us.” Dazzle was right we had to go on the offensive quickly.
“I already accidentally dealt with one servant, it’s for the best if we make the most of this situation before any more powerful ones show up. So we need to take the square at the base of the castle’s stairs!” The problem is and I was going to regret saying this. “However it’s more open to being attacked from three directions.”
“Trust me mom, just destroy the PLANT there and I’ll take care of summoning the extra APs in when you do.” Right then, we had to force our way through hordes of uncountable EPs and destroy PLANTS so we can field more APs. Also we had to watch out for servants, because I seriously doubted that all of them can be dealt with by reflecting magic back into their faces. “Do you know anything about what to call this place Dormarch?”
“We’re in a place called Dike Land, Cape as in the city, Cape Castle our specific location, we’re in an outer layer of Moon Cell from what data I managed to go diving around for in the captured PLANT.” So we were in the right place according to Dormarch, at the footsteps of our enemy and we were trapped with them at ours.
“As leader of the echelon, I suggest we make haste before a serious servant of Moon Cell shows up to stop us from seizing more territory safely while we can, forward!” Jeanne waved her banner and we started forward and waited until the APs were totaled before pushing into the EPs.
I can already tell that this fight was going to be a long one.
“We’ll set up in the castle and will hold the backline, come back if you need a break from the fighting!” Ocellus called out with the Gazimon in tow.
At the top of the stairs I glanced around us and at all the tall walls surrounding us and the city below, I had a foreboding inkling about all of this. Given the name of this place was Cape, but if those walls were a massive dike...
-Moon Cell-
A Caster was seizing territory from it? Did Circe actually fake her death and was turning on Moon Cell? Inexcusable!
It started surveying a list of Servants to deal with the errant bit of coding that was possibly free will that allowed her to kill another servant.
A list of Riders came up, it scrolled through them and eventually picked one.
It selected to send a servant that would be the most effective in that give area along with the Moby Dick Program to stop the rogue servant. No servants should have free will or any ambitions that Moon Cell did not give them!