aiko's otter den

black cat's curses - Blake Belladonna is not a faunus.

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11. A Signal from a Beacon

Ruby suddenly realizes the importance of a skilled leader.

It’s a little late, but she doesn’t have the time to kick herself for it. She doesn’t have the knowledge of strategy, the firepower to slice the thing in half, or the cleverness to see the weak points.

She has… what? A stubborn heart? A love for fairy tales? Light?

“Ruby!” Yang shouts. “Run!”

Ruby runs, and as she does, all the tension eases. Her body moves how it wants.

I have them, she thinks with vivid, feral glee. And what I want them to do. “Weiss, you and Yang bring it down to earth!”

“You’re —” Weiss pauses. “Oh, I see.”

“I’ll get its attention,” Ruby said. “Blake, can you point us in the right direction?”

“Yeah.” And Blake takes off at a run up a cliff side and leaps. Yang just uses her fisticuffs to send herself flying. Glyphs carry Weiss into the air.

Ordinemon screams. Ruby hears her own voice in the garbled mass of noise that come from her fanged teeth. Huh. She doesn’t want to know what else is in there.

She turns herself into petals and slices through bullets and the left cheek. It falls sideways and Weiss stabs into the air. Ice Dust floats around her rapier before she stabs down. Ice freezes one wing. Ruby darts, snagging her out of the way.

“Thanks,” she said awkwardly.

Ruby nods back, just as awkward. “No problem.”

Yang punches down, hard enough to dent Ordinemon’s enormous head and unsettle its already awkward bobbing. It quavers and drops, its huge wings dragging towards the earth even as the gems on it flash wildly. Blake emerges on top of its wings. She slices down, but doesn’t get very far.

“Looks like direct damage works better,” Weiss said as they land. Ordinemon flaps its wings and feathers fall. “But not by much.”

Yang catches Blake, who hovers anxiously, staring up at the behemoth with a bitten lip. “We hurt it,” she said, her expression mulish. “I know for a fact we caused damage.”

“Maybe it’s just strong enough to heal quickly,” Weiss said, but her expression turns doubtful.

“I don’t think grimm do that.”

“Well,” Yang said reasonably. “It’s not just a grimm.”

There is that.

“Well,” Ruby said bracingly, transforming Crescent Rose. “Plan B! Crack the jewels. Those things are probably holding a lot of the power. If it goes out of control, it’ll hit them too.”

“Will we survive it?” Blake asked, seemingly rhetorically.

“Definitely,” Ruby assures. Though where she gets her confidence from is anyone’s guess.

The large feathers slowly morph before their eyes, turning into monsters. Monsters like Grimm.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Yang mutters.

“That’s the source of all, Grimm?”

“It can’t be,” Blake muses. “It’d be too easy if it was.”

“It looks… like Greymon did.” Ruby readies her scythe. “We can’t fight them all. We’ll need to be up as high as we can. If we can make it hit the ground, it’ll crush a lot of them.”

“Considering our luck last time, that’s going to be a problem.” Weiss grimaces. “I don’t have many cartridges like this.”

Blake clicks her tongue, looking thoughtful. “Do you think—” She stops as Ordinemon screams, hate, and rage and thousands of voices. Then she pushes forward, looking at Ruby and its aeons and aeons before when they’d held a digivice together. “Do you think that, because the digital world is data and dreams, that as long as we believe we have infinite Dust and the ability to do this, that we could?”

“You’ve read too many fairy tales,” Weiss said, but she doesn’t dismiss the thought entirely.

“I mean,” Yang said dryly. “What have we got to lose?”

“Enough for me!” Ruby pulls up her hood. “Let’s try it!”

They move into battle and like she did as a sick five-year-old, Ruby believes with all her might.

Her gray eyes flicker with light and her hands with power. Crescent Rose thrums underneath her fingers.

There are eyes on her back, but when Ruby turns around, no one is there. She turns back and leaps into the fray.

Far, far below, as a familiar dinosaur, greyed out by time, approaches him. Its claws are raised. They could easily skewer him in the eye. It dwarfs him with ease. But Taichi isn’t afraid.

And if he is, well, courage is that first step.

He opens his hands to the giant dinosaur. “Hey buddy,” he said as thousands of digimon, burned black and white like ashes, roam past them. “Ready to go home?”

“Tai… chi…” it rumbled as it approached, leaning down its head. “Home…”

“Yeah.” He leans over and touches his goggles, then pets his snout. “We’re going home buddy. Just you wait.”

---

Thankfully, Wizarmon did not explain what he was doing, no matter how much everyone but Daisuke was intensely interested in it. Daisuke had busied himself with hiding the digimon and feeding them. The digital world provided plenty of food and water, at least. Or whatever this was, anyway.

V-mon tumbles out first. He’s bouncing on his feet. “I’m ready, Daisuke! Let’s go, let’s go!”

“Alright!” Daisuke concentrates as Wizarmon approaches.

Pyrrha swings her sword, and Alphamon explodes again. Everything slows to a crawl this time. It’s struggling as golden light flashes up into the sky. Sweat slides down her face, but Pyrrha doesn’t flinch.

Meiko did. There’s no time to flinch now.

“You guys ready over there?”

“Peachy!” Daisuke replied as the light burns her back. “You sure you got this, dude?”

“You and Ken did it before,” Wizarmon reminded him.

Ken steps forward and Pyrrha wishes she could get to know them, wishes she was their friend because they were likely about to die after a long line of fighting.

He places his hands over Daisuke’s without a word and the other two join them. The golden light starts soft and warm and then overwhelming. She looks back and sees the light turn into a golden… almost like a box. Her current logic rebels at the thought of it, at the sight of pure energy, not in an aura becoming a physical object. But it does.

THe digimon all shine underneath its glow, their injuries fade. Hope fills her throat and Pyrrha — Meiko — wonders—

Could they have saved her? If she had been with them, could she have saved Mei-chan?

She doesn’t think she’ll ever get the chance to find out.

“Digimental Up,” they say, like casting a spell, and the world warps.

On another plane, Blake feels pain and warmth blossom through her sternum, her chest, her being. It spreads outwards like a dying star. The others all yelp, but they’re huntresses so they keep moving, keep fighting. Blake is no different. The light pulls at her aura and for a moment, she tugs for her semblance.

It doesn’t listen to her. Something else does and despite herself, she looks high to the sky, even as she tumbles to earth. She reaches out her hand and Ruby takes it right as the sky opens up.

Ordinemon screams in her own voice.

Yeah, she thinks. Yeah, me too.

“I can’t forgive her,” Blake said suddenly as Ruby darts in a flurry of rose petals, carrying her like air. “We won’t forgive easily.”

Ruby sets them down on a piece of broken tree. “Yeah. She knows.”

“But you’re a clean slate, right, leader?”

Ruby blinks and then smiles. “Not yet. Not until we close this book for good.”

Blake Belladonna is not a faunus. She is not as human, nor as kind. She is something else and in this moment, that is all right.

“You need to get to that crack, I think,” she says. “Use Crescent Rose as a boost.”

Ruby nods. “What are you going to do?”

“Follow the light,” Blake replies as Ordinemon rises towards the spreading crack. She raises her weapon. “Wherever it goes.”

As she lunges, a familiar hat passes her vision. Forgiveness, compassion, hope, buoys her. Blake strikes with claws and teeth.

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