The Long Road [Hunt]

He was lying on his stomach in the damp grass on a gentle slope, soft earth pressing into his cheek. He took a slow, deep breath and smelled fresh grass, dirt… garbage. Finally, amber eyes fluttered open. It was twilight, and a sixteen year old boy was sprawled out on the banks of the Shibuya river. He pushed himself up on his arms, slowly looking around, his hungry amber gaze drinking the fetid little park in. Something about the way he grinned was a little… haphazard. Crazy. Broken. Next to him was a black D-tector, its casing scuffed and marked. He stuffed it into a hip pocket on trousers just a little too small. In fact, the whole outfit, a ragged school uniform sans tie, looked a little run-down and too-small.

He was back. Finally, he’d made it. Actually, they had made it. “We’re here,” he muttered seemingly to no one in particular. “He really led me back. We have to go. I have to find Shichiro Inoue,” he said as he raised himself to stand on wobbly legs, and set them on a path to walk the streets of Shibuya. Even after three years, he still knew the way. And as he walked, he remembered what had brought him to this point…

Three Years Ago…
Kouhei Kanemoto raced his bike through the streets of Shibuya. It was late evening and his curfew was already ten minutes past. He was taking a shortcut down by the river to save time, even though Mom didn’t like him taking this way because there were so few streetlights. She wouldn’t know. And he didn’t need to be any later…

He was fifteen minutes late by the time he turned down the road that ran parallel the river. There was a bridge a couple blocks down that would let him cross and then he would be home free. Kouhei pedaled furiously, glad the streets were quiet and clear and he didn’t have to navigate around anyone. He was gliding along between street lamps when his phone lit up, screeched and vibrated in his pocket. Mom calling, probably. He let go of the handlebars with one hand to reach into his pocket; the bicycle lurched under him as the front tire went over a branch or something in the shadows on the road. It couldn’t have happened at a more perfect moment; already off-balance, Kouhei cried out as the wheel twisted under him, turning off the path and throwing him forward. Everything went black.

Wake up, child.

Kouhei thrashed and sucked in a startled breath when he awoke, flailing to protect his face from the fall. But… he was already on the ground. Pulling himself into a sitting position, the thirteen-year-old saw found himself huddled in a broken landscape of unevenly-tiled white and black stone. His phone leay nearby, its screen dark and spiderwebbed with cracks. A little way behind him his bike lay in a bent and mangled heap. How did he survive a fall that did that?

You are lost here.

The boy whipped his head around fearfully, his eyes settling on a humanoid form lying with its back against a nearby upturned spit of rock. It was a vaguely female form armored in tarnished black metal and cracked pink plates with dull gold trim. Her gold helmet was dented, one leg lay at an oblique angle and her armor was covered in pixelated slash-wounds. At her side a long staff with a hammer at one end lay in multiple pieces.

“What.. what are you? Where am I?” I am the Black Queen. I am a digimon… and I am mortally wounded. This is the Digital World, and you are lost in a hostile land. I may be able to save you… if you will aid me. My data will disperse without your intervention. Kouhei blinked. It was… a lot to take in. And this place was so strange. He was so alone. Where was he? Where was his family? Shichi?

“All right. What do I have to do?” Accept me. His phone began to screech and glow with a bright light, harsh in the dark wasteland. The Black Queen nodded towards it and so Kouhei reached out to gingerly pick up the formerly broken device. He looked back to ask her what next, only to find the space the digimon had occupied empty. He looked back down to his phone and was shocked to find it was no longer his phone but a black and gray electronic device that fit well in the palm of his hand. On its screen was a symbol that vaguely resembled the symbol for a queen in chess.

I will always be with you now Kouhei, the Black Queen spoke to him from over his shoulder. She stood seven feet tall with unblemished, pristine armor in black and pink with polished gold trim. Her presence was commanding, imposing, and at once her felt her proximity like a physical thing. You are the new Black King. I shall make you worthy…

And so she did. The Black Queen tutored and drilled Kouhei endlessly. She taught him about the Digital World and how to survive in a hostile place. With a sky constantly shrouded in clouds and shadow and a broken landscape that stretched forever in each direction, it was a hellish landscape full of creatures that lived to fight and kill. The Black Chessmon fought back against the oppression of the White, and in the last battle the Black Chessmon army had taken severe losses. Black Queen had been wounded in the final push, and that was the state Kouhei had found her. They saved each other, that night.

She was too weak to be much direct help at first, but she still had forces left. The first to offer its strength was a shortish, armored humanoid that resembled the most common piece in chess. PawnChessmon kneeled before Kouhei, and the Black Queen instructed him to ‘scan’ the digimon. It vanished, and Kouhei gained his first form.


Today...
Familiar streets. So funny that he still remembered the way. Kouhei walked, his D-tector held loosely in one hand. As he walked, occasionally he would mutter as if speaking to an unseen companion. “You don’t know that. He was there. He showed us the way. He’s not.”

“He can’t be…”