In Service to Darkness 1 (Commission) (Patreon)

“SLAMMING TUSK!”

The green-skinned dinosaur launched itself at the two foes before it, the twin horns emerging from its shoulders, each as large as a full grown man, glowing brightly with energy. One target was a bipedal rabbit, the other a bird with a plumage made of fire. The rabbit leapt to the side, while the bird flapped its wings and took to the air.

“Meteor Wing!” the firebird cried out, giving a mighty flap of its wi9ngs and sending a barrage of fireballs at the dinosaur. The dinosaur closed its eyes and turned its head, accepting the rain of fire against its hide.

“Moon Night Kick!” the rabbit shouted, leaping up into the air and bringing its leg down in a spinning kick, the heel of its paw landing on the dinosaur’s neck, just below where it met the head.

There was a sickening ‘CRACK’, as bone and spine broke under the force of the attack. The dinosaur collapsed to the ground, unable to move, unable to even breathe. After a moment, its form became hazy, breaking up like bad TV static. The firebird and rabbit both moved in close, and the cloudy, staticky form that was once a green behemoth broke apart, being absorbed by the ones that defeated it.

“Hey! Pay attention, idiot!” a shouted voice in my ear made me turn away from the news feed. Well, the voice and the sudden grip on said ear that pulled my head away.

“Relax,” I grumbled to my partner/work buddy as I waved him away from my ear. “With the Tuskmon causing such a racket, that’s all seven of them accounted for. Birdramon and Leskimon dealing with Tuskmon, Togamon and Aquilamon were seen fighting a Tyrannomon half a prefecture over, while Renamon and Leomon were both tied up fighting the Dorugamon Riders.”

“And the cat that turns into an angel?” came the immediate reply from the diminutive digimon. “Y’know, the one that shot an arrow through Myotismon?”

Smirking, I lifted my left arm up to arm height and, with the cyberware within it, accessed the various camera feeds throughout Chiba City. Easily hacking past the various firewalls, I found the appropriate feed and showed it to him. He perched on my shoulder, his bat-like wings folding in, and stared. Finally, he turned to give me an incredulous look through his blue mask-like attire.

“How the hell did you manage that?” he asked/demanded.

“Paid some Lien to one of the staff at the cat cafe that her partner frequents on her lunch break,” I said with a chuckle while looking at the absolutely stoned Gatomon on the camera feed. “You’d be surprised how quickly they agreed to slip some catnip into the water.”

DemiDevimon snorted, sharing in my amusement, before continuing, “Even with all seven of the bitches out of the way, you really shouldn’t be stalling on getting Mr. Johnson’s delivery taken care of.”

Much as the sight of the completely out of it cat amused me, he did have a point. With a sigh, I closed the video feed, put on my helmet, and started up my motorcycle as DemiDevimon climbed into one of the many bags on the side of my bike. With him secured, I pulled off into traffic. As I rode through the cramped Japanese traffic, I connected with more of the city’s cyber networks, slipping between the cracks of the different firewalls and VPNs to make the commute just a little easier. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t make it so that I was hitting nothing but greens, that was a rookie mistake, I just made it so that any inconvenient yellows waited until I was just too close to slow down.

Fifteen minutes later, and I was coming to a stop outside of a hole-in-the-wall type ramen stand. The food wasn’t particularly great, but it was situated in an intersection where networks of three different MegaCorps (Beel Inc, Kamishiro Enterprises, and Belialco) overlapped. Meaning that any deliveries on the sly could be easily made here. The catch was, all three of the MegaCorps knew that, so made sure to keep an eye on it. The trick was to have a way to make contact and drop off the delivery without doing anything to catch the attention of any of the CorSec goons. The easiest way to do that, you ask? Have a digimon be the one to make the actual drop.

I placed my order, chicken ramen with some pork and an egg on top, and opened up my cyberware to the local net. Not enough for full immersion, but enough to surf the net, appearing for all intents and purposes to be some schmuck having lunch. Meanwhile, DemiDevimon was pulling the files we were hired to deliver from my DigiVice before using it to slip into the local cyberspace.

The official name for it was EDEN and, from what DemiDevimon had told me, it served as a bridge between the physical world and the digital world that digimon originally came from. It was originally developed by Kamishiro Enterprises, and had all but replaced the old internet in the span of five years after its launch. That was twenty years ago, making EDEN more than old enough to drink legally, even in America.

The most important part about it though, for me at least, was that certain digimon were able to essentially “hack” it at will. It still took time and effort, but they didn’t need dedicated equipment or anywhere near the time to do so that a human did, even a human with dedicated cyberwar implants. DemiDevimon was one such digimon, it was how he stayed ahead of the officials that hunted digimon that made their way to the real world.

Most digimon who breached into the real world did so by accident, and very few wanted to stay long term. Their bodies relied on electromagnetic energy, and while they could absorb some from the environment, the real world didn’t have near the amounts that they were used to. The bigger and more powerful the digimon, the worse the effect was. It was why whenever they did come over, they were almost always destructive: they were suddenly starving and didn’t know how to get more energy. Weaker digimon were almost always smaller, and so they didn’t need much energy.

Obviously, the government didn’t like it when giant monsters appeared and made a mess of things. By the time they figured out they were coming from EDEN though, it was too late: cyberspace had become too big and too integral to everyday life. So instead there was a division made that was dedicated to keeping an eye on digimon crossing over. The next issue was that ordinary weapons just didn’t have the punch necessary to deal with any digimon that were causing trouble.

That’s where the Digidestined came in. I have no idea who came up with the name, but it was pretty well entrenched by the time I moved to Japan. But the long and short of it: some digimon were able to form a bond with a human, and in doing so convert some of the energy that the human partner generated just by living into a form that they could utilize. It was no coincidence that everyone who had such a bond also had an enormous appetite.

Different countries had different approaches to how they used the Digidestined, but here in Japan they were like a mix of professional athletes and rock stars. The local division consisted of seven members, and it was pure chance that they were all of the feminine persuasion. That wasn’t the reason I did my best to avoid them whenever possible, it was because one of them had a brother who was easily in the top three most powerful Digidestined in Eastern Asia, and the last time someone fucked with his baby sister his digimon dropped a miniature sun on their ass.

There was a ping on my implants, and I blinked as I refocused. That was DemiDevimon telling me the data was delivered, so I finished my ramen and made my way back to my bike. I got another notification as I was making my way back to the office, confirming that the rest of the pay for the job had been delivered into one of my multiple bank accounts.

After parking my motorcycle in the parking structure, I unzipped the side bag and DemiDevimon popped out with a gasp, “Finally, do you have any idea how hard it is to breathe in there?!”

I raised an eyebrow and asked, “Weren’t you the one who said I produced enough energy you could go two days without taking a breath?”

“That doesn’t mean I enjoy it!” he snapped, landing on the seat of my bike as I took my helmet off. “In any case, you were right about Mr. Johnson. He had a few dirty secrets that he really should have kept under better encryption. He’d been embezzling from Belialco for the last ten years, and hadn’t changed the account he was funneling all that money into in that entire time.”

“How much money are we talking about?” I asked as he hopped up to my shoulder, a bit of hope burning in my chest.

“Not as much as you’re thinking. From what I can tell he only embezzled a bit over fifteen million lien a year, nowhere near what it would take for the auditors to notice,” he answered.

I bit back a sigh. Sure, fifteen million sounded like a lot, but when a hundred twenty five Lien equated to about a dollar thirty back in Canada, it wasn’t nearly as much as it sounded like. Still, every little bit helped, “How much did he have all together?”

“Hundred fifty six mil, already funneled it to five different accounts through various backdoors, VPNs, and dummy accounts. Plus, it’s not like he can complain to his bosses or the authorities,” DemiDevimon said with a cackle.

I rolled my eyes with a smile and made my way down the stairs to the basement. The one with horrible lighting, steel plates covering a good chunk of the walls, and the building’s main electrical breakers. Where my office was. Believe it or not, it wasn’t (entirely) because my boss hates me, I actually requested it. My eyes are unusually sensitive to bright lights, enough so that I need to wear sunglasses when walking around a normal office space. Besides, it actually had the best climate control in the building, better even than my apartment. Something about the insulation combined with being underground made its temperature fluctuate a lot less than the rest of the building.

Honestly the only downside when I moved in was needing to spend most of my first paycheck on air fresheners. The previous worker loved the office so much he’d actually died at his desk and no one noticed for two weeks. One of the workers in the building above (the only one who was an immigrant like me) made some rather morbid jokes about the previous inhabitant turning into a puddle of goo. About the only part I didn’t think was a joke was that the office used to have carpet, but they threw it out after giving up on getting the smell out.

Flipping the light switch as I entered, I set my helmet on the designated hook, took my riding jacket off, and set it on the appropriate hook set into the wall. DemiDevimon flew over to his little corner, which was mostly furnished with cat furniture, and I walked past the cot to grab a bottle of water from the minifridge I’d brought down.

I sat down in my office chair in front of my desk, took a sip, and booted the computer up. A minute later, I punched in my password, and started up a macro I’d made a few months after I was hired. My main job was to compile information from dozens of different reports within the MegaCorp that owned the building and send it off to different recipients, depending on what the reports were. My knack with digimon let me write a program that would sort the reports and compile the needed information from them. I got the reports sent to my company email on Monday morning, and sent them out Saturday evening.

It took a month into the job for me to turn into a good little office rat and set up a cot in my office with a change of clothes. I used the showers in the company gym and sent my clothes with DemiDevimon to the cheap laundry place next door. I came to the realization that I seriously needed a vacation six months into this arrangement when I accepted the week’s batch of files from a Bakemon and woke up, falling out of my cot. I swear, my skin sizzled when I walked outside for the first time in six months.

As soon as I got back from my short vacation, I immediately wrote a series of macros that did the work for me. A macro to take the reports sent to me and sort them, a macro to condense and compile the information, and a macro to send them where they needed to go. Nearly a hundred hours of work a week, turned into less than three minutes on my part. That was a year ago.

With my work until Saturday done, I pulled up my firewalls, VPNs, and other cybersecurity features before making the connection and diving into the mini-server I’d set up down here. My mini-server had no wireless capabilities whatsoever, the only way to access it was to have a physical connection, or be a digimon. I specify the latter part, because as I open up the server, my screen shows a very familiar Bakemon with his eyes closed, a Sailor Moon pillow under his head, and what looked like a thumb in his mouth.

I chuckled, and gently tapped the top of the server under my desk, “Sorry to wake you, but I need to go over the files.”

The Bakemon on screen blinked his eyes open, before stretching and yawning. He floated to the edge of the screen, before drifting up out of the server into the physical. I scooted back, to give him space to float out from under the desk. I pointed over to the side table as he rubbed at his eyes, where a brand new container of his favorite blend of coffee sat. I offered once to make it for him, but he refused and insisted on making his coffee himself. After seeing the horrific monstrosity that he concocted, I agreed. I also purchased a second coffee maker so that my own wasn’t contaminated by it. Don’t get me wrong, I have no trouble drinking my coffee black, but I still want it to be consumable. Cuban coffee is less dangerous than what he made.

“Got anything planned for the day?” I asked as he began spooning the crushed grounds into the coffee maker.

“IT’s been fucking up ever since Toyama-san was promoted over Shimoda-san,” he grumbled.

I knew exactly where he was leading with that, “I’ll loan you some dirty socks to put in the vents.”

Bakemon raised his empty coffee mug in my direction before floating into the coffee maker and making it turn on. I, meanwhile, started pulling up the files and folders I’d made of the local branch of the Digidestined:

• Aiba Ami: the oldest of the branch and partnered with a Terriermon who somehow digivolves into Lekismon.
• Inoue Yolei: partnered with a Hawkmon that digivolves into an Aquilamon.
• Kamiya Kari: partnered with a Gatomon that digivolves into an Angewomon.
• Kato Jeri: the newest member and partnered with a female Leomon with no known digivolution.
• Nonako Rika: partnered with a Renamon that digivolves into Kyubimon.
• Tachikawa Mimi: partnered with a Palmon that digivolves into a Togemon.
• Takenouchi Sora: partnered with a Biyomon that digivolves into a Birdramon.

The seven girls who were responsible for dealing with any and all Digimon in Chiba City. My eyes drifted over to where DemiDevimon was settling down for a nap and Bakemon was pouring the coffee into the tank to run it through a fifth time. Digimon like these two. Like my friends.