It began with silence—terrible, absolute silence—as though the world itself had forgotten how to breathe.
Then came the pull.
An invisible hand, vast and unyielding, reached across the battlefield and wrapped its fingers around everything. The very air groaned under the pressure. Trees bent backward, screaming as roots were torn from the soil. The shattered land, the broken sky, the fleeing children—all began to spiral toward the dark heart that Naruto had pierced.
The black hole pulsed once. And the world unraveled.
Naruto barely had time to react.
He had hoped, somewhere in the back of his mind, that his sacrifice would be enough to end it. That throwing his spear would be the final move. That perhaps, if fate were kind, they'd all be spared.
But fate, as always, was cruel.
As the abyss yawned wider and gravity itself seemed to warp and scream, Naruto's eyes widened—not in fear, but in understanding. The Digivices, tiny beacons of light on each of the children's belts, glowed fiercely. And then the Crests—Courage, Friendship, Love, Sincerity, and more—flared to life.
Like ancient shields awakened, they surrounded their chosen partners in soft, golden light. Invisible walls, delicate but firm, held the children safe as the void drank in all else.
Naruto, however, had no such safeguard. He was not a DigiDestined. He had no Crest. No Digivice. No divine protection.
Only resolve.
And beside him—Piximon, the last remnant of a generation now fading, floated broken-winged and bleeding, his face twisted in pain but his eyes locked on Naruto.
In that one instant—when reality itself folded like parchment—Piximon moved.
"Together," he rasped, and Naruto nodded.
The air shimmered around them as chakra met ancient digital magic, a sudden weaving of incompatible forces, chaotic and blinding. Piximon's wings, once radiant and proud, spread wide—and ripped apart as they folded over Raikomaru, shielding him.
Naruto roared, the six tails of his transformation spiraling into a cloak around all three. He anchored himself with will alone, his feet digging trenches into the cracked earth, blood flying in long streaks behind him as the wind flayed him alive.
It lasted mere seconds.
But it felt like an eternity.
And then—darkness.
They fell from the sky as if spat out by the world itself, crashing through the canopy of a dense jungle, its foliage too wild and thick to be real. Great vines curled like snakes. Trees as thick as buildings shivered under their landing.
Naruto hit the ground first with a wet, sickening crunch. His body skidded across the earth, blood leaving a long, ugly trail behind him. He didn't scream—he had no strength left to do so. His entire back was torn open, pounds of flesh carved from him by the sheer force of the black hole's pull. Bone was visible in places. The six tails were gone now, reduced to faint smoke and fading embers.
Piximon landed moments later—if one could call it a landing. He crashed, limp and broken, his once-vibrant wings now nothing more than scorched, skeletal nubs, charred and twitching. The magic that had once sustained him flickered weakly around him like dying fireflies.
Between them, nestled in the shallow crater left by their arrival, was Raikomaru—or what remained of him.
The Leomon's arm was gone, taken by the dark tentacles long before. But it wasn't just the arm. His mane was matted with blood. His breaths were shallow. Yet he was alive.
Because they had protected him.
Naruto blinked up at the sky through blurred vision, unable to feel the pain now, only cold. The sun overhead was wrong—greenish, with too many halos. The air smelled like sap and ozone. Everything felt twisted.
But they had survived.
For now.
-----------
Naruto lay there, staring up at the fractured sky, the world tilted and reeling around him like a storm-tossed ship.
Everything hurt.
Every nerve was screaming. His bones felt like glass, his muscles like torn parchment. The chakra inside him—his lifeblood, his identity, his anchor—was now a sputtering candle in a hurricane, barely twenty percent remaining. Even the six tails he had called upon had flickered out, leaving behind only a burnt shell of a body and a soul crawling on hands and knees through despair.
He wanted—no, needed—to give in.
Let it end. Let the pain take him. Let the silence of nothingness swallow him whole.
But then, as he tried to close his eyes, as the lure of unconsciousness threatened to steal him away—
A groan.
Not his own.
Naruto's eyes snapped open, pupils narrowing into thin slits as his senses fought against the fog.
Piximon.
Barely conscious, the mentor's tiny body twitched with pain. His wings—no, the stumps where they used to be—bled freely, the light that once surrounded him now only a weak shimmer. His breath came in shallow gasps, each one a struggle.
And near him—Raikomaru, his friend, his partner. The proud Leomon was missing an arm, his body trembling, his eyes closed in pain but alive.
Alive, because they had trusted Naruto to keep them safe.
And he had.
But it wasn't enough.
Naruto gritted his teeth. His heart, fractured by questions of identity—Was he the real Naruto? Was he just a copy? Was his world truly dead?—throbbed with pain not physical, but deeper. A wound of the soul.
But even as these thoughts clawed at him, a quiet truth rose inside him like a flame:
"Even if I am not the original… these people are real. Their pain is real. Their trust in me is real."
And so his choice became clear.
Naruto planted one bloodied hand into the soil and forced himself up. The pain that tore through his body made his vision white-out for a moment, but he did not stop. One knee followed the hand. Then the other.
And then—he stood.
Wavering. Barely upright. But alive.
His chakra flared weakly, a ghost of its former self, but still present. Around him, the jungle rustled, the air thick with tension and threat. The shadows between the trees seemed to breathe, and the wind carried the unmistakable scent of corruption.
There was no time.
He turned first to Piximon, dropping beside the wounded Digimon. His hands, still shaking, began to move instinctively, weaving seals in the air, his chakra responding sluggishly like a beast forced out of hibernation. A soft green glow emanated from his palms, and he pressed them gently to Piximon's chest.
"Come on… you're not done yet," he whispered, voice hoarse, lips barely able to shape the words. "You've got more to teach me. You're not leaving now."
Piximon's breathing evened, just slightly. Enough.
Then Naruto turned to Raikomaru, resting one hand on his friend's mane, eyes soft.
"You trusted me to protect you," he murmured. "I won't let that trust be wasted."
Again, the green light. Again, the slow but steady pulse of healing chakra, his own life force being sacrificed in threads to stitch together what the void had tried to unravel.
The jungle howled in the distance. A digital beast shrieked—somewhere too close.
Naruto didn't look up. Not yet.
"We're not dying here," he said quietly, more to himself than anyone else.
-----------------------
The jungle canopy above shimmered in eerie twilight, speckled with patches of digital sunlight that flickered unnaturally, like a corrupted program fighting to hold coherence. Leaves whispered with secrets as the wind passed, brushing over the broken trio with a gentleness that felt at odds with the world they had just escaped.
Raikomaru walked quietly, his breathing steady despite the pain. The absence of his left arm made his gait uneven, but his eyes never left Naruto—not with suspicion, not with judgment, but with the weight of a thousand unspoken questions. Questions that hovered at the edge of his tongue, questions that pressed against his chest like a storm threatening to break.
Yet, he said nothing.
Naruto, for his part, said even less.
He carried Piximon gently in his arms, cradling the battered mentor like a wounded bird. His eyes remained forward, expression neutral, body tense—not just from the wounds, but from something deeper. Something far colder.
It was shame, and fear.
They passed corrupted vines that hissed with static. Metallic insects with digitized wings flittered by, yet none approached. The corrupted Digimon that normally stalked the trees, their code twisted into malice, stayed far away. It wasn't fear of Naruto's power—they couldn't sense that anymore. It was something else. Something older. A feeling that brushed against their instincts.
When they reached the river, calm and clear despite the world around it, the three finally stopped.
Naruto set Piximon down first, beneath the gnarled roots of a great hollow tree whose trunk opened into a curved resting space, almost like the ribs of an ancient beast. He used his remaining chakra to form a soft mat of wind-woven leaves beneath the old warrior, cushioning him with a gentleness that spoke volumes of how much the little Digimon meant to him.
Then, finally, Naruto sat.
He didn't lean against the tree. He didn't sigh in relief. He just sat cross-legged in the grass, hands resting on his knees, and stared at the slow-moving river as if it might tell him something.
Raikomaru, now leaning against the tree's opposite side, kept stealing glances at him.
There was so much he wanted to ask.
But Naruto looked so utterly still, so withdrawn into himself, that even Raikomaru, proud warrior though he was, couldn't bring himself to speak.
Because this wasn't the silence of someone planning.
It was the silence of someone… lost.
Naruto's eyes didn't blink. They just followed the water—its flow, its rise and fall over the rocks—while inside, a storm brewed.
"I don't want to know if I'm real," he thought. "Because if I'm not… why do I care this much?"
He could still feel it—the wind on his skin, the pain in his back, the warm weight of Piximon's body as he carried him. The trust in Raikomaru's single remaining eye. The desperate, terrified faces of Tai and the others just before the black hole swallowed them.
He remembered every moment. Every second.
"If none of this is real… then why do I want to protect them so badly?"
He didn't realize his fists had clenched.
Or that Raikomaru was now looking directly at him.
Or that his shoulders had started to shake—not from pain, but from the effort of holding everything in.
For now, there was no answer.
No plan.
Just the river, the quiet, and the man who had once saved a world but no longer knew where he belonged.
And so he sat, afraid of asking the question he feared the most:
What if I don't have a place to return to anymore?
----------------------
The silence between them had stretched so long it had become its own kind of presence—like a fourth figure lurking just outside the tree hollow, watching, waiting.
Raikomaru, who had sat patiently for as long as he could, finally shifted forward. The tension in his shoulders betrayed how long he'd been holding back, but the worry in his young, golden eyes was impossible to mask.
"...Naruto," he said quietly, his voice low and unsure, "what's wrong with you?"
Naruto didn't move.
"Why are you so quiet now?" Raikomaru pressed, a little braver this time. "You didn't use to be like this. You used to smile—even in battle. You used to keep us together."
Naruto's hand curled slightly, as though holding onto something invisible.
"And when you evolved back there—when you turned into that form—you froze," Raikomaru added. "Why? What happened? Where did your light go?"
There was no accusation in his voice. Only confusion. And concern.
For a moment, Naruto didn't answer. He just looked at Raikomaru—truly looked at him, as though seeing him for the first time. The Digimon was taller now, stronger, his once-juvenile frame hardened by battle and injury. But his heart… that was still pure. Still gentle.
Still young.
And it hit Naruto then, like a whisper in his bones, that Raikomaru—no matter how noble—was still a child. A child looking for answers. A child trusting him to be the steady ground beneath his feet.
Naruto's throat tightened.
He had seen too many children lose their innocence. He wouldn't be the reason Raikomaru did too.
So, he smiled.
Or at least, something that resembled one.
"I froze… because I remembered an old enemy," he said, voice calm, measured. "Someone from a past I thought I buried. It caught me off guard. That's all."
Raikomaru blinked.
Naruto forced a bit more warmth into his voice, masking the ache behind his ribs.
"I'm okay," he added. "Really. You don't have to worry about me. I just… need a bit of time. And I'm sorry," he lowered his head slightly, "that you got hurt because of me."
The Digimon stared at him, processing those words slowly. His mouth opened, but closed again. In truth, he didn't understand most of it—not the kind of enemy Naruto was talking about, nor the kind of pain he was hiding—but Naruto's voice was calm. And his eyes were steady.
So Raikomaru, in his simple, trusting way, believed him.
The young lion-like warrior reached out and gently patted Naruto on the shoulder with his remaining arm.
"You always protect us," he said simply. "So we protect you too. That's what partners do."
Naruto's smile wavered for a breath.
Then he nodded.
"Yeah," he said quietly, almost to himself. "That's what partners do."
Raikomaru leaned back against the tree, relaxing a little. And Naruto looked back out at the river, this time not to lose himself in its current—but to draw strength from it.
Because sometimes, the best reason to keep walking wasn't a mission.
It was a single, trusting soul beside you who still believed you could.