Digimon Adventure Tri: Echo

71) Blood and Silver

Touching down on Earth once again brought the Chosen Children to the small office Koushiro had been lent by Hiraku what felt like a lifetime ago, and the first course of action was for all of them to scramble to get food in their Digimon's stomachs as soon as possible. Koushiro kept a fine supply of snacks in the area just in case he had any visitors while he was working, and given how often the Chosen Children and their predecessors stopped by, this was certainly a strong choice on his part. It wasn't even a struggle for everyone to start distributing the snacks among themselves and the Digimon in preparation for the battle ahead. The fight with DoneDevimon had been long enough as it was, but this fight was bound to prove itself to be even more difficult than the previous encounter. Even if they had Supreme Digimon on their side, it wasn't going to be easy. 

Taichi found himself suspended between his desperate urge to decompress after the fight with DoneDevimon and the knowledge that they had to keep going if they wanted to do anything productive as far as protecting Odaiba was concerned. He was starting to get tired under the weight of all the energy he had spent worrying and watching during the last battle, and it had been much more draining than he initially expected. He would have been lying if he said he had any ideas as to how they were meant to handle the situation at hand, but the best course of action was for them to just keep going and ask questions later on. The people of Odaiba needed help as soon as possible, and getting caught up in their curiosity wasn't going to accomplish anything for the Chosen Children. All they could do was keep fighting. 

Their Digimon were hardly in the condition that the group would have liked when it came to handling a massive battle of this nature, but Taichi supposed that was what he should have expected when they were coming down from the heels of an encounter that they had spent so long working toward. It was unfortunate, but the situation was too pressing for them to take a moment to breathe. Taichi's foot tapped impatiently against the ground below as he watched the Digimon dig in once they had picked out their favorite snacks. He hated the idea of the Digimon being forced to jump into another massive battle so soon after the previous one, but there wasn't much of a choice for any of them. 

In that way, this situation wasn't all that dissimilar from what had happened when they were fighting off the first invasion by the Emissaries of Chaos. The activity had been constant for hours on end back then too, and even after they were able to fend off the invaders within the city, they had to pursue their foes to the Digital World to make sure the incident wouldn't repeat itself any time soon. It was almost cruel just how quickly everything was repeating itself, but there was nothing they could do about it. Odaiba was waiting for them whether they wanted to deal with the battle at hand or not. 

Light started to wash through the area as the Digimon started to evolve to their Child forms. It was difficult to say when the different Digimon were evolving given how closely they were gathered together on the floor of Koushiro's office, but Taichi wasn't looking for details. As soon as they were able to consider themselves safe, they were going to head out and do what they could to free the city of its invaders. That would likely mean the Chosen Children themselves would have to hop under Imperialdramon's hatch once again and look down at the chaos while praying the people in the line of fire were evacuated before anything could go too wrong. 

The last Digimon to reach the Child level was none other than Meiamon, and she shook her head once she had reached this point. It wasn't ideal given that she and Plotmon spent most of their time in Adult form, but it was going to have to do for the time being. Taichi glanced to the other Chosen Children before a firm nod passed over the entire party. They had only been given a few minutes to catch their breath, but at least they had a break at all. The rest of Odaiba needed them though, and they had spent more than enough time within the office.