Digimon Adventure Tri: Echo

74) Point of No Return

The aftermath of Ordinemon's release and the devolution of the Digimon gave the Chosen Children no choice but to retreat back to Earth and try to find a solution to everything that was happening. It wasn't going to be that easy, but they had to act fast no matter what. After all, Ordinemon and Raguelmon were on the loose, and who could say what they were going to do with the freedom they had been granted? It was dangerous in every way, and the Chosen Children had to be ready to fight back as soon as possible. 

The original Chosen Children had not yet arrived by the time that the younger team got back to Earth. Koushiro had sent a message out saying that they had to talk as soon as possible, but he hadn't received a response from anyone yet. Taichi's mind had been racing in the interim of Ordinemon's release and their arrival back on Earth, and he was dreading telling the original Chosen Children about it as much as he was looking forward to it. He wanted to get his thoughts out somehow, and he knew that staying in his own head for too much longer than he already had was only going to hurt him in the long run. 

In a way though, everything made sense all of a sudden. Meiko hadn't ever seen a Digimon before meeting Meicoomon, and it only made sense that this could be the case if there was some outside interference to ensure that she wasn't able to make contact with a Digimon while still being able to establish a bond with Meicoomon. Entropy had been the one to deliver Meicoomon to Meiko, it seemed. He had decided to use her to his advantage ages ago. This was a plan he had been preparing for years up to this point, and in the end, the pieces fell into place perfectly to give him the chance he needed to destroy everything. 

As far as Taichi could guess, he believed that Meiko had been given the Crest of Darkness to act as the key to releasing Ordinemon ages ago. Even if she hadn't bonded with the other Chosen Children, she would have found her way to the Digital World eventually, and when she did, she would have released Ordinemon when Entropy took control of her. It had all been just a matter of time. Entropy was simply choosing this as his time to strike because the Chosen Children had delivered her straight to the site of Ordinemon's hiding place without realizing that in doing so, they had pressed the detonation button that would lead to their own destruction. 

Taichi couldn't find any words to express everything that was screaming inside his mind no matter how hard he tried. He didn't think there was anything that he could say without completely falling apart. He hadn't ever expected something like this to be possible, but when he looked back, it seemed so obvious. He hadn't ever realized those small quirks about Meiko's history were clues that would lead to a grand picture that spelled out the end of the world, but he was silently cursing himself for not seeing it sooner. It all made so much sense all of a sudden, and Meiko had been a match to light a bomb from the start. She had never been selected to become a Chosen Children by Homeostasis and the Agents of Order; instead, she was simply the antithesis of everything the Chosen Children stood for, used as a puppet by Entropy from the start. 

Entropy had been planning all of this as far as Taichi could tell. He had no conclusive proof of such a thing, but when he thought about it, he was sure that Entropy must have been behind everything that was happening. Daemon and Dagomon had attacked from the Dark Ocean because they were meant to act as distractions from the start whether they realized it or not. The barriers between the Digital World, Inferno, and the Dark Ocean had grown thin, and Entropy was fully aware of this. He took advantage of it and decided to use the attackers from those worlds as shields. As he developed his plans to finish Ordinemon and release her upon the world, he used Daemon and Dagomon as distractions. 

The initial attacks on Earth had all been to try and eliminate the Chosen Children of Odaiba. After all, they were the strongest out of the Chosen Children across the world, and if there was anyone out there who would have been able to defeat him, it would have been them. They were the greatest threats to his plans, so his attacks were meant to target them first and foremost. No other cities were seeing these attacks because they didn't have the fighters that could have spelled his defeat before he could execute his plans. The mass invasion on Odaiba during Golden Week had been a last-ditch effort to try and defeat the Chosen Children, but when that fell through, Daemon fell in as a distraction. The interference in the gate back to Earth that had kept the Chosen Children trapped in the Dark Ocean for so long had likely been Entropy's doing as well; he knew what he was doing, and he was desperate to keep them away from Earth for as long as possible. They had been weakened and stuck in another world that was hostile in every sense of the word, and he likely thought that would have been the end of his enemies.