MetalTyrannomon's jaw split open exactly where its last breath had trailed off, and this time there was no restraint in it. The Nuclear Laser came in a solid column of white fire, and the lab that had felt too small a heartbeat ago now felt like the inside of a furnace.
Ethan hit the floor behind a bank of server racks. Jessica went the other way, dragging Impmon with her by the scruff of his scarf, cursing in a language that wasn't quite English. Gwen grabbed Peter's arm and yanked him sideways as a support strut came down where he'd been standing, and Peter let himself be pulled, because whatever his spider sense was screaming, Gwen's grip was faster than his own legs right then.
Smoke rolled across the ceiling. Sparks rained from a severed cable somewhere overhead. Nobody was hurt. Nobody had time to check.
Gatomon and BlackGatomon were already moving before Ethan finished getting his feet under him, claws skidding on scorched tile, eyes locked on the thing towering over Vanko's ruined storage floor. There was no play left in either of them.
"Digivolve," Ethan said, and it wasn't a request. "Both of you. All the way. This isn't a warm up fight."
Light gathered around Gatomon first, then BlackGatomon, twin columns rising through the smoke.
"Gatomon Digivolve to... Angewomon!"
"BlackGatomon Digivolve to... LadyDevimon!"
Ethan didn't wait to see the light fade. He'd spent this whole arc calling the shots from somewhere safe, watching his team bleed for a fight he only half understood, and something in him had finally had enough of that particular flavor of helpless.
He pulled the Digivice free and felt the old, familiar heat answer him.
"Spirit Evolution!"
The transformation took him the way it always did, total and consuming, fire threading up through his bones until there was no separating the burn from the shape it was building. Armor plated over him in overlapping segments, gold and crimson, wings unfurling from his back in a snap of heat that turned the smoke around him to steam. When it was done, BurningGreymon stood where Ethan had been, cannons humming low on both forearms, and for the first time in weeks he wasn't watching this fight from behind a wall.
Jessica caught the shift in the corner of her eye and didn't have time to say anything about it. Gwen noticed too, something flickering across her face that wasn't quite surprise. It was the kind of thing they'd talk about later, if there was a later to talk in.
Angewomon loosed Celestial Arrow. LadyDevimon's Darkness Wave rolled out low and fast. BurningGreymon's twin cannons opened up a half second behind them, Corona Blaster tearing a bright seam through the smoke, and all three attacks converged on MetalTyrannomon at once.
They landed. Every one of them landed clean.
None of them did anything.
MetalTyrannomon's plating turned the impacts aside the way a hull turns aside rain, and it kept coming, unbothered, its footsteps cracking tile with every stride. Ethan felt the miss in his own chest, a private, ugly little frustration that even his own strongest hit hadn't so much as scratched the thing.
So much for the easy way, he thought.
There wasn't time to dwell on it. A shape came in low from the side, boots skidding, a shotgun already swinging up in each hand.
Impmon had Digivolved without anyone calling it, the way Beelzemon tended to whenever Jessica was in real danger of getting hurt.
"Impmon Digivolve to... Beelzemon!"
Jessica was right behind him, close enough that MetalTyrannomon would have had to go through her to get to him, and neither of them seemed inclined to let that happen. Beelzemon opened fire with both Berenjena, and this time the plating didn't just shrug it off. Cracks spiderwebbed across MetalTyrannomon's shoulder plate, thin lines of exposed metal glowing where the blasts had actually bitten.
"There we go," Jessica said, grinning even as she ducked a swipe of MetalTyrannomon's tail.
MetalTyrannomon didn't flinch. It didn't slow down or pull back the way something protecting itself should have. It just kept walking forward through its own damage, jaw already cycling up for another blast, and something about that steadiness sat wrong in the room even as the fight tipped in the team's favor.
Nobody said it out loud. There wasn't room to.
The cracks kept spreading under Beelzemon's fire. Angewomon and LadyDevimon fell into a rhythm around it, forcing it to split its attention three directions at once, and for the first time since the wall had come down at the end of the last fight, it felt like this might actually be winnable. Jessica felt it. Gwen felt it, watching from the edge of the room with her hand already going for her Digivice. Even BurningGreymon, cannons still smoking, let himself believe it for a second.
That was the second Gwen took.
"Renamon," she called. "Now."
Renamon stepped out from behind a collapsed shelving unit, calm in a way that had nothing to do with the chaos around her, and light gathered around her the moment Gwen's hand closed around the Digivice.
"Renamon Digivolve to... Taomon!"
She rose in a column of white and gold, fox features sharpening into something older, more deliberate, robes settling around her as the light peeled away. MetalTyrannomon's attention was split three ways already, and Taomon used that the way a surgeon uses an opening, moving in fast while it was busy elsewhere.
Talismans bloomed in the air around her hands, the same pattern she'd used on Domimon in the tunnel, and this time she wasn't aiming to hurt anything. She was aiming to hold it still.
The paper strips caught against MetalTyrannomon's limbs one after another, glowing faint gold, and its stride began to stutter. Its enormous head swung toward her, slower than it had moved all fight, jaw grinding against something it couldn't quite push through.
It was working.
For one clean, held breath, the whole lab seemed to understand that this fight was about to end, and end in their favor.
Then the lights went out.
Not all at once. First a flicker, then a full section of the ceiling going dark, and an alarm cut through the smoke in a rising, mechanical wail. Somewhere behind the walls, hydraulics groaned. Blast doors began sliding shut across the far end of the room, sealing off one exit and then another, and a hiss of gas or coolant or something worse started venting from a ruptured line above the shelving Peter had ducked behind only a minute ago.
Peter, closer to it than anyone, felt the heat of it before he understood what it was. He got clear on instinct, a tuck and roll that would have looked showy anywhere else, but a chunk of ceiling panel came down where he'd been crouching a half second later, and it was close enough that his own agility had barely been the difference.
BurningGreymon saw it happen from across the room, and there wasn't a version of this where he stayed put.
He broke from his position and crossed the floor in three long strides, wings snapping out to close the distance faster, and got between Peter and the worst of the falling debris before it landed. It was the right call. It was also exactly the gap Taomon needed him to not leave.
Her concentration frayed the moment the support around her thinned, the talismans flickering as her focus split between the seal and the chaos erupting around her. The seal didn't break yet. It started to slip, thread by thread, the way a rope starts to slip before anyone notices it's already come loose.
MetalTyrannomon felt it before anyone else did.
It didn't fight the seal with strategy or patience. It simply threw everything it had in one direction, joints straining, plating groaning under its own force, and the half formed talismans shredded apart like wet paper.
Peter, already scrambling upright, got one clear shot as it turned. A web line shot out and caught on a trailing armor plate near its shoulder, held for exactly one second, taut and straining.
Then it snapped.
MetalTyrannomon didn't even seem to register it had happened. It kept moving, gathering speed, and threw its full weight into the far wall.
CRAAACK
Concrete and rebar exploded outward in a cloud of dust and debris, and MetalTyrannomon was through it before BurningGreymon could close the last few feet between them, wings already straining forward, claws closing on empty air where the tail had been a half second before.
It hadn't turned to fight him. It hadn't turned to fight anyone. It had simply left, punching a hole clean through Vanko's facility and vanishing into the dark beyond it, and there was nothing left in the room to chase but the ringing echo of impact and the alarm still wailing overhead.
For a long moment nobody moved.
The dust settled slow, catching the light from the one bank of emergency lamps still working, and the team stood scattered across a lab that now had one wall fewer than it had five minutes ago. BurningGreymon's cannons powered down with a soft whine. Beelzemon lowered both Berenjena, chest heaving. Angewomon's wings folded. Taomon knelt where the seal had broken, palms still faintly glowing gold, staring at the space where MetalTyrannomon had been standing like she could will it back into range.
Nobody said the word win. Nobody said the word loss either. The adrenaline was still running too hot for either to feel true, and underneath it was a colder question nobody had caught up to yet, the one about what exactly they'd just spent themselves fighting for, now that the only lead on Vanko had walked straight out through a wall he'd apparently already been planning to use.
Jessica was the one who moved first, picking her way over rubble toward the breach, Beelzemon's presence at her back a quiet kind of steadying. She crouched at the edge of the hole, running a hand along the broken concrete, and something in the angle of it, in the way the debris had fallen, made her frown.
"Guys," she said. "Come look at this."
Gwen came first, still catching her breath, Taomon rising slow behind her. Ethan released his Spirit Evolution and crossed the floor on unsteady legs, the last of BurningGreymon's heat still fading off his skin.
"What is it," he said.
Jessica didn't answer right away. She traced the edge of the breach again, the way the wall had given, the debris scattered in a pattern that had nothing accidental about it.
"This didn't just happen," she said finally, quiet, like she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to be right. "Look at how clean it broke. That's not desperate. That's not something a cornered animal does."
Nobody answered her. Ethan was still riding the ragged edge of we almost had it, and it showed on his face, the reluctance to let that feeling go just yet.
Jessica didn't push it further. She just stood there, staring at the hole in the wall, feeling the shape of a thought she didn't have all the pieces for yet, and somewhere underneath the dust and the ringing alarm, the facility kept humming along, patient, like it had known exactly how this was going to end all along.
***
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