A/N: Written for

Diversity Writing Challenge, h48 – write a crossover with both fandoms still in canon
Ultimate Sleuth Challenge, Ch 2 – event 7 – write a threeshot
Becoming the Tamer King Challenge, Event: The Digi-Egg's a Fake! - write a fic that is as many words as your maximum word bank (currently 7800 words)
Crossover Boot Camp, #031 – parallel
The Endurance Challenge, Week 1

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Afterlife Programme

Chapter 1
how the board was set

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MetalPhantomon was a few things: a Perfect-level digimon, the God of Death, ambitious and currently hatching a plan to deal with the dregs of Royal Knights that remained.

He was also one of the rare digimon who could reach beyond the Digital World. Even Magnamon, the Royal Knight of Miracles, was restrained to that one dimension. And many of those who could cross had been torn apart in a way not even the digital purgatory could repair.

He'd located Omegamon and Imperialdramon, both split in half and both mere children wandering happily about the world. Foolish children who didn't know of the power they'd once possessed, or the other half now lost to them. Those old forces had been powerful indeed, to rip them apart so permanently. But they were also gone.

For an ambitious digimon like himself, the digital world was ripe for the taking – if only he could overcome the last obstacles.

The remaining knights weren't as powerful as they'd once been, but they were still powerful. And they weren't as invested in the world as they had once been as well. No longer did they fight all the petty nuisances on the front lines. He'd attempted that already, to draw them out and coax them into a fight on his own less than fair terms. Those attempts failed. The Royal Knights did not rise to the bait and he was forced to consider other options.

It was one of those that included the digital world, and he realised their souls were very different to the digimon.

He decided they would be very useful pawns – though things did not go as planned. At all.

And most of it was Ryuuji Hikaru's fault.

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Ryuuji Hikaru was once the victim of a nightmare. He and three other children that were good friends of his. Pulled into another world where monsters were real and where they fought: each other, knights that tested them, and the enemy that sought to destroy them and the world they'd drifted in to.

It was a strange world, full of not only monsters but adventures too. It would have been more exciting if they'd been together from the beginning, if they hadn't had to roam around lost until they found their digimon partners: monsters they'd never met before who fought with them. And maybe it would have been more fun if they'd been together when they'd woken up in that world, instead of separated and pitted against each other. And maybe if they'd had the chance to spend some leisure time, instead of constantly fighting for their lives.

Not that the bonds they'd formed were sparse by any account, even if it had been a single night's dream – or nightmare, that they awoke from, hearts racing and the urge to seek each other out undeniably strong. So they'd sought each other. Confirmed the dream – or nightmare – had been shared between them, and also confirmed that the only thing that had travelled back over was fatigue. Their minds had been active all night long, after all. It was no wonder they'd awoken at the end of it as though they'd never slept. They hadn't.

But they'd forgotten one major detail, and they didn't realise it until quite some time later.

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It was determination that had attracted him, defeated him, and let him so quickly regain his former power.

It was also determination that would be the hero's downfall, and that was amusing at first. Justice well served.

But then time progressed and the Tamer grew ever paler, and revenge was most certainly not a dish best served cold. Or maybe he'd simply dove in too quickly, and now it had become a melted mess that sat on his chest and rebelled.

A human would have vomited. He'd have to do something else.

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Ryuuji Hikari was known to be quite an active child, at least before the age of eleven. Often, his parents had wondered if he'd ever settle down.

He started to, once he turned twelve. Started to slow down. Though that wasn't quite the same as settling. He didn't spend more time studying, or on the computer like many of his peers. And it wasn't as though his desire to be active was diminished. It was just his ability. They chalked it up to being tired, then, but it went on and on and slowly got worse and so they took him to a doctor.

They did simple tests at first: bloods, urine, all those sorts of things. But they came back normal and then the slightly fancier ECGs and spirometry came back normal as well. The only odd thing was the sleep study – since he'd started falling asleep at odd intervals and was getting difficult to get out of bed in the mornings. The doctors tried to slap a bunch of fancy labels onto it and in the end went with narcolepsy. But something still didn't quite fit in.

And then Masuken remembered the grid-like pattern that had formed on Hikaru's body, and how he'd been the last of them to return. And then they realised – or guessed, without solid proof and without any remembered dreams except that one to point them – just what it could be.

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They didn't realise it at first. The mysterious shadow creatures attacked, but they had skills and weapons and determination, and so they stood their ground. Didn't realise anything except that it was a strange phenomenon, because some of them had been in the Afterlife for a long time and didn't know such a thing. Their enemies, of course, had been Angel and Angel had been a formidable opponent. They'd suspected her this time as well, despite her having turned over a new leaf with them, and despite Otonashi Yuzuru saying otherwise. Except she fought those shadows to save them, and they had to accept two things: that she really was on their side (or they on hers) and that the shadows had another source.

They didn't find the source before Takamatsu was swallowed up by them and became a mindless husk. They didn't find the source even when they found the original Afterlife programme and its sorrowful tale. Didn't find the source when they made the group decision to abandon the Afterlife – because some of them had spent a terribly long time there, and there was another life waiting if they could let go.

It turned out to be relatively simple. By the time the SSS reached that point, the pieces were all in place for them to cross. Yuzuru himself was the final piece: Angel's piece, Tachibana Kanade's piece. And he was the only one to remain with the mindless husks and the shadows that hunted him, to guide those that came after.

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Miki Kiyoshi remembered very little about the Digital World, and once her friends discovered that, they stopped talking about it around her. She supposed that was fair enough. She'd found herself in a dark place in her nightmares, and then in Hikaru's arms, and then awake in her own bedroom and that was the extent of her adventure.

She hadn't even considered it might have been real until she'd overheard them. Teru and Masuken and Hikaru, arguing about something they'd dubbed "Digital Syndrome". And as she listened, bits of the story fitted neatly together. Like how they'd all woken up in a panic and called each other (except her, since her dream had been entirely non-descriptive – except for the shadow of something in a cloak, which might've been the MetalPhantomon they mentioned every now and then). And now they expanded on those dreams: something about a Dorumon and Grademon and knights of some sort and battles and fighting and –

Something's wrong with Hikaru?!

She listened further, and on different occasions. Yes, something was definitely wrong with Hikaru. Sleeping later and later. Dozing off at odd intervals in the day. Being generally lethargic. And, most recently, collapsing in sports as well. Like something was sucking the energy out of him. Or like he had to live another life somewhere too – even if Hikaru claimed he hadn't visited the Digital World in his dreams except for that one time…

She didn't know much about the Digital World. She couldn't help there. But it still stung that they hadn't mentioned this at least to her. Just because she'd been a prisoner for most of it, didn't mean she cared about her friends any less. And they'd saved her. Especially Hikaru. If the friendship spiel wouldn't be good enough, then she owed them her waking hours for getting her out of that eternal nightmare.

She ran through those points in her head again. Yep, that sounds right. And she stuck her hands into her pockets and crossed the street.

She forgot to look both sides first.

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Even if he'd been killed, reformatted and reborn, he was still the God of Death.

That didn't mean he killed the girl he'd once taken prisoner. That was a coincidence. Or the world's way in helping him in this endeavour. Didn't really matter. Her death opened up the road for him. Time and space twisted in the abyss beyond, and lost all meaning.

By the time things reformed, he'd lost the girl somewhere, still in the abyss. But the Afterlife was there.

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For a time, Otonashi Yuzuru was the only soul in the Afterlife, surrounded by mindless husks. He had information at his disposal but no longer any allies. His position as school council president (inherited from Kanade) was a token position at best, and his stripes otherwise. The shadows were always there – manageable since they never attacked the husks once they were form, but always there.

Though it didn't take long for the Afterlife to fill again and he found a new job: watching out for the new entrants, because the shadows would invariably be there as well, expanding its horde of mindless husks.

He might've lost a few before he caught on, because the first had run into him instead of the other way around. But then there were two of them, and they made sure to always stick together and the first two things that were explained were the process of moving on, and the shadows.

Turned out Miki Kiyoshi needed someone else's presence to be able to move on. The Tachibana Kanade situation, then. Though she was docile, soft-spoken and not a fighter.

That was fine. She had an imagination. And Yuzuru could do the fighting with the weapons she created for him.

The Guild resurrected with her at the head. Some of the latter additions joined her. Others reformed the SSS under Otonashi and they fought off the shadows as best they could.

And finally discovered that the population of shadows was proportional to the number of true souls in the Afterlife.

And so the battle went on, never-ending so long as there was a soul in the Afterlife and there was always a soul in the afterlife.

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They were fools, those children in the Afterlife. Or…they'd never had the fortune (or misfortune) of touching the Digital World. They didn't know it. They weren't aware of its existence.

And because they weren't, they'd never unlock the mystery that were the phantoms that chased them.

Their numbers tethered: grew quickly at first, when there were enough phantoms for only one teen but there were two of them, and then two for a team of four. They never realised how the phantoms slowly caught up, but never overwhelmed. Never thought of how the lone human had survived so long on his own, before help came along.

Because one human was necessary. Two humans were necessary. There was no need to empty out the Afterlife, simply to replace the empty husks with new data: Digital World data.

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Ryuuji Hikaru had had many a frightening experience in the digital world: many near deaths. He'd even come close to losing Dorumon more than once but none of that had prepared him for Kiyoshi's funeral.

And none of that had prepared him for his own impending death, that seemed more and more likely the longer he slept, the longer he struggled to wake.

He was slipping. He knew he was slipping, and he couldn't help it, though he tried. But how could he even struggle?

And he wondered what would even happen to him, in the digital world without his body, or simply cast adrift while his body was cremated and buried.

He wondered, and Teru and Masuken wondered too and they were equally helpless. The digital world was far beyond their reach.

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The original Afterlife programme was written by a man who'd wanted to reunite with his lover. It was painfully simple that way, but both it and the Digital World were proof of the power of such simplistic notions. The Digital World too, after all, had been born from a simple dream: of a child that had wanted a playground for his imaginary friends, and those imaginary friends themselves.

The child's father had created a simple game – the sort that nowadays any starting programming student could make. A simple thing that vanished as soon as the child grew out of that phase – but the Digital World endured. Just like the Afterlife endured. Both now lived independently, pulling discarded bits of data and identity to it and children – or their souls at least – as well.

But that was where they differed. On several points. On the children, it was two things: age and status. The digital world preferred them as children: real children, before their disillusioned teens. The Afterlife took those disillusioned teens instead.

And they took the dead. The Chosen in the digital world, separated from their bodies or not, were still alive.

But that was an arbitrary thing for a digimon like him. Digimon were, after all, reconfigured. Just as data was recycled. Humans weren't always reborn, as evidenced by the lack of children or adults in the Afterlife, and the husks that some left behind.

Who knew? Maybe it was because he'd followed a teenager that he would up in the teenage waiting room. Maybe there were similar afterlives for the children and adults too. Maybe the mindless husks that served as nothing more than scenery also had a place where their souls went. After all, he wasn't a soul devourer. Maybe whoever had created the initial husks had been. He didn't know and he didn't care.

He was simply setting the stage for something else.

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Miki Kiyoshi died at fifteen years old. Less than a year later, on his sixteenth birthday, Ryuuji Hikaru also passed away.

By that point, the stage was set. The Afterlife had enough digital husks to create a temporal digital field. Ryuuji Hikaru, who would have found his one piece soul torn into puzzle pieces otherwise, awoke in the musty soil of the Afterlife.

And he had the fortune to appear at the feet of one Otonashi Yuzuru – or, rather, Yuzuru had gotten good enough at predicting these emergences that he'd been in the right place at the right time.

So too, though, had those phantoms that hunted them.

'Welcome to the Afterlife,' he said, helping the teen up with one hand and shooting with a rifle slung over his other shoulder. 'Rule number one: do not get swallowed by these things.'

And Hikaru, who felt like he'd been sleeping for a very long time (which, in fact, he had), simply mumbled: 'swallowed?' And then, a breath later and slightly more articulate: 'Afterlife?'