Yesterday When the War Began, Chapter 1:

**Disclaimer: I don't own Digimon. This fic was produced purely for entertainment purposes, and I promise not to sell it. So there. Don't sue me.

The young boy stood at the top of the building, gazing down at the scene before him. Physically, he was still a child. He had celebrated his 10^th birthday only a month before. His eyes however, were different. He had the eyes and the mind of someone much older. He had seen too much, done too much to ever be the same kid again.

The wind whistled through his blond hair, and he sighed. Even the wind seemed different than it did a day ago. It had seemed warmer then, gentler. When had it become so cold, so uncaring, and so…evil? His small hand clenched tightly around the white hat he carried, and his little orange digimon gazed worriedly at his master. The boy's handsome features seemed set in stone, hard and unyielding, but his emotions were betrayed by his trembling lower lip. He had seen death and destruction before, too many times, it seemed, but never on a scale like this, and he had never imagined it could happen to his hometown and his loved ones.

Tokyo was in ruins. Even an entire day after the incident, hellish fires still raged across huge expanses of the once prosperous metropolis, the light drizzle coming from the lead gray sky doing nothing to quench it.

Tokyo tower had been leveled, entire skyscrapers destroyed. The streets were strewn with rubble, and cars had been abandoned with their doors open as their drivers sought to escape. Corpses littered the streets, and confused, panicked gangs tried to pick their way out of the wreckage, to escape.

The boy turned his gaze on the center of the city. There was literally nothing left. It was as if a gigantic hand had scooped up the center of the city, crushed it, and then littered the remains here and there. A gigantic crater was all that remained of the once busy and bustling downtown streets.

"How did it happen?", he murmured softly. His faithful digimon flew up and perched on his shoulder, trying to offer what solace it could. The boy absent-mindedly petted it. It had only been yesterday when he had been visiting his grandmother with his brother Matt, happily enjoying life. Everything had been all right, everything was perfect. How could it have gone so wrong?

***flashback. One day ago ***

Who can count backwards from ten?

Tai gaped at the strange e-mail. "What's he trying to do? Teach us math?" he asked Izzy as a countdown from 10 minutes started on the top right hand corner of the screen.

Izzy ignored his friend as he typed furiously on the keyboard of Tai's PC. Then he blanched. "Oh no."

"What?"

"Diaboromon's launched cruise missiles from all over the world. Not nuclear ones, thank God, but they're still aimed at the center of all the major cities of the world. And they'll impact in…" Izzy checked the counter, "exactly 9 minutes and 55 seconds."

This time, Tai almost panicked. He had come close in the last few hours (panicking, that is), but this time the urge to get up and start running, or go crazy almost overwhelmed him. Almost. Instead, he took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down. He was the leader of the digidestined. If he couldn't think clearly now, then all was lost.

"WarGreymon, MetalGarurumon, did you hear…" Tai began.

"We heard Tai, we're going as fast as we can." WarGreymon growled back. He was well aware that if the Diaboromon weren't all destroyed in 10 minutes or less, then all would be lost. Both of them were speeding down the information highway, as fast as they could. Suddenly, an opening appeared at the end of the tunnel. Instead of the "light at the end of the tunnel", this was the opposite. Instead, it was pitch black, and emanating an almost palpable evil. Both digimon put on an extra spurt of speed as they flew down the final stretch, and burst from the opening.

What they saw stunned them. It was a huge, cavernous opening, and every surface was pulsing with Diaboromon. The walls seemed to be alive with them, writhing black and flashing metallic legs.

"Man, how many of them are there?" Tai managed to gasp after he had gotten over his shock.

"I stopped counting a while ago. There should be well over a million by now!!"

Countless black heads turned as one, taking notice of the intruders. WarGreymon recovered from his shock first. "Terra Force!" he exclaimed as he launched his attack in a random direction. The way he figured it, there were so many of them, he didn't have to aim.

The orange ball of energy hit home, blasting a score of the black spiders, but the net effect was nothing. The gap was instantly swallowed up again by the legions of Diaboromon there.

"Mega Blast" (** sorry I forgot their attack), millions of sibilant voices whispered as one. Orange, flaming meteors streaked from the walls, focusing on the 2 Mega digimon. Both of them tried to dodge out of the way, but the countless e-mails from all over the world slowed them down. Even if they had been completely up to speed, it would have been impossible to dodge anyway. The shots came thick as hail, tremendously powerful, and impossible to avoid.

Dodging and weaving, they valiantly tried their best to dodge them all, but it was impossible. Twisting through all three planes at once, flipping about in a blur, it was still too slow. WarGreymon was hit first, a shot catching him on the back and flipping him over, a roar of pain ripped from his mouth. MetalGarurumon, momentarily distracted by his partner's predicament, was hit as well. Thrown off course, both of them started drifting randomly. Immediately, countless blasts rained down on their armour before they could catch their breath and start dodging again.

Wheeling around, both megas were pummeled over and over, all over their heavily armoured body by the orange meteors. Too overwhelmed to try and fight back, they curled into a ball and tried to absorb the impacts as best they could, but the shots kept coming, and coming, and coming…

"Izzy, what's the matter!!?" screamed Tai. "Why can't they dodge them? Why can't they fight back?"

"It's the e-mails!! They're slowing their processing speed down!!" Izzy gasped back over his shoulder as he pounded furiously on the keyboard. "Guys, I know you mean well, but you're really hurting our cause right now! You've got to stop sending us e-mails!!"

( for those of you who haven't seen the movie, people from all over the world was watching the fight at the time, and they had been sending countless e-mails to Izzy's laptop, slowing down his processing speed and the digimon)

Then disaster struck, as if it hadn't already. WarGreymon's armour started to crack, then he glowed, and with a sound like gears winding down, he devolved all the way back to Koromon. MetalGarurumon followed a second later. All of a sudden, they were 2 helpless in training. The only blessing was that they were suddenly much smaller than before, so the shots all missed for a crucial split-second.

Tai saw it happen. There was no time to think, no time to balance everything out. If the 2 digimon remained in there for another second, they would surely be killed. He had to trust his instinct on this one.

"Izzy, pull them out…NOW!"

The instant Izzy heard that command, he stabbed down, initiating the program that would pull Koromon and Tsunomon out. In a blinding flash of light, both digimon abruptly disappeared from the monitor, then the entire screen started to glow brilliantly. Two streaks of light shot from it, one hit Tai in the chest and bowled him over, and the other rocketed out the window, in search of Matt.

Diaboromon, the original one inside the digiworld, saw it happen. His dark, insane mind was disturbed, as a new feeling, one that he had never experienced before in his short life, filled his consciousness…fear. The 2 megas his copies had just blown away had been powerful. Given time, they could grow strong, perhaps stronger than he himself would ever be, and if they were to digivolve together…

The dark virus almost shuddered at the thought. No. This threat had to be eliminated here, now, before it could develop into something more menacing. The 2 digimon had been pulled into the human world, thus they must have had masters, or people outside helping them out. He had stumbled onto a reference of such humans before, the Digidestined, but he hadn't paid much heed, until now.

Stretching out in all directions, his mind spanned the entire length and breadth of the Internet in an instant. Using every last connection he had, he shut down all forms of communication, Internet, e-mail, telephone, TV, radio, satellite…every last communicating device instantly went dark, all around the world. In that one instant, the world stopped cold. Now the Digidestined couldn't contact each other.

Then, he concentrated briefly, and dimensional portals opened all around the chamber. Throwing a thought to his legions to follow him, he dived through the nearest one to the outside world.

A world ripe for conquest. His dark mind almost quivered with anticipation as he felt himself sucked into the real world. The digidestined would fall. He was certain of it.

In less than 15 seconds, the entire chamber was empty.

Tai slowly sat back up, rubbing his chest with one hand, and holding Koromon in the other. The little pink digimon was unconscious, having taken too much of a beating to even notice that it wasn't dead. Vaguely, he noticed that the incessant pinging of arriving e-mail messages had stopped rather abruptly.

"Tai…the countdown…what about those missiles…?"

Tai stared at the numbers rapidly winding down. The counter was now at 5 minutes and counting. Things can't get any worse, the cliché phrase flashing through his mind.

That was before Izzy's laptop, hooked up to Tai's PC, started beeping and flashing every alarm that it had. Izzy whirled and pounced on it, staring at the figures and numbers as they scrolled past the screen. "Holy ****."

"Watch your tongue." Tai automatically replied, then he shook his head with a snap. "What is it?"

"The Diaboromon have opened up dimensional rifts between the digiworld and this world. I don't know how they did it without having built a gate beforehand, and without someone on the outside helping them, but they did." Izzy gulped. "They're popping up all over the world. America, Japan, Europe, Asia, South America, everywhere!!"

"But how is that possible?! Why would he want to come here himself?"

"I don't know!! I told you already!"

Tai again forced himself to calm down. Diaboromon was coming over, he couldn't stop that. The missiles were going to impact, he can't stop that either. Once those missiles hit, access to the Internet, or any working desktop for that matter, would be next to impossible. He couldn't change that either, so what could he do?

"It's going to be a long, drawn out war…" he mused to himself.

"What was that?"

"It's Myotismon all over again, except on a global scale. Diaboromon's coming over, and we can't stop that, but to defeat him, we'll need our digimon…"

Reacting on gut instinct, Tai threw himself into the chair in front of his PC, and began typing furiously himself, even as he began snapping out orders.

"Izzy, I want you to locate and pull back every one of our digimon. I know, you'll have to find them, but I want them out and into the real world in less than 5 minutes. I have a feeling we'll be needing them soon."

"And what are you doing in the meantime?"

"I'm contacting the others," came the simple reply.

Izzy nodded, then turned back to the computer again. His fingers, began moving across the keyboard so fast, all that could be seen of them was a blur. Windows popped up and closed, folders opened and lines of computer code were typed within the blink of an eye. He knew he had to move fast. To trace and find all the digimon, and then pull them out under 5 minutes, was no easy task.

Tai, at the moment, was feeling incredibly grateful that he had taken that computer course in school last year. Using every hacker's trick he had learned in his short life, compiling all his knowledge from school and from Izzy, he focused it all on breaking through the e-mail ban that Diaboromon had put up over the net. All he needed was 1 second, a one second opening for him to send 4 crucial messages through.

Both boys worked feverishly against time. The small study went deathly silent as they concentrated on their respective tasks. All that could be heard was the plastic clacking of computer keys. Their concentration was total.

Thirty seconds…

Izzy tied up the remainder of his tracing and extraction programs. His computer teacher would have been appalled at his code, his lack of comments and proper structure, but at this point, he couldn't care less. It worked, and that was all that mattered. Tai finally cracked the e-mail ban. He began to desperately type out a brief message.

Ten seconds…

The last line of code typed in, Izzy ran his programs, as fast as he could, his mouse pointer flying like mad all over the screen. In a flash, all the programs were up and running full speed. Electronic tracers ran across the entire digiworld at once, searching for, and finding, 6 special digimon, 5 rookies, and 1 champion.

Five seconds…

Tai feverishly sent his messages, hoping desperately that they would get through. A second later, Izzy's programs began extracting digimon from the digiworld, and his laptop's screen again blazed with brilliant light as the digimon streaked from it and shot out the window, looking for their masters.

At the same instant that Tai sent his messages, they appeared on their recipient's screens. Joe, Mimi, and Kari were nowhere near a computer at the time, so they didn't read it. However, Matt, TK, and by sheer dumb luck, Sora, received the messages.

One second…

Tai grabbed Izzy's arm and pulled him under the table, covering his head with his other arm. Curling up into a ball, they both braced for the impact, wishing that they could have been in someplace more sheltered.

Impact.

The digidestined would later recall this as the moment that the whole war began, the moment where, undeniably, they were once again soldiers out to save the world, and no longer simple kids. Matt and TK would later recount that they felt nothing spectacular, since they were out in the country at the time. All they had noticed was a loud explosion sounding somewhere outside. It was only after they had run outside and had seen the mushroom cloud did they realize what had happened.

For all the rest of the Digidestined however, being much closer to the blast, the effects were dramatic.

Windows disintegrated all around them, the ground shook and heaved, and felt like it was going to split apart. Every conceivable piece of furniture or object that was not secured instantly went flying across the room. Dishes, silverware, decorations, pictures, chairs, bookcases… they all tumbled onto their side and shattered.

Electronics immediately died out, some of the more high-powered devices going out in spectacular explosions as a power surge ran through them. Tai's computer was totaled, but Izzy's laptop, being independently powered, survived. Sora, TK, and Matt's computers had instantly gone dark, but not before they had scanned the message at least once.

And that message would be forever burned into their minds.

DD. Diaboromon invading. Hide, he'll be looking for you. Get out of Tokyo if you can. Meet at where this all began in 1 week. It's war.

Tai

** Author's note: Well, what do you think? Terrible? Incredible? Remember, REVIEW!! I really need the feedback. Also, don't sue me if I got certain parts of the movie wrong. I'm not like some people who memorize movies line by line. If I got something wrong, tell me, and I'll see what I can do about fixing it. This fic is probably going to be edited a lot before I'm happy with it.