Casual Users

"And I can never remember the time
We crossed over that line

And I'm never going back
I didn't mean it this time
I got confused
Just want to sleep it off for a while..."

-- Machines of Loving Grace

***

Bruised and bloodied, but far from beaten.

Not by a long shot.

Not him.

His breath whistled painfully through his teeth as he stalked through his fortress. The shredded remains of his cape fluttered in ragged strips behind him, snapping out an angry tempo in time to the hollow ring of his heels along the metal floor. His left leg dragged awkwardly, rendered nearly useless from a shallow incision running laterally along the muscle of his thigh. A gloved hand was pressed tightly against it, partly to stem the slight flow of blood seeping in thin veins down his leg to prettily pattern the floor. Already it had begun to soak into his uniform; the material stuck and peeled wetly away from his skin as he limped, a wholly unpleasant sensation that nearly made him want to scream aloud in aggravation. The wound burned hotly, as if the tip of a soldering iron was being pushed down against it, and the feel of it through the fabric of his glove only added to his nausea.

As with everything else in his life, he hammered his anger down into a fine, offensive spearhead and beat back the queasiness with a vengeance. It wouldn't do for someone of his stature to drive himself into sickness over something as trivial as a little scratch, no matter how offensive the injury actually was to his pride.

Not him. Not ever.

His face was flushed, his brow dotted with beads of sweat and his hair dishevelled and full of dust. His free hand clenched convulsively into a fist at his side. His teeth were bared and ground together in silent fury; from between them hissed a steady stream of free flowing hatred. Hatred for those miserable savages that had the audacity - the damnable nerve! - to inflict such injuries on his person. Hatred for those who were supposed to be his servants for turning on him. Hatred for a world that still allowed blood to fall and hatred for the doubts and fears and frailties of a humanity he couldn't quite be rid of no matter how hard he tried and how he hated he hated he hate hate hate hate...

A detached part of him, a dense core of common sense left standing alone against his anger, marvelled distantly at the turmoil of his thoughts. It was as if they were being caught up and whipped away beyond his reach, like drifts of dead leaves in the bitter winds of December. Rage was making him nearly incoherent, thrashing through his mind in a frenzy of hurt and humiliation, scattering away any and all rational thought in its path. It was wild and wordless, an unspeakable ferocity that constricted his chest and flexed his fingers into trembling claws seeking victims to vent his wrath upon.

And this tiny, removed piece of himself acting as an unseen observer finally tapped at the back of his consciousness and haughtily pointed out that, really, such a childish display of anger was petty, impotent and, above all, a very human failing-

It was that idea that shook him out of his fury like an open-handed slap across the face. His temper cooled by increments, down to an angry simmer. His mind snapped to attention at once, his thoughts reassembling themselves back into a proper order befitting one of his cold and impassionate genius. His stiff-legged stride smoothed out again into a limping tread. The red haze cleared from his vision. Reluctantly, the hand that had closed into a fist uncurled; the other continued to conceal the insulting injury in his leg. Maybe if he just didn't look at it, ignored the fact that it was there and it hurt...

There. Much better. Think happy thoughts instead, like the quiet deaths of all involved in the morning's little fiasco. Why bother getting mad when you can simply get even. Anger was a worthless waste of emotion, but revenge a pleasant distraction.

Staggering into the control centre of his fortress, his temper spiked sharply again when he saw that the room had been left in near darkness, dimly lit with dusky blue ambiance light. A suffuse gloom had invaded the room during his absence, and he could barely see more than a few feet in any direction. The hall at his back was little more than a tunnel of shadows, as was the orderly honeycomb of empty passages and rooms beyond that. Even surrounded by darkness he could sense the great expanse of unmoving air beyond him, standing as still and calm as a fog. It smelt dry and clean and sterilized, of static electricity bristling off computer monitors, and a crisp wintry chill lingered about the room. Instead of the usual soft hum of hidden machinery ticking over obediently behind the smooth metal walls, an oppressive silence hung heavily in the atmosphere. All was peace and tranquility, a disconcerting void of activity.

He scowled. What a reprehensively unproductive state of being.

Glaring about the darkened room at large, he barked, "What do I have to do to get those monitors turned on? Wormmon!"

"Of course, Master, right away," an unseen voice said. There was a soft sound of something scuttling off into the distance, a gauche pause and then the room was flooded with stark white light as a wall lined with computer monitors suddenly flared into life.

Even through his glasses were deeply tinted, he had to squint for a moment until his eyes adjusted to the new light levels. He could hear the familiar background noise of countless computers booting up, a steady and reassuring drone that was easily filtered to the back of his consciousness. A brief blast of cold air knifed past his cheek, and at the same time the distant sound of a faraway generator firing up somewhere deep in the bowels of the fortress caught his attention. He frowned at that; he had given explicit orders that the ventilation system was to be pumping chilled air throughout the structure at all times, whether he was there or not. Any idiot with half a brain cell in his head knew that computers operated more efficiently under colder temperatures than warm ones. If someone had deliberately gone against his command and put his precious computers at risk by shutting it down, heads were going to roll-

As the room gradually frosted over with neon blue light he caught sight of Wormmon huddling some distance away, blinking about him in the hesitant, uncertain way that so typically summed up his character. When the little caterpillar caught sight of the dark, suspicious look his master was shooting his way he quailed back into himself and did his ample best to crawl out of sight, sharp.

The Kaiser's expression soured. Well, there was one mystery solved right there. He'd lost count of the number of times that his digimon had raised feeble concerns about him catching a chill from the fortress' low temperatures. Come to think of it, he'd also lost count of the number of times that he beaten the wretched creature within an inch of his life for pestering him with such useless worries. If even one heat sink in one computer had melted because of that miserable, mothering worm and his misplaced affection…

A predatory stalk across the room proved to be a difficult task with one game leg and an outfit full of desert grit. Fuelled as he was by rage and pride, however, the Digimon Kaiser was not one to allow a mere scratch to spoil his carefully cultivated image of aloof sang-froid. A simple office chair, all sleek lines with raised arms, marked the centre of the chamber. He threw himself into it before his bad leg gave way entirely and swivelled around until he was facing the semi-circle arrangement of monitors. Each was a blank blue screen glowing passively down from the darkness ahead, silently awaiting a command.

For the barest of minutes he savoured the familiar feeling of basking in the crux of his power; then he tossed his head back and shouted over his shoulder, "Territorial map. Now. I want to see just how much this morning's debacle cost me."

The largest screen directly in front of him promptly flipped up the file. It was a representational display of the digital world, with the areas reclaimed by the digidestined indicated with white squares and neutral ones in grey. His territory was marked quite predominantly in black. Focused as intently as he was on the image on the screen and the black squares marching determinedly across it, he was only half-aware of Wormmon's presence at the side of his chair.

"Master…?" whispered up a timid voice.

"Mmmm," he replied absently, his attention fixed rigidly ahead as he captured his chin in his palm.

The caterpillar reared up to place his front legs on the seat of the chair, taking care not to actually touch the boy. The Kaiser had made it very clear on several separate occasions that he wasn't very keen on being touched without permission, and Wormmon didn't dare arouse his ire by accidental contact. "Please, Master," he said plaintively, concern for his human making him momentarily fearless. "Please, let me take care of the wound in your leg. That dirt is dangerous, and I don't want to see anything worse happen to you."

"They've taken out two more control spires along the northern fringe," the young Kaiser mused, pointedly ignoring his digimon. His fingers tapped against his cheek. "Dammit! That area had been mine! I'd been hoping to put that canyon to good use too, but now I'm going to have to pull back and recapture it, then cap it off with a couple more spires before moving on to the villages further west."

"It looks awfully painful," the digimon fretted. His antennae were swept back flat against his head, and his wide blue eyes shimmered with earnest anxiety. "I beg you, Master. You're hurt. I'm only worried about you-

"That's another day wasted right there," the Kaiser growled, desperately. "And that means another delay, and another opportunity for those Digidestined fools to steal away another area right behind my back-"

"- and I hate seeing you bleed like this."

"You'll bleed too in a minute if you don't get out of my hair!" the boy roared as he rounded on the caterpillar, his temper finally snapping.

Wormmon stared up at him for the space a second, mesmerized by the raw fury in his master's wild-eyed gaze. Then he scrambled back and bolted for the safety of the shadows.

The Kaiser spun back to face the monitor. His mind whirled feverishly, his hands spasming convulsively over the arms of his chair until the fingers gripped so hard that he fancied he heard the plastic crack beneath them. His slender frame shook with bottled up anger and he sharply bent over into kind of wounded crouch. Blue hair fell messily over his eyes. He'd been doing so well, had almost forgotten entirely that the injury was there, and yet a few words from a digimon insect had brought the memory crashing back. And he hated Wormmon and he hated the human weakness and he hated the pain he hated he hated he hate hate hate hate…

On some hidden, self-preserving level he was very much aware of the fact that his rapid rate of conquest was having a serious effect on him. Even though he no longer had to maintain two separate identities, when he had discarded his existence as Ken Ichijouji he had swiftly diverted all of his attention and energy into his work in the digital world instead. The Kaiser's agenda left very little room for sleep, and the few hours he was forced to spend in useless unconsciousness chafed at him anyway. He far preferred to spend his valuable time entrenched in the control centre, keeping a wary eye on the monitors displaying the far reaches of his territory. The very idea that a freshly subjugated area might be stolen away from him while he slept insulted him enormously, and the larger his domain grew the more time he devoted to jealously watching over it.

For a little while it had seemed as though he could stand up under the burden, but lately he was beginning to feel the first stirrings of stress as his nerves frayed under the effort. For a while he'd bitterly fought back against the notion that he was being harried by such a human affliction, and banished it to the back of his thoughts. While the Kaiser ego balked at the suggestion that he was slowly wearing down under the strain of running his growing empire, a tiny core of rational thought still left behind admitted in a tiny voice that maybe, just perhaps, he had finally gotten himself into a situation way over his head, had carelessly thrown himself in far too deep for him to ever claw his way back up to the surface and he was becoming lost, so very lost-

In one swift gesture he clamped a hand onto the gash in his leg and pressed down hard, hard enough that it hurt. And then he pressed down harder again, until pain blossomed out along the length of his thigh. And as much as it hurt he could still feel the way it washed away the irrational anger and panic like a douse of ice water into his face, and he held it there until he felt himself calm down by degrees.

He always had been very good at turning a disadvantage into an advantage.

Slouching down in his chair to what could barely be considered a respectable level and taking care that Wormmon was nowhere in sight, he peeled back his hand and allowed himself to moodily survey his injured leg. The rock fragment that had hit him had slashed straight through the fabric of his uniform and left a long and ugly scratch behind. Although shallow, it had bled a little and, in the nature of fresh injuries, was painful and irritable. The damage wasn't severe by a long shot, but it would hamper his movements nevertheless for a couple days and just looking at it, not to mention his tattered outift, was proving a very disagreeable blow to his pride.

A wave of nausea pulsed its way through his system, and he swallowed once hard. Cupping his gloved fingers and growling something vile beneath his breath, he covered the injury with the palm of his hand again and did his ample best to simply forget that it was there. Running the back of his free hand across his brow, he was disgusted when it came away from his forehead smeared with sweat and dust. Good lord, it really had been one godawful mother of a morning. Sullenly, without really seeing anything and looking for nothing anyway, he glowered out into the darkness, one hand resting fitfully on his leg and the other dropping to curl around the arm of the chair.

To be certain, it wasn't as if he was a stranger to his own blood. There was an old scar, a thin white line running between his thumb and index finger, that marked an accident where he had tried to slice through some tough string binding a package with a small kitchen knife and had carelessly cut his hand. And another on his wrist where, as a child, he had bumped into the sharp edge of a bracket under his brother's desk and spotted the carpet of his room with tiny drops of blood. And there had been that one regrettable incident during a heated soccer match where an opposing player had accidentally clipped him along the inside of his left knee, the cleats of his shoes leaving behind a harsh, angry red line. A hasty apology had been met and accepted with aloof indifference, and the steady flow of the game had resumed as if the incident had never taken place.

Hell, his childhood and practically everyone else's was littered with those types of minor injuries, scrapes and paper cuts and episodes with scissors. But they had all been accidents, innocent and unintentional, easily remedied with antiseptic and apology.

Not this time, however. Someone had gone out of their way to actually hurt him. Him! Deliberately drawn blood in anger and vengeance. There had been no mistake in identifying the intentions of his antagonists, not with their hatred of him written that plainly across their faces.

The morning had not proven a typical one in any sense of the word. Waking in his chair after catching a few hours of fitful sleep, he'd blearily turned to a monitor in time to spot a fleeting glimpse of the detestable Digidestined brats in the act of attempting to destroy one of his control spires at the very ragged edge of his territory, where his influence was stretched the thinnest. Recent tensions had left him edgy and high strung and put him in a foul temper; he'd been secretly spoiling for a fight for some time. With nothing else better to do other than prowl restlessly around the fortress and vent his frustrations on a hapless Wormmon for the sheer hell of it, he'd rounded up a pack of Tyrannomons stationed in the area, picked an AirDramon to act as his own personal airlift and sallied forth to engage in what he had expected to be a tidy little spat to chase the pests off his property and work off some stress at the same time.

His good luck, however, had abruptly ended there. With every day that passed that much more of the digital world fell beneath his advance, and the Digidestined themselves were quickly becoming backed into a corner. With nowhere left to retreat to and with nothing left to lose, they fought back with ferocity of spirit that he never would have expected from that lot of peace-loving yuppie idiots.

Today had been no exception. No sooner had he sent his troops charging down into the canyon after the Dididestined than fully one half of his Tyrannomon forces had been freed from his control and had turned back against him with a vengeance, before he could even get a good grasp what exactly had just happened. After that, what had originally started out as a simple morning's excursion to blow off some steam had swiftly degenerated into a chaotic free-for-all. Within minutes he had found himself right in the thick of the brawl, the lash of his whip a blur, desperately struggling to fend off the both the attacks of his former slaves, who were apparently holding one hell of a grudge, and a bunch of angry Digidestined digimon swooping down from the sky like avenging angels. After a particularly nasty explosion had showered him and his AirDramon with a vicious spray of rock fragmentation and fallout, nearly throwing him clear off the digimon's back, he'd come to the hasty decision to just cut his loses and get the heck out of Dodge before his day could be any further shot to hell.

But as he'd fought his way out of the pack and into the safety of empty skies, he'd hazarded a brief glance back over his shoulder and had caught sight of one of the Digidestined - the brown haired one, Motomiya something or other - staring up at him through the clouds of dust and the crowd of battling digimon. Hatred had been raw on his face, and the intensity of the emotion had startled the Kaiser for a moment. And in the instant he had met the other boy's eyes he'd flashed back to the second where a detonation of rock had smashed through the air around him like a fist and filled his world with noise and fire - and suddenly he'd known exactly what that boy had tried to do.

Shrapnel, as a gesture, can rarely be misinterpreted.

It was a rather unsettling revelation, actually.

They'd been trying to kill him.

His brow creased pensively. No, wait, but that wasn't their way, was it? They despised him, hated him and everything he stood for, certainly, but those repulsive morally upright, diamond-in-the-rough types usually didn't scream for the blood of their enemies. No matter what he'd done or just how badly he had them whipped they still wouldn't go to quite that dramatic an extreme to tear him back down to their level. Not even to take revenge for the friends he'd enslaved, or out of sheer jealous spite for the fact that he was playing the game far better than they were.

Grievously cripple him then, maybe. Or at least slow him down a bit.

About as subtle as a punch in the face.

Still, blood was blood. And his leg hurt, dammit. But there was more blood spotting his gloves and his shirt and the fringe of his torn cape, and not all of it was his. Even surrounded by madness and angry digimon making a spirited attempt to stomp him flat, he was still a dead aim with a whip.

His mouth suddenly bent into a frown as, out of the blue, a passing thought struck him.

But this was the digital world, wasn't it? It hardly followed the same rules as the real world. Granted, it was an impressive and elaborate piece of programming and on that level he could respect it, but calling it real was about as absurd as accusing a computer game of being true to life. Nothing truly "died" in a game. Nothing really lived in one either. A bunch of sprites you either controlled or attacked just faked it very convincingly and looked good while doing so. And nobody got hurt and nobody died, because it was technically impossible to kill a being that wasn't even alive to begin with. When you won or lost the game all you had to do was turn it off and step away to reenter reality again, completely consequence free. It was a fairly straightforward concept to grasp.

So just how the hell could anyone bleed in a world where life and the living had no meaning?

With a throaty growl of frustration he closed his eyes and let his head fall forward onto his chest, even as he mentally shoved that line of thought aside. For the first time he could remember since entering the Digiworld, thinking was making his head hurt. And really, there were better ways he could be spending his time and genius than driving himself to distraction over a bunch of foolish ethics for a game where anything went. Like plotting a way to get those annoying Digidestined children out of his hair completely, so that he could finally unite the last corners of the digital world underneath his regime.

Speaking of which...

His fingers rattled an erratic tempo out along the arm of his chair. Opening his eyes again, he stared down at his lap in a meditative fashion, his mind whirring with thought. As much as he was loath to admit it, the simple truth was that he was beginning to reach the end of his tether so far as fighting the Digidestined was concerned. Granted, despite all of their noble and cloyingly heroic efforts he still had a good foothold on at least eighty-five percent of the digital world, with the final fifteen percent poised to fall beneath his advance at any time. Fighting digimon was one thing; he had swiftly learned that the creatures were passive and peace loving by nature, with a few notable exceptions. Bullying them into submission was about as difficult as rounding up sheep; once the troublemakers in the pack were singled out and brought under his control with the help of a few handy dark rings, the rest soon fell into heel. If that were the only opposition he had to face, he would have been ruler over the entire digital world a long time ago.

Fighting the Digidestined and their well-trained, fully evolved digimon, however…

The Kaiser gave the floor a long, ugly look, blue eyes narrowing into slits. But that was just it, wasn't it? A bunch of lousy real world kids with some fancy toys and powerful sidekicks were throwing a serious crimp into his agenda and, as ludicrous as it seemed, were managing to hold their own against his forces. Time and time again he'd thrown the most dangerous digimon slaves he had at his availability into their paths, only to have them stolen out from under his control. The control spires he'd placed strategically around the digital world had met with moderate success, although it hadn't taken the Digidestined long to learn that destroying them cancelled out their restricting effect on evolving Digimon. Lately he'd been pouring most of his attention into improving and modifying the dark spirals, the newest tool in his arsenal, but at this rate he suspected that it wouldn't be long before a means to counter their influence would be hit upon too.

To make things even worse, the fight had reached the crucial point where the actions taken over a single day could determine the outcome of the war, and a minor battle lost here and there might just prove to be that final blow against him. If anything, the disastrous encounter this morning had proven to him that, no matter just how much of the digital world was under his control, the Digidestined were still doggedly in the fight and still quite capable of throwing a serious wrench into his plans.

Hell, sometimes life just wasn't fair.

His jaw set stubbornly. Well, survival was all about adaptation and change, wasn't it? You either adapted or you got eaten - it was as simple as that. He'd just have to give the Digidestined something new, something they'd never, ever seen before, could never expect and therefore had no experience fighting against. Something completely unheard of. Something that could gore.

The Kaiser smiled crookedly as a nasty little idea began to take root in the back of his mind.

God, he loved being a genius with foresight.

Settling back into his chair with the unruffled air of a man on a mission, he tapped at a terminal and brought up holographic subdirectory. As he paged through lists of files, he spotted Wormmon creeping up on him again from the shadows to the left, uncertain and afraid. Ignoring the digimon completely until Wormmon was crouched underneath his chair, he leaned far over and grinned down at the caterpillar with a big smile that was about as friendly as the one on a crocodile.

"Want to see something really interesting?" he said.

Wormmon, he noticed with disgust, was becoming so starved for affection lately that he eagerly wolfed down even the most vague indications of kindness he could find. The little digimon stared up at him with a watery-eyed gaze that was an interesting jumble of shock and kittenish love. It practically made his teeth hurt just looking down at those eyes, and his hand was edging through the folds of his cloak towards the hidden handle of his whip when the caterpillar finally said, in a voice trembling with thinly restrained joy, "Of course, Master!"

It was sad, really.

"I had a suspicion that things might come to this," he said as he leaned back and continued shuttling though files. "A couple months ago I came up with this particular design but shunted it aside in favour of the dark spirals. For a while it seemed as though I'd never need to bother with it, but recent events make me think that it might prove more useful than I had originally believed."

With a flourish, he opened the file he had been browsing for. The largest monitor went blank for the space of a second, then brought up a picture worth a thousand nightmares.

"Nice, eh?" the Kaiser said casually, when Wormmon could only gawk at the grotesque image. "Personally, I think I could have added more claws, but what are you going to do?"

"I've never seen such a digimon before in my life, Master," Wormmon finally managed, staring at the image on the screen as if hypnotized. "What's its name?"

"I'd be surprised if you had," the Kaiser chuckled. "I guess you could call this thing a little side project I've been working on, a backup plan should things finally come down to the wire. As for its name, I haven't decided that yet."

Wormmon stared at him blankly for a moment, and then something seemed to click in his mind. "You're going to build that... creature, Master?"

"Of course," the boy sniffed airily. "I've already collected all the data I need to construct it. It's simply a matter of compiling it all together, programming in some simple reactions and then compositing the final pieces together. Give me a couple days and I can make it a real monster."

The caterpillar regarded his master with something akin to open horror. "Nobody has ever created a digimon before," he breathed.

The Kaiser gave the monster on the screen a thin-lipped little smile of approval.

"It's nice to be a trend setter," he said.

The caterpillar shrank back, clearly very unhappy about the entire prospect. "That's not right at all!" he blurted out.

The Kaiser gave his digimon a withering look. "The next time I'm interested in hearing biting social commentary from you, I'll rattle your cage."

"B-but, Ken-"

The Kaiser held up a warning finger. "Don't give me an excuse," he growled, an unpleasant gleam in his eye.

"Master," Wormmon corrected himself hastily. "I'm awfully sorry to upset you, but Master, how can you possibly create a whole new living creature? It- it's not that I doubt you, nothing like that at all, but…"

The Kaiser's derisive snort spoke eloquently enough of his opinions concerning that particular vein of thought. He stared broodingly at the blueprint on the screen, ignoring Wormmon as the caterpillar stammered off into incoherence somewhere behind him. His injured leg had begun to hurt abominably again and the maddening ache, combined with the irritation he felt over his digimon's treacherous scepticism, was beginning to fray at his temper. Absently, without really noticing he was doing it, he ran his thumb lightly over the gash in his leg. Hidden behind his glasses, his eyes narrowed venomously as he silently regarded the Frankenstein creation on the monitor above him.

Living creatures?

Ha.

What a joke.

Oh, the Digimon Kaiser knew exactly what the digimon were, all right. Unlike the Digidestined, who seemed happy to blind themselves with rose-tinted idealisms, he was very much aware of the stark truth to the digimons' existence.

Computer generated images. That's all the miserable things were: calculations of voltages and primary values of red and green and blue. A creature - no, less than that, a projection - made up of little more than three simple colours fired as a constant stream of electrons at a phosphorous screen. Pixels. Nothing but little coloured pixels tracing unremarkable origins back to minute chains of data treading invisible footsteps through the computer's complex operating environment. Digital to analog. Electron gun through shadow mask. And then the final image glowing off a layer of phosphorus coating on the inside of a cathode ray tube, millions of insignificant dots focused into a final forgery of a living being.

Sprites.

Pixels.

A blueprint of life made up of little more than complex arrangements of carefully plotted binary code.

Bits that eventually eroded down into numbers.

Numbers existing only in polysilicon flesh, pumped out through the system on tiny electrical charges.

Unseen transistors switching on or off. One or zero.

He caught a glimpse of Wormmon from the corner of his eye. The digimon was hovering in his own world of misery in the shadow of the chair, between a place that was much too close to the Kaiser to be safe and yet nowhere near enough to be loyal. He seemed entirely torn between his desire to take up a faithful berth at his master's feet and his wholehearted fear of the familiar abuse that the boy's expression promised. Despite his pain and humiliation the young Kaiser's lip curled into a thin sneer at the oblique sight of his cringing digimon.

Pathetic. Sprites and pixels. Not even dumb animals. Hardly something to form a nonsensical attachment to. He'd be better off wasting his time feeling affection and sympathy for the strings of data on a periodic table. Or, more to the point, for a random character in a computer game.

Which, in essence, was all that they really were.

And Wormmon thought he didn't have the skill to program his own character into the game, did he? Well, Wormmon could go off somewhere and rot for all he cared. He'd wasted enough time and energy sending flawed digimon into battle, only to have them resounded defeated by the Digidestined. It was finally time for him to seize the reins himself, to set things right once and for all.

Something was brushing up against his leg. Reflexes honed during his time spent in the digital world reacted instantly to the gentle pressure, and his foot lashed out on automatic. The blow clipped Wormmon across the side of his head and sent the little digimon tumbling helplessly away across the floor.

"How many times have I told you never to touch me!" he spat. "Just what part of that defies definition in your clearly uneducated little mind?!"

The caterpillar flailed his legs in the air as he struggled to right himself. Rolling awkwardly back onto his feet he said, in a melancholy voice, "I don't like this at all, Master. I'm sorry, but I just don't! I've been so worried about you lately, with your injury and now this… please, just let me make you a nice cup of tea, and we'll get your leg fixed up and forget all about the new digimon-"

He trailed off clumsily when he caught sight of the murderous glint in the boy's eyes.

"Are you quite finished?" the Kaiser said acidly after a minute of strained silence.

Mutely, and without meeting his master's steely gaze, Wormmon nodded.

"Good. Because if I ever hear you saying something like that to me again, I'll cripple you."

The boy stood abruptly, his shredded cape falling in ribbons around his body. His injured leg quivered under the sudden pressure and he gripped the back of his chair firmly in one hand for support. The Digimon Kaiser didn't show such human weaknesses. If he folded under this trifling pain now, he couldn't consider himself fit to rule the digital world. And he was close to doing so, so very close, no matter what laughable resistance the Digidestined had put up against him in the past. He hadn't gotten this far to quit the game now.

"Do you really think you'll be able to build that digimon, Master?" Wormmon asked, defeated.

The Kaiser gave the room at large a cold, brilliant smile.

Of course he could. Didn't they know? He was the Digimon Kaiser.

"Just watch me," he said.

***

Author's Note: H'okay, is it just me, or did someone really crank up Ken/The Kaiser's Psycho-Meter a couple notches during the timeframe ranging between the "Run, Yolei, Run" episode and the "Crest of Kindness" one? 'Cause every time I watch them I wonder if he's not acting a little more unhinged than usual. Heck, even Wormmon picked up on it, and I like to think that my powers of observation are at least at the level of a caterpillar's.