"If you wanted to see my 'Agumon form,' you should've just said so! It's not like I wouldn't have shown you."
Smiling bitterly at his still-recombining Digital Avatar, Chen Ze knew he'd been royally tricked by both that shady dealer and Renamon this time.
As for that dealer—forget it, he'd definitely settle the score once he got back!
He had clearly been promised a genuine Japanese account, yet here he was, unable to even log into the public sector. It was obviously just a well-disguised fake account.
And Renamon?
Based on Chen Ze's understanding of her, although Renamon always acted calm and graceful, beneath the surface dwelled a fox brimming with curiosity.
More importantly, despite her boundless curiosity, Renamon rarely showed her intentions openly, let alone actively asked others for favors.
In fact, the only time Chen Ze remembered Renamon explicitly asking for something was when he purchased the EDEN debugging device—she casually asked him to pick up a camera and a CPU along the way.
If one had to categorize Renamon's personality type, she'd be the kind who never asked for anything directly yet possessed an extremely strong initiative.
Precisely because of this, even though Chen Ze knew Renamon was curious about his new form, he never imagined her curiosity could be this intense.
"It's not just because I want to see your variant form."
Renamon herself couldn't clearly articulate exactly what mood she had been in when deliberately choosing not to warn Chen Ze that his Digital Avatar would never pass the EDEN public area's identity verification.
The only thing Renamon knew clearly was that beyond mere curiosity about the variant Agumon form, she was even more concerned about the fact that Chen Ze had chosen not to use the data she'd personally given him.
That was clearly a "gift" she had given him, yet he stubbornly refused to use it. This made Renamon feel particularly gloomy and dissatisfied.
Especially after Chen Ze firmly denied being involved in an "online romance" with her, Renamon found herself increasingly amused by the idea of watching him embarrass himself.
"You almost convinced me with that act."
Unaware of Renamon's subtle thoughts, Chen Ze continued dutifully playing his role as the perpetual complainer.
...
While Chen Ze and Renamon exchanged barbs, another pair of login users—a boy and a girl—appeared in a different corner of EDEN's public sector.
Their Digital Avatars recomposed far faster than Chen Ze's had. In the blink of an eye, their figures descended from above, fully intact and complete.
"Eh?"
As soon as they had finished materializing, this boy-girl duo quickly noticed the unusual situation involving Chen Ze and Renamon.
The girl, with her distinct pink hair, didn't bother hiding her curiosity at all, openly staring with wide-eyed surprise at the pair whose Avatars were still struggling to form.
"Are they hackers?"
Seemingly without needing any real reason, the pink-haired girl immediately came to this conclusion.
"Probably hackers, yeah."
Observing the situation, the boy nodded calmly, agreeing with the girl's guess.
While he himself wasn't a professional hacker, the boy's recent experiences had taught him enough to identify real hackers at a glance in a crowd.
Without a doubt, those two users whose avatars kept glitching out were hackers—and most likely hackers whose accounts had been attacked, causing their current bugged-out avatars.
This wasn't particularly rare among hackers; after all, those strange individuals loved nothing more than attacking and sabotaging each other anyway.
"I really can't stand those guys. They're nothing but parasites feeding off the network."
Having received the boy's affirmation, the pink-haired girl openly showed an expression of disgust.
Unlike the calm and measured boy, she was naturally bright and straightforward—never hiding her feelings, expressing joy, anger, sadness, or happiness directly through action.
"And Agumon and Gabumon—they were definitely caught by these kinds of guys!"
As soon as she mentioned Agumon and Gabumon, worry instantly clouded the girl's face.
Although those two unusual Digimon were only chance encounters, after spending some time together, the girl had long since considered them her friends.
"We'll find them."
Standing quietly behind the girl, the boy spoke gently, his tone somewhere between comforting and certain.
"Yeah! We'll definitely find them!"
Raising a fist to encourage herself, the inherently optimistic girl quickly shrugged off her sadness, loudly declaring her intentions.
"And when we do, I'll definitely give those awful hackers a good beating! I'll make sure they know Nokia's friends aren't to be messed with!"
The boy smiled helplessly at that. He couldn't quite match Nokia's righteous indignation.
Rather than worrying about the two Digimon who seemed quite good at running and hiding, the boy found himself more concerned about what his boss had been up to lately.
"Kyoko-san's behavior seemed a bit strange just before we came out."
Hearing this, Nokia—always a bit slow on the uptake—immediately widened her eyes and stared blankly at him.
"Kyoko-san seemed strange?"
Since she wasn't particularly familiar with the boy's boss, the self-proclaimed "Nakano's greatest detective," Nokia hadn't noticed anything unusual.
In fact, in Nokia's eyes, Kyoko-san had seemed as composed and professional as ever today—certainly not someone troubled by anything.
But even though she herself had detected nothing, Nokia firmly trusted the boy's judgment—his performance these past few days had completely convinced her.
Considering his sharp intuition and insight, it was no wonder that the famously tough Kyoko Kuremi had made an exception to accept him into her detective agency, appointing him as a specialist in cyber cases—a "Cyber Detective."
"Do you think it has anything to do with that mysterious Digital Lab you mentioned before?"
Neither nodding nor shaking his head, the boy simply smiled ambiguously.
Although he hadn't been a Cyber Detective for very long, he'd already clearly sensed certain abnormalities impossible to hide.
Whether it was that mysterious woman in the Digital Lab or his boss's occasional self-muttering—as if she were undergoing some personality split—all signs indicated an unknown danger was approaching.
Even these two… somehow make me feel strangely uneasy.
Thinking this, the boy unconsciously glanced again toward Chen Ze and Renamon, still under the public sector's protective mosaic.
His intuition told him that these two unknown hackers were nowhere near as simple as they appeared—they might very well become the fuse igniting everything to come.
"I think you're overthinking things, Takumi!"
"Kyoko-san doesn't need us worrying about her—heck, it'd be a miracle if she wasn't worrying about us instead!"
---
A/N: The two protagonists from the game have officially made their debut!
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