This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an auditor, I'm an analyzer. You can find all my work at MJMunoZ.com.
This is Digimon Chronicles. I'm continuing to read Digimon Seekers. This is chapter 1, part 17.
This is still A.G. Wolf of the Ninth Avenue, which is something I will continue to say until it's no longer time for me to say that because it feels appropriate.
So, anyway, without further ado, I will read this as quickly as I can. This is KakerInn's translation, and I'm thankful that she's working so hard to get this out every week.
And fortunately for her, I hear in Digimon news that the Digimon Dreamers manga is going to be released on Digimon Web.
I think that's what it's called. Digimon Web, much like Seekers is, will get one chapter a week for about 20 weeks, I think.
And then after that, a hiatus will be over, and they'll start releasing all new issues there. So that might be something you want to check out as well.
I did actually check out the... Sorry. I'm distracted because there's a mystery cat in the neighborhood I've never seen before.
Interesting. I did check out... Apparently KakerInn also did the Digimon Adventure novelization, which I've known about that for a little while.
But I listened to it made from... Oh boy. Lost in Translation, I believe. Lost in Translationmon.
Did a reading of it, and I listened to a couple chapters, and I like that book. I like Digimon Adventure the novel so much more than I like Digimon Seekers the web novel.
And it's very interesting, the contrast between the two of them. But I will not let that shake me from the small investment of reading this a little bit a week.
Part of the reason I'm making an audiobook for myself is so that I can continue to chip away at it and get the whole thing done.
And then also I'll be able to listen to the audio all the way back from the beginning to the end when it's a completed project and see how I like it.
So anyway, I will go ahead and read it now. I will give a little bit of commentary on Chapter 1, Part 17, after I'm all done.
And I'd like to hear your thoughts on it as well. So here we go.
More supple, more powerful, more shrewd.
Such was the form that he'd changed into, a result of seeking power only for the sake of hunting and eating his prey.
The fearsome wolf that was said to dwell in Walslum's Ninth Avenue.
Lugermon? No way! This digimon is, Satsuki hissed from her fallen position on the ground. A blue wolf, far more massive in size than he was before and clad in magical flames, landed on the tiled roof of the castle of Nine Wolves' mausoleum.
An enormous amount of energy could be observed. The energy overflowing from within this adult-level digimon erupted out in the form of spitting flames from his mouth.
That's right, I am Lugermon, but also Lugarmon. Eiji's digimon recalled the memories of the magic flame that had been burning within just moments ago.
Lugermon? I mean, Lugarmon, Eiji spoke from inside him. Did your memories come back?
The Demon Wolf of the Castle of Nine Wolves.
The Demon Wolf of the Castle of Nine Wolves? I've heard of him before. It's supposed to describe the digimon boss that inhabited this place, Satsuki gritted her teeth. Magic and fire converged within Lugermon's mouth. A flash.
Howling Burner! He shot out a condensed incandescent flame. No amount of mucus could defend against it. Numemon took a direct hit, causing them to wriggle and thrash about.
That would be thrash about. Satsuki screamed, Numemon, my precious Numemon! When a partner's digimon is damaged so severely that it reaches their digicore, that damage affects the mental data of the mind-linked human as well.
The human can feel the pain of the damage to their digimon, creating stress signals to their consciousness. Numemon kept burning within the inextinguishable fire. The power of this flame was far greater than the one before it. If the flames of the child level were like a bonfire, then this flame was a colossal burner that could incinerate steel.
Numemon is heavily damaged. There's orders to retreat. Recover the wounded! The members of the Digi-Police acted immediately upon seeing their fallen commander. The wind pressure from Cargodramon's rotors extinguished the flames consuming Numemon, and after they recovered their wounded into the cargo area, the Digi-Police, with the rest of their Cargodramon squadron, retreated.
On board the Cargodramon.
How dare they do this to my Numemon! Sasuke grit her teeth in fury as she tended to her badly burned Numemon. Deputy Squad Leader, warning thresholds have exceeded. You must hurry and deactivate the mind-link. No! The hollow-eyed Sasuke brushed off her subordinate's concerns in their chat room. But look what they did to my Numemon! Next time, I'll make that insolent codecracker pay!
The Cargodramon returned its tilt-rotor engines to a horizontal position and ascended through the net ocean at full speed. Sasuke bellowed as she gazed down at Walsum's 9th Avenue below. Codecracker AG, you'll be mine to arrest!
After watching the retreating Cargodramon disappear beyond the net ocean, AG hollow-ized once more and stood beside his Digimon.
Lugermon
His appearance remained largely that of a wolf, while the color of his fur gave off the impression of a larger Lugermon. What was different, though, was that the hairs on his body had grown longer, giving him a more demonic appearance. Biggest difference of all was his size. Lugermon was about as big as a rhinoceros. The interface on his forehead remained there, unchanged.
As Lugermon stood on the tiled roof of the mausoleum, he looked up at the narrow slit of sky above the castle of nine wolves.
After I devolved to adult, after I devolved back, I finally remembered something. This 9th Avenue in Walsum is where I rule. The Demon Wolf of the Castle of Nine Wolves, right? So you're the boss here. Impressive, AG complimented. I don't know. I mean, being this way now must mean that I've lost my position as boss, right?
Maybe he'd lost his authority to someone else, or maybe he just left. He couldn't remember.
You've had a very strange kind of amnesia, since you only remember more each time you evolve, AG commented. Then again, my knowledge of amnesia comes from comic books and movies.
Hmm. Well, whatever. Lugermon shrugged. I'll get it all back. My power, my memories, and all of my evolutions. Lugermon seemed to have a hunch that he could evolve further.
The smoldering magic flames finally died out and silence returned once more to 9th Avenue.
A rustle. Something appeared from within an alley.
It was Digimon. Not just one or two. Crowds of Walsum residents, in numbers that made one wonder where they had managed to hide, emerged to gather in the castle's plaza.
Huh? What's going on? AG said in surprise.
In Walsum, it was either kill or be killed. Were all of these Digimon planning to attack them next? Lugermon, however, calmly greeted the Digimon that were gathered in the plaza.
Lugermon! a voice cheered. The cheers soon became the voices of dozens of hundreds of Digimon echoing throughout the castle of Nine Wolves.
Lugermon! Lugermon! Lugermon!
The Digimon gathered at the castle of Nine Wolves celebrated the return of their boss. The unknown SOC Digimon, hidden under rags, watched their celebrations secretly from atop the building roofs of the Red Light District.
The Demon Wolf of the Castle of Nine Wolves has returned, the cloaked Digimon said. An aspiring sight, isn't it? someone murmured in the voice chat. It was the SOC interviewer.
That was a nasty thing you did, tipping off the fuzz just to test them. The Digi Police's deputy squad leader wasn't even a match for him, the interviewer said.
I don't think they'd send a mind linker of their own, but the results were what I'd expected. Lugermon, that prototype Digimon, is just what we're looking for.
What about the Codecracker kid? I'm reserving judgement for now. But it looks like he completed the mapping job. They had already received the mapping tools data hours ago.
He passed the SOC entrance exam, of course, the interviewer said dismissively. I want as many Codecrackers with the ability to mind link as I can possibly get.
Do you think he can guide him? That kid, Eiji Nagasumi? I mean, do you think he can take his Digimon partner to deeper depths? He'll have to.
It's the place we've been promised, after all. Wouldn't you agree, Doruman? Whoosh.
The ragged cloth fell away just then, pulled by a strong wind. Doruman. Child level. Beast type. Dady species.
He had a bushy tail. The Digimon that emerged from beneath the rags was plain in color and looked like a squirrel at first glance. However, he had the data of Dragon, the mythological beast that was told about in stories passed down through generations, stored in his Digicore.
The only evidence of that were the small dragon wings sprouting from his back. The same interfaces Lugamon's gleamed on Doruman's forehead.
That is the end of the chapter. The artwork and the illustration was done by Malo. M-A-L-O.
And I gotta say, I did like that chapter. I don't know if that was the best written chapter, best formatted chapter, or not, that I've read so far. And I haven't read of all of the K-Kun's. I was mostly reading off the website, the auto-translation provided there.
But this was certainly good. So finding out that there's this Doruman and their cracker or whatever, I was just gonna say tamer, because that makes more sense, but whatever.
And that they're part of SOC, and knowing now specifically that the interviewer tipped off the Digi-Police to make it more of a challenge to hear that Lugamon's got memories coming back to him as he's really early in the morning.
And I've not been getting a lot of sleep lately. It's just circumstances demand. Anyway.
Circumstances, I thought you called it. No. It's an old Tremors reference, by the way, if you didn't get that one.
But I was gonna say, you know, you've got Lugamon's memories coming back and him becoming less amnesiac. Oh, and then all the Digimon cheering for him. That's very interesting.
So I don't quite get what happened, and they call him a prototype Digimon as well. To sum up, I'm just excited and happy that there's interesting stuff actually happening.
And I like the consistency of Eiji being a little bit behind the 8-Ball, I guess you could say, and these other people around him knowing more and having more capability and setting things up in such a way that they're difficult for him.
And he's being tested and.
Hmm.
He's being tested and I would hope and I would think that we're going to learn more about him the more he's tested because so much of the time we've spent in Eiji's head and then talking to the professor Ryuusenji.
And being that he was so affectionate, not affectionate.
He very much wanted Ryuusenji to like him and approve of him, one, so he could get a job and get paid, and two, because he seemed to have respect for Ryuusenji for what the man was able to accomplish.
That we got a different form of Eiji than we're getting even with the SOC interviewer who is somebody above him as well, even if it's in a more distributed way so it's smaller and the power differential between them is, you know, not as large as it could be.
But still this person is instrumental to Eiji in a way that it puts them above him and I think because of the, you know, nature of Japanese society that definitely has an effect on how he acts around them.
And then Satsuki who, yeah, is Digi police but is around his age and has a new one, mine linked with it and, you know, very much you could say is a parallel to Eiji in his situation.
It's curious to me how he interacted with her because he revealed a totally different side. He said she was cute, he said she was a pain in the butt.
He, you know, ended up not liking her and expressing that and putting him with more peer type people and putting him on a more even footing.
I think we'll reveal a lot more about his character and will enable us or enable me at least to connect with him a little more and have a little more fun with the story as well as like seeing Lugaman face challenges and, you know, pass them or get through them.
And the last element is that we'll get to see more of Eiji and Lugaman have themselves tested and find out what their metal is exactly because as I've said before in another thing that I've done, conflict creates character.
And the reason that conflict creates character within a book or a story is not because it literally creates character, although it does, but it reveals it to the audience because we can't see the character of the people in the story unless they're put into a conflict and see how they conflict with each other, how they resolve their conflict or when they're attacked by an outside force, how do they defend themselves against it, how do they deal with those things and what do we learn about them.
Because seeing how they deal with the issues does reveal the way their minds work, the way their ethics work, the way that they've been raised and the culture that they have, it's all very much expressed through their, through what they do in different situations that they get put into.
So it's making me think now of Digimon Adventure, seeing all the kids get attacked on File Island in that first seven or so episodes where they all had their Digimon first Digivolve.
It's kind of like that because you get a little insight into each kid and then you see this cool monster turn into a cooler monster and fight a bigger monster.
It might be silly and it's tropic and it's of the genre, but it's also giving you exactly what you're here for.
So getting more fights, getting more conflict, getting more development happening in a layered way where everything's kind of stacked on top of each other with, okay, they're learning more about Lugaman, they're coming into conflict, he's getting into bigger fights with stronger Digimon and that's testing him.
And we're going to have it revealed more of who he is. And I don't want him to just be the super powerful guy, which he kind of seems to be.
I'm okay with him starting off with an advantage. A.G.'s starting off with a disadvantage and he's starting off behind the eight ball, like I said earlier.
And Lugaman's like his linchpin because he's so advanced and so strong and whatnot.
But seeing him get into situations where it's not just he's so powerful because he's a demon of the Castle of Nine Wolves and that's the most important thing about him.
I'd like to see him really struggle. Like, I mean, the fight against Machin' Juman, that's cool.
The fight against Black War Greymon, those are the types of things that make Greymon such a great character or like a fun, memorable character.
I mean, Ogomon really. But you know what I'm saying, in his different forms, that's fun that he had to struggle so hard to fight that guy.
And yeah, so anyway, I am going to go ahead and get out of here. I thank you for your time and attention.
I insist that you check out all the links in the show notes. And until next time, folks, this is MJ signing out.
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