Japanese Title: Soaring! Warrior of Darkness Velgmon
BeoWolfmon, unable to find Duskmon, resorts to calling for him. Duskmon hears him and stops, and BeoWolfmon, having finally caught sight of him, pursues him. They meet up in a cave and question each other on who they are, and Duskmon decides that the fact he and BeoWolfmon constantly end up fighting each other is due to fate; they are the warriors of light and darkness, which can never mix, and thus the two will always be fighting each other.
The two of them begin fighting and momentarily hit another stalemate, once again revealing Kouji and the mysterious boy with his face within BeoWolfmon and Duskmon. They continue the fight, the severity of their constant stalemates destroying the area around them.
The other kids look for Kouji, but are unable to find him. Patamon, however, begins flying in one direction and saying that Kouji is that way, saying that he can see a brightness that way. Bokomon reasons that Patamon may have some kind of mysterious power from having hatched from Seraphimon’s egg, and the kids set off in the direction Patamon is going in.
Duskmon and BeoWolfmon continue their fight, while Cherubimon looks on amusedly. Cherubimon catches sight of the kids heading towards the site of the battle and, deciding that it wouldn’t be good to have any interference, sends a bunch of spikes down at them.
During the battle, Duskmon manages to cause some poles around him to fall and trap BeoWolfmon under it, but is stifled when he sees the image of Kouji inside BeoWolfmon. BeoWolfmon takes advantage of Duskmon’s hesitation and is about to finish him off, but Cherubimon interferes, stuffs BeoWolfmon into a dark sphere, and whisks Duskmon away.
The other kids take a look at the spikes that have fallen around them, realizing that they’ve created a barrier that’s impossible for them to go through. The kids are unable to destroy the barrier even after spirit evolving, but Patamon begins to dig a hole, and the others realize that they might be able to get around the barrier by digging a tunnel under it.
Cherubimon induces Duskmon to remember the day he - as a human boy - first came to the Digital World. The boy remembers having been trapped in a dark realm, and although within the realm he saw images of people he recognized as his father and his grandmother, the images would only dissolve away when he approached them. When he saw an image of Kouji, he’d approached it, saying that he wants to meet Kouji even if he doesn’t know about him, but the image had only vanished. As he became frustrated at nobody being able to notice him, Cherubimon approached the boy, recognized that his heart was filled with darkness from sadness, loneliness, and anger, and, deciding that the boy was good for his purposes, implanted him with the Spirit of Darkness and transformed him into Duskmon.
Duskmon reels over in pain, and Cherubimon tells him that the pain comes from his “useless human heart”. In order to “release” Duskmon from it, Cherubimion uses the Beast Spirit of Darkness on him, fully putting Duskmon - and, therefore, the boy - fully under his control and turning Duskmon into Velgmonnote .
BeoWolfmon wakes up from unconsciousness only to find Velgmon attacking him, and when the other kids emerge from their tunnel on the other side of the barrier, they hear a giant roar coming from the battlefield. The kids realize that they have to hurry, knowing that the roar doesn’t mean anything good.
Velgmon, consumed with nothing but a base instinct to destroy the light, manages to incapacitate BeoWolfmon and cause him to revert to Kouji with little effort. As Velgmon’s about to land the final blow, however, Kouji’s Digivice lights up and shoots a beam of light onto Velgmon, and Ophanimon’s voice commands him to remember his life in the human world.
The beam of light causes Velgmon to remember his life as Kouichinote , a human boy who found out from his dying grandmother that he had a brother named Kouji, followed Kouji to Shibuya Station on the day he’d been going towards the Digital World, and had been unable to make it into the elevator. When trying to take the stairs, he’d fallen down them, and was only able to say Kouji’s name before passing out.
Velgmon, now remembering his past, flies off in pain and Kouji, still shocked from hearing Ophanimon’s voice say that Velgmon is actually a human, remembers how there was a boy who looked just like him inside Duskmon and how Ophanimon’s voice had once told Kouji about “the mysteries surrounding him”. With this, Kouji gets up and yells after Velgmon, demanding to know what he is to him.
Tropes
- The Berserker: Velgmon focuses solely on attacking Kouji to the point that Cherubimon can no longer manipulate him.
- Eye Catch: Kouji and Tomoki’s variants are used for this episode.
- Image Song: The original version has Kouichi’s image song, “With Broken Wings”, play over his flashback.
- The dub version tries to emulate this with the insert song “Darkness in My Heart”, which, while not officially an image song, is the closest thing in the dub’s soundtrack to being one.
- Non-Fatal Explosions: Subverted. Kouji gets out of the area of effect of Velgmon's Zone Deleter, but is still caught in the explosion, which causes him to revert to human form.
- Shout-Out: The dub title is a reference to O Brother, Where Art Thou?
- Unholy Nuke: Velgmon's Zone Deleternote , which detonates everything within its area of effect with enough force to collapse the overlying land surface. Kouji barely gets out of the area of effect, but is still caught in the explosion and resulting crater, causing him to revert back to human form.
