Evolution paths

It looked like he could mooch another wave of data. Although the data currently stored in him and Wizardmon was already enough for Wizardmon to evolve into an Ultimate Digimon, who would ever complain about having too much data? Why pass up free Wi-Fi, right?

Besides, the gaps between Ultimate Digimon could be enormous. A Dunamons that evolved with a hundred thousand units of data would not be much stronger than an ordinary Ultimate Digimon. As a Royal Knight, Dunamons simply had a greater data capacity than ordinary Ultimate Digimon.

For example, an ordinary Ultimate Digimon might start with a hundred thousand units of data and still be able to grow stronger, but that growth would eventually hit a ceiling. Depending on the individual, that ceiling would fall somewhere between two hundred thousand and five hundred thousand. Digimon such as the Royal Knights and the Seven Great Demon Lords clearly had higher limits.

Of course, that was assuming they had enough data to reach those limits. Otherwise, they would end up like the difference between the world-destroying Lucemon in the fourth series and the Lucemon who later showed up just to fill a background role...

Right now, Wizardmon had sixty thousand units of data, and he had seventy thousand himself, making a total of a hundred and thirty thousand. That was enough to evolve into an Ultimate, but at best, it would give him the strength of a run-of-the-mill Ultimate.

Yeah, it would be like... a Metal Etemon wearing the shell of the Royal Knight Dunamons~

But if he seized this chance to mooch another wave of data, judging by the previous haul, he would gain another hundred and forty thousand units, bringing the total to two hundred and seventy thousand.

Two hundred and seventy thousand. That much data would probably put him above Piedmon, wouldn't it...

Unfortunately, all that stored data still needed time to be digested and made his own. Otherwise, he could use those hundred and thirty thousand units right now to evolve into an Ultimate and go stomp Devimon.

"Phew~ Don't get reckless! Stay steady! After keeping my head down for so long, I've finally scraped together a little something to get off the ground. I absolutely can't go running wild like those villains."

Taking a deep breath, Zhou Zhu barely managed to calm his surging emotions, then began practicing his special moves and finishing moves alongside his Wizardmon avatar.

After all, he was currently in Devimon's lair. One careless mistake, and Devimon might kill him.

Besides... at Wizardmon's current rate of absorption and conversion, it probably would not take long to evolve into a Perfect. Given the level of strength on File Island, a Perfect could already do whatever he pleased.

He wondered whether Wizardmon could reach the Perfect stage before Tai and the others returned for their final showdown with Devimon.

If he made it in time, the look on Devimon's face would probably be priceless, wouldn't it? After all, Zhou Zhu had chosen the evolution path leading to the Royal Knight Dunamons, and its Perfect stage, Wisemon, was not something Devimon could withstand as he was now.

But before that...

He first needed to figure out how to give his main body some fighting power, too. Remembering how he had hidden beneath the ruins with his head tucked down like a frightened quail, Zhou Zhu felt a strange twinge of shame.

Perhaps it was because he was an adult on the inside. The more he knew, the less courage he had compared to Tai and the other DigiDestined children.

Zhou Zhu understood this perfectly well. All fear came from insufficient strength. Devimon was stronger than him and could even take his life with a wave of his hand. It was entirely normal for him to be afraid.

But he could not stop at being afraid. He had to find a way to improve his own fighting power. Although Wizardmon counted as part of his strength, reality was not a one-on-one, turn-based game. What if his main body came under attack and Wizardmon could not rescue him in time?

Thanks to the feedback, his physical condition was already on par with that of a Champion Digimon, but that only applied to his flesh-and-blood body. He knew none of the special moves or finishing moves those Digimon possessed.

Yet special moves and finishing moves accounted for the bulk of a Digimon's fighting power. For Digimon, those skills were the keys to unleashing the strength within them.

That much was clear from the original series.

Different Digimon had different upper limits to the power of their finishing moves.

If Agumon's "Pepper Breath" had an attack power of fifty, then Sukamon's finishing move would probably only have around twenty.

Although both were Rookie Digimon with similar amounts of data, Sukamon would clearly be no match for Agumon.

It was just like the online games from his previous life. Both sides might have the same amount of mana, but if they chose different skills, the damage they dealt would naturally be worlds apart.

At the same Champion level, with everyone having only a hundred mana, Agumon chose a skill with fifty attack power. Although his mana only allowed him to use it twice, the end result was that Agumon could utterly crush Sukamon, who had chosen a skill with only twenty attack power that could be used five times.

When applied to Ultimates, that gap grew even wider, to the point that it could result in an instant kill.

An Ultimate Digimon might have a hundred thousand units of data but choose a skill with a thousand attack power. Even if it could use that skill a hundred times, it still could not defeat Ultimates that had chosen attack skills with ten thousand, fifty thousand, or even a hundred thousand attack power.

Its opponent might only be able to attack once, but one winning move could carry it through everything. Often, once was enough.

These were only analogies, however. The power of a Digimon's skills depended on what kind of Digimon it became after evolving, and was not something it could choose for itself. Ordinary Digimon could even fail to evolve.

Moreover, even when two Digimon of the same kind used the same attack skill, the difference in their data reserves could lead to vastly different boosts to its attack power.

For example, an Ultimate Gold SwordLeomon with a hundred thousand units of data and a Gold SwordLeomon with two hundred thousand could not possibly have equally powerful skills. As for the Super Ultimate level that people online in his previous life had speculated about, Zhou Zhu could only say that it probably still fell within the Ultimate tier.

Although the Digimon called Super Ultimates were already strong enough to instantly kill the vast majority of Ultimate Digimon, that was all because their data reserves far exceeded those of ordinary Ultimates. Their actual appearances had not changed much.

Before accumulating all that data, Lucemon had been weak, too. But after absorbing vast amounts of data from the Digimon world, being able to kill two Royal Knights instantly was only to be expected.

There were also hints of this in the plots of the other Digimon series, from Azulongmon handing out power-ups in the second series to BelialVamdemon, and then to the outright bloody slaughter in the third series, where Digimon absorbed one another's data.