Japanese Title: Piemon, the Clown from Hell
Gomamon and Jou find Yamato's swan boat and realize that Yamato should be nearby.
While searching for the others, Sora wonders how they'll find them; Takeru asks if they'll find them, Sora rather shakily responds that they must, and Takeru nervously asks her if she's okay. Piemon deftly avoids all of WarGreymon's attacks, but Taichi remains resolute in keeping the others back because he’s confident that their friends will be able to return.
Yamato wanders through a dark cave, reflecting on how Takeru had found his way out of Pinnochimon's house without help. He reasons that this means that he needed Takeru more than Takeru ever needed him, and that with everyone else supporting Takeru and Taichi acting like a better brother than he was, Yamato doesn't have the right to be Takeru's older brother, having been using him only as a crutch so that he felt purposeful in life.
As a mysterious darkness begins to swirl around them, Gabumon tries to convince Yamato that Yamato's still a person with many good qualities about him, but Yamato insists that Taichi turned out to be a better person than him after all and had treated Takeru like an adult when Yamato never did. The darkness begins to swirl around Yamato, pushing him over the Despair Event Horizon and make him wallow in the feeling that he has no right to go back to the others.
Gabumon bites Yamato, telling him that Yamato shouldn't constantly compare himself to Taichi when there's only one unique Yamato in this world, and that Gabumon's waited for years in the Digital World just to finally meet him. He offers to leave Yamato alone forever if Yamato truly wants it, and Yamato admits that it's not that he wants to be alone, but that he used the excuse of wanting to be alone as a defense mechanism for coping with the loneliness that stemmed from his parents' divorce.
Gabumon assures him that he isn't alone and that he'll always stand by Yamato, and Yamato realizes that he really does have his friends who will support him. Yamato breaks free of the darkness surrounding him and sees it visibly for the first time, and deduces that it's not something that's possessed him but something that had been with him the entire time. With that, he thanks Gabumon for snapping him out of it and tells him that they'll always be together from now on, and the cave around them disappears. Outside, they meet Jou, who's overjoyed to see them and returns Yamato’s harmonica to him.
WarGreymon continues to struggle against Piemon, but Taichi continues to hold the others back and mentally urges Yamato to hurry...
Sora and Takeru see Yamato's swan boat and go in to take a closer look. Upon going in and seeing that Yamato isn't there, Sora begins to break a little, but continues to insist that she has to find them because she promised. The darkness that had surrounded Yamato starts to swirl around Sora's leg and pulls her and Piyomon into a hole the ground. Jou and Yamato arrive soon after, but, when Takeru tells him that Sora was pulled into a hole in the ground, Yamato recognizes it as the cave he'd been trapped in earlier.
Yamato, Takeru, and Jou go in to save Sora, where they find Piyomon trying to snap her out of it. Sora is unresponsive to everyone around her, muttering that she has to find everyone or else the world will be destroyed. She's finally able to recognize Jou and Yamato, but continues on about how she has to save everyone, and Jou and Yamato tell her that she has to throw her dark feelings away and that they're not saving the world because they have to, they're doing it because they want to, and that they have hope. Sora snaps out of it, and they escape the dark cave.
Taichi still won't give up on keeping the others safe and shouldering the burden of holding Piemon off on himself and WarGreymon. Koushirou questions why Taichi is acting this way, while WarGreymon, injured and beaten down, falls over, with an also heavily injured Taichi collapses in turn. Yamato arrives with Sora, Takeru, and Jou, and Taichi is happy to see them, telling Yamato that he knew he’d come. Yamato reaffirms Taichi as his friend, and his Crest of Friendship’s power gives Garurumon the power to heal and restore WarGreymon, after which he regresses to Gabumon.
Gabumon then warp-evolves back to MetalGarurumon and fights alongside WarGreymon to take on Piemon...
