Contradicting Mission

Part 34

Here was yet another wonderful example of the great comedy of errors that all but consistantly befell Son Gohan.

He led the way, now; his enemy/ally, Freeza, following close behind him, as he tracked Sunow's chi, avoiding the numerous and dangerious powers emiting from the Heng assault, all the while wishing that Freeza could suddenly, magically, know how to hide his accursed and loud chi. It made the boy feel exposed, vulnerable, as though, instead of an Aeesu-jin, he were being folled by a shining red beacon that exclaimed "Here I am, come, please, and destroy me"

At his destination, the area Sunow occupied, the boy felt Bojack's chi heighten and then begin moving. It was a delibarate and quick movement. The Biraju-jin was moving away from Sunow and toward Gohan and Freeza... Too deliberate. The blue giant had probably employed Garlic as guide to lead the way to the beacon-that-was Freeza. Looking for Gohan.

Perhaps it was paranoia on the boy's part. He did not know. But past experiances showed that in a time of crisis, Bojack liked to have Gohan close by. Protecting his investments. Keeping Gohan alive to save himself.

Bojack was no doubt looking after his own best interests.

And looking for Gohan.

Dangers pressing in from all sides. Like the crushing walls of a room. Clausterphobia.

A tinge of rising panic.

Can't breath!

"Can't you lower your chi at all?" The boy could not restrain himself from inquiring of Freeza, his hands tense at his sides, his tail twined protectively about his waist, nervously fingering the furry section that passed over his stomach. But then he checked himself -- such a bad habit touching his tail had become -- and ceased, clasping his hands behind his back, instead, to keep them from fidgiting. Nevertheless, the end of his tail twisted around his unseen wrist.

He'd shown enough weakness already. Enough fear. He wouldn't again. Not in front of Freeza. Not in front of anyone.

"Baka," Freeza said, nervous himself, but just as stubborn as the Saiya-jin boy about hiding his own fears, "My chi shouldn't matter. Did you not say youself that there were thousands of other Aeesu-jin swarming this concentrated area? It'd be very unlikely that anyone would be able to pick mine out of the mass you've described, even if they weren't using the primitive chi detectors they have now."

He wanted so much to sound sure of himself. To sound comfortable and confident in his own power. But his tought-as-nails Aeesu-jin pride was trembling like a delicate, tremulous leaf in the wind. Any other Aeesu-jin might notice that the mighty Freeza's face was paler, more drawn than normal. He was very much afraid.

It was a waisted cherade to hide his fear, however; Gohan was hardly aware the Aeesu-jin had even spoken at all.

He was too busy watching, following, Bojack's chi with both his eyes and other sensing facilities, his head slowly rotating at he neck as he "watched" the Biraju-jin make a turn, storm a ways in a restrained run (restrained, no doubt, so Garlic could keep up and continue leading the way like a blue-skinned blood hound.) Bojack's chi paused, flaming yet brighter, as it encountered the chi of three unknown Aeesu-jin. A battle erupted, briefly, but ended hardly before it even had a chance to begin.

The Aeesu-jin chi winked out, one by rapid one.

Bojack kept coming.

Following Freeza's chi.

Looking for Gohan.

Gohan almost found himself asking, again, if Freeza might not lower his chi, but caught his tongue before it ran its course. He brutally berated himself for acting childishly. This was a time of battle, forethought, simultaneous offence and defence, neither getting so far ahead that the other could not catch up to it. A time when a sharp mind and lightning decisions and reflexes would be all that stood between him and a bitter fate.

He did not have time to deal with Bojack!

"Hey, where are you going?" Freeza's voice. Trying to sound authoritive. Ghosted with panic.

The question brought Gohan out of his mental strangulation, and he finally remembered to breath again. He almost asked, "What do you mean? I'm not going anywhere." But then he noticed that he'd already turned his back to Freeza and begun, his body moving without conscious orders from his brain, to depart.

His response also came without mental consultation, "I'll be back in a minute." His voice was non-commital, he noticed. "You stay here. Bojack and Garlic are on their way. You would be safer with them."

He must have sent so many mental suggestions, pleadings, really, that Freeza did not question him further.

This is not running away, he tried to assure himself. This is just survival. Getting rid of the distractions that could get you killed. Fulfilling a mission as quick and efficient as possible.

His pace was a run, using his perceptions to avoid confrontations with the numerous Aeesu-jin pressing in around him. Running not because he was in a hurry, but because on some subconscious, primitive level, he was sure he was being pursued.

Not running away. Not fleeing. Surviving.

Feet pounding against the ground. He ran on.

What are you...a coward?!

Behind his back, Joru Le'Armont's hands shook as he rubbed them together under his cape. Anxious. Mourning the lost fur on his bald knuckles. Worn bare from the friction of his fingers.

The sentry accompanying him were uneasy. Their chi detectors had alerted them that, in their short time of absence, the fortress had become over-run by an unknown but numerous force. It was realized too late, however -- also through the use of their chi detectors -- that their original escape route had been cut off by a great number of impressive, imposing chi.

And find out they did by tracking the low, lone chi of a green (the word used both in literal and figurative connuctations) Aeesu-jin; Heng-loyal, and seperated from his platoon. A sitting duck. Caught, it took the sentries little effort to convince him to expell all he knew and, more importantly for the sake of the Tahch-jin curiosity, who he was abroad on the order of.

Heng.

Heng, the very target the Tahch-jin had orginally come to this planet to destroy. Who they spent countless hours seeking, engaged in an inch-by-inch search for. Waiste of time. All of the meticulous planning turning up nothing, and all they had done was stop searching for him, and he had come to them.

To destroy them, actually.

It would have been a perfect example of mutual loathing -- the Tahch-jin wanting to rid the universe of Heng, Heng wanting to obliterate the Tahch-jin from the face of the planet -- were there not one problem.

Joru was entirely done with wanting anyone dead.

And that included Heng. That included the entire Aeesu-jin people.

He'd seen Son Gohan, a boy less than half his age; and in that youth, he'd seen the amount of damage over-exposure to death can do to one, even in the short number of years the boy had been alive. Though no physical effects existed, the damage was evident in his old, old eyes, aged and weary and full of (what else could you call it?) full of death. And with that, Joru decided that if someone as innocent as Son Gohan could be marred by killing, how could someone with an adult-sized life-time of even minor sins hope to escape such acts with their soul intact?

And indeed, he'd furthermore decided he did not have the right to decide who lived and who died. He could not really pass judgement on anyone but himself and -- in his current state of mind -- he'd concluded that he, himself, was a practicer of gross acts. Most of all, his worst transgression: turning a blind eye to his brother's torturous and brutal killings he'd inflicted on so many. What saddened Joru the most was the knowledge that he would continue to error in that area. Especially in the near future when Son Gohan was finally siezed.

He'd been soul searching during his trip to the Underground. And for once his mind was not clouded with false self-rightousness and over-confidence in his personal inner strength. He discovered that he did not have the power to defy Henning again. He was too afraid. When the boy was reobtained, it would be permanantly. Joru saw into himself well enough to know that he would bend to his brother's wishes. He would ignore the loud, then quieter, then death screams of Son Gohan as Henning toyed with him until the life had entirely left his tiny little body.

He would not interfere with his frightening brother again. The boy. The polite, good boy. The quiet, bright, troubled boy... The boy would die. A horrendous death where his pleas for mercy would only heighten his tormentor's determination to do worse, lusting for more anguished cries.

Joru trembled for more reasons than one.

A war cry echoed down the hall, and suddenly, the Tahch-jin and his escort found themselves under seige as a large tidal wave of Heng-loyal Aeesu-jin swept over them.

Through the tiled walls, large boots pounding the floor hard enough to send the halls vibrating at his sides, following the speedy little cloaked form of Garlic Junior, Bojack fumed for reasons not entirely within his understanding. It was a quiet anger, stemming from more than one other contributing emotion.

Fear. Fear of his own death. Bitterness toward the small gremlin that skittered expertly ahead of him, leading the way to Freeza -- and hopefully the kusobozu -- with well honed Earthly senses. And beside the recognizable, understood feelings, the Biraju-jin felt a queer sense of impending closure. A cold shadow of ending that grew ever closer; that everything, or something, was going to end soon. He didn't know why he felt this, but through the long, numerous years Bojack had lived, he'd long since learned to trust in his foresight.

That didn't mean he had to like what it told him.

Most of all, however, he brewed within his great blue chest a seething anamosity toward the key to his undoing. His weakness. The means of his destruction. The trouble-proned brat: Son Gohan.

Oh, how Bojack hated him.

Hated his innocent face and his piercing eyes and that look that crosses his face as he enters the heart of a battle. The expression that was nothing like the normal face of Son Gohan. The hard, hatefull expression that he bore in his lethal, golden form, the form he had used to kill -- kill -- Bojack. He had used that face when he'd last addressed Bojack, outside, before entering the Underground.

As the feeling of conclusion continued to grow nearer, the mission coming closer to its final chapter, Bojack was becoming increasingly aware of his own -- second -- impending death. And it had been Son Gohan to construct this plan, this plan to begin this ending. Son Gohan. The gaki. Who had already killed him once, with his own small, bare hands. He'd come up with the concluding plan. So, as indirect as it was, it was Son Gohan's fault he would die this second time, even if it was only by completing this mission.

He had no doubt the Kami Larkas would stick him back into Hell once this was over. He hated Kami's.

But not as much as he hated that boy.

The intensity in which Bojack longed to be able to murder that bozu was beyond all dialects. How he longed to be able to wring his scrawny neck, or to return the treatment he'd recieved, to lodge his mighty fist deep into the boy's stomach with the power to drive it out the other side, tearing through his soft, young intestines, feeling his hot, red blood drip down his arm, off his elbow.

The mere daydream of doing it drove Bojack half mad as he plowed along behind Garlic, and he mentally went over then gripping the boy's gaping hole and tearing the his small body clear in half length-wise. Then shredding the remains, yanking his head off, ripping his body into a hundred gory little parts.

Surely then that brightness in the boy's eyes, that acursed cleam of cleverness, would cease to shine. His eyes would glaze in death, turning gray and lifeless. His little head would roll limply between the shoulders on his lifeless body.

Bojack continued to run.

He could hardly wait to find Son Gohan again.

It was all that boy's fault.

Damn him.

Forester clung vertically to the rocky wall of a mountainous hill, his reptilian body flat against the stone, both his hands and his feet naturally finding grip at his sides, his tail balancing him in his feat against gravity. His entire form was frozen, flat against the stones, half-hidden in a dark shadow seeping out from under an over-hanging craige. A sentient lizard, in his element. Though the trait had all but vanished along his line of evolution, his skin still faded slightly to readjust, forming better camoflage for his body agains the rock. His still-stuby horns only adding dimension, the irregularity of texture around him.

He was nearly invisible, hidden in the shadows of plain sight.

It was a good thing, too, for less than thirty yards beneath him stood the figure the Aeesu-jin boy had immidiately identified as Henning. A Tahch-jin. A being of uncounted cruelty. The man that wanted to kill Gohan.

To Forester, he didn't look so tough.

The fifty-or-so bulky Aeesu-jin that accompanied him, however, looked identifiably lethal.

Forester trembled.

"Sir, look here!" A lean, sinewy Aeesu-jin called to the Tahch-jin, "See this? These are foot prints we assume to be the Saiya-jin boy's!"

The silent, observing Aeesu-jin boy held his breath as Henning first surveyed the landscape, his eyes seeming to pause for half a second on the spot in which Forester clung, before directing his attention to the indicated prints in the dust at his feet. His pale, lightly furred hands against the soil, traced a long finger around a print, before he began crab-walking along behind the prints, then dropped down to his knees to craw along behind the prints.

Finally, he sank to his belly, one arm bending under his head to create a cusion for his chin. He sighed in a suspisiously loving manner, blowing up a small spume of dust with his breath, his other hand tenderly carressing another of the prints.

What struck Forester almost as maniacal as the Tahch-jin's behavior was that none of his men seemed particularly surprised by it.

"It's him." Henning all but purred, rubbing his chin against the soil where Gohan had, indeed, previously stood. "My little Gohan. He was here. And not too long ago." Finally, he pulled his tall, long-limbed body up to his knees, then to his feet. He addressed the troop with him, "We're catching up!" His eyes studied the prints yet further, "It looks almost as though, from the purpose of his step and the direction that he's going, he would he heading for..."

Then his golden eyes widened. He began breathing harder and harder. Forester hugged even tighter to the stone beneath his feet and fingers. This Tahch-jin radiated danger. Even his own Aeesu-jin sentries backed away from him a few feet as his normally white face began to darken.

Henning tore his hat off his head and threw it to the ground, "No, no, NO!!" He grabbed the nearest Aeesu-jin to him by the shoulders and shook him, "I didn't see this!! Why, why, why!?! Why didn't I-"

"Sir, what?! What is it?!" The Aeesu-jin yelped, half afraid, more startled.

Henning released him, stomped at the ground, pounding two fists at the sides of his head, perhaps to grab his ears, perhaps to pull at his hair, and shrieked in an all-out tantrum, kicking at the footprints left behind by Gohan, "He's going back!! Son Gohan is going back!"

The senty Aeesu-jin got it immidiatly, as the realization that the Tahch-jin fortress was virtually abandoned struck them simultaneously.

Immidiate action broke out.

Aeesu-jin were barking into communicators, others were sweeping the area, searching for further signs Son Gohan might have left behind. Most of the Aeesu-jin, however, began to run nearly in circles, desperately seeking something to do, but not sure what. All the while, Henning continued howling and storming, stamping his dusty boots, his vocabulary growing from comprehensive to vulgar as he began swearing oaths of horrible vengence and "harsh punishment when he got his hands on that boy again".

Forester decided he'd seen enough.

Instinctively keeping to the shadows he felt more comfortably in, his body moving like a liquid along the craiges.

On the other side of the rocky hill, he found Eesei, where he had left her.

"For'ster, what-?"

"C'mon, we have to get out of here. Now."

The little Aeesu-jin girl did not argue, but climbed willingly into into his arms to be whisked away to safety.

The proof of the intensity of Son Gohan's thorough distraction was soon displayed as he made his own personal way to Sunow's chi-and-person. Tracking Bojack's movements as he is chi reached Freeza's -- relief, that -- the the Biraju-jin's chi flamed red as he found that Freeza was alone.

The boy, running now, his black boots pat-patting on the tiles under him, his arms mechanically pumping in rhythm at his sides, in step with the poundig of his heart and the impact of his feet with the ground, his eyes focused pointedly, severely forward, yet not really seeing, the walls vanishing into his pereferal vision as he actually heard the air he was sprinting through whistle past his acute ears, his tail spanning free behind him...

He was outside of himself. Watching and feeling but not there. Too caught up in the movement of his own bodily self, the beating of his wild heart, the tinge of rage he felt in his chest, boiling up at himself, at everything, he was a piston, he was a jet, he was going to make them, who every they were, them, the ones that made him suffer, them! They would pay.

Breathing hard, rounding a corner, his tail a sharp arc behind him --

He crashed into an Aeesu-jin.

The boy's abruptly canceled momentum sent them both reeling into the great mess of Aeesu-jin that just happened to be behind the first Aeesu-jin-obstruction. A who fleet of them.

And the entire mass of them were sent sprawling in a great tangle of arms and legs and wildly thrashing tails, in the midst of which swam Gohan.

Panic! No open spaces! Can't breath!

The boy rolled free, instincts flaring like a thousand burning stars, quickly retrieving his tail and returning it to the safety of his waiste. He was on his feet as the first Aeesu-jin managed to scramble free of the great tangle to see what it was that had crashed so suddenly into him and his squad.

Sudden recognition.

"It's-"

Eyes snapped from the heaving mess of limbs.

"The Saiya-jin boy -- get off my tail!"

"It's Son Gohan!"

"Kill 'im!"

Gohan stood before them for half a second, his person lowered into a flawlessly tight, defensive stance. Both his arms raised to strike or parry. Looking fit to fight to the death. To kill and, no doubt, be killed.

But then, on a raving, more prudent, second thought, whilst the Aeesu-jin only began to get back to their feet, he turned and ran.

Not running away. Not fleeing. Surviving.

It wasn't what Tousan would have done. He would have stayed and faught to the death and maintained the stainless honor that was his character.

But Tousan is dead, said the unkind side of Gohan. Dead with his stainless honor. But our honor is already spotty and stained with blood. The least we could do is succeed and save reality rather than try to save something that is beyond repair.

He had been prepared to fight and kill.

That didn't mean he'd harbored the anxious ambition to.

To be continued....