All in the Technique
By Moonraker One
2. Late Dragonball
Chapter Three – The Tenkai Heats Up
Once the two friends and training partners realized that they would be fighting each other, the strategies began to formulate. Goku thought up his plan in less than a minute; he would go in strong and quick, but not arrogant or eager. Kuririn knew that he had to somehow keep Goku distracted while he went for his tail. When Goku's tail was grabbed, the seemingly invincible young warrior lost all of his strength, which would make it quite a bit easier for Kuririn to win. He had to try this method; it was his only hope of winning the match and hopefully, the Tenkai itself.
Maron was watching from the sidelines as the two friends stepped into the ring for their struggle against each other. She had no doubt that Goku had several main advantages going into this struggle, so she knew that if anyone was going to win, it was him. Kuririn was powerful-even on a superhuman level-but not good enough to defeat Goku in this match. At least, he couldn't do it without some kind of miracle. She had learned, from her last few years training with Hebi-sen'nin, that miracles in martial arts fights did not happen regularly.
Both contestants were both eager to start the match and scared as to what might happen, but they both were ready when the gong rang signaling the start of the fight. Kuririn began the offensive side with a medium kick attempt to Goku's stomach area. This backfired, because Goku grabbed the foot in midair, and reversed the move, sending Kuririn far backward. Goku then responded with a strong offensive of his own, consisting of powerful punches to the face and chest. Fortunately for Kuririn, most of these he managed to either dodge or block. The ones that he did receive sent him back quite a distance, and took a lot out of him.
Kuririn decided that his best chance was to try a plan that he had quite a bit of doubt in. He first waited for Goku to try and attack him from afar, and when he did, he jumped up in the air to dodge it. Goku, willing to continue the fight, followed him into the air. Kuririn then used the sunlight reflecting off of his bald head to temporarily blind Goku so that he could send him crashing to the ground with a downward kick. He tried, and most of this plan worked, but when it came to the crash, Goku caught himself and landed on his feet, unharmed. Kuririn was then quite an easy target as he descended to the ground. Goku, knowing that this was an open opportunity to end the match, flew towards him with a flying kick that almost hit, had Kuririn not taken in a sudden breath that allowed him to descend slower.
As the two stood opposite each other in the ring, both were keenly calculating what to do now. "That was a really fun attack, Goku!" Kuririn said, referring to his inflating of himself to avoid Goku's flying kick that surely would have ended the fight right there. "Now, I think it's time for you to have some fun of your own!" After saying that, he drew his arms back to his side for a Kamehameha. He then began reciting the phrase that preceded the energy blast. Goku saw that his friend was trying a beam that was far too weak to do any sort of damage to him, so he put up his palm in warning.
"Wait, Kuririn!" He cried, knowing that he would be easily able to deflect said Kamehameha. "Your beam's too weak! You'll simply be wasting your energy!"
Kuririn, however, did not listen. He powered up and fired, causing Goku to roll his eyes and put up his palm to deflect the energy beam. When Kuririn fired, the beam soared across the ring and was stopped by Goku's left hand. "See, Kuririn?" he asked, then looked around for his friend, for he could not see him.
"I'm here, Goku!" Kuririn yelled, suddenly appearing behind Goku. "Sorry it had to end like this, but otherwise I didn't stand a bit of a chance!" He then grabbed Goku by his tail, causing Goku to bob forward a bit, and then pass out on the ground. The crowd let out a gasp, for they did not know how such a great warrior could be toppled simply by the grabbing of a tail. The announcer began counting to make it official.
"One! Two! Three!" Maron blinked a bit; she had been keeping track of the whole fight, and she was astonished by Goku's sudden loss of energy. She did not realize that it all came back to the tail, that it was that little appendage that caused him such grief when it was grabbed or squeezed. All she knew that he had to do something about it.
"Four! Five! Six!" Kuririn began to smile at his easy victory.
"Eight! Nine! Te…" The announcer was suddenly interrupted by Goku leaping off of the ground, behind Kuririn, and then launching him backwards with his tail. Maron raised an eyebrow in amazement.
"What!?" Kuririn exclaimed, confused as to how Goku was not defeated. "I thought that if you had your tail squeezed, you lost all of your strength! How can you be still moving?!"
Goku smiled. "I trained my tail so that when it is squeezed, I don't lose any strength! Amazing, huh?"
Kuririn was now scared; he had no chance of winning. Goku was far more skilled than he, and was also far more powerful. If he tried anything, Goku would instantly know exactly how to counter it, and what to do in response as an offensive. It was quite hopeless to fight, but he had to press on. He moved forward, causing Goku to leap from his current position, and send Kuririn out of the ring with a swift kick to the side of the head. Maron smiled; she predicted this outcome because she knew that there was no way that Goku's friend Kuririn was capable of winning the match. Now, coming up, was the another major match of the Tenkai; Maron versus Tenshinhan.
Tenshinhan, a student of Tsuru-sen'nin, knew that if he was going to beat her, it was going to require just about every bit of power that he possessed, and the same for the level of skill. He had previously heard of Hebi-sen'nin, and knew that this master had, in his arsenal, one of the deadliest weapons of all time. He knew, down cold, the power-up technique of the gods. This was the legendary Daimaoh-Ken. This technique had several major advantages to any other method of powering up; namely, whatever your enemy's power was, this allowed you always to be in proportion to theirs, so there was no way they could outmatch you. He'd never seen this powerful technique used, but he knew that if the legends he read were correct, he'd surely lose unless he used every single advantage he had.
Maron had been trained by Hebi-sen'nin never to reveal any of her secrets to her foes. She knew that if she was to win, she had to give it her all, and not worry or experience any emotion that wasn't needed to win. Hebi-sen'nin had learned over his long life that the best fighter was one that thought only about the fight during the fight. It was how he defeated a legendary foe quite a while ago in his life. Now that his secrets belonged to the sixteen-year-old blue haired girl, she was quite different from the girl she was just three years prior. She'd aged a few years, matured as a warrior, and learned the single best method of martial arts ever constructed by a master. She was more than ready to fight Tenshinhan.
Tenshinhan was up to the task of trash-talking. "You," he said, referring to Maron. "I hope you are as skilled as you are sexy. If not, you don't stand a chance." Even as he said those words, he knew in his heart that she was more skilled than she was sexy, even though her beauty went quite a long way. She looked at him and in that instant, sized up every aspect of his martial arts training due to her psychic mind-reading capability.
They both walked down the aisle and out into the ring for their fight. They bowed to each other, got in their stances, and waited for the gong to tone. The announcer slowly walked away from the ring, sweat pouring off him more so than the warriors, hoping that none of the action about to take place involved him. Tenshinhan wiped a bit of sweat off his brow before it fell into his third eye. Maron tore off her sleeveless training shirt that had her Snake School symbol on it, revealing her yellow tank top which was loose against her breasts. She did this both to relieve herself from the heat, and to provide a possible distraction. Not, however, that she needed any such distraction. She knew she was ready. She just didn't know exactly how much.