Inversion of Shadows
BOOK ONE, CHAPTER FOUR
Another turn of the wrench, smooth and masterful of course. Why, she was sure that she'd been using tools since before she could walk, an obvious premonition of her great genius and technical expertise. She had never been all that much like other little girls, playing with dolls and such. Not that she had never done so, but she'd much preferred to take things apart and put them back together or make her own toys, though the family could more than afford to buy them. She had always been the do-it-yourself type.
Across the room, a radio blared music, but Bulma did not find this disturbing in the least. In fact, she actually worked better this way. A lack of any noise as she worked would almost drive her crazy. Not that such a thing made working on the weekends any easier, since Trunks usually did a great deal more than make noise when he was off from school. But it was Bulma's own fault for making her projects so irresistibly fascinating that she could not leave them alone.
Take the one she was working on at the moment for example. The concept seemed simple enough: a way in which individual air molecules could be manipulated and placed as desired. Perhaps, this technology could be used for things like the betterment of acoustics in theatres and such . . .
A rumble echoed through the room, drowning out even the radio for its few seconds of existence. Though it had not exactly surprised her, Bulma frowned in irritation. Then again, maybe the technology should be used as an improved sound-proofing agent.
Naturally, Bulma had long ago soundproofed the gravity chamber, ever since she'd discovered how loud Vegeta's training could get. He'd trained all day and all night back then, and she was not about to let the inconsiderate jerk ruin her required eight hours.
Still, the occasional extraordinarily loud noise would pierce through the walls. And though the thing didn't blow up as often as it used to – Vegeta had learned to be more careful, at least – ki blasts would blow holes through the thick materials every now and then. Sometimes they were accidental, but Bulma was sure that ninety-five percent of the time Vegeta did that just to annoy her.
Dismissively, Bulma shook her head and returned to her work. It was about time for another test run, anyway. She set the wrench absently into her toolbox, and flicked a few switches. The machine hummed to life, vibrating slightly under her hand. For just a second, she smiled; her inventions always made her feel powerful, a sensation she was sure that her warrior friends experienced when they used their ki powers.
She winced as a spark flew off of the console and toward her face. Inwardly, she cursed – but thanked her common sense that she was wearing goggles to protect her eyes. More sparks flew, however, as the humming got louder and there was no other choice but to turn off the machine.
With an irritated sigh, she flicked the switches back to their previous positions. Things hadn't been going right from the start with this stupid thing. It took a moment for it to shut down and several more for it to cool off. As soon as this was the case she knelt down beside the console and slid her goggles on top of her head. Without even looking, she reached behind her for her toolbox and plucked out a screwdriver on the first try; she knew her toolbox almost as well as she knew herself and thus no search time was required.
Deftly, she removed the side panel and in her irritation dumped it unceremoniously onto the floor. She was thankful of the sun pouring in through the window at precisely the right angle; it would have been most vexing were she to have needed a flashlight. She bent in for a closer look at the wiring and the connections . . .
"Oh, please. Give me a break," she muttered. It was the same circuit that had overloaded the last time. Not to mention the time before that. She had been continually repairing and replacing this circuit and it refused to bow to her will as the queen of technology. For all that she was worth, Bulma could not figure out what the problem was. She'd never even gotten this thing anywhere near full blast.
Grumbling some more about the recent disobedience of her inventions, she removed the offending circuit, lifting it to her face to examine it more critically. Her mechanic's eye caught the scorch marks marring the surface. There would be no repairing this one; yet another replacement was in order.
And as if this was not bad enough, the blaring music from her radio stopped, bringing instead the appropriately annoying sound of a newscaster. "We apologize for the interruption of you regular programming. This just in: the downtown area of West Capitol suffered heavy damage last evening. We've yet to receive any reports on casualties, but preliminary sources indicate –"
Bulma switched off the radio. Normally, she would have paid some heed to a report of this nature, but she just wasn't in the mood for it right now. She was having enough problems with her own inventions and didn't need something from the outside world to give her extra ones to deal with. If it was really that important, then she could just hear about it when she was in a better mood.
Still, she conceded as she reattached the console's side panel and placed her screwdriver back into the toolbox, Bulma could not deny that she was a bit curious. It wasn't as if she wasn't an adventurous person; she craved adventure, in fact, probably more than was healthy. And the beginning of the report had tweaked those tendencies a bit.
It could be any number of things. A chemical plant explosion, a terrorist attack . . . There was even another possibility that intrigued her as much as it frightened her. The world, despite being basically safe, was still not necessarily absent of any abnormally dangerous threats; there was a certain jinzouningen out there that could be causing some havoc.
Bulma knew that it would not be Juuhachi, for she had recently settled down in marriage with Kuririn. Her life wasn't any more a secret than what she made it now – by nature she was a secretive person, but Bulma respected a girl's right to her privacy. Besides, it just didn't seem like the kind of thing that the blonde woman would do these days. While Bulma would not claim to know her very well, she knew enough for that much.
But they never had figured out what happened to her brother. The only thing that was certain was that he had been revived by the Dragonballs along with all others who had been killed by Cell four years ago. No one had seen him since – well, Juuhachi might have before she settled down, but if so she never said anything about it – and looking for him wasn't easy. He was, after all, a jinzouningen and there was no ki for her warrior friends to sense.
Not that he had caused any trouble in the past few years as far as she knew, but that didn't necessarily mean that he couldn't have started now. Whether out of some perceived provocation or just for kicks she didn't know. But it was a fascinating concept.
She needed a distraction from this project. It was giving her nothing but frustration, and a change of pace – say, studying a jinzouningen, one that wasn't a full robot – would be most welcome indeed. She just had to hope that he wouldn't be taken care of by one of the others before she got her hands on him.
For the first time in hours, Bulma smiled. If she wanted this, then she was going to have to do it herself. Somewhere in her father's laboratory, the blueprints for Juunana were still stored – assuming that the notoriously absent-minded man hadn't thrown them away accidentally. While doubtless they would not contain the very specific data that she needed, she should be able to extrapolate enough information to create a locator device. And she could always construct a new shut-down remote; the blueprints for that were safely stored within her own head.
Bulma barely refrained from rubbing her hands together in glee. Oh, yes, she was getting excited about this one. A little quest of sorts, just like the old days. In truth, she had grown to kind of miss them. Just a quick stop to her room for a shower and a change of clothes, and she would be on her way down to her father's laboratory to root around for those old blueprints.
Nothing moved in this forest without his being aware of it. Even the tiniest bird, the most inconspicuous insect failed to escape his notice. He needed none of his eyes to detect them – in a long-ago battle, a tournament match in fact, he had been told that he relied upon his eyes too much. Despite his stubborn nature, he was not one to ignore constructive criticism when it was offered. Especially when it came to fighting technique. Over the years, he had come to rely far less on his sight and more intently upon his other senses, from hearing to ki.
And in fact his eyes – all three of them – were closed to the world. Some people were able to meditate with them open, but there were fewer distractions this way. Sight could be a curse sometimes and he needed none of that during meditation.
It was a daily activity for him, one at which he typically spent about two hours in between more physically rigorous training. Always training, even though there were no opponents for him to fight. And it wasn't really about beating someone, anyway. The reason lay in being superior to his own self; he wanted to know just what his limits really were, how far he could really go before his ability was complete.
The breeze that grazed his skin was chilly, unsurprising for how far north he lived. He heard even the slightest ruffling of leaves on the trees, smelled the animals scurrying for some form of cover from predators. And not far off his mind, with its marginally psychic tendencies, detected his housemate and friend of decades. He hadn't started off with any psychic abilities, but when one lived with someone who used them as readily as he breathed it was only natural to pick up a little bit of it. No one was completely absent of the talent; it was just that the vast majority never learned how to use it.
Another presence briefly touched this talent, but was gone quickly, almost as soon as it came. Nonetheless, Tenshinhan frowned. The nearest town was over a hundred miles to the southeast and thus he should have been able to detect no other mental presences. He would have passed it off as just a paranoid mistake on his part, but the presence had been too real. It wasn't as though he had seen some imaginary shadow out of the corner of his eye. The psychic sense was not as easily fooled as the eye.
Someone or something had invaded this territory.
Odd though this was, it hardly indicated anything dangerous. Not for sure, at least. And regardless of whether it posed a threat or not, Tenshinhan could not let a subject such as this lie without confirmation.
Smoothly, he raised himself out of his meditative posture to stand at his considerable full height. All three eyes were open now, scanning for the direction in which he had briefly detected that presence. When they met with no luck, he refocused his mild psychic energy to search for it again. He strained a little harder this time, sweat pooling just under his central eye and was able to get a slight taste of the presence once again. It was all that he needed.
He raised himself into the air and headed off to investigate.
While Tenshinhan may have had a difficult time holding on to the new mental presence, his housemate certainly did not. It was part of the curse of being so well-gifted and trained in the psychic arts that he could not lose it even though he might want to. And in this particular case, Chaozu doubted that he would mind that very much.
He sat propped against the cupboards below the kitchen sink, eyes squeezed shut and hand pressed to his forehead. The headache had come upon him quite suddenly when he had just been preparing to fix lunch and was so intense that he had no choice but to sit and attempt to make it subside.
Headaches were not really an uncommon thing for a psychic; using all of that mind power could hurt sometimes, but ones of this intensity were rare. In fact, the only time that he ever got these were the times when he was in close proximity to another psychic of some ability. It didn't take a genius to figure out the situation.
Being a powerful psychic was a rare thing these days. In the past, it was far more common – people recognized the abilities as true and viable. But in this modern age people thought of them as a delusion at best and a hoax at worst. Very few regarded them as legitimate anymore and thus the art had been slowly dying away for some time now. That limited the number of probable suspects.
Chaozu's first impulse had been that it was the Crane Master, but he shoved that aside as soon as it occurred to him. Not only would he have been able to distinguish that mental presence quite readily, but the man had been dead for nearly fifteen years. He and Tenshinhan had seen to that.
He knew of a few other powerful ones and this didn't match them at all. In fact, there was a distinct difference, such a dissimilar brainwave pattern to a human being. Certainly not every sentient creature or psychic was a human, but the pattern did not touch any familiarity at all within his mind.
It was unnerving to say the least.
And something else that was unnerving was that he could sense Tenshinhan heading in its direction. Apparently his friend had detected this presence as well and had decided to investigate it. While he was fairly certain that Tenshinhan could handle himself, this wasn't the type of thing that Chaozu could help worrying about. A psychic could be a very dangerous opponent and in that regard it was usually best to fight fire with fire.
It took some effort, but Chaozu climbed to his feet, taking his hand away from his forehead. From long habit he levitated without even thinking. Theoretically he could lend a hand without leaving the house; he did have powers with this kind of range. But there were certain attacks that could only be performed at a much closer proximity – not necessarily attacks that he enjoyed using, but ones that might be needed nonetheless.
Chaozu didn't waste any time floating through the house to get to the front door. Instead, he merely drifted up to the window above the sink and pried it open with ease. The window wasn't large, and most people wouldn't be able to fit through it, but he was perpetually about the size of a typical three year old and it wasn't a squeeze for him at all.
The fresh air helped his headache a bit – a very welcome blessing considering that he would be getting closer to the presence than was healthy for him. Though he could hope that he had the same effect upon the other psychic. It would put them on more even grounds.
He took to the sky without hesitation, ready to offer whatever aid he could to his closest friend.
Though he could no longer detect it psychically, Tenshinhan could now clearly sense a ki signature – several of them in fact. At least he assumed that they were ki signatures; something about them didn't feel right. Perhaps this was more of a threat than what he had previously thought.
A few of the ki signatures suddenly vanished, and this caused him to frown. Either whatever was out there had attacked and killed some of their own – which he doubted – or some of them knew how to hide themselves from his senses. Which would mean that they knew he was coming.
Tenshinhan had once trained to be an assassin, in the arts of stealth and surprise. It was a tactic that he frowned upon now and thus did not employ. But there was a difference between using an assassin's stealth and surprising the enemy honestly. The latter was something that he would still do, but in this case the option had been taken away from him.
Not that rushing headlong into battle was his style either. What he needed to do was get a feel for whatever was out there and then devise the way to handle it. If he discovered that the force was hostile, then he had no problem with joining battle. If he found otherwise, then perhaps he could convince it to leave.
But the decision was abruptly taken out of his hands.
A sudden, stabbing pain thrust into his chest, though there was no opponent next to him that could have made such a strike. It had simply come out of nowhere and while it had at first been localized directly over his heart, it spread quickly through the rest of his upper body in dull, parallel waves.
By the time that he realized that he was falling, it was too late for him to do anything about it. He crashed down through the trees, even thick branches snapping off like twigs against his weight. His back slammed hard into the ground, arched over the several branches that he had taken down with him, and leaves drifted down onto his body like spectacularly out of place green confetti.
The shock did not last long, and within seconds Tenshinhan rolled himself onto his stomach and then pushed himself onto his feet. Quite suddenly, he realized that the stabbing pain in his chest was gone. Not the slightest hint of it remained – something that worked against the theory that it had naturally subsided. It seemed as if it had been some type of illusion, or . . .
Yes, that was another possibility. If whatever was here had abilities such as that, then he would do well to be cautious and keep those particular defences primed. He remembered attacks like that all too well.
He darted his gaze about, searching for anything at all that looked out of place. Aside from the mess that he had created with his fall, he found nothing. But for the assault laid upon him he would have believed that he was alone here. However, he knew that this was impossible; that attack was a short range one.
A flicker of movement caught his eye.
Tenshinhan fired a thin beam of ki in the direction of the movement, hoping to flush out whatever had caused it. For a second, he thought that he might have simply been overly paranoid and that it was just a forest animal, but he got another hint of one of the ki signatures that was not.
And flush out the creature he did – in fact, he flushed out several. All of them looked more or less the same. Low to the ground, grey-skinned, compact musculature . . . They certainly didn't look like anything that he had ever seen before. Rather, they looked like demons. All the more reason to take care of them; a quick check to his senses told him that they were not particularly powerful.
But in the next instant, he realized that this did not matter at all. How it happened, he was not sure as he had beefed up his psychic defences. Nevertheless, he found himself almost totally paralyzed; the only motion that he could manage was a slight twitch in his arms and face.
Had he been able to, Tenshinhan would have frowned darkly. It was most unfortunate, after all, to be paralyzed when surrounded by the enemy.
That had been a close call.
Were he free to do so, he would have wiped the sweat off his forehead; it was starting to drip into his eyes, which was most irritating. Unfortunately, he needed his hands for something that was currently more important.
This creature was a strong one, a definite target that they had stumbled upon purely by coincidence; it happened to be near the point where he had opened up the gateway. Lucky, perhaps, in that they did not have to cast a wide net to find a target but not in the sense of being prepared for an assault.
Opening gateways required quite a bit of energy and he had only just let it go when he and the others had detected a strong power approaching them. With the others so weak in comparison to the target – they always were, though in terms of power he was even worse off – he had no choice but to quickly refocus the energy.
Had he not been so drained from the sudden change, his attack may well have been able to kill the target; as it was, he had been unable to get it up to its full potential. And effecting the paralysis had been most difficult as well, for this target obviously knew something of how to defend himself against a psychic attack.
But he had managed it, and now the others were closing in to perform their duty. All that he had to do was hold him for a few minutes more –
Another presence suddenly intruded upon his mind, almost breaking his concentration. Dully, his head began to throb. Ungh. No doubt about it that another psychic had intruded upon the battle – a strong one, or he would not be suffering the beginnings of a headache.
But as he quickly found out, a headache was going to be the least of his problems.
