"Really? Chayote was beaten?" Bora looked in surprise. The story that Upa and Chayote had to tell made the native protector of the Sacred Land of Korin lower his massive arm that clutched a dinosaur's thigh. Over the short period of time that the Saiyan had taken residence in their tent, the father and son had gotten used to dinosaur diet.
"Not really… She just didn't win." Upa shrugged. Usually, a single chunk of meat was enough to fill the youth up. "He was a really frightening man! If he ever returns, I'm scared about even thinking about what he might do."
"I know, right? I can't wait to fight him again!" Chayote shrieked out in glee. "This goes beyond just good and evil. The thought of killing him just feels so… Sunny."
"You scared me back there…" Upa put down a wooden cup after downing all of the tea inside it. He looked at Chayote with whimpering eyes. "Three times I thought I lost you."
"Huh? You mean when he attacked me with his energy beam? Then his sweet flurry of attacks at the end… Wait…" Chayote tried counting on her fingers, even if the task demanded much fewer fingers than she had on one hand, she still failed to do the count right.
"When you asked him to teach you!" Upa yelled out. "I was worried that you'd join with him and do something horrible!"
"You asked that man to teach you?" Bora looked at Chayote. At that moment even the sturdy believer in God's judgment began doubting his unwavering faith.
"He knew how to fire his energy. I thought he could show me how. I don't get why he wouldn't. It makes for a much more entertaining fight when your opponent is the best they can be." Chayote shrugged.
"You just don't get it!" Upa yelled out, the kid ran up to the Saiyan and stepped on top of a pile of unused logs that were to be burnt to keep the fire going through the night. "That man wasn't like you, Chayote, he was really evil. He didn't like fighting, he only kills people for the money, just like the bandits that come here every day."
Chayote looked down as if Upa's words had just revealed something frightening to her. For a blink, the teen looked like her entire life had run through her eyes as if the very foundation of her beliefs was shaken. The Saiyan looked back up at the dull, black points where Upa's lacking features eyes were.
"Wait… You mean Taopaipai doesn't like fighting?" she uttered.
"The outside men are different from us. They are most certainly different from you," Bora spoke with a firm yet soothing voice. "Perhaps it was wrong for you to land here. These lands are a poor reflection on the rest of the world. The outside man shackles himself with money, the same money you've been stacking up and lost to Taopaipai. If this Taopaipai took your money, that means he sees fighting as his job, not his passion."
"That bastard…" Chayote's face turned sour. "Now I have to kill him for sure. Where did you say he went?"
Upa shook his head. "Wait, you shouldn't chase after him. He knows martial arts, he can fire his energy from his fingers. This is your chance to train. I believe you've said you're stronger than him and that might be. If you weren't, you would have never survived that beating he gave you. But if you want to defeat him, and the other evil men, you need to learn actual martial arts."
"Hmmm… You kept talking about that martial arts thing…" Chayote hummed and lingered on the concept, desperate to understand what it may have been solely from the wording but its meaning still eluded her.
"You will love it." Bora smiled. "It is an art entirely dedicating to being more efficient in combat."
A flock of birds took off, frightened by a wild shriek of an overly excited teenager. A shriek that continued for miles and miles on end before it frightened a pair of pterodactyls resting atop of a small rocky pillar as well. Nobody around wanted anything to do with the source of that hungry for action and comprised of pure passion shriek.
"Do you know it!?" Chayote jumped on her feet, shaking her fists up and down as if hurrying the native warrior to answer her question or else she would shed her fleshy core from her lazy and static skin.
"I know a fair bit of what my father passed down to me, but it relates to spear-fighting, archery and the like." Bora shrugged. He raised his finger up at where the summit of the Korin Tower was, still invisible through the pitch-black clouds. "The God on the top of the Korin Tower, however… Legends say that he is the greatest martial artist in the entire world. He loves martial arts so much that he only allows those with tempered bodies anywhere near his tower. Unless you use your own body strength to climb the Korin Tower you will just be cast down."
"Chayote, didn't Taopaipai crash in that steel bird that the outside men use?" Upa looked up at Chayote.
"Yeah, when I dropped down from the Korin Tower, I figured that there may have been no way that your planet has discovered space travel. Seeing that aircraft, however…" Chayote looked up and to the east. "I will need to see the rest of the world. There may just be a way for me to take off to space from this rock after all."
"W-Wait, take off?" Upa ran up to Chayote and pulled on her trousers. "Why would you leave?"
"You don't get it, do you? I can kill everyone on this planet but who knows how long it will take for the Frieza Army to find me. Whis was fairly confident that our paths would never cross so I've been figuring it out for a fair while – I might need to fly off by myself in search for Lord Frieza's territories in the outer space. Oh well…" Chayote shrugged. "Unless I can find a decent spaceship on this rock, it isn't like it even matters…"
Bora and Upa stared at Chayote with confused stares. They did not know exactly what their recently met acquaintance was talking about but their guts suggested that it was more pondering on the darkness she remained lost in. It was like no matter how hard the two tried to subtly nudge her in the right direction, the direction passed down to them by the God of the Korin Tower to the ancestors of the guardian tribe, it all remained for naught and this confused teen willingly remained submerged in the choking swamp of corruption.
"Well, if it will ease your mind, I can show you some moves with the spear. It will soon be about time that Upa makes his own spear from stone and wood, I'd be honored to have you walk alongside him and nudge him in the right direction if needed." Bora smiled at the Saiyan, handing her a sharpened stick.
"A spear, huh?" Chayote scanned Bora's weapon of choice before jumping up and hurrying to her treasure chest. "I know I have one of those somewhere…"
Over the time she had spent hanging around the natives of the Sacred Land of Korin, Chayote had accumulated an impressive array of trinkets from the outside, eastern world as well as its weaponry. She had some of those weird and useless, steel arm cannons that fit entirely in her hand, she had swords and other weapons she could barely identify or understand the point of. It did not take her long to pull out a spear out of her loot crate.
"Well…" Bora examined the weapon with his eyes. "It's a spear alright but… It won't last too long in your hands. The outside man has a nasty habit of crafting weapons and tools on a belt of some sorts, producing it for someone else but themselves for an exchange of money. A weapon forged like that cannot last."
"Whatever, it's just for now, until I can climb back up and convince Kami to train me in those martial arts." Chayote grinned while mirroring the stance she saw Bora take during his morning workouts. She would not be picking the art of spear-fighting completely blind, she had observed the native warrior long and hard. After all, he showed off some of the best that the Earth had to offer and was the closest to skilled fighting that Chayote had seen on Earth up until she met Taopaipai.
"I see… In that case… Let's see what you can do." Bora nodded and turned serious. Upa wrapped his tiny arms over his bent knees and settled down to watch his father and Chayote train. He had dreamed to become tall and strong enough for his father to train him but that time had not yet come. Regardless, the shrimp looked more than happy to live out his dreams through Chayote until he himself came of age.
Initially, Chayote used to count the thrusts she had performed, the number of moves with the spear she had picked up on by just getting floored again and again by Bora. It proved to a fruitless endeavor not even one-tenth of her training in. The Saiyan trained hard and long, refusing to roam the Sacred Lands and pick on bandits anymore, exchanging the pleasure of freedom and roaming for strenuous and lengthy training. She had counted for Taopaipai to soar through these parts one of these days but nothing of the sort had happened. The more Chayote looked at the sky with her spear in hand during every tiny break she had, the more her frustration of the assassin's absence annoyed her.
Chayote managed to learn a thing or two by the time that she had gotten frustrated with the tremendous spike of training required for her current level of skill to progress. Her devotion was by no means fruitless. Bora even allowed her to don her face with war-paint although he only allowed her to draw circular shapes instead of the badass, sharper lines he himself donned.
This painting of one's own body appeared to be the way in which the local warriors displayed the lessons they have learned. It was similar to badges and medals that some of the Frieza Army warriors wore on their chests. Chayote could recall seeing some of the gold-emblem donning folk amongst the usual chaff back when Lord Frieza came to visit Planet Vegeta.
Recovering from Taopaipai's beatdown, part of which Chayote permitted, just for the sake of fun, took far less than the initial recovery after the post-resurrection stiffness. Scaling the rocky mountains in search of the hawk feathers for her own headband took no time or effort. Bora even lamented how it may have been cheating that she barely had to struggle to scale the mountain and could easily run one up if needed. Despite the worries of Upa's father, Chayote handicapped herself to climb the mountain the way which Bora himself told her he climbed the mountain in his youth.
The teen was by no means a warrior yet but the more time passed, the more she became sure that it was simply not meant for her to keep on training with Bora, to learn new moves with a weapon comprised of a sharp stone attached to the end of a stick and to perform more and more oddball hunting rituals to earn new feathers. Just like Bora initially thought of Chayote making it look like cheating, the Saiyan did not feel like she had earned those honors either because she was not like these Earthlings. She could understand their rituals and decorations just fine – it was the same on Planet Vegeta. Struggle bred excellence and reward.
It was just that Chayote was not one of these Earthlings and their struggle did not overly bother her, meaning that the decorations felt meaningless too. Besides the obvious, official honor of being acknowledged by a great native warrior who did earn every decoration on the agenda of an Earthling's lifetime.
"Are you sure you're ready? If you rush it, you'll just get cast down again…" Bora looked strict and a bit worried about the fact that Chayote was stretching out to climb the Korin Tower all the way back up and train martial arts properly. He may have regretted a little bit of having told her about God being this excellent martial artist because now his trouble would become God's trouble.
"Don't sweat it, it wasn't Kami that kicked me down, to begin with. It was that asshole Mr. Popo." Chayote punched her own palm to relieve some of the pumping up passion that was burning inside her. "Besides, this will be my version of the mountain you climbed for the hawk feathers. Something like this is the only thing that can make my arms burn even a little bit."
"Well… You've survived falling from the top of the tower already. If you get kicked down again, we'll be waiting here to listen to your story." Upa looked up at Chayote with a smile. He may have been suspicious about this fallen from the sky girl initially, mostly because of how scary and convincing she was about her frightening future plans, but over time he had come to warm up to her.
"Are you sure you don't want to climb with me? I'll have a tough time telling good from bad without my guide…" Chayote smirked at Upa.
"You idiot, you know I can't climb nearly that high!" Upa yelled out, just like he used to yell at the Saiyan for what seemed like the longest time. After the initial burst of emotion, the boy covered up his whimpering mouth after getting overwhelmed by a whole different set of emotions altogether.
"You're such a wimp…" Chayote looked up and away from Upa, turning her back completely at the whining boy. "I can't kill a little crybaby like you. I'll keep you as my pet."
After that declaration, the Saiyan dashed off, bouncing from one side of the tower to another, like the sabertooth tigers she had killed for a lighter meal during her time resting and training in the Sacred Land of Korin. She may have come to view the place as the first step of the major inconvenience it was to stay on Earth initially, but now she was beginning to grow kind of attached to the place. Maybe that was part of why she had to leave…
Just as the ground beneath her feet stopped being visible any longer, Chayote felt the burn in her muscles from all the leaping about that she's been doing. The Saiyan let her hand grab hold of one of the decorative ridges of the tower and remained hanging for a short breather. She was not entirely sure how tall this mountain was but when she was making the trip down the easy and fast way, it seemed like forever… Then again, who knew how much of that may have been that weird martial arts witchcraft thing.
Chayote could not wait to learn it all. In a much more straightforward dash up, she scaled the tower up. Its sandstone-colored surface became blurry and tough to tell from the sky defined by the setting Sun in the horizon. While she spent her time laying on her back and staring at the sky, the Saiyan used to wonder just what these puffy clouds in the sky felt like. Now she had busted through multiple layers of the suckers and yet she was nowhere closer of finding it out than she was back then…
A jolt of lightning hit Chayote square in the face, running down her body and then the tower itself. The Saiyan's hand remained firmly attached to the ridge while she recovered from the shock of the blast. It was nowhere near as intense as Taopaipai's energy beam but it came just about as fast and out of nowhere as that dreadful attack.
"I guess you really don't want me to get back up there, huh?" the teen smiled to herself after shaking the bolt of lightning off and continuing a much slower climb up. It would have taken thousands of these jolts of electricity to send her tumbling back down and knowing how little things of interest awaited her there only sprung Chayote to soar higher with every leap and bound.
Another jolt hit her square in the face, then another, it seemed almost like the heavens themselves were conspiring to keep the Saiyan down but the teen remained attached to the tower, clinging to it with her arms and legs while her teeth gritted through the ceaseless electric punishment. Chayote was not sure for how long she just walled the entire array of bolts flung her way but all that she could tell for certain was that it had ceased.
With a slow crawl, the Saiyan continued climbing. Just after a handful of sizeable yanks and pulls higher and higher, the end of the tower appeared within sight. Something was wrong, however. The closer the Saiyan approached the summit, the surer she became that this summit looked vastly different from Kami's lair she fell from. With infinite curiosity, the teen let the tip of her tail grab hold of the edge of a large hole and swing her up to the bottom room of the place where the Korin Tower led to.
A circular, small storage room that was completely sunken in the darkness cast on it by the night outside. All around her laid thick and sizeable jars. Led forward by the same curiosity that outright forced Chayote to swing up to this mystery place, the Saiyan approached one of these jars and looked inside. It looked like just rippling liquid, may have been water or something of similar consistency.
Something odd was happening, the surface of the water started changing until Chayote could vaguely make out shapes it was reflecting. This nothing like ordinary water, in this deep shroud of darkness there could have been nothing for the water to reflect and yet… The Saiyan could make out clear as day her own image, standing in a ridiculous pose like one Taopaipai struck before engaging in his enigmatic method of attacks called martial arts, facing a boy in a signature pose of his own, one quite possibly half her size. One in a red shirt and possessing spiky, black hair.
A boy with a tail of a Saiyan.