The Silver Corps was an elite aerial division capable of pretty much any task. Even if their leader was not present in their current mission, being engaged in setting up military bases in the northeast, the masters of aerial combat were up to any task. Even throwing bombs from above at the Red Ribbon base itself. Unlike the cowering, ant-like ground units, the Silver Corps would not back down until…
The adamant sentiment in the heart of every air fighter shook from its foundation when a thunderous blast sent a fighter down spinning. That blast was the one that missed the target as the ground unit knocking them all down needed a few shots to get used to whatever they were using to attack the aerial units. With this much firepower, could there have ever been any doubt that this was the assailant that slew the entire Brown Squadron?
"Wait… I think that's OUR guns taking us do…" a radio signal made most of the full of their own grandeur soldier sitting about as high up their leather and steel throne as their current altitude slip up a step. The next blast, the first one that connected directly did not just blow a soldier out of the sky, it blew them up and then some. The resonating shockwave sent several more planes shaking, it was only due to the uncanny skill of the Silver Corps that, out of the shaken bunch, not a single unit crashed.
"Those ARE our guns! What's happening!?" another radio signal reached the interconnected network. More and more screeching static noises followed by a bubbly disconnection noise telegraphed the quick end to another handful of planes.
"Dammit, is the base firing back at us!?" one of the soon-to-be-downed soldiers wondered.
"What the sh…" before yet another elite aerial unit could finish that potty-mouth thought, an explosion beside several of their colleagues tipped the folk off to the demise of the swearing soldier.
"The Red Ribbon's got the most advanced anti-air system, unless we nuke the whole base into a crater, we're done here!" a remaining field commander, after countless spontaneous field promotions, declared as the buzzing sky of bombarding daredevils cleared out to only the unmanned, automated, high-caliber gunfire spitting buzzards.
"There's still the Metallitron Squad and the Battle Jacket. Cheer up, boys. Whoever's down there won't get any more ground." The field commander tried cheering up the troops he just ordered to retreat.
"Sir, the attacker's in the middle of our base, using our anti-aircraft weaponry against us, they've got all the ground they want, it feels like."
One final explosion of a missile fired at the devious-minded pilot lit up the sky and sent airwaves across the tundra and the mountains to the north and to the rich in diversity and thick in size and numbers forests to every other direction.
"This weaponry is primitive, though satisfying and effective against the locals of same technological advancement stage…" Chayote observed to herself while scanning the sky in a massive steel dome that had cannon tubes the size of a small building sticking out all over its front. "I suppose if the most powerful military on the planet has not mastered space travel, there's no hope of me leaving until someone finds me and picks me up."
It was because of such naïve and longing thoughts that the following attack had caught the Saiyan unprepared. An unorthodox assault, to say the least, a colossal fist flew at the teen, however, unlike the normal manner one would use a giant floating fist projectile for, it did not merely punch – it blew up together with the building hosting the massive anti-aircraft stations on its roof.
It was not that the fire or the blast itself were particularly hot or that the blast did any damage whatsoever to Chayote, it was merely because of elementary physics that she got ragdolled about yet again and found herself surrounded by the draining forces of the Red Ribbon ground units. Those few that were mad enough to approach the young woman, likely ones oblivious to her sheer power, speed and nonchalant attitude towards taking lives as well as her destructive tendencies, perhaps merely those choosing to not believe the stories of their disobedient fleeing comrades, soon found themselves directing their attention at a pair of heavy shoes landing nearby.
The heavy thud from under said shoes sent quakes across for at least the nearest four-hundred meters and the badass appearance of the deadly operative hunting after the Saiyan raider spoke by itself. The soldiers, as numerous as they were, figured that if that thing could not kill the attacker, they would have stood no way in hell of doing it either.
Wiping slobber off of her face, Chayote stood back up and faced the one-armed giant. It was a towering brute that matched some of the garages hosting tanks and APCs that the Saiyan had seen in the earlier stages of her invasion. The size of the man's muscles, visible through his burgundy-colored, sleeveless military vest told stories of the man's only rivals in terms of having a neck massive enough to be squeezed by these arms being dinosaurs. The white, spiky cut on the man's head contrasted the cool, dark shades he was wearing on his eyes.
"You gave up an arm for a blast that pathetic?" Chayote taunted the giant before leaping right at it. Just this once she did not move like a martial artist. The excitement of seeing an opponent this big and, potentially, this powerful just got to Chayote and she allowed herself the mistake of forgetting her basic combat training just so she could dash at this mountain and kick it around a bit.
Another missile stopped the Saiyan in her tracks. An almost identical clone of the hulking brute before her landed nearby his one-armed brother with an open mouth that, Chayote could have sworn seeing, hosted a massive hole, not unlike those in the tubes launching anti-aircraft blasts from earlier, except a tad more compact to fit within the giant's mouth, apparently.
[Not even you can defeat the Metallitron Squad], the brute spoke in a static, artificial tone, as if speaking through a voice of some other man that was being transmitted from inside in a rather lacking sound quality. Then again, it had an entire chunk of flesh and bones to work through to leave the mouth of the colossal brawler so…
"Your vests are pretty cool but way too big for me. Sorry, guys, unless I need a parachute, I'll pass." Chayote replied and dashed right at the handful of these newest enemies that have presented themselves.
A dull, yet sufficient to throw Chayote off her feet, blow sent the Saiyan crashing through a building hard enough to make the building collapse. There were soldiers inside, not that the Saiyan cared too much about the cowards using the confusing layout of the place to seek sanctuary inside one of the dozens of buildings in the military complex.
"I guess I should have figured a "squad" would include more people…" Chayote cackled like an excited child after leaping out from the rubble with a grin that covered the entirety of her face.
A stomping attack from another giant squished the Saiyan down and made her completely disappear under the foot of the attacking brawler. The bunch looked at the spot where Chayote was last seen before the stomp, their eyes fixed at her location as if the entire squad was under hypnotic control.
[Not even an attack like that killed her], the Metallitron with a dark green vest and blond hair declared in an identical, artificial voice.
[The enemy does not resist. Perhaps they've given up]? A Metallitron with a golden vest and eggplant-colored hair wondered in a voice that was as monotonous and single-note as that of his comrades. The content of the brutish soldier feeling curious could have only been picked up from the content of his words.
The Metallitron with its foot having squished Chayote into the pavement shook. It was about the only show of body language as even the facial muscles of these badass giants barely moved when they spoke. Only a few of the wrinkles by their cheeks did. Without much resistance from the attacker, Chayote flipped the behemoth over by standing up and pushing the leg pressing against her up.
"So what's your deal? Are you brothers or do you just wear themed outfits?" the Saiyan looked confused by the appearance of these odd enemies. While initially, she felt somewhat excited by the prospect of duking it out with them and maybe even letting them land a few blows just to see how strong they could get, the novelty was beginning to wane at the moment.
[Remarkable physical strength. Alien]? One of the Metallitrons wondered, marveling at the ability of the teen to flip over one of them with such ease.
Before the yellow-vested Metallitron could speak up, the titan stumbled back with a teen-sized hole in its chest while Chayote spun her fist about and marveled at the chaos of wires, steel plates, chips and electric sparks that she's caused. Having damaged something important in the mechanical giant, the Saiyan made the stumbling enemy blow up. It was a recurring theme of that day.
[Impossible…] the burgundy Metallitron exclaimed. The lack of emotion in his movements or even in him uttering that word may have seemed creepy to anyone who did not just take one of these mechanical soldiers out with one punch through them. Usually, when people exclaimed that sort of thing, they sweated profusely and stumbled back. This Metallitron and all those who weren't forced back stood their ground and merely observed their enemy as if absorbing the data that she'd been showing.
"Although… You guys did say something interesting about being able to register that I wasn't dead. I wonder about those shades…" Chayote smirked.
Screams became a part of the total routine for that day. Men taken out by the dozens in a blink of an eye, dogs howling while they were dispatched with a bit more softness to the blows, the deafening explosions resonating all over the place of the world's most advanced military technology announcing its failure against a great amount of brawn.
Colonel Violet did not expect the murderous Saiyan to reach the top floor of the vault so soon, however. She was beginning to foster false hopes of being able to run away with the most fun pieces of hardware stored in the Red Ribbon base and the seemingly infinite riches, however, the efficiency of the attacking force caught her with her pants down for the first time in her life.
"Hmmm?" Chayote hummed in a bemused tone after seeing the Colonel of the Red Ribbon with money sticking out of her pockets and bags of gold stacked around her while dozens of assault rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers and vintage revolvers stacked against the toughest walls amongst those that the Saiyan had to bust down yet.
"Damn it, I'm not letting you ruin this for me!" Violet yelled out before grabbing a grenade launcher by her side and flinging a handful of grenades at the Saiyan, mixing in incendiary and gas rounds into the barrage, hoping that one of these would do the trick.
"I guess this isn't where the cool tracksuits are stored…" Chayote blew the resulting smoke and fire out with a nonchalant breath. "I figured that these Earthlings would store their most valuable possessions at the top floor of their storage…" she scratched the back of her head.
"T-These are the most prized possessions of the Red Ribbon, the only more expensive one is the Battle Jacket and Commander Red's own revolver. But Commander keeps those to himself and I'm not walking into that hive." Colonel Violet spoke with a bit of defiance to her impending fate, one she heard her more foolish comrades meet not too long ago by the masses at the hands of this very unstoppable monster.
"But there's nothing but junk here…" Chayote sighed. The Saiyan just about prepared herself to execute the woman that had almost burnt down what little remained of the native warrior uniform of the Sacred Land of Korin that Bora and Upa gave her. "I'll never find the green tracksuits at this point, may as well blow this whole base up…"
"W-Wait! You mean the zip-ups that the soldiers use for the morning jogs, right? I'll tell you where they are if you let me leave this place. Also… What is that thing on your face?" the confused Colonel finally mustered up the strength to ask.
"Huh? You mean these primitive, Earthling scouter thingies?" Chayote pointed at the shades that may have been the size of her whole head and just barely stayed attached to her head. It was a bit difficult looting them off of one of the Metallitron units as it required defeating it without having the bastard detonate and it took Chayote multiple tries. As it turned out, these Metallitrons were much more durable than they were strong.
"Scouter?" Violet jerked her head to the side. Clearly, the term of this basic technology was beyond this primitive Earthling.
"Yeah. It's supposed to tell you someone's power level. These are garbage, however, one thing a scouter's supposed to do and these can't do that. They can just register life signatures and kind of assume their power. With how weak this army is, I can barely test if this thing works right or if I busted it by accident." Chayote sighed.
"I-I think you look just fabulous in these. I'm not sure who said that fashion goes around in circles but… Girl, you're rocking those babies!" Colonel Violet offered the confused Saiyan her thumb up before slowly making her way with all of her loot toward the door. "Come on, let's get you dressed up in something REALLY cool."
"Damn it! DAMN IT!" Commander Red slammed his hands against the desk before flipping out and flipping the table, symbolic to his mental state. The shorty stared at the images transmitted by the Metallitron Squad that had gone offline one after another. The image of a spunky teenage girl with a tail would haunt his nightmares if he survived to have any.
"This girl… Where on Earth did she come from?" Staff Officer Black grumbled. By now, both of the two men went through a rough day. While Commander Red appeared same as he did on a usual day, if a bit more sweaty and pissed off to no end, Staff Officer Black had completely collapsed and required the support of a table to stay on his feet, it seemed.
The second-in-command was serving every need of his Commander the whole day. Every single caprice, arguing to the last about every bad decision that his Commander came up with. Initially Black admired his superior's genius, after all, the leader of the Red Ribbon identified the enemy's threat level right out of the gate and sent everything he had at the right time. By all means, Red's strategies should have worked – use the Silver Corps as aerial support in sync with the ground units, combine every single Metallitron unit present in the base into a single squad and send all of them at once instead of waiting for the enemy to wander into each of them.
And yet…
With a mighty punch, the attacker blasted through the side and, in an instant, dispatched of every single one of the bursting from the lower floors guards that resorted to standing by their leadership to the bitter end. Granted, the folks had expected the attacker to come through the door and not that they'd have to rush after her, but such was the nature of combat – sometimes things did not go the way they were supposed to. This was only elementary in a field where deceit and thinking ahead was the key.
"Why are you attacking us!? What on Earth do you want!?" Commander Red jumped atop of the table that previously offered Staff Officer Black some support while he gestured at Chayote. Standing atop of a table was the only way that the Red Ribbon's leader could stand taller than the young woman that had decimated his forces and sent Red Ribbon back to its infancy stages, postponing their plans to collect the Dragon Balls by decades.
"I thought there was nothing on this planet that I wanted…" Chayote smiled with far too much kindness for someone as monstrous as she revealed herself to be that day. "However… I've come to find out that there are things here that are more exciting than even Planet Vegeta… Martial arts, cool clothes, fighting tournaments and… I've even seen another Saiyan once in a vision of my future. I can't help but wonder what sort of insane stuff is still out there. It makes electricity pass through my tummy to even imagine!"
"Planet Vegeta? So you're an alien of some sort? Screw the army, how about you work for us? Help me gather the Dragon Balls and I'll make it worth your while, any kind of clothes you want, any kind of weaponry. You said you're from another planet, help me take over the world and I'll have Dr. Brief himself build you a spacecraft. Damn, who even needs Dr. Brief, we have our own genius scientist working just outside North City!" Commander Red looked calmer than he did before. He had figured that his offer was simply too good to refuse. This was how he got himself to the top of the food chain, by listening and then giving people what they wanted until he himself had surrounded himself with people mighty enough to take whatever he wanted without offering anything in return.
"Cool clothes and a journey back home sounds fun. Have you offered this to me a couple of weeks earlier, I may have been tempted." Chayote shrugged. Beginning to put together where this was going, Commander Red began taking careful steps back, trying to make a bit of distance between himself and the alien invader. "I may have even considered allowing you work for me, maybe have you guys join the Frieza Army eventually but… You're far too weak to be of any use to me, let alone Lord Frieza."
"Why you!" Staff Officer Black completely lost it, charging at the Saiyan who was elevated in calmness by the pile of bodies, rubble, and fires she had left behind her. The teen moved her head aside, dodging the blow while she thrust her knee right into the groin of the last man daring to resist her siege. Sounds both shrieking and gurgling in nature followed Staff Officer Black all the way to the atmosphere, although anything past the moment when the man busted through the roof of the central hub and snapped his neck as well as shattered his skull in the process was just an echo.
An explosion opened up the top floor to the outside as one of the aircrafts lingered atop of the busted central hub offering a rope ladder to anyone willing to take it. With his vintage, gold encrusted revolver with a wooden handle in hand, Commander Red tried suppressing the Saiyan while he made his exit. The teen barely registered the bullets, even if they were larger and faster than most she's been attacked with that day. Still, what stopped her in her boots the most was the fact that Red actually thought he'd get away like that.
"Kinto!" Chayote yelled out while she leaped up. She figured that since his enemy was so slow and pathetic in his wriggling retreat, she may as well have played with her food a tad bit.
After the Saiyan had elevated herself to where she got a bird's eye view of the devastation she wrought, a loud pop followed by colorful clouds up ahead demanded her attention. A blue, mechanical suit began plummeting at high velocities from where Commander Red used to hang. A difficult to make out, dwarfish shape took a wild dive down and entered the mechanical suit that used jets to break its fall and prepare for a pilot taking their seat in its pit.
"Red Ribbon Battle Jacket…" Chayote recounted what her oversized set of shades told her. The blue mechanical suit floated in mid-air before leaning forward and showing off a massive missile on its back.
"Disappear with the entire base! To Kingdom Come with you!" a mechanized version of Red's voice preceded the launch of the deadly missile. Chayote knew that the missile would be trouble because it had a red end at the tip, that meant that whoever was making it tipped the enemy off this meant business!
"Commander! This will blow us out of the sky!" the pilot manning the aircraft that Red was just retreating in yelled out but the resulting nuclear cloud of decimation drowned out the pleads of the dying to consider the worth of their lives.
Only a massive crater of ashes and cinders remained of what was once the headquarters of the Earth's strongest military. The floating, slightly dirtied and banged Battle Jacket posed in its might, having survived the town-ending blast. When the Battle Jacket was being built, it, without a doubt, was built considering that nothing could have survived such excessive weaponry and it was given such weapons of untold destruction not because they would ever be needed but out of symbolic value alone.
"Ha ha ha ha! Take that, you alien filth! Nothing survives the Battle Jacket! Everything of worth has been preserved, the Red Ribbon is victorious! I don't really even need the Dragon Balls to make my wish come true. The Battle Jacket makes me both tall and strong enough to shut everybody up! Although… Not as handsome… Back to the drawing board then, handsomeness is a must…" the Battle Jacket entered a contemplating stance, completely ignorant of the Saiyan floating above it. By the time that Commander Red stopped ignoring the life signal warning beeps, it was all too late.
"Lima Spear!"
With her palm strike ready and wound up, Chayote was diving down and collided with the center of the Battle Jacket, busting it open and splashing waves of Red's blood by just thrusting her open palm into the previously thought invincible battle bot. The mechanical suit began glowing with surges of salad-green Ki as it spiraled down and then detonated in an explosion matching the previous one in power but massively dwarfing the clean nuke before in sheer compressed power.
After the debris cleared out, it became crystal clear that there was much less left of the mountain range that once protected the Red Ribbon Army from an attack coming from the north. Not that it mattered, given how the base that the kilometers of ruthless mountain range disappeared a bit after the base it was supposed to protect did.
Chayote looked on to the south-east. She still had a couple of years before Korin told her to go to Papaya Island and meet his pupil for some more martial arts training. What seemed previously like a curse and a prison to the unwilling Saiyan, deprived of Heaven, proved to be a rather exciting new bag of possibilities. Given how she'd eradicated thousands of bad people all at once, she was now ahead of the schedule and had a few more months all to herself.
It was a close one though, she very nearly killed that nice lady with violet hair that showed her where the cool tracksuits were… Chayote just wished that Upa was here to help her tell the bad from the good. Then again, if she kills too many good people, she can always just change her mind and wipe everyone out. Shouldn't take more than one blast to wipe the whole surface clean. The worth of the planet would plummet though, enough for some space rock so distant from any of the nearest Frieza Army sectors to be rendered worthless and Chayote aimed to please after her previous fiasco during the test.
"Go, Kinto, let's see what else we can do until the time comes!" Chayote raised and pumped her fist up into the sky. The best thing about magic clouds was that they did not need a second request – the Dark Kinto split the clouds with a violent burst of speed after the first one. At this point, the Saiyan was unsure if the smile on her face was due to immense speed she was traveling in or because of how excited she was about what else Earth had to offer.
Oh, what difference a change of perspective makes!
Author's Note: I've received a note stating that some of the readers have caught up with one of my stories and we can't have any of that, can we? Anyway. There goes the first, Land of Korin Saga of Paradise Lost. Can't believe that my interest of mashing my keyboard to put the rest onto a doc file that I then can copy/paste on is just as vivid as it was when I started, then again, I still feel passionate about Tales of a Ninja Magician even though I've been working on it for YEARS now. Hopefully, it's a sign of me finishing this story and, hopefully, it won't be even half as long as probably half-finished TONM :D