"I can't even see them… We should have hurried up instead of delivering inspiring speeches…" Krillin squinted with his hand over his eyes, doing his best to focus on the horizon. "He's probably submerged by now anyway."
"Don't worry," Yamcha replied with calculated aggression to his tone. "He's not getting away far. We're in the same kind of submarine he is, that means our radar can track it."
As a testament to his prophetic declaration the man that used to once put bread onto his table from being a desert bandit robbing people of precious capsules and money turned the radar on. One did not spend time stealing and selling capsules without having to evaluate what the stolen junk was worth and one could not evaluate anything without knowing a thing or two about it. Yamcha was nowhere near in the same league at driving or working with tech like his girlfriend but he sure as hell knew his way around a submarine, even a military-grade one.
"Wow, look at that!" Krillin pointed at the bleep on the radar. "You were right, he's a good 8 kilometers away. And we're closing in fast."
"That's because he's not moving anymore, otherwise our speed should have been the same." Yamcha noted with the first hint of worry in his eyes ever since he settled on tracking a commander of his own military force which was a spinoff of the most dangerous military force on Earth.
"Is he hiding? What is he, an idiot?" Krillin wondered. The boy was an astounding martial arts prodigy, sure to surpass Muten Roshi in his prime but… Sometimes he got a bit carried away and trusted his abilities a bit too much, the other half of the time he just underestimated his opponents. What a far cry from the terrified boy back in the World's Martial Arts Tournament. The opening of his eyes to his true strength might have served Krillin a bit ill.
"No. He might have stopped to let us catch up to him." Yamcha expressed his worst worries. Even if that meant getting to Bulma faster, he did not like the fact that his opponent was so eager to engage his pursuers.
"Why would he do that?" Krillin rubbed his bald head, his head let out a rubbery squeak upon contact with the tips of his fingers.
"Because he is confident he can beat us. Because he wants to get rid of his tail. Because he can see us on his radar the same way we can see him. Because he will fight us on a battlefield of his own choosing. Just pick one…" Yamcha got more and more frustrated with each reason he provided. Rushing ahead was anything but intelligent. Muten Roshi was right, Goku and Chayote must have been on their way, wherever they were, they could not have missed that message to the world, could they? Still, Bulma just had that kind of effect on him. Whenever she was involved, Yamcha became stronger, no longer afraid of girls anymore, but also kind of a love-struck idiot.
Krillin gulped with the fear that he inhibited back in World Martial Arts Tournament returning to his face. Regardless, he did not request that Yamcha turned back or try to reason with him as Muten Roshi did. He did not express disagreement when Yamcha accelerated the submarine or submerged underwater, where Commander Blue was waiting for them.
"Underwater? Why would he try to take us on underwater?" Krillin blinked a couple of times. "He won't be able to use his psychic abilities without seeing us in the darkness of the abyss, plus, he won't be fighting us with martial arts but engaging us in an underwater dogfight… How good are your submarine skills?"
"Decent." Yamcha confirmed. "Still up in the air if they're better than those of a commander of his own army."
"Hey, he's a commander, not an officer. Commanders have grunts do their work for them and Blue hit me as the off-hands, sissy kind of type anyway…" Krillin joked with a smirk. It was humor meant as a shield of defiance in front of frightening odds. So deep underwater their odds for surviving a failed submarine dogfight would have been slim, the pressure must have been insane and they'd likely have drowned long before coming up to the surface.
"Look at that…" Yamcha pointed his fingers at something his illuminators showed him – a wreckage of a submarine stuck in a pile of rocks. "Shit… Bulma!"
"He really is an idiot…" Krillin chuckled. "He must have fallen asleep behind the wheel and crashed the sub into this rock. What is this place anyway?"
"Hold on, I can see some bubbles gathering around the place, there must be air on the other side, I'm going to have to push the sub inside and then see what he crashed into." Yamcha informed his ally before gently ramming into Blue's submarine. He did not pack any speed behind it whatsoever, placing his front by the rear of the other submarine and accelerating subtly from that point on, just letting the stuck submarine power through the layer of stone and into whatever laid on the other side.
The roaring waters spat both oceans out into some rocky formation that almost looked like a cave of sorts. It had a single stage-shaped rocky stand and was surrounded by rocky surfaces from each side. The bump was significant enough to rob both martial artists of their attentions to anything else but once they used their allotted time for recovery, Krillin pointed at a point of the underwater cave that was filling up with water and beginning to fall apart after two submarines forced their way in.
"Look, what's all of that glitter?" Krillin yelled out, doing his best to overpower the rumbling and the thuds of the falling stone as well as the frequent splashes and the noises of intense showers of the flooding water.
"It's… Gold?" Yamcha exclaimed, knowing full-well of that illustrious shine as an ex-desert-bandit.
"There he is!" Krillin pointed at a half-naked man staring at the fallen submarines with a death-inducing stare that was just waiting to choke a pair of persistent martial artists with his mind. "Are you ready? What's our plan?"
"I'm coming, Bulma!" Yamcha yelled out, using the eject button to have the submarine encase him in a pressure-proof glass pod and spit him out into the air, because the underwater cave was just now filling up with water and barely done getting submerged halfway, the pod flew up and smashed against the rocky ceiling of the cave, letting Yamcha land right in front of the enemy with a furious stare to match that of Blue's and in an effective shower of glass that reflected the faint golden glitter all around the cave.
"Dammit, Yamcha, that's not a viable answer to that question…" Krillin shook his head before busting the submarine front illuminator open and swimming out. Choosing a subtler point of entry by climbing up the central rock from the side. As the rocks crumbled and broke off from the ceiling, it sent more and more gold tumbling down, suggesting that even the surface of the central stage was drowning in gold and jewelry and somebody's booty. "This has got to be the place where the ancient pirate treasure is hidden… Just our luck, I could never find it when I tried looking for it under the guise of training my body but Blue just happened to crash right into it…"
"Bulma! What did you do to her!?" Yamcha clutched his fists, directing his fury at Commander Blue. The girl laid by Blue's feet unconscious. The man had a black-eye on his left side, that stroke the martial artist as odd as he could not recall punching the man there or that he would have ever gotten hit in that area.
"I released her from my psychic technique, by accident at first when I fell asleep behind the wheel. The wretched thing drove us off into this cave by fighting me. Ruined my perfect face!" Commander Blue flipped out by taking an aggressive fighting stance and losing his composure completely.
"Bulma does pack a wicked elbow strike…" Yamcha replied with a smirk, taking a position that setup his Wolf Fang Fist. If he recalled Muten Roshi's lessons, a defensive stance was the wrong answer to an all-out offensive, unless one was a vastly superior martial artist or had an insane power and speed advantage over the opponent. The defensive stance would have always gotten overpowered by the relentless aggression, therefore, a matching response was always the most suitable reply to an all-out offensive attack.
"I'm done with the stupid bargaining plan!" Commander Blue declared. "The moment I dispose of you two, I'm going to choke the life out of her and return to base. Then, after recovering the gold in this place, I will once again embark on the quest for the Dragon Balls!"
Blue attacked without much warning. Yamcha lunged back at the Commander, throwing a wild flurry of fists, completely ignoring the opponent's attacks. The connected strikes stunned and dulled Blue's attacks, the flinching from the successful Wolf Fang Fist canceled the all-out offensive out, sending Blue crashing back into the rocky walls of the cave and then plummeting down into the golden waters below the rocky platform. Yamcha ran up to Bulma the first moment he got.
"Bulma, Bulma, wake up! Are you okay?" he yelled out, doing his best to overpower the noises of the collapsing cave.
"Phew… Who knew that getting ejected and crashing your pod into the ceiling was the right call? Climbing wet rocks sucks!" Krillin fell on his back shortly after climbing up the rocky platform successfully.
"H-Huh… Yamcha?" Bulma blinked a couple of times before smacking her boyfriend across his cheek, sending her savior tumbling off of her with a red mark shaped like a woman's hand across his right left cheek. "Where were you!? I had to fend off for myself! What kind of boyfriend leaves his fragile and stunning lady to fight his battles all by herself!?"
"S-Sorry, Bulma, I chased after him the first moment I got. We didn't even wait for Goku or anything like that…" Yamcha tried excusing himself but Bulma's death-inducing stare triumphed over all the other stares flung that day in its sharpness and toxicity.
"Can we just get out of here, you guys can argue back at the Kame House… Damn… All those soldiers are still asleep there, we'll have to clean them out too…" Krillin sighed, he was already plenty exhausted after the noon training and before the Blue Ribbon Army attacked. Despite not being the one that had to fight Commander Blue or the one to have to deal with his toxic relationship, Krillin looked the most miserable out of everyone in that cave.
The drained eyes of the pint-sized martial artist cracked wider than his dropped jaw. Yamcha and Bulma who were still somewhere in between yelling each other's ears off and smothering each other could not notice the boy's despair until his voice finally broke out in a cracking whimper. Had it not been for Krillin's shaking hands and twitching index finger pointing in the distance, the pair would not have noticed the source of his anguish.
The pair turned their eyes to the northern edge of the cave, noticing a topless man of an athletic build and blond hair floating above the flooding water, surrounded by blue gleam and grinding his teeth with eyes that spit hellfire.
"Burying such a cute gentleman, fit for service in my corps will be such a pity. Regardless, it is that which defined a leader – the ability to make the tough calls." Blue declared with the strictness of an iron razor separated from a sensitive vein only by a delicate layer of skin.
The commander extended his hands, the cerulean shimmer around his body faded away, dropping the man to the rocky platform while the shine and glitter moved on to the falling rocks that threatened to bury down the entire cave area. The rocks that at first appeared to have been directed by gravity now spiraled out of control towards the distraught pair and their friend.
"Bulma!" Yamcha yelled out, covering his girlfriend with his own body while Krillin took a dash up to evade the rocks. The boy's eyes did not fail to register the fact that his friend was too worried about protecting Bulma to evade the telekinetically altered rock falling trajectory as Krillin did.
"Ka!" Krillin shouted out, cupping his hands to his side. "Me!"
"Don't think you'll be getting away!" Blue hissed, squatting his body down and raising his hands out while his eyes focused on the air-bound boy. Krillin's eyes widened while he froze in mid-air, clutching at his throat. There was a fundamental flaw to Blue's technique, the commander had strengthened the might of his psychic abilities, however, the techniques he used did not come naturally to him, they demanded the entirety of his focus. It was not something that Krillin and Yamcha could have exploited at that moment as Krillin was choking up in mid-air, all of his channeled Ki beginning to scatter back from where it came from and Yamcha was still taking the brunt of Blue's psychic rock-fall rampage from before.
It was neither Krillin nor Yamcha that exploited the flaw in Blue's psychic techniques, although both of them had noticed it and had it in their minds, it was the creeping tentacle shaped limb that ascended from the golden depths of an ancient mollusk awakened by all this ruckus. Using its soft body to squeeze through all the nooks and crannies of the fallen rocks and emerging in the treasure room from the abyss. By the time the tentacle wrapped around Blue's body and lifted the commander up in the air, adamant about dragging him under, the malicious military official just wheezed out the air that left his chest and grumbled in shock.
Yamcha burst forth from underneath the rock, dirtied and missing a few teeth but toughened by Muten Roshi's training and ready to provide his friend with one final push of encouragement.
"Do it, Krillin!" he yelled out while he wiped the stone crumbles from around him and cradled the shaking Bulma in his arms.
"Ha-Me… Ha!" Krillin completed his technique, blasting it at the gigantic octopus emerging from the depths and dragging it back down under from where it came. It was not easy to realize that an opponent as tough as Blue would not have gotten done-in by a Kamehameha wave for which the channeled Ki was almost halfway squandered.
The mollusk disappeared deep into the golden depths. With his body freed from the psychic technique, at last, Krillin fell flat on his face but peeled his bald head off the ground and rushed to Yamcha who helped Bulma up as well and the trio ran to the pair of busted submarines, praying to whatever was listening that either of the two vehicles was still working.
"It's no use!" Yamcha yelled into the microphone of the submarine that he had ejected from in a pod. "This one's got only one half of its cockpit functioning and even that one half's cracked. "It was not meant to be used after ejection."
"Heh, I knew my choice of leaving it was the right one." Krillin squinted at his pal while the flooding water threatened to squish both submarines to the ceiling of the underwater cave, with the level of water having recently filled above the central rocky platform and at last consuming all of the gold and jewels.
"Not the time, Krillin…" Yamcha scolded his friend.
"This one's mostly working but… The hull's damaged from the initial impact breaching the cave, I'm not sure it can handle the process of emerging." Bulma worked through the electronics of Blue's submarine trying to determine the degree of damage before the group was forced to make a choice between the two subs.
"It doesn't matter, it's a long shot against certain death!" Yamcha grumbled, unbuckling from the submarine he arrived in and jumping out of it, followed by Krillin shortly behind him. Before the two could jump to the other submarine, however, the baldy glared at the water.
"Are you sure that octopus thing is done for? I can't see it down there…" he quivered.
"You were the one who blasted it. In any case, with any luck, he got knocked out and dragged Blue down under. I don't think Blue can work his way out of the grip of an already unconscious enemy with those shiny eyes of his…" Yamcha shrugged. "Right now we've got no time to sit here and think, we've got to act."
"Alright." Krillin nodded, leaping over to the submarine under Bulma's control and buckling himself in. "Huh?" he turned back at Yamcha only noticing the martial artist taking a plunge underwater.
"What's he doing!?" Krillin paled out. "I didn't mean for him to go down under and check if Blue's really dead!"
"It doesn't matter, we don't have much time to wait for him!" Bulma started the engines. "This sub's busted up as it is."
"What are you talking about?! He saved your life, he shielded you from those rocks!" Krillin objected.
"Don't you think I know that!? He's a tough guy, he might just survive this…" Bulma argued back, although she did not move an inch from where the ship was approaching the cave ceiling at an alarming rate.
"I don't think even someone's as tough as Yamcha could survive a cave-in such as this one. Even if the rocks don't kill him, even the toughest guys can only survive so long underwater…" Krillin shook his head, unbuckling himself and peeking over the edge into the depths that were beginning to drown out the alluring, golden glow.
A wild and unexpected splash sent Krillin tumbling back and all over Bulma's face. The annoyed girl elbowed at the top of the boy's head and pushed him back. It was not Blue emerging from the depths with a burning passion to kill, it was Yamcha, clutching an orange crystal orb with three red stars in a triangle formation on the orb.
"A Dragon Ball!?" Bulma's jaw dropped.
"I thought I saw a familiar glow…" Yamcha wiped his itchy nose looking proud of himself.
"So that's a Dragon Ball…" Krillin pointed at the orb, rolling it around in Yamcha's hand before Bulma got serious and closed the hatch shut, sending the submarine into a spiraling down to the depths. Once the lights of the submarine activated, the golden gleam from the sunken treasure made everyone onboard cover their faces. The submarine jerked in a violent manner, throwing all passengers about.
"Bulma!" Krillin complained.
"It's not me! For whatever reason, we're not moving… Maybe a rock fell on top of us?" Bulma tried pulling some switches and going through a few buttons but nothing worked. A few of the boosters were dead from the initial damage that the submarine suffered after the crash.
"Look at that suction cup! It's the giant octopus again!" Krillin pointed at the pink sucker pressing at the hull.
"Tsk. What a persistent bastard, can't it just eat that Blue bastard and be done with it?" Bulma yelled out and slammed her fist onto a large button at her right side, activating the few of the boosters that still worked and pushing the engine to its limit just as the gigantic mollusk was about to gobble up the submarine, blasting a stream of superheated water bubbles right into the octopus' eye.
The onboard crew yelled out in pain, grunting and panting as the submarine cracked and the metal it was built from shrieked, bent threatened to give way. Had the emerging of the submarine, riding a bursting stream of sticky ink, octopus blood and water filtered out of its mouth, been any slower, perhaps the vehicle would have burst from the external pressure but it had managed to force through the unstable rocks of the collapsing cave and emerge in an arcing flight first before breaking down completely.
"Great… Now I'm stranded at sea…" Bulma cried out.
"Oh, come on. Let's just feel lucky that we made it out of there…" Krillin could not stop panting incessantly.
"Yeah, being stuck on a broken submarine in the middle of the ocean with my girlfriend isn't exactly my worst nightmare…" Yamcha smiled looking at Bulma who softened her glare once she made eye contact with Yamcha.
"She almost left you to drown there, you know…" Krillin squinted at him. His snark turned to despair once Bulma's fist landed right in the blind spot at the top of the boy's head.
"I was just going through all the options, I would never have left without Yamcha!" Bulma growled like a tyrannical dictator punishing her subject for the crime of wrong-thinking.