"Huh… What kind of planet is this?" Chayote stared through the window onto a lonely, cerulean orb floating in space, covered with cottony, white fluff over it instead of any visible patch of land.
"Data not found." A cybernetic voice informed the Saiyan before the robotic voice resumed the "Dragon Ball signal detected" song that just couldn't shut up whenever the ship had approached a planet with a Dragon Ball on it.
"Can't you scan it from up here?" Chayote wondered but it seemed as if though Dr. Brief had designed this ship without any social capabilities of entertaining its crew's requests. She knew better than to try and press any buttons though. While this entire vessel was put together halfway from a Saiyan design, it was almost like operating witchcraft to Chayote so as long as the thing worked she let it do its own thing.
The Saiyan pressed the handle that authorized the ship's descent. The only input she felt she had was when the ship stopped to hover over a planet as if inquiring if Chayote wanted to land or if she wanted to keep moving on. As if she was in any position to skip through planets. She was already a handful of weeks into the quest and while she did get some progress under her belt with a pair of Ultimate Dragon Balls under her belt, there was still more than half of the universe to explore.
Prompted by Chayote's command, the spaceship moved out of its paralysis and began accelerating toward the world's surface, garnering heat and speed. One detail that Chayote couldn't help but notice was the vast amount of static electricity garnering around the spaceship's blaze when it entered the atmosphere. The weather on the planet must have been remarkably stormy though Chayote couldn't feel any of the raging winds while on her spaceship.
"What the… You mean the Ultimate Dragon Ball is underwater?" Chayote wondered when the spaceship plunged a good fifty meters underwater and then floated up to the surface after the force of the crash had left from underneath it in the shape of waves and hectic ripples.
Was it of any surprise that the ship did not speak to Chayote? At this point, she would have been far more surprised if the thing did speak to her. Thunder cracked the sky open, sending a profuse bleed of rain down over the drowned planet. The skies weren't exactly dark per se, whatever gas had accumulated in the skies let plenty of sunlight through, while the storms made Earth's light breezes pale in comparison, they were nowhere near as gloomy.
"It's not like I'm gonna dive down there myself…" Chayote grumbled and tied her arms over her chest. She might have been capable of surviving for at least twenty minutes underwater but she wasn't sure what she was dealing with as far as this planet was concerned. For all she knew, the air of this place might have been some terrible poison or the water might not have been water at all but some corrosive acid… The last thing she needed now was to let the armor she looted off of freaky Frieza Army fish guy as well as her bottom-tier scouter to corrode.
The Saiyan just closed her eyes and imagined fighting what little data on the Beiko planet warriors she had gathered. She had witnessed their speed and profound Ki manipulation abilities first hand. Judging from what Krillin and Goku told her when they briefed on their battle with King Piccolo and his lackey, they had similar abilities where their Ki could mimic the effects of the elements. Their Ki could turn hot when their spirit was surging and cold as ice when it was serene.
"Planet Sando." The ship declared out of the blue, breaking Chayote's concentration and session of image training. "The planet has a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere and a rotational period equal to 0,32 Earth days. The common temperature of the planet is 272 degrees Celsius, however, due to the planet's surface being primarily comprised of water, the depths of the planet up to the core are nearly freezing, resulting in extreme and violent storms as the elements converge with the cool steam being boiled by the scorching air. An interesting factoid is that the air particles of this planet have microscopic fragments of diamond that reflect limited sunlight in a magnificent gleam, making the planet's surface a deadly but gorgeous shimmer to behold."
"So the whole planet is just a bunch of water!?" Chayote dropped her jaw. "With that logic, the Dragon Ball might be at the bottom of the goddamn planet in the core itself…"
A deafening thud made the Saiyan look at the source of the noise with a bemused expression, witnessing cracks in the frontal door of her shuttle. Little by little, Chayote's eyebrows twitched into a downward slope while her teeth moved from the peeled upward lips of her mouth.
"Is that a trident? Am I being attacked with tridents right now!?" she yelled out, kicking at the door when it refused to open and jumping out of the ship, taking a plunge underwater.
Truthful to her instinct, outside swam a bunch of fish-like beings with flippers for their backside, covered with red, scaly heavily enough to assume biological armor skin, the locals possessed a wavy mouth that extended from one bony protrusion where ears should have been to another. Facial markings and bony protrusions littered their heads with each specimen possessing their own signature pattern of cartilage and facial armor formations. Each alien had four eyes staring at Chayote like small beams within the holes in the armor.
Numbers ran down Chayote's scouter as she looked around the folks, letting her Ki sensory abilities pay attention to those behind her as the creatures rotated around her with their three and a half meters of length and significant bulk. It was of little surprise that one of these bastards could skewer the hull of her shuttle that was meant to withstand the inhospitable conditions of space. These fishfolk had power levels ranging from around 750 to twice that. Nothing of note or worry to Chayote but almost immediately her scouter picked up a signal that might have been eight hundred kilometers below her. One that nullified the readings of these fish-people and made Chayote's scouter heat up, prompting her to quickly turn it off so that it didn't crack or blow up on her face which was a nasty feature of the older models.
It was unfortunate that the massive reading located in the deepest reaches of the planet's core might have made the use of the scouter problematic because even the older models might have functioned as decent universal translators. Now she was stuck underwater, surrounded by fishfolk warriors with no idea what their problem was. Most sentient species tended not to attack aliens that landed on their planet, then again, Chayote was donning the Frieza Army armor…
Fighting underwater seemed like a drag. Chayote could feel how sluggish her movements were almost immediately but it helped that her own power level surpassed that of the locals' by almost ten times. By the time she figured out that using her Ki for flight while underwater made her move similarly to these fish-men, eliminating whatever measly biological differences there were that inhibited her movements, the squadron was almost done for. Goopy, lapis-colored blood began filling the area of the ocean and the fish-folk used that muddled water for their retreat. It was fortunate since Chayote felt short of air, with quick reaches she emerged and climbed into the open shuttle before shutting the door.
She could feel the planet's bothersome heat flowing through the crack, it was just another hindrance that pissed her off to no end but ultimately had little effect. Chayote ran through what she recalled being the contact function to reach out to Dr. Brief, she wanted to know how bad of a problem this crack was and if the ship could have fixed it. Despite the signal working as intended, nobody picked up.
"I wonder what Dr. Brief doing… Maybe Kakarot resurrected Bulma and the rest already so they're all having a picnic or something…" Chayote wondered. Imagining a picnic helped her calm down a bit, being angry was a fun state of mind to fight in but it was pointless when figuring important details such as these out.
Dr. Briefs sneezed in his laboratory, hunched over a small TV screen positioned on his worktable on which bodacious Earthling females were performing their stretches while practicing basic math, counting from one all the way up to two in a rhythm of their stretching.
"Oof… One, two… One, two…" Dr. Brief shook his head to ease himself from the sneeze back into the rhythm of his favorite background show to run while he worked. Seeing how both his work and the curvy yoga babes were on Dr. Brief's mind, the man seemed to utterly ignore the red light beeping behind him.
Having completed her basic training and knowing how to operate the basics of the gear that Saiyans employed on their noble quest of conquering planets and removing all traces of intelligible life so that they could have been used as intergalactic real estate, Chayote picked off her scouter and turned it off, pressing a few buttons on the panel on the side to ignore the largest reading before its readings became too large for the scouter to operate. The Saiyan then applied it back where its place was and opened the door, taking a deep breath while she tried finding Planet Sando on the scouter's database of languages.
Of course, Planet Sando was one of those remote planets at the edge of Frieza Army's controlled territory that had absolutely no coverage from its services, the scouter could neither translate from Sando to universal nor the other way around. Chayote let her Ki surge and burst forth from her body as she used the same principles she'd have used when flying her fastest while taking a plunge underwater. It didn't take long for Ki signatures to begin circling her from all sides.
It was those same local soldiers, this time they were wiser than to try and rush at Chayote with their spears and tridents, this time the folks snapped their mouths, sending some rippling waves at Chayote from afar. The Saiyan tried to just rush through, just a few hundred meters in and it was already getting way too dark and cold for a comfortable and fun fighting time. The underwater pressure waves blasted at the Saiyan with more ferocity than she'd anticipated. It was as if all of her bones snapped all at once for a brief moment when one of them hit and her ears began shrieking bloody murder – this wasn't just Ki they were hitting her with. Whatever it was, it seemed to be targeting the moisture in Chayote's own body and turning it against the Saiyan's own physiology, somehow.
Everything went black and Chayote couldn't hear a damned thing due to the deafening bursts of the jaw-snapping waves around her. Then the tridents started, Chayote began throwing her arms and feet to the side, threatening to outright murder anyone she could get her hands on but these buggers were smarter than to fight someone that's proven to be vastly stronger than them. They used their homeland advantage, their own inherited way of fighting off an invader and while it wasn't like they'd feast on Chayote's bones for all too long as there wasn't much of the young woman to feast on, but it was the grievous offense of her invasion that irked them. The Saiyan didn't need a translator to tell a territorial animal defending its pride, she had faced off against plenty of dinosaurs and flightless birds somewhere in between a reptile and a bird back on Earth that acted very similarly to this.
Chayote threw her hands out and shut her airway off, nearly giving in to her anger-led instinct to roar as she expelled an explosive Ki wave from her entire body, wasting far too much of her Ki in the process but she had hoped to, at the very least, dispatch of one or a few of these fishfolk which would then have scared the rest off as well. Nothing of that sort seemed to be happening, sadly…
She could sense every single signature floating around her, circling her for another round of concentrated underwater shockwaves that robbed her of her senses and a way to fight back while they then would have rushed around her and stabbed at her again. Their tridents packed a wallop, while they lacked the strength to outright impale the Saiyan, they could easily break through her armor and leave bothersome flesh wounds with each thrust.
They sent their shockwaves again, this time something akin to her salvation greeted Chayote's eye – a mossy blob of green down below, it was right there the whole time but Chayote couldn't see it due to the inherent darkness of the abyss – something that her rampant Ki blasts rectified temporarily. Operating by sheer memory, the Saiyan swam behind the float and found it to be surprisingly rigid. It was as if this was just common seaweed but the pressure of so deep down hardened it to be tough as steel as, despite its blobby softness, the weed seemed to resist pressure and become hard like something to stab with when pressurized – might have been what these fishfolk were using to stab at Chayote with…
The shockwaves seemed to bounce off of the wondrous abyssal weed while the Saiyan kicked off and continued her dive, forming a Ki blast in her right hand to illuminate her way if only a little bit. There came the soldiers again, bombarding her with their weaponry, failing to keep up with the Saiyan, the Sandoans send their weaponry torpedoing through the oceans right at her. Chayote let her Ki burst in an explosive bubble that deflected the rushing weaponry and then took a sharp turn to hide behind one of the moss formations that seemed to just be floating around.
What a curious planet indeed. Entire civilizations residing in floats of hardened seaweed, positioned all throughout the deeper layers of the ocean planet, from hundreds of meters under the surface, where the temperature was like that of Earth's warmest resorts, all the way to the unsurmountable Ki signature lurking at the planet's core. A mysterious entity that Chayote wanted to have nothing in common with unless absolutely necessary. These folks had so many inventive ways to fight, such impressive stamina and resistance to underwater pressure… Space was a remarkable place to train. If only Chayote had the time to spend just one year in each of these planets she had visited… Sadly, time was a luxury she lacked the most.
The Saiyan kicked off of the mossy structure and took a plunge downward, this time restraining her instinct to dive with her full speed. Even when the burning sensation set into her lungs that she needed to emerge for air, Chayote restrained it. Slow and steady, judging from her time on Earth, she could spend around twenty minutes underwater, she'd start feeling like she needed air since at least two minutes down under and feel that dread and agony the entire time through. Her body was more of a whiny bitch than she knew, it was only when Chayote got truly stuck in one of Earth's caverns while preparing for the 21st World Martial Arts Tournament that she discovered how long truly she could spend underwater…
The Saiyan pulled out the handheld radar she held by her side, the Saiyan formed a Ki blast by it and her heart froze – the radar was done for. It showed absolutely nothing and seemed all-around inoperable. The Saiyan clenched her fists, forming emerald Ki beams that she just blasted randomly in each direction. Now she wanted those fishy bastards to find her so that she could bash their brains in and let off some steam, also to avenge them possibly dooming the Earth.
A crystal gleam caught Chayote's attention as her Ki blast passed through something interesting, she was by this point a good three hundred kilometers down under and it was tough to say if it was the abhorrent water pressure strangling her with each passing moment or her own boiling fury that made the veins around her head feel like bursting but that one golden gleam caught her attention because it was the golden shine of salvation. The Ultimate Dragon Ball was just floating on the water. The fluid underneath it was pressed too dense for the Dragon Ball to drown. It was a stroke of good luck unlike what Chayote was used to – maybe less so given that she had checked the location of the Dragon Ball before diving and only needed to dive down deep enough to find it, but the fact that she noticed it nevertheless was fortunate.
The last thing she needed was to meet whatever lurked in this planet's core and sent her scouter into a stressful fit. Feeling like the strangulation of the abyssal pressure was just about forcing the water into Chayote's lungs, the Saiyan blasted upward, thrusting her hands down and firing Ki blasts that detonated right by her face, aiding with her rapid ascent. There came the fusillade of abyssal shockwave techniques and trident rushes.
Chayote turned into a furious hedgehog of elbows, kicks, and punches, bashing a few of the Sandoans to lapis-colored mess while she emerged from underwater, gripping the Ultimate Dragon Ball together with a handful of the seaweed now turned to paste due to the sudden emergence to the surface. The Saiyan carefully scraped off the seaweed off of her prize as she observed the fishfolk diving back to their homes now that the surface dweller had left their domain. The Saiyan examined the cuts and bruises all over her body, feeling the warm sensation of blood trickling down a few of the nastier ones and wondered if that seaweed maybe could have served as decent anti-septic and a makeshift bandage. She'd need to affirm that with the codex of information that her ship had downloaded off of the nearest space station.
A round, building-sized vessel lingered above the raging seas that formed waves eleven meters tall. The shuttle opened its door, exposing the platoon of soldiers clad in white armor similar in appearance and texture to that which covered the walls of the ship they came in as they lined up, ready to take a plunge. A screen flashed by the side of the commander of the troops, a tall and staunch, orange Adonis with horns on the sides of his head and rich, mahogany-colored mane.
"Commander Zeeun, the priestesses claim the Dragon Ball is no longer there. Return to the cruiser and do not waste the lives of our men." Lord Slug's withered, timber-shaded lips still holding a pair of rotten and crooked teeth stated.
"Again?" Commander Zeeun exclaimed with frustration in his voice. "Someone seems to be collecting these universal Dragon Balls as well…"
"Yes, it appears our situation is most dire. Just when the clan of priestesses had located the traces of Namekian magic that matches the signature of Dragon Balls, a surge of Namekian magic spread them all throughout the Universe. Sadly, we have no other method than the rituals of our priestesses to track the Dragon Balls' location. You will return to the cruiser until you are dispatched again, Commander." Slug repeated an order which was a luxury only granted only to those that were not to be blamed for the failure that preceded the order.
"Whoever the other party gathering these universal Dragon Balls is, they seem to possess a more precise radar than our magic-tracking it seems…" Commander Zeeun growled and slammed his fist at the button that shut the shuttle door. Some of the Lord Slug's army seemed relieved by the fact that they would not need to enter the deep of Planet Sando's oceans and encounter the infamous abyssal dread that took residence in the husk of the planet's core.
The shuttle took off and joined with the planetoid-size cruiser floating by the orbit of Planet Sando. In a dark room located within the cruiser, a caste of green feminine shapes comprised of a serpentine body shape and wet, slug-like skin and multiple mouths filled with lines of razor teeth scattered across the bodies of the four-armed priestesses wearing revealing dresses for their appearance that most species across the universe would find revolting, lacking eyes or any other notable features other than their slug-like bodies and matchstick-thickness arms divined the location of the next Ultimate Dragon Ball for their Lord, breaking off twigs and branches of the Ajisa trees cultivated inside the cruiser, native to Planet Namek and using them to mix salt rubbed in emerald body secretion of Namekian mixed with the blood of the priestesses themselves that they've added into the mix while one, largest of all sisters, waved her arms around a floating skull with a large horn on its center, hoping for a projection to beam from its eyes, cast onto the dark wall of the temple room.