AN: In hindsight, I definitely do not regret giving Sakura the ability to fly on Nimbus, because Goku seriously gets pissy with people who want to ride with him and need to hang on to his neck the whole trip (seriously, Bulma and Krillin are his besties and he makes such annoyed faces when they demand to go with him). One trouble averted!

The Next Dimension Over

Chapter Twenty-five

She recognized his voice as the one who had been following them through the different floors. He didn't look particularly impressive, but he'd never sounded all that impressive, either. He backpedaled slightly, as if the console could protect him from them if he stood behind it. "The two of you are very impressive. With your strength and resourcefulness, the Red Ribbon Army could use you if you wanted to join. Even as a child and a woman."

She clicked her tongue in annoyance, and started toward him. Just who exactly did he think would believe such an offer after he'd tried to kill them more than once? "I don't think so."

"Yeah!" Goku chimed in behind her. "We'd never want to help people like you!"

"General White!" So, that was his name. "Please stop doing all of these bad things and surrender!"

The man, whose expression had been wary at her approach, twisted to that of disgust when the larger one spoke. "You, Traitor...do you think simply because I don't have the remote control to your detonator in my hand that you can speak to me like that? My offer was a show of the Red Ribbon Army's generosity. You should have taken it."

He lunged forward to one of the buttons in front of him. Her hand clasped over his wrist just as the button pressed in. Behind her, something clicked, and she heard Goku give a surprised scream. She turned just in time to see the floor where Goku and Eight had been standing close again.

"Goku!" Damn it, it was yet another stupid trap. She'd tried to stop it this time, raced across the floor to interfere, but all it did was keep her away from Goku.

Behind her, something else clicked, a soft, sliding metal-on-metal sound.

As she turned back toward him, a loud sound echoed off of the walls, and pain exploded in her chest.

(*)

Everything hurt. Mostly it wasn't the fall that made it hurt, it was the surprisingly heavy body of Eight falling on him that made it hurt.

"Ow." He winced as he worked a kink out of his back, and stared up at the ceiling above. It was a really long drop! The Power Pole could probably make it all the way back up to the top without too much trouble, but it was still a dirty trick to just drop the ground out from under people like that.

Really, this Red Ribbon Army just kept using dirty tricks over and over! It was starting to piss him off!

"Goku..." Eight looked down at him in concern, as if he didn't also fall just as far. (Almost!) "Are you hurt?"

"Nuh-uh." He shook his head quickly. Even if he was sore, he'd been hurt much more before.

The big man looked around the large room for a moment or two, before speaking again. "This...must be the fifth floor. There is no normal entrance to this floor...I always wondered what was on it."

"Huh?"

Fifth...he wasn't really any good at numbers. Even after old man Roshi taught him to count, just using them without warning like that was kind of confusing. How many floors were there? He pressed a finger to his other finger, a trick he'd learned in Kame House. There was that big empty room...then the one with people in it...

The sound of rattling stone broke through his concentration, and he looked up in surprise. Part of the wall was moving! "Ah! The wall's lifting up!"

"Be careful, Goku!" Eight shouted behind him. "I can see something behind it!"

He squinted through the dark room, under the lifting wall. There was definitely some kind of sha...

The top of the wall vanished into the ceiling. A really large thing stood on the other side. Big, bumpy...and with a really, really big mouth. And tongue.

He gasped. "A monster!"

Which meant...

Which meant!

He grinned without even really realizing it, gripping his hands into fists in front of himself in anticipation. "I'm gonna get another turn after all!"

(*)

The impact of whatever it was he'd used knocked her across the room onto the floor, and an arc of blood followed her path. In review, she'd heard that sound before, while they were outside and taking out those guards. It had been at a distance, but that must have been the same thing.

A quick review of her body told her some small metal object had cut through a lung, chipped a rib, and lodged itself somewhere in her liver. It stung, and if she couldn't heal herself...it could have been a pretty dangerous injury. She resolved to figure out what the hell kind of tool he'd just used was...and then deal with how to nullify it as a threat in the future.

She coughed up a spatter of blood as the man pressed something else out of her sight, and then walked up to where she lay. His expression twisted with smug satisfaction as he looked down at her, small metal device in his hand, pointed down at her. "Now...don't you feel stupid? All of your tricks, all of that power you displayed, and it means nothing next to one little gun. It's a shame you didn't take my offer, but...maybe we didn't need you after all."

She glared up at him, and he tutted, waving the...gun, in the air. "Don't be such a sore loser. Even if you defeated one little tower, you'd never be able to conquer the Red Ribbon Army itself. Long before you ever succeeded we'd have the dragonballs, and then before you knew it, you'd think you'd always been on her side..." he aimed the weapon at her face. "You should thank me. I'm giving you the one opportunity not to work for us that you'll ever have."

As expected, a military power looking for a wish wasn't that creative at all. Still, it was good to know that for sure, before she tore down any more of their bases and crushed their forces entirely.

His finger curled inward, and she surged upward, fingers likewise curling. Her fist contacted with the weapon head on, and crushed it inward. As it flattened, it exploded backward, and he stumbled backward with a pained cry, one hand clasping to his face, and the other falling uselessly to his side, blood and bone hanging in a grotesque display even conventional medical jutsu would be unable to fix.

She straightened, and pressed her hand to the wound on her chest briefly, stimulating her natural flow of chakra and sealing the opening and then undoing all of the damage the device had done to her in his surprise attack. "What a waste of my time." She brushed herself off and glared over at him, who still crumpled over in pain from the backfire of his weapon. "If you're going to believe in a story like a wish granting dragon, try to think of something worth wishing for, at least."

She batted his hand away from his badly injured face, and gripped his throat, raising her other fist in threat. "Now...bring Goku back, and tell me where you've put the Elder, and I'll make certain you don't bleed to death."

He coughed, squinting up at her. "The...th...console...yellow button."

She let him go, and turned toward the console. As records stood, so far these things had been traps. Something beneath her, where Goku would be, exploded. She didn't really have a choice but to try. Even if it was just a way to drop her into the floor below as well, she'd rather that than leave Goku on his own, considering the things these people did.

As she walked, she heard him shift and stumble to his feet. In the amount of pain he currently suffered, he probably didn't even think of attempting to do it quietly. In the amount of pain he currently suffered, she could almost forgive him for suffering delusions.

Which he clearly did.

"Take this!"

His gun hurt.

His pathetic attempt at a punch might as well have been the impact of a wad of paper. But it really was the thought that counted. She grit her teeth and round on him, delivering a furious punch of her own. The very large man crashed into the far wall, and cracked the stone there.

Unsurprisingly, he collapsed soundlessly to the ground.

Surprisingly, when she pressed the indicated button, the door really did open again. Slowly this time, and without immediately snapping shut again.

She immediately ran to the opening and crouched over it to get a look at it. "Hey!"

The explosion had apparently been one of the walls on the floor below, which had mostly collapsed. Eight stood staring at it in surprise, and Goku...stared up at some sort of gigantic creature that appeared to be frozen in front of him. After a moment, he blinked and looked up at her with a grin. "Sakura! Did you beat yours?"

Hers...?

She shook her head quickly and frowned down at him. "Did you freeze yours?"

"It was an accident!" He pointed at the hole in the wall. "It bounced my Kamehameha off and broke the wall, and then I accidentally bounced off it and hit the wall, too. And then it stopped moving."

...Bounced a Kamehameha? Exactly what had she missed? It sounded far more interesting than listening to that idiot general. She held a hand down toward him. "Get up here. We still have to find the Elder."

Goku gestured for Eight to come closer to him, and set the power pole on the ground in front of him. "That guy wouldn't tell you where he is?"

"He wasn't cooperative."

Goku sped up to where she held out her hand, and pulled himself out of the hole. A moment later, he retracted the pole much as he'd had when she'd been holding onto it, and pulled the giant man up to the top floor as well.

"I think I know where he is..." Eight rumbled, looking off toward the door they'd originally came from.

"Really?" Goku perked up, looking up at the larger man. "That's great! Then we can go and get him right away!"

"I don't think so."

The three of them turned as one toward the voice. The general stood, rather leaned against that console, another gun in an unsteady hand. His twisted face stretched into a grin that had an edge of madness to it, and fire exploded from it. For a brief instant, she expected it to strike her again, perhaps in a more vital spot.

Goku made a strained cry, and crashed back down through the trap door.

"Goku!" Both she and Eight both screamed it at the same time, and both of their attempts to reach out and grab his falling form barely missed. He plummeted to the ground, and shattered the frozen statue of the creature, bouncing and rolling off of walls and then along the floor.

When he finally came to a rest...his body didn't move at all. He was so much smaller than her, much younger, his body hadn't been trained to deal with the things she had. He didn't have medical jutsu to heal himself with...

The man's wheezing laughter filled the room. "No matter how freakish you two might be, the power in this gun is unbeatable!" His shaky hand turned toward her. "Now...now...it's you next...!"

"Stop hurting people!" Eight boomed, hands gripped into fists.

"Shut up!" The general screamed in a frenzied voice. "Shut up, you traitor! You...you...pathetic half-wit of a failure, after her, I'll destroy you as well! You'll all die!"

Again, he fired. This time, she immediately moved to dodge...but it was too late. Eight stepped in the way instead, taking the impact as if it were...very little at all. If she weren't so worried about Goku below, she'd be pretty impressed by that.

"You..." The giant man growled in anger, and began to advance on the other. "Will stop hurting my friends!"

"Shut up! Shut up! Just die! Die!" The gun clicked several times as he shouted.

He fell silent for a moment and then screamed, just as Eight's gigantic fist contacted with him, and sent him crashing out through the wall.

But those were things that she had to extrapolate from sound. As soon as she realized the weapon was unable to do any further harm, she'd turned and jumped down to the floor where Goku was. Medical attention was, after all, her first priority. She'd been trained well.

"Goku..." She collapsed to her knees and immediately summoned chakra, scanning him for an entrance wound, and for the damage the weapon must have done to his body.

She blinked, and stared down at him in surprise.

There wasn't a wound at all.

AN: A Goku POV!

And also, the first real sign of where Ninja abilities fall behind dragonball abilities. Ninja are more about avoiding and shrugging off injuries. Ki-infused bodies, however, are impervious to them.

But, we know it's not Goku himself that is. It's the ki technique he uses.