AN: I made it to chapter forty! We skipped like ten chapters when we skipped Slump, I wonder how many Blue will add back now that he's here.

And how about that Super ep, man? How adorable was that chick? How adorable was Krillin?

The Next Dimension Over

Chapter Forty

It was only a short distance to the crater, but it felt like the entire length of the camp. It felt like too long.

She shouldn't have allowed Goku to fight without supervision. These people had decimated an entire village. Goku wouldn't have been prepared to deal with that all on his own no matter how much he wanted revenge. She should have been thinking like a captain, and not like a genin herself.

Just hold on a bit longer, Goku...

"Who said we were finished?" A voice snarled from behind her. An unbelievable voice, because he should have been unconscious longer, if he even survived. Had he somehow mastered a substitution jutsu as the other ninja in the world had?

It didn't matter. He could be dealt with later. Protecting Goku came first.

And so, of course, nothing less than a tree slammed into her.

And out of her.

It was, most likely, the one that she'd caused him to crash through. How he'd managed to throw it at her, particularly with such force, she didn't know. The initial impact knocked her off of her feet, but the large wooden object moved more quickly that her body did. Something unpleasant (she knew exactly what something) snapped in her back, and large chunks of wood speared through her body, jutting out in front of her in a spray of red and black. After a moment, her body crashed into the ground, and the sharp ends of the tree that jutted out in front of her dug into the dirt beneath her.

It hurt.

She...also couldn't feel her legs. Her arms...struggled to force her up again under the weight of half of a tree. In a better position, it would have been much easier to deal with. She could do it like this...but it wasn't the best position to do it in, all the same.

The man staggered toward her, an almost crazed glint in his eye. "No matter how strong...none of you are a match for the Red Ribbon Army!"

She didn't have time for this.

Damn it, she didn't have time to be pinned under a tree, didn't have chakra to waste on healing herself, and didn't have time to waste on fighting this person while Goku might be fading away.

She slammed her fist into the ground, and a fissure in the earth sped its way to where the man stood, knocking him off of his feet.

There wasn't any choice. Goku was only one person, after all. No matter how hurt he was, she could heal him up with what she had stored up. She'd have to spare some of that chakra to heal herself so she could to get to him.

Her seal flared to life, flooding her body with renewed energy. A sharp elbow to the tree behind her shattered the wood pinning her down in one blow, and she pushed herself up to her feet. The injuries from the projectile healed as quickly as the hiss of the jutsu dispersed into the air around her.

A moment later, she shut down the jutsu again and sealed her chakra safely away, reducing the spiral marks on her face to a simple diamond on her forehead once more. Once that was done, she sprinted toward the crater with fresh determination. The general had landed the last hit she'd allow him to have. If he tried anything like that again...it wouldn't succeed.

In the end, all of her haste, all of her desperation to get to Goku before it was too late...amounted to nothing.

A moment before she crested the top of the impact she'd created herself, Goku himself appeared. He looked worse for wear, stumbling and bleeding out of his mouth and ear. He was, however. most certainly not dead. The injury he suffered, though...was still very grave. If untreated, the concussion he must have suffered could kill him.

Just not quite immediately. Hopefully.

"me...ha!" The boy shouted and wobbled on his feet, shooting a brilliant beam of light behind her.

She turned in time to see the man, having stood up once more, engulfed in the blast, and sent flying into the surrounding forest again.

As the light faded from the clearing, she swept down and caught the small boy before he could crash to the ground. Obviously the General had successfully knocked Goku unconscious with his attack before. He'd probably thought Goku was dead. Or would be soon enough for it to count anyway.

She intended to make him wrong on both accounts. And then she intended to teach him a lesson. For the moment, though, the only thing important was the dead weight in her arms and the way he made no attempt to do...anything.

"Goku...you idiot." She grit her teeth and summoned medical chakra. As it filtered through his system, she grimaced to herself. The damage was terrible. She'd suspected as much when she noticed the blood from his ear...but part of his skull had cracked inward, and the brain itself had been damaged.

She had the skill to fix it. Thank...whatever deity the world happened to have, she had that amount of skill.

How he'd managed to crawl out of the crater, much less wield ki while suffering such an injury, though...his determination was almost on the level of Naruto's.

The way he slumped in her arms, not quite conscious, hanging on to life as she worked to heal him...

She shook her head quickly, and banished the image of Naruto, floating on sand, resisting everything she tried to do to heal him. Distractions...worrying about how similar this world was to the one she knew when it wasn't...now wasn't the time for that!

Bones knit slowly back together, damaged chakra circuits slowly straightened again, and the blood that spilled where it shouldn't was carefully funneled back where it belonged. It took extreme precision, it took calm, and it took a considerable amount of healing chakra. But it worked.

Goku made a faint sound of protest, as his consciousness slowly faded back in. "Auw..."

"You...idiot." She scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. Not because there were tears, they just...burned. From the dirt and the splinters of wood in the air. "Don't ever just try to fight someone stronger than you alone when I can help you! What if I weren't so close by? You could have died and not been able to help Upa at all!"

"Uh..." he frowned slightly and rubbed at his head. "Sorry..."

For someone who almost died, he didn't sound sincere at all. Not even a little. He sounded...more confused and put upon than sincere.

She dropped her fist onto the top of his head. Just hard enough to make him wince and give an indignant cry. "Idiot."

He shuffled away from her and gave her an accusing look, as if she were the one in the wrong, before turning to look in the direction the general vanished in. "He's...weird."

"Weird?" She glanced between he and the darkness of the trees. Was it possible the general might still be alive? Had the man actually been strong enough to hurl a tree at her? More importantly: was there any danger the man might decide to meet up with the other force that had the dragonball, and endanger Yamcha, Bulma, and Pu'ar?

"I dunno what happened..." Goku frowned, and then started in the direction the general went. She stood after a moment, and followed after. "We were fighting, and he wasn't very strong...but then...suddenly I couldn't move! And then he hit me with a big rock and when I woke up I heard him fighting you."

Couldn't move...?

So...did the general have some sort of paralysis jutsu? Or a genjutsu that Goku simply didn't recognize?

Could ki do that?

He couldn't...possibly have the ability to manipulate chakra, could he?

She frowned, and marched onward. There were answers she needed. He had them. They needed to find him before he could escape. And once she got the answers she wanted, they were absolutely going to kill him.

(*)

Okay, so. He never really doubted it, but his arm was definitely broken. In at least one...maybe one and a half places. Could an arm be broken in one and a half places? Because it felt like it.

As much as it would be weird and a little exploitative to take up Pu'ar's offer to be a sling for him, the way each step was jarring his arm...he was kind of starting to consider it. Which meant he probably should just make another sling for himself. Silk made an okay sling for arms, right? And his shirt was ruined anyway.

"Hey...wait."

Bulma and Pu'ar both stopped in unison and looked up at him with worried eyes. He wasn't sure if he found that comforting or unsettling. Maybe he'd know if he were sure the concern was just because he had a broken arm, and not because of killing someone right in front of them.

Well, it wasn't like Pu'ar hadn't seen him do it before, but...that hadn't ever been the same thing.

But he'd done it in self defense this time, too. He'd done it in sort of self defense, and he'd done it for them and for some village full of murdered people!

...And...it was entirely possible he was the only one who felt like that was some kind of a lie. Even if it wasn't.

"Um..." He lifted his good, uninjured arm up to start unbuttoning his shirt. "I was thinking...can't we just use this shirt as a sling for my arm? I mean, it's ruined anyway, so..."

Bulma blinked and shook herself slightly. "Ah! That's...yes, we could, I guess. But, do we have any scissors?"

Well, he could just rip it...

"I can be scissors!" Pu'ar chipped up, floating closer to Bulma. "Just be careful, okay? I can get ticklish."

(*)

They didn't find a body.

General Blue wasn't dead.

Even if she wanted answers, knowing that...was a little bit of a disappointment. It would have been simpler if the man had died from the Kamehameha. Now they didn't have much choice but to scour the forest around them looking for him.

Objectively, that wasn't much of a problem.

But the best manner of searching through the forest quickly enough to find someone trying to escape through it, would be to split up and search different directions until they found him, using their own different abilities to travel through the forest at their own maximum speed.

She had no interest in leaving Goku alone to fight that general agian. Not if genjutsu might be involved.

She frowned, and looked down at him. "Can you...smell the general anywhere?"

He sniffed the air and scanned the forest around them. "Yeah...but it's weird. I can't figure out where it's coming from."

"You mean...like he's right here?" She glanced up at the trees above them, and then curled her fingers into a fist as her gaze fell to their feet. If the man had access to chakra somehow, then it meant he might also be trained in other shinobi methods. And that meant...a foe might just be underneath them.

Goku, however, shook his head. "No...it's...coming from more than one place."

Clones?

Or...had he been wandering in multiple directions and gotten lost? Could it be that?

She frowned, and glanced back toward the encampment. "...Maybe we should find the others."

"Huh?"

"If we've lost him..." She glanced back down at her small companion. Blood still caked on his ear and his chin, but he looked otherwise as if he'd never been harmed at all. He practically looked healthier than when they walked into the camp, in fact. "He's either going to go back to his base, or he's going to try to meet up with the other force and find the dragonball."

"Ah! The dragonball!" Goku brightened in surprise, as if she'd brought up something he'd completely forgotten about. Which he might have, in his haste for revenge.

"Right." She frowned, and turned her gaze in the direction the three had gone. "If they have the dragonball...then it means that he's going to attack them next."

Goku's expression hardened at that, and he turned in the direction she looked. "...Right. Then...we're gonna stop him!"