AN: It's the big five-oh. CRAZY. Red Ribbon saga is crazy long. And we cut out Penguin Village and shortened the Korin Tower arc.
A good thing to remember about Sakura's mental state is that even when she first arrived, it was during the Kaguya arc, after the Fourth War ended up with her helplessly standing in Susano'o while Sasuke and Naruto planned to do something effective. Girl has some understandable issues with her ability to measure up to her team.
Whis as the Doctor is kind of a hilarious concept. He certainly has the outfit to do for a Time Lord, though. Maybe it's best if Sakura doesn't ever meet with Beerus however...
But we'll see what happens. Because that sure would be a long, long time from now to plan for. If it can't happen, I may have to write the lost possibilities as a side fic after all.
The Next Dimension Over
Chapter Fifty
The most efficient way to rid the house of the smoke was apparently to reduce it to capsule size again. She didn't question it because she barely understood what explanation Bulma did give on the matter. She knew the woman well enough to realize by now that a more in-depth explanation would only leave her entirely behind.
Which was what they should have done with the woman herself, at that point. An assault on an enemy military base wasn't exactly a good place for someone who couldn't defend themselves, and there was no telling what kind of resistance they'd encounter both capturing the dragonballs and destroying the army itself. It was exactly as they'd done to Pu'ar for the same reason: the danger it presented Pu'ar far overwhelmed the help the shape shifter would provide to their current plan.
Unlike Pu'ar, Bulma had insisted. In the end, they had agreed that she should remain in her diminutive size and ride along as she did in the Nimbus. Sakura volunteered to be the one to keep her, because...if something did happen, she'd be able to help the woman best. Probably. If something happened to her at such a small size, there might be little she could do.
Before long at all, they hovered over the walled off castle. She'd been expecting an island of some sort, but it seemed they were on an entirely different landmass, well hidden within a forest. Well hidden on foot, at least.
"Let's go, Nimbus!"
The cloud spiraled down toward the castle and fortress. Right past a very small looking plane. Or something that looked quite a bit like that, anyway.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the flying craft immediately began to shoot at them. Bulma shrieked, and covered her ears with her hands. "I'm not bullet proof! Do something!"
"Alright...Nimbus, loop around!"
The golden cloud immediate swung back upward, and then made a graceful loop backward. A graceful, speedy loop. The craft following them wasn't nearly as quick, back still facing them when they leveled out behind it again. Goku made a cheerful sound, and the cloud charged ahead. His fist extended ahead of them, and the force of the charge was enough to break cleanly through both sides of the vehicle.
"Try to get us near to the middle of the courtyard!" Bulma shouted. "The dragonballs are that way!"
"Okay!" Goku shouted over his shoulder. You two can jump off there. Yamcha and me will deal with the rest of the army while you get the dragonballs."
She couldn't help a slight smile of amusement at that. Expecting to deal with an entire army of people in the time it took to find dragonballs with a radar? It was almost rude of him to expect her to take so long retrieving them. "Try to save at least one or two of them for us."
"If I have to..." He grinned back at her after a moment. "But I'm only gonna leave you two."
The skies around them echoed with warning sirens, and quickly began to fill with other flying crafts. The nimbus cloud swerved left and right and looped around through the air as it dodged constant gunfire. Really, they wouldn't be able to get much closer than this if they wanted to advance without a fight. It would be easier to have that fight on the ground. She glanced down at the roof not far below.
"Here." She tapped his shoulder, and then jumped off of the cloud to the roof below.
Bulma screamed.
(*)
He woke up today knowing he'd be taking down the headquarters of the Red Ribbon Army with only two other people. He still didn't find that he felt completely prepared for the sheer amount of danger and chaos flying around him right after they arrived.
He'd known this was an army...but the massive amount of defense in the fortress only made it more clear just how much they'd be fighting off an entire army. If it wasn't an even worse idea to openly invade the place, steal the dragonballs, and then run away and leave the army time to come after him...he'd have been loudly suggesting that instead.
Well...as loudly as he could manage, when his stomach kept flip flopping around every time Goku would spiral or plummet from the sky to avoid a burst of fire. It probably wouldn't have been that loud, honestly. But it sure did motivate him to not be on the cloud. Splitting up might not have been the best defensive decision...but if they wanted to cause the most ruckus and take attention away from Bulma (and Sakura, he supposed), multiple points of attack were necessary.
"Hey, let me down here!"
Goku looked down at him. "Huh?"
"We'll split up." He gestured toward the...house in front of them. "If there's two of us, we can take down more enemies at once and keep them from getting away, right?"
Goku blinked. "Oh...oh! Okay!"
The golden cloud swept down to the ground, and he was lifted out of Goku's shirt and set on the ground. He didn't actually return to full size until after he'd scrambled under a rooftop. Because there sure were a lot of bullets being fired, and it wouldn't be a good thing if bigger bullets were a bigger threat.
Well..at least 'bigger bullets' gave him an idea as to what to go for. The resistance the base was giving them would be minimized if their armory were gone. Particularly if there was anything extra nasty hidden there. And, maybe the three leading the assault could handle most of the things the army could use...but Bulma wouldn't be able to. The less people and things shooting in her direction, the better.
Armory it was.
(*)
An explosion rocked across the base, as a plane crashed into a nearby turret. She flipped off of a wall and slid under a swath of fire from one of the vehicles above. With her passenger, even if she'd felt like throwing away chakra and her training, she couldn't risk walking through all of that unnecessarily: Bulma was a small target, but her vital points were clustered together close enough that anything which managed to hit her would hit more than one vital point.
Dancing through the waves of bullets and mini explosions was, comparatively, far easier than avoiding Sasori's poisoned blades. She ran in the direction her pocket companion indicated, kicking the helmet off of one soldier, and leaping into the air to shatter the balcony three of her attackers stood on.
She bounced, flipped, and sprinted through the courtyard in the directions Bulma indicated without hesitation...or very much resistance at all from the base. For being such a fearsome army, the bulk of their forces were barely worth notice. Clearly, they'd stationed their strongest men to defend the dragonballs they sought or found.
Which meant, wherever these would be hidden was the actual resistance.
"If you don't quit jumping around I'm gonna be sick!"
"You want to walk through the next ball of fire?"
Bulma grumbled something incoherent for a few moments, before giving an irritable response. "We could've just snuck in here at night and avoided this in the first place."
That...wasn't untrue, probably. She, at least, had the training and skill required to sneak in and grab the dragonballs. But it wouldn't have eliminated the threat of the army. Much as this plan wasn't much of a 'plan' as 'attack all at once and see what happens', it was likely to at least cripple the army in the process of retrieving the balls. And that would be good, considering what the army got up to unchecked.
"It must be in that building up ahead!"
"Got it." She jumped onto a low-flying plane, and then hopped across three of the smaller rooftops. "Can you see with that cross-section which floor they're on?"
Not that she had any problem with blazing through each of the floors on the building ahead...but considering the last time she did it, it was in the pocket of one of their prisoners...perhaps it was best to know from the start where the dragonballs were hidden.
"Uh...yeah, give me a minute."
She flipped backward to dodge a lone bullet that shot from a nearby tower, and flung a section of the roof beneath her at the man with the gun. A large section.
"Okay, it looks like they're on the top floor!"
She nodded. "Right. Hold on."
The jump, though it required a bit of a running start, wasn't too bad. Bursting in through a window in an explosive spray of glass, however, could easily have dislodged the small woman from the impact of it. And it would be difficult to catch her without also hurting her if that happened.
As glass scattered across the floor and rained down on the street below, she somersaulted to a stop.
In the room, her company simply stared down at her in dumbfounded shock, words cut off mid-sentence.
(*)
Aside from collecting the dragonballs, he hadn't been told any other kind of plan. The others seemed to have some kind of plan, since Sakura left with Bulma and then Yamcha also wanted to go his own way...but no one told him anything about any other plan.
Actually, he was perfectly okay with that.
There was no way his friends would need any help doing whatever it was they were doing. Bulma and Sakura had the dragon radar, and no one in the whole place seemed to be dangerous enough to give Sakura any trouble anyway. Yamcha was also really strong, so whatever it was he wanted to do, he'd do it too.
No one gave him any kind of instructions about what to do, and that meant he could probably do whatever he wanted to. What he really wanted to do was try out his new strength after all that training he did with Korin. A big evil army like the one that killed all of Upa's village was a really good opportunity to do just that.
He grinned as he jumped off of the Nimbus, and spun through the air. As he twirled, he drew Power Pole, and struck out at the nearest plane. It barely felt like he used any strength, but the stick went right through the metal armor, and the entire vehicle exploded a moment later.
Alright!
He dropped to the stones below with a confident grin, surrounded by a group of startled looking men.
"I'm gonna get through all of you as quick as I can!"
Because, after all, now that they were split up doing their own things, he had to compete with Yamcha and Sakura, or there'd be no one left for him to fight at all.
(*)
In retrospect, as he kicked the fifteenth soldier through a wall (window, or hall, really the little differences didn't matter as much after a dozen) he wondered what the hell he'd been thinking when he split off from Goku. Other than not wanting to get shot at when he was approximately the size of the bullets shooting at him.
Not that looking for the armory was a bad idea! He still thought that was perfectly good and smart to do, considering the fact that they'd easily get flanked when they dropped right in the middle of the base.
The problem really was that he had no idea where the hell that armory was. Maybe he should have gone with Sakura and Bulma first, and hoped to find a map near the dragonballs. Or gone for the center where there was probably a map and maybe the armory.
Instead, he just ended up running through bigger looking buildings and taking down enough soldiers to make him feel less like an action hero and more like he was stuck in an infinite loop. Seriously, the rush of storming an enemy base faded in the second building full of food and bedding.
This building, at least, had winding hallways and locked doors he had to kick (or punch!) down. It was promising.
He sighed as yet another figure appeared in front of him, still indistinct in the haze of smoke that settled over the base due to all of the ruckus of their invasion (at least half of it had been caused by the army shooting at itself). "Hey, you don't happen to know where your armory is, do you?"
The faint smile that grew across his lips at his own humor faded immediately when the smooth voice responded.
The smooth, feminine voice.
"Did you really think a line like that was gonna work on me?"