AN: So, part of what took so long was that I've been busy. Part of it was that I just wasn't satisfied with how this chapter went and rewrote basically every part multiple times because it was just terrible. So there.
The Next Dimension Over
Chapter Seventy-two
She'd considered the room past the giant entrance as 'inky black' when she'd first entered it.
In retrospect, that was a completely inaccurate description of it. Next to the room she crashed into that one was at least twilight. She couldn't even see her hand in front of her face. She knew that because her hand was right there pushing her away from the ground she'd slammed into. Or whatever it was that cracked underneath her.
Air stirred and she flipped herself off of the ground a moment before Shula (as it must have been) slammed into where she'd been. Considering the relative darkness of everywhere else she'd been...could he functionally see in this darkness?
Probably, or he had great confidence in his ability to fight blind over hers. The latter would be a mistake.
She ducked, and hooked her fist into the stomach of her attacker just as he made another attack. A moment later, something heavy smashed into stone a short distance in front of her. Fighting blind wasn't ideal, but it didn't make a ninja useless, either.
She lurched to the side and slammed her shoulder into a solid wall with a hiss. Figuring out where he was wouldn't be too much trouble...but she needed to establish the size and shape of the room.
A kick swept her legs out from under her, and she rolled in the direction of the attack. Dodging too quickly without establishing her boundaries and obstacles would be more dangerous and potentially harmful than hitting the floor. Again.
Light.
She just needed a glimpse of the room.
The air stirred around her - too much - and she shoved hard against the floor, propelling herself into a nearby wall before one of the man's attacks shattered the stone she'd been lying on. Sharp chips of rock pelted her even from where she lay, one slicing her cheek as it passed by.
Definitely stone.
She dug a hand into her pocket as she cautiously pulled herself up, still squatting and ready to move. Stone tapped as the man began to move.
Quickly!
Her hand lanced out, and a self-made kunai slashed across the stone in front of her. Sparks shot up into the room and flashed a light almost brilliant in the total darkness around them. The king recoiled instantly from the sudden flare, and the outline of the room burned negative relief in her vision.
Now...that was better. She just needed to get through the king and back up top before the princess woke up. Or those guards found the princess sleeping in the middle of the floor.
(*)
Tedious.
That's what this 'mission' was. Wander a poorly populated part of the world and find an attractive woman willing to live on a tiny island with three strange men - one of whom would spend most of the time harassing said woman. Yeah.
Why not also have a bandit wander by and bother them? That might actually have been an improvement, and something he could make some kind of attempt to train with.
If it wasn't a woman.
"I don't believe this..."
The figure that stepped out from a large boulder in front of them grinned, hefting something that had to have been stolen somewhere better equipped than a wasteland like this. "Neither would I, but here you are. Two dummies rushing right where I can shoot you."
Krillin next to him scoffed. "What kind of a woman that pretty needs to resort to stealing things?"
The woman's green eyes turned from him to his shorter companion, irritation flaring up immediately. "You got a problem with the way I look? Lemme show you how tough I am!"
"Whoa! Wait!" Setting off the woman with the gun who'd just attacked someone else was probably not the best of ideas. "W-what he's trying to say is-surely we can help you?"
"What?" Krillin glared up at him in annoyed confusion immediately. He pointedly ignored his short companion. Really, anything that got the woman out of their sight and no longer aggressive toward them was best.
The woman swaggered up toward them and he resisted the strong urge to take an equal step back. The last time a violent woman with a weapon had gotten close to him, he'd nearly ended up with a broken nose. He had no interest in revisiting that.
"You must be the brains, huh?" The woman smirked up at him, and then leveled the gun in her hands in his direction. "Since you're so helpful, just dump out everything you've got in your pockets and I might let you go."
"There's no way!" Krillin shouted his response before he could say or do anything else. The younger man took a step forward and clenched his fists, managing to look intimidating enough to cause the woman to look apprehensive. "You think you can just bully people into giving you their precious things? It's not gonna happen!"
"Krillin-"
"No!" Krillin snapped and sliced his hand through the air. "I don't care if it's not important. I'm not getting pushed around that easily!"
The woman shook her head, overcoming whatever surprise he'd induced, and turned her gun. "Heh. If that's what you want your last words to be, I ain't gonna change 'em!"
It wasn't really a surprise, but the next few moments passed quickly. Bullets exploded from the gun, and Krillin shot from the ground, moving as quickly as he'd ever seen his fellow student run. Dust and dirt kicked up and partly obscured his vision of the two in front of him, a line of bullets raced across the ground past the point Krillin had been, and a fist collided with metal, knocking the bandit's weapon out of her hand.
She stumbled backward, off balance, and crashed to the ground with an angry shout.
"Why you little-!" She rolled onto her hands and knees and lurched for where the gun slid across the rocky ground. Krillin slid more quickly, kicking the gun into the boulder she'd hid behind earlier and shattering something metal on it.
"I-!" The woman spluttered, face red, glaring up at Krillin. "I'll...I...-"
Whatever she'd been about to say exploded into a spectacular sneeze, instead.
(*)
She spun through the air. At the last moment, an arm that felt like compressed steel collided with her leg and sent shock waves through her body. It was getting a little bit old, honestly. Whether or not he could see her in the darkness, his reflexes and reaction time were unreal.
She gripped his wrist before it could collide with her face-he'd made similar attempts before, now she didn't even need the change in air pressure to know he'd try. Chakra surged through her hand and she twisted with a growl of irritation.
For once, at least, she managed to get enough a grip to snap the wrist in her hand, but the response was less than satisfying.
She narrowly flung herself out of the way before one of his invisible blasts of air sliced through where she'd been and smashed into the wall behind her.
Really, she couldn't expect Goku to wait much longer before he came in after her. Which meant he'd find the princess up where she'd left her...and then trap both of them in a dimension that there might not be any ready escape from. With a very angry king.
A very powerful, angry king.
She slowed her skid across the ground just enough to keep from crashing into crates she'd seen earlier. He'd knocked the kunai out of her hands almost immediately, clearly miffed at the idea of neutralizing his sight advantage in the dark, and she'd yet to find them again.
This battle...could take a while yet.
She swerved to the side and uppercut, simultaneously dodging a strike and landing a solid one square in his chest. He slammed into a wall with a satisfying crash, but...it wasn't the first time he'd done so. He was frustratingly durable, and every attempt she'd made to escape out the hole to the top room had ended in painful failure. Nothing seemed to stun or delay him long enough to get all the way to the top, and he just refused to stay down.
She grit her teeth in frustration, and leaped away from where she stood. Dull sparks of light illuminated the room briefly as his own metal weapons clashed against the stone behind her. He didn't look any more worn out than he'd been before.
Something needed to change. If it were just her fighting him, with nothing else at stake, that would be one thing. But if Goku found his way into the mess of things...finding a way out would be less of a worry than ensuring nothing happened to him. Which was the worst way to fight a battle.
A solid force slammed into her back and sent her flying across the small space, crashing into thick walls that never seemed to end, regardless of how hard she or he slammed through them.
See.
Just thinking about the situation distracted her.
She shook her head and turned on her heel. He'd been still a few moments. It meant he was about to attack with something powerful, or he was finally getting the tired. The first was obviously more likely between the two. "Damn it..."
She clenched her eyes shut - it wasn't as if keeping them open did her any good - and focused her chakra.
No, not chakra.
Ki.
Something destructive. Something concentrated.
Something he wouldn't be expecting to dodge.
Heat flared in her hands, and light flickered against her eyelids.
Raw, unprocessed chakra...ki...was a raging storm, ready to explode inside and out of her, to spiral out of control into uselessness the moment her grip slipped from it at all. Any sane person would process it the way it was meant to be used.
Energy burned bright in her hand and she finally opened her eyes. Shula staggered back a step and shielded his face from the light that flooded the dark room so completely that tears formed and trickled down her dirt-caked face.
Her scream was equal parts effort and freshly surging adrenaline, as she thrust out her arm toward her stunned opponent.
He crashed through the wooden crates behind him and then the wall of dirt behind that without even making an attempt to dodge her attack.
She wasted no time in racing from the indent she'd made and leaping up into the air to escape. One hand made contact with the wall and propelled her up further. A second.
Below her, wood shattered.
She flipped out onto the stone floor above, where the princess lay crumpled asleep.
The ground shook even as she scooped the girl up and raced toward the light in the distance. Even that much burned her eyes after having been stuck in total darkness for what felt like hours. She fished a small ball out of her pocket. It'd seemed pointless in such a small room where he might not have had any need for sight at all...but he must have used eyes normally if he'd shielded them against the light of her ki.
And she only needed to buy a few moments.
Smoke erupted from the ground as she shattered the glass ball at her feet. For a moment, no more than that, she and the princess were concealed. She needed no more than that to create a duplicate image of them both, and leap into the darker part of the room nearby, racing parallel to the one that continued onward.
A brilliant shot of light sliced through the image, square through its chest.
For a moment, her mirror image twisted in a mimicry of pain, disrupted by the attack.
White smoke exploded in every direction as it dispelled, and she dove through the open door into the crater she'd made out of the ground outside.
"Close the door!"
Out in her own territory, without the threat of being trapped forever in what might have been an entirely different world from the parallel one she'd already been trapped in, fighting him would be a very different thing. With a frustrated Goku ready to get in on it, however...
Her concern was unfounded, a moment later the gigantic door slammed shut above where she landed with the princess, and a very dissatisfied Goku dropped down after her, sliding down the uneven dirt of the damaged ground without any concern.
"That wasn't fair! I wanted to see what was in there, too!" He huffed and glared up at her even as she straightened, hands on his hips. "I can't train and get stronger if I can't fight anything."
She let the jutsu holding the princess asleep slip away, and looked up at the mouth of the crater. A few of the guards that accompanied them to the doorway peeked over the edge with some concern. "There wasn't much to see."
Goku didn't look at all convinced. "You were fighting someone!"
She helped the groggy princess onto her back, and climbed the uneven wall of the pit toward the worried looking guards. "...I didn't beat him, though."
"Nevertheless." The king, who must have heard her comment as she climbed out to freedom, gave a relieved smile. "You've brought our Princess Misa back to us!"
The young girl dropped to the ground near to her and sprinted the distance toward the king. "Father!"
She turned her gaze from the reunion back to the solid looking door. Despite how close that other king had been to her, the door seemed to show no indication of being opened. Perhaps whatever key they needed was on the outside, given that the sword had been forcing the door to stay open?
...That seemed unlikely to be completely true, given it had been opened from the inside before.
"So...you didn't beat him?"
She shook her head after a moment, and glanced down at Goku, finally allowing herself to feel some relief. He looked both confused and still a little disappointed at being unable to participate. "Next time...maybe you can do it for me. If you finish my training."
His expression lit up then, disappointment vanishing, and he gripped his hand in front of himself in excitement. "Then I want to get back to it right now! Let's get started immediately!"
From behind her, the king spoke suddenly. "Wait, before you go...you rescued our princess and saved all of us. There must be some reward we can provide you."
She shook her head. Normally she did charge for her services, but...really, there wasn't much need to when they had at least two wealthy friends and little to spend it on while they were traveling anyway. "It wasn't like you promised us one when we got here."
Not that she could remember, anyway. Mostly they were promised danger.
The man frowned slightly, and then gave a reluctant nod. "...Very well then. However...to celebrate the safety of the princess and the people here, we shall host a feast. If you are not in too much of a hurry..."
"I think we should stay for the feast." Goku nodded, cutting into the king's words without any sort of hesitation. "And then we can get back to training. Holding that door made me hungry."