AN: Life is busy. This is an important chapter, and it took many rewrites and restarts to get it quite right.
The Next Dimension Over
Chapter Eighty-Three
Run.
She's never felt so slow. She hasn't felt so painfully slow since she was a child watching better ninja move so quickly their movements were barely more than blurs to her untrained eyes. It was such a short distance, and yet it felt like she crawled across it.
Run.
She needed to run faster.
(*)
The ring was...almost hopelessly ruined. A corner of it had cracked and fallen off, some of the tiles had dislodged, there were pock marks littering the usually smooth surface and more than one indented trail that cut almost halfway down to the ground.
Oh yes, and there was a giant hole into the deep ground near one of the edges of the ring. The only reason why they hadn't done anything to fix it is probably because the tournament hadn't budgeted enough time to replace or remove the ring halfway through, and there wasn't any better place for spectators to safely observe the last two fights.
Ah, well. The semi finals and finals were supposed to be the most challenging, right? He'd just have to consider it an obstacle course. One with a few tools lying here and there for him to use, if necessary. Like a hole he'd like to kick Ino into.
That'd be pretty nice, yeah.
But he couldn't worry about a round he wasn't in yet. If he did, the younger boy in front of him would win embarrassingly quickly. And he definitely refused to disappoint himself that much after three years of preparing and training under the great Master Roshi. No way.
Goku settled into that familiar non-stance in front of him, grinning in excitement, none of the weight of the previous battles in his expression at all. As it should be. Both of them needed to focus completely if they wanted to win. Neither one of them was going to hold back this time, after all. And neither one of them were going to get distracted.
"You ready, Goku?"
"Yeah!" The kid gave an excited nod.
"Let's do this!"
(*)
Two against one. Honestly, he didn't know why Sakura had that worried look on her face. Even if she wasn't way more of a terrifying monster on the inside than this guy was on the outside, here he was too! He wasn't just some common kid to be ignored! He, too, was trained by Master Roshi, and even though that Tien managed to catch him by surprise...well, that wasn't going to be the case this time.
"Be careful, Krillin." She frowned at the man in the distance.
"Heh." The lizard approached them slowly, leisurely, even. "Well...if that's what you want. It's your choice how you choose to live right before you die, after all."
Die?!
He blinked.
The lizard crossed most of the distance between them in the time that took. He stumbled a step backward, startled more than anything by the sudden movement. Why was it him-?!
Pink flashed across his vision, and Sakura's open palm slammed into the dragon-man's torso, sending him spinning into a nearby building. When she spoke, her voice cracked sharply. "Krillin."
Damn it-focus!
He shook his head quickly and turned on his heel. As weird as it was to think someone could just randomly approach them on the street and be a threat, clearly it happened. No one shrugged off those kinds of hits twice without even looking...pained! And he definitely said 'die'.
Krillin's fists clenched, and this time he took the offensive. He sprinted forward as the hostile figure brushed debris off of his shoulders. Beside him, Sakura seemed intent to run at his pace. It had been three years since they even fought together at all, let alone something like this, wasn't it? Well. Hopefully she was used to fighting alongside Goku enough to follow his lead easily. If not...he'd try not to hit her.
His lips quirked up into an amused smile.
He kicked himself into the air, spinning his leg out to strike the man's neck. Sakura, fortunately, really did respond accordingly. She ducked instead.
A scaled arm connected with his ankle, and a moment later, clawed fingers seized around his leg. Similarly, he grasped one of Sakura's wrists. "Ho? If we've moved onto this, does it mean I get to fight seriously yet?"
A few things happened at once, but what seemed to be most important was the flash of Sakura's free hand. Her fist slammed into the green man's wrist and with what must have been the first cry of pain that Krillin had heard from the creature, he dropped the both of them.
Well.
'Dropped'.
Somehow Krillin still ended up the only one falling on his butt.
"Krillin..." Sakura grabbed his collar and jumped backward, across the street away from their opponent. "You need to run."
Wha-?!
"Excuse me?! Just because you broke free first doesn't mean I wasn't about to escape too!" He growled and glared up at the woman. He...just...knew it! She'd been underestimating him this whole time! Just because he wasn't Goku didn't mean he wasn't one of the strongest fighters on the planet! And besides, if that Tien guy wasn't basically a cheater he'd have gotten to fight Goku and prove he was better by now anyway!
"Oh...you're getting better at giving advice." Their enemy approached them slowly again, expression twisted in what was either anger or pain. Probably both, under the circumstances. "In the end it doesn't matter, though. Run all you like. I'll still catch you."
"Krillin-"
"I don't need your protection, damn it!"
He sprinted forward. Their argument was a good distraction to get the man to be unguarded, right? At least it was better than waiting for him to launch another attack, anyway.
He made it about halfway before the man's tongue - long, purple, generally super gross - shot out and encircled him. Multiple times. How did that even fit in a normal mouth?! Up off his feet he went, straining and struggling to break free of a muscle he couldn't even begin to imagine how someone trained up.
The world spun and he flew.
Kind of embarrassing, but who would have expected a trap tongue? Really.
This was the second time today he'd gone flying somewhere. The second.
Rather than a painful impact, though, something cushioned him suddenly, and he skidded to a halt. Rather...Sakura skidded to a halt, arms encircling him and holding him...way uncomfortably close to things he didn't actually want to risk having his face so close to.
Damn it, he refused to count this as a second time getting rescued by Sakura in a day.
"Krillin, look, the way I am now-"
"If you think I'm just going to abandon a friend of mine in a battle like this you've got me all wrong!" Maybe he wasn't the bravest person in the world! Okay, he could admit that! Maybe he wasn't as strong and impressive as she and all of whatever freakish friends she had in that world of hers, too. But he wasn't the kind of person to cut and run so easily. At least...not like this. And he could take care of himself!
Her expression turned to surprise and she turned to look at him briefly.
Sh...did she really think he was that much of a coward? Why?!
"Heh. You know...you two are starting to piss me off. If you're just going to bounce around and do nothing else, I think it's time I got on to more important matters."
Did that happen to mean he planned on leav-brilliant red light erupted from the lizard's mouth. And...not a little amount of it, either. A huge ki blast. Just...shot from his open mouth at the both of them.
"Wh-What the hell?!"
(*)
She wanted to fly.
Her feet touched the ground occasionally, and damn it that just wasn't good enough. Buildings bled away into whirls of color, the sounds of the city turned into a dim roar of constant noise, and every little detail of the world around her narrowed into the image of the dragon man.
Images from a shadow clone were always choppy, injected so suddenly that putting them together took a bit of understanding and processing time.
Now she remembered it clearly. The strange, dangerous opponent. The ki attacks, the wanton destruction. The glowing hand that sliced right through her shadow form, and the look of shock on Krillin's face the moment before her memories ended.
She skidded and stumbled to a halt as the buildings broke apart into the destruction she remembered.
A bit of tile fell to the asphalt below and shattered into dust. She tensed, ready to defend herself against immediate attack...but none came. Not even a malicious laugh, or a flicker of ki. The man, whoever or whatever he was...seemed to have left the area.
She frowned as she dropped to the street level, glancing left and right through the damaged section of the city. "...Krillin?"
Had the fight moved?
She didn't hear anything in the distance, hadn't seen anything on the way to the tournament. No sound came in response to her call, either. Had he managed to escape, then? Maybe she'd missed him in her rush to get back here to help protect him. Maybe she'd totally underestimated him, too, and the eerie silence of the area came from the fact that he'd single-handedly taken down the man once he had no witnesses.
That wouldn't be a terrible thing.
She stepped lightly across the scattered, broken debris.
In some ways, it reminded her of those years ago, when she'd woken up after an explosion in a castle completely destroyed, when they'd searched desperately for Yamcha against all odds, despite the fact that they all knew it was completely hopeless to think someone else, someone without her unique abilities and strength, could survive such a blast.
The area wasn't nearly destroyed enough to be the same, and this situation...wasn't nearly hopeless enough.
"Krillin?" She tried again. "Krillin!"
Damn it, how was she supposed to know where to look? She didn't have his phone number! What if that man had kidnapped him? What if she was wasting time when she should have been getting Goku and trying to rescue him from some evil group after another stupid wish?
She picked up her pace, sprinting across the area, looking across each rubble pile that seemed large enough.
No, no...of course. Of course she didn't want to find anything. The sooner she finished with this area, the further she went without seeing him here, the better.
She was worried about nothing. After all, no matter how many years might have passed in peace, no matter how much she intended to recover all that she'd lost, make it better than if she'd never left and never failed in the first place...she'd still failed, hadn't she? She'd still failed to protect any one person she'd cared about in her entire life so far.
It's a perfectly reasonable paranoia.
Just a paranoia, really.
"Krillin...Krillin!"
She shouted, spinning in place. Damn it, why couldn't she just...why wouldn't he just say or do something to let her know he was okay?
She grit her teeth and turned a street corner, following the path of destruction beyond what she'd seen in her memories.
For a few moments, her legs stopped moving. She felt rooted to the ground as surely as if the man had reappeared from the ground right then like a proper shinobi and seized both of her ankles at once. A glimmer of something pale, something too pale, something too familiar looking, stuck out from beneath a collapsed wall a couple of blocks away from where she stood.
No.
No...it was just...it could...have been anything...!
She moved.
She ran.
She might have flown.
Her fingers seized the chunks of crumbling stone and flung them with enough force to shatter the walls of another crumbling building. Beneath it...beneath it was-
His skin wasn't really pale, just a part of it had seemed like it was pale against the darker blue stone above it. In reality, it looked red. Dark, charred black at points and leathery. Not from fire - his clothes were still intact, save for the damage he'd already taken before she'd been hit - but burned some other way.
No...
Nononono- "Krillin...Krillin, come on!" Her hands touched his neck, his cheek, pressed to his chest. It didn't matter that there wasn't a pulse. It could be too weak to feel.
Her shoulders shook, breath reedy as she focused on her chakra, struggled to smother the welling panic, the horror and frustration and guilt. Her chakra system was well trained, and even with her distress, she managed to pour the healing chakra into him.
Into...
She searched.
For anything.
"Damn it...damn it!"
Her fist clenched in his shirt, vision blurring. "Damn it! Damn it!"
She was...
was so...
so...
A howl of...rage...of fury and frustration, of grief and frustration, echoed through the air. It was probably her voice. No one else was around to make the sound, so it must have been her. She didn't feel herself make it, though. Didn't really remember. She draped herself over the small figure and curled her arms around him in a manner that didn't protect him at all.
Why?
Why?!
Why couldn't she protect even one person?
Not even one.