Disclaimer: I don't own Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT, Dragon Ball Super, or anything else related to the Dragon Ball universe, or any of its characters. They are all owned by Akira Toriyama.
A/N: Sorry for the lengthy delay. Real life got in the way over the past few months. I've barely had any time to write at all.
A big thanks to TheRangerBoy for being a beta for this chapter.
So, I consider this to be a bit of a landmark chapter. We finally reached the point where all of that nonsense in all the previous chapters has finally all come together.
All of the previous chapters have basically been for this moment. For when the fight actually starts. I actually never thought I'd even make it this far. And you know… if I'm being honest, I consider this story, especially the earlier chapters, to be a bit of a train wreck.
This was the first story I ever wrote. I learned how to write, using this story. So there are a lot of mistakes. And I still have a long way to go yet.
But it was fun. I still cringe a little every time I skim over those previous chapters, but the way I see it, we're in too deep now. Even if it sucks, I'm just going to keep on going until this either gets flamed into the ground, or I get to the end.
Thanks for making it this far to everyone who has.
-Levitamm
It started out with a simple question.
'I wonder…'
If capsules can stop time, does that mean that the velocity of all objects within its range would be preserved as well?
Suppose he had a gun, and he had a capsule house with two windows that shared a line sight. Meaning, he could stand outside the house when it was materialized, look through the glass of one window, and see not only into the house but through the window on the other side of the building as well.
...Lined up in a perfect way that when both windows were open, he could point his gun and fire a bullet into the house from outside, through the first window, and right out the open window on the other side.
So they would be lined up in a straight line like that.
What would happen if he had a clone at that exact moment, observing this event in the slow-motion world, with a finger on the capsulation mechanism of the house?
What if that clone pressed that button at the exact instant of time that the bullet was inside the house?
After it had traveled through the first window, but before making it through the second?
In that region of space in between. What if he capsulized the house in that precise moment?
When the house capsulized… would the bullet just be frozen in the air inside? Just waiting for time to resume?
Being the curious guy that he was, Gohan had wanted to test this out immediately upon asking himself this question.
...And so a few months back, he had done that exact test.
He hadn't had a gun with him at the time, but he had a ball of energy that could demonstrate the same concept.
...And so he had fired the blast through the window that day. And the clone had capsulized the house, before the ball of energy shot out the other side.
…
And then after waiting a few moments, that same clone rematerialized the house to see what would happen.
...The ball of energy had then shot out the window it had been heading towards all along as if time had never stopped at all.
…
It had taken no time at all for Gohan to understand the implications of that test.
Velocity was preserved.
With his magic energy so severely depleted for the fight against the Saiyans simply getting all of his clones where they needed to go, he knew that he would not be able to use any of his more magically intensive attacks such as his laser, or any of the ones that Piccolo had taught him.
But the thing was, he didn't need to anymore after seeing the results of that experiment.
The version of Gohan that lived and breathed one month before the Saiyans had arrived, had no such restriction on his reserves.
Why not take advantage of that? He had asked himself.
Why not recruit past Gohan to aid him in the fight with the Saiyans by getting him to donate already formed attacks and storing them?
So that he would not need to waste his already dwindling magic reserves forming said attacks when the fight started.
This would effectively be a way to store his magic energy, just like his battery stored his Ki. It took magic to compress energy attacks into anything other than the default gigantic sphere, after all.
And he was already using a capsule to contain that massive ball of Ki that he would be using as a battery… why not shoot a few of his lasers as well?
He could easily fire off his laser into a house like that.
And he could capsulize them just as easily as he could with a bullet.
...And so he did.
He was not the type to pass up an advantage of any kind, after all.
…
And then he had asked himself… why stop at just one?
Empty Capsules were pretty cheap...
As the dust from Vegeta's attack permeated the battlefield, Nappa slowly descended to the ground.
He landed by Vegeta on the opposite side of the massive, newly formed crater with an expression of shock plastered across his face.
…
The Saiyan had no idea what to say to his superior at all.
Seeing this happen from his spot floating in the air with Piccolo, all of his plans changed in an instant.
He had basically been playing around this whole time, trying to manipulate every last piece of information that he could.
But seeing Nappa's turned back, changed everything.
He had wanted his temporary allies to do most of the fighting. He had wanted to wait to strike until there was a moment of opportunity to go all out and kill one of them in a single instant before they had a chance to react.
This was an opportunity... and it had revealed itself far sooner than he had expected.
His minor plans had been failing anyways, and it was pretty much inevitable that the whole situation would quickly devolve into combat.
The Saiyans wouldn't leave, and he was just wasting his time trying to get them to, it seemed.
So he asked himself in that moment... why wait for them to recover?
…
Instead of reacting to whatever they decided to do next, he'd attack them first.
The rising smoke obscured the vision of everyone on the battlefield.
Not his, though. Gohan had his bubble sensing technique and could see clear as day, right through it all.
…
He was going to kill Nappa now, he decided.
Vegeta wasn't at the right angle to get a decent approach without being noticed. But Nappa's back was facing a smoke screen.
He'd be able to get right behind the bald Saiyan without being noticed until the last moment.
This was it.
He powered up and blitzed forward as fast as he could before Piccolo or any of his temporary allies could react.
His feet touched the ground and he blurred forwards, taking full advantage of all of his stealth training from the past months.
He had powered up without a sound.
His steps were silent. Using the final iteration of his air-walking technique.
...Where he used both his reverse air walking technique and his normal air walking technique at once. That let him stick to the ground by grabbing his foot and a chunk of the ground with the same ball of energy, and compress them together, all while making sure that his feet never actually touched said ground with an energy cushion in between them.
It involved some pretty intricate 3-dimensional geometry, involving a sphere within a sphere, that were both being pulled towards each other, but that couldn't actually reach each other because his foot was in the way.
And all of that was going on, invisibly, in the tiny few centimeter gaps between each of his feet, and the ground.
And it all added up to create the effect of silent footsteps, while also letting him stick to the ground, while also preventing his feet from directly contacting it. Which gave him the ability to change directions almost instantly, and gave him tremendous traction.
…
He was in a plume of smoke. Leftover from Vegeta's last attack.
They wouldn't see him coming until it was too late.
They had dropped their scouters, so they wouldn't sense his power level.
…
He continued on, deeper into the smokescreen, only a few meters away from Nappa.
…
The Saiyan had his back turned.
Gohan entered the slow-motion world and prepared his attack carefully.
…
It would not matter if he died a horrific death in the next few moments. He had 4 other clones. And the principle of superposition ensured that as long as he had at least 1 clone left in the world, his consciousness would spring to it immediately if whatever clone he was currently piloting suddenly died.
And that clone would become his normal body from that point forward.
So it didn't matter at all if he failed here.
Sometimes, the entire foundation of a plan so important that it could save the world depended on the most random, unexpected, seemingly useless piece of information.
…
How did the safety mechanism on a capsule work?
The answer to that question gave him coin-flip odds of killing the Saiyan in front of him, he figured.
…
Gohan was a curious kid. And he asked a lot of questions.
Months ago, he had asked himself a pretty simple one.
What would happen if he pressed the trigger on a capsule and just... didn't throw it?
…
Lots of people across the internet had asked themselves that question as well, as it seemed at first glance like a bit of a safety concern.
Naturally, Capsule Corporation had anticipated this potential hazard as well and had installed a safety mechanism in all of their products.
A capsule would not materialize its contents if there was something that would obstruct it, to prevent anything from getting damaged, and to prevent anyone from getting hurt.
A capsule couldn't be deployed in a narrow cave where there was no room for it for instance, unless the interior of the cave was surprisingly big and the materialized structure would fit inside.
It couldn't be deployed in a forest if the trees were too crowded together and got in the way.
It couldn't be deployed while held in a person's hand either.
Even something as small as a mosquito would stop one from materializing if it happened to just buzz through the area at an inopportune moment.
…
But someone like Gohan was not satisfied with this explanation. There were a few holes in it that had required further investigation.
How long did it take for a capsule to materialize from the moment he pressed the trigger, to the moment it appeared?
That had been pretty simple to answer, as that timer was standardized across all capsules. It had only taken a quick internet search to find the design document.
Three seconds exactly. That was the default. It could be altered of course, but that was up to the customer.
But this timer was very precise. It only started counting after the sensors on the capsule determined that the range was free.
In other words, if Gohan hit the button on the capsule and held the thing in his hand for 10 seconds without throwing it, this timer would not even start.
If after those ten seconds went by, however, he then threw it, in the exact instant that the sensors on the capsule determined that it was safe to materialize in that space, then this 3-second timer would start counting down.
This meant of course that certain capsules had to be used carefully. If you tried to materialize a house for example and threw it as hard as you could straight up in the air, if it didn't hit the ground in those 3 seconds, it would actually materialize in the air and drop like a stone. Potentially ruining any appliances and furniture inside.
It was actually a crime to do that, too. And you could get in some serious trouble with law enforcement.
But there was a reason on why that obvious safety flaw existed in some capsules, and it was pretty simple.
Some capsules had to be materialized in the air. Aircraft, and military equipment, for example.
Other things like hand-held tools and the like were simply more convenient to be materialized in the air. Weapons as well. It would be inconvenient if you had to materialize these things on the ground and then pick them up, instead of just tossing the capsules into the air and catching the materialized item.
And as a result of this, the standard capsule safety mechanism was just that three-second safety timer. It was up to the user of these capsules to include extra precautions if they wanted to.
You could download the ability for the capsule to not materialize unless it was on the ground, or the ability to increase the length of the safety timer or any other safety mechanisms, but the default was meant to be as unrestrictive as possible so that the same mechanism could be applied across all capsules.
Just that 3-second timer.
...
But… Gohan then asked a third question after finding out all of this.
What if... that timer started counting down after the capsule had been thrown, and then something interrupted it?
Say, for example, he threw a capsule into a wide open area, and counted out 2 seconds, and then using his top speed, he then sprinted into the range suddenly?
Would the capsule materialize then?
...No, actually. As you might expect, the sensors would suddenly register that he was in the area and it wasn't safe to materialize any longer.
So the timer would pause.
…
The timer would pause.
It would not reset back to 3 seconds.
This was the detail that changed everything.
Now, he wasn't actually sure why this happened the way it did. He had never been able to find an official explanation. But he figured that it had to do with convenience.
It would be super inconvenient if you were trying to materialize a capsule that you needed if the air was full of insects or something like that.
Where the timer would be almost at 0 only for a stray insect to interrupt and reset it, and for that to keep happening if there was a beehive nearby or something… but this was basically just a guess of his.
So instead of needing to wait for a full 3 seconds with absolutely nothing in the range of the capsule after every last interruption, you just had to wait a single instant, essentially.
...
So the exact instant he cleared the area in this hypothetical scenario, the timer would continue.
It would only have one second left on it though since it had paused. So, a single second later, the capsule would materialize as if nothing had happened at all.
Well… as it turned out, Gohan was pretty good at counting time.
He had recently developed those SIT tiers after all. He knew how long a second lasted, so three seconds was no problem for him to time out, precisely.
...And so he had developed a pretty bizarre plan.
He had those capsulized lasers that the version of him from weeks ago had fired off. He could deploy them at any time.
But… he also knew that he could reduce that capsules safety timer by doing exactly what he had thought about earlier.
Toss the capsule, and a single instant before it materialized, suddenly stop the timer by stepping into its materialization range.
Then when he left, the laser would materialize without needing to wait for those 3 seconds to go by.
…
This was what he referred to as, priming a capsule.
It worked the same way as cooking a grenade. If you knew it would detonate after 5 seconds, why not hold onto it for 3 before tossing it?
You could prevent anyone from properly reacting to the attack.
And with his SIT tier system of timing, he could get that margin of error down extremely low.
Seeing the implications of all this a while ago, he had spent a good amount of time practicing throwing capsules at his clones in arcs that lasted just under 3 seconds.
And that had sure been interesting training. Piccolo had had no idea at all what he was doing, and Gohan's explanation of 'creating a standard algorithm using SIT delays to precisely prime capsules,' hadn't helped.
He had been feeling a little facetious at the time due to the fact that he had been recovering from another beating.
His unhelpful, though technically accurate explanation, had earned him another one.
...
Timing it all out was easy, with the algorithm.
At SIT tier 0, time was normal and he would count out two seconds.
Then he would accelerate to Tier 1, where he counted out tenths of a second. Nine of them in fact.
...Then hundredths of a second at Tier 2. Then thousandths at Tier 3.
At the end of this process, that safety timer would be at 2.999 seconds elapsed exactly. If he exited the range at that point, exactly one-thousandth of a second later, his laser would materialize.
…
Though there was one final piece of information that pulled everything together. Hidden deep in the settings when printing out capsules, there existed an option to lock the orientation of an object.
Meaning, the capsule would have a direction with this feature active. There was an invisible arrow that would point outwards that would indicate where the 'front' of the capsule was.
If you used this feature on a capsule house, which was a horrible idea to do, if the capsule materialized with the arrow pointing in one direction, that would be where the front door would end up facing.
If instead, the arrow had been pointing in a different direction, the front door would have pointed somewhere else.
Since most people tended to just toss capsules randomly in front of them, this was a terrible idea to do in most cases. Houses would appear upside down half the time.
Instead, capsules by default, depended on various machine learning techniques, and a multitude of sensors to determine not only which orientation would be the safest upon materializing but to also predict which direction would be most convenient for the user.
It sometimes got the convenience part wrong, but there had never been a case where a capsule had destroyed itself by accident due to this. Whenever something like that happened in the news, someone had always activated that locked object setting by mistake and had carelessly ignored the warnings that that entailed.
But this setting… it allowed Gohan to always know exactly where his capsulized attacks would be pointing...
Which was sort of the whole point to this plan of his.
So… as Gohan continued his sprint through the smoke screen, all of the pieces of his plan came together.
The clone that he had nearby that had been observing the fight to prevent him from being taken off guard, had one of his laser capsules on him.
...And since that clone had been waiting for this exact moment, he tossed the capsule after pressing the trigger.
Gohan watched the arc and went through that process of precisely accelerating his perception of time through the tiers.
He counted out 2 seconds as he observed its path with his bubble sensing technique, then moved to Tier 1 SIT. Then he counted out 9 seconds relative to him, before moving to Tier 2 SIT, and so on.
At the last instant, he 'grabbed' the capsule telekinetically with a slight application of his energy and pulled it toward himself so that he was within its materialization range and so that the safety timer would pause, successfully priming the capsule.
…
He had marked the capsule in advance with a red indicator that jutted outwards so he could see it with his bubble sensing technique without needing his eyes, having anticipated the situation of being inside a smokescreen while doing this.
It wasn't actually a house that he had capsulized his lasers in, after all. They were actually hollow tubes of metal. A giant rifle barrel basically, that was open at both ends.
So, the capsule's range was not a sphere in this case. It was cylindrical. He could stand an inch to either side of that barrel and it would materialize without a problem even if he was right next to it.
He had to literally be in the direct path of the cylinder, or else this plan wouldn't work.
So the red mark was there so that he could see where the end of the barrel was pointed, and so he would know where to stand. As long as he was facing that red marked end, when he 'pulled' the capsule towards himself, it wouldn't materialize as he would suddenly be in the way.
…
Gohan caught it in his teeth.
That red mark wasn't simply a dot, after all, it was actually taped on so it would create a protrusion that he could detect with his bubble sensing. It marked the back of the barrel. The direction that the laser would not shoot in.
So while it was in his teeth like that, he could feel around with his tongue for that little red piece, and he could orient it in the right direction without being able to actually see it.
Then he put on the porcelain mask he was carrying, over top of his face.
It was a pretty cheap and worthless thing that he had prepared for the fight. It wouldn't protect his face or anything from any attacks, but it did a good job of concealing the fact that there was something in his mouth at the moment. And that was all the mask was needed for. He had materialized it from a capsule just a few moments before this assault of his.
He put the mask on an instant before leaving the smoke screen.
On his final step before his ambush truly began, he planted his leading foot on the ground and leaped with considerable strength, in a wild horizontal spin directed straight at Nappa.
…
A moment later, he blew through the smoke and found himself right behind the Saiyan.
He hadn't made a sound.
Time slowed to a crawl, and all sound ceased from his perspective.
...
Gohan planted his hand on the ground.
Nappa twirled around in surprise, sensing the disturbance.
It was too late to stop the attack though, Nappa would be on the defensive for the next few moments.
Gohan twisted on his hand and carried forward all of his rotational momentum from his spin, directing it up with his right heel in a sort of low donkey kick with a sizeable portion of his strength.
...
He aimed towards the Saiyan's crotch.
A pretty obvious weak point shared amongst humans everywhere. He had no idea if the same weak point existed in Saiyans, but he didn't actually expect the hit to land, anyways, so he didn't really care.
He fully expected it to be blocked.
...And it was.
Before Nappa's mind had even understood what was happening, his body had reacted instinctively and blocked the strike completely with his forearm in a low block.
...But his hands were now no longer protecting his face, and the Saiyan was directly facing him. And that's what Gohan was waiting for.
It would have been ideal if the Saiyan hadn't noticed him at the last moment and still had his back turned, but he could still manage.
He had planned out this exact maneuver months ago. Timing everything out exactly. Choreographing these next few movements like a dancer, or an actor would. He had practiced it over and over again until he didn't have to think about it anymore.
Drawing from his orbital Ki battery, Gohan grabbed a decent chunk of energy and transferred it to his free hand. The one that wasn't planted on the ground.
Then he released it all with a wave of his hand.
...
A wall of plasma slammed into Nappa.
Again, Gohan didn't care if it did any damage. It probably wouldn't, anyway.
But it gained distance. It pushed the Saiyan back by about 3 meters and set him up for what came next.
Using his bubble sensing technique, Gohan then drew on all of the hours he had spent practicing measuring precise distances with it, and leaned back just enough so that his mouth was precisely 3.16 meters from the tip of Nappa's nose.
Then with a small application of energy, Gohan blew apart the bottom half of his mask and spit out the perfectly oriented capsule, further enhancing the action with an application of Ki.
The broken fragments of his mask were the same colour as the capsule he had just spit out, and so it blended right in with all those tiny pieces flying around in Nappa's field of view.
He had painted the mask in advance to ensure this was the case.
The Saiyan would not be able to pick out the capsule among the mask fragments until it was too late.
The red taped part of the capsule that he was using as an indicator was facing Gohan, so it wouldn't be visible to Nappa from the front.
Why was 3.16 meters the magic distance? Because the metal pipe that his laser was contained in was 3.15 meters long.
He wanted the error margin to be as small as possible to minimize the chances of the attack missing, and he could confidently measure the distances between things with his bubble sensing to about 1 centimeter.
...
Gohan observed the capsule on its arc towards the Saiyan at well past the third Tier. It crawled its way to the midpoint between them from his perspective.
Generally speaking, when concentrating, a Ki user could see the world around them far faster than they could actually move through it. Making it surprisingly easy to follow the movements of someone 10 times faster than you. But when viewing the world like that, it took ages to move around, and you could watch your opponent winding up to punch you in the face for thirty seconds, all while knowing you won't be able to dodge it, and that it will hurt like hell when it lands.
That was what was happening now. Gohan was watching his plan unfold at the slowest rate he could manage.
...Only about half a second had passed in real time since he had put his mask on back in the smoke screen.
The point of the mask was also pretty simple. It turned out, that when you were wearing a mask, whoever you were fighting didn't typically expect an attack to come from behind it.
In that brief moment of time that Nappa had spotted him at the beginning of his assault, his mind would have picked up on the mask Gohan was wearing, and he would have subconsciously deduced that it was unlikely that an attack would come from Gohan's eyes or mouth.
Gohan had done this little trick on Piccolo once before during their training, and it had worked like a charm. Piccolo hadn't even noticed that he had subconsciously limited his own expectations on where an attack would come from just by seeing a simple mask.
Piccolo had made sure to never make the same mistake again, though. And he had not been amused at all by the underhanded tactic.
But if it worked on Piccolo, Gohan had figured that his mask trick might work on one of these Saiyans as well.
It could prove to be the deciding factor in this plan of his.
It was a sort of backup plan. Ideally, Nappa wouldn't have noticed his assault at the last moment like he, unfortunately, had, and the mask wouldn't have been needed. He'd have just fired at the Saiyan from behind as a complete surprise.
But he was glad that he had it, now.
All it had to do was surprise the Saiyans just enough to buy the time needed for this attack to go through and by doing something so crazy, outrageous, and unexpected, the idea was to get Nappa to freeze still in confusion for just one moment too long.
…
The capsule arrived at the midpoint between them, under the subtle telekinetic direction of Gohan to get the position just perfect.
He had spent hours practicing for this exact moment.
The sensor inside the capsule then determined that the range was clear, and it was safe to materialize.
The safety timer started once more.
...But it only had less than a thousandth of a second remaining on it, so the metal tube appeared practically instantly, in an explosion of smoke.
Capsules materialized unbelievably quickly.
Even in the slow-motion world, it appeared instant to him. They probably operated on a picosecond, or perhaps even a femtosecond scale that was far beyond what was likely possible to observe with his SIT tiers.
One end of the tube was suddenly 5 millimeters away from Nappa's nose, and the other was 5 millimeters away from Gohan's.
Naturally, since the red mark determined the direction that the laser wouldn't go in, and since Gohan had been facing that side, a fully primed and unbelievably powerful laser attack that he had fired off months ago, roared out the other side of the tube towards Nappa.
There was enough energy in that attack, and it had been compressed enough that it would easily take the Saiyan's head off if it hit.
Nappa hadn't powered up yet after all and wasn't expecting it.
A little over half a second now had elapsed since he had put on the mask.
...
Everything had fallen into place.
There was almost zero time for the Saiyan to react.
Nappa had suddenly found a fully charged laser less than a centimeter away from his face, and it had appeared out of nowhere.
And the best part about it was that he couldn't even see it yet. There was smoke everywhere from the materialization process of the capsule. They appeared in explosions of smoke, after all. So neither of them could even see each other anymore, let alone the tube containing the laser.
And even if Nappa could somehow see the tube, it was so close to his nose that he would not be able to tell that it was hollow at all due to the parallax error from his eyes, let alone the fact that it contained one of Gohan's strongest attacks.
It was possible for an object to be too close to your face to be able to focus on it clearly, after all.
All of these things added up to become an incredibly dangerous surprise attack.
A fully charged laser, fired with no charge time at all, aimed at an opponent that not only hadn't been taking him seriously as a threat, but that was caught completely flat-footed.
At best, Nappa could figure out that the tube was a blunt weapon of some sort.
...
His laser within traveled at speeds far faster than a bullet.
All it had to do now was travel 5 millimeters.
Somehow, 5 millimeters of space was enough for the Saiyan to not only react to the attack, but to also manage to rotate his head to the left by about 30 degrees in response.
It was an impressive feat of reflexes that thoroughly impressed Gohan.
...But naturally, it was not enough. The laser had just been way too close.
So while the Saiyan had moved his head just enough to avoid the shot being lethal, he had not dodged it entirely.
The Saiyan's left eye disappeared in a shower of red, along with a portion of his cheek.
Gohan was unable to determine the full extent of the damage due to the lingering smoke still in his vision from the capsule he had materialized, however.
...But he still continued on with the assumption that the Saiyan had survived the attack.
That had been his first trump card. But it was hardly his last or even his best.
He had to walk this fine line of using a trump card good enough to have a decent chance of killing whoever he played it against, but that would still leave him with options to play against whoever he didn't target.
Vegeta was a distance away and was watching all of this unfold in surprise, after all.
Gohan definitely had to save some of his better plans for someone as strong as that.
If he had used his best move at that moment, what would be left for that Saiyan?
If there was one thing that he had learned in all of his fights with Piccolo, it was that variation was key.
Usually, that meant something along the lines of: 'don't repeat your attacks too often, as your opponent will eventually figure them out.'
However, Gohan liked to take this idea to extremes.
Why stop at just varying your martial arts techniques?
Gohan changed everything.
Get them to let their guard down by talking their ears off for twenty minutes, before stepping in with a crazy combination of rapid maneuvers that can't possibly be anticipated by a thinking person.
Then when they survive by some miracle, instead of pulling out another crazy combination of maneuvers on the next person… wait a while first.
Instead, begin actual combat immediately to get them to let down their guard again. Make them think something along the lines of: 'I see. So he used up all of his tricks now, did he? Now it's safe to attack.'
Then he would change things up again.
Nappa was still stunned for the most part. And Gohan stepped in.
He didn't intend to showcase himself at his absolute best yet, but he made sure to be fast enough to take advantage of the surprise his opponent was currently experiencing.
Every last attack of his was now aimed at the Saiyan's damaged eye.
He punched as fast as he could, grappled the Saiyan's arms to get them out of the way, and used his feet to alternate between extreme high and low attacks.
If Nappa's face was guarded, Gohan would start kicking lower down.
If the torso was guarded, he'd start punching higher up.
And he could get away with it too because Nappa had literally no time at all to comprehend the fact that one of his eyes was now missing. The shock hadn't even registered yet, and Nappa was running sheerly on instincts.
It would remain that way for another few seconds.
Gohan abruptly sped up the pace of his attacks, giving him the opening he needed to slap the Saiyan's arm away and dig his thumb into his empty eye socket.
He started charging up an attack with the same hand, intending to blow the Saiyan's brains out the back of his own head.
By taking out that eye in the way he did, he had messed up Nappa's Ki shields.
During combat, Ki users had their entire bodies encased in a barrier of energy at all times, which typically allowed them to survive attacks of unbelievable strength.
But sometimes, they aren't set up properly, as was the case with that Saibamen he had killed earlier.
The Saibamen's head hadn't been protected properly with this shield. Because of the fact that inside that Saibamen's head there had been that pool of acid, it was inefficient to have to constantly lower and raise this shield every time it was about to use whatever acid attack it clearly would have tried to use.
The Ki shield would have stopped it, after all. So it would have had to have been lowered.
The Saibamen had needed to be able to abruptly launch the acid at a moment's notice, and it just took too long, and used too much energy to open and close the Ki shield that would have otherwise been there, so it had elected not to set one up at all.
...Which had had the side effect of leaving it open to Gohan's precision energy attack.
But Saibamen aside, everyone else had theirs up at all times, and Nappa was no different
But sometimes, after dealing serious damage to a Ki user, these shields wouldn't be where they needed to be, or there would be openings in them.
It was a bit like an amputee, someone without their right arm, wearing a sweater.
They'd just have their right sleeve dangling around uselessly.
Since Nappa had gotten used to defending his eyes with this shield, he had learned how to mold his energy to protect it.
...But that assumed that he had his eye, not a gap of air where it used to be.
Just like an amputee would have an empty sleeve, there was an unprotected pocket of emptiness where Nappa's eye used to be that Gohan took advantage of by driving his fingers in there to get past the shield before Nappa could reshape it.
...But these Saiyans were something else. They could easily react based entirely on instinct, and Nappa's limbs sprung into action immediately.
Nappa let out a roar of pain at the attack, and then Gohan's arm was immediately redirected.
He was able to sense Nappa's shields immediately adapt to the missing eye a moment later, eliminating the weakness.
Gohan pressed the attack.
...
The next 8 hits of his were all blocked.
On the ninth, Gohan feigned a wild haymaker. However, just as his right arm pulled back behind his head in preparation for the swing, he subtly opened his fist.
His clone had tossed him another primed capsule, and he discretely caught it in his open hand.
...In that moment, for Gohan, it felt as if time had frozen still.
In that instant of time, he knew with about 90% certainty that if Vegeta intervened, this fight would be over.
The capsule in his fist at that moment he was fairly certain could take down anyone. It was his best one. Because of this, he did not want to waste it on Nappa if he could avoid it but wanted immediate access to it in case Vegeta intervened during this assault.
In fact, now that his best trump card was ready, he actually wanted Vegeta to intervene, as if both Saiyans were close together, he might even be able to catch both of them in it at once.
…
But Vegeta, much to his disappointment, stayed where he was.
Gritting his teeth in irritation, Gohan swung his fist at Nappa as he had intended to all along. The attack was blocked, and Nappa grabbed his arm, preparing for his counterattack.
Nappa brought his own fist back, in an obvious attempt to crush him flat with it.
…
The Saiyan was pretty pissed.
And he was fast.
But Gohan wasn't too worried just yet. He still had options.
Card one had been played, number two was in his right fist, the one that Nappa was holding, so Gohan skipped right past that one and moved to card 3.
Everything had been planned out right down to the color of his own pants.
They were purple. Piccolo's colours.
Initially, he had been hesitant to wear it, mostly for pragmatic reasons. He understood that wearing the same colours as your teacher was a sign of respect towards them, but purple just didn't fit in with his combat style.
He prioritized sneak attacks and stealth and had originally wanted to go with black, or grey. Something that could blend in a little better.
However, he had gone with purple instead due to the fact that the poison he had brought to the fight was also purple. Almost the same shade, in fact.
On the back of his left leg, there was a barely noticeable stain. A sticky substance that hadn't been noticed by anyone yet due to the colour of it blending right in.
Materializing a small blade in his left hand, one of the few things he knew how to make with magic materialization, he swiped it across his pants, coating the blade in the substance, and stabbed it forwards after enhancing the attack even further with as much Ki as he could.
Since Gohan was piloting a clone, he was going to go for a blow exchange. He fully intended to be punched in the face, as long as he stabbed Nappa with a poisoned dagger in the process.
Nappa, picking up on the attack at the last moment, redirected his fist that he was about to hit Gohan with, and tried to intercept that blade instead.
He must have seen the sticky purple stuff on the end of it.
...But Nappa was just a hair too slow. The blade punctured his skin, but it didn't go very deep. Nappa had managed to stop it from entering any vital organs at the last moment.
Taking the opening, Gohan freed his trapped right arm and front kicked Nappa in an attempt to gain some distance.
Since Vegeta hadn't interfered, for a moment, Gohan considered using trump card number 2 on Nappa after all.
His finger twitched, but after using his bubble sensing technique, he had been able to determine that Piccolo was stepping into the battle.
Seeing this, Gohan immediately altered his strategy and packed as much power into his next attack as possible.
Another kick, way stronger than the first, sent Nappa flying into a boulder in the distance.
...It seemed that Piccolo was in a position for trump card number 4 to be played.
They would skip 2 for now, and use it later.
3 had probably failed miserably, but it would depend on if Nappa started showing any symptoms from the poison to be sure.
Card number 4 was rather interesting.
It turned out that he and Piccolo were almost perfect teammates.
They had the exact opposite problems.
Gohan had a lot of Ki... a lot of destructive potential but he didn't have enough magic to properly utilize it all. He simply hadn't had enough time to get the mental mastery over his energy that Piccolo had. As a result, there were occasions where throwing around gigantic balls of energy was actually more energy efficient than compressing it down into a denser attack as that required a lot of magic to do.
But Piccolo had the exact opposite problem. He had a lot of Ki, sure. But his true strength lies in what he could do with it. His magic was not a bottleneck for him. Piccolo would run out of Ki, long before running out of magic.
And this made them nearly perfect teammates.
If they could somehow figure out how to combine those abilities together, they could cover up each other's weaknesses.
If Piccolo had twice as much Ki, he'd probably be ten times stronger due to the fact that he could make far better use of his magic.
And if Gohan had twice as much magic, he'd be ten times stronger due to the fact that he could make far better use of his Ki.
...But one day, during training, Piccolo had casually demonstrated to him this simple technique that allowed Ki users to voluntarily give up their energy to other people.
Gohan could make a ball of Ki, and literally drop his control over it so that Piccolo could use the energy. The process had to be voluntary, of course, so as far as he knew, you couldn't actually steal energy from someone like that, but this concept had the potential to make the two of them incredibly dangerous when working together.
What could Piccolo do, if he had full access to Gohan's orbital energy? When the amount of Ki his mentor had left was no longer a factor?
He had once considered setting up one of those batteries for Piccolo, but it would have taken too much work. He would have had to explain orbital dynamics to him, how to use GPS satellites to calculate orbits, how to read altimeters and a whole bunch of other things that Piccolo had never been exposed to before.
It was an almost laughable thought, trying to teach someone like him that sort of stuff.
Even if it would have been a worthy investment in the end for the Namekian to learn, sometimes, it just wasn't possible to convince someone to do something that was in their own best interest. Especially when there was such a steep learning curve to get over before the benefits would reveal themselves.
It would have taken a lot of time, time that Piccolo could otherwise spend training. He wouldn't have understood the fact that sacrificing all of that time to set up a battery, and to properly maintain it would have paid itself off with interest in the end.
So Gohan hadn't even brought up the idea to him. He hadn't wanted to risk getting into some kind of argument for 'daring to presume to be able to teach someone like Piccolo, anything at all.'
To be fair, he may not have actually done that, but he and Piccolo had had a pretty… frosty relationship at the time and he hadn't wanted to push things. Instead, he had figured that he would set all of this stuff up for himself and try to show his teacher by example, why that sort of knowledge was useful.
They just didn't seem to value the same things.
...But Gohan had a backup plan to make up for that wasted potential anyways.
He had managed to capsulize some of his teacher's attacks, just like he had with his own. That hadn't required any convincing on his part at all.
It was of no consequence after all, whether the energy attacks Piccolo fired off during his training sessions exploded off in the distance, or if they got captured inside a capsule.
Piccolo had seen the advantage in that idea almost immediately. And this pretty much made up for the loss of Piccolo's Ki battery, anyway.
So he ended up deciding that the two of them sharing just one battery was a better solution in the end, even though it was way less efficient.
If Piccolo needed extra Ki, Gohan would pull some out of the battery and donate it with that energy sharing ability.
Now, the unfortunate thing was, this ability to share energy with each other was pretty difficult to master. Gohan couldn't actually manage it himself, yet. If he had been able to figure it out, he would have added Piccolo's own energy to his battery in addition to his own over the past few months to basically double the size of the thing.
But since he didn't know that technique, and since Piccolo had better things to do then buy a bunch of capsules, pick up a spacesuit, and learn how to add energy to a battery of his own, they were stuck with just Gohan's.
But there was still a lot of energy packed into that thing.
In fact, in terms of raw energy present on the battlefield, the people of Earth had more than the Saiyans.
Gohan's Ki battery, based on what he could pick up with his senses had more energy than all other fighters on the battlefield combined.
Both Saiyans, all of his temporary allies, Piccolo, and even the amount he naturally contained within his own body, himself.
It had more than all of that. So raw energy wasn't really an issue at the moment. The only thing that was unknown was whether or not he and his allies could overcome the gap in skill between them and the Saiyans, and the magical energy gap that also existed between them.
The Saiyans had them outclassed there after all, and that put them at a serious advantage. Even despite the people of Earth having access to more raw power.
But that was the point of all of these preparations. To attempt to make it over this skill gap.
That was what made card number 4 so dangerous.
Gohan immediately started rapidly drawing energy from his battery.
In the meantime, the rubble that Nappa had found himself buried in, was immediately assaulted from above by a shower of energy blasts delivered by Piccolo.
His mentor was buying him time. He knew what was happening.
Gohan grinned under his broken mask.
The ball of energy in his hand immediately ballooned in size.
More.
...
More.
...
More.
...
A few moments later, Gohan was carrying more energy in his hand then he contained in his body at any one time.
He put in enough to be totally sure that Nappa would die from the hit.
...Which barely put a dent in the amount he had left in his battery.
And then, he released his control over his energy, giving it up to Piccolo.
The gigantic ball of plasma flew up towards Piccolo as the Namekian took control of it and began manipulating it himself.
It flattened out into a disk and then shrunk down into an almost black aura around his hands.
Then, with one final shout of exertion, Piccolo fired off a black beam of energy, and it slammed into the spot where Nappa had landed, cratering the ground.
Gohan had supplied the Ki, and Piccolo, the magic, meaning both fighters had been able to avoid their own bottlenecks, rendering the technique far more efficient than it otherwise would have been had either tried to make it on their own.
As soon as the surface of the Earth caved under the weight of that attack, there was no stopping it.
There was more energy in that attack than Piccolo had ever dealt with at any point in his life.
...But he had done an admirable job with it.
Nappa was buried into the ground, and he just kept going. Every passing second, the Saiyan went deeper.
This attack was so strong that Gohan had no doubt at all that Nappa would die from it unless Vegeta intervened.
Vegeta seemingly came to this same conclusion, as he immediately stepped in after being stunned speechless at the sudden turn of events, with a massive energy attack of his own, which overpowered Piccolo's and sent both beams sideways into the distance.
...They did not get far.
Gohan had predicted this response after all and had discretely maneuvered his clone into the likely trajectory that the reflected attack would go in, based on where Vegeta had been standing at the time.
Maneuvered into a position so that the attack that was on top of Nappa, the location Vegeta was standing, and the location of his clone could all be drawn as 3 points on a straight line passing through them all.
The two energy attacks collided, and swirled around each other, flying off in the predicted direction, as expected.
Gohan's clone immediately took off after them.
While in the air next to it, the clone opened a capsule big enough to store both beams, and then did so a moment later, using all of their practice of matching relative velocities that they had picked up from dealing with their orbital battery.
By moving just slightly slower than the combined attacks with the storage container in front of him, the energy would slowly creep its way inside it. Until a second or two later, it was completely inside it, and Gohan's clone could safely store it.
The clone landed with his new capsulized attacks, clicked the button on said capsule, and hurled it back to the clone that Gohan was piloting on a carefully timed, 3 second arc.
During those few seconds, everyone observed in astonishment as the gigantic attack suddenly vanished, plunging the entire area into intense, unexpected silence.
When the capsule reached Gohan's hands less than 3 seconds later, at the last instant after using his precise SIT tier timing method to make sure the capsule timer was as close to 3 seconds as possible upon catching it... Gohan froze in place as his mind went into overdrive.
…
His current course of action was suboptimal, he realized.
Sure he could throw Vegeta's own capsulized attack right back at him, but what if it just didn't work?
It would be extremely hard to get Vegeta to fall for this sort of trick again. Gohan had just introduced everyone to the idea that he had the ability to absorb and redirect attacks.
At that exact moment, Vegeta was on the back foot. There may never be a greater opportunity to end the fight than right then.
The attack that his clone had just capsulized was in his left hand… but he still had trump card number 2 in his right.
Maybe instead of just throwing his newly absorbed attack back in their faces, he should assume the worst case scenario.
That Vegeta was a god-level threat. So powerful that he was totally immune to all forms of energy attacks… somehow. That it wasn't even possible to defeat him conventionally.
And both Saiyans were right there. He had a real chance of taking them both down in an instant.
And if trump card 2 failed, then he'd still have his new primed attack in his hand for later. And better yet, Vegeta would know it. He'd become hesitant to rush him head-on, knowing that he could be hit with his own super-powered attack at any time.
…
Gohan made his decision.
Card number 2 it is.
He threw that capsule at the Saiyans instead, switching up his strategy at the last moment.
He had caught one capsule, and thrown the other.
Even if the Saiyans had somehow followed everything that had happened in the last few moments, there was no way they would figure out what was about to happen.
There was just too much going on.
They had seen an identical copy of him come out of nowhere, watched him absorb their attack, redirect it, then they had seen him catch a small object, and throw an identical small object with his other hand, headed right towards them.
And this had all happened in just a few seconds.
And it happened just a moment or two after he had taken Nappa's eye out with a surprise assault, and after he and Piccolo had produced an attack large enough to do way more damage than the Saiyans had probably ever expected.
It was all just too much.
It had to be.
They had spent so much time just having a conversation before all of these developments took place all at once, and completely out of nowhere.
He hoped that this was the case. That they were in total surprise. It would be nice if this fight could end, totally anticlimactically like that.
Vegeta and Nappa were going to be in some serious trouble unless they had something up their own sleeves.
...
Naturally, the capsule did what capsules do.
The timer unpaused when the range was clear. But since the capsule had been primed, the object inside materialized almost instantly.
It covered the distance to the Saiyans in less than half a second.
...They hadn't dodged it, for one reason or another.
Vegeta was engulfed in a massive shadow as the high-speed projectile was suddenly on him in an instant. Right in his face.
The Saiyan's eyes widened.
Then…
All hell broke loose.
A/N: Hope you enjoyed.
- LeviTamm