Chapter Two

A serpentine river encircled a small town on the outskirts of King Wonton's territory, and at first, Pan suspected the blunted ki signature was coming from somewhere inside it. The longer she followed the river, however, the closer she got; no. Its source lay somewhere in the surrounding plain. A building by the river, well beyond the sparse housing and farms.

The Panther-Fang Academy.

Pan landed a ways down the path, kicking up a cloud of dust on impact. She straightened her bandanna. This was her first time visiting the school in person, but she recognized it from Grandpa's stories. Pale yellow plaster offset its wooden façade, punctuated by woven bamboo windows. A sign hanging between the roof and transom spelled out the academy name in bold red letters.

Nothing appeared to notice her presence. Good. She'd landed far enough away and masked her own energy. She didn't yet know what she was hiding it from, though, as nothing seemed to be happening here at all. It was only barely afternoon, with the sun almost overhead. There should be students in blue uniforms outside, practicing forms, doing chores, stopping for a quick lunch, but Pan saw and heard nothing but dead air and silence.

Pan dared to give the building a light energy-poke. Something was alive in there, but what? Was it the students? If not, where were they?

She did hear something as she walked up the dusty road to the academy: a low hum. The closer she got to the school, the louder and more droning it became; and that noise, she recognized. It came from the bushes around the porch.

Oh! Bees!

Pan dashed the rest of the way and leaned over one of the bushes. There, crawling the red flowers, a group of bees, their stripy bodies wriggling as they collected pollen. She bit back a giggle. These hives must be a new addition, because Grandpa hadn't mentioned them, and he knew she loved bees.

There'd be time to visit them later, though. Right now, she had to find out where everyone had gone, if they were safe. She walked into the academy with an old nursery song about bees in rosebushes running through her head.

Unfortunately, opening the door did nothing to allay her concern. The sun fell through the muntins onto the floor of a building that looked just as deserted on the inside as it had on the outside. It wasn't enough to brighten the twilight-dim of the old track lighting, which probably hadn't been up to code since there was a code. There were two doors, one in each corner. Where did those lead? Maybe everyone was crammed back there?

Pan was so intent on reaching them, and so creeped out by everything that led up to them, the first punch almost connected. It came from her immediate right, in a recess blocked by the open door, from a signature so faint it blended with the beehives outside. She heard the rush of air over knuckles at just the right moment and stepped back, letting the student who'd thrown it sail past her and into the right wall. She gave him an extra chop to the back for momentum.

This had exactly the effect Pan had suspected it would: four more students peeled from the walls and tried to surround her.

The first one, a sour-faced boy with cropped hair, didn't get a chance to move. She hit him with an uppercut that connected to his stomach and then his chest, with just enough time to pull away from a punch aimed by the second at her back. That left her open for the third, though; and with no room to blast him without risking hurting him (or the academy, for that matter), she had to take the hit full-force. It smarted. She countered, spinning into the blow, and it sent him flying, even with her holding back.

The fourth man dropped into a stance. It was familiar enough to nag, but Pan couldn't immediately place it. He shifted right, then to the left. Where had she seen that before? It wasn't the Panther-Fang's signature Cyclone.

He popped his arm and threw his head back, and Pan groaned. Not the Panther Cyclone indeed.

"All right, you guys," She said, pushing the guy out of the way face-first. "Come out from wherever you're hiding and put your hands up."

There was a rustle of cloth, a hasty whispered conversation from the back of the academy, and a deep voice asked,

"Pan?"

The doors burst open and three men bounded out of them, right to the center of the dojo floor. They were very strange men: one tall and stringy, one short and round, and the third, posed dramatically between them, muscled and generally ogre-shaped. They wore matching red space suits, but even without them, it would've been obvious they weren't local to planet Earth. Their faces were as blue as the academy uniform.

"Donpara, Sonpara, and Bonpara," Pan sighed. At least Chi-Chi… and, Pan admitted, she herself … had been worried for nothing.

"You're not supposed to be here!" said Bonpara, the ogre-y man in the middle. "What are you doing, busting in on us like this?"

"Well," Pan said. "It just so happened I thought I should investigate that huge spike in energy you let off when you decided to put everyone in the academy under your mind control and force them to boogie. Since I've already established that's what you're doing here, I'd really love to know why."

"You don't get it!" said Donpara, the tall and narrow one. "You can't be in here!"

"We'll throw you out if we have to!" added Sonpara, the short one.

"You will?" Pan asked, crossing her arms.

It's no bluff, Sonpara thought. You remember how she and that family of hers used those giant Mouma worms for macramé lacing.

Maybe if you go straight at her and I hit her from the side, she'll be so distracted Bonpara can sneak up behind her, Donpara thought.

I know you can use telepathy, Pan thought right back at them. I can hear every word you aren't saying.

"Well played," Bonpara said. "I guess you've got us beat. Now, have we got a beat for you."

He reached to a button on his suit.

Before he could press it, Pan was across the room and smacking his hand away.

"Save yourself the effort," She said. "The Parapara Boogie only works if the target stands still and listens long enough for the music to take effect, and unlike your thralls here, I know not to. Turning that on isn't going to get you anything but a scrap. Maybe I'm misreading the situation, but it sounds like that's something you're trying to avoid. Why not answer my question instead?"

"If we agree to talk outside, will you leave? I'm serious. It isn't safe here."

Bonpara seemed absolutely convinced of this, and the other two must have agreed, because all three of them looked deadly serious. Deadly serious was not an expression Pan was used to seeing on their faces.

"Are you going to let the students go first?" She asked.

The whole class had formed a line and began to dip right, then left, adding flourishes with looks of confused terror on their faces.

"When you've left the building," Bonpara said.

Pan sighed again, deeper this time. "Fine. Just so long as it happens. But this had better be good."

"Define 'good,'" Sonpara said. "Never mind, this isn't it. The news we bring is bad by any standards."

So Pan followed the Para Brothers outside to hear it. As she closed the door behind her, she heard a series of thuds and sighs of relief as a class of martial-artists-turned-dance-students finally got to sit down for the first time in who knew how long.

ooo

A bee flitted past the door and landed on a flower. Pan stooped to give it a closer look. It was small, fuzzy, and yellow, and the sun seemed to glint in its eyes as it clambered over the edge of the petal.

Donpara screamed.

Pan jolted, wondering if whatever tragedy they so feared had come to pass. But he was just staring at the back of her.

"Pan, you… you've got a… I was just about to say how little you'd changed in the last ten years, so little I was afraid maybe getting trapped in Luud's energy-collection device had stunted your growth…"

"Oh, thanks a lot!" Pan put her hands on her hips. Then she realized what must have startled him. "You're talking about my tail."

"How'd you get a tail?"

"I'm a Saiyan. You know that."

"But you didn't have one before."

"We cut them off at birth these days to, er…" Pan bared her teeth and swiped the air, "…minimize certain risks. But when I started having issues my training wasn't resolving, Auntie Bulma grew mine back to see if it would help. Never mind my tail. Are you going to tell me what this is all about?"

"We need to get further away," Bonpara said.

"We can walk through the new garden, then," Pan said. "I'd like to see the beehives."

"Walk? When you hear what we've got to say, you'll run."

Still, when Pan drifted into the hedges, the brothers fell in around her, almost as if guarding her from ambush.

"As you're all too aware," Donpara said, "We weren't always on the right side of the galactic legal system. You might have even called us mercenaries."

"I thought you gave that up," Pan said.

"That doesn't mean we don't have access to some of our old channels, and the tunes they've been playing lately will chill your blood." Bonpara seized Pan by the shoulders. "Someone's after you, girl. Someone with a lot of money they aren't shy about spreading around the back alleys of Imecka."

"Don Kee money?" Pan asked.

"Planet Trade Organization money. They're offering half their territories' GDP to anyone who can bring you in alive."

Sonpara shuddered. "They never showed a whole lot of interest in our 'backwater' corner of the galaxy, but even we know the Planet Trade Organization means the Cold family, and when the Cold family says they want you alive, it means they don't trust anyone but themselves to kill you painfully enough."

The buzzing around the roses hushed. Pan now stood at the intersection of a cross of bushes and a stack of pastel boxes, absorbing the information that someone in the space mafia had put a bona fide bounty on her head.

"Oh," She said. "I guess that isn't really surprising."

The brothers' jaws dropped so low, Pan thought she might have to pick them up and snap them back into place.

"Didn't you know?" She explained. "My grandpa killed the Colds' youngest son, Frieza. Not on purpose, not really. Frieza challenged him to a duel to the death. Grandpa won and gave Frieza chance after chance to back out of the 'death' part, but he kept getting back up until there wasn't anything left of him to scrape off the ground. This isn't the first time they've come after us over that."

It wasn't a long walk until they'd left the academy and even the outermost hives behind them. The river wasn't far off now.

"Not surprised, she says," Bonpara said finally.

"Disappointed, though," Pan said. "To hear they're hiring mercenaries. No offense to your past selves, but I was hoping I'd get to fight one of the Colds. I missed my last chance, back when the gates of Hell opened. Frieza challenged Grandpa to a posthumous rematch and I almost got to go with him. But then the Red Ribbon Army came back from the grave and attacked the city, so I had to stay and route them."

"The whole army?" Sonpara asked.

"I tell you, Pan comes from one weird family," Donpara said. "I'm glad I'm related to you guys and not them. We thought she was gonna be scared, and instead, she's excited."

"Aw, come on," Pan said. "Can I help it if I wanted to meet the nut who wouldn't take 'you lose' for an answer? Besides, there's still one part of your story that doesn't make any sense. How did all this lead to you attacking the Panther-Fang Academy?"

The three looked back at the academy, which was at this point just as squarish dot. The hives and the garden, too, were tiny and distant.

Why do I still hear buzzing? Pan thought.

"Like we said, we've got our sources, and they were telling us something from up there…" Bonpara jerked his head towards the sky, "…landed here a few days ago, infiltrated the school, and has been staking your place from here. No doubt, it's someone after that bounty, posing as a student to avoid suspicion."

"We don't know which student, though," Donpara cut in. "And don't ask why we didn't just look for recent enrollments, because that's the first thing we tried. Computer says there hasn't been anyone new on Sky Dragon's books for a good three months. Whoever it is, they knew well enough to falsify the records, or stay off them in the first place."

"That left us only one course of action," Sonpara said.

All three simultaneously said,

"We had to thrash the whole lot of them!"

"The way we see it, we still owe you big for what happened back on Luud."

"Guys, that wasn't…" Pan said.

Bonpara held up one hand. "That's why we weren't gonna bother you with this. We were just gonna come here, do what we had to, and leave without you ever having to know about it. That was the plan."

"Y-you," Pan said, "You weren't going to dance those students until they…"

"No, nothing like that! We were just going to dance them onto the ship and dump them off on, say, Nutts, or Polaris, or that one moon of Jupiter… you know, somewhere they wouldn't be able to leave. That's all."

"That's all," Pan said. "I'm touched you were so worried about me, but you can't kidnap a dojo full of people because one of them might be a mercenary. Some of them are just kids. How do you think their moms would feel? Besides, your sources said it was someone at the academy, but did they specifically say it was a student? It could be the delivery man or the janitor. The universe is such a funny place, I wouldn't rule out the janitor's mop."

All three brothers looked at the ground.

"We… didn't think of that."

"So you'll back off now, right?" Pan asked.

There was another huddle and more whispering.

"We'll back off," Bonpara agreed.

"Good," Pan said. "Since that's settled, if you're still worried about me, you can escort me back to Mt. Paozu. The thirty-fourth World Martial Arts Tournament is next month. Are you going to be in the neighborhood that long? You can watch it, or if you want, you can register and fight yourself. There are prizes if you place."

"Oh, we couldn't possibly," Donpara said. "Okay, you talked us right into it."

"It's this way. Just follow… huh?"

Pan held her hand in front of her face. There was a blotch on the back of it, just above her wrist. She had only a second to recognize it before the pain shot through every finger, fierce as if something pushed jagged chunks of ice through her veins. She screamed and shook her hand.

The blotch flew away and landed on a stick protruding from the riverbed.

"What's wrong?" Bonpara asked.

"A bee stung me." Pan shook her hand, but that only made the throbbing worse. "What's it doing this far from the hives?"

She took a closer look at the bee on the stick. It curled up on its back, feet wrapping around itself. It must have broken its stinger off in her hand; that would explain why it still hurt so much. It didn't explain why this bee was twice as large as the others she'd been watching, or why instead of a yellow and black jacket, its fur was a bruised and dirty shade of purple…

"I don't feel so good," Pan said.

She stumbled one step, then another, and on the third she knew she was going down.

Bonpara tried to catch her.

The problem was, by the time he got to her, there was no one to catch.

ooo

Pan slammed into cold stone. Whether the layer of frost atop it or the jagged edges, she reflexively pushed away from it, onto her knees.

Not only was her stung hand still red and blistering, a thin ribbon of smoke rose from the welt above her wrist. She'd been right about the stinger. Its needle-tip protruded from her skin.

Still moving faster than she was thinking, Pan squeezed the welt between her thumb and forefinger. The pain flared so bad she thought she'd black out, but she fought back the starry cloud of unconsciousness. The stinger shot from her hand, taking the smoke and the bulk of the agony with it. It hit the floor with a clink like glass. It looked like glass, too. Not just any glass. A shard of mirror glass.

Pan fell against the nearest wall, polished marble, and cradled her hand in relief.

Slowly she became aware of a presence. It was distant, but definitely living and very, very powerful. Even if it hadn't been, she'd have known it wasn't the Para Brothers or the Panther-Fang students, as it didn't feel quite… perhaps 'human' wasn't the best word, as Pan wasn't quite human. Familiar. That was it. This life-force felt like nothing she'd ever encountered. Touching it felt like reaching blindfolded into what you'd thought was a basket of grapes and coming up with a handful of slugs instead.

Definitely not Bonpara, and as long as it was there, she didn't dare call out to him. There wasn't much point anyway. He wasn't going to answer. She was nowhere near King Wonton's territory.

Where was she, then?

Deciding there was only one way to find out, she pushed her ki down as far as it would go and stood.

She'd been crammed into a rocky alcove in a fusty cave of some kind. There was light enough to see the round, untouched wall she faced; it came from a lantern somewhere behind her. The polished thing she fell against was the back of a small obelisk. She thought she saw a path beyond it, so she circled around to its front.

In spite of her vow to be quiet, she couldn't hold back a gasp.

The front of the obelisk bore a carved picture, and it was not a nice one. Crowds and battlements of distorted proportion surrounded a figure lashed to a pole, wreathed in flame. Though he'd been drawn crudely, and with horns and a tail Pan thought might be symbolic, there was no ambiguity about his age. That was a child burning at the stake.

Pan groped her pocket for her phone. Maybe she could get a call through…

Nothing. It switched on, but she couldn't call out. She put the phone back and turned away. She might not know the iconography, but Pan recognized a tombstone when she saw one, and she wasn't hanging around a graveyard with its tepid graveyard silence.

Turning the corner, she found leaving would be more of a challenge than she'd planned. She stood in one of many branching hallways, crosshatched with tombstones and cobwebs, lit with rows of lanterns that emitted sparse light and absolutely no heat. The effect was as colorless and two-dimensional as an old photograph.

Pan remembered her father, Gohan, explaining that catacombs could run as deep as wells and as broad as cities. A wrong turn here could mean death. She wiped tears away with her forearm. She hated herself for crying and tried to stop, and that only made her cry harder.

Beyond all this death, she felt the hum of that peculiar life-force. Suddenly, it wasn't so unwelcoming after all.

She let it lead her through the twists of the grave-maze, and was not disappointed. At last, she saw a square of color: the vivid, even, but unmistakable blue of sky.

Unfortunately, it came with howling and a blast of frigid air that tossed her hair even from the back of the hall. She looked down at her gray sweats, cut off just above the knee, and her grandpa's gi top, cut off at the sleeves, and wondered how long she was going to hold up.

She'd found outside, all right, and the weather was terrible.