A top floor of a tall building wing with the decoration of red tiles with quartz tiles that formed a pair of R shapes on both sides of the red formations spun across the sky. Inside it, Taopaipai sat with his arms crossed over his chest. The world's deadliest assassin had considered trying something new this time, instead of splitting the sky with a column or another debranched tree he flung the top of a building like a discus.
While hopping across the sky and landing perfectly in the spinning floor of the building looked profoundly cool, flying across half of the world while spinning around in an uncontrollable spin did not do any wonders for Taopaipai's stomach.
From up above a swift, orange blur slammed into the top of the spinning flying saucer and sent it crashing down into the forest of the Sacred Land of Korin below. Inside the crashing structure, Taopaipai grabbed the sides of the dislodged top floor by the two sides of a control panel and cursed to himself. He would not express his endless frustration with these accursed lands this subtly however before the initial moments of shock could pass, the man erupted in a deafening outrage.
"Not this again!" Taopaipai raged.
A pair of leather boots tapped onto the forest floor with the light tap of a landing eagle, looking around for the next prey to swoop at and execute with marvelous precision and then feast upon the fruits of its labor and talent combined. A simian tail flapped and whipped around in excitement, hanging from a small hole in male pants and a light brown shirt with darker brown ornaments across it.
Busting through the only intact window of the recently crashed improvised aircraft that Taopaipai was traveling with, the cold-hearted assassin landed farther in front of his assailant and only after settling on the outside of the crash site did his eyes bother to examine the young woman that had derailed the procession of his contract.
"It's not that djinn bastard on the carpet… Wait… You!?" Taopaipai looked shocked and leaned back in surprise. He even cowered with his arms placed and bent in front of him, breaking his flawless martial arts stance which he employed in his battles.
"Yeah, you ran away before I could kill you last time. That wasn't very nice." Chayote grinned with a slight hint of restraint behind her emotions. While her whipping about tail betrayed the excitement of the Saiyan, her mood swings were now infinitely less noticeable due to laborious emotional training that the young woman had gone through atop of the Korin Tower.
"Hmph… You've acquired some decorations since last time. War paint and feathers and such. I assume you have trained somewhat before challenging me again?" Taopaipai stroke his mustache in relative amusement. Given what Chayote had surmised and heard of the man's personality, he still thought himself superior to the Saiyan despite their somewhat on par clash the last time. "It would be a pity to throw all of those accomplishments away…" the man surmised.
Chayote removed the spear hanging from her back and placed it in front of her, assuming the spear fighting pose that Bora had shown her before her ascent up the Korin Tower.
"I have not grown stronger or faster in any way. The training I've done was too easy to challenge me, sadly." The young woman admitted before smirking with the left side of her face. "However, I've taken the first steps of a thousand-mile journey."
"What's that? Must have fallen off of a mountain while looking for those feathers and hit your head pretty hard… You poor, mad thing, let me put you out of your delirious misery." Taopaipai took his fighting stance having somewhat accepted the fact that Chayote had survived his previous beating.
The deadly martial artist removed a tiny, pink storage gadget, pressed the button on top and let the gadget fall to the ground at which point it exploded into a boom of smoke and a unique, almost mechanical sound. The entire show of smoke and noise was disrupted by a metallic clang of a single-edged broadsword falling down and rolling about on the floor. Taopaipai picked up the sword and swung it over his head, entering high sword-fighting stance.
Chayote attacked first, attacking with the tip of her spear using a flurry of thrusts that Taopaipai easily avoided. The assassin caught a pair of thrusts, attempting to entrap the spear tip using his strength but he had enough foresight to not contest in terms of raw power with the Saiyan youth and let go of the spear so that he would not fall for any follow-up attacks. With a single, spinning slash, following up one of his gracious evasive moves, Taopaipai cut the spear in the middle.
Having no skill in fighting using two shorter sides of one spear, the teenage Saiyan tossed the broken weapon aside. Taopaipai attacked Chayote repeatedly with his sword in similar, wild swings but Chayote managed to avoid the first few strikes whereas, after becoming sick of dancing around the subject, with a triumphant roar, Chayote punched straight at the edge of the blade, busting the sword in half. While the teen attempted to keep pressing her attack onward, Taopaipai dashed backward and avoided the follow-up uppercut.
With a sudden leap forward, the assassin lunged at Chayote with the same attack that she had endured previously, the one that had almost snapped her neck.
Taopaipai flew forward with a dashing knee strike, only for Chayote to place a block and cushion it. Once Taopaipai transitioned forward into a gut punch, the Saiyan leaped over her attacker whilst her tail wrapped around the assassin's wrist and drove his fist smacking into his face. Taopaipai threw a wild kick to his backside that landed onto Chayote's back, the Saiyan slid back to Taopaipai's original position while the assassin staggered about, clutching at his bleeding nose that he himself busted.
"You m-mock me!?" Taopaipai wheezed through the natural difficulties breathing that having a busted nose provided to a combatant.
"Sorry, couldn't let you kick me around like the last time. While fun, I don't want you to run away again." The Saiyan wiggled her finger.
Taopaipai charged onward, without waiting for his nosebleed to stabilize. That was a dumb move, his breathing shall be all over the place this way. The teen warrior danced around his opponent's attacks, waiting for the pressure-point-striking assassin to wind out and she was not in for a stretched out wait. It looked like the opening presented to Chayote as if wrapped in an actual red ribbon.
With a straight, rising kick, Chayote sent her opponent flying diagonally back up. Unwilling to let her opponent out scot-free after such an amateur mistake, the Saiyan pursued her opponent into the air, dashing above the assassin to unleash a flurry of leg stomps that derailed the assassin's arrowing path skyward and allowed the Saiyan to land onto the man's chest with both of her knees crushing Taopaipai into the ground.
"D-Damn it… You really have soared leagues above in just a handful of days…" Taopaipai grumbled while wiping his bleeding nose and wheezing after the Saiyan's crushing landing had driven the final nail in the coffin of his hopes for lady fortune of looking his way that day.
"That's what I've been trying to tell you. If you stopped for a moment and stopped giving in to your sadistic urges and petty anger, you'd see that I have not grown any stronger at all. Had I grown any stronger, I'd have killed you outright with a single strike." Chayote looked frustrated that her opponent could not identify the fact that she's actually added adequate skill in martial arts on top of her awesome natural strength, speed and toughness.
"If I can't match you in hand to hand… Dodonpa!" Taopaipai exclaimed while throwing his finger forward, fury gleaming from his eyes, that same boiling wrath transitioning into a bursting beam of light that blasted like a rogue ray of light in Chayote's direction. With a careless swipe of her hand, the Saiyan deflected the beam aside, letting it pierce through the trees and then explode in a relatively tame manner for something of its power.
Despite his showing. Taopaipai was a remarkable martial artist. He had managed to unleash such lethality in his Ki within such a contained beam that did not explode all too strong whereas the assassin had the capacity of leveling a far more incredible distance than a few trees and throwing up some smoke from a puny crater that the beam had made. Chayote was right to previously consider the man inspiring, however, he surrendered to his vices and emotions too far, that was what separated Taopaipai from Master Korin. Korin was cool and subdued in all matters… Most matters. No one was perfect.
Taopaipai gave into his sadism and his meaningless reputation. Thusly he threw away a considerable amount of his skill by squandering his uncanny martial arts style. Once Chayote realized how far she's transcended from this level, the current engagement began boring her. She placed a hand to her side in a similar pose that the other Saiyans held it when ready to shoot out an energy wave.
"You call that a Ki Blast? This is a Ki Blast…" Chayote exclaimed while preparing for her finishing touch but Taopaipai fell to his knees all of a sudden. What odd martial arts stance was this!?
"W-Wait! H-Have mercy on me, will you!?" Taopaipai groveled. Chayote straightened her body out and cocked her head to the side like a confused puppy. She was fully aware that she was dropping her iron composure by showing this deeper insight into her emotions but it did not matter all that much to the Saiyan.
"Ha! Die, you fool!" Taopaipai yelled out while pulling out a tiny, handheld container of sorts and lobbing it in Chayote's general direction. The taunting was a dead giveaway already, the Saiyan felt utterly confident that she'd been able to kill the assassin before he had even pulled out his tiny device, however, overcome by curiosity over this Taopaipai's ultimate strategy, Chayote stood tall and did not budge even when the thrown gadget beamed out with intense, white light and detonated with a thunderous explosion.
"You're the fool…" Chayote's voice made Taopaipai open up in paralyzing fear before the smoke from the grenade blast had even cleared out. "Your Earthling weaponry is far inferior to Ki attacks."
Upon revealing how idiotic Taopaipai's final gambit was, in retrospect of him having seen Chayote both survive the Dodonpa by taking it head-on as well as smacking it aside, the Saiyan dashed onward and resumed her left-leaning Ki channeling stance while slamming at Taopaipai with a brutal palm strike right at his solar plexus. The eyes of the overwhelmed assassin shifted about while his face twisted in hilarious manners, the man's tongue stuck out from the pain and agonizing sensations running up and down his nervous system.
"Lima Spear!" Chayote yelled out, no longer feeling overly attached to the sharp stone on a stick that she'd lost earlier after having discovered a new type of "spear", one that she owned in its entirety.
Before the initial shock could even properly walk up and down Taopaipai's nervous system, a violet Ki Blast blasted the cold-hearted assassin from a close distance, carrying him off into the nearest rocky platform and then leveling it entirely with a rising Ki pillar. Chayote waited for her opponent to reveal himself and try to entertain her some more but apart from a burnt chunk of the assassin's long coat, no signs of his existence were in sight.
Chayote turned her sights to the south of the Korin Tower and the Sacred Land of Korin. After looking for a brief moment in the location of where the assassin had come from the Saiyan cupped her hands together and yelled out.
"Kinto!" Chayote called out into the sky. In a shriek sounding like the final moments of someone meeting an agonizing end, a dark purple cloud descended from the sky and stopped in front of the Saiyan. The dark cloud caught the teen while she leaped up into the sky and carried her to the north, where the Korin Tower, as well as Bora and Upa's camp, were. Before she went off her own ways, it sort of felt right that the Saiyan would say her farewells to her most faithful minions.
"So you've killed this Taopaipai man…" Bora left it hanging ominously and mysterious as to if he approved of the act or not. "You've made the Sacred Land of Korin much safer, it seems."
"I still don't get why you have to leave…" Upa looked down and turned his gaze away from where Chayote was filling her stomach in front of a fire. "This is all so sudden. You ride in on a black cloud after having disappeared for almost two whole weeks and declare you're leaving."
"That was Kinto. A flying cloud of sorts. It isn't the real Kintoun as, for whatever reason, I was unable to sit on it but it's the next best thing. Korin said that he'll have it disperse one day just to see me fall flat on my face and have a laugh so… I have that to look forward to." Chayote turned her attention to the crystal clear night's sky.
"Where will you be going? If you're so adamant about leaving, you must have a destination in mind." Bora wondered.
"First, I need to pay a visit to Taopaipai's employers. They must be residing far east from here, given how he's traveled there for his contract and from there after he's taken it. It's been several weeks since I've started preparing Earth for being sold to the highest bidder and I haven't moved an inch closer. I need to stack up a body-count for a couple of years I'll spend training and a base of evil, assassin-hiring guys is just what I need." The Saiyan declared with celebratory cheer in her voice.
"And then?" Bora inquired.
"Then… I will be heading for the World Martial Arts Tournament to the south-east. There is a pupil of Korin's that I must meet to continue my training. The cat told me that I should have no problem convincing Muten Roshi to train me for some reason…" Chayote smiled with a mouthful of meat showing through her grin.
Upa looked to Bora with a sad glance but the father affirmed his son with a nod. It was time to let-go and the native protector was glad that someone like Chayote appeared and taught Upa this lesson. One day his son might need to let go of something much more than just a friend to hang out around. One day he would need to take over the protector's duty from Bora and having learned this lesson and suffered through this pinch of pain will help the boy overcome the massive burden of the future to come.
"Your clothes are all busted, you klutz!" Upa yelled at Chayote, it may have been the last time in quite a while that he would get to do that so the shrimp decided to empty his throat and his chest.
"I guess… I'll grab something from those R-R guys. They're supposed to be warriors, don't they?" Chayote pondered. "I'm sure they'll have something honorable and fitting to borrow."
"Thinking things through… It's like you've descended as a whole different person." Bora smiled.
"You'll visit us though, won't you?" Upa looked at Chayote with wet eyes. It was the trait of a true and strong protector of the Sacred Lands to never show tears so the twerp combatted his emotions the best he could.
"Sure. That black cloud is really damned fast. I'll be hours away from any point in the whole world with that." The Saiyan nodded before letting a chunk of meat to get stuck in her throat, forcing Chayote to smack at her chest to try and swallow the deadly chunk of dinosaur meat as well as enlisting Upa's aid of slamming his tiny fists at the girl's back like it was a drum he's been working.
The Dark Kinto was much faster than even what Chayote described it being like to Upa. Before the boy's final goodbyes even reached Chayote, the Saiyan and her black cloud were long past the point in space where she could hear them. The best that the teen warrior could hope was to turn away just in time to see Upa's hand waving goodbye, crying and laughing at the same time. Whatever happened to the brat wanting to become more like his father, who just smiled with an approving glare and looked ahead at the departing warrior like he looked forward to the inevitable future to come.
With a single mighty burst of speed, Chayote let the Dark Kinto spearhead her through the air and the clouds. It was a good call to ascend past the layer of leafage and thick forests. The young Saiyan had not yet had a chance to deal with the immense speed of the cloud she was riding, she'd only received it as a gift shortly before her descent from the tower and even then she only had the limited space of Korin's Temple to ride it around in.
This was a whole different thing… Chayote let the cloud spin about and gain more and more speed, hurling like an arrow. Forests turned rarer and rarer before transitioning into a mountainous, winter scenery. Spruces and pines, covered in snow, were an impressive replacement for the ancient oaks of the Sacred Land of Korin. Chayote did not get to enjoy them for long
An impressive formation of aircraft lined up in front of the young woman. Ones that appeared better suited for warfare compared to the sizeable and rather pathetic version of aircraft that Taopaipai first crashed into Chayote's life in. They must have been scouting, wondering if Taopaipai was making his return already after a job well done seeing how nobody else would have been brave enough to travel the Sacred Lands of Korin on foot or by plane.
The Red Ribbon Army were in for a rude and unforeseen clash with an alien wrecking ball. One that had little to no grief with them besides vague ideals for destruction and demise for anybody evil that would force the interplanetary visitor to keep on going until not a stone remained unturned in the Red Ribbon Base.