"Now, ladies and gentlemen, all that remains is the fight to end all fights! The bout to determine the one that is truly the Strongest Under the Heavens!" the announcer raised his hands up only to follow the rising wave of hype with a sprinkle of disappointment. "However, to keep things fair, we will be having a brief 10-minute intermission for our less fortunate finalist to get a breather! If you ever found any of the limited-time World Martial Arts Tournament accessories suit your fancy, now's the time to nab them!"
"Man, Goku's in a real pickle." Krillin laughed out, rubbing the back of his bald head. "He'll have to fight Chayote in the finals right after fighting Ranfan."
"It is unfortunate." Yamcha nodded with an awkward smirk. One that he likely faked.
"What's wrong, you don't believe that Son Goku can win? Saiyan blood runs through him, out of all the people here he's the only one to have ever stood a chance." Chayote teased the martial artist.
"No, it's just… How did Goku get this good? We've all been training for the same amount of time and I trained my hardest. In the end, it doesn't seem like I will ever have a chance against him." Yamcha's expression lightened up. It looked like a boulder had just plummeted off his chest just through the sheer act of voicing his thoughts.
"Of course not, Saiyans are a warrior race." Chayote looked back at Goku. With drools tracing his steps the boy ran off to stuff his stomach to the fullest.
"How can you even eat right now? Right before the most important fight in your life?" Krillin sighed.
Goku froze. The boy turned back and looked at Chayote with a curious glare. "Aren't you going to eat?" he wondered.
"No. You must absolutely replenish your strength but if I eat now and to the same – there won't even be a fight." Chayote taunted her little Saiyan rival.
"That's not fair. I want to fight you at your strongest!" Goku protested. What a brat… He made no compromises, left no space for them even. He demanded what he wanted and expected things to go his way, just like a true Saiyan would have. How could Chayote have ever doubted this buffoon's heritage? Then again, it took exposure to another Saiyan to bring out his most interesting traits.
"Well, if you want it…" Chayote taunted her opponent in the finals, the tails of both Saiyans spun around in the air, coming dangerously close to lashing at each other in few spots but eventually swinging away from one another.
"The moment you have all been waiting for has arrived! The final match of the World Martial Arts Tournament! This here's a showdown between two Saiyans! Whatever that means! This curious tribe of people with tail have invaded our tournament and are now ready to clash! Just who will win this showdown!?" the announcer did his thing and hyped the crowd up. He filled his speech with meaningless banter just to invite those that have wandered off too far in the Papaya Island could hear the rumble of his voice and find their way back to the main attraction.
"Good luck, Goku, win it for sure!" Krillin cheered for his friend.
"Chayote's a tough cookie but I'll do my best!" Goku nodded with childish vigor.
"Are you listening, old man?" Chayote closed her eyes and thought in a manner that she thought would be the best suited for a telepath to listen in to. There was nothing. If Korin truly did teach Muten Roshi this technique, how come the old cat didn't teach it to Chayote too. It seemed like it was quite important and useful.
The Saiyan teen walked out into the arena and approached the edge, looking right at the wing of the audience where she had seen Bulma and her friends watch the matches earlier so that Muten Roshi could catch her need to talk. Deep down in her thoughts, Chayote repeated the question.
"I hear you…" she finally got a mental reply.
"I'm not going to hold back on your student. I hope you understand that. It would serve my mission best if he avoided death by a thin margin." Chayote warned the old man. "Don't come crying to me afterward and don't tell me that I can't train with you. You promised and we've set this clear, right?"
"Don't worry, I don't need you to hold back. Show Goku just how much space he still has to grow, show him the full extent of the interesting world, no, the universe, out there." Muten Roshi nodded while replying with his telepathy.
"Oh! Contestant Chayote appears to be staring at an old man in the crowd! What could this mean!?" the announcer tried to spin this to give more mystery to the battle about to unfold, given the showman that he was.
"That old timer? That's Muten Roshi…" Goku pointed at his master while looking at the announcer with a look that implied that Goku was talking to an utter moron. The boy must have seen this same look applied on him enough times for it to rub off on him.
"Oh! Ladies and gentlemen! I have just been informed that the man standing right there is none other than the great Muten Roshi, the reclusive and invincible martial arts master!" the announcer extended his hand at Muten Roshi who appeared to revel in the attention with a slight blush and a two-toothed grin.
"Peace, peace!" he cheered while extending both his middle and index fingers and making the peace gesture.
"Peace, peace!" Goku mirrored the gesture of his master with a simian grin on his face. The effort it took for the Saiyan boy to restrain his fit of laughter made him shake.
"Contestant Goku, you seem in good spirits! Does the might of Contestant Chayote not frighten you?" the announcer wondered with the entire audience cheering for the two to start fighting already.
"I'm just really excited to fight someone so strong!" Goku shook his fists in front of him with both his legs bent. Seeing the kid so fired up almost made Chayote show her excitement but the teen Saiyan managed to mask it. If she did get too excited, she may have ended up killing this boy and ruined everything once again.
"I see, finalists, take your places and your stances! Let the finals of the World Martial Arts Tournament begin!" the announcer declared. A prolonged silence of the grave variety reigned after his first prompt as a build up before the deafening gong ring and the declaration that the finals have begun.
Goku stood in his martial arts stance, he did not charge forward since the first bell, he was on the defensive, just what on Earth was he thinking? Chayote did not begin the match either. She did not have a full read on the extent of Goku's abilities meaning she had to take a few blows to get a feel on how hard she should have been trying to make it interesting, challenging and not to kill her opponent.
"With the thunderous gong, the final match is underway! You can feel the suspense rising in the air, ladies, and gents, who will win it all and who will leave home with nothing having walked most of the distance!? By everything, I, of course, mean the 500 000 Zeni prize money! I can hardly contain my excitement!" the announcer spun circles around the two frozen contestants like a vulture.
"Aren't you going to attack? It's better for weaklings to apply as much offensive pressure as possible. You can't hope to defend against my full power." Chayote taunted Goku.
"If I attack you, you'll just see how strong I am and weaken yourself to my level." Goku declared with fury brimming in his eyes as if what he was talking about was a cardinal sin. "I want to fight you at your full power!"
"Don't worry, I intend to show you my full power." Chayote stretched her shoulder out before resuming her fighting pose. "I intend to break you and then have you recover so I can break you again. I need to build up your strength before you can help me do the same."
Chayote's image blurred. Similarly to how an afterimage blurred out upon being hit but this time Chayote was not just using an afterimage. She attacking Goku head-on. An elbow strike dug into Goku's face, sending the kid Saiyan flying back like a rocket. Did she hit him too hard? She used maybe a quarter of her power by default, that was about how much she used to humiliate Taopaipai, could a Saiyan truly be weaker than an Earthling?
Had Goku flown a bit lower, he'd have hit the walls guarding the audience against the heat of the battle, the barrier that most of those thrown out of bounds would have hit. Worried that she might have ended the battle too early, Chayote dashed in. With a knee strike from below, she tried sending the brat aimed to hit the area outside of the ring up into the sky, where she could control the flow of battle more precisely.
Chayote's knee only passed through the air, dispersing the illusionary afterimage of her opponent, once again, executed even better than she did. Out of sheer instinct, Chayote grabbed her tail without clutching on it too hard so that she did not rob her own strength. Goku appeared on the other side of the ring, clutching at his jaw that was beaming red.
"Eeeeh! I hoped to catch you unprepared with that but… Damn, do you hit hard!" Goku shrieked out. His entire body was flailing like a pendulum from the daze that a single blow from Chayote sent his body to.
"You asked me to not mess around. You knew what you were getting into." Chayote stonewalled Goku's mid-battle compliment. Something was off, this battle did not flow right. She lowered her guard to worry about the kid not getting ringed out too fast and paid for it by him nearly blindsiding her. What if he did go for her tail?
"I know, right? I'm getting shivers!" Goku could barely contend the childish instinct to shriek in excitement while he picked himself off the ground and took a fighting stance with his jaw still swollen red.
"Now it's my turn to attack!" Goku declared. With a straightforward leap, he dashed right at his opponent, having apparently learned nothing from their previous exchange about the gap between their strength. Then again, he was doing exactly what Chayote thought he should have – rushing with whatever level of force he had to try and apply some relentless pressure.
With a careless smack, Chayote set off another afterimage fake-out. A powerful battle cry alerted the Saiyan teen to her pint-sized opponent jumping up in the air with an attempted cross-chop at her neck. If he thought that a mere repeated afterimage would provide him enough of an opening…
Chayote threw a wicked cross, she put enough force behind this one. If Son Goku was puny enough to get eliminated by such a puny strike, it was his fault entirely. She was done worrying about him. The reason why she did so, to begin with, was because she wanted a fun and challenging fight and only a Saiyan could have provided that.
Goku's image blurred out with the gust of air picking up from Chayote's strike dispelling the fake afterimage. The Saiyan realized that Goku pulled a double afterimage, only to realize that she was surrounded with afterimages. This was his answer to facing a more powerful and much faster opponent – try and match skills with her, not play a game of power or speed.
"Oh! Contestant Goku pulls an improved version of the Afterimage Technique, ironically enough, a maneuver he had taken from Chayote's handbook!" the announcer explained to the audience why there seemed to be an entire army of Gokus surrounding the other bemused Saiyan.
The afterimages and the real deal alike all attacked Chayote from different angles and directions. Even if Chayote was stronger and faster, she was not strong and fast enough to defend against all of them, even if only one of them was real. Goku's blows did not hurt too bad, at this pace, he would likely run out of breath before he left notable damage on her but Chayote couldn't stand the humiliation. She couldn't fall to a weaker opponent like this!
Lashing out in aggression was the wrong move. She only opened herself up, dispelled afterimages that soon reformed while the real Goku dashed in an out, switching between the fakes. Chayote could follow all of them with her eyes but without an ability to sense Goku's Ki or some event of blind luck she'd stand little chance of pinning the little bugger down.
"Rock!" Goku smacked at Chayote with an open palm. The Saiyan blocked it but failed to catch hold of the real Goku while he showed himself up to attack. The tiny Saiyan must have realized what Chayote was planning as he took longer than usual to show himself again, thinking and rethinking each of his moves twice.
"Paper!" Goku lunged for Chayote's eyes with two extended fingers. While all the afterimages attacked her as well, the Saiyan placed her palm positioned sideways in between her eyes and prevented Goku's fingers from reaching the most important target – her eyes. With the real Goku out and exposed, Chayote swiped a quick downward jab, clocking the little bastard so hard that his body bounced off the ground and positioned itself in mid-air in a prime opportunity for a stiff kick.
An opportunity that Chayote explored in full by sending Goku flying toward the edge. The kid Saiyan winced and cried out in pain but he clutched his thick but short fingers at the dirt and tiles of the arena before using his entire body to stop his flight and transition it into a nasty slide. With just half of his body remaining in the ring and the other half dangling close to the grass outside of it, it almost seemed like Goku was luring Chayote to follow up her attack.
"Oh! It appears Contestant Chayote has seen through Contestant Goku's deception!" the announcer declared.
"Deception?" the Saiyan teen wondered as she turned to the staff member of the World Martial Arts Tournament. "What do you mean, what deception!?"
"Why Contestant Goku's Rock-Paper-Scissors technique, of course!" the announcer nodded. "The one he used against Kaiju Giran!"
She knew she should have watched that fight! And yet, Chayote breathed easier. Even if she had wasted too much time to ask for a count now, she thought that the announcer had seen something in Goku's current, compromised position to imply he was blindsiding her. Something that, if true, would have frightened Chayote as it would have implied measly Earthlings were capable of seeing what she was not.
"That was a technique he used?" Chayote raised an eyebrow. It seemed irrelevant and weak to her in retrospect.
"Don't you know the game of Rock-Paper-Scissors!?" Krillin grabbed his head in disbelief.
"Of course she doesn't, she's a girl…" Yamcha postured at his smaller friend.
"Of course I don't, I'm an alien…" Chayote squinted at the two and then the announcer as he scratched his head and laughed.
"Yes, I assume switching rock, paper and scissors between one another would be meaningless against an actual alien…" the announcer nodded while emitting a faint chuckle.
Grunting and panting, Goku dragged his dangling body back into the arena and rose from the floor, one of his eyes beginning to swell enough to shut it down, his body covered with bruises from the dragging across the arena tiles and the smacking about its surface that he's been doing and half of his turtle gi was flat out torn off from the rough contact with the floor.
"Damn… There's no other way. You're a really strong girl, you'll survive this… KA!" Goku grumbled to himself while cupping both of his hands in front of himself.
It did not take supernatural Ki sensory abilities to sense the intense Ki pressure emanating from the child from the moment he began channeling his Ki right now. It would have seemed apparent that the lacking charge-up stance and the long time it took to launch his technique was a massive weakness but… With the frightening pressure emanating from Goku right now, nobody in their right mind would have come after him in mid-charge or else they risked being hit point-blank.
"ME-HA-ME!" Goku roared out as he placed his cupped hands by his side. A concentrated mass of Ki appeared in between his hands and began glowing with enough intensity to drown out the entire nearest area in bright whites and blues of solid, concentrated light.
"What's this feeling…" Chayote did not want to freeze in place but she could not help it, almost like something about this technique was kicking her senses into overdrive, warning her at an instinctual level to respect its awesome power.
"HA!" Goku yelled out while he threw his hands back out in front and unleashed his built up Ki in the shape of a destructive Ki wave that rushed right at the confused Saiyan teen.
The dominating pressure of the technique made Chayote's feet slide about the arena, the push of the force contained within the destructive Ki wave felt absolutely bonkers and at the first moments following the contact with the wave Chayote felt glad that she used her full power to block this technique or else she'd have been seriously injured or thrown out of the arena.
The wave kept pushing, that irritating, loud sound demanding every ounce of her attention and the triumphant, overwhelming light that drowned out everything Chayote could see. A mighty explosion drowned out the chaos of the final match with the Kamehameha wave detonating, unable to overcome the opposing force throughout its lifespan and therefore making all of the energy contained within just burst in the most violent way possible.
The entire audience, Krillin, Yamcha, and even Goku all cowered in front of the awesome destructive potential of Goku's full-powered blast. One that nearly decimated the entire arena and covered it in all-drowning clouds of dust and debris while grave silence reigned in shortly after the storm of violent devastation that came before.