"Send me flying, you say?" King Piccolo showed his fangs with a mocking grin. "I'm glad that I had Drum heal me before coming here. If I am to pummel another Saiyan into a pulp, I can use that extra vitality!"
"Another Saiyan?" Krillin wondered before his attention turned to the rice-cooker that King Piccolo was cradling under his arm. "That wouldn't by any chance be…"
"That's right, that Saiyan girl…" King Piccolo crossed his arms and raised his head, brimming with vanity in front of the two kids, he waited for them to lose their cool but when they didn't he just thundered out in laughter, never being one who waited for some company to enjoy himself. "I've used the same sealing technique that once imprisoned me, such poetic justice. If only I could have used it on Mutaito himself…"
"Chayote?" Goku clenched his fists. "That's it, I'm definitely kicking your ass now!"
"Calm down, Goku, if Piccolo escaped from his captivity, so can Chayote. I bet we just need to bust that rice-cooker." Krillin pointed at the kitchen appliance resting in Piccolo's hands. "Patience got you this far already, it can help you free Chayote too!"
"You seem far too calm for kids in the presence of the Great Demon King Piccolo. Then again, you spent so much time hiding here and doing nothing that perhaps you aren't aware of the glorious chaos I have wrought upon the world… Let me help you by bringing you a little bit of that sweet hell in this endless void as well." King Piccolo spread his hands and then leaned into a fighting position. Having bested Chayote and then being rejuvenated did wonders for already looming confidence of the Demon King.
"I can kill too, let me fight!" Drum clapped his palms at his chest erratically, feeling impatient. "Using my powers to heal makes me sick, I wanna fry someone too!"
"Very well then, you can fight it out with that bald kid to your heart's delight. A Saiyan might not be an opponent you are quite prepared for…" Demon King Piccolo nodded.
"Krillin…" Goku said and then entered a fighting stance.
"Right!" Krillin nodded. "I'll take the creepy fatso so you can settle things with Piccolo."
"Thanks…" Goku nodded with a gentle mumble. He wasn't used to fighting alongside Krillin. More times than not he took enemies on all by himself and when Krillin came into the picture they were fighting in the World Martial Arts Tournament. It was a novel feeling but Goku seemed to enjoy it very much, judging by his delighted expression.
Drum's image became blurry, with a murky shift, the demon spawn moved further into the Room of Spirit and Time before stopping to pant. The chubby demon tilted his head to look behind him and see where his opponent was and if he wasn't too confused by where Drum had gone, he did use his top speed and the speed of demons was not for the eyes of mere humans to keep up with.
"Where are you looking?" Krillin's voice reached Drum's oversized, pointy ears, forcing the demonic titan to turn around and drop his jaw. The little baldy was standing right in front of him, as if he had gotten here before even Drum did and as if he was in no way at all inconvenienced by the tremendous gravity inhibiting Drum's hi-speed movement.
"Heh, I see… You guessed my intention to move here and moved ahead of me. You even had time to catch your breath so you can just stand here and act cool…" Drum fixed his wristbands with a smirk, buying his own pretty story with the story's prettiness defining only how unlikely it was to have happened.
"No. I've just trained in this place for months now." Krillin flexed his arms with an excited expression. "It was really difficult at first, my body wasn't ready for this place so I had to pretty much cold turkey it… I wouldn't move around too much if I was you, you need to get used to the gravity of this place or else you're gonna get winded all the time or sprain something."
"Don't lecture me, shorty!" Drum yelled out and rushed at Krillin with a fist raised over his head. Much to his chagrin, the bald shorty was no longer where Drum's eyes had left him when his massive fist pounded the ground under his feet. A strong tap to the back of his head sent Drum tumbling over his front so hard that he completed a full roll before getting back on one knee with his feet on the bottom side.
"Of course your weight doesn't help things…" Krillin shrugged after landing nonchalantly behind Drum and then turning around to face his compromised opponent. "I've often had problems moving before I did my stretches after a good eating session…"
"You think you're some kind of a speedster, huh?" Drum smiled with a toothless smirk before his image turned blurry again and the demon began moving at blinding speeds all over the white void around the two. "For your information, I was only born some hours ago and I haven't yet had the time to eat pretty much anything!"
"Not bad…" Krillin observed before Drum's arms appeared behind him and clutched him in the demon's embrace from behind. The face of the teen martial artist stretched out like rubber from the strain he felt inside of Drum's hold as the demonic chubby applied his full force on Krillin. The baldy threw his round head back, smashing it into Drum's ribs and leaving the demon gasping for air before Krillin swept at Drum's feet to leave the fatso flat on the ground while Krillin vaulted back to safety and gave his downed opponent a peace gesture.
"You've got amazing power and you're faster than I'd have thought someone of your build to be…" Krillin admitted. "There's no way I could have held a candle to your power the way I was back then but, as I've told you before, you need to conserve your breath in here. If you didn't spend so much air in your lungs just jumping around and showing off, you'd have withstood that headbutt without wheezing for mercy now."
Krillin's words struck a sensitive chord with Drum who was indeed wheezing for more air at the moment when the martial artist spoke to him. With his disadvantageous position being brought to light, Drum jumped up on his feet though by forcing his straight stance like that, he still stood on wobbly legs and could barely breathe.
"I might not have eaten anything yet, but I think I'll start by chewing the flesh off your bones!" Drum pointed his hand at Krillin. Almost instantly the massive end of his limb lit up with electricity that discharged in the shape of a messy jolt headed Krillin's way. The rather hectic appearance of the Ki attack wasn't a sign of slipping control over Drum's power but a sign of his strength as it made the attack more difficult to avoid. "Beam Ray!" Drum croaked out. In his mind, the frog-like spawn could almost smell Krillin's roasted flesh.
Avoiding the dangerous yet elegant dance of electricity seemed like no matter at all to Krillin, even in the crippling gravity of the Room of Spirit and Time and in the searing heat that manifested itself around the area where the pair were fighting. The heat was just another factor that made Drum's ignorance for proper breathing even harder as at higher temperatures it was much harder to breathe properly as the body employed breathing for ventilation purposes too, making breathing more irregular.
"I see you've already learned to change your Ki into elements. That's amazing, especially if you truly were just born hours ago!" Krillin exclaimed in excitement over Drum's technique that he avoided with minimal trouble.
"Elements? I didn't change nothing, I just wanted to fry you real bad like the shrimp that you are!" Drum clenched his fists and whined out while twitching in anger.
"I see… It took us a while to learn that. We never thought that Ki could have been used that way but… It seems that there's more to Ki than we've thought. It can be hot and cold, it can shake the ground underneath your feet or make the oceans swirl. Even lightning can be tamed with Ki. I think that might be something Mr. Popo wanted us to learn though, that's why he placed us in such a horrible place." Krillin looked around as his Ki flared up in a controlled aura stream covering the entire body of the young man. Drum took a step back and entered his fighting stance as if preparing for Krillin's incoming attack but the baldy just laughed out and rubbed the back of his head.
"Oh, don't worry, I'm not attacking just yet. I just calmed my mind down so the flow of my Ki could cool me down a bit. If you've actually learned to manipulate Ki well, you could also cool yourself down like that. That's how we've learned to cope with this place – our Ki warmed us up when the place froze up, it cooled us down when things got way too hot." Krillin shrugged. Drum clicked his tongue in frustration.
"Sorry, the air seems to have stabilized now, there's no need for my mind to stay calm, I can let loose a little bit…" Krillin declared and got serious, entering his own fighting stance before taking a blinding dash at his opponent.
Drum put his hands up to protect himself but Krillin went right past them, shifting into the visible spectrum only upon appearing right in front of Drum's face and kicking him in the chin. The highly malleable flesh of the demon spawn made Drum's face deform from Krillin's kick and resemble raw dough that had just suffered the chef's wrath. The flurry of Krillin's fists continued to morph Drum's face as they ran rampant across both cheeks of the demonic fatso who continued to stand in place with both his palms raised up. Krillin roared out as he flipped over his front to finish his combination of blows with a heel drop to the spiky part of Drum's head.
Where one would have considered such a target of attack reckless, Krillin's leg appeared to suffer little to no damage from the ruthless strike whereas Drum's bony and edged protrusion suffered a great deal, becoming cracked and fractured with bits of the spikes snapping off and scattering all over the place. Krillin took a careful dash back right after landing beside Drum and continued to observe his downed opponent.
"Stop trying to trick me, you won't deceive me, I can sense your Ki!" Krillin yelled out at Drum who just twitched after a moment of stonewalling Krillin's declaration and then began picking his beaten body off the floor. Just as Drum picked himself up and got himself on his feet, the demonic spawn began molding his mangled face with his own two hands until it resembled his old appearance with the bonus of bloody streaks extending over his face.
"That was an impressive attack for a human…" Drum laughed out and tried wiping the leakage of his purple body fluid off of his face.
"I must admit, you demons picked up in strength since the last one I fought. Though without innocent people to threaten me with, you still don't seem that scary…" Krillin smirked. "That's too bad, I was all kinds of excited to get to cut loose and fight with the full power I've accumulated in here."
"You're saying you're not fighting seriously?" Drum raised the fleshy stump that would have been where his eyebrows grew if he had any. "Interesting, but I think you're bluffing. It must be taking everything you've got to lay it on me like that, little human."
"I didn't say I wasn't fighting seriously, I'm just not fighting with my full power." Krillin declared and then straightened his body. "If you want to try and last a second against me while I'm at my full, be my guest…"
A faint, white glow forced around Krillin's body, like an energy-based outline of the young man's body before the emanating power grew in size and intensity, beginning to reach out and burst in wild flow outside of Krillin's body. After just a few moments of letting all of his power out, Krillin tightened all the muscles in his body and had to yell out to release all of the pent up tension from his body. Power such as his felt good but it also hurt a little to fight at full power which was why it was best done after sufficient warm-up.
"Here I go…" Krillin declared before disappearing before Drum's eyes. Being just educated about the difference between their speed, his speed being something Drum was quite proud of, the demon couldn't help it but gawk before Krillin's sliding kick threw him rolling in mid-air. It then took just one solid elbow strike to stop Drum from spinning but just as Krillin leaped up with a rising kick, Drum seemed to evaporate from thin air.
"Tsk… Damn brat, gotten pretty fast…" Drum grumbled to himself while feeling up his hurting shins.
"You're pretty amazing, your rapid movement almost makes it seem like you're warping around…" Krillin declared before turning around to face Drum. Had Drum's shins not been damaged by Krillin's slide, the chubby demon would have likely exploited seeing Krillin's back like that.
"But I'm still faster than you…" Krillin's voice forced Drum freeze for it came from right behind him. Before Drum could even turn around, a sharp throb in his back made his senses black out while Drum's body soared into the air. Spinning like a whirligig, Krillin delivered a crashing kick into Drum's fat abdomen in mid-air. The airborne martial artist delivered a mad flurry of strikes, overwhelming his airborne and utterly pummeled opponent before sending him flying even higher with a vertical kick.
Krillin's aura burst forth from his entire body, sending his flying without the need of solid ground to kick off from, while the baldy continued to throw mad, seemingly random strikes from both his feet and his arms, mixing and changing each one as long as his body could contort that way. It didn't seem like any fighting style that Krillin had studied but it was just a way to flex his awesome full power on his enemy. Drum's eyes burst open, Krillin could almost feel him considering blinking out but it felt so slow that it may as well have been in slow-motion. The martial artist threw both his hands out.
A destructive blast of Ki of a blazing, orange glow blasted Drum away with enough force to crash his battered and broken body farther away in a pool of purple. Krillin landed on his two feet and breathed out heavily, he didn't have much of his full-power left to spare before he would begin growing weary and actually losing strength to keep it up. It would have been for the best if he concluded it with a single, strong strike.
"How was that? Hot, wasn't it?" Krillin mumbled, not caring if his opponent could even hear him anymore. "You said that you'd be the one roasting me so it only felt fitting that I'd heat my Ki up a bit… I've never tried making my Kamehameha hot before so I wonder what would happen…"
The pint-sized warrior cupped his hands in front of him and then took a hefty breath in. "Ka…! Me…! Ha…! Me…!" Krillin chanted as he turned his cupped in front of him hands around and drove them to his side at the very last bit. He could feel Ki surging through his body, the young man focused all of it into his hands like before but he made sure to heat hi Ki up before focusing it.
"Hot-Blooded Kamehameha!" Krillin yelled and threw his hands out. The Kamehameha wave that normally would have blinded with its luminescence and consumed the surroundings with its celeste surges of rampant power now glowed with fiery intensity and its usually high-pitched tones now sounded grungier, like an awakening volcano and blasted off at the enemy with an unusually vibrant flow, creating a mushroom-shaped blast instead of the usual, spherical annihilation it wrought.
When Krillin could, at last, examine the results of his attack, his eyes opened up almost as wide as his relaxed mouth with a twitching lower lip. His entire blast had curled up in a round orb and whirled around inside Drum's mouth while the mushroom cloud crawled to the skies from its mouthful imprisonment, obscuring the bloody sight of Drum's mashed face. With a lick of his tongue and a grumbling gulp, Drum gobbled the restrained fireball down and burped a breath of flames and black smoke out as it refused to go down easy. The demon stumbled on his feet, hurting from the beatdown as well as the uneasy way that he had dealt with the lethal attack of his enemy.
"As if I'll let a mere human do me in like that…" Drum grumbled and began working at his malformed face with his hands to shape it into something more presentable.
"I've never even seen anyone deal with an attack like that, you're a demon alright…" Krillin dragged his wristbands over his face distraught having just fired a great deal of his Ki at the enemy.
"I bet that sudden surge of power left the building and you've wasted a great deal of Ki, attacking me with your strongest technique at full power like that. I'll make you want to have done me in, you runt!" Drum pressed his arms by his sides and clutched his knuckles tightly. Had it not been for demonic physiology and unnatural endurance, possible lack of vital organs in his anatomy, he'd have pretty much been done in by now.
"Big deal," Krillin sighed and entered his fighting stance. "I've beaten you plenty before I kicked it into overdrive, I can finish the job with a little bit of heaviness in my breath just as well."
He tried saying it in a way that would make him believe that because he truly wanted to not only be able to believe it but also for it to be objectively true.