Krillin threw a rapid barrage of wild kicks in the air before regaining his balance and turning his attention west. He had been so focused on his training that he had missed out on the foreign Ki signature until it was careening right at the Kame House island. There was no way that it was tracking anything in particular or hitting this spot directly, it was Krillin's own Ki that must have been attracting this assailant.
"They're coming, Krillin!" Muten Roshi ran out of the Kame House. Blond Launch walked out behind him, loading up a submachine gun but Muten Roshi turned around and began pushing the woman back into the house.
"Hold on just a second, Launch, this isn't a battle you should be taking part in!" Muten Roshi objected, finding an easy opportunity to slip his hands onto the woman's breasts as he pushed her further into the house. It had earned him a few knuckles and Launch hit like a truck. She certainly was no ordinary woman but, judging from Krillin's face, even he wondered if he could take the enemy on himself.
There was no other choice, Krillin knew it. Now that he was no longer focusing on his training and decided to scope the situation of the battle out, it became apparent that the Saiyan did not come alone, just as Upa had warned them. Though the Saiyans decided to split themselves up, maybe it was a gamble, they were trying to hold everyone off so that the Earthlings didn't team-up…
"No luck finding help, huh? Guess it's going to be all up to us…" Muten Roshi left the Kame House with more than a few nudges all over his face that were beginning to swell up. As pathetic as it looked, the Ki signature of the old man began to soar as he increasingly became more serious.
"The enemy has split themselves apart. They must be trying to confront all of us individually and keep us from teaming up…" Krillin turned to his mentor. He didn't feel too brave about Muten Roshi choosing to fight alongside him but he had trained on the island for a few days and Muten Roshi helped him retrain his body after a few years of a rather lax training schedule.
"That's not it. They are looking for one of their own but they don't know which one of the higher battle powers is the one. That is why they are attacking all of the powerful fighters individually…" Muten Roshi explained as he took his position beside Krillin.
"We need to take this elsewhere. This battle's gonna get crazy and your home is going to get totaled. Launch-san will be put in danger," Krillin glanced at his mentor who nodded.
"We must make sure that the Saiyan doesn't get too excited and attack the Kame House on his way. We'll confront him first, then lure him away," Muten Roshi corrected his student.
"Blast it! You guys ain't Kakarot!" Shugesh grunted floating in mid-air, catching the full attention of the two martial artists that decided to stand their ground and intercept the Saiyan warrior.
"Kakarot? That's Goku's Saiyan name. I guess you were right, Roshi-sama…" Krillin gave his mentor an approving look before focusing back on the intimidating chubby floating over the Kame Island. "You guys better get off our planet! Goku doesn't want anything to do with you!"
"Huh? So you know who we are and I guess you must know Kakarot too… That's convenient. Won't have to waste my time jabbering with you pests. I can go right on and start breaking some bones!" Shugesh cracked his knuckles, smirking at the two Earthlings.
"Hold on, don't you want to know how we know about who you are and what you want?" Muten Roshi raised his cane up and pointed it at the airborne Saiyan brute.
"Roshi-sama, is this really the time for that?" Krillin raised an inquisitive eyebrow at his mentor.
"Stay put, we need to prolong this for as long as possible. Bulma said that there is a fair chance that Chayote may be joining us in the heat for battle. It might be beneficial to keep this brute away from the others and let Tenshinhan, Goku, and even Piccolo handle them while we waste this guy's time. Once Chayote joins us, this will be over for sure!" a telepathic signal rang in Krillin's mind, making the bald martial artist cheer up a bit and made him break his fighting stance with a lax expression as he decided he'd help his mentor beat his gums.
"Huh? Not really, I'd rather just smash you two to bits for wasting my time and go find the real Kakarot!" Shugesh pressed a button on his scouter as numbers began counting up on the green monocle part of the gadget. "Hmmm, power levels of 1321 and 879? Something really must be off with this damn thing, I could have sworn the readings were higher a minute ago…"
"Krillin, these Saiyans use those devices on their eyes to locate their targets. For them to waste their time with such gizmos, it means that they aren't capable of sensing their opponent's Ki. Destroy them and it will leave the enemy blinded," Muten Roshi once more contacted his pupil mentally.
"Right. Leave it to Roshi-sama's experience to carry us through this. He doesn't appear to be aware that we're not at full power yet too. We can catch him unaware this way…" Krillin focused on these thoughts, making Muten Roshi's mustache line tilt upward a little bit by each side, suggesting that the man was smiling.
"That's my pupil…" Muten Roshi commended Krillin mentally.
"Oh well… I'll just kill you two anyway and go find the real Kakarot then!" Shugesh charged at the pair out of the blue, bursting with a transparent aura that emanated sheer brutality and immense power. Krillin braced for impact, putting his arms up while Muten Roshi remained oblivious to the charge of the Saiyan ruffian.
Krillin pushed his mentor away with a sideways shoulder bash and took the brunt of Shugesh's attack, riding the overwhelming force backward but maintaining his balance. The sand beneath Krillin's feet turned into wet splatters and cool brushes of the boundless ocean as he careened back through its surface, maintaining his position above the water's surface via the flight technique.
"Take this!" Shugesh yelled out as he continued his attack on Krillin, diving with a flying kick right at him. Krillin didn't move at all, he absorbed the strike right at the center of his cross-shaped block and skid across the ocean until he felt the brush of grass again. Shugesh continued to charge at him with short and separate bashes, lacking any semblance of martial arts prowess, proving easier for Krillin to avoid.
"Nice thinking, there's no way this brute would let us take him to fight elsewhere, let him think he is winning!" Muten Roshi commended his pupil on a feat of nice thinking on his feet as Krillin managed to take Shugesh to another nearby island where they could fight him all they wanted. The elder martial arts master hurried to his student's aid.
Krillin's body flew into a nearby rock, hitting it with such velocity and force that the rock outright blew up from the erupting pressure but Krillin burst forth out from the rubble and rejoined the battle with nothing but dust on his orange gi. Muten Roshi rejoined his student in battle, he felt a bit embarrassed by the fact but he couldn't see his opponent at all the first time he attacked. They really did need to power up to their limit to even stand a chance against this opponent.
"Huh… Something's off… I hit you with some of my best shots. Someone with a power level of just 1321 would have been crushed by these attacks! Stupid new scouter models! Can't even know how powerful the enemy is!" Shugesh growled to himself, growing visibly upset by the fact that his meaningful attempts at ending Krillin's life were shrugged off like that.
"Idiot!" Krillin pulled his eyelid and stuck out his tongue. "That's what you get for relying on some computer to tell you how to fight…"
Krillin charged forward with a flying kick but Shugesh vanished and appeared up in the air, popping his scouter back on and attempting to calculate his opponent's real strength. The readings he saw perplexed Shugesh as shock and awe soon overtook the frustration and aggression gleaming on his face.
"Power levels of 7929 and 3584!? T-This can't be!" Shugesh exclaimed. "Your power levels were insignificant just a while ago, how could they have skyrocketed like that!?"
"They must not be teaching you how to fight back on the Saiyan home planet. Before we were reserving our strength for the upcoming battle. There was no need to show you all of our power." Muten Roshi pointed his cane at the enemy, feeling a little easier knowing that his constant training has paid off and that his level of strength still bothered the enemies that his pupils encountered.
"Right! Now that we've traded blows, I can tell that I'm stronger than you. I've got a better plan, Roshi-sama. Let's take care of this guy and then go help the others. The Saiyans they've run into must be stronger than this guy," Krillin glanced at his mentor who seemed to approve of Krillin's plan as he nodded lightly while stroking his beard.
"You bastard! Underestimate me, will you!? We Saiyans have no equal!" Shugesh ground his teeth and clenched his fist out in front of him, letting his swelling up Ki create a field of intense pressure around his fist that bent the light passing through it and colored the bubble of sheer force bursting out in a mean shade of pink. "Massive Catapult!"
The energy field that Shugesh had created around his arm expanded to cover his entire body as the Saiyan flew toward Krillin and Muten Roshi. The master and his student both extended their arms out and drew them back to their sides, focusing their Ki and channeling it all throughout their body only to form spheres of concentrated energy in their hands.
"Ka-Me!" they both chanted together. "Ha-Me!"
Muten Roshi's body swelled up, ripping the sleeveless shirt on him apart as his upper torso became oversized for his bulking up legs to bear. The energy blast that the old martial arts master was channeling grew almost five times in size while Krillin's own aura turned blazing red, lighting his still channeling Kamehameha wave ablaze. The pair thrust their arms out together.
"MAX Power Kamehameha!"
"Hot-Blooded Kamehameha!"
The two Kamehameha waves flew alongside one another, merging at the very end right before clashing with the charging Saiyan. The Master-Student Kamehameha wave appeared to barely at all struggle with the opposing force, instead choosing to swallow the pink Ki bubble whole and tearing the battle armor clean off of the rampaging Saiyan brute as he plummeted down and smacked in a bone-churning manner against the island floor, cracking the rock-hard ground that he hit.
"His power level is really small but it's still there…" Krillin closed his eyes, panting from having unleashed all of his power in one blast just to take care of the opponent quickly. "We should finish him off. If he recovers, he'll grow way stronger, just like Goku and Chayote do after a tough battle."
"By the time that Chayote returns, it will not matter. Even if this warrior multiplies his power several times, he would not be able to defeat Goku or Piccolo. With his current lack of martial arts skill, he is of no threat to us. Let's leave it up to Chayote and Goku on deciding what we do with them. Without an ability to hide their Ki, they will be easy to find and defeat anyway," Muten Roshi placed his hand on Krillin's shoulder and stopped his student from killing his unconscious, whited-out opponent.
Krillin lowered the one hand he held raised over his head and sighed. He didn't like the idea of leaving this guy just lying beaten here but it didn't look like he enjoyed the thought of killing him either. The young warrior felt conflicted about this, it did not take someone with an intimate knowledge of the workings of his student's mind like Muten Roshi to tell.
"Umigame!" Muten Roshi yelled out, his voice augmented by the supernatural strength of his lungs reached far and wide and before long a brown sea turtle emerged from underwater on a nearby shore. The old martial arts master hopped onto the back of the turtle and turned back to Krillin.
"Let's head out. Yamcha and Goku are the nearest ones to our location though I feel like Yamcha might need our help a little bit more…" Muten Roshi rushed Krillin just so his student recovered from the deep pit he was in, staring at his trembling hands and switching the focus between his own shaking body back to his beaten opponent.
"You aren't going to fly, Roshi-sama?" Krillin wondered as he took off, keeping it relatively low and by the level of the sea surface so that he could talk to Muten Roshi who lagged behind a little bit on Umigame's back.
"My flying is a little shaky. I feel like riding Umigame is still a little bit faster and it doesn't wear on me at all," Roshi replied as he looked on ahead at the horizons extending past the oceans. "I'll switch to flying once we reach the shore. Yamcha appears to have been training in his old hideout back in Diablo Desert while Goku is still in his home with Chi-Chi… He must not have felt the need to leave anywhere crazy to train, I guess."
"Goku's changed a little bit. He's been training all this time but not like he used to be. He's training just because he likes fighting and wants to grow stronger but there's nothing pressing him to train harder. I was a lot the same way. I still trained these past seven years but I never felt like there was something I was training myself for so I didn't blame myself for skipping a day or two." Krillin sighed.
"What about Yamcha?" Muten Roshi wondered. "I haven't seen him for a couple of years. Not since our last get-together in Capsule Corp."
"Yamcha hasn't been training at all for the first four years. He felt like he didn't need to, maybe he felt like he owed Bulma something so they've been hanging out together. It was only after Yamcha and Bulma broke up that he started training again though Yamcha's been putting effort into it ever since he did start training again. He might even be stronger than me at this point…" Krillin replied.
"This was your first time, wasn't it?" Muten Roshi turned his eyes to Krillin who just kept his pace up evenly with his striding master and stared ahead with blank eyes. "Facing the need to kill somebody like that…"
"I guess so… I've killed my opponents before but they were demons. It's easy to blow those guys up and not think about it. Hell, if I didn't know Chayote and Goku, it would have been pretty easy not thinking about killing these Saiyans too but… Every time we fought some serious threat before, it was in a tournament or that threat was a demon and… No. I never had to kill anyone up until now. It sometimes happened. Maybe we've ended up killing a few Rainbow Brigade soldiers but never like this. Not deliberately…" Krillin replied.
He must not have wanted to think about it as his face sunk in gloom once Muten Roshi brought it up and forced the young man to return to that island again, stand over his beaten and broken opponent while knowing that he needed to finish him off or else the Saiyan would grow stronger and he might not have this chance ever again.
"These Saiyans won't hesitate to finish us off but don't feel obliged to stoop to their level. Remember, just live your life to the fullest, use martial arts to defend the weak from those that think they can bully them just because they're stronger and things will turn out alright. Don't try and take up the weight of the entire world on your shoulders. Just do what you feel is right and don't force yourself to do what you don't want to," Muten Roshi advised his pupil. Krillin's loss faded away before the old man's eyes, he turned to the side and nodded with a light smile on his face.
"I just now remembered that these Saiyans would end up running into Piccolo too. I've never thought that Piccolo would end up helping us save the Earth…" Krillin dragged his hand across the back of his head while he pushed the weight off of his chest through his airways and out his mouth.
"True. There is one warrior who will feel no qualms about crushing the poor Saiyans that decide to stand in his way. I have no doubts that Piccolo won't take kindly to invaders threatening to reduce the world he sees as his for the taking to ruin. It might be fortunate that Goku did not finish Piccolo off all those years ago…" Muten Roshi nodded in agreement.
"I guess sometimes acting on one's gut feeling and not reason can lead to good things though it's unlikely that the Saiyan we beat could ever end up helping us…" Krillin said.
"You're off on your own, old perv…" Umigame stopped all of a sudden right before hitting the shore, throwing his absent-minded master off of his back flying though Muten Roshi managed to balance himself out in mid-air and transition from free-flight straight at the dirt present on the beach that the pair had reached into a controlled and paced flight.
"Sometimes I wish I'd have made soup out of that old sea turtle with that attitude. If only I didn't know his kids and didn't feel bad about it…" Muten Roshi shook his fist over his head in the direction of the defiant sea turtle who turned around and submerged to the bottom of the ocean shore, swimming further into the ocean.