"Hey, wait up!" Chayote yelled out to Bardock. Normally she'd have just caught up to someone she tried to close up on but Bardock was far too fast for her to be able to do so. His injuries after the battle against Piccolo and Goku had made him too much trouble to handle now that he had somewhat recovered which could have made him a huge problem if he didn't have the warm feelings toward his son that are rather uncharacteristic for a Saiyan.
"Oh, you've finally mustered up the guts to come with. Good, I've no idea where I'm going…" Bardock acknowledged Chayote's presence by slowing down some.
"Are you sure you're good challenging prince Vegeta like this? You're not fully recovered after the battle yet." Chayote warned the brutish Saiyan.
"I don't care about that. That little shit is the son of the bastard king that sold our planet and our pride out. My only regret is that I won't be able to make king Vegeta grieve the loss of his son quite like I have because he doesn't care about his son anywhere near as much as I do about my own," Bardock spat to the side in disdain of the Saiyan royal family. "Not to mention the fact that the brat killed my other son just because he could…"
It occurred to Chayote that it wasn't the entire reason why prince Vegeta ended blowing up Raditz's pod, if what little snippets Raditz himself let slip were to be taken seriously. Plus, it wasn't like Raditz was a guy that was at all easy to grieve based on what Chayote could recall about him. He was more than ready to send his own brother to the Otherworld way back. It was just cruel irony that it would be Goku's father who sent him there despite having no will to do so.
"Although I've gotta say, I will appreciate the bit of assistance. The little prince works in a squad of two so if you could take care of his hired muscle while I spank his unfledged ass, that would be great," Bardock clenched his fists by his side, judging from his stiff movements he was still feeling sore. The fact that the Saiyan was this powerful just after waking up a brutal fight for his life and just trying to imagine how powerful he'd become when fully recovered made Chayote worried, especially seeing how intense this guy could get when he had his mind set.
"Fine, I'll take care of the second guy, I won't fight prince Vegeta though," Chayote looked to Bardock. "If you're rushing into your death like this, that will be on you."
"That's cold…" Bardock chuckled to himself. "Then again, I can't ask you for anything more than that. I'm sorry I doubted your fortitude, you've got a Saiyan's attitude through and through."
Bardock picked some speed up though this time Chayote could keep up. His previous rush made him burn through whatever was remaining of his Ki so she breathed easier seeing Bardock regain some cool to his glare and take his pace in arriving at the northern wastelands where the two Saiyans occasionally flared up their Ki signatures, suggesting that they were partaking in some of the devastation that their cultivated warriors were into.
A scattered yet meager group of Saibamen blasted at the civilians that fled for their lives and reduced the buildings of the nearby town to dust with Ki blasts. A handful more flew about, ripping and tearing the fleeing people to pieces with a much more hands-on approach to their violent riot while a pair of them continued to hurl balls of sizzling bio-goop from an opening in their heads that dissolved the townsmen they showered in mere seconds.
The plant-like, childish menaces enjoyed their rampage a great deal, as evidenced by the wicked smiles on their faces and them taking their sweet time to cackle, flex, or dance in mid-air before picking up their concert of violence where they had previously left it off.
Roaring in a fury that drew from the source of the suffering experienced by the poor, fleeing fellow humans, Tenshinhan dived into the fray. He was alone right now, there were far too many groups scattered too far across the entire globe for them to stick together. Upa and Mr. Popo had a pair of magical carpets though they wouldn't have carried all of them where they needed to go, plus, Upa had his own business to take care of and he was the weakest hand-to-hand combatant and the slowest flier without the carpet anyway.
Tenshinhan's thoughts were everywhere but the battle. The enemy was making fun of him and grimacing at him as they evaded his strikes. The group attempted to swarm him all together by raiding him with aerial slashes. While individually this group was meager, together they were quite troublesome to deal with. Tenshinhan felt like he could have crushed these cultivated warriors with a single blow if only he could get his hands on one. Though actually getting his game together with all that's been happening, worrying about his friends and the humanity as a whole as well as dealing with their unorthodox team tactics that, admittedly, these folks were rather good at, was a pain in of itself.
The Saibamen scattered in a spherical formation and all extended their hands aiming at Tenshinhan. Volleys of Ki blasts erupted from their hands, in an attempt to overwhelm the three-eyed martial artist with the sheer quantity of their attacks and wear down his vastly superior Ki to that of their own. While Saibamen preferred bullying around weaklings, they had ways of dealing with a stronger opponent as well, as long as they still overnumbered them vastly.
Once the smoke cleared out, a transparent Kiai bubble flickered around Tenshinhan, having protected the martial artist from the bothersome fireworks. Having found his opening for attack, the martial artist could only smirk in mockery of his opponents who preyed on the weak though now found themselves confronted by someone vastly stronger than them that aimed to protect the weak they've been slaughtering up until now. Someone who possessed all of their values yet valued something else entirely, a living challenge to the few rules that defined the way of life of a Saibaman.
"Is that the best you guys got?" Tenshinhan prepared for a sudden counter-attack. His body flickered. The next time the Saibamen registered the man who moved with the swiftness of a greased lightning bolt, it was when Tenshinhan's elbow had smacked into one of their own within their dense ranks and splattered it and all of its compositional remains into mush.
The three-eyed fighter then vanished and appeared in between a pair of very confused Saibamen, spinning with elbow swipes aimed at their bloated heads from each direction – front to one of them and back of it to another. Both Saibamen fell to the ground and blew up from the influx of swelling force that their bodies failed to contain, heads smashed to porridge until their entire bodies blew up making the testament to Tenshinhan's mercilessness to the merciless irrelevant in the grander scheme.
A stiff kick to the mid-section send yet another Saibamen flying off into the horizon and blowing up as his body had sustained far too much damage in that one kick. The rest of the Saibamen staggered in fear. While they sometimes challenged mightier prey and managed to take it down through wicked team tactics, this time they had bitten off more than they could chew and they acknowledged it by flying off, running for their lives just like the humans that they were slaughtering a few moments ago.
"Barrage Dodonpa!" Tenshinhan yelled out, extending his finger and sending an incinerating beam to spell out oblivion to each and every little horror to terrorize this town. It wouldn't be easy to clean out the Earth just like this, even weaklings like these Saibamen would end up piling up in the end but Tenshinhan was a man of responsibility, not excuses for that was the way of a martial artist.
"Eeek! Bulma-san! My drones are getting totaled!" Dr. Puri dragged her curly, auburn hair by the handfuls as she shrieked at the view of static-filled cameras on the assortment of the drone view screens.
A rumbling blast made the entire Capsule Corp building shake and bob as more and more chunks of pebble-sized rubble began to fall from the roof, suggesting an imminent demise of the building if the complete mayhem in the West City was to continue.
"Your drones? Capsule Corp paid for them all, you know…" Bulma crossed her arms with a pout that suggested that the prodigy scientist was exactly the lady petty enough to worry about these sorts of things in a situation as dire as this one. "Damn it, where is everyone? If this keeps up, we won't need drones to track all this action, we'll be able to see it with our own eyes…" the woman looked up at the cracking roof of the lab.
"We'll be lucky if we won't be a part of that action…" Dr. Puri grit her teeth, looking more irritated than frightened for her life. Almost like these cultivated bio-warriors didn't seem like as much of a threat to her life as it was to her inventions.
"W-Wait… Who's that? Goku, maybe?" Bulma leaned in to gander at a flickering image on one of the wrecked drones that were yet to detonate. Before she could press her forehead to the screen, the warrior smashed the green cultivar with a double ax-handle slam and swooped in to catch the fragile invention, posing before the camera with a thumb-up. "Oh, it's him…" Bulma growled.
"He's quite a dreamy fellow, do you know him?" Dr. Puri turned to Bulma.
"Yeah, we used to date before he started cheating on me with every girl in the city like the complete oaf that he is!" Bulma yelled at the drone as if the man holding its bits and pieces could still hear her, which he definitely could not and it was something Bulma knew very well, having had a hand in building a few of them and sharpening Dr. Puri's designs.
"Ah, I see… It is unfortunate that you'd have caught him cheating like that… I was married once though our bond to each other was as deep as our devotion to our work." Dr. Puri nodded, looking like she could genuinely relate to Bulma's ire to some extent, though, perhaps, through a different angle.
"Huh? You were married?" Bulma crossed her arms, once again choosing to focus on the absolute worst thing imaginable to focus on in the face of an imminent, city-threatening crisis. "You look like you're barely in your twenties…"
"Oh, yes, well… I suppose I'm one of those older than they look types…" Dr. Puri chuckled, caressing her own blushing cheeks as she shook her head in the enjoyment of the compliment. "Sadly, I cannot imagine what it's like to have a man that abandons the bond of love for another though I do know what's it is like to lose them."
"Well…" Bulma's nose turned up as her lips stiffened in a pout. "I mean… He wasn't technically the one chasing all those chicks. It was more like they tied around his lap and arms when they noticed him as a prominent finalist of the World's Martial Arts Tournament but… He may as well have cheated on me!"
Yamcha continued to strike his way through the large group of Saibamen, punching and kicking them aside though these buggers looked tough enough to be able to take more than a few of his strikes before they called it quits. More exactly, they didn't even have what it took to call it quits, it was more like their bodies blew up forcing them to admit defeat via the way of self-destruction.
"Okay, guys, look good before the camera, let's try and get Bulma really impressed and swoony over me so that she won't be mad at me anymore, okay?" Yamcha joked in front of the raging band of Saibamen. The utter arrogance of their opponent drove the cultivated warriors into a frenzy as they rushed in to pile up on the poor oaf.
Yamcha leaned aside and continued to evade more than a few attempts to stranglehold him though once his carelessness allowed one of the nasty, little buggers to wrap their arms and legs around his arm, the rest were rushing in like sharks to the bloody water. Before long there were too many Saibamen for Yamcha to move, only a tiny gap between the living ball of holding through which Yamcha could see.
Even that final grace soon sunk into a flash of bright light, before a resonating blast covered the entire sky over the West City decimating the windows all across the major capital of the world and driving it into the nastiest case of a blackout that they've known since the riots of the "Devil" kanji appearing in the Central City. In a desperate attempt to kill the strong and goofy warrior that opposed them, the one-track-minded Saibamen chose to destruct their own bodies and sacrifice the entire squad for the death of one man.
"Awww man…" Yamcha stroke the back of his head, observing the resonating destruction that lingered after the cataclysmic blast of the combined self-destruction wave of the Saibamen attempting to drag him down under alongside them. "Bulma's not gonna like this at all. I better… Yeah… Maybe the others still need my help…"
With some minor scrapes and burns and one more tattered martial arts gi, Yamcha scurried on his way to get himself as far away from the West City as possible, after a simple visual inspection suggested that the Capsule Corp building was still intact and in decent enough condition.
Krillin grunted, surrounding himself in a bubble of Kiai that shielded him from a blob of acidic goop from an opening inside of a Saibaman's head. He didn't think that he'd be struggling quite this hard with these cultivars, he could sense that whenever Tenshinhan or Chiaotzu got to these small clusters of Ki signatures, the battles tended to wrap up neatly. And thus, Krillin lobbed a Ki blast into the opening of the Saibaman's head while it was still closing from throwing acid at him, causing a gruesome, head-splitting blast from within taking the cultivar out.
"It hurts to admit it, but I might need some more training. I better take this battle seriously or else I'm gonna lag behind…" Krillin sighed. He cupped his arms beside him and activated his Hot-Red Mode to supercharge his attack "Ka-Me-Ha-Me…" he chanted.
A rumbling, orange blast covered up and swallowed the lot of Saibamen together, freeing the recovering construction of the Papaya Island that still fostered the hopes of hosting the next World Martial Arts Tournament soon enough once the reconstruction of the island is finished from the invading threat of these plant-like interlopers.
Krillin drove his wristband over his sweaty forehead. He did not expect that taking on a handful of these mooks would work up a sweat up for him, though it did. He had lost touch with the rest of the guys though in these times of peace he had fallen behind not just Piccolo and Tenshinhan but Yamcha too. Krillin hated to admit it but the dolt had taken the frustration of his break-up and channel it into training whereas Krillin just engaged in light workouts that kept his shape up.
Things might have needed to change. This was too close for comfort. The bald-headed warrior lamented the experience of facing someone like Bardock or those other two Saiyans that crashed onto Earth in his current state. He'd need to work extra hard compared to the rest to catch up now that he was reminded of how quickly the peaceful life that he had been taking for granted for seven years straight could all go to hell.
"You won't come near this sacred temple!" Chiaotzu exclaimed, extending his palms downward as an azure glow of erupting Ki surrounded his body and transferred in an instant in the shape of a telekinetic hold over his opponent. The Saibamen shrieked out in discomfort as they froze in mid-air, having ascended all the way up to the God Temple already.
The ghoulish martial artist clutched his tiny fists, forcing his telekinetic grip to crush the cultivars into mush that was too disembodied and messy for their bodies to maintain their integrity. The cultivated warriors blew up all at once in a resonating cascade of blasts.
"Thank you for staying behind and protecting this temple," Mr. Popo nodded with a smile on his face, looking not at all frightened by the invasion of these cultivated alien warriors. His eyes remained as apathetic as always even if his upturned lips suggested a gleeful expression.
"I've intended on patrolling the Sacred Land of Korin but I saw Yajirobe slicing up these aliens down below. That was when I sensed a handful of them rushing up here though I have no doubt that you'd have handled them, Mr. Popo…" Chiaotzu chuckled to himself, looking a bit embarrassed by the expression of gratitude as it wasn't even a full decade ago that he had intended on following Tenshinhan in the path of assassination.
"No, you have become so amazing!" Mr. Popo shook his head calmly while admiring the efforts of the Dragon Team. "Honestly, I'm not sure if even the old Kami would have managed to keep the situation on Earth under control in these crazy times but with your aid, we just might do it!"
Chiaotzu nodded, looking ecstatic with hope.
"Goddang it!" Yajirobe croaked as he dived past yet another cultivated warrior rushing past him, leaving the sliced-up cultivar to fall down in pieces after he had cut him down and re-sheathed his sword once more before the Saibamen could even register it. "Where is errybody!? I'm gonna get killed in 'ere!" he huffed before regaining his composure and entering his sword drawing stance in preparation for the next batch of assailants.
"If only I could drop dis 'ere payload off my back…" he huffed while looking down on a sash filled with heavy orbs hanging on his waist. "But dose are what I went out ta get in da first place!" Yajirobe complained as he slashed into ribbons a pair of Saibamen that looked to do the same to him.