"Launch-san, you're still living with this old pervert?" Bulma turned toward the kitchen where Launch was working at some more party snacks for the upcoming gathering of the Dragon Team. It would mark the first time in over seven years that the whole gang would get together.
"Oh my…" Launch gasped and covered her mouth, shocked that Muten Roshi would ever be described that way. "Why yes, I do still live with Roshi-san. He's been very kind to me by providing me a place to live and a somewhat normal life for both me and the other me. I am very grateful to Roshi-san and helping him with chores is the least I can do!"
"How am I the bad guy in this situation?" Muten Roshi mumbled while sitting on the toilet and scratching his head. "You should see Launch-san when her hair goes blond, I'm the one being held hostage here against my will and doing the chores for her, honestly."
"Close the damned door when you're taking care of business!" Bulma growled and shook her fist over her head. "Honestly, I should have come here with the rest of the guys instead of rushing ahead…" she wrapped her arms over her chest as the blue-haired genius grounded her teeth away, seething in frustration.
"Say, say… You said that your new assistant would come, Puri-chan, was it? How come she wasn't with you?" Muten Roshi wondered, looking up from his less than inspiring position.
"Yeah… She said she needed some extra time to prepare. Find a nice dress and apply make-up and all that. Honestly, I think she didn't quite get just what kind of party this is going to be," Bulma sighed, letting go of the pent up aggression toward the pervy and crude old man seeing how she had been around him for too long not to know how pointless holding on to such feelings was.
"Oh! Puri-Puri… Paffu-Paffu…" Muten Roshi began chanting something on the crapper as he felt an imaginary set of breasts with his hands while the man's cheeks flushed with red. It took a heavy slam of the door to the Kame House to break him out of his trance.
"Old man, you should close the door when you're crappin'…" Umigame pointed out while crawling through the door. It was the most abhorrent detail that caught his attention first, the sea turtle only noticed the fact that Bulma was visiting later, flopping his flipper up in a welcoming gesture. "Hello, Bulma, it's nice to see you."
"Hey, Umigame, how's your son doing?" Bulma wondered.
"Never mind that!" Muten Roshi jumped off of the toilet and flushed it, hurrying to pull his shorts back on and unleash a torrent from the sink to wash his hands so that he could be done with it and give a good yelling at the loud cohabitant of his island for just bursting in like that. "Why did you have to bust in so loud for? Honestly, I'm over three-hundred years old, that's just asking for a heart attack!"
"Oh… Sorry… I completely forgot why I barged in… Say… What's the deal with that submarine by the island? Is it yours, Bulma?" Umigame rubbed his head with his flapper, a bit more relieved to have a potential explanation for the unnatural sight he saw.
"Huh? No way, I flew here by plane, and my plane's sealed up in a capsule," Bulma answered after Launch brought her some cold refreshments to enjoy until the rest of the crew got to the island. "What did it look like? Maybe the rest of the crew got here?"
Bulma turned to Muten Roshi and froze in place, almost dropping her glass of juice when she saw how serious the old man had turned all of a sudden. This was not a usual situation where Roshi acted like his usual, aloof, and pervy self. Bulma hadn't seen the old man so serious since Demon King Piccolo attacked.
"A bunch of Ki appeared all over the island," he stated with a dire tone of his voice before rushing to the door. Before slamming it open and walking out to face whoever had arrived at his island by that submarine which Umigame had mentioned, Muten Roshi turned around and looked at the women and the sea turtle. "Stay indoors, no matter what. I should be able to handle it and if not, the rest should arrive soon."
The moment Roshi opened the door, the fact that his island had been riddled with dug up patches of land became apparent. Metallic bulbs of Prussian blue stuck out from the ditches like some extraterrestrial garden that was about to bloom. When Muten Roshi walked out and stepped down from the steps and onto the grass and sand of his island, the bulbs began twitching. Like little drills, a handful of dwarfish creatures appeared from underground.
The enemy were tiny warriors with oversized heads, not entirely unlike the Saibamen that had terrorized the planet just a day ago. They had shells of dark blue on them on their feet, their calves, chest, and forearms while the rest of their flesh looked soft and stringy. Their limbs looked segmented like these tiny warriors were a mixture of an insect and a man of some sort. Their mouths had prominent insectoid features though the rest of their brainy heads looked more bird-like with maroon eyes focused on their prey. The tiny things let out giggling shrieks as they pointed their claws at Muten Roshi and prepared to pounce on him.
All of the odd warriors lunged at Muten Roshi at once but the old man extended his hand out, releasing a powerful Kiai blast that threw all of them aside like ragdolls. Once the creatures moved their focus away from Muten Roshi and struggled to return back to their feet, the weathered martial arts master rushed across the battlefield, delivering beatdowns to each unfortunate soul in his way. The attackers shrieked out though it was not out of pain but out of wrath that they were unable to lay a hand on the martial arts master.
The battered and bruised, blue dwarfs danced across the battlefield, dashing aside in an attempt to change the range between them and their superior opponent. Sunlight glistened and beamed off of Muten Roshi's sunglasses as the old man realized that these seemingly mindless fighting drones were very much capable of strategic forethought as he now found himself surrounded with the little shrimps extending their hands and forming spheres of Ki in their hands in an attempt to attack the old man from afar.
With grace and mastery of his own movement, Muten Roshi evaded each and every Ki blast in the flurry of attacks surrounding him and proceeded to blitz up to the warrior of the surviving quartet that he believed to be injured the most. Roshi flipped over his head to try and slam the beaten warrior to the ground but his attack was promptly blocked. A pair of others rushed in from the sides and locked Roshi down, rendering him effectively helpless. The old martial arts master was stronger than these little fighters individually though together in a group they posed a real threat to his life.
The odd, spliced warriors continued to rush up to Muten Roshi and throw fists at him, trying to beat him down while the pair held him tight. Given how battered and weakened those fighting drones were, Muten Roshi didn't feel all too much of the beating that they intended to deliver onto him. As more and more of his true power surged into his weathered body, the veteran of martial arts felt his muscles slightly swelling up and as that might flowed all over his body, Roshi found himself capable to slam the two warriors holding him at each other and kick them both aside with a jumping split kick.
These warriors weren't as loud as the Saibamen but they were every bit as reckless with their lives. Seeing how outmatched the lot were, they began rushing at Muten Roshi, overflowing with Ki. Had the martial arts master not been over three-hundred years old, he might have missed out on the impending reckless explosive Ki waves emanating from the bodies of the rushing fighting drones. The explosive waves they used decimated their broken bodies, allowing them to deliver a considerable blast even in their battered states. Noticing that he had his own home to take care of, Roshi punted the rushing, self-destructing soldiers aside where they could self-destruct without leaving a dent on him or his house.
"Whoever you are, show yourself, no more games!" Muten Roshi shouted out with a hint of heavier breathing as disposing of these spliced soldiers made him work up a decent sweat and served him as some fine training.
"My, my… I see that you are every bit as capable as you were back when you won the 13th World Martial Arts Tournament, Muten Roshi. No… Whom am I trying to fool? Far stronger!" a mechanical-sounding voice that came from the bubbling water by the shore of the Kame Island filled the air. "You've dispatched of my Bio-Men in no time at all, though, perhaps, if I allowed them to rush you on and on, even a master such as yourself would have caved…"
"Hmph… Beating an old man with a group of your footmen, what an accomplishment…" Muten Roshi mocked the speaker whom he assumed to be located inside the surfacing submarine when, in fact, the speaker was the submarine itself. The emerging vehicle was a pill-shaped cockpit of oxford-blue with a massive brain floating in a jar out in front of it and ridges of spiked, metallic teeth extending on both sides of the submarine.
"Don't you dare undermine the intelligence of great Dr. Wheelo! I will have you know that I am the genius who managed to reverse bio-engineer the remains of these green aliens that had invaded our planet and, of course, improved upon their limited design," the submarine appeared to be losing its temper for a brief moment there before composing itself. The ego revealed itself to be a sensitive subject with this talking vehicle.
Clawed hands began bursting from underwater as dozens of more Bio-Men took the stage, more and more of them shot out from openings within the corpus of the brain-decorated submarine where usual military submarines would have had hatches for missiles. The shot Bio-Men straightened out from their curled, cannonball-like positions and landed gracefully onto the beach, forcing Muten Roshi to take a defensive fighting stance. Each one of these was at least half of Roshi's own power and there didn't appear to be any limit to these biologically engineered soldiers.
"You'll forgive me if I'm all out of medals to give. I'm not a man that appreciates shortcuts in martial arts so your achievements do not interest me," Muten Roshi cut it down, defiant in the face of the invader of his island. If the worst-case scenario broke out, the godly master of martial arts counted on himself erupting with all of his power and firing his max power Kamehameha right at the talking submarine, hoping that it would somehow limit the production or control of these Bio-Men that seemed to be produced infinitely.
"As expected of a fist-swinging fool, you are plagued by your short-sightedness. Then again, you are a relic, I'll have you know that you are surpassed by almost every successor in the World Martial Arts Tournament and it only out of lack of living champions that I come knocking to your door, Roshi-san," Dr. Wheelo replied while the Bio-Men awaited for his command without as much as a twitch to their faces. Certainly, these folks appeared to be much more restrained than the Saibamen the Saiyans employed.
"Hey, what's going on here…" Bulma appeared, opening the door against Muten Roshi's wishes. One of the Bio-Men moved in a blur, given his superior speed and reaction, Muten Roshi raced against him but was swarmed by the rest of the ground, pressed and beaten into the ground while dozens of the biologically engineered critters bent his arms behind his back and held him down.
"Why if that isn't Bulma, the prodigious daughter of Dr. Brief? I am a great fan of your father's work, Bulma-san, though short-sighted, clinging to his primal ways of tinkering with nuts and bolts, his mind I can acknowledge being as the third smartest person on the planet. Inferior to mine by a wide margin but a close inferior to that of Dr. Gero himself," Dr. Wheelo continued to bleed ego as he postured at the scene of a Bio-Man rushing behind Bulma and taking her hostage.
"Well, that's not necessarily tru…" Bulma was about to argue, even when threatened to have her throat ripped out by a Bio-Man's claw when Muten Roshi intercepted her argument out of worry that the egotistical submarine would order his footmen to do something dark and rash if his shaky ego was questioned in any way.
"Did you come here just to gloat?" Muten Roshi growled. He might not have voiced his frustrations any better but it was hard to think up of something better to say on the fly when one's head was being stepped on by a Bio-Man while a handful more restrained and twisted his limbs preventing him from moving.
"Why no, not yet. The time for gloating shall come when I prove you once and for all that I, Dr. Wheelo, have made a breakthrough in the world of martial arts!" the talking submarine declared, revealing an elongated tail to segment out of an opening in its corpus that extended and scooped Bulma up, hiding her somewhere inside it before it proceeded to do the same with Muten Roshi.
While he did not appreciate being kidnapped off of his own home like that, Muten Roshi preferred being a tight, damp space alongside Bulma rather than being manhandled by a bunch of Bio-Men and being forced to wheeze at sand and struggle against having his joints dislocated all at once. A small monitor descended in front of the two captives from up above them and provided them with some limited lighting. Roshi could feel the submarine taking a plunge and rocketing off into some direction, likely to Wheelo's own headquarters.
"Greetings esteemed martial artists. You find yourselves invited by the smartest man alive – Dr. Wheelo to a challenge of your insignificant lifetimes. Given your thick-skulls, I have taken the luxury of kidnapping you against your will, for you would not otherwise contemplate the supreme importance of your role until it would be too late and your precious, flesh and bone bodies would be rendered useless to my experiment by my ever-loyal Bio-Men."
"Geez, this guy!" Bulma exclaimed, crossing her arms and legs as she pouted at being forced to stare at various blueprints and graphs being displayed on the screen though it was hardly the visual aspect of the show that displeased the young woman.
"I was a man as blessed with genius as I was cursed by it. My intelligence had been so ahead of time that, eventually, my human body had failed to sustain it and I was forced to transfer my most precious and the only relevant asset – my brain, into a more secure and trustworthy containment than the flawed and failing human body. I know that as martial artists you put all of your stocks into your pathetic bodies and while I mock such short-sightedness, this is also the point I intend to prove with this experiment."
"I am not overly fond of this fool myself either but it appears that we are trapped…" Muten Roshi attempted to break out of the cell they were being held tightly in but he couldn't garner enough strength to even leave a dent in it which was odd, given his unnatural strength. "Our only hope is that this Dr. Wheelo keeps it brief."
"In fact, I have chosen the field of martial arts especially because a genius such as myself is in need of a prime body, worthy of hosting an esteemed mind such as my own. At the moment of the failing of my own body, I had limited resources so I was forced to place myself into a mere cyborg body. Dr. Gero did not appear to share my interest in bio-engineering and thought that steel was the only potential successor to flesh and blood which was why I had to settle on allowing my dear assistant Dr. Kochin to do the operation. Yet another reason why I couldn't have been a chooser, I suppose…"
"Ugh… We're getting his whole life story, boy does this guy love to hear himself talk!" Bulma lamented her fate. Something told Roshi that she'd have rather preferred having her head ripped off by a Bio-Man on that beach back there rather than have to listen to this.
"And so, after decades of extensive research and constant breakthroughs in the field of bio-engineering that have all gone uncredited and shunned by the imbecilic scientific community of our time, I submit to you my thesis – a bio-engineered warrior possesses far greater combat potential than any human martial artist of our, or any other time. It is a grand thesis, indeed, and while it is almost self-evident, given how I am a firm supporter of the scientific method, I am forced to seek out all the living champions of the World Martial Arts Tournaments and pit them against my bio-engineered finest! To put it in terms that you nitwits can comprehend, I intend on hosting a tournament of sorts, with the prize being the ultimate honor of hosting the brain of the one and only Dr. Wheelo."
"Given his sense of honor in Kame Island, I wonder just how fair that tournament is going to be…" Muten Roshi ruffled his beard.
"To be fair, I do not expect it to be much of a competition. Given how it is obvious that all of you simpletons are going to be wiped out by my superior Bio-Warriors, it is only a matter of selecting a Bio-Warrior that will be chosen to be the greatest body to fit the most sublime intellect! After all, I have experienced first-hand how pathetic the human body is, its flaws, and its limitations. Bio-Warriors do not age, they do not die of natural causes and they are not plagued by diseases. Though I am getting ahead of time. You will soon have the chance to find out just how meritorious my magnificent warriors are."
"Hmph… Then why did you go ahead and kidnap me too?" Bulma pouted, choosing to completely ignore the video she was being shown.
"I don't think he's hearing you, Bulma, it appears that this is a pre-recorded video…" Muten Roshi pointed out.
"Typical…" Bulma scowled at the screen that had completed its light show and turned off, returning to the compartment which it came from. The corpus of Dr. Wheelo, however, continued in an ocean-splitting rush, building up speed in its journey back to his laboratory where he would soon host his self-hyped event to determine the worthy puppet for his mind to control.