Chi-Chi was the first one to shoot off toward the Muscle Towers. Her task was to take out the Muscle Tower separating the irradiated wasteland laying in between the Sacred Land of Korin and the ruins of the Red Ribbon Army base. Her success was vital to the team's mission because the facility served as a radar jammer and made remote communications and coordinating attacks on the Muscle Towers impossible.
Each tower controlled one troublesome advantage that Android 21 had over the Earth's forces. Coordinating attacks to enable specific methods for attack at the right time was vital to ensuring victory against Artificial Humans. All of that could only be possible if Chi-Chi won here and destroyed the Muscle Tower. Her gut had been rumbling the entire time. She'd have to face off against cybernetic soldiers and heavy warfare machinery and undoubtedly the tower would also be protected by Artificial Human One-Five–the converted remains of the ruthless Taopaipai.
Still, this was a battle she had to win. The only way to reclaim back the peaceful world they once had for her family, a family that would so soon grow just a little larger, was to win here and now. Chi-Chi wondered if she should've just flown to the place, but from what she heard, multiple Muscle Tower facilities ensured that cybernetic drones controlled the air. Memories of fending off Lord Slug's own hi-tech army and how troublesome that was made Chi-Chi want to preserve as much of her strength as possible for the upcoming match. It was specifically because of the importance of that fight.
The road to the Muscle Tower would not be an easy one. The tree line in front of Chi-Chi rumbled and the ancient oak trees began falling to the sides to make way to the sky-scraping battle stations rolling on tank links and armed to the teeth with outward-pointing cannons. With a shine of brilliant, transparent aura around her, Chi-Chi dashed toward the rolling battle station and crashed into its core, popping it like a balloon from pent-up pressure and the sheer force of the collision. The resonating force made many more holes pop out, spewing storms of shrapnel as the damage sought for spots to break loose from.
As the war station exploded in a chain reaction of blasts and collapsed to scrap litter, Chi-Chi blitzed in between the roaming cybernetic soldiers, driving her elbows and knees and taking each of them out in one hit before moving onward. Ahead of her laid a clearing. A wide circle of grasslands that ended in a wall of snowy mountains. Right in front of it, signifying the end of the Sacred Lands, stood a tall tower of a redwood frame and silken cloth stretched over its walls with the top of it being decorated with a merry-go-round that appeared to be off and unmoving.
Seeing the skies drowned out with bots, Chi-Chi launched herself in a spearheaded charge toward the tower. She moved faster than any of the drone radars could track on the ground and ended up right by the doorstep of the Muscle Tower. Without waiting to gather more attention, Chi-Chi drove her foot into the door and rushed in. She may have been a wife and a mother who was willing to pick any fight to help reclaim peace for her sons, but she was also a martial artist trained by the Ox-King and a wife of Son Goku's. Whether or not she liked to admit it, Chi-Chi actually wanted to face the challenges of the Muscle Tower one by one, just like her father and husband would, so the oppression of the skies wasn't that big of a deal to her.
It was just the way she was raised and the way she raised her own family.
With a careful step, without dropping her fighting stance, Chi-Chi advanced through a tall and wide hallway filled with inactive machinery. Her Ki sensory couldn't pick up on a single soul, but she expected that much since her enemies were all machines and Artificial Humans. A turned-off television screen flickered with static before lighting up to reveal a slender man with an entirely robotic head except for his lower jaw and a braid of wires that connected the back of his head to his spine. The man was dressed in a pink Chinese long coat and stood with his arms bent behind his back.
"So, the forces of Chayote Security have finally come into my humble fortress… How inconsiderate of you to wait for so long before giving me a shot for revenge, Chayote…" Android One-Five spoke up.
"Sorry…" Chi-Chi barked back at the screen. "I ain't Chayote. She's got bigger fish to deal with. Your boss, namely."
"W-What!? You mean Chayote didn't even bother coming here? Then what is the whole point of this thing? I thought surely either Chayote or Tenshinhan would come here and present themselves to me! Heck, I'd have even settled for that joker, Mark Satan. He's a bad omen to my reputation as a cold and merciless assassin. The last time we met I thought he'd have surely died, but afro-runt is more resilient than I thought him to be," One-Five growled with his mechanical fist, letting out a grunge with a leathery grind to accompany it.
"Nope, just me…" Chi-Chi kept her guard up while staring right back at the television screen as if waiting for it to come to life and attack her. "I'm here to make sure your radar jamming tech and this tower go down."
"Unbelievable… First, my soldiers desert me, now this…" Artificial Human One-Five stroke his face.
Chi-Chi let her eyes scan the massive garage and storage facility she found herself in only to notice smoking piles of scrap scattered all over. Almost as if someone or something had already cleaned house here. Realizing that she and One-Five were the only living souls in this entire tower, Chi-Chi straightened her back out with a confused look on her face.
"Deserted?" Chi-Chi wondered about that.
"Correct, those disobedient heaps of junk. They wouldn't pay me my service toll. Each soldier I command must pay me fifty billion Zeni at the end of every month, and neither of them paid up. Thus, I've executed them all as deserters," One-Five stated. "And to think that I reduced the price for them because we both worked for the same boss. I used to charge ten billion Zeni for assassination but, adjusted for inflation, that would now make one hundred billion Zeni, meaning that I still charged them half the price."
"I… I don't think that's how employment works…" Chi-Chi scratched her cheek.
"So. You've come here for me to kill you, then. Very good. I have no qualms about killing women and children. Did you bring the one hundred billion Zeni I should kill you for?" One-Five leaned closer to the screen as his red and googly eye expanded to focus better on Chi-Chi's face he saw through the cameras.
"I'm not paying you for my own assassination, you dumbass!" Chi-Chi lashed out. "Even if I had that sort of money, I'd pay it to get Gohan-chan through university!"
"Unbelievable… I'll kill you for this!" One-Five snarled at the camera before smashing a button by his side that Chi-Chi couldn't see. "Seeing how my soldiers have all deserted me, there doesn't appear to be any use of you hiding on that abandoned floor anymore. Come up and confront me then so I can punish you for your cheap skating ways!"
A section of the floor behind Chi-Chi slid back, letting an escalator lower down and begin rolling up to the second floor. Wasting no time, Chi-Chi rushed to the escalator and rode all the way up. In front of her was a floor made of solid jade pieces that stuck in a frame of gold. On the other side of the room was a round staircase platform that led all the way to the third floor. A television screen flickered with static on the leftmost side of the room.
"Behold, challenger, the Jade Tangram Room of Death! When all of my soldiers and cyborgs abandoned my service via me killing them for being cheapskates, I had to redesign my Muscle Tower and I designed each floor as a deadly puzzle. Now, be brave and take a step. When you step on a piece, you can move your hips to move it in the corresponding direction, however, if it's obstructed, you'll plummet to the hot magma below alongside the jade Tangram piece!" One-Five let out a burst of maniacal laughter before coughing up when he saw Chi-Chi climbing the round staircase on the other side in a blink.
"You do realize I can fly, right?" Chi-Chi mumbled to herself.
"Why I ought to…!" One-Five wheezed out, thrashing about in his control panel room. "I can't believe it that traitorous Tenshinhan taught you all the flying technique! I'll kill him for half the usual price for this!"
Upon entering the room on the third floor, Chi-Chi looked around, noticing nothing unusual about this room. It had been filled with old walls that formed a maze out of the room, and there was the usual screen hanging near the control panel by the entryway to the labyrinth.
"I congratulate you on making it to the third floor of the deadly Muscle Tower. Before you lay the impassable labyrinth, so confusing and so intricate that you will stay forever lost on this floor. You should also be wise to beware of the guardian of the labyrinth… Even if you do survive the guardian and the labyrinth itself, you will still have to untangle the key puzzle at the very end. And don't even try to smash through. If you do, you'll activate the acid trap that melts the key to the next floor," One-Five chuckled to himself before hammering his fist down. "And now for the unexpected gas attack!"
Chi-Chi heard a faint hiss coming from the ceiling and floor corners. Chi-Chi rolled her eyes and leaned down, kicking off the ground and charging right through the current floor she was in, the next one and the next one until she landed on the merry-go-round structure of the Muscle Tower around which swarms of troubled drones whirled.
"Wh-What did you do!?" One-Five turned around, reacting to the deafening rumbling of his tower.
"Your puzzles are stupid. I would've beaten your labyrinth by just placing my hand on the left wall and walking by the outer wall and my dad has taught me the Nine Linked Rings puzzle already. Since you wanted to cheat by drowning me in deadly gas, I figured I'd cheat and skip ahead too," Chi-Chi replied before taking a fighting stance.
"Amusing… Also, absolutely infuriating! Then again, I believe the guardian of the labyrinth deserted alongside the rest so it's not that much of a waste," One-Five turned around and took a few bold steps from his control panel before assuming a fighting pose mirroring that of the Taopaipai himself. "It makes my heart bleed that I'll be wasting my skill killing someone for absolutely free. Anyone to put me through such shame deserves to die for it!"
"Something's seriously broken about you…" Chi-Chi lamented with a sigh.
"Of course, I'm not all there, Artificial Human No. 21 had to reassemble me from ashes and dust that Chayote left behind!" One-Five yelled out while soaring through the space between him and Chi-Chi. The two collided in mid-air before turning around each other, exchanging blows without skipping a beat or a single hit each. With their aerial dance concluded, the two parted ways gliding across the merry-go-round fighting stage.
"And because of you, now I won't get a chance at my revenge!" One-Five seethed. He lowered his guard by looking down at his shaking fists and paid for it as, when he looked back up, Chi-Chi was already in his face with a palm strike. The martial artist stepped up with an uppercut palm thrust and sent One-Five rolling in mid-air before transitioning into a double palm strike push that sent him smashing through the control panel and flying outside.
As One-Five split the skies, he crashed through countless drones, sinking them into fireballs that spewed heated scrap in all directions. Seeing the control panel smashed to bits, Chi-Chi smirked. This way, even if her enemy gained the upper hand, she'd know that she had completed her mission. A pulsing shock wave resonated through the merry-go-round peak and the walls of the entire Muscle Tower as Chi-Chi charged toward the enemy.
The two collided in mid-air again. Leaning down with her entire body, Chi-Chi rolled in mid-air with a sweeping kick, but One-Five put his leg up and avoided it. Chi-Chi sent another palm strike uppercut, but her opponent leaned out of the way and began rapidly vanishing, drowning the air out in his afterimages. The female martial artist blew air out from her lungs and closed her eyes. In a snap, she opened them back up and turned around to block One-Five's backhand swing. Chi-Chi vaulted over One-Five to avoid his sweeping slide and then carefully blocked each successive blow of his flurry with her forearms, deflecting them or guiding them away into a lock that One-Five avoided through manipulation of his own body and an inhuman, automated contortion of his joints.
Chi-Chi's vision became blurry when One-Five's elbow dug into her abdomen after an especially devious contortion let him slip out of an arm hold. One-Five shot an uppercut that stretched Chi-Chi's neck out before diving with an elbow shot that sent her plummeting down. Instead of hitting the ground, Chi-Chi slammed straight into One-Five's elbow as the deadly Android floated vertically with another combination of fists and pinches delivered in the signature Crane Style of hand-to-hand combat.
"Your punches feel dull…" One-Five taunted Chi-Chi as she soared into the air after a finishing stroke. The Android vanished and appeared in front of his opponent, swatting her back with a roundhouse kick before assuming his fighting pose again. "Your strikes are blunt and lack the intent to kill and maim your opponent. Whoever taught you martial arts, I'll kill them for making a mockery out of the art of combat."
Chi-Chi salvaged her flight and rubbed the blood off her lip with her wristband. "There is more than one way of fighting. Martial arts can be about many things, not just hurting your opponent."
"Rubbish. The theory and practice of martial arts are the theory and practice of violence. To attack your opponent is to strike to kill them. Your attack must either kill your opponent or make it easier to do so with your follow-up attacks. Anything less than that is garbage martial arts," One-Five dismissed the idea, drowning the air in his afterimages as he moved in for the maiming and the killing.
Chi-Chi reacted with a roundhouse, but her opponent wasn't where she thought him to be. Afterimage was such a deadly technique when used by an Android. Usually one could have used Ki sensory to trace their opponent's correct location, but an Android was utterly untraceable, making each use of this technique just a deadly gamble. One-Five's fist smashed into Chi-Chi's jaw, flinching her and leaning her back with the entire upper half of her body.
Another sharp dig into Chi-Chi's gut bent her up like a folding chair before One-Five hammered his fist down and sent the woman crashing down to the grassland field below. A sharp snapping noise colored the sky. One-Five appeared from behind Chi-Chi with an elbow smash and sent her careening aside instead of straight down. The Android assassin vanished once more, appearing in front of where Chi-Chi was going, and delivered a Snake Style pinch at Chi-Chi's throat before overwhelming her with a brutal flurry of fists and hammering her back down with a chop at the back of Chi-Chi's neck.
"Oh well, maybe my skills will not be completely wasted on this…" One-Five shrugged while warming up and playfully stretching out. The Android assassin cracked his neck and knuckles and assumed a fighting pose again. "If I can remove another sloppy martial artist making a mockery out of the art of killing, that's a worthy reward on its own. Second best to Zeni, in fact."
"I told you already…" Chi-Chi stood up with wobbly legs and wiped the blood off her lips and nose. Her eyelids felt heavy and a taste of blood lingered in her mouth. "There's more than one way of being a martial artist. It is the martial artist that defines their martial art and not the other way around. Just like it's up to a family to define their love for one another instead of chasing some standards or rules that someone else set for them."
"I should have shut your mouth when I had the chance…" One-Five replied. "Hearing you talk such hogwash will give my brain a short circuit."
One-Five vanished, appearing in front of Chi-Chi. He threw a stout fist her way. Chi-Chi locked it by the wrist but her opponent swiftly pulled it out, leaving his forearm in Chi-Chi's grip as he unsheathed a vibrating blade with a laser edge to it and thrust it into Chi-Chi's solar plexus. Chi-Chi gasped as a feeling of weightlessness took over her body. One-Five tilted his impaled opponent over his head as the barrel of his hollowed-out cybernetic arm lit up with a golden shine at the other end of the barrel.
The cruel Android let out a resonant battle cry as the ground underneath his feet ruptured, collapsing into a myriad of fissures that swallowed the dirt and grass alike into their abyssal depths and offered only spouts of magma in return. The collapsing ground even gobbled up the entire Muscle Tower in a landslide as a beaming Super Dodonpa took off from the other end of One-Five's barrel, engulfing Chi-Chi and beaming out into space where it disintegrated a few measly meteors passing by in the vicinity before stretching out and letting the cold oblivion of space snuff its overwhelming energy out.
Seeing Chi-Chi still hanging on his blade, smoldering with her dress torn up, covered in bruises, and drenched with blood, One-Five swiped his cybernetic hand and tossed the woman aside to flop on the ground while he picked his forearm back and secured it over his blade.
One-Five turned around to see the destruction that unleashing his full-powered Super Dodonpa has caused to the surrounding land. He even took a moment to lament the loss of his Muscle Tower. The Android assassin sighed and bent his arms behind his back as he began looking around for something to fly to West City on. He needed to speak to Android 21 about being assigned a new base and a new platoon of soldiers that were actually programmed to pay their dues to him as their employer.
"Hmm… On the other hand…" One-Five turned around and looked down at the lifeless woman that stared at the murky skies with a blank stare. "I've accidentally spared far too many enemies already. I don't want another witness like that oaf Mark Satan spreading the word of my inadequacy of finishing the job."
One-Five hopped up to Chi-Chi and kicked her in the side, sending her flopping over into the nearest fissure and into the hole that led to bubbling magma down below. A swoop of air blanked out One-Five in shock as a platoon of rabble-rousers passed right through him. One of them dived into the abyss and pulled the battered woman out by her hand before flinging her aside onto the grass again.
"What on Earth…?" One-Five's expression twisted with wrath. "Just how many freebies does Artificial Human 21 expect me to pull here!? Whoever you are, I demand that you pay me your one trillion Zeni right now so I can proceed to kill all of you! That's right, a trillion, your transgressions here have raised the price!"
"Seriously, lady?" a burly Saiyan grunt looked down at Chi-Chi's limp body sprawled out on the ground. "You got done in by a joker like that? Aren't you the wife of Kakarot, a Super Saiyan? The guy trained us up to conquer the universe after dealing with Frieza…"
"Who said… Anything about… Getting done in?" Chi-Chi's coughing and husky voice made the burly and balding Saiyan barbarian twist his face with an apish grin as the martial artist rose back on her feet and took a shaky fighting stance.
"Damn, Kakarot's got a fine taste in women. Thanks for disabling that radar jammer for us, lady. We're off to rampage and pull apart some machines," another Saiyan with just one functional eye pointed behind him.
"Take a hike then and break a leg. This guy's more than you can handle anyway," Chi-Chi panted out, glad to have a breather in between the beatings. She'll need to push the King Kai's Fist to the limit to keep up with an opponent that's on the world of power alongside Super Saiyans.
"Eh, you're probably right…" the mountain of muscle who did Chi-Chi a solid rubbed the back of his head before the entire squad of Saiyans took off in various directions to cause general mayhem and wreck some cybernetic warriors and heavy machinery. "Don't get yourself killed now," he barked out right while flying away.