Chayote and Nam were speeding along the skyline side by side. When Chayote reached out to Nam with a promise of an endless regular supply of food and water with an armed escort in exchange for his aid, she wasn't sure what to expect. She soundly beat the guy during the 21st World Martial Arts Tournament and has heard little from him since. There were no guarantees that he'd be able to hold off anyone from the infected bunch for any amount of time at all.
And yet he appeared calm and confident that he was up for the task. He certainly had that cool sage look going for him with a greying beard and a slight increase in body mass, yet Chayote couldn't sense much in terms of Ki that was emanating from him. Even if she assumed Nam was suppressing his energy as she told him to, he felt much weaker than what Chayote remembered during their first bout, which left only the impressive looks and confidence to sell Chayote on Nam.
The problem was that she was short on hands right now. Just like she had discounted the martial artist from a poor desert village, so would Baby and his parasites. If Nam told her he would help her, Chayote trusted his word. Nam wasn't the kind of fighter who would foolishly get into fights he didn't belong in.
Just like clockwork, a sharp and high-pitched snap halted their advance with Yamcha using his Instant Transmission maneuver to appear right in front of the pair of fighters and intercept them halfway to God's Temple. Unlike the rest, Yamcha didn't need to fly up to Chayote and, apparently, given the fact that they were on the same planet, even if Chayote suppressed her Ki, Yamcha could still pick up on it, eventually.
"I'm leaving it to you," Chayote turned to Nam who nodded with a wholly confident look despite being face-to-face with Yamcha.
"Do you truly believe I'll just let you slip away?" Yamcha smirked, reaching for his forehead with his index and middle fingers.
"Your opponent now… Shall be me," Nam proclaimed, having blinked straight up to Yamcha and secured a firm hold on Yamcha's wrist that let Yamcha reach for his forehead no further. Before Yamcha could even register the shock of how fast someone as weak as Nam could move, Nam thrust his fist deep into Yamcha's gut and made the martial artist stagger back with bulged-out eyes and furiously blowing air out from his smashed abdomen. In just a handful of seconds it took for Yamcha to deal with the temporary flinch, Chayote had already been far away.
"Damn, tracking her signature would demand concentration. I guess you won't let me just stand still and concentrate, will you?" Yamcha sighed, abandoning any hopes of catching up to Chayote and turning to Nam.
"Chayote is a very crafty woman. She planned for you to be able to appear right here in an instant and asked that I accompany her until you make yourself known to us. She even knew that despite being ordered to capture her son, you would become desperate enough to hunt for her once it became clear what we were doing. Now it is too late for you to catch either of them. As I've said before, your opponent is me," Nam put his arm in front of him in a praying pose while closing his eyes and brimming with internal focus.
"Heh, I don't think we've ever fought before. You've fought Krillin during the 21st World Martial Arts Tournament and faced off against Tenshinhan during the preliminaries in the following one. Sorry to tell you this, but you're way too far behind us to where I would be even remotely interested in fighting you," Yamcha teased the strangely confident sage fighter. "It shows how desperate Chayote is if she's contacting the likes of you."
Nam charged forward, thrusting an open palm strike and forcing Yamcha to soar above the desert village fighter. Yamcha thought he kept a tight track of his opponent, but Nam surprised him by appearing directly behind Yamcha unexpectedly and chopping the back of Yamcha's neck. Yamcha grunted in pain, spitting up as his eyes rolled back and the cocky fighter began plummeting down from the sky and crashed down with a thunderous crack into a grassy wasteland.
The turban-wearing sage fighter descended in a praying position with a graceful tap of his bare feet on the ground. Grumbling, Yamcha peeled himself off the ground and shook his fist at Nam. The humbled warrior had red swelling stretching out across his face.
"That's it!" he barked out. "I'm done holding back and not taking this seriously. You're through!"
"It was a foolish decision to take me lightly solely because you cannot see my strength. Physical senses are so often fooled," Nam replied.
Yamcha dashed across the battlefield with a high vertical kick but Nam leaned under it, with a smirk and a malicious glint in his eyes, the warrior who started out as a lowly desert bandit used Instant Transmission to position himself back on the ground and directly in front of Nam at which point he repeated the high kick but Nam slipped with a turning step to the side. Yamcha grunted in pain when Nam thrust a jab into his side before expelling a violent explosive wave that threw Nam across the battlefield.
Having reset the engagement to a blank slate, Yamcha used Instant Movement to rush his particles instantaneously toward Nam, accumulating infinite weight behind his rear horse kick but Nam crossed his arms out and took the brunt of the blow, skidding backward with his expression refusing to sell the pain he was feeling from having a bundle of particles accelerated to infinite, instantaneous speed crashing into him all at once.
"H-How!" Yamcha barked out. "How did you become so strong in such a short time!? I assume you've kept up with your training, that's a given, but mere training shouldn't be able to cover the difference between the training I've been doing and mere exercising!"
Nam overwhelmed his baffled opponent with a barrage of bare-footed kicks before thrusting both his hands out to slam them into Yamcha's chest and send him flying away to crash into a faraway mountain and make it collapse into a rocky mess with dust clouds that reached the skies.
"A few years ago, the metal men took the world over. They hunted and captured our villagers, but they didn't exterminate us. They made all of us less reliant on water and food, strong enough to shape the desert ground around us. They've begun terraforming processes and extended vast networks of roads to deliver us all the wares from faraway cities. While I resisted the forced nature of their metallic conquest, I was too weak to protect my home and was taken by them. When all the metal men were defeated, different city folks came into our village. They offered to restore those turned into metal-men back to humans. I asked if they could only do part of that work," Nam explained. "I couldn't live being powerless in protecting my home again, so I kept the limitless stamina heart of the metal men."
"Hmph… So, you took the same deal that Bardock did. Then, I guess, being part-Android and having infinite stamina to train as long as you like and push yourself as hard as you want can't hurt either…" Yamcha wiped the trace of blood off his lip with the back of his hand. "That damned Saiyan struck gold crawling to you with her plight for help."
Yamcha used Instant Transmission to transport himself high into the sky, then plunged down diagonally with his feet pointed down like a bird of prey by using Instant Movement. Once again, Nam crossed his arms and leaned forward, unable to compete with instantaneous speed but possessing a hardened enough cross-arm attack to answer even Yamcha's Instant Movement strikes.
Vaulting to the front, Nam caught up to Yamcha as he was dashing backward and thrust his fist into Yamcha's gut, then dashed forward in pursuit. Yamcha reached for his forehead, transmitting himself away from danger, but Nam's senses were too sharp and the desert warrior shocked Yamcha with a surprise appearance from right behind him and another blow to the ribs. From a point-blank range, Nam breathed in with deep, spiritual focus and exhaled a Kiai shockwave that send Yamcha crashing through several mossy rocks and left him flattened on the rocky grassland further back.
"Chayote said she needs time. Apparently, any amount of time is fine, but I'll make you sleep for ten days just to be sure!" Nam declared, taking it to the skies and taking aim at his fallen and writhing opponent. Unlike before, when Nam could only ascend to around a dozen meters into the air, now he ascended into the lower atmosphere before crossing his arms and turning down. "Heavenly Cross-Arm Fist!" he chanted out before falling toward Yamcha at full speed to where a golden tunneling heatwave of re-entry formed around him and the cross-arm dive resulted in a vicious explosion that reduced the rocky wasteland to a dour and gray mess and covered the skies with ash clouds that spat rain out.
"The metal men gave me the power to call forth favor from the heavens when gods would show us no mercy and plague us with drought! This is the heavenly cross-arm dive that makes the heavens cry with rain and their tears sustain our lives!" Nam declared with a clenched fist. "Truth be told, we do not need food or water from Chayote. But I feel grateful to her and all her friends I've met for setting me on the path that would make all this possible. Had it not been for my mad journey to the city to fight for water for my village, I would have never reached the level where I could call down water from the heavens themselves with my own strength."
Yamcha laid sprawled out with his eyes rolled back, covered in bruises, and with a dirty uniform that was torn and burnt in a few places from the explosive landing that hit him straight in the face. Getting held back by Nam of all people was the last thing he expected to happen, and yet, even he was forced to lay low and writhe in misery for a few seconds before rising with a heavy rub against his head and a painful cough.
"Incredible!" Nam exclaimed in surprise. "My Cross-Arm Dive should put anyone to sleep for ten whole days. My Heavenly Cross-Arm Fist should never be used against another person, but even if used against a powerful martial artist, it should put them to sleep for 1001 day."
"Don't think I'll let you humiliate me by defeating me after everything I went through to become this strong!" Yamcha barked out with a painful wheeze of a crushed throat. "This is no longer a matter of getting past you and stopping Chayote or kidnapping her baby, this is a matter of martial artist's pride for me. If I cannot even defeat you, if I cannot even draw your blood, I will never be fit enough to serve Baby-sama!"
"King Kai's Fist X50!" Yamcha hunkered down with his fists clenched tightly, bursting with a vivid crimson aura outlined with a pink shine and creating a static field of rose-colored electricity around him. Nam's eyes widened in awe at how quickly the opponent he had a firm handle on scaled completely out of control by simply multiplying his Ki by fifty in a split instant.
"Instant Movement X50!" Yamcha grunted out, creating a shatter point of both light and sound that left trails of hypnotic, otherworldly sights of ruptured dimensional rifts behind him while Yamcha threw himself forward at a speed exceeding infinity exactly fifty times, breaking through the boundaries of what was possible and real. Like a bleeding wound, the three-dimensional reality sifted into the lacerated rifts and covered them up, but Yamcha had long since charged at Nam.
"The metal-men gave me the power to…" Nam was still delivering his cathartic speech when Yamcha's foot hit him square in the face, sending him flying. Yamcha disassembled each of his particles and sent them soaring at logic-defying speed toward his opponent, arriving at his intended location before he even left. That was the only way for the shattered reality to justify Yamcha's ludicrous fighting speed.
The scarred martial artist appeared above Nam high in the skies where they started their fight, slamming his arm down like a wolf's paw and raking a bleeding wound across Nam's chiseled chest, tearing through his traditional village robe. Hopping instantaneously from place to place while arriving at the intended location just a moment earlier, Yamcha kept up his surreal beatdown by thrusting his arm into Nam's gut and opening a terrible gash of red, then making his right hand blur into a dozen snake-style thrusts that all co-existed in the same moment in time simultaneously because of the mind-melding way that Instant Movement meshed with the King Kai's Fist.
Yamcha slammed his left hand with a backhand to Nam's jaw before sweeping his opponent's legs, then stepped in with a backhanded thrust to Nam's chest and kicked his opponent upward. By the time Nam flew into the air, the downpour he had created with his Heavenly Cross-Arm Fist was already gone. Or rather, it never happened. High in the troposphere, Yamcha kept switching between his amped Instant Movement and ordinary, human speed, creating a sensation that he was hitting Nam repeatedly with the same strikes by punching or kicking him, then setting up Instant Movement X50 and punching and kicking Nam again before the previous flurry even connected.
Realizing that his opponent was bloodied and bruised and barely resisted the beatdown anymore, Yamcha slammed his elbow to the back of Nam's head and sent him crashing down before activating his Instant Movement and appearing on the ground with a Wolf Fang Fist ready. Each fist of the rush attack delivered at instantaneous speed before he thrust the weight of his entire body's particles with Instant Movement and flattened Nam with a tunneling concussive shockwave that spread from the entire planet as if Earth was a mere comet with the shockwave serving as its tail, threatening to boost the planet on a collision course with the Sun from the backlash of the force of the impact.
Twitching and overwhelmed, Nam collapsed to the ground while Yamcha stared down at his broken opponent. The eyes that stared with a brutal and sadistic glint just now widened when Nam's shaking arms began the fruitless venture of putting him back up on his feet.
"You're a hopeless fool!" Yamcha seethed. "Can't you see? By activating King Kai's Fist X50 and combining it with the Instant Movement, I defy reality itself and attack at a moment preceding the moment of attack. I effectively move not at instantaneous speed, but at negative speed! That means that any strain King Kai's Fist X50 puts on my body is undone by my defiance of the natural passage of time. By hopping to the moment before I gamble on the…"
Before Yamcha could finish this sentence, his vision became blurry and the scarlet boom of King Kai's Fist snuffed out around him. Yamcha's muscles broke down so intensely that their collapse was clearly audible from outside with a blood-chilling, grinding churn and a cacophony of tearing tendons and flesh. Yamcha coughed blood out and collapsed on his knee, panting, as he couldn't make out a second of clear vision to help him understand what his body was going through.
"The heights you've climbed to… Truly defy all explanation," Nam grunted with a grave, panting grind of his voice. "It does indeed seem that… For a brief time… The natural progression of time and the rules of speed… As we understand it… Do not apply to you. However… By letting your heart beat once more, you submit to the passage of time once again, forcing the accumulated drawbacks of your technique upon your exiled from the rules of linear time body once again. It appears that fate is… Inevitable. At some point, you have to stop, let your heart beat, and accept the consequences of your own strength."
A slight cackle came from Yamcha's side while he lay on one knee, feeling like the gravitational pull of the Earth was too alluring to resist, and Nam stood clutching his shattered ribs and clenching his ravaged and severely bleeding abdomen. Even if Yamcha turned his sweaty head up with a dull and tormented stare, Nam recognized a sense of triumph in it.
"I hate the thought of winning this way but… I don't really have much choice!" Yamcha barked out, vomiting out a mouthful of blood on the ground and shocking Nam with the full extent of injury his opponent went through. However, the alarming amount of blood revealed itself to be more than just that–what masked itself as just an ordinary gulp of blood soon thickened into a reflective, metallic, jasmine-colored, mercury-like mass.
The wobbly and malleable mass expanded and thrust itself at Nam, who, in terms, spread his arms out and formed an electrified energy field around himself and let the parasite knock against it and fry from the massive output of energy.
"So, this was the parasite that Chayote warned us about," Nam panted, collapsing to one knee from the strain that erecting the barrier so quickly and unexpectedly put him through. Neither of the pair appeared to be in much condition to keep on fighting. "Could this mean that… Yamcha is free of the evil that's possessed him?" Nam pondered out loud.
"Tsk… Damn it… I can't believe he incinerated the parasite! It will take forever to grow it to that size again! Damn you! In this state, I can't even use Instant Transmission to halt Chayote! I'm sorry, Baby-sama, I've failed you!" Yamcha collapsed on his front, writhing on the ground, and panting hard enough to pick up compact clouds of dust upon each breath he exhaled.
Seeing his opponent powerless before him, Nam's own legs buckled, having the desert village warrior to fall flat on his back and pass out. He came here warned that this would more likely than not be a suicide mission and yet he has challenged his impossible odds and come out with a double knockout. Given the stakes and the chances for success, an outcome such as this was a pure victory.