"Hmph, you should have just gone hot-dipping and accepted your death. You're making me work overtime without my pay," One-Five grumped out at Chi-Chi while the battered combatant stretched out and returned to her fighting pose.

Wrapping into a living cannonball, One-Five soared through the sky, forcing Chi-Chi to put up a block, but a dark barrier of Ki shimmered around One-Five mid-flight. Not even with her most stout defenses could Chi-Chi handle the crackling crash of her rolling opponent enveloped with the Android Barrier. Chi-Chi flew out from the blast zone and the surrounding cloud of dust and debris while One-Five charged out in pursuit.

A trail of vapor began streaming from Chi-Chi's cheeks, elbows and knees before it turned into a violent aura of scarlet, and the female martial artist corrected her airborne position. She thrust her foot up, kicking One-Five aside like a ball of rags before vanishing after him. Appearing right beside her airborne opponent as he reached the peak of his flight, Chi-Chi drove her knee into One-Five's back as he floated horizontally. Whirling around, the martial artist delivered a multitude of chops across the body of the Artificial Human, then leaned with her entire body to drive both of her fists into his chest and send One-Five flying backward.

Snapping in front of him, Chi-Chi repeated her leaning double-strike before turning around with her entire body to drive her elbow into One-Five's gut. A soaring roundhouse kick as the woman once again turned around like a buzzer left One-Five rolling vertically in mid-air while Chi-Chi thrust her palms and whipped her legs, putting her entire body to work. With her single heartbeat of King Kai's Fist clocking in, Chi-Chi concluded the rush down with a backflip kick that hooked her foot over One-Five's chin and flipped him over, leaving the Android crashing back down into the hectic piece of hell he had left of the landscape.

One-Five grunted in pain, thrusting out his feet and expelling a mighty puff of flames from his boots. Once the wave of fire washed across the grassland, leaving it barren alongside the spews of magma bursting from the underground fissures, One-Five threw his head up to track his opponent. Instead of from above, Chi-Chi appeared from the side, crashing her elbow into One-Five's jaw with a thunderous boom that dislocated the almost tore off the leftover Taopaipai's chin from the Artificial Human and left it dangling awkwardly while Chi-Chi beat down her opponent from the depths of her heart, finishing the beat down with an elbow smash into One-Five's gut that left the Android spewing oil and collapsing on his knees.

"This... This is Son Goku's move..." One-Five huffed and panted, trying to scrounge up to his feet to defend against an oncoming Super Kamehameha from above, as Son Goku employed such a combination in the past against Piccolo. One-Five's rush to counter a move that Puri & Co had all data on proved futile, however, as Chi-Chi didn't vanish over One-Five's head to deliver her finishing touch.

Instead, the martial artist crossed her arms up and expelled a powerful Kiai wave from her entire body, making it surge and expand beyond the limits of an Explosive Energy Wave that Piccolo or Vegeta might have employed. Chi-Chi's Kiai burst was so powerful that it even lit up with azure energy, instead of being purely invisible as the shock wave from her explosive Super Kiai Burst enveloped the entire area, delivering all the destruction and boom of a Super Kamehameha, albeit in a different method.

When the dust cleared out, only a single, round platform of charred stone stood atop a bubbling ocean of magma. One-Five laid flat on his back, puffing out smoke as the air he had reserved in his lungs after forgetting to breathe before began escaping his chest the only way it knew how. One-Five's traditional long coat outfit got torn up to cinders, revealing baggy, white trousers and extensive cybernetic augmentations and plating covering his entire body.

"Stumbled yourself onto a bit of a second wind, haven't you?" One-Five wheezed out while writhing on the ground for a few moments and scrounging his battered body back on his knees. It took One-Five more than a handful of seconds to return to his feet and assume his fighting pose once again.

"It doesn't matter if you're as powerful as a Super Saiyan. Martial arts are deep and full of secrets that allow even ordinary humans to ascend to that level if they work hard enough. All that you Artificial Humans did was jump a few steps ahead of us but skipping all those steps of the martial artist's journey has its costs. I've become accustomed to fighting with King Kai's Fist and if I crank it up high enough, even I can keep up with a Super Saiyan but it takes guts and perseverance of a thousand battles to temper one's body to withstand such a method. This is the experience that you Androids lack," Chi-Chi claimed, having used the time in between her response to her attempted murder and One-Five's return to form to polish up her fighting stance and keep her legs from quivering due to fatigue.

"Even if your fists pack the wallop you've been missing earlier, you still don't have the killer instinct necessary to seal your opponent's fate," One-Five pushed his dislocated jaw to where a couple of bolts automatically screwed into its side and reattached it. Once he was back to his feet and ready to continue, One-Five grabbed hold of his forearm and snickered with a malicious grin lingering in his expression. "You've shown me great kindness in letting me stand back up. Make no mistake, this was a folly and it won't be one that I'll share with you. Man, woman or child, standing or prone, front or behind, armed or using my bare hands, a martial artist will seize any opportunity to strike their opponent down!"

With a crude yank, One-Five dislodged his cybernetic forearm off of his right hand and then extended it toward Chi-Chi. The woman sharpened her stance and kept her wits about her, but the display of flashy marbles decorating the empty barrel ring of One-Five's right cybernetic arm surprised her. The marbles began hurling toward Chi-Chi as if fired from their open compartments. The back of One-Five's cybernetic arm fumed with hydraulic expulsions as it kept on spewing decorated ivory-colored marbles at the woman from a standing position.

Chi-Chi chose the path of wisdom and security, engaging her King Kai's Fist in a blink as she shot in staticky, lightning-shaped trajectory, evading these marbles like the plague. With each of them detonating with a blinding flash and a lung-rattling blare, Chi-Chi realized she took the right choice in not treating these explosives as something trivial. These rivaled the hi-tech spacecraft cannons meant to deal with entire space stations and ripped through their shields and extraterrestrial, adamantine materials in moments.

"King Kai Fist x 50!" Chi-Chi clenched her fists by her side, preparing for her counterattack as the crimson aura around her turned into a vibrant pillar that let out a bright flash all the way into space and parted the cottony shroud lingering above the battlefield in the atmosphere. With a snap of his fingers, One-Five detached his left forearm, two, slitting out a slick slicer he used to impale Chi-Chi on before and readied himself for an impending close-distance beat down.

Chi-Chi blinked in right up in her opponent's face. One-Five slashed with his blade. Its laser edge beamed red, but Chi-Chi was no longer where One-Five wanted to slice her to ribbons at. The woman turned around with a roundhouse kick from behind her opponent. One-Five thrust his laser sword into the charred platform, which led to its collapse and vaulted over his head, shoving his right arm into his detached right forearm piece and then offering his right arm for a blocking motion. One-Five exclaimed a painful grunt as the force of impact sent him flying.

The blazing martial artist dashed all the way across the space separating the two fighters in a beam of red that split through the magma showers and the clouds over the head alike, throwing a high jump kick which collided with One-Five's laser sword and engaged into a struggle with it. Despite One-Five's best attempts at cutting Chi-Chi's leg off, the sparking engagement ended with the tip of his blade flying off somewhere and his laser edge dying out.

Chi-Chi whipped a flurry of palm strikes One-Five's way, but the past life of the famed assassin Taopaipai instilled the artificial warrior with the technical skill to answer the crazed offensive of the enemy. Despite the profound skill of One-Five, Chi-Chi began turning her body around and jabbing with leaning backhand strikes so quickly that for a moment it seemed like her whole essence became just a mirage-like blur and that multiple martial artists were attacking One-Five at once. One at a time, then several, then the whole incoming barrage, One-Five began taking nasty shots that flinched him and opened him up for the leftover beat down of Chi-Chi's heartbeat.

For the rest of that single heartbeat, the Artificial Human was at the complete mercy of his opponent. Chi-Chi jabbed over and over repeatedly, turning and leaning in with modified Snake Style thrusts that One-Five himself sometimes employed alongside the Crane Style. Chi-Chi whirled like a crimson hurricane and twirled in up to close distance, thrusting her elbow into One-Five's gut with so much force that the blazing King Kai's Fist aura transitioned through the strike into a destructive beam-shaped energy wave that filtered through One-Five's abdomen and beamed out to cause booming devastation in the outer Sacred Land of Korin area.

"Wide open, now's my chance..." Chi-Chi muttered to herself, braving herself up to keep pressing onward. She needed all the self-hyping that she could get as that last King Kai's Fist x 50 pushed her already battered and bruised body to its edge. She wasn't fully sure if she could keep up with another heartbeat like that, but she had to take that shot because letting One-Five recover now would have meant him abusing his oppressive advantage of limitless stamina and finishing her off for sure.

"King Kai's Fist x 50!" Chi-Chi yelled out, feeling veins bulging out all over her body as her muscles gargled and twitched with an inner pressure that threatened to tear them apart at any point and drown her from the inside with blood of her own torn muscles and burst blood vessels.

"Just like each family determines its own way of living, each martial artist determines their own way of fighting! There is no good or bad way to live a martial artist's life, as long as you're devoted to it and work hard every living day!" Chi-Chi said the words that her soul needed to stabilize her shaky body state and keep her in the game.

One-Five scrounged to recover and defend himself, but his opponent just hopped once, kicking off of an invisible air pillow, and utterly vanished without a trace. Afterimages began washing in and out from all directions and One-Five carefully scoped each incoming attacker to determine if they were dangerous or not. The distraction kept him working long enough to completely fail to notice that Chi-Chi had vanished over his head and placed her index and middle fingers of both her hands on the center of her forehead as an emerald crackle formed around her fingertips. The booming energy of the King Kai Fist turned it blood-red before the energy beam took off, racing toward her opponent.

"Nice try..." One-Five dashed back as an energy reading began counting upward and alerting him to a troublesome Ki signature over his head, despite his sensory input lagging. The beam went off and separated the oceans of magma, missing One-Five entirely.

"It won't work...!" Chi-Chi declared as she turned her head to the side and scanned through the void, which she missed her enemy by. One-Five's red goggles began counting numbers up while his expression changed to absolute terror as the bolstered energy beam sliced him into two and left the twitching Artificial Human plummeting all the way down into the magma storm below. The glow in his eyes vanished long before he hit the rustling waves.

The King Kai Fist aura around Chi-Chi snuffed out like a flame in a room which one deprived of all oxygen. The martial artist couldn't help herself but let out a pitiful moan as a wave of pain pulsed through her entire body, centering all the way up to her head that seemed like it was trying to split itself apart. No matter how hard Chi-Chi tried to engage in flight, her body just wouldn't listen. Just as the heat of the bubbling, fiery death below began washing over Chi-Chi's cheek, a pure and white beam washed over her from above and granted her the welcome gift of weightlessness.

The scooping draw of whatever had engulfed Chi-Chi drew the woman out like a noodle and scooped her all the way from the rundown area of the western continent to the massive Capsule Corps Star landing pod. Bulma's face greeted confused Chi-Chi on the monitor long before Chi-Chi could fathom what had just happened and deal with the fact that for a second she's been stretched out like a living spaghetti and became one with solid rays of light.

"That was some light show you put up. I've sent Trunks to pick you up. He'll take you to someplace where the Capsule Corps Star can treat your injuries. Vegeta's boy-band let me know you're pretty banged up..." Bulma sighed in relief after seeing Chi-Chi safely sprawled out in the beaming dock while Trunks rushed to pick her up. "Us mothers have to look out for one another, right?" Bulma winked at the monitor. Chi-Chi didn't even fully register what was going on, but she just blinked slowly and nodded out of the social instinct.

*****

"I've gotta say..." Krillin snickered, rubbing the back of his head. "I feel a whole lot safer than usual going with you guys. I rarely get to take part in the main attraction bouts, you know."

"What are you talking about? Didn't you fight Frieza?" Chayote turned back with an expression of bafflement.

"Fight is a strong word..." Krillin rubbed his nose with an insecure chuckle. "We all did our best, but it didn't amount to too much."

"No way, you should take more credit. It gave us more time to get ourselves together and win!" Goku objected, sounding fully serious. "Let's just get ourselves together and do our best now too!"

"Hmph... It would've been just fine if you stayed with Gohan and Dende and watched the God's Temple," Piccolo said with certain demonic indifference to Krillin's efforts. The Ultimate Namekian looked down at his own hands, clutching his fists together and releasing them like a stretching exercise a few times. "If only I had the time to fully recover from the rot that Dr. Puri left behind on Planet Namek, I could've beaten all the Androids packed together with one arm behind my back."

"Whoa... You mean your current power ain't even your best?" Goku shrieked out. "Even now, I'm getting the shivers sensing you out and you ain't even warmed up yet."

"That's right, I've become one with every Namekian survivor. That way, I've become the ultimate Namekian warrior, far beyond the realm of even a Super Namekian's world of power. It's just that the damage that Dr. Puri did to the Namekian people all transferred to me as well. It might take whole years for me to completely recover from it and reach my full potential," Piccolo replied, looking like he wasn't kidding even the tiniest bit by expressing his confidence in his newfound raw power.

"Wow... Everyone's gotten crazy strong..." Krillin whined out, looking down at the suburban scenery shifting underneath the party homing straight at the heart of Dr. Puri's establishment looking to kick her off her seat of power and devastate her stranglehold over the entire Earth. "Me and Yamcha trained a bunch, but I haven't fused with every living human on Earth if you catch my drift."

"You downplay your skill too much, Krillin," Chayote stated calmly. "I can sense a lot more power in you than you'd get from just flexing inside of a gravity chamber. You've done some secret training, both you and Yamcha, right?"

"Well... It's not as much of secret training. It kind of proved to be a disappointment since we didn't have the time to master all the techniques the locals of Planet Yardrat were showing us. I feel like it was a colossal flop. They weren't all that strong and their training was just flat out weird..." Krillin scratched the back of his neck.

"Well, we could surely use whatever you've learned in battle. So far, Mr. Satan's reports mention nothing about Androids 17 and 18, nor Bardock, so Puri likely kept them on a tight leash to protect her," Chayote pointed out.

"I want to deal with my dad," Goku declared with an expression that changed from merely being serious to flat-out dire. "Whatever Puri did to him, I know I can talk or beat some sense back into him."

"That's too bad. I'd have wanted to fight your father one more time and settle our previous score," Piccolo sighed. "Though I suppose there'll be plenty of time for that after we undo whatever brainwashing Puri put him through."

"G-Guys... What's that?" Krillin pointed at a pair of humanoid shapes hanging in mid-air.

"17 and 18..." Chayote said, gritting her teeth as the entire team stopped in the presence of Android 21's favorite pair of lapdogs. While their level of power that Chayote recalled from having clashed against them before was nothing alarming, their infinite stamina would've made things troublesome even now.

"If it isn't Chayote and Son Goku..." Lapis said with a subtle smirk, his arms crossed and looking like he wasn't here to duke out at all. "Just the duo we want to tangle with the most!"

"As if..." Piccolo grumbled out, stretching his neck and wrists out. "Those two have better things to do. Krillin, since you're shaking your legs, you can take the woman on. I'll handle the bratty dirtbag myself."

"W-Wait... Why did you have to go on deciding that..." Krillin's lips quivered as he trembled in front of the completely apathetic-looking woman in front of him. "Oh well, I suppose I have to fight either of them, so fighting a girl might not be the worst thing..."

"Hm... You're funny," Lazuli chuckled, running her hand through her hair. "Maybe I'll drag your broken body back to the lab and convert you into my personal pet."