"Ten-san!" Chiaotzu let out a yelp though his friend continued looking on over the peaks of the mountain range ahead. He had chosen a flat mountaintop for the battleground and the Saiyans appeared to have followed right after.

"Yeah, I know..." Tenshinhan closed his eyes, tracking the motion of the appearing Saiyans through his other senses, hearing the long hair of one of the Saiyans rustling in the wind, the taps of their boots as the Saiyans landed behind him only to be faced by Upa and Chiaotzu.

"Do you think any of these are Kakarot?" Taro looked at Tora who just scratched his head.

"We don't know how what the runt looks like but... This pale guy looks like a ghost, that bald guy has three eyes and that guy might be Kakarot though his power level is too puny even for a low-class Saiyan warrior. Tough luck..." Tora shook his head to himself and shrugged.

"To think that Earthlings could possess power levels as high as 9200 and that this power level wouldn't even belong to Kakarot..." Taro growled out frustrated. "We should just transform and squash these fools. Maybe Bardock had better luck and he found his brat already?"

"We can't do that. We need to make this a little bit difficult on us or else we might not succeed in our coup. That's just fine, if we work together we can take the 9200 guy down, let's see..." Tora turned on his scouter to scan through the power levels of the enemy to determine which one of them was the most powerful. "The one with the highest battle power is the three-eyed one. The pale vermin looks pretty dangerous too but we should be able to take him and that Earthling with girly hair is a complete weakling."

"I see. So you have come for Son Goku," Tenshinhan stated, finally opening all three of his eyes and acknowledging the enemy. "You need his power for some cosmic coup of yours, do you?"

"Shit, that three-eyed bastard's been listening in on us!" Taro threw his fist out and shook it, threatening Tenshinhan's nosy behavior.

"Who cares, none of them will live to tell anybody anything they've heard," Tora shrugged and adopted a fighting stance. Tenshinhan noted how this Saiyan was not just a brutish type to swing his fists wildly and even though his stance was ridden with flaws, evidently, he had picked up a few tips on fighting from the battles he'd experienced.

"You have made three mistakes which will bring about your downfall," Tenshinhan stated.

"Huh? Three mistakes? What're those?" Taro scratched his head, gesturing at Tora to halt his attack until Tenshinhan could make his point.

"First – you've attacked a stronger opponent with fewer numbers. From what I sense, your individual Ki are inferior to mine, meaning that you are weaker than me even the way I am now. Judging from your approach, you without a doubt intended on utilizing teamwork in bringing me down but you failed to take into consideration that I have superior numbers on my side too. You might have underestimated Chiaotzu and Kami, in that case, well... That would be a mistake too," Tenshinhan pointed out while warming up and removing his uniform to expose his bare and trained chest to the harsh elements of the mountain peaks.

"Heh, you got us there, we did mean on pummeling you together as a team..." Taro smiled without dropping the threatening look in his eyes.

"Then – you just assumed that the states we are in now are our full power. If you rely on the data that your gadgets provide you with and not track the tide of the battle using your natural senses – that is just bound to bring you trouble," Tenshinhan placed his arms to his side and let out a hefty battle cry, unleashing all of his Ki at once and causing the scouters of the Saiyans to turn on automatically and begin counting up as the emergency alarm feature of the scouters acted up from the immense power surge.

"H-His battle power is... Rising?" Taro took a couple of cowardly steps back.

"10 000... 12 000... It isn't stopping!" Tora broke his fighting stance, shocked at the overflowing power of the Earthling before him.

As Tenshinhan's power shook the entire mountain range, sending crashing avalanches to the uninhabited rocky wastelands below and sunk them all in snowfall, Chiaotzu also powered up beside his friend, synchronizing with Tenshinhan's power.

"That shrimp's power is also rising!" Taro flipped out. "The power level of 4804!? That's more than twice than we previously picked up!"

"Forget that, the three-eyed bastard... Look at him, he's a freak!" Tora stared at Tenshinhan as his Ki finally stopped surging and the blizzards that he had picked up in his wake had begun to settle down, dropping fistfuls of snow down below once no supernatural fluctuations of air and energy held them levitating up.

"Huh? My scouter's not done counting yet, what does yours say?" Taro turned to Tora.

"18 656..." Tora stated with a muzzled voice and twitching, whited out in shock eyes. "Forget working together, we need to transform now!"

"This is also not the highest that my combat power can rise," Tenshinhan stated, raising his fist up in front of him. A blazing flare erupted in a whirlwind of infernal flames and swallowed the three-eyed martial artist up, dyeing his skin in an unhealthy, swollen up hue but forcing the scouter to continuously count upward until it exploded right off of the pair of the Saiyans' faces, leaving tiny bruises where the unfortunate workplace accident had occurred.

"H-How high did it go?" Taro turned to Tora with a shake to the motions of his body.

"Who knows, even the newer models blew up... These shouldn't have worked on everything but the Great Apes and the Frieza's most trusted elite men," Tora appeared to have already been beaten before the battle had even started.

Tenshinhan vanished, the burning up aura that surrounded him had erupted in a star-shaped formation as it failed to keep up with its master. Taro yelled out in pain as he took a few stumbling steps forward and collapsed. Reacting to the shouts of pain from his ally, Tora turned toward his comrade only to see the image of Tenshinhan with a flying knee kick frozen in mid-air, having just knocked out his friend. With a graceful backflip, Tenshinhan moved back and vanished in mid-air again.

Just as Tora turned back to try and witness his opponent back in his original position, he found Tenshinhan standing right in front of him to the point where if Tora leaned down just a little bit, he'd have touched Tenshinhan's forehead with his nose. Despite finding his enemy lacking in height, it was Tora who stumbled back and collapsed to his knees.

"Normally I'd enjoy a good fight, I am, after all, a martial artist. But the fight that your kind brings does not further martial arts in any way. You are all brute force and very little skill therefore Earth's martial arts would be wasted on the likes of you. Pick up your friend and leave, now that you know how hopelessly you are outmatched here," Tenshinhan glared at Tora with a strict look and allowed his surging Hot-Red mode to vanish before he began suffering the aftereffects already. The fact that the body of the three-eyed martial artist was so tempered that he did not mind the sharp contrast of the freezing mountain weather right after extinguishing the flaming Ki which threatened to burn out all of his bodily fluids from within served only as a testament to the grueling training that the two best friends had gone through in these past seven years while Earth enjoyed its peace.

"You... Cocky fool! Don't underestimate the Saiyans!" Tora bellowed as he threw his arm to the side, igniting a bright, silver flash in his right hand and winding it up for a toss. His body froze in mid-motion, shocking the Saiyan himself as to why he could not move a muscle and even his Power Ball that enabled his transformation into the Great Ape had dissipated in his hand.

Tenshinhan threw a restrained backhand strike to the front of Tora's face, sending the lumbering Saiyan flying off of the mountain peak and crashing through a pair of other mountains, reducing them to rubble at once in the Saiyan's crashing pathway. Such an eventuality was considered when the three were choosing the location for their upcoming tangle with the Saiyans.

"Chiaotzu, was it you?" Tenshinhan turned back to see his friend floating with both of his index fingers pointing forward.

"Yep!" the ghoulish martial artist nodded. "He was gonna do something so I stopped him."

"What an odd attack..." Upa noted.

"Odd? How?" Tenshinhan wondered.

"Well, Saiyans seem quite brutish and primitive with their choice of techniques. Their entire lifestyle appears to be suited to better serve their combat potential. All that matters in their society is sheer strength and even their Ki attacks serve to further that purpose and overwhelm the enemy. They lack versatility in the way they fight, all of their Ki techniques appear to solely try and injure or kill their opponent," Upa pointed out.

Tenshinhan and Chiaotzu nodded in sync.

"Though that last attack didn't boost that Saiyan's Ki at all, in fact, it appeared to reduce it and only drain it a bit. He would have actually become a bit weaker when using that attack which is unusual for a Ki technique, especially for a Saiyan..." Upa elaborated on his point.

"That brightness... Perhaps that technique was sort of like the Solar Fist?" Tenshinhan wondered.

"That is interesting, the enemy appeared to be speaking about some sort of transformation too..." Upa reached to his hind pocket and drew out a ball of thread while his other hand reached behind him and picked up one of his tomahawks and tapped the ball of thread with the wooden end of the knob.

The ball of thread unraveled at once and began weaving itself at an alarming pace as the Earth's protector employed his mystical powers to weave up a flying carpet out of just a ball of thread and jumped on top of it. Crossing his two tomahawks together while standing on top of the floating carpet, Upa bathed in a lightning bolt that crashed down from the cloudy sky and imbued both him and his floating carpet before turning to awed Tenshinhan and Chiaotzu.

"I will use this flying carpet to consult with Bulma on something, you seem to have matters well-handled here. It has been a while since a great battle has enveloped the entire Earth and most of us have not been training anywhere as intensely as we used to, check up on if anyone else needs some help," Upa suggested before taking off and blitzing all the way to West City in seemingly an instant.

"R-Right..." Tenshinhan nodded with his reserved façade being completely shattered by the awesome display of Kami's mystical powers before him.

"G-Goddamn Earthlings..." a grumbling yet weak voice of Tora failed to break through the wreckage he had been driven underneath of. His body felt broken in far too many placed for him to level all of the mountainous rubble he laid buried underneath but he still felt like he was strong enough to push a few boulders away and pull out another mechanical gizmo from his back.

"I told you lot... To not underestimate the Saiyans." Tora growled with a husky and crushed tone as he pressed a button on the side of the remote he had pulled out. Despite his hefty injuries, the Saiyan let out a barely audible chuckle. "You can only blame yourselves for letting your guards down..."

Far to the south, a round Saiyan attack pod rocketed upward, building up momentum even when sunken underneath layers on top of layers of the ocean. In mere seconds the pod emerged from the abyssal trenches and blasted toward the north. Given how the Saiyan pods possessed the speed necessary to traverse throughout the entire quadrant of the universe in a mere couple of years, covering half of a planet took no time at all.

Once it reached approximately the same continent as its owner that issued the signal on his remote, the pod opened up, exposing a prismatic signal piece inside that came installed in most Saiyan attack pods. The prismatic signal sent a focused beam of light, broadcasting the holographic image of an artificial moon in the sky. Summoning the last of his strength, Tora roared out from the bottom of his chest, unleashing a destructive explosive wave that cleared out the rubble so that he could take a gander at the broadcasting signal of the moon in the sky.

"Heh... You Earthling lot are about to go extinct..." Tora chuckled before wincing for his cracked ribs and wiped the blood off of his face before his only functional and non-swollen eye looked up at the sky to observe the signal of the moon.

"Bulma-san!" a curly-haired lady in a reception uniform burst forth inside the laboratory of the Capsule Corp building where the blue-haired inventor was tinkering on some handheld gadget while staring at the television set, desperate for more news on the Saiyan conflict as the moment when the news revealed the presence of the Saiyan invaders she would know that at least one of her friends had failed in defeating their enemy.

"Stockings-san? What is it?" Bulma wondered. The receptionist had never before bothered her or her father, she usually had things well-handled at the reception so the only times that the two would even meet were when Bulma entered or left the building during the woman's work hours.

"There's some weirdo hick that wants to see you! A real delinquent type!" the woman yelled out with a freaked-out expression as she pointed at the direction of the main entryway into the building.

"A hick? You mean Goku?" Bulma wondered, scratching her head. "Does he have a weird haircut and wears a martial arts uniform?"

"No! It's some fit hick with a braid and a loincloth! He rode in on a flying carpet and said that he wanted to see you!" the woman shook her fists as if she was complaining about an icky spider that someone needed to squash.

"Oh, you mean Upa!?" Bulma jumped up and rushed to the door. Having nothing better to do, Stockings followed, knowing that Bulma was headed toward her workplace anyway.

"Is he your friend? Is he perhaps your date now that you've dumped Yamcha-san? Oh, Bulma-san, I know it's not my place to question these sorts of things but I am telling you, I don't like this guy, don't like him one bit. In my experience, magic carpet rides are not a great basis for a functional relationship..." Stockings spoke up.

"No, you don't get it, Upa is the new Kami, he might know what's going on with the Saiyan invaders!" Bulma replied before jumping onto a scooter and taking off, leaving Stockings panting in the dust.

"Oh... All these delinquents coming in and out are making Bulma-san unruly... Don't ride the scooter indoors!" Stockings tried reaching the young woman but she was too far gone to hear and even if she could still hear Stockings' voice, she'd probably not even care to listen to what the woman had to say.

"Upa!" Bulma skid with her scooter and jumped off it just in time before she would have crashed into the Kami patiently waiting for the receptionist to fetch Bulma for him. "How is the fighting going?"

"Well... I haven't had the time to track it too closely but I haven't sensed any casualties and I've lost track of a few Saiyan signatures so it is going as good as it can, so far, at least. I've come to ask something..." Upa dismissed Bulma's worries.

"You know, I'm really getting all worried in here, I can't just sense all those fights happening all over the place so all I can do is watch the news at this point! I've tried sending out drones to film some key locations but by the time they'll reach them the fighting will probably be over..." Bulma groaned in frustration.

"Never mind that, Tenshinhan and Chiaotzu beat this Saiyan and he said a very interesting thing. I recall being asked by a whole bunch of people to remove Son Goku's tail, they said it was to prevent a disastrous transformation and that Saiyan was talking a whole lot about a transformation too, what is that all about?" Upa wondered.

"Oh? You didn't know? That's awfully irresponsible for a Kami!" Bulma pressed her knuckles to her waist. "When a Saiyan sees the full moon they transform into the Great Ape monster and cannot control themselves. Goku almost killed everyone multiple times when it happened but it appears that the transformation can be prevented by removing the Saiyan's tail. Even when the Saiyan is already in their Great Ape form you can revert them back by cutting off their tail or destroying the moon."

"Huh... So odd... It is indeed the full moon but it will be hours until the night falls yet the Saiyan spoke a bunch about his transformation and he used that interesting, flashy technique... I couldn't help but wonder if he meant to transform using it," Upa sighed.

"Hmmm... I mean... The concept of seeing the full moon in order to transform sounds an awful lot like some magic ritual so it must be based on some scientific concept. It is more than possible that the actual full moon is not necessary and that the transformation is triggered by the tidal force or the brightness of the full moon... Though Goku and Chayote have seen plenty of flashy stuff and they've never transformed from it, either way, the possibility shouldn't be dismissed." Bulma shrugged.

"Hmmm... So what you're saying is that full moon sounds too mystical and far-fetched... I see, thank you, Bulma. I must hurry back and warn the rest, Tenshinhan and Chiaotzu might be in grave danger right now if they do not dispose of the Saiyan they've defeated," Upa nodded while he leaped atop of his magical carpet and took off at space-time bending speeds that carried him all around the world in a split-instant.

"Y-Yes... A magical explanation is... A bit far-fetched..." Bulma scratched her temple, looking a bit stunned by the cosmic irony of just having seen Kami take off on a magical carpet mumbling under his nose about how mystical rituals causing drastic and feral transformations made no sense.

Tenshinhan and Chiaotzu turned toward a spiking Ki signature that appeared to overwhelm all of their senses at once. Just when they tried tracking the location of the nearest Dragon Team warrior, a literal mountain of wild Ki blinded both of them at once, forcing them to open their eyes and witness with their own two eyes what had caused this grim smokescreen of their spiritual senses.

A massive ape monster roared into the sky, pounding its chestplate which looked identical to the armor which the Saiyan wore while picking up entire mountains over its head and flinging them aside, causing untold tremors the likes of which Earth had not seen since the climactic battle with Piccolo Jr. seven years ago.

"What is that!?" Chiaotzu yelled out. "That Ki is crazy! We can't attack that thing, we'll be killed for sure!"

"Tsk..." Tenshinhan grunted, feeling cold sweat running down his forehead. "I'm not sure how but... It appears that the Saiyan we've beaten transformed into this giant ape monster. To think that his power could grow tenfold just like that... Even if he was someone we could deal with before, he truly is a monster now. If we don't stop him, the whole Earth is going to be history."

"Ten-san..." Chiaotzu turned to his friend. "Are you going to use it again? The Mafuba?"

"No way!" Tenshinhan swiped his arm aside in a dismissive gesture. "As a martial artist I cannot rest until I defeat this monster and winning that way again doesn't feel right. I know that this sounds like just a matter of pride and that it might seem foolish, Chiaotzu, but a true martial artist values his pride more than their life."

"Ten-san..." Chiaotzu objected.

"I know that this sounds crazy. That is why I won't be asking you to come with me. But I will fight this Great Ape monster and I will not rest until I stop it," Tenshinhan looked at his friend with an adamant look which he saw mirrored in Chiaotzu's own ecstatic eyes. The pair kicked off of the flat mountaintop the two of them rested on and took off toward the looming giant just hundreds of meters away from them engaging in a blind and mindless fit of destructive rage.