Auger
CHAPTER THREE
You grin wide, a smile that isn't calculated. The push to excel, that's always the ticket. "Oh, you've already got my full attention, Scion. But do you want me to stop holding back? Really go all-in? Then show me you're smart, not just fierce. You're learning how to hit. That's good! But what have you learned that you think will really impress me?"
Jaffur stares angrily. "You know, I can tell you're making a game out of this." Then he almost smiles himself. "...but you're right."
Recommended Listening
The little prince nods firmly, as the two of you float in midair. "You're right, Master Mitsuba. So let's see how you like my Thundering Punch!"
"I've never heard of that. Where did you learn it?" Now you
are interested. Curious. Not just testing him.
"I invented it myself!"
"Oh? Show me, then."
The little boy really does smile this time, half child, half wolf. "Are you sure? It's a pretty good attack!"
"I can take a punch." You cross your arms, rising into guard position.
Jaffur nods. "Brace yourself. HaaaAAAA-" His aura contracts, condenses into liquid fire that flows across his skin, shimmering a different blue than the color of traumatized air molecules he tore through in his earlier charge attack. This is new, not something he was doing in the spar earlier. You nod and raise your arms into a guard position.
Mitsuba Ki Sense vs. Jaffur Ki Control : 78 vs. 94
"-AAAH!" You don't recognize it. You have no idea how he does it, or even
what he's doing. He bunches his fist and blue flame turns it into a thing of light. Darting close with a burst of flight, the prince strikes with a right jab towards your upheld guard.
Then his aura hits your own, looser-flowing one- and detonates. A blue-white, ring-shaped fireball of dissipating energy puffs outward from the impact. You're pretty sure that wasn't the kid's plan, at least not like that. Not given the shocked look on his face, and how much smoke is trailing from his hand.
Whatever that was, it hurt him more than it hurt you.
Jaffur Thundering Fist Research: Critical Failure.
The blast flings Jaffur away from you on a ballistic arc. You start to accelerate, ready to flit ahead of him to catch him, then slow back down as he recovers control under his own power.
Jaffur balls his fists and floats there, growling to himself. He's glaring at his hand, and it's turning red fast- not just over his knuckles, either. You frown. The poor child's only a little older than Taro, even if he doesn't have
that much else in common with your son.
There's a Vegetan protocol for this. You remember the one for chivalrously offering to heal the injuries you just inflicted on a sparring partner because you use that one umpty times a year. But there's a
different one for accidental injuries and you don't know it and... ah, Special it. If you can't joust 'em, outflank 'em.
You put on your most self-parodic 'cheerful Gokun hick' expression.
"Honey, I should take a look at that."
It worries you how good Jaffur Vegeta is at not crying; those burns have to
hurt. You resolve to do a little thinking about that. For now- sports injury to take care of. But the prince pulls his hand away, then looks around quickly, closes his eyes as though sifting through the evidence of his ki sense- and silently, eyes wide, extends his hand.
You stoop down to his eye level, reaching out with a fingertip wrapped in just enough aura to soften the touch to its uttermost limit, bringing you into bare contact with the his skin. You remember everything Ashitaba taught you and
focus, willing a reparative surge into his hand. The skin regains its normal color and texture.
But Jaffur doesn't look any happier. "That punch is supposed to work." He sounds angry more than frustrated.
"Let me guess, you practiced it on rocks?"
He shakes his head. "Armor plates. Big ones."
"Good thinking- but the punch didn't misbehave, did it, until you tried a live target- me?"
"It
has to work! I have to make it work!"
"Honey, not everything we try works." You stoop down, close to his eye level. "Maybe your next idea will go better. At your age? It's good that you're innovating. That's really something!"
"Not good... enough. Not for what I need." The Scion closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them. "I have another idea. Almost ready. I need to watch something. You're a Piccolo stylist. I want to see the Makankosappo!" He looks a bit eager, not just fierce- but fierce too.
You nod and smile. "Always a favorite."
Jaffur's raptor-like intensity, uncanny for his age, focuses on you fully. You drop into the second stance, to charge the beam.
"Ma..." Index and middle fingers snapping to your brow, to the metaphysical third eye at the front of your cerebral cortex.
"Kan..." You pour the energies of your soul into your fingertips. The primary beam, the star of the show. But you have to control it, or it just turns into a short-lived flash.
"Ko..." The hard part begins. You separate your energy into two parts, the primary to strike, the secondary to confine the strike.
"Saaaaaa..." Now you wrap the Special slowly in a helix of your ki. The energy resists being bent into that concave shape, struggles against itself
and the main beam. The Special is famously hard to charge, and this is exactly why.
"PO!" You fling your hand outwards and let fly. The flaring gold of the main beam refracts and mixes with the dulling, blurring ruddiness of the containment helix, to create the Special Beam Cannon's characteristic smoky orange glow.
Your target point is a rockfall, some boulders dumped down the side of the Hall- on this side of the main wards. The pile of dense, igneous rock might as well be so much styrofoam for all it does to impede the bolt. A cylinder as thick as your thigh flashes to ionized plasma instantly, the head of the drill beam slamming against the wards and flattening out, mushrooming. You pulled the punch a bit, for the sake of the light show.
The wards coruscate brilliantly in an auroral display, absorbing most of the energy. The boulders shatter, erupt, burst outwards in a mist of magma. Hypersonic rock shrapnel, melting with the heat of the blast and the passage of its flight, bounces into the wards that cover the Hall from the open sky. A shower of tektites falls from where the wards caught it, pattering down across the floor.
As the clattering mass of refrozen rock subsides, you turn to the young prince, who nods slowly.
"Good. Like I thought. Can you fire one quickly? Even a smaller one?"
"Pretty fast." You nod. You once spent three months practicing almost nothing else- Taro's third trimester. Not a good time for your usual bouncing and jouncing all over the sky. Excellent time to work on your target shooting, though.
Jaffur looks avid. "Do you know anyone who can do it faster?"
You think about it. You know several stylists whose Specials hit a fraction harder than yours. You know four old masters who are, to your mind, the true perfect experts of the Makankosappo. One who even put a dent in the second-line training wards, forty years ago. He had to pay to get the seals realigned. And yet... none of
them ever sank three months
just into perfecting their quick-draw. That's what the Masenko is for, right?
Right. You grin. Do you know anyone who can throw a decent Special faster?
"You know, I'm not sure I do."
"Then
show me!" This is as close to bouncing boyish eagerness as you've seen from the kid yet. Not very close... but something. There
is a saiyan child in there, somewhere under that case-hardened layer of precocious power and too-young pride. That's a relief. You get to work.
Fingers to brow, open the third eye. "Ma-kan-ko-" Wind the helix. "-saaa-" Loose! "PO!"
The dusky-orange ray that screams downrange and bells against the wards half a kilometer away isn't the painstakingly charged, nigh-unstoppable drill that killed Raditz. A peer competitor could knock it aside, break the containment and let asymmetry do the rest, or stop it with a blast of their own. But in that moment, you'd be making them give it everything they'd got- as a reasonable fee, for the privilege of not getting perforated.
Jaffur, watching intently, nods slowly as the rings of shimmering light dissipate. He's learning something from watching you, you can tell.
Jaffur Communications Check... lolnope
"A few more times. As fast as you can." If he was just some ordinary boy, or for that matter some adult disciple, you'd have a choice remark for the tone of that. Brusque.
Rude. Starting to get on your nerves.
But he's Scion of Vegeta, he's impressive in his way, he's obviously actually learning something, and this is
not an argument you want to have. Not even if he rubs you the wrong way. You have to respect the little fireball.
So you don't smile, but you nod, and you tap yourself on the forehead. "Sure thing. Makankosaaa-PO!" you let fly again. You repeat the pattern. Open, wind, loose! Open, wind, loose! You repeat a few more times, the second stance focusing the energies of your body into your mind, the energies of the mind into the pineal gland, into your hand, into the beam.
Jaffur is a tiny statue- Thoughtfulness incarnate. He watches you, drinking in every detail of stance and structure with his sixth sense. You throw a few more Specials downrange, then turn back to the Scion. "It takes a while to learn. What do you think of it?"
You feel a slight flutter of subversiveness. How would Butcher Junior feel if you sold his son on Demon Style,
huh?
The prince nods solemnly. "I can see why. It must be very hard to hold the energy in that way, to make a ray out of it."
"Mhm. There are a lot of tricks to it."
"But there's an easier way. You're halfway there. I was halfway there. Now I see how it'll work." He stops, thinks visibly, gathering his energy. You've just given him a hint, you know not what, and now he's running after it. Thinking,
hard.
Jaffur: "You Need To Create That Need" fires...
Whatever he's pondering, he must believe he's got it worked out. His left hand is covered in that same tacky, clinging sapphire flame from before. Brighter now, brighter. "I just need to...
focus..." The little child grits his teeth, the vitrified surface of the Hall floor cracking under his feet- especially on his left, below outstretched hand and extended index finger. He's shaping something again, something different.
"RAAAA!" Jaffur cries out and raises his hand to the heavens, and-
tzzew!- a golden line slices upwards from his index finger. It sizzles upwards at a steep angle,
fast, and you barely have time to see the structure as it leaps out of his hand.
Like a sped-up Special.
Very like a sped-up Special. But Jaffur's taken the containment helix and tightened it down to within an inch of its life. Tighter-wound than should be possible, probably with more of those funny compression tricks of his. Multiple threads, lower-energy, easier to spin, dense enough to compensate and still confine the beam. Easier to charge than even your low-yield version. Faster. Maybe Dodonpa-fast, even. And at a high-intensity focus precious few could manage at his power level. Not bad.
It pierces like a Special, all right. The ray slams through the self-sealing first layer of regenerative wards. The one that's
supposed to stop just about anything a saiyan can throw. It's not invulnerable, not when you're at cap- that's not what it's
for.. the Krillin stylists sometimes make a right mess of the first-line wards. You poke holes in it by accident now and then, too.
But you cracked the first line for the first time at fourteen. Jaffur is what,
going on six? And a long way from cap, too! Even allowing for the less focused blasts and waves of the Goku Style you trained in as a girl, that's a hell of a thing.
The ray stops at the reinforced second line of wards, of course. That one can swallow a super-saiyan blast. Jaffur's beam still carries at least enough energy to light the seals up in a ripple of shimmering colors. Doesn't even warm up the third and fourth backup layers, but then, just about nothing ever does. Not unless royalty gets carried away.
Jaffur Piercing Ki Beam Research: Success. New Attack Unlocked: "Focus Ray."
"That's it." Jaffur stands there, his little chest rising and falling, looking satisfied for the first time today. "That's IT!" He lets out a laugh that sounds
wrong coming from a little boy's throat, but there it is. Then he raises his right hand, and does it again, a little faster this time. "
Focus... RAY!"
Tzzzzew!
