Seeing Bora lying motionless in the dirt ignited a fury she couldn't contain.
"You're going to pay for that!"
Chi-Chi detonated into motion, closing the gap with a velocity that eclipsed her skirmish with General Blue.
She didn't hold back. She unleashed the full kinetic fury of the Ox-Style, transforming into a blur of lethal intent.
She targeted his kill zones with surgical precision: a whipping snap-kick aimed at the button of his chin, a crushing palm strike driven toward the solar plexus, and a vicious, cutting elbow slicing toward his temple.
Tao Pai Pai refused to shift his stance.
He remained rooted, his feet anchored to the earth with arrogant permanence.
He simply weaved his torso, slipping her barrages with such maddening, microscopic precision that her strikes missed by a hair's breadth.
His eyes didn't hold a flicker of respect—only the cold, heavy weight of absolute disgust.
"Is this it? I was told I was being sent to deal with threats. You're nothing but a pair of flailing kittens."
A cry of raw frustration tore from Chi-Chi's throat. Face burning, she pivoted on her heel, whipping a high-impact roundhouse meant to take his head off.
Tao Pai Pai didn't even dignify the assault with a glance.
He simply dropped his level, ducking under the arc of her leg, and snapped a vicious vertical kick from the floor up. His boot dug squarely into her floating ribs.
CRUNCH.
The kinetic transfer was absolute. Chi-Chi was lifted clean off her feet and catapulted backward, a rag doll tossed by a hurricane.
She collided with the base of Korin Tower, a sickening crunch against unyielding stone that sent a tremor vibrating up the ancient shaft.
She crumpled to the grass, the world swimming in a haze of gray as she desperately clutched her shattered side.
"Chi-Chi!" Goku yelled.
Seeing her hit the ground ignited a primal fuse in Goku.
He launched himself at the assassin with a feral roar, his fists becoming a blur of kinetic violence.
He poured every drop of his power into the barrage, but Tao Pai Pai treated the onslaught with insulting indifference.
He deflected the bone-crushing blows with lazy, minimal flicks of his wrists, as if brushing away a gnat.
Tao snapped a parry against a desperate cross, collapsing Goku's structure. He stepped deep into the pocket, invading the boy's defense, and rammed a hardened palm strike directly into his sternum.
Goku was sent flying in the exact same trajectory as Chi-Chi.
He tumbled through the air and crashed right next to her at the base of the tower, the two of them slumped against the stone, battered and gasping for breath.
Tao Pai Pai reached back, calmly flicking his long braid over his shoulder. He advanced on them with the slow, inevitable cadence of an undertaker arriving to collect.
He looked down, his eyes narrowing into cold, predatory slits.
"To think the Red Ribbon Army actually feared children of this caliber. What a waste of my time. You're not even worth the effort of a proper execution."
Goku struggled to push himself up, his arms shaking. Beside him, Chi-Chi wiped a smear of blood from her lip, her eyes burning with a mixture of agony and defiance.
"We... we're not done yet..."
Chi-Chi didn't wait for Tao Pai Pai to finish his insult.
Gritting her teeth against the sharp pain in her ribs, she pushed off the ground with an explosive burst of speed.
"Don't you... look down on me!" She roared.
She leaped high into the air, but she didn't come back down.
Using the Skywalk technique, she kicked the air itself, creating small sonic booms under her feet to propel herself even higher.
She hovered above Tao Pai Pai, her shadow stretching across the grass.
Goku's eyes widened.
He recognized that posture—it was the same terrifying move she had used to nearly clear the ring back at the World Martial Arts Tournament.
"Watch out, Upa!" Goku shouted, grabbing the boy and leaping back toward the safety of the teepees.
High above, Chi-Chi's arms became a blur.
"HAAA!"
She began throwing punches with the speed of a machine gun, but she wasn't hitting the air at random.
Each strike sent a concentrated, invisible bullet of air pressure shrieking toward the ground.
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
The clearing erupted. The dirt around Tao Pai Pai exploded in violent succession of craters. It was a literal rain of force, a localized hurricane designed to crush anything beneath it.
Tao Pai Pai's eyes widened slightly as the first few shockwaves cracked the ground inches from his feet.
For the first time, he actually had to move. He began to dance between the invisible impacts, his body blurring as he dodged the relentless barrage.
Crr-ack!
One Kiai clipped his shoulder, tearing a piece of his pink sleeve away.
Chi-Chi didn't stop.
She kept punching, her face pale from the sheer strain of outputting so much Ki at once.
She was a floating fortress, pouring every ounce of her rage and energy into keeping the world's greatest assassin pinned down.
Tao Pai Pai couldn't keep dodging forever without losing face, and he would not be outmaneuvered by a mere child.
He needed to end this.
He saw a momentary lull, a tiny fractional pause in Chi-Chi's rapid-fire assault.
With an explosive burst of power, he slammed his foot down, creating a small crater where he stood, and launched himself skyward.
"What?!" Chi-Chi gasped, her eyes widening in shock.
She had expected him to charge, or to use some other ranged attack, but not to leap with such unbelievable height and speed.
In a flash, he was no longer a target below; he was right in front of her.
"Foolish girl. Don't ever think you can corner a master assassin." Tao Pai Pai hissed, his eyes blazing with cold fury.
He brought his hand down in a brutal, chopping motion, a single, perfectly executed Karate Chop aimed directly at her neck.
CRACK!
The sound was sickeningly sharp, echoing across the silent clearing.
Chi-Chi's body went limp in mid-air, the Skywalk technique instantly failing. She plummeted downward, a lifeless ragdoll, and hit the ground.
Her neck was twisted at an unnatural angle. She didn't move.
"CHI-CHI!" Goku's scream tore through the air, filled with a raw, agonizing despair.
Seeing her fall, seeing the way her body landed, something inside Goku snapped.
His vision tunneled. The fear, the grief, the rage—it all funneled into a single, terrifying surge of power.
He thrust his hands forward, his palms cupped, a blinding blue sphere of energy already swirling between them.
The air crackled around him, electricity arcing from his body. His face was contorted in a mask of pure, unadulterated fury.
"You... you killed her!" Goku roared, tears streaming from his eyes, mixing with sweat and dirt.
"KAME... HAME... HAAAAAA!"
The blast erupted from his hands, a massive, focused beam of destructive energy, wider and more powerful than anything he had fired before.
It screamed toward Tao Pai Pai, consuming everything in its path, a desperate, grief-fueled attack aimed at eradicating the monster who had taken his friends.
The massive beam of blue energy engulfed Tao Pai Pai mid-air, a brilliant explosion of light that illuminated the entire Sacred Land.
Goku held the pose, his chest heaving, pouring every last drop of his spirit into the attack until the final spark faded.
As the smoke cleared, Goku's heart sank.
Tao Pai Pai was still floating there. His expensive pink tunic had been scorched away, leaving him shirtless and covered in soot, but his skin was barely singed.
His eyes were cold, devoid of any emotion other than a growing, poisonous irritation.
"A parting gift for my tailor, I suppose." Tao said, his voice a low, terrifying rumble. He looked down at the charred remains of his clothes, then back at the trembling boy below.
"You've ruined my outfit. For that, I will not be merciful."
Tao Pai Pai landed softly on the grass, ignoring the broken body of Chi-Chi nearby. He raised a single finger, pointing it directly at Goku's heart.
A tiny, orange spark ignited at the tip of his finger.
"DODON RAY!"
A piercing, needle-thin beam of golden energy shot forward. It was faster than the eye could follow—a concentrated strike designed for a single purpose: assassination.
The beam struck Goku squarely in the chest.
Goku didn't even have time to gasp.
The force of the impact lifted him off his feet, his small frame flying backward until he slammed into the base of the Korin Tower. His head slumped forward, his eyes glazed and vacant.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Tao Pai Pai walked over to the two fallen children, his expression bored once more.
He reached down and snatched the bag containing the dragon balls.
"A bit longer than I anticipated, but the result remains the same."
"YOU MONSTER!"
A small stone flew through the air, bouncing harmlessly off Tao Pai Pai's shoulder.
The assassin paused, his back still turned.
He slowly rotated his head to see Upa standing a few yards away. The boy was shaking, tears streaming down his face, his small fists clenched in a mix of terror and absolute grief.
"You killed them!" Upa wailed, his voice cracking.
"My father... Goku... Chi-Chi... you killed them all! You're a demon!"
Upa bent down, grabbed another rock, and hurled it with all the strength his small frame could muster.
Tao Pai Pai didn't even move his hands. As the stone approached his face, he simply pursed his lips and let out a sharp, concentrated puff of air.
"Hmph."
The air pressure from his breath hit the stone mid-flight, reversing its momentum with double the force. The rock whizzed back and struck Upa squarely in the forehead.
CRACK.
Upa let out a sharp cry and collapsed into the grass, blood beginning to seep from a gash on his brow.
He wasn't dead, but the world was spinning, and he lay there gasping, unable to move.
"Consider yourself lucky, boy. Be glad I'm a man who sticks strictly to his contract, or I'd finish you just for the noise you're making."
He looked down at his ruined, charred clothing and sighed in disgust.
"My reputation is one of elegance, and I refuse to report to the Commander looking like a beggar."
Without another word, Tao Pai Pai walked to his stone pillar. He kicked it into the air, leaped onto it with ease, and vanished into the horizon in a blur of pink and gray, leaving the Sacred Land a graveyard of silence.
Upa spent the next hour in a haze of heartbreak, his small hands stained with soil as he finished burying his father.
He placed a simple stone marker over the grave, his tears falling silently into the fresh earth. After a long moment of prayer, he wiped his eyes and turned toward the base of the tower, his heart heavy with the task of burying his two new friends.
As he approached the spot where Chi-Chi lay, he saw her body twitch.
Upa froze, his breath catching. Slowly, painfully, Chi-Chi's head straightened with a series of sickening clicks and pops.
She let out a long, ragged groan and pushed herself up onto her elbows, her face pale and her breathing shallow.
"Is... is that freak gone yet?" She rasped, her voice barely a whisper.
Upa stumbled back, his eyes nearly popping out of his head.
"C-Chi-Chi?! You're alive?! But... I saw it! I heard it! He broke your neck!"
Chi-Chi sat up fully, clutching her throat and wincing as she gingerly tilted her head from side to side.
She looked exhausted, and a dark bruise was already forming around her neck, but she was very much alive.
"It's an... old Ox-Style secret." She wheezed, rubbing the back of her head.
"My father taught me how to dislocate the cervical vertebrae on impact. It's a desperate defensive move. If you relax your muscles at the exact second of the strike, you can let the force pass through the joints instead of snapping the bone."
She coughed, spitting a bit of blood onto the grass.
"I had to hold my breath and play dead. If I had twitched once, he would have finished the job."
She looked over at Goku's still form, her expression shifting from pain to deep concern.
"What about him? Did that monster..."
"He hit Goku with a beam of fire... right in the chest."
Chi-Chi leaned over Goku, her hand hovering over his chest. For a moment, she couldn't hear a thing but the wind whistling through the grass.
Then, a sharp, sudden gasp filled the air.
"OW! That... that really stung!"
Goku's eyes snapped open, and he sat up so fast he nearly knocked Chi-Chi over. He was coughing and rubbing his chest, his face twisted in a grimace of pure pain.
As he moved, a heavy, orange object tumbled out from under his shredded shirt and clattered onto the grass.
It was the Four-Star Dragon Ball.
"The ball!" Upa cried out, rushing over.
"It... it blocked the beam!"
Goku picked up the sphere, looking at the faint black scorch mark on its crystalline surface.
"Whoa. I had tucked it into my shirt after Bora handed it to me. I guess Grandpa Gohan really was looking out for me."
He felt the spot on his chest where the Dodon Ray had hit; it was a nasty purple bruise, but the Dragon Ball had absorbed the lethal concentration of the blast, spreading the force across his ribcage instead of letting it pierce his heart.
Goku blinked, his vision finally clearing, and he looked up to see Chi-Chi sitting there.
"Chi-Chi! You're okay! I thought... I thought that guy broke you!"
"It takes more than a karate chop to get rid of me." Chi-Chi grumbled, though her voice lacked its usual bite.
She reached out and gripped Goku's arm, partly to steady herself and partly out of sheer relief.
"But he got the others. He took the bag with the rest of the Dragon Balls while we were down."
Goku's smile vanished instantly.
He looked over at the fresh mound of earth where Bora lay buried, and then up at the impossible height of the Korin Tower.
The playful spark in his eyes was gone, replaced by a cold, quiet determination that made even Chi-Chi shiver.
"He's coming back. He'll realize this one fell out and he'll come back to finish the job."
Goku stood up. He looked at the tower again.
"Bora said there's a master up there. And some water that makes you stronger. If I'm gonna beat that guy and bring Bora back with the Dragon Balls... I have to climb it."
Chi-Chi followed his gaze upward.
"Could it really be more than just a legend?"
Goku gave a single, firm nod.
"We don't have another choice."
She drew herself up, a sharp wince crossing her face as she moved, but her gaze didn't waver.
"Alright, then call it. Call the Flying Nimbus."
Goku shook his head, his expression unusually serious.
"No, we can't. That would be cheating."
"Are you kidding me? Does that even matter right now?!"
"It does to me. If there really is a master up there, they won't agree to train people who took a shortcut to the top. We have to do this the right way."
Chi-Chi paused, the protest dying on her lips. But seeing the conviction in Goku's eyes, she realized he was right.
"I guess that makes sense." She admitted, looking up at the pillar that seemed to pierce the very fabric of the sky.
"But if we're climbing this by hand... how long is it even going to take us to reach the top?"