Dragon Ball Z: Paradise Found

Chosen By Fortune

A sudden booming pillar of red engulfed Yamcha, shaking the ground underneath the stadium and shifting all the attention of the active battlefield to the pair of main attraction combatants. After the pillar of energy thinned down and only Yamcha remained levitating in a neutral fighting pose, a strict glare, a sweaty face, and a pant, One-Eight must have realized that Yamcha broke out of his mind control.

"That's yet another weakness to your technique," Yamcha said with a certain heftiness to his voice. The martial artist figured that if he could get One-Eight riled up again, he'd keep on yapping and give him a few seconds to cool down after exploding into a King Kai's Fist X 50 out of nowhere. "You apply your psychic stranglehold on a certain level of Ki. If that level goes through a drastic shift upward, you can't maintain it. Almost like tying down a man that can turn himself into a giant and snap your ropes."

"You think you've got it all figured out, don't you?" One-Eight gnashed his teeth. His left eye twitched, just like Commander Blue's used to when he turned upset and busted his facade of elegance and good manners.

Yamcha didn't want to admit it to his opponent by replying genuinely, but he didn't feel like he could maintain the constant switching between different layers of King Kai's Fist needed to keep up with and overpower his opponent. He had to break past his natural limits to match One-Eight, whereas One-Eight was an artificial human with stamina he could simply leech away from Yamcha, only adding to the tremendous schism of longevity between the two.

The thin outline of red died out and withdrew within Yamcha's body as the martial artist relaxed and coated himself in a layer of pure white outline that emanated with white flakes of energy. His build slimmed down as the tension present in his overworked muscles eased. The man that started his fighting career as a desert bandit took a deep breath in and blew out a stiff brush of air accompanied by cold vapors.

"Huh? What are you doing?" One-Eight's wrath and spite vanished from his face as they turned to bafflement why his opponent had just de-powered and purposefully lowered his overall Ki output. "My sensors indicate a sharp decline in fighting ability."

"I think I kind of understand the type of fighter you are. In combat, you're very much alike as you are in your work–greedy, manipulative, and thinking everything that everyone has, namely, everyone's treasured techniques and fighting styles, are only there to make you richer and more powerful, right?" Yamcha asked with a significantly calmer tone. His breathing balanced out somewhat, compared to the overworked panting from previously.

"If you have nothing more to show me and you've given up, you should've just taken the hint and killed yourself when I asked you nicely inside of your mind," One-Eight replied, taking a wary fighting stance as his experience dictated caution when one's opponent purposefully dropped this much in raw combat power.

"I can't say I blame you," Yamcha closed his eyes and straightened his back, completely dropping his guard. "Back when I started training with Krillin, my mind was a lot like yours. I sought for new, stronger techniques to improve myself and to catch up to the Saiyans, no, to surpass them. It was only after training with Krillin and seeing all the different styles of motion in the Galactic Baseball League arenas around the universe that I've come to realize that sometimes it's good to step back and stick to fundamentals. Temper your old techniques and polish yourself instead of chasing for new heights in power."

"So effete and ludicrously human... I am an artificial human–a perfect machine. I cannot polish myself any further because I already am perfect," One-Eight's lips extended in a cocky smile before he threw himself across the fighting stage toward his opponent. Yamcha's arms moved in a circle, flowing in excellent motion that seemed as natural to him as breathing–the fruit of laborious training in perfecting every motion of his Wolf Fang Fist and making it feel as natural to him as twitching a finger.