#cosia

[24 November 236 Before Age.  Extraliga.]

The Shockmaster’s punch hit home, and Luffa staggered backward from the force of the blow.  Yet she stayed on her feet.  The yellow aura that flashed around her body thrummed as strong and as steady as ever.  A second later, she reached up with one hand to touch her jaw, then she stood up straight again and chuckled.

"Good one," she said.  "But you’re still holding back.  You still don’t want to kill me."

"I WON’T KILL, LUFFA," he insisted.

"That’s right, you won’t sink to my level.  You’ll just get one of your soldiers to finish me off, right?"

She looked around at the Wistian soldiers who had gathered around the two of them.  "How about it?!" she shouted.  "Anyone here want to try to kill me?  Your leader’s too scared to do it himself."

The Shockmaster made an irritated growl, and readied another punch.  Luffa turned her back on him.

"Fair warning!" she called to the soldiers.  "The last guy who tried to finish me off?  He’s dead.  So maybe you ought to run away while you still can.  Or stay and fight, if you have the courage.  Shocky needs all the help he can get!"

The Shockmaster threw a second punch, but this time Luffa dodged it.  She grabbed his forearm, and swung him forward, using his own momentum to send him flying into his own soldiers.

"Come on!" she screamed.  "You’re warriors, aren’t you?! You came here for a fight didn’t you?!  Well I sure as hell did!"

She raised her left hand and swung her arm towards the sky, pointing two fingers directly above her head.

"Vengeance Canon," she muttered.

A streak of crimson light erupted from her fingertips.  A moment later, a point of light appeared in the sky, indicating a ship she had destroyed.

The soldiers were dumbfounded.  Most of them either stared at her or looked fearfully to the Shockmaster.  A few of them moved in to help him up, but he was on his feet before they could touch him.

"Vengeance Cannon," Luffa said as she fired again.  Another point of light appeared in the sky.

The Shockmaster charged towards her, and she leaped into the air, avoiding him with ease and landing squarely on the top of his glittering silver helmet.

"Vengeance Cannon!" Luffa shouted, firing into the sky once again.    "You were right, Shocky.  You won’t kill me, not as long as you keep trying to toy with me the way you did last time!  If you don’t start taking this seriously, you won’t have any ships left!"

He roared and grabbed for her ankles, but she had already jumped down from his head and now stood directly behind him.  When he turned to find her, she delivered an elbow to his voluminous gut.

"Vengeance Cannon!" she screeched, firing at the sky again.  "Do something about it!"

At last, he stopped chasing her and stood his ground, summoning more of his power.  Luffa watched him with perverse fascination.

"That’s it!" she screamed.  "More!"

*******

In orbit, the Shockmaster's invasion fleet had broken formation and moved to a higher orbit to avoid Luffa's attacks.  Most of the crews had no idea who was firing upon them.  The working theory up to this point had been that the Extraligans had some new weapon in their arsenal, something powerful enough to shoot down enemy ships from the surface, but small enough and mobile enough to avoid return fire.  

But a number of mercenaries in the fleet had the ability to sense ki powers, and when Luffa's was suddenly revealed, they reported it to their leaders.

"It can't be her," insisted Cosia, the robotic captain of the mercenary ship Infinite Recursion.  "She couldn't have fired upon us and concealed her ki at the same time.   It doesn't compute!"

"I don't know how she did it," replied Ty-83.  The humanoid man was one of the few organic beings in the universe to earn Cosia's trust.   "But I've sensed Saiyan power before.  Only this is beyond any Saiyan I've ever encountered.  It has to be the Super Saiyan.  Captain, if she gets past the Shockmaster, there'll be nothing to stop her from destroying us next."

"The Shockmaster is our client," Cosia said flatly.  "If we abandon him now, we will forfeit our payment, to say nothing of the damage to our professional reputation."

"We can't spend our pay if we're dead, Captain," Ty-83 said.  

Cosia considered this for a moment, calculating whether her nickel-rhenium frame could survive the destruction of her ship.  

"Helm, take us to the opposite side of the planet from the battle," she commanded.  "And tell the engine room to be ready to take us out of the system.  For now, we will wait and see how the Shockmaster handles this."

*******

The Shockmaster tried to hit her again, and this time she hit back, their fists colliding at the midpoint between them.  The impact made a sound like thunder, and the air around them seemed to ripple from the sheer magnitude of the forces at play.

Many of the soldiers watching decided to take Luffa’s advice and ran.  Many more were too stunned to move, and they became engrossed by the battle that unfolded before them.

The Shockmaster continued to throw punches, only for Luffa to block with punches of her own.  This repeated itself over and over, faster and faster, and then the two of them vanished from sight as they began to move across the ground and through the air, much faster than any Wistian eye could follow.

It was at this point that Tigon regained consciousness, and slowly began to re-establish control of the camp.

"All personnel, full retreat," she said weakly, still rubbing her face from where Luffa had batted her away with her tail.  "We expected something like this.  Find a radio and raise III Corps.  Tell them to rendezvous with us at coordinates... 67J."

The troops were shaken, but they still followed orders.  She could sense the Shockmaster’s power had been withdrawn from her body, and she wondered whether that meant he was being careful... or desperate.

*******

"Do you want to know where you screwed up?" Luffa asked.

The Shockmaster refused to dignify that with a response.  Luffa had tried to bait him with idle chatter in their last fight.  That she was doing it again only proved she had learned nothing from her past defeat.

And yet, he found her new tactics bewildering.  Before, she had focused on gathering large stores of ki and unleashing it in big attacks.  Between these onslaughts, she would dodge and use diversions while she gathered her strength to try again.  None of this had worked against him, but he understood the basic approach.

This time, she was fighting at an even keel.  She would dodge and block, and sometimes strike, but she wasn’t building up to anything.    It was as if she was trying to wear him out, except that was impossible.  His powers had sustained him for millennia.  In their last encounter, she had been the one to collapse from exhaustion.  He had expected her to try to end this quickly, before her body succumbed to the strain.

It all felt like a trap somehow, but he didn’t seriously expect her to explain that to him.

"You’re incredibly strong," she said.  "But you don’t understand war.  You’re just used to dominating enemies with your power.  It’s made you sloppy.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m speaking from personal experience.  I know how tempting it can be to fall back on brute force."

He charged his left hand with power until it glowed bright violet, and fired a burst of energy at Luffa’s head.  She ducked, batting the blast away with her right forearm, and moved inside his reach to hit him in the abdomen.

"I’m not saying you’re a lousy fighter," she added, as though the last exchange had never happened.  "You beat me, after all.  But you couldn’t finish the job.  Just like you keep blowing this invasion."

"YOU THINK MY REFUSAL TO KILL MAKES ME WEAK?!" he shouted, unable to resist her taunting any longer.  "YOU’RE WRONG!  I’M MORE THAN A MERE FOOTSOLDIER, LUFFA.  I’M THE HOPE OF THE WIST, THE SAVIOR OF CIVILIZATION."

He put his hands together and launched a torrent of lighting from his arms.  The bolts of energy surrounded Luffa like a cage, and for a moment, she seemed to be stymied.

Then she made a loud, sharp cry, and the entire energy structure dissipated in a field of yellow flame.

"Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.  You think your powers solve everything, so you forget about tactics and focus on big picture stuff.  Only, the big picture doesn’t tell you how I got here so quickly.  Be honest, you thought I wouldn’t show up here for another three weeks."

She was right.  All of his intelligence reports put Luffa on a remote planet in the center of the galaxy.  It was less than half the distance to Extraliga than his fleet had traveled, but only his fleet had known the date of the invasion.  So how did she anticipate his arrival three weeks in advance?

"I got here two days ago," Luffa said with a grin.  I’ve been picking off your ships as soon as they entered orbit."

"YOU'RE LYING!" was all the Shockmaster could say.

"You should know better," Luffa scolded.  "After all, you’re the guy who gave me the idea.  You used a wormhole to launch the first invasion, so I used my own wormhole to come here and stop you."

"HOW DID YOU FIND A WORMHOLE FROM EXTRALIGA TO YOUR OWN WORLD?" the Shockmaster demanded.

"I didn’t," Luffa said with a shrug.  "I asked the faeries who lived in yours.  They built one for me.  You remember Queen Phenylal, right?  You forced her to let you move your troops through her domain.  Well I liberated them, so they owed me a favor.  I asked if they could construct a new wormhole for me, and they were happy to do it."

She held up her thumb and forefinger, spacing them less than half an inch apart.  "It’s not a spacious as the one they live in.  No more than eight feet across, but that’s plenty of room for me to make the trip."

"BUT I SHOULD HAVE SENSED YOUR PRESENCE ON THIS PLANET WHEN YOU ARRIVED!" the Shockmaster protested.

"I’ve been masking my energy," Luffa said.  "Not just from you, but from anyone else who might leak my plans before I was ready.   I can’t conceal all the power I’m putting out right now, but I can dial down my ki just low enough that I can hide it from you.  Turns out that’s still enough power to take potshots at your fleet, and to run around the planet so your goons can’t tell where it came from."

She dodged a kick and laughed.  "You people probably thought the Extraligans had some mobile surface-to-orbit cannon!  Only, how could something so powerful move so fast?!"

"HOW?" the Shockmaster snarled.  "YOU DIDN'T HAVE THAT ABILITY--"

"Before? No," Luffa said.  "I’ve been learning some new tricks, Shockmaster.  I knew you’d come back here, and while you’ve been rebuilding your army and polishing that stupid helmet of yours, I’ve been preparing to stop you."

"THEN WHY DID YOU WAIT UNTIL NOW TO CONFRONT ME?" the Shockmaster demanded.  "YOU COULD HAVE DESTROYED MY SHIP BEFORE I REACHED THE SURFACE."

She laughed again.  "You’re a fool," she said.  "What sort of a coward do you take me for?!  There’s no way in hell I’d be satisfied with a hollow victory like that!  Besides, you’d probably survive and fly the rest of the way to the surface on your own somehow.  You seem like the kind of guy who can pull off a stunt like that.

"No.  I want to beat you one-on-one.  No distractions, no soldiers running around, no meddling spouses to get in my way.  That’s why the Extraligan army hasn’t attacked you so far.  I told them to steer clear of you, and to focus on fighting your other forces."

She was almost giddy as she boasted of her plan.  "You probably thought you were overwhelming our defenses, but this whole time we’ve been herding you like livestock, she said with a twisted relish in her voice.  "And now that I’ve got you all to myself, out here in the middle of nowhere..."

"YOU’LL LOSE, LUFFA.  YOU CAN’T MAINTAIN THIS POWER LEVEL FOR MUCH LONGER.  I DON’T NEED TO DEFEAT YOU, I JUST HAVE TO OUTLAST YOU."

"Is that so?" Luffa said with a smirk.

Without warning, she screamed, and the aura surrounding her expanded in size.  The Shockmaster backed off, thinking she was preparing to unleash some offensive move, but it never came.  She was simply raising her power... raising it beyond what he had thought possible.

"NO..." he said, unable to hide his amazement.  "IT’S IMPOSSIBLE..."

When Luffa finally stopped, she looked at him and snorted.  "'Impossible?'," she scoffed.  "You know, I hear that word all the time.  I’m going to make you choke on it."

She rushed towards him and grabbed his hands, locking fingers with him.  He tried to shove her away, only to find that he couldn’t.  And she was still pushing forward, her teeth clenched as she grunted and huffed with effort.

And then he started to feel himself move backward through the air, in spite of his efforts to resist.

"Well?  How about it, Shockmaster?!" she shouted.  "Is this possible?!  What about this?!"

Before he could summon the additional power to stop her, she swing him by his hands around in a circle, and flung him to the ground  like a sack of laundry.  The impact of his body left a crater, and as he lay face up in the dirt, he could see her looming over him, cackling with delight.

*******

As Luffa battled the Shockmaster over the night sky of Extraliga, her only concern was that maybe things were going a little too well.

She had been looking forward to this moment for months, and she had been a little nervous at first, but now that she had finally gotten the Shockmaster to take her seriously, she was starting to enjoy herself.  Occasionally, she turned her ki senses to the rest of the planet, in search of any sign that things had gone wrong.  So far, she had found none.

She had divided the conflict into three theaters.  On the Orbital Theater, she had softened up the Shockmaster’s fleet prior to attacking him.  Soon, a Federation fleet would be arriving to finish them off.  When that happened, they could land ground troops to assist the Extraligan military on the Surface Theater, and mop up the Shockmaster’s ground troops, though Luffa suspected they might not need the reinforcements after all.

The third theater was simply herself versus the Shockmaster in isolation.  If anything went wrong, she supposed she could try to defeat him quickly, but she didn’t want it to come to that.  He was still a formidable opponent, and while she was much stronger now, she didn’t want to make the mistake of underestimating him again.  Also, the Wistian troops were counting on him to lead them to victory.  By keeping him occupied, Luffa could effectively paralyze the Shockmaster’s army.  They would fight defensively while they waited for him to win, and that attitude would give the initiative to her allies.

Besides, it was more fun this way.  The Shockmaster managed to land a hard right to her jaw while she was sensing the troop movements, but she managed to avoid his follow-up attack.  She had a worthy opponent, and a planet-wide set-piece battle going on at the same time.  It was the nearest thing to heaven that she could imagine.

But the Shockmaster still wasn’t using his maximum strength.  She wanted to push him to his limits before beating him, both to satisfy her pride and to ensure his attention was focused on her instead of his objectives.  Fortunately, she knew just the thing to get his goat.

"Oh, by the way," she said casually.  "You can forget about the Recollector."

"WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT?!" the Shockmaster growled.

"Oh, plenty," she said.  "Those rebels on your home planet?  I’ve been in touch with them.    They did some research, and found out why you wanted to take this planet so badly.  They contacted me because they knew I was the only one who could stop you."

"YOU WON’T STOP ME!"

"Yeah?  Well, how about you beat me, and you can drag me over to the Recollector and show me just how stupid I was to get in your way!  Or did you come here for something else?"

"YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!  A SAIYAN COULDN’T COMPREHEND THE POWER OF THE RECOLLECTOR--"

She ducked a right hook and slipped around to his back, and kicked him with both feet. Before he could hit the ground, he stopped in midair and turned to face her, only to be bombarded with ki blasts.    He weathered this storm, and started firing back.

Luffa noted that he was ramping up his power.  She had struck a nerve. 

She wanted to strike it again.

"Here’s what I 'comprehend'," she said.  "Your worthless planet used to be a big deal a long time ago, because they had some power source called the Ur-Ember.  Right?  Only it was destroyed, along with Wist’s moon.  After that, Wist just had to make due with whatever they had left."

She flew through the crossfire, slipping between the Shockmaster’s ki blasts until she reached his person.  Then she drove her elbow in to his abdomen.  He tried to grab her, but he was too slow, and she flew straight up and kicked the chin of his helmet as she avoided his hands.

"Only you couldn’t accept that, could you?" she continued.  "You wanted to go back to the way things used to be.  Eventually, you found out that Extraliga used to be a Wistian colony.  I guess that explains why there’s a wormhole between them."

He managed to grab her by the shoulders and pin her arms to her sides, but she simply grinned at him and continued her story.

"The Recollector was some doohickey built by the last Sorcerer King of...of... well, I forget which dynasty it was.  I’m interested in history, but I'm not that interested.  It was supposed to be used for archaeology research.  Instead of digging up relics, you’d turn this thing on and pluck objects out of the distant past, back when they were still new.

"But the Recollector was abandoned on this planet.    Forgotten, along with the colony, until you rediscovered it.  You wanted to go find it and use it to pull the Ur-Ember out of the past, right at the moment Wist’s moon was destroyed.  Then you can take it back home with you and use it to jumpstart your little fantasy, right?  Well, you might have pulled all that off, if I hadn’t come along."

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?" the Shockmaster asked.  She heard a trace of panic in his voice, and chuckled.

"Who, me?" Luffa asked.  "I haven’t done anything.  The rebels on Wist found out about all this.  I just relayed the message to the Extraligan government.  Once they knew what you were after, it didn’t take them too long to track it down."

"YOU LITTLE FOOL!" he shouted.  "YOU THINK THEY CAN HIDE IT FROM ME?!"

"Oh, we aren’t going to hide it," Luffa said.    "We’re going to destroy it."

"NO!" the Shockmaster cried.  He tried to squeeze Luffa in his hands, but she just laughed.

"Yes," she said darkly.  She set her teeth and growled.  Gradually, she pushed back against the Shockmaster’s hands, until finally she force his arms away with a burst of golden light.

Seeing him stumble backward like this was a thing of beauty.  She dove after him and started punching him.  His helmet, his chest, his legs, they were all fair game.

"You don’t even know where the Recollector is, or you would have secured it when you had the chance.  No, you didn’t want to take any risks, so you tried to invade the planet with as little destruction and bloodshed as possible.  You were going to wait for the planet to be completely pacified, and then you’d start searching for it.  Well, it’s too late for that now."

"NO!" he screamed.  "YOU THINK THAT YOU’VE OUTMANEUVERED ME, BUT YOU’RE WRONG!  I’LL DEFEAT YOU, AND THEN I’LL--"

He tried to shove Luffa away with his ki, but she crossed her arms over her face and blunted the force of it.  Then she delivered a kick to the side of his head, and he went tumbling to the ground.

"You still don’t get it, do you?" Luffa shouted.  "You lost the moment you decided to spare my life, Shockmaster.  I’d be grateful for your mercy, except that you thought I’d slither under a rock and hide like a pathetic animal while you went on with your scheme."

She dropped down beside him and grabbed him by the collar of his sleeveless jacket.  "For you, this war is just a means to an end.   But me?  Hah!  Before I was a Super Saiyan, I was a mercenary, from a family of mercenaries.  I was bred for war.  I was steeped in war.  I killed my first hostile when I was three years old.  At seven, I was reading battlefield maps and tactical readouts.  I was teaching aliens how to fight when I was sixteen."

He began throwing punches, and she deflected each one with ease, backing away slowly to invite him to come forward.  "Unlike you, I know how to fight a war.  How to gather intelligence, how to deploy troops, how to manipulate my enemy, and how to utilize my allies."

She sidestepped him, and drove the point of her elbow into his ribs, staggering him.

"I wasn’t completely sure I could get strong enough to fight you like this," she admitted.  "And a good friend of mine told me I’m more sensible when I’m around other people.  You have to learn to be careful when you’re as strong as I am, you know?  It got me thinking about how to beat you.  Not just win this fight, but to utterly crush you.  That’s why I contacted the fairies to make me a wormhole.  That’s why I stayed in touch with the rebels on Wist.  That’s why I’ve been relying on the Extraligans to keep your goons out of my way.    And I’ve got my wife handling the Recollector."

"SHUT UP!" the Shockmaster shouted.

"It keeps me motivated, you know?" Luffa said.  "I always wanted to beat you, but now I’ve got to, because if you somehow make it past me, you’ll have a clear path to her.  Thinking about that, well, I think it helped me with my training."

He began to scream, and Luffa made a satisfied grunt.  She’d been pushing him, trying to break through his cool and calculating demeanor, and now her taunts and jibes had finally paid off.  She could sense his ki rising, and while she was impressed, it wasn’t quite the increase she had expected.   It didn’t bother her too much.  If this was his limit, she could still have a good match with him.  

And if he still had more power to call upon, well, she had plenty of time to wring it out of him.