The Vibrations In My Fists

[Gehn]

Age 891

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Bowl-cut black hair swung form side to side as Gehn weaved fists. On the other end: spiky black hair, tall, strong, with a serious gaze that cut like a knife. Her name, he had been told, was Aspara, a daughter of a noble clan.

The status that his family aspired to.

Much to the frustration of his elder siblings, Celerus and Ollis, Gehn counted himself among those invited to a social event under Vegeta’s red sky. Food – mostly meats from exotic worlds the galaxy over, where half the attendees claimed to have killed the animals themselves and probably didn’t lie in so doing – adorned countless tables. Many Saiyans, even those in their equivalent of high society, ate without manners.

To do so would be seen, by some, as lacking in confidence – one of many forms of weakness they despised.

Yet, no Saiyan social gathering for entertaining and influencing could be complete without battle. The families attending agreed to a series of exhibition matches as the sun hung over head. The elders in the family watched, those on the listed either dreaded or eagerly awaited their matches, and everyone judged as they stared at the combatants.

“I could have beaten that one.”
“That tactic was a mistake.”
“What an imbecile!”
“That woman fights like a drowned Saibaman!”

Thoughts privately, comments aloud with a mouth half full of food. It didn’t matter. Saiyans didn’t care. And someone like Gehn, far below the average of Saiyan strength, up against a Saiyan noblewoman was far easier on the eyes than he was? The comments, as he fought her, as fists blurred in the air and sweat flung between them, were directly entirely in one direction.

Aspara’s fist cracked against the side of Gehn’s face. His cheek split against his teeth, blood splattered into the air, Gehn stumbled. Then, red orbs appeared, spinning so fast they stretched and distorted, in both of his hands. He threw them straight at Aspara and they whined as they weaved through the air – and she easily weaved between them.

Gehn wore a simple set of Saiyan battle armor. Almost everyone present wore theirs, as well. His was the kind with long pauldrons, striped and yellow. It stretched well but didn't provide the protection of newer or higher-end models. Aspara wore her own set, well beyond anything he ever had the good fortune to touch let alone don.

Another fist caught him on the opposite side of the face. More blood coated his teeth and tongue, he breathed the iron flavor, and felt his vision wobble for a moment. He could take hits, yes, whatever gods existed knew that for a fact.

But they shook him all the same. He stumbled back in the opposite direction, Aspara readied another blow, and Gehn’s dark, Saiyan eyes locked onto her with a knowing sheen of light in them.

With a gesture, those twinned, spinning orbs of red energy suddenly stopped midair – high in the sky now, flying away from them – and whistled as they reversed course and screamed through the air right towards Aspara’s back.

 

[Aspara]

She heard them before she felt them. A high, thin whine cutting through the noise of the crowd, the pitch shifting as the orbs reversed and came screaming back.

Aspara turned her head just enough to confirm what she already knew. Two spinning masses of red Ki, tight and fast, aimed at the space between her shoulder blades. She'd tracked them when he first threw them and dismissed them as a feint, something flashy to buy distance after she'd opened his face up. They should have been fifty meters out and climbing.

They weren't.

Her body moved before the thought finished. She dropped low, pivoted on her lead foot, and let the first orb scream past her temple close enough to feel the heat lick across the scar on her jaw. The second one she caught with her forearm, batting it sideways into the dirt where it detonated in a burst of red light and kicked dust across the ring.

The crowd reacted. She didn't hear what they said and didn't care.

What she cared about was the boy across from her, bleeding from the mouth and standing like he'd planned every second of it. The orbs hadn't been wild shots. He'd known exactly where they'd be when he called them back, which meant he'd known exactly where she'd be, and that kind of spatial awareness at his age, at his power level, was not something you picked up by accident.

Aspara closed the distance in two strides. He read it coming and got his guard up, arms crossed high, weight shifted to absorb the blow. She hit him through it anyway, a straight right to the center of his guard that folded his arms back into his own chest and sent him skidding across the packed dirt on his heels.

He didn't go down. That was twice now he'd taken a clean shot that should have put someone his size on the ground, and twice he'd absorbed it and stayed standing.

She rolled her shoulders and reset her stance, tail unwinding from her waist to flick once behind her before settling back into place.

"The orbs," she said, and the way she said it made clear she expected an answer. "How long can you sustain them at that range?"

His blood was on her knuckles. She didn't wipe it off. The fight wasn't over yet, but the question mattered more to her than the next exchange, and she was already watching his face to see whether he understood what she was really asking, which was how a low-born Saiyan with middling power had taught himself to fight like that.

 

[Gehn]

White impacted Gehn’s forearms as he raised them like a vertical wall. For a moment, the impact of the glove of Aspara’s battle armor, her knuckles beneath it, against him made his bones bow forward. A moment later and the air cracked from the impact and Gehn skidded backwards, the soles of his white Saiyan boots partially shredding on the stone upon which they fought.

For a moment, as Aspara took her usual stance again, Gehn stood there with his arms still up in front of his face. He felt certain he looked a fool, even more certain that Ollis would say something about this moment later, but hardly cared: the sudden numbness in his arms took priority.

With set teeth and tight jaw, he slowly lowered them and took his stance again. Every nerve in his body ached for him to shake his arms, to get feeling back, to banish the pins and needles sensation throughout him.

He steadied his mind against those urges.

“My family has made it all but a necessity. I’d never get by, otherwise,” he answered real question, his breathing labored but steady. It wasn’t an answer that would shame Celerus and Ollis, and so he didn’t feel paranoid about the consequences of these words later.

Likely, Aspara and anyone else would interpret it as a compliment.

He tilted his head.

“Less than a minute total,” he answered the surface question, too.

A distraction that he didn’t even have to make, her question. It gave him time.

“Plenty, during a fight,” he added as, suddenly, the whine of the last blast returned.

Gehn closed the distance this time and struck with a straight. Aspara dodged it, and then dodged the spinning ball of red as it raced past her again. She countered, Gehn weaved, and realized he had his chance.

She didn’t dodge it just now – he made sure the blast missed!

The blast came at her back again and she was more than prepared. She stepped to the side and the orb, spinning so fast now that it had elongated like an egg, raced towards Gehn’s gut instead.

The famous weakness of such techniques, and he had fallen for it hims—

One of Gehn’s hands snapped outwards and caught the egg-shaped ki blast in his own, white glove! Already so close to Aspara, who stepped to the side just now, his body only needed to twist to orient towards her. Gehn swung the hand, following the momentum of his pivoting trunk, carrying the volatile mass of energy straight at the striped-yellow section of Aspara’s armor that covered her stomach.

Eyes wide. Teeth clenched and a roar behind them as he seized his opening and hoped for the best.

Let’s see how you handle this one!! He thought – and a single iota of that Saiyan pride, that thirst for victory, flared to life.

Red light shot out in beams and cast shadows across the stone courtyard-battlefield and all the onlookers at its edges.

 

[Aspara]

The blast hit her square in the stomach and the world went white.

For one full second, Aspara felt nothing but heat and pressure and the shriek of Ki against armor. The impact lifted her off her feet and drove her backward through the air, and when she hit the ground she hit it sliding, one hand down in the dirt and the other braced across her midsection where the blast had connected. Dust billowed around her in a wide arc. The crowd noise swelled and she heard, distantly, someone laugh.

She stood up before the dust settled.

Her armor had taken the worst of it. The striped plating over her stomach was scorched black and cracked along one seam, heat still radiating off the surface in visible waves. Beneath it her skin stung in a way that told her she'd be bruised by evening, and that the bruise would be deep. She rolled her neck once, felt something click back into place, and let her hands fall to her sides.

The boy had caught his own blast out of the air and used it as a weapon. He'd turned a technique's most obvious weakness into the strike itself, and he'd done it mid-exchange, while she was already countering. Someone had spent a long time thinking about how to fight people stronger than him and had come up with answers that worked.

My family has made it all but a necessity.

She'd heard what he meant by it. The noble families on Vegeta produced warriors through resources and bloodline. Whatever his family had produced him through, it wasn't either of those things.

Aspara settled back into her stance and the tail around her waist tightened. The crowd was still buzzing, probably thrilled that the noblewoman had taken a clean hit from someone they'd already written off. Let them buzz.

She closed on him again, faster this time, and what followed was shorter than the audience wanted it to be. Three exchanges. On the first she tested his guard and found it solid. On the second she broke it with a low feint that pulled his hands down and a knee that caught him under the ribs. On the third she put him on his back with a palm strike to the center of his chest that landed with enough force to crack the stone beneath him when he hit.

The match was over. It had never really been in question.

Aspara stood over him, breathing evenly, and looked down at the blood on his face and the way his hands were still half-raised even now, still shaped around techniques he couldn't throw from the ground. She wiped her knuckles on her thigh, his blood and hers from where the armor seam had split her skin, and turned away.

She made it four steps before she stopped.

"Your name," she said without turning around. "What is it."

She expected an answer the way she expected gravity to work, and she waited for it the same way.

 

[Gehn]

The glove over his blast-clutching hand shredded into pieces. Gehn got shoved back out of the blast and his own armor, face, legs – his entire front, really – were singed and scorched. The smoke cloud from the blast swallowed him as much as it swallowed Aspara, and his ears rang. Yet, despite it all, despite how the way his now-burnt hand agonized him, he felt the rush.

He had taken down not just a noblewoman, he hardly cared about that, but someone much stronger than him.

Or so he thought.

The smoke parted around her as, with a scorch mark over the stomach of her armor, as well as the curve of it over her upper chest, Aspara appeared again. Eyes sharp. Fists drawn back. Gehn’s tail, which he also kept safe around his waist like any good Saiyan, vibrated and jerked about like a cat’s instead of a primate’s.

The first blow landed against his raise arms again but, this time, blew them apart and open. He felt them go numb and begin to drop to his sides, unable to be lifted, but they never made it that far. Instead, the second followed a feint that distracted him – and her knee introduced itself to his ribs. He felt the air wheeze out of his lungs as he began to double over. His black irises and pupils flickered in and out of existence, wavering with his consciousness.

His vision tunneled black at the edges.

The third was a palm strike into his armor. It, just like the knee strike, felt like he wasn’t wear any at all. With the wind already knocked out of him, consciousness already fading, it all simply went dark.

He came to with the sound of footsteps. It could have been an hour later or a mere moment, but he felt stone beneath his back, beneath his head. He took choking, raspy breaths as he lay there. His tail rested loose on the ground instead of wrapped around his waist. He saw Aspara’s ankles.

He had heard her footsteps as she walked away – and her question, a moment later.

She didn’t even give him the dignity of a glance.

Gehn rolled onto his side and cough, still wheezing instead of breathing.

“My name…” he choked the words out, likely just barely loud enough for her to hear. “…is…”

He leaned on his left forearm and felt the feeling and life come back to his right. Silent, red light appeared in the palm.

“…don’t you…” he grunted through his strained breathing. “…remember the rules?!”

In that moment, as time slowed, even Gehn didn’t know why he did what he did. The only expectation from his siblings and family had been to not embarrass them. To not be such a disgrace, a disappointment, a failure.

That had been achieved. No one expected him to defeat Aspara, so much stronger than he.

For a moment, Gehn’s eye flicked to Ollis as she watched. Red Saiyan armor. Beauty, though not comparable to Aspara’s. A smirk that he could see on her face even when it wasn’t there – her face just looked like it. Thin arms betrayed how hard she punched, how sharp her knuckles felt.

Celerus, with his long hair pointed upright like an elongated style natural to the Vegetas who took this planet so long ago. Except, he also had a low ponytail that looked more an untamed and spiky mess tied together.

His fists were heavy, his disappointment in later years heavier. Celerus always believed, Gehn could tell, that his younger brother was capable of overcoming who he was. Ollis hoped Gehn never proved Celerus right.

All that in just a moment. It ended and Gehn’s cracked-open eye flicked back to Aspara.

The rules: Battle until yield or unconsciousness that lasted ten seconds or more. The overseer of their duel counted, but Gehn heard only seven when he awoke and rose.

And Gehn had not yielded.

“Blackroot…!!” The energy sang as it gathered into a ball within his palm; energy so deeply red that, if it were nighttime? It would be indistinguishable from a starless sky.

Still half on the ground, Gehn thrust that arm forward, fingers clenched around the energy but not completely closed. It erupted into a dully roaring wave that washed above the now-cracked stone floor Gehn laid on, cast dark light into Vegeta’s red-pink sky above, and descended upon Aspara with enough size and volume to swallow three of her entirely whole.

“Cannon!!”

 

[Aspara]

The wave hit her and Aspara leaned into it.

Both palms forward, feet grinding furrows into the cracked stone as the Blackroot Cannon broke against her guard and split around her arms in forking streams of deep red. The heat of it baked through her gloves and the force pushed her back half a step before she caught herself and held. Her hair whipped behind her. The crowd noise disappeared under the roar of the blast.

She pushed forward. One step, then another, and the wave thinned and shredded apart around her until there was nothing left of it. The last of it scattered upward into Vegeta's sky and burned out.

Her palms were red and raw when she lowered them. The boy was still on the ground, arm extended, fingers open, breathing in shallow pulls that she could hear from where she stood. He'd emptied himself into that. Everything he had left, shaped into a single named technique and thrown at someone he knew was stronger, because the rules said the fight wasn't over and he wasn't done yet.

He'd corrected her. She had turned her back on a match that was still live and he had punished her for it from flat on his back. On Vegeta that kind of stubbornness got you killed more often than it got you anything worth having, but the ones it didn't kill tended to be worth remembering.

Aspara walked back to where he lay and stood over him. Her tail settled tight against her waist. The scorch marks on her armor were layered now, the fresh heat from the Blackroot Cannon overlapping the damage from earlier, and the cracked plating along her stomach had shifted out of alignment.

"Yield," she said. The word came down at him the same way gravity did.

She waited. Her eyes stayed on his face, on the blood drying at the corner of his mouth and the way his hand still held the shape of the blast he'd just thrown. The fight was over. She'd known that before she turned her back the first time, and she'd been right about everything except him.