"You are small and weak! I will destroy you!" My sensitive ears picked up Bacterian goading the dark-skinned fighter as the two stepped onto the stage.
"And you smell like death. Unfortunately, that will not help you against a real warrior. I am giving you one chance to give up now, before I defeat you." King Chappa replied level-headedly, holding his nose irritably as he took his place across the stage from the smelly caveman.
I grimaced. While I was far enough away that the smell hadn't carried to me, it was still disturbing, seeing Bacterian in real life.
Nobody that ugly should ever go out in public wearing nothing but a speedo. It was just wrong on so many levels.
"You're tough, but my stink works on everyone all the same!" Chappa ignored the overgrown stink-factory, raising one fist in a partial fighting stance.
The moment that the announcer (not the same blonde guy from the anime, interestingly enough. This guy had brunette hair.) began the match, it ended.
Anticlimactic, but I couldn't quite bring myself to blame the stronger King Chappa, who'd moved in with two steps like a cobra, striking the large, smelly fighter with three lightning fast kicks to the sternum.
As Chappa walked away, 100% certain that Bacterian wouldn't be getting up, the announcer got over his shock and began his announcement a bit late. "Oh, wow! It looks like King Chappa's won this round with one single, powerful kick, right to the gut! Guess, while he could stand his opponent's foul odor, he didn't want this fight to last very long! Still, though, by tournament guidelines, I must count! 1…"
Bactterian did not get back up before the count of 10.
…I found myself disappointed. As snappy as the movements were, the technique itself wasn't particularly profound. He'd simply placed all of his power into speed for a single breath, literally.
While impressive by normal standards, it was the most basic of basics, and had a big downside. It required a certain rhythm, and there'd be a small hitch in your movements, which an equal opponent could take advantage of.
Luckily for him, Bacterian wasn't particularly strong. Krillin had struggled against him once or twice, but only because he was good at getting someone off their guard, due to his stink, not his actual abilities.
With my senses, I could feel King Chappa go straight to the bathroom in the qualifying building after his battle. Probably to wash his… everything.
Eww. If I ever had to fight Bacterian personally, I decided to use my energy to grab him telekinetically, bring him all the way to the ocean, and dunk him repeatedly until he was squeaky clean, even if it took weeks.
…Or months…
The next battle was one of raw strength, between some sort of pterodactyl-like monster and a tiger-man. Thanks to the cutting power of his claws, the tiger-man ended up winning the fight, but it wasn't particularly entertaining from my point of view.
A bit like someone with a toy mallet fighting someone with a twig. Both had their own natural advantages, but they didn't have anything beyond that.
No technique, at least. That was for sure. People like that bored me.
Luckily, Roshi (Still going by the name 'Jackie Chun') and Gohan both faced real martial artists. Not ones on their level, certainly. They still won their battles with comparable ease to that of the 'fight' that Chappa had, but the other fighters at least had a chance to show their stuff.
Gohan's opponent was a large grappler type who attempted some sort of lock, using his overwhelming size to his advantage.
Gohan, being a turtle hermit-trained warrior whose physical strength was beyond normal human limits, simply picked the large grappler up and tossed him out of bounds in a display of 'inhuman' physical strength far beyond what his size would belie.
Honestly, that wasn't as interesting as Chappa's kicks, but it did give me a rough estimate of his physical prowess.
Sometimes, physical strength and ki power, while they could enhance each other, weren't directly relative to each other. For example, I had a lot of both, but my own physical strength, not enhanced by my ki, wasn't completely incomparable to Gohan's.
That didn't mean that I wasn't still in another league from him. I could probably go against someone with a power level of around 700-800 without using a drop of ki to enhance my strength, after all, while he was subconsciously enhancing himself to the limit, but for someone whose power level was only around 150 at best, Gohan's physical strength was pretty… okay.
I far preferred the battle between Roshi (Chun) and his opponent to the other quarterfinal matches, though.
He went up against some tall, lean fellow I'd never heard of before. According to the announcer, the guy called himself the 'Kick King.'
And 'Kick King' he was, by human standards. He hadn't surpassed human limits, and he didn't know how to use ki, but his kicks were still faster than the announcer's eyes could follow, according to the commentary. I was rather impressed by it, overall. You didn't see humans that skilled very often.
But as I began taking notes on the guy's posture, I noticed something. "...Dammit…" I muttered to myself.
Obviously, Roshi was dodging every kick without visible effort, using the bare minimum movements in a dance with grace that left me almost in awe, but he wasn't looking at this 'Kick King' fellow at all.
No. Roshi's eyes were locked onto me, far behind the audience. An unmoving stare.
He'd taken notice of me. And not just because I'd been able to follow this 'Kick King''s movements, either. From this distance, there was no way that Roshi'd be able to see my eyes that precisely.
No… He'd managed to sense my energy through its concealment. Maybe not all of it… but even if he'd only been able to see through 1% of my true strength, that was far beyond anything that anything he'd probably ever sensed before. No wonder his eyes watched me, unblinkingly, as he knocked the 'Kick King' unconscious and descended the stage, having won the match.
"Urck…" I groaned, as Roshi vanished from sight. This was part of the reason I'd been hiding my energy, but I'd forgotten one thing.
On this planet, there were only three people who actually taught energy sensing. Kami, Popo, and Mr. Korin.
The only way for someone to learn it was to directly apprentice underneath one of them. Roshi had. He'd apprenticed under Korin for three years in his youth. Apparently, he'd kept the skill, continuing to work on it. I'd thought he'd be long out of practice with that particular skill by now, but apparently my meager skill with concealing my strength hadn't been enough to work on him.
I shrugged. There wasn't much I could do about that now. Besides, the only one who could see through me was Roshi. Wasn't that big a deal, hopefully.
He wasn't the type to stick his nose where it didn't belong. It was unlikely that he'd take any real action at all unless he felt like I was actually hostile.