Okara Vs. Cooler

Cooler smiled under his mask, before crossing terrain in an instant and hit her hard enough to blow her back through several mountains, her feet digging a trail behind her. Okara turned the momentum against him, using it instead of stopping it as she teleported behind him, fist aimed at the crown of his skull.

He caught her by the wrist and threw her down through a hillside.

She grinned and vanished before the dust settled, reappearing at his flank, driving a knee into his ribs. Cooler grunted and slid sideways, and she pressed forward with a flurry of blows, one after another, until he finally caught her last punch without turning his head.

"Interesting," he said, without looking at her. "Spirit control... quite an unusual technique."

He turned the caught fist back toward her and drove his other hand through her chest in a single punch, then released her arm and blasted her away. She hit dirt, rolled, spat blood, and teleported out just as his heel cratered the spot where her head had been.

She reappeared thirty meters up, blood running down her chin.

She took a breath and dropped straight at him. He braced for her attack. However, before she reached him, she pulled up, changed her intent, and fired instead; a wide golden blast of ki that ate the whole sky in front of him.

He crossed his arms and took it head-on. She used the cover, kicked off the ground, pivoted to come in behind him —

But he was already turned into her. The blast broke against his back as he caught her arm and hauled her forward, elbow arcing toward the back of her head. She winked out of the lock, reappeared at his other side, and threw another punch, only for Cooler to jump back.

"I see," he said. "Your energy shifts for a fraction of a second before you leave... and again before you arrive."

She jumped back and put distance between them. Cooler let her.

They stood a hundred meters apart in the wreck of the plain, glaring, and Okara understood with a cold little jolt that they were doing the same thing, both of them taking the other apart in their heads, hunting for the seam.

He had the edge in power and experience, and unlike his father and brother he had earned every scrap of it, drilled it into mastery. Her edge was technique and control, enough to hold the fight, but it was an edge with a timer, and she could already feel the seconds bleeding out. 

Once he closed the gap there would be nothing left between him and her.

She had to move first, and trust her plan.

"Don't get cocky, bastard." She made the first move.

Cooler answered with a spread of purple bolts, each one powerful enough to destroy a planet. She reached into the middle of the spread, weaving between the beams before closing her hand around the nearest bolt, before vanishing out of sight, reappearing at his shoulder with the bolt still in her fist, driving it into the side of his head.

The explosion went off point-blank.

Cooler reeled through the smoke and she was already on him, both hands ballooning to the size of boulders, clapping shut on him from either side with a crack that rolled across the plain before she kicked him away.

He caught himself before he hit the ground, twisted, swept a leg through the space she'd need to follow up. She wasn't there. She'd teleported behind him, gotten both arms under his, and hauled him off his feet, and at the top of the suplex arc she teleported them both.

They reappeared a kilometer up, beside the energy ball she'd left floating there as a marker. She drove him straight down out of the sky into a mountain, riding him through it, letting him go at the last second so that his own weight finished the job.

The mountain came apart.

Cooler came out the far side, bleeding, before hurling a blast back at the hole he'd made. It detonated against nothing. Her ki moved in at his back and he turned straight into a punch that folded him around her fist.

"So much for understanding my technique," she said, shaking out her hand.

"You are enjoying this," Cooler said, cracking his neck.

"Uh, yeah? Aren't you? This is great."

"I am," he admitted — which surprised her.

She grabbed him again, got a fistful of the horn off the side of his skull, and teleported back up to the floating marker to put him through the ground a second time. This time his free hand was already braced against her when they arrived. He shoved off, broke the grip, and hit her twice before she could set the throw.

"The same trick won't work on me twice, little girl," he said. "But don't let that stop you."

"Fine." Spitting blood, she tore a slab from the shattered mountain and flooded it with spiritual energy until it was many times denser than it normally was, then hurled it at him.

Cooler split it with a single chop, and the halves had barely begun to part when the second slab, thrown right behind the first, crashed into him and drove him to one knee.

"Neat trick," she said. "Don't you think?"

His answer was to close the distance in a blink, hammering her guard four times in the space of a second before his tail hooked her legs out and flung her into the ground.

She landed on her back hard enough to shake the plain. She barely had time to grunt before she rolled, right as Cooler's heel cratered where her head had been. She pushed off with her tail, caught the ankle he'd left hanging, and put her whole weight into a spirit-control powered yank, dragging the leg out from under him.

He dropped to one knee, right as Okara's own knee was already coming up into his exposed face, increasing the size right at the moment of impact, delivering a strike with such force that shattered part of his mask before the blast threw him clear.

He slowed himself with his tail, digging up a trail, before grabbing a slab of stone from the ruined mountain and throwing it at her. She caught the slab on her ki, spun it, and threw it back twice as fast and heavy with spiritual power.

Cooler split it with a blast and flew through the halves into empty air, turning out of the way right in time before a massive fist landed on his back.

The fist hit dirt where he'd been standing, and the shockwave split the plain right down the middle.

"I must thank you," Cooler said. "Every exchange makes you easier to read. Whatever edge that technique gave you... it no longer exists." He looked at her. "But like I said. Don't let that stop you."

Her breath was ragged now, this constant exchange was tiring her out. But she still had an ace up her sleeve.

"Cocky bastard."

She teleported once more, and his elbow was already swinging into the space she was about to appear, catching her clean across the face.

She skipped twice across the rocks before digging with her heels, stopping.

Good, she thought, wiping blood from her mouth.

Okara knew her plan was risky, but it was her best shot at winning. While it was true that Cooler was learning how to counter her, he was learning what she wanted him to learn.

And that was the thing he hadn't worked out yet. Every time he read the shift and swung his counter into the space she arrived in, he was drilling the same reflex deeper, the same movement, the same timing, growing accustomed to what she wanted him to. She'd stopped changing it up two exchanges ago, she was feeding it to him on purpose, and he was too busy winning to notice he was being taught.

She just had to survive long enough to enact her plan.

“Ok,” Okara grinned, raising a hand, releasing a dozen little ki markers around him, each one humming, each one a place she could be in an instant. Then she started bouncing between them, delivering a flurry of attacks.

For several seconds, the battlefield became a blur of movement as Cooler turned and turned, swinging at the afterimages of Okara’s teleportation, catching nothing, but hits that were leaving fresh cracks that spread across what was left of the mask.

Then he stopped turning.

He went still in the middle of the storm of blows, arms loose, and without a sign, the next time she blinked into one of her markers, his fist was already there.

It caught her across the face and stopped the whole swarm of afterimages as she dropped through three of her own markers and hit the ground hard.

"That was annoying," Cooler said, flexing his hand. “I knew you were planning something, but this was disappointing."

"Eat shit." 

The two of them meet in the middle, trading hundreds of blows a second, with shockwaves rolling off them and flattening the planet around them.

Breaking off, she teleported and put herself behind him, but his elbow was already there. She jumped over the hit,  and spun off into a spirit-loaded hook at his temple. He rolled his head with it, barely, and his hand snapped up and caught her wrist mid-swing, before squeezing, and as he did, something gave in and Okara screamed.

He let her go, and she staggered back cradling the ruined arm against her chest, the hand hanging limp.

"You have done better than anyone else," Cooler said. "Probably better than Escarot would’ve, but it’s time to end this."

He was on her before the words finished. A knee to the gut folded her; followed by a backhand that snapped her head sideways; just as his tail caught her across the ribs and put her airborne. 

"Come, then, little monkey," he said. "Show me the last of it."

Fine. Okara thought, if he wanted to see it all, she would FUCKING oblige!

Taking a few steps back, she planted her feet, brought her good hand back to her hip, and started pouring everything she had into her hand.

She dumped the last of her energy into it and kept dumping, using her spirit control until the ki compressed to a dense, screaming point of gold so heavy the air bent toward it, and the dirt lifted off the ground and fell inward.

Across the gap, Cooler watched her charge it, and didn't move to stop her.

"A last stand?" he said, almost disappointed. “Like a dying animal…”

"Yeah, yeah." Okara grinned through the blood. "You've got me all figured out. Right?"

"I do."

"Cool." The point of gold howled between her hands, full, ready. "Then you already know exactly what’s going to happen."

She vanished.

Cooler felt the shift, the fraction-of-a-second flare before she arrived, the tell he'd taken apart and mastered, the one that had put his elbow through her face a moment ago. His body answered on its own, faster than thought, the perfected counter already moving: a fist swinging hard into the space where she would appear, behind him!

However, unlike all previous times, where she teleported behind him or at his flank, this time, she appeared in front of him. Not only that, but this time, her technique had been faster.

And her new technique, the Collapsing Assassination was already firing.

There was no gap. No breath between her arrival and her movement, the shift he read and the beam that hit him happened in the same instant, she had tricked into learning a pattern she could alter and Cooler could only smile at that as the blast closed on everything else.

It took him point-blank, as the planet went white. 

A trench opened from where he'd been standing all the way to the horizon, and Cooler went down it, folded around the beam, driven through the crust of Planet Vegeta and out the far side of a mountain range and into the earth beyond.

Okara held it until there was nothing left to hold, not energy left to burn.

Then the light died, and the gold around her died with it, and she dropped out of the sky, hitting the ground as she chuckled, but not of celebration.

“Fuck me,” Okara sighed, looking at the sky. “How durable are these fuckers?”

The dust hung over the wound she'd carved clear across the planet. Then, a long way off, at the end of the trench, something moved.

Cooler dragged himself up out of the earth slowly. Half the exoskeleton was gone. One arm hung wrong, as blood ran freely from a hole punched clean through his side as turned his head down the trench to find her.

"..That… hurt," he rasped.

Cooler took a step toward her down the trench, dragging a ruined leg, and the last of his gathered power began, slowly, to glow in the one hand he had left.

"Get up," he said quietly. “This isn’t over."

And Okara, spitting blood, black-haired, and obviously empty of energy, grinned up at him, and clawed her way toward her feet.