"You've grown a lot, Hanna. I can't hold back at all against you." Goku admitted to me, keeping a wary stance.
"Thanks, dad, but after that trampoline trick, saying stuff like that makes me feel like you're making fun of me." I argued.
He responded with a shrug. "That took me six months of hard training to learn, you know, and you'll probably be able to do it by the time this battle ends. So who's making fun of who, then?" He reminded me. He wasn't wrong. Now that I'd seen the technique, it wasn't going to work on me again, but I could pretend to be figuring it out. Seeing my dad use it against me had opened me up to a world of new derivative techniques that I could now use if need be. But right now, I felt like taking him off guard with a different school of techniques.
"KA-"
"What?!" I got into the stance and began channeling my energy, which instantly put my dad on guard. Honestly, about the dumbest thing I could use right now was an energy wave. After all, he was within five feet of me. Dodging it or attacking me while I charged up was the easiest thing in the world for him in this situation. But I kept charging it up anyways.
"ME-"
"Alright, then!" Just as I'd expected him to, my dad didn't take the bait and attack me while I was charging it up. If he had, I would have simply released the wave early, anyways. The smarter thing to do here was to wait for me to finish charging, then dodge the wave once I set it off. Clearly, he was planning to use the moment that I released it to move in and get in close. But I was one step ahead of him there.
"HA me HA!" Honestly, what I did was completely disrespectful to the fundamental technique that Roshi had originally created, which was exactly why it caught my dad off guard. Separating my hands, I released a crescent-shaped wave of energy from the core of my charging Kamehameha as I split the beam in two on the third syllable. This wave was weak by design, but it wasn't so weak that my dad hadn't needed to address it in some way, which he did by simply jumping over it during the "me" portion of my Kamehameha, giving me enough time to funnel a little bit more energy into the two separate balls of energy in my hands before I blasted both of them out at him as he landed back on the ground during the last syllable.
"GEH!" Off guard, my dad was forced to fall back onto Silver Mode in order to give him the power that he needed in order to block the energy waves with crossed arms. In response, I resorted to my own Silver mode, pushing him back through several trees before finally cutting the wave off.
"HA HYAH!" After my attack ended, Goku didn't hesitate to go onto the offensive with a powerful kick. When I managed to block it with my arm, I couldn't help but wince at the power behind it, feeling my bone creak a bit. Technically, since we'd both jumped straight to the maximum usable limit of Silver Mode, the gap between our respective strengths hadn't changed at all, but as the fight transitioned to the next level, that gap became ever so slightly more oppressive. I didn't dare block another blow like that again, forcing me into a more flowing fighting style that involved giving up ground in order to lessen the amount of damage I took from every blow.
We tore through the forest as he pushed me back. With Vegeta, his speed and predictability were his weaknesses. He had some moves that were rather unpredictable, but he never tried the same thing twice, and there was always some method to what he did. Constantly probing, looking for a weakness to exploit. For me, it was child's play to read Vegeta's energy to figure out what he was going to do next, so even though he was twice as strong as me, he'd never stood a chance in a fight. My dad wasn't like that at all. He had the roots of Autonomous Ultra Instinct inside of him, after all.
By reading his energy, I could see what he was going to do, to an extent, but it wasn't very reliable. Sometimes a punch would become a kick, and sometimes he'd do something on a dime that not even he'd expected. The basis of his fighting style was unhesitating. Or perhaps unthinking? Either way, he was faster than me, and almost as strong as Vegeta. The longer this dragged on, the more of my fighting style he managed to get himself accustomed to, the less chances I'd have to win if the differences between our strengths stayed where they were.
"Argh!" With a scream, I blasted the ground below me, creating a cover of dirt and mud that I used to take an exaggeratedly long jump backwards, leaving an afterimage in my place. My dad didn't look at the afterimage for a moment, but he didn't follow me, either. He looked amused by my reaction.
"Having problems there?" He asked with a mocking smirk, sparing a glance at the gigantic hole that I'd created within a foot of him. I couldn't even see the bottom of it.
"You... made it go crazy?" I asked. I immediately had realized what'd happened. I'd attempted to take his energy during his last attack, in order to even the power gap between us, but after I'd taken the energy in, it'd suddenly gone from placid to berserk. He'd managed to get so much control over his own power that he could hide the connection between himself and his ki from me. Aside from the Core girls who'd learned it from me, and Raika, I'd never met anyone capable of 'thinking' with their ki before, until now.
After I'd lost control of the stolen energy, I'd reflexively discharged it as quickly as possible, resulting in a hole too deep to see the bottom of it, and a fair-sized drain of my own power.