Ch. 91: Riley's Doubts

"Alright, girls. So, we're all in agreement, then? Riley, can you do the predictions, then?" Chelsea asked the veteran Core Girl sitting beside her.

"Uugghh... For Mistress, of course." Riley groaned, powering up into her Core Girl Issue Super Saiyan Silver state, complaints that she wasn't going to bother voicing clear in her mind. Manipulating the future and predicting it accurately were two very different things, but they had something in common: They both broke the universe's rules. Going backwards in time, even a little bit, was too stupid to attempt. It'd create another timeline, with a whole other universe, and a whole new version of Hanna and the Core girls, after all.

So, instead of actually making the changes, then going back, the girls would use a power similar to the Kai's time rings' power in order to look forward into the possible future that they were making. Once they knew how to create the future that they wanted, only then would they make the change, ensuring that only one (observable) timeline existed at any one time. They'd made it a rule to stay away from the 'Time Nest' where all potential timelines converged as a countermeasure against running into their potential alternate selves, just in case, though this wasn't ironclad by any means.

Using that power came with its own problems, though. It needed someone roughly twice as strong as the average angel. Just using it for a peek was even more draining than actually manipulating time itself. That was why Riley wasn't exactly happy about doing it, but she powered herself up and took a look anyway.

"Aah!" She gasped, her divine Super Saiyan Silver aura vanishing as the time manipulation drained almost the entirety of her energy in what seemed to Chelsea to be a single instant.

"Riley, are you okay?" Chelsea asked, helping the younger Core Girl support her own weight before she fell to the ground.

"Y-yeah." Riley stuttered, "He'll take too much time on his own. We'll have to amp up his aggression artificially. Once we do that, nine minutes fifty-five seconds on the dot." She explained. She'd probably spent an hour peeking through different potential timelines to figure that out, Chelsea realized. 

"Thanks, Riley." The older girl said, doing the time manipulation as she did so. 

Riley watched Chelsea do the time-manipulation as she'd specified, a look of shock on her face. Seeing the future was incredibly difficult, but manipulating time in such a precise way to create a difference of almost exactly ten minutes? Almost as bad, especially since Goku and Ginyu were both already fast. She had to bend the time zones pretty far, as well as manipulating the latent energy in the air to make the time manipulation less obvious. 

Even doing all of that, Chelsea didn't seem to be straining herself at all in Riley's eyes. She looked like she was simply taking a pleasant stroll.

'Are we... really that different?' Riley couldn't help but ask herself internally. The older Core Girl was effortlessly doing something that would've made Riley's face twist with concentration and strain. 

Riley was one of the older Core Girls, but she was still nearly 10 years younger than Chelsea. That shouldn't have meant much, though. While Mistress had been there, she'd been mostly focused on increasing her own strength. Each girl's available power had been effectively 'capped' and as they grew, all of that growth would simply pass straight to Mistress, who would create other Core Girls when it became too much for her to handle. 

Once Mistress left, though, she was forced to seal her strength, meaning that she couldn't create Core Girls herself to lower it. As a result, the girls were allowed to grow and multiply as much as they felt like. In other words, in only a few years Core Time, Chelsea had grown her own power far beyond Riley's own, despite the fact that neither of them had bothered to split their energies yet. 

Despite being born from the same person, the gap between the two was clear. Chelsea was more useful to Mistress than Riley was.

With that fresh in her thoughts, Riley went back to the mansion to rest. When she woke up, she immediately went to the training grounds to release her frustration, but...

"Riley, are you okay?" One of the younger girls, Ashley, asked Riley, dodging a fairly powerful blast that Riley had used as a feint.

"Of course! Why do you ask?" Riley landed a kick right to Ashley's side.

Flipping backwards gracefully with the blow, Ashley answered. "Because that didn't hurt!" Taking a page out of Hanna's book, Ashley used some of the energy that she'd left in the air to create an explosion in front of Riley's face. It was honestly more of a flashbang than a real explosion, though. "OOH... HAA!!" Ashley used Hanna's preferred energy wave. Riley could barely react in time. She was flung back against the barrier that separated the training grounds from the rest of the Core, injured a small bit. It wasn't enough to incapacitate Riley by any means, but Ashley had proven her point. There was no point in continuing to train, with Riley being so distracted.

"Look, Riley, you should go find Big Sis Chelsea and take a day off. You really strained yourself manipulating time yesterday, after all." Ashley advised.

Riley clenched her fist. A younger girl had beaten her. It stung a little bit, but Ashley was right. Riley wasn't on her game. She needed to take some time off.

...

"You're being pretty hard on yourself, Riley. You were plenty helpful to Mistress yesterday with those predictions." Chelsea told herself once Riley admitted how she was feeling to the older girl. Inside, though, she was thinking 'Good grief. She's so much like Mistress. Only satisfied with absolutes...' 

"Anyone could've done that. I was just lucky that you asked me. I'm nowhere near the best girl here when it comes to pure power, or control." Riley told her self-deprecatingly.

"Alright, then!" Chelsea said, an 'AHA!' expression crossing over her face. "I've got the perfect idea, Riley. Take a vacation!"