Ch. 188: Promotion Exam

"Alright, Videl, are you ready?" Gohan shouted, standing directly between Yamcha and Videl on the large courtyard of the main Legacy complex, the same one on which I'd once killed Frieza.

"Absolutely!" Videl chirped back, rearing to go.

"Why am I doing this again?" Yamcha whined from the other side of Gohan.

"I promised to make you a real Captain if you beat her." I called back as an answer.

The reason that Yamcha and Videl were fighting in front of a crowd of Legacies was simple. Videl wanted to be a Captain. Gohan vouched for her strength, and the scouters built into Legacy's sensors agreed with him. Her power level had shot up by an order of magnitude since the deal with Garlic Jr, the real experience with life and death struggling having helped her get a better grip of her powers, and now it was time for her to prove that she was strong enough to handle the responsibility that came with being a Legacy Captain.

I'd decided that the best way to do that was to have her fight someone I'd already turned down for the job.

A few months ago, Yamcha had come to me asking to become a Captain, and I'd shot him down due to the fact that he simply wasn't strong enough, at least of mind. His body was weaker than the other Captain candidates, too, but more than strong enough for what I needed, but I didn't trust his drive when it came to anything beyond meeting girls. In fact, he'd already been suspended from Legacy twice for bringing dates to our main complex (which meant more 'silencing' paperwork for Chelsea and I). Since then, my dad had come back and now I was being put under pressure from all sides to give Yamcha a shot at handling the responsibility that I just knew he'd flub if he got the chance.

So, I created this opportunity. A fight against a weaker opponent, on paper. If Yamcha could pull this easy win off, then it'd prove that he wasn't totally useless, and the gap in strength wasn't so much that Videl wouldn't be able to show off what Gohan had taught her over the last year or so. 

When Videl absolutely destroyed Yamcha, it'd be more than enough to prove that he was only barely training at all, and that my abysmally low opinion of him was fully merited. Then, I'd toss her into a Captain's uniform and make the scouters built into the sensors ignore her power level, which was already more than high enough to make them glitch a bit when she went all out. A perfect deal.

"Why do I have to do this? I'm totally strong enough to deal with any problem on my own already!" Yamcha complained, but I ignored him, nodding to Gohan, who nodded back at me. 

"Everyone ready?! And fight!" Gohan shouted, dashing out of the arena as he signaled the start of the battle. 

And with that, the battle between Videl and Yamcha started. Immediately, the two dashed toward each other and unleashed blow after blow at each other at dizzying speeds that none of the low-class trainees could even keep up with. Seemingly teleporting around the courtyard in a display of incredible speed, to the low-class Legacies, it looked like the rocky outcropping brought in to help training had spontaneously combusted. 

Meanwhile, beside me, my dad was holding his head in his hand. I'd already explained that Yamcha wasn't training, but seeing was believing.

Yamcha was more than twice as strong as Videl. Honestly, without the Kaio-ken derivative, he was so much stronger than her that the idea of fighting should have been naught but a bad joke, like the difference between Vegeta and Recoome back on Namek, but they were actually pretty equal. When the first exchange of blows between them finally ended, the two of them both had a few cuts and bruises, but nothing more, and that fact annoyed everyone who could follow the battle.

Yamcha did have more power than Videl, but he hadn't been training recently, so he wasn't using it very well. His punches weren't sharp, and every single one of them had already been predicted by Videl long before he'd ever thrown them. 

Even with that in mind, the sheer power difference should have still made this an unwinnable battle from Videl's side, if he'd used his full power, but she looked like a nine-year-old, non-Saiyan girl. If it was me against him, no matter the power difference, I knew for certain that Yamcha would've used his full power, but against someone that actually seemed like a little girl, Yamcha simply couldn't bring himself to give her a real fight. That was a big mistake, though. Videl was the same person in this reality as the girl who'd gotten up and kept fighting after Spopovich had broken most every bone in her body. There was steel there, and grit, just like the Pan that I'd just fought not days ago. 

"Grey Mode!" And this girl didn't hesitate to step things up a notch.

"You taught her well." Dad muttered to Gohan as he watched Videl fight. With her activation of Grey Mode, Videl's power increased more than five times over. Admittedly, against Yamcha, that wasn't much if he decided to go all out. For reference, she maxed out at a power level of around 200,000 or so, while Yamcha's Kaio Ken times ten could catapult his power level into the million mark, but Yamcha was already failing to use his energy properly. With her power level eclipsing his on top of that, Yamcha made a big mistake in the heat of battle. 

"I can do that too, you know! GREY MODE!" With his usual exaggerated swagger, Yamcha decided to break out his own Grey Mode. I could sense him attempting to push his power level up about three times what it normally was, but he was trying to show off a bit too much, attempting to use the more complicated Grey Mode rather than a basic Kaio-ken. 

After rising his strength meteorically, far higher than he'd attempted to push it, Yamcha let out a horrifying scream, and his power level almost instantly bottomed out. He'd messed up the Grey Mode, and the effects of that on his body had instantly knocked him unconscious, maybe worse. So much for his usual swagger.