Chapter 6 - A game of drones

When Shu came to his senses, he found himself in the middle of a crisis meeting. He was still groggy, so even with his eyes open, he kept laying back for a while.

"Oh, you're awake."

Mai casually acknowledged him, then looked like she wouldn't have dedicated another second to the matter, but Pilaf in person got up and reached the ninja.

"We're glad that no harm has come to you, loyal Shu!" he said "It would not have done for a king to lose one half of the forces under his command in a single battle. Your courage will be commended and rewarded."

"Thanks, Your Majesty." whispered Shu, still feeling a bit faint. "It was hard fought, but I did all I could to keep the honour of the Rice dynasty high."

"Hard fought!" Mai laughed "You fell on your bum and got yourself knocked out by your own weapon. You don't even have any wounds, meaning you were overpowered so easily that the enemy didn't even need to actually hurt you."

She looked at him with contempt. "But on one thing I agree." she added. "You did do all you could."

Shu groaned, still not in good enough shape to engage in a duel of witticisms - not that he would have won against her, anyway. He gestured that he was fine, and Pilaf, while still showing some worry, did leave him be, feeling that it would not do either for a king to appear too emotional about the health of a subject. He merely gave Mai the order to bring Shu a glass of water, and then the discussion resumed.

"I believe we should pursue them, Your Majesty." said Mai "Whether they succeeded or not, they're a threat, and should be swiftly disposed of."

"Do you believe they could inform the usurper of our intentions?" asked Pilaf.

"That, I don't think. First because I'm sure she was mostly bluffing and she's not doing this with the knowledge or consent of her parents, and second, because they want the Dragon Balls, and right now, apparently, they have none. To denounce us would mean to lose that chance forever, because they would have to explain the King about the seven mystical devices of infinite power, and well, you see why they might not want to do that."

"Wait a second!" Shu jumped up, suddenly revitalised. "What did you say? They don't have any Dragon Balls?"

Mai nodded. "That's right. They did not seem to succeed in getting the one from the basement, I think the girl was trying to figure out how to hijack our alarms when I caught up with her. And when they escaped they had to leave some of their stuff here. The radar shows the same blips as it did when they were in the castle. The Dragon Balls should be in a capsule around here."

"Did you check in on the one in the basement?" asked Shu.

"Not yet." Mai shrugged. "I had to blast the lock when she got out, to make sure she wouldn't escape that way, so it needs some repairs before we can go down again. I could have destroyed the door like I did the one to the Residential Wing, but then the elevator wouldn't work either."

"Wait," cried Shu alarmed, "you did what to the other door?"

"This is of no consequence." Pilaf cut short all complaints with a hand gesture. "The only result that matter is - this was a victory! Unconventional, if we want, but now we have six Dragon Balls out of seven inside this castle. We only need to find five of them. And we know they're in this room."

"Well... yes."

"So let's focus on getting our wish granted first. Once we will have that, nothing else will matter. And we're so close."

"As you wish, Your Majesty." Mai let out a small sigh. "What are your orders then?"

"You should stay here, Mai. We have two important tasks for you. The first is to find the Dragon Balls that are in this room. Just check all the capsules - with due care, in case some are booby trapped."

Mai nodded. That sounded almost shockingly sensible, coming from him.

"The second is to, uh... address the concern that girl raised at dinner. The one about the wish." Pilaf's kingly demeanour sort of drained out of him as he mentioned that.

"Your Majesty," said Mai, firmly "that was just an attempt at making you doubt your own destiny. Pay it no mind."

"Well, yes, but there may be some truth to it." muttered Pilaf. "There is no harm in giving it some thought, is there? Just think and let me know how you would formulate the wish if it was you. And not us. Since we are the legitimate king and all."

Mai bowed. "As you wish. And what will Your Majesty do?"

"Ah, here comes the importance of our in-depth study of history! The last Dragon Ball seems to be in the hands of the Ox King, a local lord who has limited power over his own territory, consisting of a mountain and the immediate surroundings. This is effectively an independent kingdom, in which the forces of King Furry have not established their domain yet. This brave, freedom-loving man and his ancestors before him have fiercely fended off all of their envoys until now."

"As everyone else who ever walked into their territory, from what I've read." Mai frowned. "With a broadaxe."

"But you do not know all of the story, Mai. We searched painfully and for long the royal library," and here Pilaf pointed to the digital tablet he was holding in his left hand, "and apparently his tiny kingdom has splintered from the rest of the world back at the time of the Demon King. A remarkable display of loyalty! This man's family has pledged fealty to our royal House, and thus since then refuses to submit to the order imposed by the usurper. We are sure they will be happy and grateful to know that not only we have returned, but that we require their assistance in going back to the position we deserve."

Mai looked sceptical. "So, Your Majesty wants to go negotiate with him in person?"

"Precisely." Pilaf smiled, satisfied. "As soon as Shu feels well enough to go..."

Shu let out a whimper, just to make it clear that was not the case yet.

"...we will take one of our planes and pay him a royal visit. I am sure he will be a precious ally in the fights to come, if those people pester us again."

"Well," Mai said, "that is certainly proactive. But what if it turns out to be dangerous? Is Your Majesty fully confident in the historical accuracy of those sources?"

"Nonsense, Mai! Here we have a brave patriot, holding out for our own return to the throne. It is not only our right - nay, it is our duty to let us be known by him, relieve him of the burden of kinghood, and give him back his rightful place as our vassal. We are sure he will cry his eyes out in happiness at the news. What danger could there possibly be?"

"NO ONE ENTERS MA' LAND AND LIVES!" roared the gigantic, bearded man in a horned helment, waving his axe around threateningly. "YA BETTER SAY YER PRAYERS!"

Pilaf and Shu had barely gotten down from the plane when they were greeted by the owner of the land, the Ox King himself, in all of his extremely intimidating majesty. The trip had been easy enough. As they approached Mount Frypan, the only problems had come when they got close enough to feel the heat. It was well known how ten years before the mountain had inexplicably caught fire, turning into a gigantic smouldering mound that scorched the area for kilometres all around. At the beginning all they felt was just a slight rise in temperature, and they could see the mountain sort of glowing in the distance. Then it got hotter, and the air currents started. Powered by that gigantic fire, convection loops enveloped the whole area, causing turbulent currents that pushed the plane down. Shu had done his best to keep the attitude as much as possible, but the closer they got, the worse it became. When it started calming down he suggested they immediately land, as coming any closer would probably mean entering the part of the loops where currents began ascending - and then touching the ground safely would become almost impossible. Pilaf agreed, somewhat disappointed at the sight of the distance that still separated them from their destination, and they landed at the periphery of a small village that looked empty. They must have been sighted and followed for some time, though, because it would have been hard to believe that the lord of the land just happened to be exactly in that forgotten spot in which they arrived. Which solved the issue of finding him, but posed another whole lot of problems, the most pressing of which being a decent risk of decapitation in the next two minutes.

"We do not come to mean any harm!" Pilaf rushed to bow to the Ox King, forgetful of his own royal dignity. "We are in fact the bearers of good news."

"That is all ya thieves and scoundrels say." grunted the giant. "Liars, the whole lot of ya. But ya never say it again after I do my thing."

Shu did not feel like pointing out it would be very unlikely of them to say anything at all after he 'did his thing' was the wisest course of action, despite having the urge to.

"My lord," he said, bowing lower than Pilaf, and drawing from all his best servile arts, "my master says only the truth. We have landed far from your palace because we did not want to alarm you; we seek an alliance, not to attack you. We're honoured you managed to come and greet us immediately."

"What he says!" confirmed Pilaf, nodding vigorously, but still never raising his eyes to meet the ones of the Ox King.

"Greet, huh?" the man scratched his beard. "I was just chopping some wood for ma' daughter's bridal bed. Saw ya coming down through the winds, thought ya'd crash. Ya thieves got guts, I'll give ya that."

"Oh, you were chopping wood!" said Pilaf, relieved. "That explains the axe."

"Nah, that's another axe." blurted out the Ox King. "This one's for thieves' necks. Blood makes the blade rusty, ya need a good edge to cut trees around here. Wood's hard as steel."

Pilaf gulped. "How informative."

The axe swung high as the giant man approached. "So. Ya got any last words?"

"Congratulations to your daughter? Who's the, huh, lucky boy?" tried asking Shu. Maybe some thoughts of familiar joy would remove his mind from those of murder.

"There's no boy." said the Ox King, without stopping his advance. "Just thought a good father should think about his daughter's future and all. Putting myself bit ahead with the work. I'm that kind of man."

"That's very thoughtful." whispered Shu, choking.

The axe now was right above their heads, in position to strike.

"Now ya stay still," said the giant "and I can do both yer heads in one clean chop. Ya won't feel a thing. Ya move or try funny things, second one might get only half-sliced, and I tell ya, not a good way to go, that one."

"WE HAVE COME TO ASK YOUR DAUGHTER'S HAND IN MARRIAGE!" screamed Pilaf.

Everything stood still.

The Ox King stared at the intruders, his expression unreadable as his helmet covered his eyes entirely.

Shu and Pilaf, for a long minute or so, almost held their breath, cold sweat dripping down their faces.

Then the Ox King lowered his axe.

"Well that makes things complicated." he grunted. "I never thought about that, but ya'll right, people might come here for that too, not just thievin'."

"Countless tales of her beauty travel the land, and have reached our royal ears!" pushed on Pilaf, hopeful. "And we thought, here, this would be a bride worthy of our royal dignity, and the perfect way to seal the alliance with our longest, most faithful vassal!"

"Royal dignity? Vassal?" the man lowered himself on his knees, and sort of prodded Pilaf with a finger thicker than the poor guy's arm. "Ya a king too or sumthin'?"

"He sure is!" jumped in Shu. "He is the one you and your ancestors long waited for - the last descendant of the Rice dynasty! The one true King, who's come back to take the throne from the Furry usurper."

"I dunno ma' ancestors, but I am not waiting for crap." said the Ox King. "What is this dynasty thing? Ya not a real king then?"

"Technically a prince, we would guess." admitted Pilaf. "As we have not yet been crowned. But we heard that you fend off the emissaries of King Furry. Surely you are not a friend of the current dynasty!"

The man's voice seethed with rage. "Those pests! Ya right I send them away. Them thieves and scoundrels too. Come to take my money, call it 'taxes'. Taxes, figures! This is ma' and ma' family's land. Why do I gotta pay any damned taxes on it?"

Pilaf smiled and got back on his feet, looking at the man in his eyes now. "We fully agree with your fiscal policy. And were we to come to the throne, with your help, and bonded to your family by marriage, we would exempt you from any tributes, and allow you in fact to levy taxes on your own subjects."

"Well, not like I got those any more." mumbled the Ox King. "Since the mountain caught fire, they all left. Just ma' daughter and me now."

"I am sure we could do something about that too. And if you helped us, and I married into your family, you would grow old knowing one of your grandchildren will one day be King!"

"That sounds good." the man stopped a bit suddenly, as if struck by a thought. "Ya not lyin' scoundrels too? Ya sure ya can become King?"

"We have no doubt whatsoever!" said Pilaf. "We only need one thing, and we believe it to be in your treasury."

The Ox King clenched his axe a bit tighter. "That sure as heck sounds like you're up to some thievin'."

"Not at all!" reassured Pilaf, suddenly dropping half the confidence he had just built up. "It is an insignificant part of your many riches, I am sure, and with it, I can grant you your rightful position in my new kingdom. In fact, it is the only thing I will ask for your daughter's dowry. Truly, it is a great deal for you!"

"Ya sound right on that." mumbled the large man, again stroking his beard. "We gotta discuss the arrangement. Come to ma' house, and ya can meet ma' daughter."

It was said that the Ox King's castle was a magnificent thing to behold; a massive, imposing structure, with halls so tall, the ceiling could barely be seen when they were illuminated by candlelight, and pillars so large, it would take three men to hug them in their entirety. None of this, of course, could be seen by Pilaf and Shu, as the castle itself was on top of Mount Frypan, and for ten years the fire had prevented anyone from reaching it. Instead, the King now lived in a cramped house in the village at the foot of the mountain, a building so small he had to bow to pass through the door. Like for all buildings in the area, the side exposed to the fire was blackened with soot and cracked by the heat. The two followed their host in as he made room for them by pushing stuff aside, shuffling piles of boxes and hoards of weapons through the floor and tossing away bunched up clothes, in a house that looked very little the part of a royal palace.

"Come on in, sit down." the Ox King signalled that the way was free, and carefully, Pilaf and Shu came forward, trying not to step on anything. The three of them sat at a table in a tiny dining room. Their host kept his head slightly tilted on one side to avoid hitting the ceiling. He sat at the table, and finally took off his helmet, revealing a bush of hair as black and unruly as his beard, and two small eyes that almost disappeared in his massive head.

"The heat burns ya throat round here!" he said loudly. "Ya gotta have something to drink."

"That would please us very much, yes." said Pilaf, while Shu merely nodded.

The Ox King turned around, grabbed a barrel full of water as tall as a man, and smashed it on the table.

"Have as much as ya want!" he proclaimed gleefully. Pilaf and Shu looked at each other perplexed, then climbed on the table, trying to get some water by forming cups with their hands. The Ox King simply dove head first into the barrel, guzzling down almost half of it with grand production of gurgling noises. This lowered the level of the water so much it became impossible to reach for either of the other two without risking to fall inside, so they just gave up altogether and pretended to be satisfied.

When the Ox King decided everyone had had enough, the conversation proper started.

"So, this plan ya have to become king. Tell me about it!"

"Well, we can not tell you everything right now," explained Pilaf, "but thing is, there are certain... items, which we believe will grant their owner any wish. We are in possession of all of them except one, which we have reason to think is in your treasury."

"Ah, the Dragon Balls!" the Ox King laughed. "Thought that was just a legend. Good for ya! But I don't got 'em."

Pilaf and Shu exchanged a worried look.

"Are you sure?" Shu insisted. "We located the Ball exactly in the middle of the mountain."

"Ah, that. Well, ya know." the man started scratching the back of his neck, thoughtful "I might have one in the castle. I don't keep count of that stuff, haven't seen it in ten years. But what ya gonna do? The mountain's on fire, no one can get up there."

Pilaf waved his hand, dismissively. "No need to worry about that. I'm sure Shu can figure out a way."

Hearing this, his companion, or subject, started flashing rapidly between being embarrassed and alarmed. It looked like a dozen different objections were fighting their way up his throat to try and reach his mouth; and after a while, their match must have resolved in a draw, because all Shu ended up doing was emitting a choking sound, shut back up, and have a kind of a nervous twitch.

The Ox King scrutinised him during this whole process. "Ya say he can, huh?" he mumbled without much enthusiasm. "Well, if ya manage to get there, the Ball is yers alright! I would be very happy to get ma' castle back, ya know."

"I do not think I can guarantee that much." said Shu starting forward, to then hunch back in his place. "But I'll try."

"Well, that's just great! Ya know what, I will go get ma' daughter, so ya can meet and start getting along."

After saying so, the giant man got up from the table, picked up the axe that he had left next to his seat, and left, lowering his head to pass through the comparatively tiny door. His steps got less and less loud as he got further away.

"Boss, I can't do that!" screamed Shu, as soon as they couldn't hear them any more.

Pilaf looked back at him with a hint of annoyance.

"It's 'Your Majesty', Shu." he said. "Just because we are outside of the castle and we have barely escaped death by decapitation it does not mean you are allowed to break etiquette."

The other hung his head, ashamed. "I'm sorry."

"Well, we can understand it was force of habit from our days before we knew of our ancestry. You are forgiven." Pilaf put a hand on his subject's shoulder. "And for the Dragon Ball, we have full trust in you. Before our quest started, you were already our most trusted engineer, and we were never once disappointed by your abilities. And now you have all resources that our royal means can currently put at your disposition available to solve this problem!"

Shu's eyes did not get much brighter. "You mean the two caches of equipment we managed to load and take with us before leaving?"

Pilaf nodded solemnly. "All resources."

The dog sighed. While the situation was all kinds of unusual - what with the possibly not completely avoided threat of death by decapitation and the imminent axe-facilitated political marriage - this, at least, sounded like a very familiar script to him. One that he had gone through many times, back in those simpler days in which Pilaf was simply his boss and not his king, usually managing to pull through not too shabbily.

"I'll give it a shot, bo... I mean, Your Majesty." he sighed, finally.

"Good! We leave the success of this enterprise in your hands."

They fell in silence as they heard booming steps came back, and get gradually closer. Finally, the door was slammed open by the Ox King's hand, large almost as much as it. Before entering, he pushed in a little girl, probably twelve years old or so, wearing an incredibly skimpy bikini, and with a weird bladed helmet on her head.

"Come on, Chichi, say hello to our guests." said the Ox King. The girl barely managed to squeak a feeble 'hello' before blushing and running back to her father to hide behind one of his trunk-like legs out of sheer embarrassment.

"Why, hello, little one!" said Pilaf, attempting a friendly, non-scary smile with little success. "Is your big sister coming to meet us too?"

The Ox King looked at him and scratched his head in puzzlement.

"What sister ya talking about?" he asked.

While Pilaf was engaged in talks with his future father-in-law about a marriage arrangement that seemed to get more insane by the minute, Shu was granted some time on his own, to begin planning the Dragon Ball recovery operation. A moment of respite that he sorely needed - everything that was being discussed depended on this. Without the Dragon Ball, Pilaf had no reason to tie himself to the Ox King, and the Ox King, perhaps, had no reason to leave them alive. Except any sympathy that they may have managed to elicit in him thanks to their natural charm, but Shu was not in the habit of relying on that too much. In fact, he was not in the habit of relying on any kind of stroke of luck at all. He had learned to expect, not necessarily the worst possible scenario, but at the very least the most likely bad scenario, which turned out to be usually spot on when it came to his job. Unfortunately, that also made him the sort of person that you would not usually drag around in a globe throttling adventure full of deadly dangers, as his usual approach to those had always been to never come close to them in the first place. For some reason however Pilaf had seen fit picking him, of all his employees, when he had decided to upgrade his status from capitalist to monarch. Shu had felt obliged to accept out of friendship, but now he started really doubting his choice. He cursed the moment he had mentioned the weekly community centre ninjutsu course he attended for the sake of cracking a bit his squeaky joints, in a bit of water cooler talk. It seemed to have given Pilaf weird ideas about the level of martial prowess he could contribute to the whole enterprise.

With a sigh, Shu put aside those thoughts and focused on the problem at hand. Pilaf and the Ox King had left him the kitchen, so he had a chance to brew himself some coffee to relax and start thinking. The information he had available was not much. At some point, ten years ago, Mount Frypan had caught fire. The stories mentioned some kind of 'spirit' that had fallen from the sky, but he doubted this was how things really went. Even if magic was a thing, after all, this sounded a bit improbable to Shu - he suspected the triggering event might have been a small burning meteorite. Still, the effect did not change much. The mountain was on fire, its flanks had been scorched of all vegetation, which had only fuelled the gigantic pyre, and now its temperature was permanently above anything humans could withstand, which made its summit entirely unapproachable. Reaching the castle was out of the question, on foot or by air. Part of the issue was of course also that the huge fire would create strong ascending currents, making landing on the summit absolutely impossible.

There was no obvious way of putting out the fire, so Shu started thinking about what caused it and kept it going. To burn for so long, the mountain must obviously provide some source of fuel. The most common possibility would be some sort of hydrocarbon seeping through the rock, or a coal deposit just under the surface. Luckily, among the few tools he had managed to bring with him, he had a portable device for air quality analysis. It was nothing too precise, but it gave him a fair idea of what was in the air surrounding the mountain; some carbon monoxide, some aromatic compounds, and some sulphur ones, which confirmed more or less his theory. The large amounts of soot that could be found deposited everywhere in the town also reinforced the hypothesis that it was really coal burning under Mount Frypan, as any and all trees had long gone from its sides.

So, landing on top safely would require basically putting out the entire mountain, and putting out the entire mountain was fundamentally impossible, unless they asked the dragon to do it, obviously; but first, that would have been a grave waste of one magical wish, and second, it was not possible to do it without retrieving the Dragon Ball. Wait a moment, was it? There were not specific indications in the legends they'd read about the distance the Dragon Balls had to be from each other in order to be considered 'gathered' enough by whatever magic animated them to allow for summoning the dragon. Perhaps bringing all six Dragon Balls in a plane above the castle and hovering a few dozen metres over the seventh could do the trick? Shu discarded the idea quickly, though. It could be tried if all else failed, but it was unlikely to work - any reasonable human intuition about what it means to 'gather' seven small items would involve bunching them all up in less than a metre of radius, and it was unlikely that whatever magical being who had created them would think differently. Even if it were possible, that would result in summoning the dragon in an extremely precarious position, and it was unclear what the fire could do to it, or what it could do to the plane.

Discard landing on top, then. Was it possible to recover the Dragon Ball without landing? Well, one could rope down a single person from a helicopter (the plane they drove to the mountain had a convenient ability to rotate its jets and switch to a hovering mode, in fact), and then after they grabbed the Dragon Ball pull them back up. With a search radius of ten metres approximately, owing to the precision of the radar, they hopefully could do it in a few seconds, and with enough heat resistant equipment, and possibly a few consecutive 'dives', there may be a chance. Shu pulled a calculator and ran a quick estimate of the heat involved, but even with decent heat-resistant equipment (which they didn't have), right now no one probably could survive at the top of the mountain for more than a few seconds. The entire area was literally on fire, it would be like diving inside a furnace. Not to mention, you had to search the castle, and that meant moving inside a maze of rooms, corridors and doors. Not only it ought to take longer, it probably meant you couldn't even be roped out in an emergency.

If only the fire could be quenched for a while in an area surrounding the castle, then that may give a window to act. A usual way to do something like that would be to use a powerful explosive charge - powerful enough, probably, to also demolish the castle, but that may be agreed upon with the Ox King. He had done without it for ten years, he could do without it until Pilaf became King and could give him pretty much any residence he wanted. The shockwave from the explosion should push away the surrounding air fast enough to temporarily stop the fire, and then it would take time for it to spread again to the summit. Not much time, granted, but enough to find and retrieve the Dragon Ball. But an explosion of that size would have required a few tons of dynamite, which not only they did not have with them at the moment - they just didn't have at all. Even scraping every bit of explosive and gunpowder back at the castle, all they could get together was probably a few kilograms of the stuff. As for the things they had with them now, nothing came close to being able to produce those amounts of energy; just a bag of electronic components, three of his surveillance drones, measurement instruments, various tools, two laptops, some other assorted junk, and the storage capsules they all came packed in.

The engineer's eyes lingered over these items, all laid in front of him, and suddenly an idea sprung into his mind. He thought about it, and the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. In fact he seemed to remember reading that it had been done in the past, though it wasn't usual practice mostly for how expensive and wasteful it would be. But expense and waste weren't constraints here - time and a very threatening broadaxe were.

Shu bolted up and ran out of the room.

"...and, well, you understand that we assumed your daughter was of marriageable age, since you mentioned something about a bridal bed." Pilaf was explaining, as apologetic as he could possibly sound.

The Ox King frowned. "I told ya I was putting myself ahead with the work. Did ya really hear about ma' daughter before?"

"Of course!" the other rushed to answer. "Of course I have. The famous Chibi..."

"Chichi." corrected the little girl with a small voice, sitting in a corner as she was, flushed by either embarrassment or shyness.

"...Chichi, of Mount Frypan. It's just that the accounts were so stunning, we assumed no girl could possibly get this beautiful without even hitting puberty first..."

To this, Chichi's face only veered even further towards bright red.

"Hmm. Well, ya'll marry when she's of age of course, in six years." grunted her father. "We just need to stipulate the contract. For safety."

The gigantic axe was leaning on his side, resting on the floor, ready to be picked up at a moment's notice.

"Of course." agreed Pilaf. "But first, we would like to hear our would be bride speak her mind. Six years are a long time, and this is a very important commitment for both of us. We would not want her to be, uh, displeased or disappointed by the arrangement later on."

"Why would she be! She gets to be Queen. Chichi, ya like the prince, don't ya? I told ya I'd get ya married to one one day. Like in the fairy tales and stuff."

Chichi looked at Pilaf long and hard, resisting her own impulse to just lower her eyes and be generally embarrassed. Her education as sort-of-royalty did show after all. She looked at Pilaf up and down, searching his features - from the brightly coloured skullcap, to the pointy ears, to the protruding brow - for anything that even remotely matched her own fairy tale-induced ideas of princely qualities.

"Well," she finally said, politely but with a rather unenthused voice, "he's blue."

"He is, right?" the Ox King laughed loudly. "They say nobles have blue blood, he sure shows it!"

Pilaf giggled along uncomfortably and silently hoped for deliverance.

Which, unexpectedly, arrived, in the form of Shu slamming the door open with a bang.

"Your Majesty!" he said, excitedly. "I know what to do."

The drones were so small that they couldn't be seen with the naked eye at their distance, but still, Pilaf and the Ox King stared at the empty sky above Mount Frypan, squinting, and occasionally swearing they had seen a movement or a black speck against the backdrop of the sky, amidst the rising smoke. The Ox King had put back his helmet - turns out it wasn't just meant to look menacing, the binocular-like prongs covering his eyes were in fact glasses, as he was shortsighted. This made the likelihood of him spotting those drones even more insignificant, but did not seem to discourage him.

Shu, more pragmatically, was piloting the things by looking in a tiny screen on his controller that showed a first person view taken from one of the cameras they carried. It was blurry and low resolution but you could make out the mountain, the raging fire and the clouds of rising smoke, and the towers of the castle. Once he was sure the drones were hovering above approximately the right spot, he started having them ascend. As soon as they were more than one kilometre high above the ground, this made any already small chance that they could be seen from the ground vanish, and he said as much. Pilaf at the very least stopped looking up for a while.

"Can they really go that high, Shu?" he asked, coming close. "We would not like to imagine how he would react if..."

"They can, Your Majesty," reassured him the dog, "they're not cheap store-bought models. I built them to have the same range as a normal plane. But the problem is keeping them exactly above the castle."

He kept pushing them back and forth in small course corrections as they ascended, to compensate for the push of the wind, using their accelerometers to keep consistently track of their position. When he felt pretty sure that they had ascended high enough that the atmosphere would be quieter, and the autopilot could be relied upon, he locked it in, and invited Pilaf to follow him in their plane.

"Where ya going?" asked the Ox King.

"To recover the Dragon Ball." he answered. "The window of time may be very small, so we can't afford to be still on the ground when the castle is hit. By the way," he added, "sorry again for any, uhm, damages."

"Don't ya worry." the giant made a dismissive hand wave. "Hadn't used that in ten years, lived just fine without."

"Right."

Pilaf and Shu mounted both on the plane. Given the extreme lack of manpower, Pilaf had acknowledged that even his own help was necessary, despite the task not being too worthy of a king. They avoided to dwell on it too much. Shu drove the plane to an altitude that put it a decent distance above the mountain's summit, then turned it to helicopter mode and left the control stick to Pilaf. He checked the position of the drones on his remote, double and triple checked just to be sure, since they only had one shot at this and this aspect of it was actually really sort of nerve-wracking considering their whole situation. All his engineer instincts screamed that stuff like this needed to be tested before you bet the success of your entire current project, and possibly your life, on it. But circumstances were what they were, and that would need to do.

Shu pressed the button.

Way above their heads, and a bit forward, at almost twelve kilometres of altitude, the actuators Shu had mounted on his drones clicked, pushing multiple buttons on as many capsules. An instant later the capsules burst in a puff of smoke, completely blowing away the drones, and freeing their whole content. Fifty tons of rocks each, loaded quickly thanks to the herculean strength of the Ox King inside the storage tanks, the mass limit for capsules of that class, three hundred tons total, were now in free fall, in a straight line above the castle.

"Will they hit?" asked Pilaf, nervous.

"Almost certainly," said Shu, who had retrieved a pair of binoculars and was now checking the sky. "since they're way too heavy, and will be way too fast, for the wind to move them significantly off target. I tried to compensate a bit for what I could anyway, but they won't be precise. They should still hit around the summit of the mountain anyway. The chance of any straying as far as we are is very low."

"There is a chance?" squeaked the other, horrified.

"An insignificantly tiny one, Your Majesty. I would never risk your safety."

They held their breaths as they waited for the rocks to become visible. Considering that at some point they would reach terminal velocity, it should have taken a bit under a minute for the improvised bombs to hit.

"Here they come."

They hit. It was a massive detonation, but from afar it did not shake the plane much. The castle however seemed to explode spontaneously, hit by projectiles falling too fast to be easily spotted by human eye. The towers crumbled on themselves, the walls ruined towards the outside. The terrain itself was blown to bits; a cloud of dust rose from each impact point, and hot fragments of burning coal were projected like a fountain all around. But the important thing was that it worked. When the dust started to settle, it was obvious that the summit of the mountain wasn't a burning hellscape any more; it was merely surrounded by a burning hellscape. Which also meant it would not stay that way for long.

"Your Majesty should pilot the plane right above that spot," Shu had started grabbing a heat resistant suit and the rope to hook it, "while I get in gear."

"Eh? Eh? Uh, sure, okay." Pilaf shook himself from a moment of stupor and started pushing the craft forward.

Now the raging inferno was below them, and piloting was made increasingly harder by the ascending currents. Good thing was, they didn't need to land. Well, good for the pilot - Shu was beginning to breaking out in a cold sweat at the thought of what he was about to do, even amidst all the heat. He finished zipping the suit, put on a backpack oxygen tank, a mask and a helmet (no guarantee that the air would be breathable down there, with how much oxygen must have been eaten up by the fire) and walked to the open hatch, the ruins of the castle just under his foot, and fire all around. They were positioned right above where the Ox King had said the treasure room was - in fact, even from here, Shu could see the glint of gold and gems occasionally peering amidst the smoke and rubble.

"Are you ready?" asked Pilaf, struggling to keep control of the plane.

"No." answered Shu, but then a sudden current violently shook the aircraft, and down the hatch he was anyway. He fell quickly, but as his rope unwound, the winch prevented him from going so quickly that he'd smash into the ground. He descended steadily and finally touched ground on the ruins of the treasury. Now that he was here, his paralysis that prevented him from leaving the relative safety of the plane had gone; all he wanted was to finish quickly and go back to it. He pulled out a small blocky device he had rigged together some time ago, finally having a chance to test it. It was a bit the complement of their usual radar - it should give him a much better idea of where the Dragon Ball was, but could only work at an extremely short range. Which was where he expected it to be here, so when the thing started blipping intermittently, faster or slower depending on the direction he walked in, it didn't come as too much of a surprise. It took a few minutes of following it around in this treasure hunt for Shu to be confident he was in the right spot; and sure enough, as soon as he moved a few pieces of ceiling, he found the Ball, an orange shiny sphere that could have passed for just another gem in the middle of all the other treasure.

Shu turned the detector off; it had been incredibly helpful, but now that he would carry the ball near it at all times it would merely turn into a very annoying alarm. It was a pity he never made two of them, or Mai would have found it extremely useful too, looking for the hidden Dragon Balls left by Bulma and her friend in their room. But it was more important to have it in this situation - in fact, without it, it would have been hard to find anything at all. The smoke and dark dust made visibility rather poor all around.

In fact, it was even worse than he expected it would be. The dust was outright black.

At which point, Shu realised what was happening, remembered why is it exactly that you test ideas before betting your life on them, and desperately tugged the rope in the pattern that meant I found the Dragon Ball, pull me out of here FAST.

One second later, his rope was winding up, sweeping him off the ground and pulling him speedily into the air, right towards the plane, as if he was being spirited to heaven by a very impatient god.

Three more seconds later, the cloud of coal dust that had been raised when the ground had been smashed and cratered by a hail of high-velocity rocks, and had somehow managed to survive until then, finally ignited due to some stray spark. The blast was so violent the plane was rocked back and forth, and Shu felt the heat below his feet, even through his protective equipment, and feared he'd catch fire. He didn't, but the summit of the mountain did. As they left in a hurry, Mount Frypan went back to its previous state as an unquenchable, unapproachable mountain of fire.

Shu ripped his helmet off. He was laying on the floor of the plane, breathing heavily, the Dragon Ball clutched in his right hand, covered in sweat both hot and cold.

"Boss," he whined, "I want a pay rise."

Pilaf threw a disapproving look initially, and looked like he was about to say something, but then kept himself in check.

"We agree," he answered finally, "we believe you deserved it."

The celebrations for the success of the mission were many and very loud. The Ox King was overjoyed, and had pulled the dinner table out of his house to have a feast in the open. His booming laughter and enthusiastic descriptions of their joint future as great allies and friends, of the new castle he was going to build at the foot of the mountain, and of the wedding ceremony between his daughter and the newly crowned King Pilaf he was planning to hold first thing in its Great Hall to inaugurate it kept resonating across the landscape, drowning the constant background provided by the roaring flames. Pilaf joined him in a display of diplomatic pleasantries, despite getting sort of antsy whenever the whole 'marriage' topic was brought up. Shu ate whatever the Ox King saw fit to offer his guests, and for the rest mostly laid back somewhere trying to recover from the terror and exhaustion of this very long day. Chichi politely attended the reception as was expected of her, but mostly kept spacing out and staring in the distance.

It did not seem like anything could possibly ruin the mood. Least of all, the ring of a phone coming from Pilaf's plane.

"That must be Mai informing us that she found all the other Dragon Balls!" Pilaf exclaimed, beaming. "Shu, go fetch her call, and put it up on a speaker for us all to hear!"

Shu grumbled a bit - sheer tiredness seemed to had worn out his patience for royal etiquette a lot - but in the end he dragged himself to the plane. Sure enough, the call came from Mai's phone. He pushed a couple of buttons to answer and put it on the plane's main speaker.

"Hello? Can you hear me?"

Both Pilaf and Shu froze. That was not Mai's voice. In fact, it was eerily similar to another voice they heard very recently.

"Good evening!" said the voice, cheerfully. "This is Bulma Briefs talking - and boy, do I have a good deal to offer you..."