"What's going on? Why am I here?" I asked aloud,
"You?! Screw that, why am I here?!" Tater shouted at me from the top of a rock formation nearby.
"You know, I'd like to know that one, too. Why are you here, Tater?" Pepper wondered, her hair gently moving with the breeze, the sand around us seeming to slip right past the two Saiyan women's combat suits as they stared Tater and I down.
"LIKE I'M DOING THIS ALONE! Don't you dare leave me alone with these girls, Tater." I threatened, staring Lynn in the eyes. Though she hadn't said a word this entire time, there was a terrifying, animalistic gleam in her expression that terrified me to the core.
"Screw you, Tarble!" Tater complained, but he didn't leave, "I don't want to get caught up in your crazy love triangle thing!"
"It's… Uhh…" I stammered.
"Tater. This is your one, single chance to leave conscious. I suggest you take it." Lynn finally spoke up. She wasn't bluffing this time around. For whatever reason she and Pepper had for forcing me to come out to this random desert in the middle of nowhere, they were both completely serious right now.
It struck Tater's Saiyan instincts perfectly. With a smirk, he activated his SSJP form on full blast, sand billowing around him at the sheer ki output.
I readied myself for combat, too. The girls weren't thinking about talking… They wanted to say something more important, deeper, than they were willing to explain with just words.
"You really want to fight us, two-on-two, girls? You don't have any clue what you're getting into. Don't worry, though. I'll show you!" Tater boasted, his energy exploding another level as he concentrated his energy… rather well, too.
His effective power level… I was impressed. It wasn't anywhere near my current, SSJP-boosted power level, but definitely somewhere above 15 million.
Tater had been training hard. His power level had tripled since our fight all those years ago, and he could now control all of it like an extension of his own body, significantly increasing his combat potential.
It happened in an instant.
BOOOOOM!
Tater vanished from view. The sonic boom hit my eardrums around a second later, like an attack of its own. When the sand settled, Pepper was standing where Tater had been just a moment ago, strength roiling through her body like a terrifying, unstoppable force turned directly in my direction, now that my backup was gone, miles and miles away, his energy having dropped to the point where it neared the limits of my senses.
I was alone. Fighting Pepper, and she wasn't holding back at all this time around, with Lynn covering her.
This was bad. From that one attack alone, I could tell that her effective power level was at least twice that of Tater's. A little more, actually. Comparable to mine. And that was if she was my only threat. Though Lynn wasn't in our league right now, she couldn't be ignored, either. The girl may not have access to Ikari or SSJP, she still had a base power comparable to Tater's. Upper hundred thousands.
Both girls had a technique repertoire that wasn't inferior to my own.
Why I was fighting them didn't matter. If I let my guard down, I was done for. I could honestly feel genuine killing intent, and I didn't have any clue as to what I'd done to deserve it.
Pepper's power came mostly from Ikari mode. Though she hadn't managed to stabilize it to the point of acquiring SSJP, for some unknown reason, she'd still achieved a similar level of pseudo-perfect mastery, allowing her to use it like Goku's canonical 'Kaio-Ken', for short bursts of stable power, making it possibly even more deadly than SSJP itself.
She didn't hesitate to strike at me. With a sudden burst of speed only slightly inferior to the Hyper-Motion technique, Pepper launched herself toward me like a bolt of lightning, kicking up a massive cloud of sand around us, obscuring Lynn's form from view as the Ikari girl's leg slid off of my forearm in a fluid block that transitioned seamlessly into several hundred more quick exchanges, none of which turned out in either of our favors.
…But something was wrong.
The moment that I noticed it, Pepper jumped back, a smirk on her face as she closed the lid on her trap.
I barely had time to put my guard up before-
BOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!
"Wh-"
SHZZZZ!
The girls announced their techniques simultaneously, as the dust settled.
"Shockwave Cannon!"
"Horizon Tempest!"
"Gah!" I figured the trick out just a single millisecond too late. A small, Horizon Discus cut into my left forearm before I pulled it back, obliterating Lynn's technique with a rough explosion of ki.
When the dust from the girls' combination attack settled, I stood there, a bit worse for wear. Blood dripped down my hand, and scorch marks covered my clothing, but the actual damage was minimal at best. The cut, only surface deep, had already stopped bleeding.
"Ouch." I muttered, rubbing my wrist as I looked down at the two girls, who both had animalistic grins on their faces. "I still don't know why we're fighting, but you're really serious, huh? You know that, no matter how serious you two get, if I pull out all the stops, you can't beat me."
"...You're an idiot." Pepper replied, a dark expression on her face.
"What are you talking about? Why are we doing this!?" I couldn't help but shout. I didn't get it! Why was this so serious for them? It was just a fight! Like all of the sparring sessions we'd done over the years. This wasn't any different from those.
So why was this so important.
"WE KNOW!" Lynn's screech broke the silence brought about by my confusion. "We know. We know that we can't beat you as we are now. That, even if we break all of our limits, you'll just grow further! Smiling all the way, like it's no big deal, Tarble! Joking about stupid things, spending obscene amounts of time in that stupid lab of yours, you're still somehow this untouchable figure that seems capable of everything when it counts! THAT'S WHY WE BOTH FELL SO HARD FOR YOU!"
The words seemed to tumble out of Lynn all at once. I'd never seen her lose her composite like this. But the girls weren't done.
Pepper spoke up next, continuing where Lynn left off. "We can't beat you by ourselves. No matter how much we struggle, how strong we grow mid-fight, we can't beat you, Tarble. Not by ourselves. You're this… thing. This thing that's always there, always takes care of us, and never complains when I act childish, selfish. I've accepted that, by myself, I can't keep up with you as I am… but together, we can. We'll beat you, then you'll marry both of us, Tarble! I'm not giving you a choice anymore! NO MORE HESITATING FROM ANY OF US! COME ON, LYNN!"
"Right!"