Slug's figure snapped forward at the same moment that mine flickered to the left. He adjusted instantly.
I'd already adjusted to his adjustment.
A few short exchanges later, and the evil Namekian was blown away again, taking another blast for his effort.
I had the upper hand.
As far as raw power went, my edge was slight, almost nonexistent, but there. My ki control was also, admittedly marginally, better.
Naturally, those two factors compounded to give me a notable edge in the fight… but it shouldn't have been this much.
The real problem, from Slug's angle, was raw skill level.
The gap there was like a championship MMA fighter against a pampered teen. Honestly, for him, it was simply a bad matchup. I'd fought (and honestly lost) a technical match against Master Roshi himself, once upon a time. I'd spent years upon years specifically training my technical skill, after I hit the plateau on my actual power level.
While still inferior to my insane weirdo of a wife, Pepper, Slug gravitated heavily toward boxing and wrestling-type techniques. That meant that he specifically tended to stay away from long-ranged techniques and didn't use many kicks, either, instead mostly going for punches and grabs, making him easy to see through.
Quickly, the frequency of the evil Namekian being blown back increased from once every five to ten exchanges to once every handful. Then once every other exchange.
The injuries healed by Slug's passive regeneration piled up slowly. My only injury was a small bruise on my collarbone, when Slug managed to slip past my defenses for a single moment and pull me into an armbar, which I'd responded with by shooting a weak blast of pure energy at his torso through the center of my back to loosen his grip before wrenching his arm down and smashing my elbow backward, giving me enough room to slam a spinning backwards kick into his thigh.
A few moves further into the exchange, and he'd been blown away once more. I shot three Dodon Rays after him, partially out of habit.
Surprisingly, he managed to react to my follow-through with three lightning fast motions. One Dodon Ray was reflected back at me. The other two slammed into the forest below, creating two different craters where they landed.
I was forced to block my own blast with my forearm. It smoked a bit, and left a light red spot the size of a small coin, but it only barely made it past my aura, and therefore didn't actually hurt at all.
Slug used the distraction, though, to shoot a fist at me. It punched straight through my afterimage, while I shot a Blitz Spear at the Namekian's main body from a totally different position. It grazed his side, leaving a reddened patch on his skin, which almost immediately healed, and blasting a crater into the forest below where it landed.
He whipped another fist at me. I grabbed it, intent on using it as a lever to throw him to the grounds, but as soon as I touched it, it overloaded with ki energy.
I barely managed to pull away before Slug blew up his own arm, right in front of me. Due to the fact that it was a completely insane combat tactic, it'd completely caught me off guard. The explosion engulfed my body completely.
The fire from the blast climbed down my right arm first. When it'd all cleared, nearly half of my shirt was seared away, and a large first-degree sunburn covered my bicep and a part of my forearm, ironically covering the exact same spot on my arm where my old scar from my fight with Dodoria was.
I hissed, not so much in pain as annoyance, before a second flying fist interrupted everything, forcing me to dodge with an exaggerated level of caution, now that I knew that he was crazy enough to blow his own arm to smithereens simply to harm me.
Still, now that I knew about the tactic, it wasn't going to work on me again. Shaking my arm in midair to loosen the muscles up as I dodged the barrage of fists with flickering, precise motions and the occasional use of the midair version of the Hyper-Motion technique, which relied on small midair footholds made of pure ki, I rapidly closed in on the Namekian's location.
Even though close-range was his specialty, if he was willing to use that technique for a chance at hurting me, the choice to close in, rather than keep my distance like I'd been mostly doing up till now, became the naturally better one.
Slug began blowing his fists up and regenerating them the moment that they got anywhere near me. Finding myself taking little bits of damage, a bump here, a bruise there, despite how fast I dodged, I wracked my brain for a solution, and arrived at one in an instant.
Intensifying my speed to the highest level that I could manage, I stabilized the light of the Blutz Light Generation technique that enveloped my body, forcing my S-Cells to work as well as they possibly could, a roughly 35-times multiplier in power compared to my base form, and stable as a rock.
Suddenly, the 'Tarble' afterimages in the air doubled, then tripled in number. From an outsider's perspective, it likely seemed like there were nearly a hundred of me in the air simultaneously.
Then, they all began emitting pressure.
Specifically, vibrational pressure. Weak, omnidirectional Shockwave Cannons, emitted from the entire body at once, as repeatedly as I could manage, while I moved as quickly as I possibly could.
The effect on the surrounding atmosphere was immediate and dramatic. Suddenly, the area went from 'Slug's territory' to my territory. Many of Slug's 'exploding fists' blew before they ever came near me, simply from the force of the vibrations as they bounced against each other, building toward a massive, cascading reaction of pure raw energy that shredded random points of the area without warning, all completely invisible to the naked eye, and nearly impossible for Slug's less-developed energy sensing abilities to pinpoint.
The technique was dangerous, and the power that it required was costly, but it did its job after less than thirty seconds.
"Blitz Explosion!" My fist slammed into the Namekian's chest with the force of a train.
Unfortunately, it was an afterimage that I blew away, and the evil Namekian and I exploded into another intense series of exchanges.