Krillin took a deep breath. Master's advice had reminded him of something that he'd nearly forgotten: He wasn't alone, and he wasn't the strongest.
In other words, even if Krillin lost, his life wasn't in danger. There were people watching whose abilities were far beyond his comprehension. He'd seen it over and over again during his training, his master's casually overwhelming, crushing might.
He wanted to touch the threshold of that kind of power. Tien wasn't even close to the ceiling that Krillin was aiming for. This battle should be easy for him.
Emptying his mind, Krillin pushed his fears, his anxieties, aside for the moment. They mattered, but they weren't important. Not at this moment.
Pushing his ki as high as he could, Krillin took the fluttery half-step involved in the afterimage technique, not as a conscious tactic, but simply as a decision that his subconscious had made because it was easy and cost little.
He felt every single little shift of his own energy, the energy in the atmosphere that touched his skin, the shift of the wind pressure, the subtle vibrations of the concrete beneath his feet as his body moved. For that single moment, the world felt, to Krillin, like it'd been draped under a curtain, slowed to a crawl.
Subconsciously, Krillin factored each of these little things into the rhythm of his footsteps as he raced toward Tien, not at the highest speed he could manage, but the sharpest, a distinction that seemed distorted, but felt clear to him as the feeling of being at one's limit for a single moment took hold of the young fighter.
The air currents didn't slam against his skin like they normally did when he moved too fast to manage, but rather slipped around him as if they were actively trying to help, the small, nearly imperceptible vibrations of his feet against the concrete perfectly timed to cancel each other out.
Tien lifted his arm to block, a moment before Krillin attacked.
Krillin's fist slipped right past the three-eyed warrior's guard, slamming into his side.
"OAGH!" As he was launched from his position and thrown into a flying roll, a sound escaped Tien's lips that was somewhere between shock, annoyance, and a fleeting glimpse of pain that flashed across his face.
But, a second later, even midair, Tien's shock resolved itself and the expression on his face hardened into something on the boundary between extreme annoyance and pure rage. Krillin's lips pursed as he felt the three-eyed warrior's ki suddenly explode inward, sharpened like a blade.
Tien's fist slammed into the concrete beneath him, forcibly killing his momentum with a theatre that left a three-foot-long trench gouged in the arena floor in front of him before he landed softly on his knee, the air around him completely different than before, solemn and charged with killing intent.
He stood, his hand instinctively tracing over the bruise that was already forming on his side, "The Phantom Step… Bold, to use an assassination technique on me. I wouldn't expect someone like you to know a high-level killing technique like that. Even Master Shen has only heard rumors of the Phantom Step."
"Heh." Krillin huffed, unwilling to admit that he was 100% certain that there was absolutely zero chance that he could do that again, even if he tried.
"How about I show you another assassination technique?" Tien flashed over to Krillin's side and unleashed a powerful combination of blows that Krillin could only barely manage to block.
Then: "Solar Flare!"
"GAH!" Krillin screamed as Tien's face suddenly exploded with a bright light, blinding and disorienting him just long enough for a fist to slam into his chest.
He flew backward, but stopped when something gripped his arm, stopping him just before he went over the edge of the arena into the buffer zone that would've spelled his loss.
As the spots cleared from Krillin's vision, he was able to see Tien shift his grip on his bicep, before tossing him forward, back toward the center. "You're not getting off that easily." The older warrior mocked with a smirk as Krillin reasserted his balance, taking the chance that Tien was giving him to rub the spots out of his eyes.
"Dodon Ray!" Krillin felt Tien shoot the beam off right before it landed directly in his forearm guard. He could have dodged, but the people who could have blocked it were in the crowd in front of him, rather than behind him, so some random innocent civilian would've been hit by the blast instead, and Krillin couldn't allow that.
When he dropped his arm back down, it was bleeding, the Dodon Ray having drilled a small hole right through at least the first few layers of skin.
Luckily, with the adrenaline running through his system, Krillin could barely even feel it.
Then, with a sadistic smirk, Tien's feet left the ground. "Dodon Ray." Krillin dodged that one. It slammed into the concrete beside him. Tien released five more in succession. Four missed. One hit Krillin's shoulder.
Realizing that dodging wasn't going to help him, Krillin remembered what Roshi had advised from the stands. "Calm heart… Feel the world around me… Then…!" With a running start, Krillin jumped into the air, on a direct line toward Tien's location. Tien didn't dodge.
Instead, he simply kicked Krillin away, faster than the younger, smaller fighter could possibly hope to dodge.
Krillin landed in a roll, wiping the trickle of blood from the side of his mouth. "It's…" 'his rage'. Krillin didn't bother finishing the realization aloud.
The dots connected in his mind instantly.
Master Roshi had taught him that strength comes from a level head and a calm heart… But Tien and Chiaotzu didn't get their strength from that. They drew their power from rage, and it was a more potent source than calmness… though more wild at the same time.
If anger was the key to Tien's raw power, and calmness was the key to Krillin's, then…
Krillin drew from his pride as a martial artist. A wellspring of rage poured out of the deepest, darkest part of his heart, tempered by the Turtle School teachings that he'd written into the depths of his soul.
His ki sharpened itself like a blade. His ki surged, higher than before, but still controlled. This time, when he jumped, Tien's eyes widened imperceptively, and he blocked Krillin's blow. They went on to exchange a flurry of punches and kicks at a speed that the holograms showing their forms on the arena floor below could only continuously follow because they were specifically calibrated to follow power levels that allowed one to move fast enough to far surpass the program's tracking capabilities, and its AI was designed to compensate for that fact.