Lynn's frequent short, but intense attack salvos were the worst. When Pepper took point, it felt almost like a game, a dance of sorts between two people who were both using similar levels of power, but Lynn had a solid leg up on me in terms of power.
If it wasn't for the fact that her breathing would quietly grow more and more labored with every exchange, I knew that I wouldn't have stood a chance.
But none of us could keep this up forever, and we all knew it.
My muscles started twitching and fighting my movements. The old scar on my arm started to throb, the burn marks littering my back screamed so loudly that I started favoring it, actively working to ensure that Pepper didn't hit it.
Naturally, she noticed that, and the girls instantly shifted to targeting my back.
Pepper started jumping in more and more often, as Lynn's FSSJ ki started fluctuating wildly, not being quite enough to protect the shattered bone in her arm from the force of her own attacks anymore.
The added stress on Pepper's already exhausted form clearly wore hard on her. Her techniques became the type of strangely fluid that only a Pepper who was exhausted beyond thought could hope to achieve. It bordered Ultra Instinct, but it wasn't actually there yet. Just a series of analyses and reactions that'd been carved into the depths of her soul from a young age.
Ultra Instinct was a perfect mastery of not only one's reactions to others, but also one's control over their own body, bringing it all beyond the realm of active thought.
Pepper was about halfway there, but the other half was going to be the hard part for her. Right now, all it meant was that she could fight me despite the fact that she'd burned more energy than me, and technically shouldn't be in my league right now, with the way sweat was pouring down her body in buckets and she'd long ago given up on expending ki to protect her outer armor, which was basically shattered, even though her red underclothes were almost perfectly intact, with only a handful of rips and tears where the ki or wind from my counterattacks had scratched her.
But as tired and near collapse as the girls were, I was just as bad. Slowly but surely, our fight was slowing, getting down to the wire, our energies flagged, our bodies slowed.
Pepper's Hyper-Motion technique failed once, forcing Lynn to step in at the wrong time and take a solid blow to the leg.
Lynn slammed a solid mass of ki into my shoulder during one of her attacks, charring it a bit and making me scream in pain, my vision going blurry, forcing me to rely solely on my energy sensing for several seconds as my adrenaline forced the burning sensation to the side.
Later, Lynn took a step to attack me during a shift in the battle, and her foot fell through the sand like air, accidentally rediscovering the pit in the ground that we'd created earlier in the fight. The mess-up forced Pepper to change priorities mid-motion. The stutter gave me an opportunity to get a glancing blow in on the red-shirted master of Ikari Mode, which would likely have ended the fight right then and there, had she not softened it by firing an energy blast out of her mouth at me, throwing me backward while she ragdolled across the desert before getting her bearings once again, the battle continuing with only a single moment's (rather painful) respite.
Then, it finally happened.
The opening that I was looking for.
Lynn's FSSJ state completely stuttered to a halt, shutting off right in the middle of her attack chain.
Suddenly, Lynn went from having me on the back foot, to moving so slowly that it felt like she was standing still in comparison to my perception.
My foot flashed forward before my conscious mind had even registered more than 'she stopped', on a collision course with the spot where her lower stomach met her upper hip.
But something shoved me to the side at the last minute, right before my blow actually connected.
The force of my ki blew even more sand into the air around me, shifting the ground beneath my feet as I spun around, my eyes losing track of the girls for a second as the orientation of my body swiveled to match my ki sense.
But at the same time, my eyes widened in response to what I was sensing.
Lynn's ki was flaring. She'd managed to reactivate FSSJ… no, she'd deliberately allowed it to fall through before, so that I'd attack.
She'd used her flagging strength as bait to create an opening. I realized my mistake as soon as her aura flared up.
But it was too late. By the time I turned around, two fists were filling my vision center completely.
Two unstoppable missiles headed directly for my face.
Then, a flash of pain, and darkness.
…
It was around an hour later that Tater found the three of us collapsed in the desert. Though the girls had won the fight, the instant the adrenaline had worn off, they'd collapsed just as unconscious as me. Annoyed and confused by the entire situation, he'd ended up calling up Cynthia, who'd been at home with Cynder, and having Cynder help him carry the bodies back to the Celatian village, where we all spent considerable time unconscious, healing from damage and exhaustion so bone-deep that even the Celatian technology required extensive time to heal it.
Lynn and Pepper woke up around two days after the fight. I took a week to wake, and spent another three days beyond that bedridden.
A month later, we held the wedding.
Tater and Cynthia's marriage had taken the Saiyan-style route. In other words, no ceremony, just quiet agreement, followed by children.
We didn't even consider that route. While it was less hassle, we wanted something that paid homage to the fact that we were just as much a part of the Celatian village on Earth as we were Saiyans.
Celatian marriage traditions were basically the same thing as Earth traditions, for the most part. You exchanged mementos of some sort, usually in the form of an accessory that one could keep with them at all times, as well as verbal vows, all in a ceremonial setting with an official mediator, usually the regional governor or a representative with the authority to tie everything up in a legal manner.
As an aside, on Celatus, around a thousand years ago, there'd been some sort of widespread disease thing that'd only attacked men, making their population highly female-heavy for around half a century or so. As such, on Celatus, one man marrying multiple women was, though rare nowadays, completely normal.
We decided to go that route, but not exchange items. If we exchanged something like rings or necklaces, they'd inevitably end up breaking during combat, anyways.
Instead, we organized a nice little ceremony based loosely on Celatus traditions, with a bit of inspiration from Earth traditions.
Zeck was my best man. Bulma and Cynthia acted as the girls' bridesmaids. Miss Dahlia acted as the mediator, Doctor Hyperion walked the girls down the aisle.
Tater's job was to keep Cynder from running away. For some reason, Pepper got obsessed with forcing the two-year-old to be the flower girl. Her insistence on putting him into a dress instead of just letting him spread flower petals in a miniature tuxedo like a normal person would genuinely terrified the boy.
Novem ended up doing it in his place.
We even went so far as to send Novem to invite Kakarot and Chichi to the ceremony.