Synopsis: General Blue gloats over the bruised and beaten Kuririn, asking him if this is really the best he can do. Kuririn gets back up and says Blue is gonna regret this, and Bulma cheers him on to keep fighting. Kuririn runs straight at Blue, but leaves an after-image behind as he leaps into the air above him. Blue notices this too late, and Kuririn kicks him hard in the face, knocking Blue to the ground. Bulma cheers happily for Kuririn, but Blue gets back up, enraged when he sees blood from his nose. Outraged that someone has actually hurt him, Blue swears that nobody who has seen this shame can be allowed to live.
As Blue approaches Kuririn once more, his eyes flash with light and Kuririn finds himself frozen in place. Blue asks the boy how he likes his telekinesis before promising to repay him in kind for the lesson in humility he's shown the General. As Blue continues to beat the defenseless Kuririn, Goku is shown to still be swimming through the water heading in their direction. Blue notices that the tunnel is starting to collapse faster and decides that he needs to end Kuririn's life quickly so he can find the Dragon Ball. Realizing that she's the only one left now, Bulma decides to use her greatest power – she starts flaunting her butt at Blue and trying to use her sex appeal on him once again. Like before, Blue tells her to stop that sickening display, and Bulma decides he really has to be gay if he's ignoring her like that. She tries to tell him that she's actually a man, but Blue doesn't buy it. Blue tells her to start praying as he'll deal with her as soon as he's done with Kuririn, and he picks up a large rock to bash in the young boy's skull with. Before he can strike the finishing blow however, Goku leaps from the water next to them and lands before the General. Bulma shouts to Goku that Blue is with the Red Ribbon Army and they need him to beat him up, and Blue commends the boy's resourcefulness in finding a way over to them. Goku asks Blue if he's the one that beat up Kuririn, and Blue says that he is. The two begin to fight, with Goku landing a powerful first blow in Blue's gut. Blue is in pain but doesn't go down, and praises Goku once more for having more strength than he appears to. Blue tries to kick Goku, but Goku leaps out of the way and rebounds off of a wall, landing a powerful knee strike to that back of Blue's head that causes him to fall to the floor. As Goku says that the Army guys are all full of talk, Kuririn watches and surmises that Goku seems even stronger than he was back in the tournament. Getting back up while holding his head, Blue says that they have all well earned their demise now. Goku asks him if he still wants to fight, but before Bulma can warn him not to look at Blue's eyes, Blue uses his telekinesis to freeze Goku in place. With his new opponent as defenseless as the last, Blue picks up the rock again, this time walking towards Goku. Review: As with the last chapter, Toriyama makes really good use of Blue as a measuring stick to show where various characters stand in terms of strength at the moment compared to when we last saw them really cut loose. We've seen Goku fight a few opponents that had him struggling for one reason or another, but it's been hard to say for sure if any of them challenged him quite as much as his own master did. While that's still questionable, how Goku fairs against Blue here is a pretty good indication that he has indeed gotten a lot stronger as Kuririn suggests. Even before using his psychic powers, Blue was doing pretty well against Kuririn. We'll never know for sure if he would have won if he hadn't cheated, but just the fact that he was holding his own puts him roughly in the same ball park as the rest of the main cast we saw compete. At the same time though, he's defenseless against Goku, and Kuririn, the only character who has both trained alongside Goku and watched him fight other people, is the one character uniquely situated to judge if Goku has improved or not. It's all a great way to forecast exactly how the characters are growing and changing without just putting it in an info dump somewhere. Let's not sell Blue too short either of course. While Kuririn managed to land a hit on him, and he's not doing great against Goku without resorting to his powers, he still takes a strong blow to the stomach from Goku and gets right back up. That's almost Goku's main one-hit KO technique at this point, as in this very arc alone we've seen quite a few characters knocked fully to the ground by it, if not taken out of the fight completely. Blue takes that hit and gets right back to fighting, and that's after previously fighting and taking at least one good hit from Kuririn. The man is definitely the strongest character Goku has run into yet since the 21st Budokai. Again, discounting Android 8. You basically have to discount Android 8 from everything strength related moving forward honestly. The repeated gag of Bulma trying to appeal to Blue is hardly Toriyama's best work, and it's also aged extremely poorly with Blue calling her a freak of nature when she tries to pretend she's a man. That's possibly the biggest oof moment for the character in the manga at least, but I'd wager that it doesn't even hold a candle to a certain anime moment...again, all in due time. This chapter does introduce Blue's psychic abilities though, something that honestly comes a little bit out of nowhere. It would have been nice if something before this had kind of hinted at him having an odd ability like that, but it is what it is. At least it gives him some kind of interesting fighting ability to match with his interesting personality. Until next time! Favorite Panel:
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