The sky overhead darkened with thick choking clouds, thunder and lightning raging and flashing in the heavens above. Several spears of lightning, the spears of an angry god, shot down from the skies and smashed into the ground just around Gohan, punching a deep craters into the rock around him.
So far, so familiar to Frieza. His mouth fell slack with a growing fear, his eyes widening as he beheld this fearsome sight. The entire ground was shaking, the growing golden aura around Gohan's body swirling around him with a growing violence and intensity; a raging tempest of pure rage and power. In the back of his mind he could dimly feel this Saiyan child's power, his ki sensing manifesting again if only for a brief while.
"No...no not again!" Frieza snapped, swiftly raising his hand. His purple aura exploded outward with such an explosive force that it blew a deep crevice beneath him, his veins popping up under his chalk-coloured skin as he powered up even further, his muscles expanding out slightly as he gradually began to reach around 88% of his maximum power. "Damn you...I am Frieza! I have conquered thousands of worlds, I have fought gods themselves! Do you think a golden monkey will scare me?! THINK AGAIN!"
A powerful burst of red and black ki shot from Frieza's outstretched hand, soaring across the desert landscape with such speed that the naked eye couldn't possibly follow it. It struck off of Gohan's body, the child's bodystill ablaze with power as his wild mane of black hair started to spike up with the same golden shade his father had used.
The blast engulfed Gohan and sent a vast crater expanding around him, the light of the explosion almost blinding to behold. But Frieza would not look away, never, he was going to watch this brat die. "Burn! Burn you little shit! This is your punishment, exactly what you deserve for having the audacity to oppose-"
Frieza wa cut off by a beastial roar, the powerful bellow knocking the explosion away from around his body as his foe's golden aura doubled in size. Gohan let out another snarl, his eyes pure white now, angry veins bulging out along the furcace of his face. This was no child, this was a wild animal! A monster!
Gohan howled like a raging Oozaru and surged toward Frieza, the ferocity of his charge catching Frieza by surprise. His small fist, amplified by the unearthly Super Saiyan power, slammed into the Arcosian tyrant's face with such power that he was knocked clean off his feet. Frieza's body hurtled backward through the air, smashing through one spear of rock, through a field of rocky debris, and then clean through one large mushroom-shaped rock formation, hitting it hard enough that the top half of the boulder exploded into a dirty brown cloud of dust.
That was...quite a punch. It took him a moment to overcome the surprise, but soon Frieza managed to halt his speed with a few quick flips in the sky until he finally stopped his body just beneath the blanket of black storm clouds. "Ugh...Little shit..." Frieza hissed, rubbing the large black mark that had been punched into his right cheek. "...skin you alive and wear you like a coat...I'll eat your damn heart, you chimp..."
Before he could act out any of these macabre fantasies of his, Frieza saw Gohan rushing toward him again with the speed of a flaming meteor. His heart filled with venom and hellfire, Gohan was snarling and snapping like a wild dog as he charged toward the alien tyrant, intent on smashing his head open like an egg.
Frieza suddenly side-stepped, avoiding another blow to the face. His own fist shot outward with enough speed behind it to catch Gohan by surprise, burying itself into Gohan's forehead and launching him down into thr ground. The Super Saiyan child smashed into the ground, bouced off it, and soon skidded to a halt with his teeth clenched together. His golden aura started to rise again, blades of ki shredding the ground around him as hurricane winds rocked around his short body. So young, and yet so powerful. But his blind rage would be his downfall, his anger preventing him from managing his new power properly. All he was doing was continually venting out energy, and as vast as his ki pool was it would eventually deplete.
With a little bit of space put between himself and the enraged brat, Frieza extended his hand out and started to fire a barrage of Death Beams from his fingertip. The salvo of purple finger beams hurtled across the sky at a blinding speed, yet Gohan proved himself faster and dodged each one once it grew close enough, vanishing into an afterimage and reappearing inches away a split second later. Some part of him was being coy, wanting to mock the alien over lord. "Hold still you putrid little brat! The easier you make it, the less it's going to hurt!" Frieza snapped.
Gohan suddenly opened his jaw wide and let out a powerful bellow, a beam of white ki firing past his fanged teeth. The speed caught Frieza by surprise, and he swiftly raised his arms to block. The beam exploded against Frieza's crossed arms and released enough energy to send shockwaves across the battle-scarred land below. The Arcosian grunted and shoved his arms back outward, a telekinetic wave blowing and smoke away from his body. His forearms were a little scorched, but no worse for wear.
Now the question was...where the hell was the hybrid? The overlord let his garnet eyes scan about, hoping in vain to spot him...yet from the look of things, he had vanished without a trace.
Gohan however, was quick to make his presence known.
The Super Saiyan child rocketed down through the sky and slammed both of his fet into the base of Frieza's spine, just above his tail. A strangled gasp rang out across the wasteland, pain lancing throughout his alien form. "Nghgu...Y-you..." Frieza breathed out, his pupils narrowed into pinpricks from the shocking jolt of agony.
Gohan grinned, his white eyes and his extended fangs making for quite an eerie effect. He crushed his elbow between Frieza's shoulder blades, the superhuman force behind his elbow launching him down through the air with the speed of a cruise missile. Frieza pushed past the pain and managed to rotate his body in his freefall, aiming his feet toward the rocky ground. His heels crashed into the rock and dug down into it, slowly halting his momentum while his feet left twin trenches in the ground.
"You filthy monkey." Frieza said. He finally managed to catch is breath, and despite the pain in his spine he managed to stand erect again. "I hope you enjoyed those free shots on me, because I plan on returning the favour a thousand times over."
Gohan threw his head back and let out an uproarious laugh, his mad cackling echoing throughout the area. This wasn't some joyful laugh...not even a mocking one really. Indeed, when listening close enough it seemed that the child was alternating between laughing and sobbing, his arms hanging slack at his side and his body lazily drifting through the air.
At that, Frieza clenched his fists with enough force to make the earth beneath his feet shudder. "So that's how you want to play it, huh? Fine. Laugh all you want. I want to hear how loud you laugh with my fingers wrapped around your throat."
He rocketed into the sky with a trail of purple and black ki behind him, rapidly reaching the insane Saiyan brat. His fist drove into Gohan' jaw and sent him hurtling backward through the air, shooting off after him and hammering him with punch after punch. His fists and feet rained down on Gohan's body, every single impact rocking the ground below. "LAUGH! Laugh now you dirty little ape! Open that mouth wide and la-"
Gohan's small fist crushed Frieza's nose with a mighty punch, the hardest he could throw in his new form. It struck hard enough to snap hia head backward, while a fountain of alien blood burst out from his ivory nostrils. "Ha." Gohan's knee hurtled forward and buried itself deep into Frieza's stomach (God knows it took a good deal of effort on the Arcosian's part not to just vomit right there) "Ha!" With his foe dazed and staggered, Gohan clenched both of his fists together and swung them like a sledgehammer, the momentum behind the mighty blow hitting Frieza hard enough to launch the bleeding tyrant up into the clouds. "HA!"
God it hurt, pain blazing throughout his body. Now Frieza was stuck in an awkwar position: He could either power up to 100% and risk succumbing to the same fatigue and sluggishness that almost cost him his life on Namek in exchange for getting far better pain tolerance. Or he could keep his current form, with the greater degree of speed, stamina and agility...while still being forced to endure the worst pain of his life.
Frieza seized his boy with telekinesis, halting his body in the sky instantaneously. "This...this is positively absurd..." the Arcosian growled, sounding like a deadly jungle cat warding off its opponents. "I am Frieza...King Cold's most powerful son, the latest in a long line of mighty Cold Family warriors! Do you think the son of a low class, lower species monkey brat like you can stop me?! You'll die like a million others before you, and after you've drawn your last breath I will tear your head off your shoulders, use it as a bloody standard to warn off all those who would dare oppose my family!"
Gohan cackled.
If Frieza clenched his teeth any harder they would shatter like glass, the veins nearest to his eyes bulging out from his growing indignation. The two charged toward each other in the air, both of them charging up ki blasts with their outstretched hands. Frieza and Gohan fired their blasts outward at the same time, both beams of ki striking off each other in the sky and kicking off a large explosion that sent the duo hurtling bac from each other.
This time it was Frieza who recovered first, flipping through the air and firing up his purple ki aura. He shot toward the injured Saiyan child, using his speed and momentum to crash his knee against Gohan's chin hard enough to launch Gohan even faster across the wasteland skyline.
From where he stood on the ground, King Cold watched the battle with a vague degree of interest. Part of him was curious to see how genuine his son had been when he killed a Super Saiyan, wanting to have a better glimpse of his sons strength. It was entirely possible that his youngest son was becoming TOO powerful.
After all, sons killing their own father in the Cold Family was hardly a rarity as history had proved. And while he did care for Frieza and Cooler (Even if he quite blatantly played favourites with his youngest son) he wouldn't hesitate to kill either of them if they posed a genuine threat to him. For now he'd just hang back and watch, get a good estimate of Frieza's strength...and if he happened to die against this enraged simian, well it would be child's play for Cold to finish the job.
Frieza flew around in an arc, swiftly intercepting Gohan's airborne body. He raised both of his white fists high above his head and swung them down like a sledgehammer. The crashed into Gohan's bloodied and beaten face, striking so forcefully that Gohan was immediately slammed into a nearby mesa, sending fissured along the mound of orange rock.
Not satisfied with that, Frieza narrowed his eyes and launched a wave of telekinetic energy at the downed child. It smashed Gohan even deeper into the mesa, and with a loud grunt Frieza started forcing him down even further still. The ruined mesa shuddered and started to collapse inward, the gravity behind Frieza's mental assault forming a sinkhole in the planets crust that stretched deeper and deeper down as several hundred tons of rock and earth aided Frieza in forcing Gohan downward.
The alien grunted and growled, straining his psionic powers even further as he forced Gohan's body deeper and deeper into the earth. The ground itself seemed to shake, nearby land formations starting to collapse as the pressure on the crust grew more intense. Gohan was being forced miles into the surface, earning a lengthy manic chuckle from the alien overlord. "Hehe...I'll forcefeed you to the planets core, you little bastard..."
And then, all of a sudden, the rumbling on the ground below grew all the more intense. Frieza's eyes widened as large fissures and geysers suddenly scarred the ground, vents of yellow ki exploding up from the layers of rock. "What...what the..." Suddenly a bright flash of light began to form at the sinkhole Frieza had formed with Gohan's body, growing in both brightness and intensity with each passing second.
Frieza's gradually developing energy sense snapped to life, and he became accutely aware of exactly what was coming his way. He released his telekinetic grip and flew backward, crossing several dozen metres in the span of a few seconds. Just after he stopped moving a massive explosion of golden ki, a mighty Super Saiyan energy wave, exploded out from the sinkhole. It shot up and up into the air, flying skyward at an incredible speed, its momentum never stopping even after it had passed the clouds and started heading into space. The landscape, bathed in a golden light in the ki waves presence, gradually returned to its normal hue after it had shot far enough into the heavens.
Gohan rose up out of what had once been a small sunken patch of earth, now blown wide open into a mile-wide circular hole that stretched so deep into the ground that the bottom simply couldn't be seen. Gohan had clearly been injured in the psychic attack, several bleeding wounds scattered across his body being proof of that. He was panting for breath; the underground almost suffocating him as millions of tons of rock and dirt had threatened to crush him into jam.
That attack had sapped a lot of his power. It had to be strong enough to vaporise everything crushing down on him, and there had to be enough strength in the blast to guarantee it breaching the surface...though perhaps he had overshot the amount of power he'd need to get through it.
"Did you enjoy your dirt nap, brat?" Frieza asked. He allowed himself to smirk and cross his arms, admiring the wounds he'd inflicted. This boy had quite a bit of power, but without the fighting skill and sense of mental stability that his sire had had, he wasn't as much of a threat. In his current maelstrom of rage and fury, he had already wasted quite a bit of power in this battle. And he was still venting off ki even now.
Gohan rocketed toward the ivory alien, vanishing and reappearing behind Frieza. He elbowed his foe in the back of the skull, making him lurch forward and leaving him unguarded. Gohan peppered his back with a trio of powerful punches, each one earning a pained grunt from the alien overlord as they formed dark purple bruises along the length of his spine.
On the plus side, he wasn't hitting as hard as he had earlier. Frieza had a fairly decent shot now. He snapped his tail backward, whipping Gohan across the cheek and sending a fountain of blood gushing out of his fanged jaw. Just as quickly as the tail had unfurled, Gohan's small hands gripped it tight and then abruptly bit into the tail, sending blood oozing and gushing from the sliced flesh.
Frieza shrieked, the pain lancing up his spine as he sensitive flesh was torn open. He flung a hand backward and fired a crackling bolt of purple lightning from his palm, letting it explode against Gohan's face and knock him backward. "And that was the last straw." Frieza hissed.
He lunged forward and buried his fist into Gohan's stomach with all the might he could muster,the incedible blow knocking the wind straight out of him. With Gohan stunned, Frieza swiftly grabbed him by the neck with both hands and started flying straight up into the sky. His purple aura swirled around the two of them as he rocketed into the heavens at massively hypersonic speed, both breaching through the cloud layer and flying higher and higher still.
The air grew thinner and the sky around them grew darker the higher they ascended. Gohan seemed to regain his bearings as they reached the end of the stratosphere, trying to pry the tyrants hands from his throat. Yet it seemed a futile gesture, Frieza was simply unwilling to slacken his grip in the slightest.
When Frieza finally came to a halt, his aura dispersing, the two were adrift in the void of space just above the earth. The remaining air was sucked clean out of Gohan's lungs, and for a brief moment he seemed to snap back to sanity, staring down at the evil Arcosian with pure horror in his eyes.
Frieza smiled, rather politely, and rotated their bodies through the vacuum so Gohan was aimed toward the planet.
Suddenly he was bombing down toward the Earth, holding the Super Saiyan child outward like a heat shield as they burst down into the atmosphere again, tongues of fire lashing at Gohan's back. "How do you like that monkey?!" Frieza snarled, his speed growing faster and faster as the pull of gravity grew all the more intense. The two falling figures were soon consumed by a large blazing fireball, heat swirling all around them and just growing hotter in tandem with their speed.
When they collided with the planet it was as if a nuclear bomb had gone off, a great mushroom cloud shooting up into the sky as they released the built up energy their freefall through the atmosphere had accumulated. The poor ravaged landscape shook violently as the explosion stretched out over the span of five miles, the depth of the crater stretching almost three miles deep into the crust of the desert. The explosive impact had kicked up so much dust and debris that the growing cloud threatened to consume the light of the sun itself, the ruined landscape being coated in a veil of shadow.
King Cold watched the force of the impact die down from a safe distance, his arms folded over his chest. "Well, that was quite a display son." Cold remarked to himself, his tail slowly swishing back and forth. The crew of his saucer stood behind with slack jaws, unable to look away from the vast mushroom cloud Lord Frieza's power had created. Small wonder the Cold family held dominance...
"Take care of the ship." Cold said casually, starting to float upward "I have to investigate this." he added, drifting across the sky toward the smoky crater his son and that Saiyan brat had crashed into. It made for quite an impressive display of destruction, but for the time being the monarch needed to know who had come out of that explosion alive.
As he drew closer, a lime green bubble of crackling ki formed around his body, stopping the vile stench from reaching Cold's regal nostrils and preventing the smoke from staining his skin any further than what that Saiyan had done thus far. The smoke and dust filtered around his mental barrier as he moved closer and closer to the centre of the impact zone.
And there he came upon Frieza, repeatedly punching the pulped remains of what had once been his foe, grunting as each impact send gore splattering up his burn-covered arms. He looked tired, exhausted. The power of reentry had clearly damaged his body, even if he had a Super Saiyan heat shield.
Indeed, quite exhausted, delirious and tired. But he was still smiling a dopey, dreamy smile as he kept punching the dead pile of meat beneath him. For he knew in is heart he had won, that he had slain another Super Saiyan with his own two hands.
Akridah looked at the aged frost demon with a revolted look clear on his face. "You...you did that to a child?" Frieza raised an eyebrow at the question and let out the most effortless and dismissive of snorts.
"Why is everyone always so offended when a child dies? Children are easy to kill, and considering how little they managed to accomplish in their short time alive, then it's no great loss. I imagine killing an adult, one who has had years to form connections and emotional attachments to people, well that would hit far harder than killing some insolent snot-nosed child."
"Y-you...you..." Akridah stammered out. "You're a monster! A heartless creep! How could you do something so vile, so callous, and not show any remorse?!" Almost as soon as the words left is mouth, Akridah grew to regret them.
Frieza sat upright fully in bed, his wrinkles contorting to match the level of anger rising in his body. "You have some nerve, daring to question me." he hissed, his voice setting itself to a worrying chill. "Do you have any idea how much more damage that dirty half-breed monkey would have done if he had been let loose on the universe?! Worlds upon worlds would have been massacred by his power, you and your filthy sand-dwelling people would have been rendered extinct!"
His pulse was spiking, the monitors and machines at the king's bedside beeping into overdrive. Frieza grit his teeth, ignoring the pain that his motions were causing him "Do you have any idea how much of a debt this galaxy owes to me, and my family?! Were it not for me, the galaxy would be under the heel of rapacious and cannibalistic Saiyans! If it weren't for my family and our empire, there would be no scientific advancement, no way to get resources to distant worlds. You Imeckians would still be dwelling in mud and shit houses, praying to your childish sun gods and sand spirits to prevent drought! It was the Planet Trade that gave your backwards planet medicine, irrigation, atmospheric shielding!"
He started coughing and sputtering, bile and phlegm rising up in his throat from each word he spoke "The universe owes us more than you fools are willing to admit! For every world and civilization killed at the hands of me and my family, every other one prospers as a result!" It was at that moment that the nurses and robotic doctors burst into the room, quickly moving to sedate and calm the dying monarch before his heart exploded in his chest.
Frieza snarled and slammed his fist into the wall, sending cracks running up the entire length of the ivory surface "Go! Begone! Or I'll show you exactly what this infirm body can do!" Taking that as a threat to his very being, Akridah was very quick to scurry from the bedroom as quick as his legs could carry him.
A/N: Well, that was something. The battle with Gohan was prehaps a little shorter than it should have been, but I didn't want to linger on Earth much longer. The next chapter we'll get a start on the next stage of Frieza's conquest, and learn a little more about his heirs.
Nickolaidas: I really admire how you write Frieza in a totally different light in this story. You explored the good side, now you're going for the bad. You'll always be my inspiration, Arkham, you're what brought me to this site, and I'll never forget it. Keep rocking on!
Say, are we going to see Cooler? In fan fiction, those two usually go together!
Aww, you're so sweet. As for Cooler, he'll indeed appear soon, and be a major player in future plotlines. Just needed to get this out of the way to set up some future elements.
Humancygrax: I like how you have Kuriza in the story not a lot of fanfictions use him for some reason
He's very obscure in all honesty. Even Arale made an appearance in Dragon Ball, linking and giving attention to Dr. Slump, but there's no real reference to Kuriza or Nekomajin in Dragon Ball or Z.
11cookeaw1: If earth isn't destroyed, then it means the androids will eventually be released, that could be interesting.
Why yes, it most certainly would :3
Chaosconetic: Kind of surprised it didn't occur to Kami or Piccolo to fiind a means to merge, given how together, with Nails power, they exceeded Super Saiyan level, he could have fought Cold on roughly even terms, well maybe Cold would still be slightly stronger.
It would have been interesting. Alack, such things didn't occur to him in canon in the years he had to wait for the Androids.