Disclaimer: I do not own DBZ.
One Step Closer Redux
"Disgusting bastard," Zangya muttered. "I think I`m just gonna go die now," Trunks said to himself, not really hearing anything else. "Are we gonna attack or just sit here twiddling our thumbs?" Goten asked, crouching down a bit more and throwing his hands back. "You aren`t going to do anything. You two still have a chance of beating him if you can do another Fusion dance, Zangya and I`ll try to hold him off as long as we can," Piccolo explained bluntly, moving one leg plainly into Goten`s path while Zangya stepped entirely in front of Trunks.
"Which probably means we`ll die with a few nice snappy comments and a lot of style but won`t accomplish very much," she stated cynically. "Welcome to the world of anyone who isn`t a Saiyan these days," Piccolo muttered annoyedly. "I can already tell that I don`t like it," Zangya complained, slowly beginning to gather power. That certainly irked Piccolo a bit though, she was now sparingly more powerful than he was.
"Grand, she-bitch gets the last laugh in the end," he thought in disdain while powering up himself, still trying to block Goten`s path to Buu, or Buu`s path to Goten depending on one`s point of view.
Neither Zangya or Piccolo ever attacked though. In fact, none of them were even paying attention to Buu for very much longer as another ki signature entered their senses, measuring so far off the scales that only Goten and Trunks were willing to actually believe that they weren`t having a mass hallucination. "Does anyone else feel that?" Goten finally asked after several seconds.
"Could be a new enemy," Piccolo growled, starting to gather more and more power up. "Talk about being caught between a rock and hard place," Zangya replied sarcastically, easing up a bit and staring out through the gaps in buildings at the incoming signature.
"Is it just me or is that ki familiar?" Trunks asked before finally, a split second later, Piccolo answered all their questions with a roaring smile. "IT`S GOKU!" He shouted with a rare enthusiasm, the kind that he had only ever displayed when the moment all but demanded it. Goten corrected him a split second later though. "No, it`s Gohan!" He shouted with the same enthusiasm as Piccolo.
Not that any of them managed to get their words out before he had already touched down, landing with a skid down a row of concrete with the sounds of shattering glass heralding his arrival a few seconds late, followed even later still by an Earth rattling sonic boom as the oldest son of Goku stopped his landing on a dime, spacing himself halfway between Buu and the surviving defenders of the Earth.
"Hi guys, long time no see," he greeted with a smirk, turning sideways to face the others. "... Kid, what in the hell happened to your hair," Zangya asked sarcastically, overshadowing the mood of the teen`s dramatic return with her usual brand of off-beat humor, though the original demi-saiyan didn`t seem to mind too much. "Figures you`d be the one to notice that," he commented with an equally sarcastic tone and a smirk.
"It isn`t just the hair and the eyes, is it?" Piccolo asked, seeing to the point in a matter of seconds. "Your entire ki`s been rearranged Gohan, what`s happened to you?" He demanded. For a few seconds, Piccolo almost didn`t believe that the man standing in front of him could be the same teen that had grown out of the boy he had spent a full year watching over and bludgeoning the snot out of to try and strengthen.
Until he saw that damnably infectious little grin that the entire family seemed to have.
"I`ll explain after I finish with the tentacle porn reject," Gohan replied with that same grin, turning sideways to face Majin Buu with a far different, far angrier expression, coldly neutral despite the rage bubbling beneath the surface. "So... You`ve lost some weight and grown a few inches."
"I also slaughtered the entire population of this pathetic little dump of a planet," Buu replied with a growl, standing straight and tossing his head in either direction. "You`re the one I defeated earlier, aren`t you?" He asked. "Depends on how you classify defeat, if you mean 'pissed me off' then yes, that would be me," Gohan answered sharply. "Good, I thought it was you," Buu replied before stepping forward and standing before the teen with that all-but-insane grin. "Tell me boy, did you really think any sort of power-up you could ever recieve would allow you to surpass me?" Buu asked.
"I don`t think, I know," Gohan answered. "I see... So, you went through all of that powering up, just to come and fight me, did you?" Buu asked. "Fight you? I don`t care about fighting you Buu, I`m here to kill you," Gohan answered calmly, turning to fully face Buu and narrowing his eyes. "Then come, come kill me O savior of the world," Buu ordered, jumping back and lunging at Gohan from almost thirty feet in the air.
His punch was soundly blocked with a small impact shockwave as Gohan moved his forearm up and blocked the attack like it was nothing, gingerly shoving Buu`s arm back and sending the creature screaming down the street to smash through the side of an apartment building and have it all crash down onto him. Gohan on the other hand, simply cracked his knuckles and glanced back over his shoulder at the small crowd of shocked onlookers.
"I`ll take it from here guys, you just hang back for now and let me deal with him," Gohan ordered with a nod before launching off of the ground, leaving the other four to scrape their jaws off of the concrete.
I cannot take this anymore
I`m saying everything I`ve said before
"You can get up now, I know you`re not hurt," Gohan stated, touching down atop one of the dozen or so individual pillars of rubble that had sprouted around where he had sent Buu into. "How right you are," Buu stated as he regenerated from a puddle of slop beneath all of the rubble to come to a plain stand in at the base of the pile that Gohan was standing on, hand already drawn back before raining down, slamming into the pile and detonating it almost instantly.
His attack would`ve worked too, if not for the fact that Gohan had circled around and was presently standing behind him, smirking slightly. Buu grinned ferally and laughed to himself before shocking upright at the small tug made on his tail, which was actually powerful enough that he found his head bent over backwards in a grotesque manner, causing the ancient godkiller to flench slightly.
"Hi," Gohan greeted. "Nice night out," he stated before casually slinging Buu skyward, though the demon hadn`t gotten more than a few dozen stories up when he was met with a solid backhand across the forehead, sending him crashing through another building with a rorar, erupting out of the side and continuing on through eight or nine more before finally slamming into the grounds on the city`s outskirts with a cratering impact, severe enough that it sent off a tilted cloud of dust almost a mile high and half as long.
Gohan was already waiting for him by the time he had landed.
"Don`t you think so?" The teen asked, politely helping Buu out of the body imprint and right into a knee into the gut before throwing him right back through the air in the direction he`d come from, zooming through the holes the demon left behind in the abandoned buildings he crashed through and appearing ahead of him once again, smacking Buu back down into the ground with unbelievable force, shattering concrete all around and finally allowing the pink monstrosity to get back up, regenerating the trench in the back of his head and cracking his neck to either side angrily.
"That. Wasn`t. Nice," Buu growled, ignoring the stares of the four onlookers to the battle, who he had coincidentally landed not too far from.
Gohan only shifted himself into an upright stance in the skies between high rise buildings, raising his arms up slightly and then throwing them back down without so much as a single sound from himself, just as an aura of fire tinted a flaming golden shot up around him, while several dozen buildings in every direction erupted in flames. "What now? Trying to scare me with a fancy light show?!" Buu demanded loudly.
"No, I`m just taking things up a notch!" Gohan yelled, promptly dropping down from the heights of the sky only to pause mere inches above the ground, kicking up a large cloud of dust on the sheer force of his now-invisible aura, which had all but dropped out of sight with him, never quite surviving the fall for one reason or another. Another wave of dust and the teen was already launching himself at Buu by the time everyone had set their eyes on where he had been mere fractions of a second earlier, slamming elbow first into Buu`s stomach with such force that it caused Buu`s body to crumple like tin foil against a sledge hammer rather than causing Buu to fly back.
All these words, they make no sense
I find bliss in ignorance
Of course Buu was too disoriented by the first strike to really feel the punch into his chin, which knocked his head for a literal spin on his neck beck another elbow cut up and into his chin, sending the demon`s head into a backflip, still attached to his neck the entire time. There were a few dozenths of a second in pause while Gohan reached back, only to swipe up with his left leg and kick Buu in the head, setting him right on his corkscrewed neck, following it with a second kick that spun his head back into proper positioning, ending everything off with a thunderous roar of ki which followed an explosion across Buu`s chest, throwing the pink demon back hundreds of feet and into a skid.
For several seconds, Zangya, Piccolo, Goten and Trunks all started at the scene before them, dumbfounded completely while Gohan touched down on his feet, lowering his now-smoking hands back down to his sides and regarding the mess he had made out of Buu, who was slow to pull himself up and out of the messy pile of distorted, deformed limbs and miscellaneous bodyparts, hobbling along briefly on one bent foot before seeming to spring back to normal, virtually as good as new.
"Elastic little bastard, aren`t you?" Gohan asked, even though Buu was around two feet taller than he himself was. "... Now I`m angry," Buu growled like a scorned child, thrusting his left hand up into the air and shouting as the same technique he had used to annihilate humanity was again put to use to try and take out Gohan, spraying thousands upon thousands of ki blasts up into the skies above the city only to have them all come spiralling right back down, tearing apart buildings and leveling virtually everything in sight as Goten, Trunks, Zangya and Piccolo all defended themselves, smacking away the blasts that randomly lanced out at them.
Gohan just stood there and let everything that was going to hit him do so.
Less I hear, the less you`ll say
But you`ll find that out anyway
Just like before...
"If that`s all you can do, give up while you`re ahead," Gohan ordered, even as blast after blast slammed into him at a frenzied rate while the city collapsed to ruins all around he and the others, explosions the size of skyscrapers towering up into the only to yield to gravity`s whims and come falling back down like toppling pillars of Hell itself.
Not that Gohan entirely noticed a single one of them. He had been to Hell after all, there wasn`t much for him to be knowingly afraid of anymore.
After almost three minutes, Buu finally ended the attack, laughing gutturally within the miles-wide, miles-taller cloud of smoke that surrounded what had once been a bustling - and then later ruinous and ghost filled - city. Buu`s cackling rang out throughout the smoke, since he didn`t need to breathe, he was unscathed by the strangling effects of having no oxygen.
Of course, his laughter ended after several seconds when a single light began to shine in the blackness of the smoke, which was promptly blown away in a roar of rushing ki, the likes of which even Buu felt a bit of envy at the sight of. Goten, Trunks, Zangya and Piccolo all stood a few yards behind Gohan, who was still unharmed even after the demon`s unrelenting assault, bearing a neutral expression of resolve in the face of a creature that had personally slaughtered gods by the hundreds in it`s past.
"I almost pity you," Gohan stated dryly before diving forward again.
Everything you say to me
Takes me one step closer to the edge
And I`m about to break
I need a little room to breathe
`Cause I`m one step closer to the edge
And I`m about to break
The next five seconds saw Majin Buu hit with more attacks than even he could even feel individual pains from, punches hard enough to leave fist marks in his skin, kicks fast enough to whip trails that were inches deep flying through the air to make impact, only to have each mark, crater or trench in his body annihilated by the attacks to come after it. Impact shockwaves rang out with each blow like a machine gun, fast enough that no individual sound could ever hope to be registered, blowing away more and more of the smoke cloud with each attack before finally, Gohan halted his attacks, leaving a deformed, warped, gurgling blob of bubblegum with it`s mouth in a place that it`s creator didn`t intend and it`s eyes located somewhere on the inside of the pile.
"Almost," Gohan stated, finalizing the assault with one last punch, one so fierce that it literally warped Buu back to his normal state with far too many bruises to count, not to mention an arm punching straight through his mid-section.
A few seconds passed and Gohan drew his arm back, gingerly taking a step away from Buu as the creature stumbled away and righted itself, head tilting from side to side dazedly. "I`ll make you pay," Buu growled ferally. "Take your best shot," Gohan ordered.
I find the answers aren`t so clear
Wish I could find a way to disappear
There was a blindingly bright blast of flame, arcing up miles into the sky as a pinkish tornado, with Buu at it`s center. "Oh I will," he stated quickly, head tilting from side to side faster and faster as the demon began to laugh gutturally, speaking as if he`d just inhaled enough helium to kill an elephant. "I`ll make you all pay..."
"If this is all the power you can call up to try and hurt me, don`t even bother," Gohan ordered.
All these thoughts they make no sense
I find bliss in ignorance
"I`ll make you pay for every single thing you`ve done to me..."
Almost too late, Gohan realized just what Buu was doing.
"Shit," he thought to himself as Buu`s power started to kick into overdrive, suddenly rippling outward in an explosion that was likely going to be even larger than the one he had carried out to try and kill Gotenks earlier. The night sky turned hot pink as the blast began, but by then, Gohan had already covered the distance to Goten, Trunks, Zangya and Piccolo, grabbing the lot of them in any way he could, just as the explosion started to expand at speeds too quick for any of the other four to even hope to avoid, with far too much power for any of them to even think of surviving.
Nothing seems to go away
Over and over again
"ALL OF YOU WILL PAY!!!"
Everything you say to me
Takes me one step closer to the edge
And I`m about to break
I need a little room to breathe
`Cause I`m one step closer to the edge
And I`m about to break
The everything within a hundred miles of Majin Buu promptly vanished in an explosion so fierce that it almost knocked the planet out of orbit. Shockwaves visible from the other end of the solar system spread off, threatening to tear the Earth into little more than a cosmic frag grenade, but instead of doing that, as Buu most certainly could have, the explosion seemed to halt itself.
Reality distorted around the blast and time seemed to slow down for a short while, and then it all calmed down. The explosion warped itself out of existence and all that was left was a blackened, charred out crater, stretching a hundred miles in all directions, even straight down.
"Well, that was close," Gohan mumbled aloud, glancing down at the four figures he had just saved from a fiery, no doubt painful sort of end and counting them off by name in his head. "Thanks Gohan," Piccolo managed to get out, though he didn`t exactly allow the fact to go over his head that the teen had him tucked under one arm like a sack of clothing in the same way he had Zangya in his opposite with Goten and Trunks held by the scruffs of their necks in either hand. "Don`t mention it," his former student, and former equal, replied casually.
"Well... At least you didn`t rip my hair out, like someone I could mention," Zangya stated with a glare at Trunks and Goten. Though her hair hadn`t actually been ripped out, it sure felt like it. A few seconds passed and Gohan let go of the four of them, lowering down and settling himself to stand atop a battered cliff, followed a few seconds later by the other four.
"Do you think that killed him?" Piccolo asked as the night finally returned to normal, dull starlight being the only illumination for the time being. "Not a chance in Hell," Gohan replied bluntly and with an oddly out-of-place lack of manners about him. "If he wanted me dead badly enough to take himself out, none of the solar system would be intact right now. Probably not much of this part of the galaxy either for that matter," Gohan mused sourly.
"How can you be sure he isn`t dead though? You saw how that blast warped the area around it... Almost like when he and Gotenks punched through time and space to get out of the Room," Zangya pointed out annoyedly, not exactly able to see much in the dim lighting of the night. "Because if he was, I wouldn`t be feeling his ki dropping through that tunnel you guys punched through the planet," Gohan replied with a light shrug. "You need to learn to pay attention to your ki senses again," he pointed out jokingly before launching off of the cliffside and heading towards the crater.
"... This out of a kid I spent a week beating the snot out of in a pitch black cave to try and help him develop ki sensing skills in the first place," Piccolo grumbled annoyedly. "Least your not the only one having a case of suddenly obsolete," Zangya commented with the same tone, ignorant of the fact that Goten and Trunks were already blasting off after Gohan.
Shut up when I`m talkin` to you!
Shut up! Shut up!
Echoes thrashed out of the very bottom of the crater as two figures battled their way out of the passage that Goten and Trunks had punched through the Earth with their own bodies as Gotenks, throwing off hundreds of shockwaves when the two finally exited, with Buu clearly on the defensive, throwing off punches by the truckload, each and every one of which found themselves individually blocked and parried by Gohan, who had yet to even break a sweat throughout their battle.
"DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE!" Buu continuously shouted with each strike, so fast that the individual words were almost inaudible from each other, even to Gohan. "You really need to expand your vocabulary," the demi-saiyan teen pointed out, almost lazily as he stopped blocking and allowed Buu`s last kick to trail through his now-dropped defenses, simply stepping out of the way and inching forward, elbow stabbing straight up and into Buu`s chin with a loud implosion of his jaw, only to extend his arm out entirely and further implode the rest of the ancient demon`s face, just as Goten and Trunks arrived on the scene.
Shut up when I`m talkin` to you!
Shut up! Shut up!
"... Why... Can`t I beat you?" Buu demanded in a near-gurgle after Gohan had withdrawn his forearm.
"If you haven`t figured it out yourself, there`s no point in telling you," Gohan stated lazily, drawing one hand back and then extending it back outward, blasting Buu in the chest badly enough that it sent the demon flying back.
I`m about to break!
"Ha!" Gohan shouted, surging forth a burst of power into the beam he had just put through Buu`s chest, catching the demon across his entire upper body with the sudden shock of ki, causing Buu to again liquify before the beam suddenly arced upward into a half-loop and drove the liquid right into the lava that was again bubbling up out of the passage that Gotenks and Buu had formed through the Earth.
"Damn," Gohan thought, feeling Buu`s ki suddenly start moving down through the lava towards the core of the planet, even in all of the unbelievable heat that he was trying to pass through. The teen took it in stride though, lowering his hand and glancing back at Goten and Trunks. "Where are Piccolo and Zangya?!" He yelled over to the two, who were standing a good distance away.
"I think they`re still on that cliff back there!" Trunks shouted back. "Let`s go get them! We have a bit o` work to do!" Gohan shouted. "What do you mean?!" Goten asked, lowering his voice when Gohan floated over to the two. "We`re going to go find Dende, he`s still alive," Gohan answered, lifting off again. "He is?" Trunks asked. "Yeah... You can sense ki, remember? Did everyone forget that when I was away or something?" Gohan asked dryly.
"... Oh," Trunks mumbled as he and Goten flew off after Gohan.
Everything you say to me
Takes me one step closer to the edge
And I`m about to break
I need a little room to breath
`Cause I`m one step closer to the edge
And I`m about to break
And hundreds of miles below, buried down through billions upon trillions of tons of dirt, rock and magma, beneath even the ever-shifting continental plates, Buu waited, gradually pulling himself back together atop the molten iron core of the Earth, gradually biding his time. He would wait, of course. It was always a wait, from the moment he had first felt that power signature growing in the distance, across even the barriers between the Mortal Plane and the Realms above it. It had been a wait then, fighting Gotenks and trying to grasp the strength of that distant power as it grew larger by each passing minute.
It was a wait then and it was a wait now.
But that was okay. Buu had a plan, he always had a plan but none had ever been particularly this good because none of the previous incarnations of Buu had ever been distinctly individual enough to plan farther ahead than what they`d have for lunch or what attack they would use to finish someone off all of two minutes before actually using it. This Buu though, this Buu had a plan.
And soon enough, he was going to use it.
"Only a matter of time," Buu thought certainly.
"Only a matter of time..."
Author`s Note: Feel the ownage! And feel the CLIFFHANGER! :D
perrin: I don`t mind a negative review but a flame won`t get anyone anywhere, yanno?
Will: Yeah, that was especially one of my favorite scenes to write in the entire series... Just having Gotenks be crazy enough to actually tear a moon out of another dimension to try and hit something the size of Majin Buu with it was a riot to me, but it actually fit! Glad you liked it.
cobra: Hope you enjoyed Round One *Evil cackle.*
diamondgirl, Professor Authordude and CysticLOL17: Ah come on guys! Where`d ya go? o_O
That`s all for now folks, enjoy, leave a review and see ya next time! Sh33p out.
