"I… Can't believe it…" Krillin stared at Frieza's body lying on the back with a gaping wound of a literal explosion blasting out from his chest, littering the pure white skin of the space emperor with a hectic splash of cherry the same that dyed all around his immediate surroundings. "Did Chayote just…?"
"His Ki… It's… Almost non-existent," Tenshinhan muttered. His face twitched while cold sweat ran down its surface. The Dragon Team struggled to rise back on their feet and continue their vain struggle against the invincible Frieza before witnessing this shocking turn of events.
"Well, he was a mean guy, so he got what he deserved. Still… I'd have liked to beat him fairly, you know?" Goku scratched his head. "Beating him with a technique like that doesn't really feel right."
"So… Does that make Chayote the empress of the universe?" Yamcha scratched his head after emerging from a black lake and wiping the thickened water off of his eyes. When the goofball noticed that the rest of the Dragon Team turned toward him with wayward stares, Yamcha just laughed it off. "It was just a joke, guys… Come on… Chayote?"
"Let's just go home," Chayote sighed. "We've found Gine, Lord Frieza is dead. We've got no more reason to spend a minute more on this planet."
Without particular rush to their step, the Dragon Team kicked the layer of ash from beneath their feet off and dashed off toward the skies. While everyone still struggled to believe what had happened just before, no one spoke up for a while. Goku stared on ahead with a blank pair of eyes. His face was completely devoid of emotion, which was not a natural look for him.
"Are you okay?" Krillin wondered, finally breaking the unspoken oath of silence that everybody looked to be oppressed by.
"I… I don't know. This just feels so strange, so… Empty." Goku admitted while the two friends flew alongside one another, heading toward the direction of the spaceship. "I know of an incredibly powerful technique called the Spirit Bomb. It calls upon the Ki from everything around it and alright decimates anything that is evil. King Kai tried teaching it to Gohan, but since he didn't know the technique himself per se, Gohan couldn't take in what the old geezer was giving him."
"And you've learned it?" Krillin gasped.
"Through hearsay, yes. King Kai never taught me directly, but I caught more than a fair share of stuff through watching Gohan learn from him. The Spirit Bomb… It's a powerful technique, but… I just don't feel like using it, you know?" Goku sighed. His face looked calm but far from ready to tangle with the consequences of Chayote just destroying Frieza like that.
"What's with you bringing this up right now? Also, why did you hold a technique like that back? We could have used it against Slug, you know?" Krillin cheeked Goku, acting hurt.
"It just… Didn't feel right using it." Goku shook his head. "I can't stand the idea of beating an opponent I can't defeat with someone else's power."
"What are you saying, Goku?" Tenshinhan scolded his old rival having just overheard the most crucial bits of the conversation. "Frieza was absolutely tearing us apart out there. We were leagues and miles away from being ready! We could have trained our entire lifetimes and have never become truly ready for a monster like that! Chayote saved all of us out there!"
"She did," Goku nodded, still not a hint of joy, satisfaction though not even a glimpse of sadness or disappointment either shined in his eyes or twitched in his face.
"The Devil Mite Beam is nothing like the Spirit Bomb either," Chiaotzu raised his own objections, being familiar with the Spirit Bomb himself after spending a decent chunk of time in King Kai's little planet and having picked up the fundamentals of the old deity's teachings. "Chayote worked long and hard, polished that technique all throughout her life until she could complete it. It's her own power, an odd mixture of dark magic and Ki, but Chayote pulled it off herself."
"She did," Goku nodded before looking back to Chayote who stayed awfully quiet, choosing just to fly dead last in the group and stare down at the shifting sights of Planet Vegeta as they closed in on the spaceship and prepared to set out home. "And I'm not trying to say the way Chayote won was dirty or anything, it's just… It just feels pointless and empty. Vegeta's dead so my promise was in vain, dad's dead too so finding mother and bringing her home just doesn't feel the same either."
"I think I know what you're feeling, Goku." Krillin nodded with a light tip to the corners of his lips. "I felt something very similar, crushing and empty. Back when the Saiyans attacked the Earth, and I ended up fighting one of them alongside Muten Roshi-sama. We ended up killing the Saiyan, and it was the first time I could remember ever killing someone in battle. It just doesn't feel the same, like friendly competition in the World Martial Arts Tournament or fighting to protect the Earth. It's just two parties fighting each other, and neither one wins anything, but one of them loses everything and gets obliterated. It's an empty, pointless feeling. One that expands and fills your chest with dread and uncertainty. It corrupts the rest of your feelings as well. Nothing else you feel for a while ever feels the same as that emptiness soaks it entirely."
"I guess you're right, maybe I just wish we could have settled it like in the old days. Like when we fought all those powerful guys trying to take over the Earth or during the World Martial Arts Tournament. I guess Frieza wasn't a martial artist, so he wasn't fighting with the same mindset. It's just… Winning has never really felt like this before," Goku nodded, still devoid of any sort of genuine reaction to how he just felt as if he was still unsure how he felt about what had just transpired at all.
"Chayote, how are you holding up?" Yamcha slowed to down to even his pace up to Chayote's.
"We won." Chayote mumbled. "We saved Gine, mission complete."
"That's not what I asked," Yamcha shook his head. "That thing you said to Frieza before you beamed him chest into exploding. You meant it, right? It sounded like the most genuine thing I've ever heard from you, and I never thought you felt this way. Frankly, we were never truly sure what you felt like since you kept talking all that rubbish about killing everyone and everything and taking over the Earth and surrendering it to Lord Frieza as a tribute for rejoining his army."
Chayote didn't reply. Her expression was anything but emotionless. Whereas Goku felt stumped about the hollow victory that the Dragon Team had pulled off, Frieza's metaphorical dead body slumped over Chayote and its weight felt like too much to bear.
"I don't need to explain myself to you," Chayote mustered a response. "I've spoken everything there was to say to Lord Frieza already."
"Earth is lucky to have a soldier like you protecting it, our little corner of paradise would like its denizen back though," Yamcha gave Chayote an enthusiastic thumb up before the scarred martial artist rejoined the rest of the guys while the Capsule Corps spaceship loomed on the horizon in a ghastly starport filled with empty vessels that will never take off.
What did he mean by that?
"You did it!" Piccolo's vociferous howl reached the Dragon Team as they settled down and slowly approached the open door of the ship. "You sent that bastard packing. We can leave now."
"Yeah…" Goku nodded. His emotional detachment from the outcome and dreamy haze of a mental state fully translated throughout his simple response despite the brevity.
"Frieza… Dead?" a wave of confused whispers and babble reigned over the crowd of Saiyan refugees that waited around the spaceship to hear from the Earthlings about how this entire situation resolved itself. They were fully ready to board their ships and run away to Earth alongside these brave or foolish souls that challenged the immovable sovereign that was Frieza.
"What about King Vegeta, though?" someone wondered.
"Who cares? He ran off to fight Frieza instead of watching over his people."
"Yeah, didn't he surrender the crown?"
"Should we elect a new leader?"
"Shit! We're screwed if King Cold or Cooler finds out!"
"Who should be the new king then?"
"Someone killed Frieza, didn't they? It had to be a Saiyan, Frieza couldn't have been killed by some Earthling…"
"You guys heard it, Frieza's dead, so you're free to do whatever you want. You can go ahead and put his head on a spike if you feel like it, elect a new king or wait until Vegeta returns to whine about his denied legacy or whatever." Piccolo turned around to let the Saiyans in on the current state of events. These simpletons weren't aware of the Dragon Balls, so it might have been a good idea to let them know Vegeta would return.
"King Vegeta is alive? But why isn't he with you?" someone from amongst the crowd of Saiyan survivors asked.
"No. Vegeta's dead. Frieza aced him good, gave him a trouncing before sending him to hell. Just what that runt deserves. Still, we're gonna ask Bardock back so we may as well ask everyone killed by Frieza and his henchmen back–that means that all the Saiyans slain here today will come back too." Piccolo cracked his numb and weary neck to both sides before taking a step onto the spaceship and staring at the stumped faces of the Saiyan survivors. They may not have gotten the full picture, but they didn't need to. All they needed to know was that Bardock and the rest would be back.
"Wait, you're going to bring Bardock back?" Gine ran out from a farther chamber within the spaceship to run up to Piccolo and grab him by the shoulders, way above her own size. "Did I hear it right?"
"That's right!" Gohan ran up to his grandmother and nodded. "We have these magical artifacts back on Earth called the Dragon Balls. The Dragon Balls can fulfill the wishes of people who collect them once every year. They can even bring dead people back to life, though only once. They can't fulfill the same wish twice."
"Seeing all of you, knowing what Bardock told me about Earth, somehow I can't even doubt that. Even if this talk about Dragon Balls seems more and more outlandish every time…" Gine shook her head after pressing her hand to her forehead. "Storage capsules, magical wish-granting artifacts, what an odd planet we've sent our son onto…"
"I'm thankful you did though," Goku grinned for the first time since Frieza's heart blew out on the outside. "I'd have never met all of my friends if you didn't. Honestly, I don't think I liked Planet Vegeta all that much, so I'm glad we're going home."
"Maybe we should stick around though?" Krillin wondered, letting his voice linger on after he was done speaking. "I mean, we can contact Bulma about using the Dragon Balls and relay the wish we need to be fulfilled. Bardock will come back on Planet Vegeta anyway, and it's not like these guys like him all that much. Maybe it's much better if we wait around for him to revive before we head home?"
"That's fine," Piccolo dismissed Krillin's worries. "The new Dragon Balls Dende enhanced can make two whole wishes come true. We can both revive everyone killed by Frieza and ask for Bardock to be returned to Earth."
"Yeah… I guess you're right. Let's just go home already, I'm beat. Figuratively and literally…" Krillin let out a chuckle, allowing himself the luxury to lower his guard. The thrusters on the bottom of the ship engaged, letting the vessel hover in mid-air and accumulate the force in its engines before shooting off to the cosmos with space-bending velocity. Hurling across the universe toward home. Home to where their hearts were. Even those of Goku and Gine, Saiyans who were born on Planet Vegeta but now found there to be nothing worth staying for.
"Two!? Two whole wishes!?" Gine flipped out, dropping her jaw.
"Yeah, we met this Namekian boy recently, Dende, he's a lot of fun and he's staying with Kami Upa. He enhanced the Dragon Balls to grant two wishes now," Gohan explained with a shining expression while his grandma picked the young boy up in her arms and looked just as gleeful to hear him out.
"God, you're such a little treat, I could hear you out explain Earth to me for years on end!" Gine yelled out as she found herself a bed to settle down on.
"Chayote, settle down," Goku smirked at the back of his old friend, giving her a thumb up when she turned back to him. "You did great out there. Saved our backs, thanks!"
"It's weird, isn't it, Kakarot?" Chayote replied with a hollow tone. "I've spent most of my time on Earth plotting how to drag you to Planet Vegeta and for both of us to join Lord Frieza's army and, in the end, we both feel like this place is a dump and can't wait to go back to Earth. I guess you worked your brainwashing magic on me faster than I could do the same to you."
"I guess s…" Goku was about to reply before he turned his head down and to the west. His glance turned grim, and the entire Dragon Team followed suit. Before anyone could ask anything, the ship went white and a roaring cacophony of a resonating blast robbed the travelers of their hearing while a wave of unbearable heat washed over them. The walls of the ship just shut inward, slamming against the martial artists and doing its best to grind them to a wet stain of fractured bones and splattered blood before exploding and scattering in the sky once its hardness fooled too puny to accomplish this task.
"The ship blew up!?" a Saiyan survivor shrieked out, pointing at the massive fireball in the sky with a horrified expression. "What the heck gives!?"
"Blow the evil right out of my heart, you say?" a wicked voice seeped downward from a nearby hill. A voice of an androgynous pitch filled to the brink with malice. "You insolent, stupid primate, I have no heart to blow up! My superior physiology is the ultimate anatomy in this universe! No heart to burst, no lungs to choke, no liver or kidney to aim for. It takes more than a burst of my chest to kill me. Filthy baboons!"
Paled out expressions of the Saiyan survivors turned behind, they already knew the name of the malady that would be engraved on all of their tombstones as the voice had been as familiar to every Saiyan as the cruel crack of a whip was to an abused animal. A bloodied, hairless, pale figure stood atop of the hill, its chest and waist had been drowned in dried out cherry-colored blood and it streamed down the tyrant's mouth and his right eye, forcing him to close it to avoid the disgusting feeling of a bleeding eyelid.
"It's… Frieza!" a Saiyan survivor shouted, awakening the mad tyrant from his celebratory stupor and forcing him to turn his eyes downward and toward the frightened and cornered Saiyans. "B-But I thought… The Earthlings killed him!"
"Not quite, they taught me what fear of death feels like, yes, but all they accomplished was leading me right to you," Frieza grinned with a psycho gleam in his left eye. "They were wrong to underestimate how good I am in hiding my power, I've been literally doing my entire life, after all!"
A thunderous thud spread behind the cowering Saiyan elderly, women, children, and the wounded. A lightly burnt up and damaged body of a spiky-haired Saiyan man flopped from the layer of the atmosphere the ship detonated in after being crushed to bits and pieces by Frieza's telekinesis. The space emperor looked to gaze at the sky, seeing a bald, three-eyed Earthling, a bald shorty, and a pale ghoul alongside a scarred martial artist hit the ground one after another. Then she slammed down as well. The one that taught Frieza the fear of death.
"Brilliant!" Frieza shrieked out, extending his hands out as his fingers twitched and caressed the empty, gracious air before him. "Oh, there is supreme justice in this universe! It preserved those heaps of loathsome filth and left them battered, broken, and ripe for punishment. I'll serenade such a sweet ode to violence before I grant those savages the sweet release of death!"
"We're… We're dead…" an elderly Saiyan fumbled back and fell flat on his bottom. Hopelessness and despair filtered through his face like a formless product produced on an infinitely extending conveyor belt. A pink beam extended and blasted past the poor Saiyan's chest, making his limp body flap lifeless on the ground where he had fumbled onto.
"Precisely, monkey. What is it they say? The lucky ones die first?" Frieza chuckled to himself, barely able to contain his festivity. "For displaying the gift of remarkable intelligence for a primitive ape, I'll free you from this mortal coil sooner than your worthless peers. Now, which one of those dregs should I execute first?"
"GRANDMA!" a wild, high-pitched roar filled the sky, forcing Frieza to turn his eyes up in shock. The single functional eye of the tyrant settled on a lone child floating in mid-air with scrapes and bruises across, his Saiyan armor had been blasted off and the black bodysuit he donned had been torn up and the boy had been covered in dried blood and ashes of someone he cradled close in their final moments before the blast decimated her. "YOU MONSTER! I'LL KILL YOU!" Gohan drummed from the bottom of his bambino lungs.
"Excuse me, have we met?" Frieza's sly smile extended across his cheeks. "No matter, I'll have to warn you though that killing a child is not beneath me."
"King Kai's Fist X20!" Gohan roared out, clenching his fist before him as a scarlet eruption of Ki pierced the darkening skies.
"Are you serious? They teach that technique to children too!?" Frieza bit his lower lip, simmering in wrath.
"Ka! Me! Ha! Me!" little Gohan cupped his hands and drew them back behind him. The boy's eyes whited out while crystalline tears squeezed out in the corner of his eyes. It was of no matter. He was a skilled enough martial artist to aim with the Ki he sensed before him. "Ha!" Gohan bellowed while throwing his hands out and unleashing a brightening beam of wild energy that dived in a swooping arc, aiming right at Frieza.
"You bonobo! I am the strongest in the universe! The likes of you cannot kill me! This is nothing to me!" Frieza extended his hand, grabbing hold of Gohan's paramount X20 Kamehameha while the resonant force drove the tyrant's cheeks to draw back and expose his grit teeth. "This is nothing to me! Nothing… You hear me!?" Frieza yelled, hissed, and wheezed as he did his best to convince himself in the weakened state that he was in that he could still handle one vengeful little monkey boy.
Once Gohan's Kamehameha fizzled out, leaving the young lad drained of all his power and trembling as his wrath left him as well, Frieza trembled for a few more seconds while his arm smoked with black smolders. The cruel emperor just couldn't pull his eye away from his blackened and charred hand.
"You… Primitive… Mongrel…" Frieza muttered as he extended his hand and fired a concussive, shapeless Ki wave booming toward Gohan. The frightened child leaned back in fear, freezing in place as he lacked the speed to dodge this attack now that his wrath had finally let down. The resonating blast spread with a grisly, robust thud that sounded just a little wet and splattery but, when Gohan opened his eyes again, the boy realized he felt no pain anywhere.
"Good boy… Gohan…" Goku's puny voice reached his son's ears. "Now… Go hide…" the Saiyan had shielded his boy the only way he could in such unfavorable conditions–by throwing his body out in front of his son and revealing his back to the tyrant.
"Hide…?" Frieza hissed. "Oh, no… There is nowhere in the universe you filth will hide from me!"
Slowly, feeling the excruciating burns littering his body and the fractures from Bulma's spaceship being literally crushed by sheer telekinetic force up in the air, Goku turned toward Frieza with a wrathful stare. Down beneath him, the rest of the surviving Dragon Team: Chayote, Krillin, Yamcha, Tenshinhan, and Chiaotzu were slowly recovering and introducing themselves to the battered states that their bodies were left in as a price of their survival.
"You keep taking innocent lives, again and again, Frieza!" Goku proclaimed, clenching his fist before him. "It's time that someone makes you pay!"
"How…?" Frieza lowered his chin to his chest as it twitched and tipped lightly. "How can one be just as cocky, just as blind to how absolutely insignificant, primitive, and worthless they are to threaten me!? Me!? Lord Frieza, the mightiest in the universe!? Your entire race, no, every primitive, savage race in this universe needs to be cleansed. Yours shall be just a grim warning to the rest of the universe to get in line or vanish!"