Chapter Three:
Goku growled low. His whole side felt like it was on fire, but it was better that dying from blood loss. And the momentary pain had shot him full of adrenaline, sending the drowsiness that had begun to creep in flying out the window.
"Vegeta, we…" he paused, his breath whistling. "We can't turn our backs even for a second. He'll attack us from behind."
"No, shit." Vegeta replied. "I saw the first time."
Goku nodded, but didn't really think Vegeta understood. The smile on Morgoth's face when he had shoved that talon through Goku's chest…. Well, Goku thought that not only would Morgoth not hesitate to attack from behind, but that he probably liked attacking from behind.
"Are you through flapping your mouths yet? I was hoping for a bit of fun before I destroyed this planet, but if all you're going to do is talk and stand there looking like idiots, I can just kill you now."
They looked up simultaneously and saw Morgoth laughing above them, as if he had just told a joke. Of course in this case the joke was that it wasn't a joke at all.
"Well, come on then." Goku said.
He expected at least some kind of response, and in a sense he did get one, but it wasn't the verbal reply he had thought it would be. Instead Morgoth blurred out, far too fast for him to see, and slammed one balled fist into his face.
Goku barely held back a cry as his cheek and nose bones crunched, blood squirting onto his face. But even in the pain, he didn't let his guard down or stop the fight. He had been in far worse at the hands of the prince who was now fighting at his side.
Goku let his body drop through the air, slipping down and away from Morgoth, and grabbed the monster's foot on his way down. Apparently his opponent wasn't so used to having someone use strategy rather than a frontal attack or a sneak attack, because a slight look of surprise crossed his face and he didn't even resist as Goku flung him straight toward the ground with most of the force he had.
"Out of the way, Kakarott!!"
Goku didn't bother to question, just flew out of the way as fast as he could, and Vegeta sent his own hit down.
"Final Flash!!"
The gold beam erupted from the prince's hands in a shower of light, slamming downward and pushing the monster straight into the earth. It exploded, sending rock and dirt flying everywhere, vaporizing stone instantly into dust, creating a huge cloud. The energy explosion pushed the two saiyajin far into the air.
As the vibrations of the blast dissipated, Goku and Vegeta exchanged a glance.
"I highly doubt we finished it that quickly." Vegeta breathed heavily as he talked. "We may have done some damage, though."
"I don't know, Vegeta." Goku said slowly. "He hasn't come up. I thought that if he was alive he would have jumped right back in. I have a feeling that being hit like that would make him pretty mad."
Vegeta didn't say anything.
Then they heard a cold voice behind them.
"One thing you should both have learned…" it started, and they both spun around to see Morgoth, barely even scuffed. "Is that the enemy is never dead when the smoke clears."
"Shut UP!!" Vegeta yelled, and he and Goku both thrust their hands out and fired one massive blast straight at the demon.
The smile never faltering, he stuck out one hand. The blast hit it and reflected off in thousands of different directions, a shower of golden light.
It would have been bad for the saiyajin if that was the sole intention of the attack. But they blurred out together, and appeared behind their opponent. The demon tried to spin, but the most he could do was to get slightly out of the way so that the two blows aimed at him glanced off his side rather than slammed into his back.
Goku kept up with the speed, however, and spun around with his foot out, slamming a roundhouse kick into Morgoth's head. As the force spun him around, Vegeta leapt over them and slammed his foot down, slamming it into Morgoth's midsection.
The demon snarled and grabbed Vegeta's foot, then brought up the other hand, slashing. Vegeta tried to move back, but the long claws still gouged four long, two inch deep furrows into his leg. He pulled his leg back and Morgoth flew back around quickly, already gazing cooly at the two recovering saiyajin.
"You two work quite well together." He said with a slight smile. "This should be even more interesting than I thought."
"If interesting is what you call it when you see your own limbs in a pile next to you, then yes, this will be very interesting." Vegeta snarled.
Morgoth laughed. "You are quite funny, I'll give you that. Just hearing your pathetic attempts to intimidate me was worth coming out of hell for. But if you don't mind, I'm getting anxious. We should begin again."
"You're really not that strong at all, are you?" Uubu smiled as he held Frieza's fist firmly in his own. "I find it difficult to believe that Goku-sensei was once afraid of you."
Frieza snarled. "For your information monkey, I put hardly any force behind that punch. And you're forgetting something." He smiled.
Just as the smile curved on Frieza's face, a fist collided with the back of Uubu's head hard, causing him to release his grip and drop his guard in pain.
"There are two of us." Frieza laughed, and drove his own fist into Uubu's midsection, doubling the boy over so Coola was visible behind him. Then Frieza clamped his hands together and slammed them into the boy's spine, sending him plummeting toward the earth.
He righted himself just before he hit the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust and spreading large cracks through the rock. Glancing up, he saw the two ice-jin waiting for him, arms crossed in identical stance.
"I let my guard down briefly." He said standing up. "Goku-sensei would never make such a mistake. I have to do better." He smirked slightly and wiped a small trickle of blood from his chin. "I will."
He shot back up into the air as quickly as he could, taking his opponents by surprise. His right fist hit Frieza's face solidly, and without pausing he spun and slammed his foot into Coola's jaw. He continued his rotation and began to punch as quickly as possible into Frieza's midsection, landing a fast succession of five blows and delivering a quick uppercut that sent the ice-jin flying.
He turned and saw that he had taken slightly too much time and that Coola was ready for him. He swung at the neck, but Coola blocked it easily, and countered with a swift right hook that knocked Uubu back on his heels, and then a hard knee to the face. Blood flew from the boy's mouth and he fell slightly. But before he could even recover he sensed a large amount of ki gathering behind him.
Frieza smiled as the death ball grew above him. "You've bitten of a bit more than you can chew, boy? Well, it's too late to take it back now. Try this one on for size. Here!" he screamed and launched the huge ball of energy, now enormous in size, down at Uubu.
The boy had almost no time to react. Dodging would be futile, as this attack was designed to destroy planets. If he moved, the ball would bore down to the center of the earth and explode.
So he counterattacked.
"Ka me ha me ha!!" he cupped his hands behind him, and the brought them forward, releasing a huge beam of white ki with nearly all of his strength behind it. It collided with the death ball and both stopped cold, sparks and lightning bolts of ki crackling and snapping, digging trenches wherever they hit the ground.
Coola immediately flew next to Frieza, and lent his aid in pushing the ball down.
Uubu immediately felt his control of the blast beginning to slip. He poured on all of his power, his face set grim in concentrated lines, looking sharp and hardened in the white and gold glow of the massive ki barrage. They were stuck at a complete standstill. If he didn't do something, it was going to be a simple decision of who would run out of energy first.
And in a two on one battle, he was pretty sure of who it would be.
-what can I do?- he asked himself frantically. But no answer came. Was there anything?
Then it suddenly came to him.
-Goku-sensei said that Choutzu and Tenshinhan are telepaths, and I know Arda must be with the mind trick we did earlier. Maybe if I yell for help with my mind, one of them will hear me!-
So he did. He knew well enough how thoughts worked, and knew that straight feeling got through better than words. So he tried to feel calm even in the raging ki battle, and yelled with all his mental force, sending a feeling of desperation. A feeling that he needed help.
And quite a few people picked it up.
Choutzu had already taken out both Zarbon and Dodoria with his psychic powers. As long as he could concentrate, it was relatively easy to give someone a heart attack. But the problem was, he had never been that great at concentration, and it was even harder when you were being attacked from all sides.
So he was mostly trying to use his ki abilities to keep the Ginyu force away from him for long enough to get rid of at least one of them. But it was hard. Stupid as some of them seemed to be, they weren't entirely, and they had seen what he could do. So one of them sent a blast his way every few seconds to keep from being killed.
Of course his heart attack ability had no use on Cell, the strongest of their enemies who was now fighting Trunks. Tien and Yamucha had their hands full with the Ginyu force, who seemed to be very much stronger than before, and Goten was still sick and dizzy from blood loss and being knocked out quite a few times, so he simply helped where he could.
Choutzu tried to keep out of the way as much as he could, because though he was strong enough to easily pick up a car and hurl it out of earth's orbit, he couldn't really help the others in the area of ki. They were simply too strong. But he had gotten a few good licks on Jiece, and he had saved Yamucha from a pretty good kick by Taiyo-ken-ing Recoome.
But all in all he was out of the main flow of things and trying to concentrate. So he heard Uubu's mental yell first. A second later, Tien's head snapped up just slightly enough for Choutzu to see that he heard it too.
-Tien, did you hear that?- he sent telepathically.
-yeah, I did. But what can we do about it? We're stuck here until we kill them or they kill us.-
Choutzu sighed mentally. -I know. Hopefully someone else can hear it, too.-
Piccolo and Arda both had staffs, so knocking the Gluttons out of the air was almost like baseball.
They were fast, but nothing close to the z fighters' speed. The only problem was that there was hundreds of them swarming around at once, and you almost had to guard all sides at the same time.
For Krillin it was more like target practice, or a game he used to play with Goku when they were kids and later when he had helped to train Gohan before the trip to namek. Basically, one person threw rocks at the other as fast as they could, and the other had to either dodge them or blast them out of the air. If he hadn't been in danger of being chewed to pieces, it almost would have been fun.
"How many of these things can there be!?" he yelled in exasperation. "We must've killed a hundred in the last five seconds, but they keep coming!"
"Who knows?" Piccolo growled. "But as long as they do keep coming, we can keep killing them." He slammed the bo staff into another of the little monsters, sending it flying, squealing, into a tree where it splattered into a sickly gray slime.
Baba floated off to one side, a magical shield protecting her from the Gluttons that flooded the clearing. Every once in a while she would zap a few of the swarm with her crystal ball, but mostly she saw that the three warriors had it well under control and kept out of it.
Then Uubu's mental yell came screaming at them, and Piccolo and Arda both paused. It was the psychic equivalent to someone screaming in their ear.
One of the Gluttons sank it's needle teeth into Arda's shoulder, and he yelled slightly in pain.
"Little bastard." He muttered, and in a second his pupils spun briefly, and the thing burst apart in flames.
Piccolo wasn't so lucky. One of the little creatures came by at just the right angle and at a very high speed. It hooked into the flesh of the calf, and tore Piccolo's whole lower leg clean off.
The namek looked down at the stump of his leg, teeth grinding in anger and pain. "That's IT!" he almost screamed.
The other three didn't need anyone to tell them what to do. Even Arda, who didn't know Piccolo, could hear the tone of the voice perfectly. It said Get The Hell Away.
Baba, Arda, and Krillin took off at top speed upward and to the left, putting distance between them and Piccolo quickly.
In the clearing, seven of the creatures had already latched onto Piccolo. He didn't appear to notice. His muscles bulged, and he screamed.
The three in the air suddenly saw a blinding flash, and a huge pillar of ki went up into the sky with a roar, spreading outward and completely engulfing the clearing, and everything else almost up to them.
"My god…" Arda muttered. "What power."
Piccolo stopped surging his ki. The remainder shot up off the planet, where it's bright beam of travel was easily visible from space.
A few charred husks of the things still hung on Piccolo's body, but that was all. The rest had been completely vaporized, along with everything else that the huge blast had touched.
Krillin and Arda touched down next to him a second later, followed closely by Baba on her crystal ball.
"I guess that did the trick!" Krillin laughed.
Piccolo smiled a bit, and with a grunt of effort, a new lower leg regenerated from the stump.
Ironically, Uubu did get help, but not until a bit later, and not from any of these four who heard him. And he got himself out of his own predicament.
Uubu knew he had to at least try to do something, before his ki was completely exhausted. If he just sat here and waited for help, he would die, plain and simple.
Normally, Uubu was not violent by nature at all. He loved the martial arts and he loved to spar, but he hated fighting. Which was actually a good thing, because one of the chief things Goku had taught him was that it was always best to solve problems without fighting.
The fact that his entire planet could be gone in a flash because of these two monsters, these two who his sensei could beat any day, made him angry. They were against everything he had been taught about how precious life was, everything that Goku had striven to teach him. And he couldn't just let them win.
In a rush of adrenaline and desperation, he hatched a plan. A plan that just could work, if he did it right now, while he still had some ki left. He could at least get himself out of this current mess.
With a burst of speed, he stopped the ki onslaught and dodged directly under the blast. As it swiftly began to move earthward, he charged his own.
"Ka me ha me ha!!"
He thrust his cupped hands forward, firing into the huge ball of ki at an angle. It worked just the way he wanted it to. Pushing it the way it was already going, just changing it's motion a little, the blast diverted away from the earth and shot off at a 45 degree angle into the sky and off into space where, strangely enough, it collided with the huge beam Piccolo had just shot up into the sky, exploding in a huge ball of orange light that lit up the black sky for just a minute.
He fell to the ground, utterly spent. He didn't know what good it had done, but he had at least saved the earth from blowing up for that second.
But now he was worn out, and the two ice-jin, though slightly tired, were far from done.
In the middle of a desert miles and miles from the battles, a lone figure sat on a rock and monitored what was going on.
He had heard Uubu's cry for help, but ignored it in favor of monitoring Goku's fight with Morgoth. But now he turned his thought to it again. The boy was strong. Not as strong as he was, but still pretty good. So what could be causing him so much trouble?
Quickly scanning the minds of Uubu and his two opponents, the figure got the answer he wanted easily enough. A smile curved slowly across his face.
"Well, if it isn't Frieza and Coola. The heads of that pitiful Cold empire from so many hears ago."
He had run across the planet pirates long ago, when the Cold empire had really been to small to be called an empire at all. He had let them live for his own amusement, but they had mocked him, and he didn't like either of their attitudes of complete superiority.
"So it comes to this once again." Osiris grinned, his fangs gleaming. "I believe I may pay those two a visit now, before I vacate this mudball."
His aura flaring around him, Osiris took off for Uubu and the two ice-jin.