"Kakarot!" Bardock's strict voice resonated through the demolished South City, attracting the attention of all three present fighters as the rebellious Saiyan warrior reached his destination and landed behind his son and his family. "What's going on here?"
"Dad…" Goku muttered, losing track of Lord Slug and his cruiser momentarily before returning his attention to focus back on the planetary cruiser. "I've defeated Lord Slug but he's retreated inside his cruiser. His soldiers managed to steal some Senzu and he's back to full power now."
"It's great that you've come!" Gohan cheered at his grandfather who turned to his grandson with a confused glare, as of yet unsure as to what relationship he cared to have with the hybrid son of his own son.
"I take it that you got too careless and wouldn't be able to handle the enemy if they attacked again?" Bardock surmised from the general feel of the situation and Gohan's reaction, as well as the visible stone that rolled off of Chi-Chi's chest when she laid eyes upon her father-in-law landing behind them and walking out in front, in between the cruiser and the alien armies it hosted and Son Goku's family.
"Who knows? With the King Kai Fist, I might be able to win again…" Goku smirked though his eyes betrayed that he would rather not test his mettle that way.
"You should have killed that bastard when you had the chance," Bardock grit his teeth though his eyes revealed that he went easy on his son and understood his decision, given the character that the father had seen beforehand. "Either way, I won't let some Frieza wanna-be disrupt our plans at sieging Planet Vegeta to rescue your mother. You've done enough, I'll do the fighting if they decide to keep at it."
"They will take off, grandpa," Gohan was quick to interject. "Lord Slug said that he gives up and that he needs a few minutes to initiate the take-off…"
"He's lying," Bardock closed his eyes with a grim look. "There's no doubt about it, a cruiser that runs on some sort of cold fusion doesn't require any heating up to take-off. I've no idea why they're staying here but I'd rather not wait around and find out!"
"Father, wait!" Goku grabbed hold of Bardock's shoulder which made the gleam of white that lit up in Bardock's hand snuff out. The Saiyan had sought to obliterate Lord Slug's interplanetary cruiser with one Ki blast before his son stopped him. "I gave them a chance to retreat. We shouldn't attack them before they say they don't intend to do so or attack us."
"That's bullshit," Bardock grit his teeth.
"If you destroy a spaceship of this size, one that's running on a cold fusion engine, you'll destroy the whole city. A whole lot of people are still trapped in the ruins and the city isn't completely evacuated yet…" Gohan muttered with a weak voice. He wondered if his voice even mattered in this decision though the boy was glad to see an encouraging look from his father that suggested that Goku was willing to support his side and felt grateful to be given another reason to do so.
"Plus, even if you beat the snot out of Lord Slug again, they have a whole sash of Senzu so they'll just heal him again, and then all of us will be even more worn out than before. He'll have no reason not to kill us all and conquer Earth for good," Chi-Chi reminded everyone. "Right now, there's still a deadlock in the air, Slug can't be too sure of his chances to survive the next encounter. Goku-sa is right in choosing not to escalate another fight."
"Everyone!" Tenshinhan's voice distracted the bunch as they turned behind them to see Tenshinhan and Chiaotzu land behind them.
"Tenshinhan, Chiaotzu…" Goku smiled, the anxiety in his eyes disappeared as more and more of his friends joined him in the field of battle. Even if the situation was to go sour again, this time he'll have the support of his friends. "You've come?"
"Of course," Tenshinhan clenched his fist with a proud and excited look on his face. "I've been training hard to try and surpass you once more while you were training in the Otherworld. I can sense that our battle powers are nowhere near the same level as I was baffled by what I was sensing on my way here, your fight was on a whole different world compared to mine but I will fight alongside you regardless."
"Heh, don't beat yourself over it, Tenshinhan, I was using the King Kai's Fist, it multiplies my power and speed multiple times. Our true strengths are closer than you think," Goku smirked and bumped his fist with his old-time friend in gratitude for joining him.
"Hmph… Kakarot went ahead and spared the enemy," Bardock informed Tenshinhan. "Apparently they've got a whole supply of some magical healing beans so we might need all the help we can get. Odds are we'll be running at this bastard again and again before this is over…"
"Senzu? So, they've done Krillin in? But that's impossible, I can sense his Ki nearby…" Chiaotzu's face turned into a sorrowful twist of sourness. "No one of our friends died, even though battles were occurring all over the Earth. Yamcha's Ki is weak, he must have lost the clash but he is still alive, I can still feel him, as weak as he is right now."
"That's Chiaotzu for you…" Goku smirked, giving an aloof look at the floating ghoulish martial artist in front of him. "Can't beat your Ki sensing abilities, huh?"
"Guys!" Krillin's voice filled the air a few beats before the bald martial artist himself landed beside them. The wear and tear of an intense battle still lingered on his body as he panted over his hurry to arrive so hard that he was unable to deliver the message he intended to spill beforehand. "The soldiers that attacked God's Temple slipped away while I fought their commander. They attacked the Korin Temple looking for some magical artifacts but Yajirobe managed to fend them off. They ended up stealing some Senzu in their retreat!"
"Too late with that," Bardock stated the obvious with a bitter look on his face as if he was disappointed by the Earthling's effort. "The head honcho already healed himself with those beans and he's holding the Earth hostage holed up in that cybernetic fort of his with a whole sash of them in his possession. Stack you, Earthlings, as high as we like, we won't have enough warriors to challenge him with all those healing beans."
"He can't just gobble them down like that!" Krillin explained, looking a bit relieved to be able to point out something that the others couldn't pick up on and be useful to the Dragon Team's effort that way. "The Senzu fill one's belly with ten days' worth of food. That's not something you can consume willy-nilly. Yajirobe ate a few handfuls and got himself incapacitated once."
"Lord Slug is a Namekian, like Piccolo. They don't consume food at all unless they like the taste of it," Goku noted. "That makes Senzu even less effective on them than they'd be on thick Earthlings like Yajirobe or Saiyans. He probably shouldn't be able to eat more than a few at once."
"Heh, way to pitch in, Earthling. I can see why Kakarot keeps you around as his friend," Bardock smirked, fixing his wristband and preparing to attack Lord Slug's cruiser.
"W-Wait!" Krillin ran up in front of the Saiyan warrior about to kick the cruiser off into space like a mere football, stopping him in his tracks. "There's another reason why you shouldn't attack. Upa said that Chayote and Piccolo are coming back in a spaceship and they're bringing some serious manpower too. He said that their spaceship can't be more than a few more minutes away and that it's filled to the brink with amazing power levels. Chayote powered up like crazy and… Upa said he could barely even recognize Piccolo anymore."
"A whole bunch of strong fighters? You can't possibly mean that they're bringing Namekians back with them…" Tenshinhan's three eyes widened in surprise.
"It could be, either way, if those two join us here on the battlefield, Lord Slug won't have any other choice but to bolt. Upa said that Piccolo's power level would smash the mincemeat out of the entire Evil Tribe army!" Krillin announced with his arms spread wide as he couldn't contain cheerful chuckling from delivering this news.
"That's pathetic, waiting for someone else to do your fighting for you…" Bardock crossed his arms and turned away. Then again, he was perfectly content with waiting some, given how he couldn't have cared about this Lord Slug bastard any less. The only meaning of this conqueror even being here on Earth was the fact that he was keeping his son's focus away from rescuing his mother, where it was supposed to be.
A cold mist began spreading from Lord Slug's cruiser as its front lid lowered a few inches, releasing a whole cloud of it from somewhere inside. As the spaceship opened its entryway, complete shadows continued to conceal whoever stood in the doorway but then, with a couple of steps, Lord Slug emerged from the darkness with a confident grin.
"N-No way!" Goku's eyes shot wide open as he could no longer recognize his opponent, both in terms of his drastically boosted power level as well as his new, youthful appearance that gave him more than a few inches in height but also buffed up the space conqueror's bulk greatly too. With a fresh and completely renewed face, Lord Slug glared at Goku with a smug grin.
"You truly are an absolute blockhead, Saiyan!" Lord Slug declared as he crossed his arms and loomed over the cowering Dragon Team. "This lunacy of yours is the reason why absolute evil always reigns supreme because the vicious and the wicked always do what needs to be done without delay or regret!"
"N-No way…" Krillin leaned, cowering back in terror. "This… Is Lord Slug? How can… How can anyone fight a guy like that?"
"So strong…" Goku's eyes quivered as he couldn't hide the shock in his expression too. "Slug! Does this mean that you've lied to me!?"
"You nincompoop!" Bardock yelled out at his son's gullible character.
"Hmph… As much as it pains me to admit it, I did not and I apologize for not being as loathsome as I'd have wanted to be," Lord Slug closed his eyes and sighed in disappointment with his own, insufficiently twisted self. "You see, I, Lord Slug, am not confronting you right now. I have become something else entirely now, that is why I've regained my youth and powered up beyond any limits I've ever known."
Just a few minutes earlier Lord Slug roared in discontent. Just after declaring that he would be leaving Earth soon enough he grabbed hold of Gyoshu's head and lifted the cowardly, dwarfish, cybernetic scientist off the ground to where his tiny feet dangled in the air in a dreary panic. Bit by bit, Lord Slug's grip intensified until a shower of nuts and bolts, oil-like fluid, and blood splashed over his torn spacesuit and withered face.
"This is for making me belittle myself before a deplorable Saiyan!" Lord Slug muttered as the lifeless, still twitching body of his subordinate fell by his feet. The first instinct of his soldiers would have been to scoop the poor sack up and throw him into the trash compactor to be processed and recycled into something more useful for longer space travels but none of them dared take one step closer to their sullen overlord.
"Lord Slug, your bodies are ready for the assimilation process," Kakuju, a twin of the recently crushed Gyoshu approached Lord Slug first, repeating the news that his twin had informed his master of right after he had recovered from the beating that Son Goku gave him. "You do not have much time."
"I see…" Lord Slug shut his dry lips and turned around to step toward the recently vacated room where he once held the Evil Tribe priestesses capable of sensing Namekian magic before a rampaging Saiyan flung all of their corpses into space, making their room serve no further use to him and be transformed into a laboratory where Kakuju and Gyoshu performed their deplorable scientific experiments.
The tiny cyber-scientist with an oversized head raised his hand at numerous tubes of sleeping Namekian clones, all donning the same spacesuit that Lord Slug wore at all times. All of them possessing similar facial features, size, and relatively lackluster power with more than a decent amount of them possessing distracting physical deformities like misshaped faces or large and swollen limbs or ones that were outright missing.
"There they are, we were already ahead of schedule with the conclusion of their production as we've planned to only put them into action if the Earth doesn't have functional Dragon Balls that could restore your youth. Their production has been drastically accelerated, hence the physical deformities present on most of them. They are created from your DNA and we've made them as puny and mindless as you requested them to be so that they do not mess with the ultimate product of your fusion," Kakuju explained himself as he paraded around the laboratory, demonstrating his own and his brother's work.
"This one will do…" Lord Slug approached the one that looked the most like him in his youthful years, recreated even with the scar present over Lord Slug's own left eye.
"Just one, Lord Slug?" Kakuju wondered.
"I am looking to regain my youth, which means that I will have to be the one being assimilated inside of this clone body. While they are void of any functional mind to dominate mine, I'd rather not flush myself too many times and risk losing my delicious wickedness in the process. These beautiful abominations are imperfect in body which means that who knows what might be going on in their brain too. Just one assimilation will do," Lord Slug nodded, approaching the opened jar containing his clone of choice and raised his hand up and placed it over his own. As the tyrant pressed against the clone's fingers, they locked into place, gripping Lord Slug's upper arm with a tight and cold grip of death.
The Namekian overlord bellowed in a roar as he unleashed all of his power at once, flushing it all out and transferring it into this new body as if it had assimilated him, gaining all of Lord Slug's power, his intelligence, and his wicked nature in the process. Due to the fact that the clone didn't possess too much notable physical power so that he didn't break out or rebel during its creation nor did it possess any mental capacity whatsoever, he was but an empty vessel for the evil Namekian to fill so that he regains his youth by being assimilated in a new body.
"Excellent!" Lord Slug flapped his new, young lips as he opened his eyes and couldn't contain his joy. The space conqueror examined his new body with an elementary visual inspection, just to make sure that nothing had gone wrong. It was not a process that he wanted to repeat as maintaining as much of his mental and spiritual integrity as he could was something that Lord Slug valued more than a continuous and endless cycle of youth.
After all, one of the planets he'd end up conquering with this new, revitalized body would end up having functional Dragon Balls, he just knew it!
"Truly superb, Lord Slug, I do not mean to praise my own work but… Incredible. Also, quite forbidden, scientific cloning has been banned inside the reaches of Lord Frieza's empire," Kakuju bowed repeatedly as he sang Lord Slug's praises.
"I simply must test the capacity of this remarkable body of mine…" Lord Slug declared as he turned to Kakuju with a sadistic smirk. It seemed that the poor scientist realized immediately what was Lord Slug's intention as he quivered on his feet and froze in dread. A faint glimmer spiked in Lord Slug's beady eyes, blowing Kakuju from inside as a chain resonance of explosions littered the lab, reducing it to an abstract hell of blazing tongues and choking smoke.
"L-Lord Slug!" the soldiers saluted the Kaiser of the Cosmos as he left the lab quarters while flames simmered and died out off of his body harmlessly. They lined up in a queue that led their glorious leader all the way from the lab quarters to the entryway to the ship where he could have boarded the planet once more and eradicated all life on it as his righteous feat of twisted vengeance for the humiliation which he suffered in the hands of a primal Saiyan warrior.
"You've fused with your own clone?" Tenshinhan's face shook in a sense of sickened surprise at the twisted means to which the Namekian was willing to resolve to regain his youth and his once unmatched power.
"I've been wondering long and hard as to how I might regain my youth using other methods, just in case there truly were no more Dragon Balls left in the universe. I've contemplated creating an offspring and fusing with it, reincarnation, and figuring out a method of assimilating with my doppelganger created through the Fission Technique. However, my youthful, sky-splitting might was all that I wanted. I didn't want to grant it to anybody else, not some offspring nor reincarnation. If even an ounce of my evil nature became somehow filtered out in the process – I'd rather die of old age than undergo such a tragedy. I must have remained whole and young again…" Lord Slug explained, glaring at his smooth, avocado-shade hands and pointy, bone-like nails at the end of his fingers.
"You promised to leave and never return, Slug!" Goku clenched his fist, gritting his teeth in anger as his face betrayed the fact that being betrayed by someone who took great pride in being as utterly rotten as possible stung the Saiyan regardless.
"Son Goku…" Lord Slug muttered, throwing both of his hands by his side while exposing his claws in a position that showed his hands to be ready to carve entire pounds of flesh out of his enemies. "Being beaten by a mere Saiyan felt painful but what was the absolute worst of all was being beaten by someone who's such a revolting do-gooder like you who took my words as the truth for even a second! The only punishment you deserve is being pummeled and punished until I can see a glimmer of wrath in your eyes. The desire to hurt, to kill me. I'll slay and destroy everything you hold dear until you truly hate me and only when I see a glitter of evil forming in your heart, only then will I tear the head off your shoulders and decorate my throne with your skull."