Chayote, accompanied by Lapis and Lazuli, swept through the floors using the elevator shaft in a downward plunge to the ground floor. When the three landed, emitting a powerful shock wave and shaking the ground underneath their feet, enough so that the resulting quake blew the bottom floor elevator door down its hinges, the sight of a decimated ground floor met them.
"Whoever was here, there's a guy that knows how to have fun…" Lapis whistled to himself, fixing his tie after the intense dive.
"These were innocent men! My men!" Chayote clenched her fists, lighting up with an emerald outline as her body pumped with vigor, enlarging her bulk by a few degrees.
"Chayote…" Bulma covered up before noticing something peculiar near the hole in the building. "Look, it's Krillin and Yamcha!"
The fact that they found some familiar faces, battered and bruised but alive, calmed Chayote down for the moment. Bulma rushed up to them. Krillin appeared to be in a worse condition while Yamcha took a few mean bumps but still appeared capable of protecting himself and, preferably, Bulma.
"We're wasting time here," Lapis ran his hand through his hair. "The guy who did this is just doing whatever he wants at this point while we're stuck on babysitting duty."
"21…" Krillin panted out. Lapis and Lazuli turned to the beaten shorty as if boiling water had scolded them. Lazuli picked the short stuff off the ground to her eye level and wound up a punch as if threatening to punch his head off if he didn't explain himself for uttering that number.
"The guy that… Did this… He's after someone… Called 21…" Krillin explained himself. Lazuli's grip softened, and she carelessly flung the bald fighter aside.
"Leave Bulma with these guys, one of them looks like he'll be able to help, at least." Lazuli addressed Chayote. "If that scumbag kills Dr. Puri, it's all over for the entire world!"
"Yamcha, take care of Bulma for us." Chayote handed Bulma over to Yamcha. While the blue-haired prodigy inventor appeared to be okay with Chayote handling her before, she wriggled out of Yamcha's grip and dusted off her dress, giving the oaf a mean look while Yamcha chuckled with a goofy expression on his face and tried excusing himself for having touched his ex-girlfriend, even if it was because of the spur-of-the-moment thing.
"I can sense his Ki. He's moving up the floors really fast. We can still intercept him." Chayote explained.
"We can't sense Ki, you lead the way," Lapis replied.
"And remember that everyone's in for an agonizing death if we cannot stop him." Lazuli twisted her lips upward, showing her pearly whites in a twisted crescent position. "No pressure though."
The three took off at once, Chayote first, enveloped in a salad-green aura while the pair of her spontaneous companions followed suit with no auras of their own, though, despite sensible irradiating Ki, they seemed able to keep up with Chayote, if not look a bit irked she wasn't much faster than this. The three blasted off to the outside of the skyscraper and spun around it like ethereal spring coils while Chayote scanned for the best place to bust through the building to intercept the enemy.
"Who was that?" Yamcha pointed at Chayote and her two assistants. "They could keep up with Chayote so easily. How come?"
"Damn it… Crazy guys popping up left and right…" Krillin cursed, barely able to stand back up on his feet.
"Those were Dr. Puri's assistants. It didn't appear so but they also serve as her muscle, it looks like." Bulma explained. "Who was it that attacked you?"
"Who knows?" Yamcha shrugged. "The guy showed up out of the blue, in a raging cerulean lightning storm in a Capsule Corps rocket ship. Then he just took off and started wasting people. Initially, he seemed to not care about us a lot but when we tried to stop him, he fought back."
"A Capsule Corps rocket shit!?" Bulma gasped. "Show me!"
"Not only that, the guy seemed to know exactly who we were... He said that we were in for painful deaths in the future… Kind of like those two Dr. Puri's assistants, what's going on here, Bulma?" Krillin panted while walking with Yamcha's help.
"The world's got mad again…" Bulma sighed. "Dr. Puri thinks that our contact with Saiyans and other alien species caused a mutation in a deadly heart virus strain. Unless all of us plant a bio-mechanical core module inside of our bodies and turn parts of our bodies to machines, we're all going to die of the heart virus."
"Wait, what!?" Yamcha freaked out.
"N-No way…" Bulma didn't have the time or the interest to elaborate on her explanation or to ease Yamcha's worries as the sight of a pill-shaped rocket ship with sharp and pointy leg stands and the logo of her own company on the side nearly socked the genius out of her heels. "This… This can't be. We need to pick this up and examine it but… This looks like… The real thing."
"You mean Capsule Corps made it?" Krillin turned to Bulma. "It's not just… Wearing the logo to confuse people?"
"Not just Capsule Corps…" Bulma shook her head as she pulled out a screwdriver from inside of her dress and stuffed it underneath a tiny pocket space on one of the plates, peeling it open and exposing some electronics on the inside. "From the looks of it, I think… I made this."
"What!?" Yamcha and Krillin freaked out, both at once.
"But… This makes little sense. It's not just that I don't remember making any of this, I don't think I even could make something like this right now. This stuff's… Those parts, those elaborate patterns, and microchips I've never even seen before… They're arranged and connected by my handiwork alright, but… I've got no clue what this even is." Bulma scratched her head. "Although, if it's my handiwork…" the genius browsed around the plating of the mysterious traveler's rocket ship and found a button. Upon pressing it, a mechanical bellow filled the air while the entire machine sunk in smoke.
"There, I left it with an option to be reduced to a capsule, obviously!" Bulma's teeth shimmered in excitement as she pinched the outlandish apparatus between her fingers, showing it off to Krillin and Yamcha, who just gulped down in bafflement about what was going on. "Come on! Yamcha, take me to Capsule Corps. I need to study this bad boy in my lab to find out what the heck's going on. This guy clearly has beef with Dr. Puri, and he's using our tech. Somehow, before I answer her proposition, I need to know what their beef is all about."
"R-Right!" Yamcha nodded. "Damn, Spinelette-san is going to be so pissed with me for just leaving her like this…"
"She should get used to it, it's what you do," Bulma placed her hand on her hip, sassing Yamcha as a cruel reminder of their own tattered relationship.
The weathered young man in a blue Capsule Corps jacket dashed through the endless corridors as the building shook and spat out broken pieces of debris everywhere around, coughing them up like these were its final death throes. The young man turned his masked face around to scan the different people running at him, but, given how they appeared to be trying to race for the elevator or the staircase and flee the compromised building, he left them alone.
The mystery assassin had more pressing matters to attend to, after all.
A large, shadowy mass engulfed the young man, prompting him to turn to the side and note the oncoming attack just as Lapis and Lazuli burst through the building's side window with diving kicks. The lavender-haired man vaulted over the combined and synchronized attack of the two and then turned for the gaping hole in the building window again to acknowledge Chayote floating outside.
"You…" he muttered. "I knew you to be a failure, but I didn't expect you to fuck up this badly and work with 17 and 18. You're partly to blame that humanity wasn't able to stop the conversion."
"Oh, you're awfully well-informed to address us by our codenames, who exactly are you?" Lapis wondered, his voice filled with amusement as he was soaking all of this game-like atmosphere of chasing down and eliminating a mysterious assailant up.
"It doesn't matter. You two stay out of my way. I need to talk to 21!" the mysterious man clenched his fists by his side. He yelled out, exploding in rampant Ki, forcefully enough to push Chayote and the two twin fighters back with the pressure of his energy alone. And that was before his Ki took a golden tinge and the man's hair stood up in a spiky posture, turning flashy golden in a blink as his one eye changed color to a turquoise shade. It was only the half of his face that remained covered up by the mechanical mask and red, round vizor that showed no signs of change.
"A Super Saiyan?" Chayote gasped. "How is that possible?"
"Hmm? What the heck was that?" Lapis said before cracking an excited grin. "You look flashier. Am I to assume you've powered up as well?"
"Humph." The mysterious assailant closed his eyes and vanished. When he next appeared, the man in the Capsule Corps jacket slid across the floor toward the two of Dr. Puri's associates, completely ignoring Chayote. Both Lapis and Lazuli vaulted over his sliding attack, surprising Chayote by how powerful they were. Reacting to a Super Saiyan's attack was no small feat, even if the mystery man's own Ki showed massive irregularities.
Something about him felt strange. Chayote could sense his Ki, but nothing in his Ki suggested that he should have been this incredible. Certainly not Super Saiyan level. Almost as if despite not holding any of his power back, the man only irradiated a portion of his true power while another part of it remained completely unseen, almost as if it was in a whole different dimension. Similar to Lapis and Lazuli, except a part of the man's power was still sensible.
The swordsman dashed up, driving his fist into the cross-armed block of Lapis, emitting a thunderous shock wave as the two collided. In a blink, the Super Saiyan pulled his claymore-style sword out and slashed toward the oncoming Lazuli, who slammed her palms together, stopping his sword in place. Lapis answered with a backhand fist step-in strike. But the Super Saiyan was no longer where the black-haired youth attacked him. After a momentary blink, the Super Saiyan appeared behind Lazuli with his own sword once again in his hand. Lazuli was too confused by the moment when exactly her opponent pulled his sword out of her grip to prepare to deal with the kick to her back that would have sent her crashing through the building but when the swordsman attacked the clueless woman, her twin brother rushed in to absorb the hit for her with a flawless block.
"Don't drop your guard like that, Lazuli." Lapis cheeked his sister.
"Shut up!" Lazuli clenched her fists. "Who is this guy? How can he keep up with us? You! Bulma's lackey… Are you just going to stand around there like that?"
"She is not a Super Saiyan. In her base state, she cannot hope to match me in power. You shouldn't count on Chayote to pull you out from your demise. This timeline will be lucky when I get rid of you for it, 17, 18…" the swordsman answered for Chayote, but then froze in place. His eyes changed from the sharp and angular, focused fury of the Super Saiyan to a round shock as he turned his attention back to Chayote with an open jaw.
Chayote's body began bulking up. One vigorous pump of blood through her muscles at a time, with each successive circulation of energy and blood through her body, Chayote grew in bulk. A blazing, tiger-colored outline surrounded the Saiyan as her suit began tearing up all over her body, unable to contain her growth anymore. Chayote surrounded herself in a nova-like fiery sphere as her mad eyes opened up and became bright yellow before her irises returned in the center. A network of pulsing veins covered her body while the hair of the wrathful Saiyan escaped the hold of a ponytail and began spiking up madly in all directions.
"Hey, hey… She'll tear the whole building, no, the entire city down like that…" Lapis scratched his head. "What the heck's all this about?"
"She's going berserk…" the mysterious man sheathed his sword. "This is my chance…" he closed his eyes and vanished again, appearing in front of Lazuli, or 18, as he addressed her, with his Ki-channeling shotgun aimed right at her face at point-blank range. "Out of my way, 18!"
A blinding flash of light beaming in a focused blast enveloped the terrified woman in the pink pantsuit whole and shoved her out the window, blasting a large hole through the building's side while the Super Saiyan charged onward to find this 21 person he sought for, leaving Lapis to deal with Chayote's Wrathful State rampage while he extracted the intel he needed out of the woman.
As Chayote continued to roar, shattering windows and peeling away steel frames with just the volume and devastating power of her booming voice, the resulting debris began circulating around Chayote's energy bubble that she enveloped herself into. With a resounding thud, Chayote smashed out of her own energy shield with a charging uppercut, enveloped in a jade-colored aura as she boomed outside of the rings and clusters of debris that she attracted toward her, devastating them all in localized explosions reducing every single piece of debris touching the wrathful Saiyan to mere dust in an instant.
"This is just unfair…" Lapis sighed, shaking his head in disbelief. As Chayote seethed in wrath, grinding her teeth, having become a sort of bulked-up warrior banshee as opposed to the previous image of the head of her own security firm she worked so hard to maintain. "Hey, Lazuli, are you still alive?" he wondered. A bruised and burnt-up hand still clutched to the edge of the building. Lazuli pulled herself back up to the edge, her pantsuit nearly blasted off her hair all messed up, bruises and burns covering her entire body.
"I'm going to kill that Super Saiyan bastard when I get my hands on him!" Lazuli yelled out after pulling herself back onto the devastated building floor.
"I think you better get in line…" Lapis crossed his arms as Chayote let out a vociferous battle cry and slammed into the skyscraper like a wrecking ball, nearly pushing it all over with just a single ram into one of its floors, resulting in a resonance that made glass around the building that still remained wave like the surface of a restless ocean before it boomed into a glass shower, pelting the bystanders and emergency responders below.
Before the rushing Super Saiyan could react, a large hand wrapped around his face and raised it over Chayote's own head. Just as the man put his arms up to resist, a hot, blood-colored steam began booming from Chayote's body as the hysterical Saiyan shoved the Super Saiyan's head through the ceiling of the floor before flinging him down and through most of the skyscraper's floors. Chayote backflipped with two Ki blasts in each hand as she dived after the enemy, concrete and solid titanium served as less resistance than a layer of wrapping paper as the wrathful Saiyan collided with her opponent and detonated her technique, enveloping the entire building in an emerald energy dome burst.
Just as the rocked Super Saiyan swordsman began peeling himself off the totaled ground, shaking his head and trying to make sense of things, why the entire city district had been reduced to rubble just now, the fearsome battle cry made him grunt and brace for impact as Chayote, enveloped in Hot-Red aura and still rampaging in her Wrathful State, collided with a rushing lariat strike, flattening her opponent. The Super Saiyan coughed up blood while Chayote scooped him up by his heel and began battering him all around her, driving him into the ground once more before blinking out of vision.
Once Chayote appeared again, she thrust her boots in a diving stomp and drove the flattened Super Saiyan through the city street and into the sewer system, the mystery man bounced off of multiple pipelines and fall face-first into sewer water in a central hive where multiple sewer lines interconnected while Chayote slowly descended, seething in pure wrath and hatred while preparing to rip her enigmatic opponent apart limb from limb.
"Wait… Chayote… I'm not the enemy here…" the swordsman pushed himself off the ground, coughing up water as he clutched for his busted ribs. "You're letting the real enemy get away right now…"
"Heh, she's really handy, isn't she?" Lapis smirked as the twins carefully landed by the edge of the collapsed city street and looked down at the scene of bloody murder that they thought they were about to witness. "Why don't you join in, Lazuli, you said you were going to kill that Super Saiyan bastard, right?"
"Don't be an idiot, Lapis." Lazuli ran her hand through her hair, trying to filter them back into something remotely resembling her usual hairdo after the energy shotgun blast messed her hair up earlier. "As if I'm going to put myself in between that raging lunatic and whoever's at the other end of her fist. Should've known better than to piss us off, boy, okay, bye now!"
Lapis saluted the terrified lavender-haired man while Lazuli sent an air-kiss his way and the two promptly took off. Wrathful, Chayote cracked her knuckles while slowly descending to continue her rampage. The unbelievable combination between the Wrathful State that empowered one proportionately to one's own wrath and Hot-Red, a state that continued to exhaust and damage one's body, resulting in a limitless supply of pain, weariness, and frustration for the Wrathful State to exploit was about to do the devil's work, even when the opponent was a Super Saiyan.
"Shit!" the Super Saiyan cursed. "You raging lunatic, you've ruined everything! My one chance to fix my future! Not only did you fuck it up in my own timeline... You're messing up my mission here and now too! It's your fault, what's happened in my time. And now here too!"
Without answering the Super Saiyan's tearful expression of his lifelong hatred for the female Saiyan, Chayote let out a mindless roar as she rushed to collide with the Super Saiyan once again.