"Hmm…" Bulma stared at her computer screen, nervously spinning around in her chair as the Capsule Corps information system failed to come up with any projects similar to what she had brought and scanned inside of a capsule. Even most of the individual microchips didn't seem to have a record of it in the system. This was although some of these systems had the Capsule Corps logo on them. "This is a full-blown mystery then…"
"Maybe those chips are fake? Maybe this whole rocket ship's just faking it? Capsule Corps has a massive name and reputation in the market, doesn't it? Maybe whoever made this stuff just really wanted people to think it's the real deal?" Yamcha wondered, scratching his head.
"No… It doesn't make any sense…" Bulma sighed in frustration. That she was getting nowhere with this no matter what she tried began taking the better of her. The genius needed some new endeavor to occupy her mind, or else she'll begin dulling out and losing her potency in a moment. "In that case, why only produce one prototype? Why not sell it on the market but use it yourself? Some of these microchips and parts look salvaged. They aren't even Capsule Corps at all, though they look like a professional has mended them. Possibly one working here. We'd have long since employed someone with crazy skills like this. This may just go beyond what I'm capable of. Someone this good has no right merely imitating us."
Yamcha and Krillin turned behind at once. Bulma didn't notice it at once, but the quivering that the two did became infectious and the stench of their sweat filled the already stuffy laboratory room.
"What's up with you two?" Bulma wondered.
"That Ki…!" Yamcha muttered.
"Y-Yeah… It's insane. They both are!" Krillin nodded in agreement. Both fighters gulped something heavy down. Neither of them looked like they could believe they just faced one of these Ki signatures in battle. "That guy… He's even crazier than Frieza was and… Chayote's Ki is busting down walls to get there too."
"So, she's gone berserk…" Bulma covered her face with a shaky hand and reached for her drawer. "Come on, we have to hurry. If we don't defuse the situation, Chayote's going to blow up the entire planet herself."
"You're planning on going there?" Yamcha turned to Bulma, looking at the inventor like she had completely lost her mind. "Both of them will rip anything that gets in their way to shreds. Even getting close to that place is dangerous. Their battle will envelop the whole planet soon enough."
"That's exactly why we need to stop it. I have a nasty feeling that neither of them is the enemy we need to be focusing on." Bulma pointed out, wagging a capsule case in front of Yamcha.
Yamcha's eyes darted around the room. They fixed on Krillin, who still clutched at his ribs and pressed against the chair that Bulma provided him with. Then to Bulma again, who stood straight and stared right up at him with her hands on her hips, gazing at him with that look filled both with wild expectations and a certain shade of disapproval that he didn't justify them immediately.
"You want me to get you there, don't you?" Yamcha deflated.
"Of course, if I travel by hovercar or jet–I'll crash. If I'm dead, that won't be useful to anyone." Bulma leaned in on Yamcha, applying pressure on the poor dolt.
"Fine, but if that guy with Capsule Corps jacket picks a fight with us, I'll Solar Fist him, and we'll get as far away from him as possible. Leave it to Chayote to rip him apart and work from there. Chayote may be the worse threat in the long run, but she's a threat we know of and can defuse." Yamcha turned his head, almost as if he struggled to believe what he himself was saying out loud. The two rushed out of the room.
"Oh, my…" a woman of a petite body build, thin eyes, and curly, blond hair gasped when the two rushed right past her. She held a young boy just a few years old in her hands, a child that seemed fully capable to walk by himself though enjoyed piggyback rides too much to engage in that laborious activity. Her other hand held a tray with cookies and milk. "They ran off?" she wondered, entering the room.
"Don't worry, they'll be back soon," Krillin reassured the woman, wincing as he clutched at his side.
"You don't look too good, Krillin-san. Do you want some cookies?" Bulma's mother extended the tray.
"Sorry, ma'am, I'm afraid cookies won't fix my problems." Krillin chuckled to himself, realizing how strange that sentence sounded when spoken out loud. "So… That boy's… Bulma's son, right?"
"Yes, this is Trunks. Trunks, say hello to Krillin. He's a friend of your mother." The woman encouraged the world's most smug-looking toddler.
"Hello." Trunks said, the bare minimum expected of him. "You look miserable. Grandma, take him to the medical pods."
"Ugh… I'm getting trounced by a toddler. This has to be the low point of my life." Krillin shook his head, standing back up on wobbly legs. "Wait, did he say the medical pods? Like the ones on Planet Vegeta?"
"Vegeta?" little Trunks muttered. "You know my father?"
"Sure do…" Krillin laughed out to himself, rubbing the back of his dirty and busted head. In that goofy chuckle, he expressed a certain amount of knowledge to show that he'd have rather not known the man, though the martial artist wasn't sure if the social cues would translate too well to the strangely articulate toddler. Then again, if there was a kid that would trample expectations, it would be Bulma's and Vegeta's.
"Yes. Bulma designed King Vegeta's spaceships, and the king wanted them equipped with plenty of medical pods. Bulma has since duplicated and improved upon the design. They're more comfortable, faster-working and have a stereo. Plus, they're sort of make your back feel all fuzzy when the bubbles wash over you, the jets give the most relaxing massages." The woman became lost in thought, trailing further and further away from the immediate subject, though Krillin just nodded with an oaf-like look, feeling too embarrassed to cut her ramblings short.
Skies were turning cloudy as the lingering pillars of smoke sought to choke them out with dreadful gloom. As tragic misery filled the atmosphere, only two bright novae shimmered with overwhelming power. One glistened with gold and crackling jolts of electricity that seemed to connect to the very heavens above and call forth stray lightning bolts while the other shined with emerald light and pulsed with rampant shock waves that sent ripples through the surrounding air and toppled the still stationary wreckage.
The two lights rushed at one another with unmatched focus. While the jade flash sought to crash into the golden shine and overwhelm it, the source of the golden might moved rapidly across the ruined city landscape, evading the jade gleam while the two clashed, again and again, sending hectic sonic booms around the area as the man and woman inside of these blinding auras became invisible to the human eye every time one of them as much as twitched a muscle.
A cascade of hammering thuds signified a particularly violent clash, a nasty, metallic thud joined in on the cacophony, but nothing was clear just yet. Then, Chayote appeared before her opponent, who had attempted to elude her. A manic smirk gifted Chayote's expression a certain malicious omen as the woman smacked her opponent like a pesky fly with an open hand, swatting the mysterious swordsman back down into the dirt, leaving him sprawled out and momentarily senseless.
"You weren't thinking of running away, after what you did to my men, did you?" Chayote pointed an accusatory finger at her fallen opponent while beaming down a maniacal display of her whites his way. Her whited-out eyes matched the pearly shade of her teeth as the Saiyan flexed up in a surge of energy that burst out from within her, engulfing Chayote whole.
A chain of mechanical beeping sounds, similar to a calculator performing hundreds of thousands of calculations per second, had snapped Chayote's fallen opponent back to consciousness. Just in time for him to kick up on his feet and aim his shotgun at Chayote's meteoric rush. A golden energy wave left the shotgun's barrel and collided with the jade orb that Chayote sought to crash into the ground enveloped in. The Super Saiyan grabbed hold of his shoulder with his free hand, adding more and more energy into his energy wave, but once he realized this struggle was hopeless and that he had contained enough of Chayote's push and shove, the swordsman dashed away. In his retreat, the man caught just a few stray shock waves that rattled his endurance, but his will to fight on had never once lingered.
"What I am doing here is far more important than the lives of some people in another timeline. Though I don't see a point in explaining myself to someone from that timeline of no significance to my mission. It's not like you could understand a word I'm saying in this state anyway, you monster." The swordsman grit his teeth and let his own wrath translate through his scowl as he pulled his claymore and prepared to answer Chayote's calls for violence.
The two lunged at each other. The man slashed with his blade at the point in between Chayote's shoulder and the bottom of her neck. It should have been a certain kill shot. Though instead wreaking havoc upon Chayote's vascular supply, reducing her clavicle to dust and shocking the hysterical rage monster by spilling the contents of her own subclavian artery all over the city she played a role in ruining, the blade just thudded like a hammer against Chayote's skin while the grinning Saiyan smacked her opponent aside with a backhand slam of her hand.
The enigmatic traveler grunted in pain when Chayote vanished and charged right at him from the side, crashing into him headfirst as the Super Saiyan's own helm couldn't quite compete with the rage-fueled berserker's. The man collapsed on the ground while Chayote hammered both of her fists down at him before wrapping them around her face and elevating above ground as green light began beaming through every crevice in her body.
Chayote screamed out in pain as it became difficult for her to handle her own overflowing power. The energy felt like a whole different person inside her, ripping and trying to tear out of her into freedom. Finding every tiniest cut and bruise and opening to wriggle out from. The light leaking from Chayote's body turned to solid beams of Ki as the Saiyan curled into a fetal position and began beaming flashing energy beams in all directions from her cuts, her nose, mouth, and her eyes, from underneath her fingernails and through entirely new openings where the chaotic Ki tore through Chayote's own body.
"All this power…" the man in the Capsule Corps jacket muttered to himself as he rose from the ground. He looked marked by the violence he engaged in as a trail of blood leaked from his cracked forehead down over his human half of the face. Somehow, it failed to corrupt the golden gleam of the Super Saiyan hair as the luminosity of the golden shine proved too radiant for mere blood trails to cover up. "And yet you were the one to fall first. Whatever horrific torture and experiments 21 put you through, keeping you alive just to preserve the universe, it wasn't enough for the disappointment you subjected humanity to."
The swordsman vanished and reappeared across the battlefield, dancing around the rampant energy beams, deflecting them with the blunt side of his sword or shooting an energy blast from his shotgun to detonate the destructive energy ray coming his way prematurely.
"Hmm… Interesting. Then now would be my time to strike…" the man muttered to himself, taking an offensive sword-fighting pose as he processed some data that the cybernetically altered right half of his face relayed to him through an entirely mechanical eye that served as a computer screen to display processed information on.
Just as the Super Saiyan took off, preparing to dash through Chayote and leave a grievous laceration on her chest so that he could finish up carving her heart out with the follow-up attack, an energy wave halted him in his path, prompting the Super Saiyan to stop and turn his head to the side. While the Super Saiyan and Yamcha met eye-to-eye and the Super Saiyan prepared to do away with the interloper in an instant so that he could continue in eliminating the wild card preventing him from getting 21, a pine-colored energy field enveloped Chayote.
"Good… She's just released a bunch of energy from her body. It'll be easier returning her to normal like this." Bulma snapped her fingers to herself in glee as she hovered on a jet just behind Yamcha.
"Mother?" the mysterious swordsman focused his look at the blue-haired woman expelling a massive beam of light into the sky that descended in the pine-colored pillar energy field around the Wrathful Saiyan. Chayote's wild, enhanced by some animalistic, supernatural tone roars filled the devastated city as the Saiyan wrapped her hands around her head and began descending on the ground.
"Mother?" Yamcha repeated, looking confused. "Just who… Is this guy?"
"You!" Bulma opened up the door to her jet and leaned out so that the Super Saiyan could hear her. "I don't know who you are, but you're wearing the jacket of my company and using my tech. You're not my enemy and that means you're not Chayote's enemy, either. Stand down and work with us and maybe we can work out a solution that works for both of us."
Seeing Chayote slowly losing weight and returning to a more feminine body build as he fell on all fours down on the ground, the man looked around and processed a few more pages of information in his cybernetic display before his golden, spiky hair settled down back to its normal lavender shape and covered up the modified part of his face again. The man in Capsule Corps jacket descended and flung his sword in the air, leaning to the left so that the sword would fall right into the sheathe on his back all by itself. Yamcha twitched nervously when the man did so, but upon realizing how lacking in power and speed this fling was–he calculated the meaning behind his motion and stood down as well.
"I guess even Super Saiyans are afraid of Bulma. Now I don't feel so bad about myself…" Yamcha noted to himself out loud.
The man approached Chayote and took off his sheathed sword, pushing the tip of his resting weapon underneath the body of the unconscious Saiyan woman and lifting it off the ground thusly. He swung the sword over his shoulder so that he could pick Chayote up without having to sign himself up for having to touch her. The lavender-haired mystery man cracked his neck with inhuman, metallic churning coming off his joints as he slowly levitated above ground and turned to Bulma to show the way where they could settle down for a bit.
Yamcha gulped while his right eye couldn't stop twitching. He observed this mysterious guy just slashing his arm open with Bulma's lab tools that looked like they could cut through useless scrap junk without flinching and began a diagnostic process of some sort. All this time, his mechanical eye glowed red and sent scanning rays of light while translating the scanning results in yellow symbols and complex algorithms and equations that only felt meaningful to the man himself.
"You know, if you are hurt, we can spare you a medical pod." Bulma appeared to be more impatient than alarmed by the unusual way in which this man was behaving.
"My clash with Chayote and the Androids had left more than biological injuries, I'm afraid. My integrated core module will require repairs. The most efficient method of recovering all of my injuries would be with a Senzu as its magical properties recover both cybernetic and biological damage." The man pointed out. "As far as I know, the Senzu still grows in this timeline, don't they?"
"They do, but I don't have any with me right now. It'll be easier if we repair whatever's busted and then you can recover the rest in the medical pod." Bulma suggested.
"That will be difficult. Even in the innovative labs of Capsule Corps, your technology is far behind anything that could help me repair the core module. With these injuries, I won't be able to defeat the Androids if they end up coming for you as I would be at full power." The man pointed out the caveat.
"The Androids? You said you're partly mechanical yourself. Is that what you are?" Bulma wondered.
"No. I am what all living humans in the future are–altered. I'm more… Of a cyborg if you will. Some people used to call us bio-androids before everyone became one and labeling us became redundant. We were then all just humans." The man pointed out.
"Androids? What's an Android?" Yamcha looked around, realizing that he was the only person in the room who did not know what everyone was talking about.
"A short way of saying Artificial Human. It was a name mother came up with to make the idea of converting humans into cyborgs more attractive to the public. That was her part of the deal with Android 21, for better or worse, mother excelled at doing her part." The man explained while flexing his stressed arm and checking on his limited mobility and ways he could remedy that in the meantime.
"You're being awfully vague about everything. I have a feeling that this has something to do with the deal that Dr. Puri laid out to me, the part about partly converting all humanity with nanobots so that they can fight off a devastating heart virus epidemic that's about to come." Bulma said.
"That's right, though I'm afraid, that you have no choice either way. Whether it is at the hands of Android 21, or the one you know as Dr. Puri, or by the merciless tide of the heart virus–your timeline is doomed already. You can only choose the way of your annihilation." The man answered with a husky and down tone. One that was apt for the chilling message he delivered.
"Wait up just a second now, buster. Just who are you to say that to us? We're the toughest there is in the entire universe! We've fought off armies, demons, and aliens from outer space! Don't underestimate us!" Yamcha clenched his fist, looking sick of this modified Saiyan's depression act.
"You still don't quite understand. Let me put it so you would–my name is Trunks, I am Bulma's son from twenty-five years in the future. A future in which humanity avoided extinction because of the heart virus though now lives under the control and mercy of Android 21." Trunks slashed through the heated atmosphere in the Capsule Corps complex lab chambers and established a dominium of silence while Yamcha and Bulma processed the weight behind his words.