"Huh? Gohan? What do you mean? Gohan took off with Piccolo and Dende," Chayote pointed out the obvious by pointing at the sky, even though none of the spacecraft that took off in search of the Ultimate Dragon Balls could be seen at this point.
"That was not the Gohan I meant. I meant Gohan from my future." Trunks shook his head, staring off into the clouds in the direction where he sensed Gohan's Ki signature. "The future version of Gohan is changed just like me, but he did not receive the countermeasures against the takeover of the conversion. His mind is under Android 21's complete control, though he is intelligent enough for 21 to allow him to act on his own accord sometimes."
"You mean someone else followed you here from the future?" Chayote approached the edge of God's Temple until she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her ally and stared off into the distance. "Are you sure that's Gohan, though? Kakarot's brat could probably take that guy over there on right now and do pretty well against him."
"Don't trust your Ki sensory when facing cyborgs. Just like me, a lot of his energy comes from the Infinite Energy Generator inside of his body. You can't sense that energy, all that you can sense is the natural energy that his body produces, but it's only a part of his full power." Future Trunks explained.
"Well, he's coming here, no doubt about it. There's no use waiting until he gets here. We need to take off and take him on before he reaches the God Temple and trashes this place," Chayote turned to Future Trunks.
"Face Gohan?" Trunks turned to Chayote. In the first few moments, his wide gaze betrayed the fact that he thought Chayote to be insane for just considering it, but after a moment of deliberation. "It's true that Gohan is incredibly strong and devious. He's been after me and my mother for so long that I may have accepted him as an inescapable part of my life. Though, with you fighting alongside me, perhaps taking Gohan on could be possible…"
Chayote and Trunks took off, blitzing toward the Ki signature of impending doom. The female Saiyan took a moment to sense major calamities around the world. If 21's Artificial Humans had already started their invasion and begun their mass conversion, as Tenshinhan said, there should have been enormous masses of Ki signatures blinking out. There had been no similar occurrences. Either the mass conversion hadn't truly begun yet, or it was slow to pick up the pace.
"So, haven't you ever tried taking Gohan on by yourself?" Chayote wondered.
"I have. Our power is about equal, though he is far craftier than me. It usually goes either way. Sometimes he tricks me and gains an upper hand. Additional sacrifices are necessary for me to make it out alive. Sometimes I press him against the wall, but he always slips away or gets help from the other Androids. Then he comes back stronger, with an additional Zenkai boost on top of his previous power. Meeting Gohan is always a struggle for my life and if I lose that struggle, many people have to sacrifice their lives to help me escape with mine." Future Trunks pointed out. "I've never faced him with a powerful partner alongside me from the get-go. This could be the advantage we need. What I'm more worried about is why he's here in the first place."
"Could be plenty of reasons. To kill you? To prevent whatever it is you're doing here? To make sure that Dr. Puri succeeds in this timeline as she did in yours?" Chayote listed the ones on the top of her head.
"Any of those reasons would be good for a human to go by. Androids, however, don't think that way. They don't obsess about killing a single target unless they're directly linked to their goal, which I am not. My absence in the future is only for 21's benefit. Changing the past won't change anything for the future, I'm sure that 21 knows this. It makes no sense for her to send Gohan here even if someone leaked it that I've traveled to the past." Trunks said.
The two stopped. The crystalline auras that surrounded Chayote and Future Trunks burst at once, leaving them levitating above the peaks of a rocky mountain range to the west of Ginger Town. The two descended a tad to meet the approaching enemy on an even level lest he flies right past them and toward the Sacred Land of Korin, where Gohan could cause a massive amount of damage.
"Gohan! We're here!" Future Trunks yelled out, reaching for the hilt of his sword behind his back to prepare for the upcoming bout. Gohan stopped and turned half of his face around, just enough to show the cybernetic vizor covering up his eyes while the converted Saiyan had been flying.
"So, you've snuck out from your little lair to face me, hoping that I don't fly up that tower and claim it for Android 21?" Gohan taunted the fellow future traveler with a mocking tone, trying to make Trunks' every thought and every plan sound ridiculous. "Have you forgotten already? That place served no use for you and your mother in the future. You were better off holing up underground like the rats you are."
"Enough, Gohan! Why did you come here?" Future Trunks released his sword and glided onward a few steps, requesting that his enemy stated his reasons for this conflict first.
"Your mother told us a lot of interesting things," Gohan replied, turning around and facing Chayote and Trunks at last. "She thought that the snippet of information about her sending her son to the past with a miraculous mission to save the doomed future would postpone her torture for the day. Well, she was right, I suppose."
"My mother? You bastard!" Future Trunks reached for his back and exploded with a golden aura, spiking up his hair and taking off to attack Future Gohan before his spiked hair even fully turned golden. The warrior from the future, hoping for a miracle, vanished in mid-dash and appeared before the cyborg from the future, aiming his double-barrel Ki shotgun and blasting from both barrels at once.
A wild energy blast sent the cyborg flying back while Future Trunks completed his transformation into a Super Saiyan and soared like a shimmering arrow through the sky, driving his right cross into Future Gohan's jaw and throwing a barrage of furious blows before shooting his knee up to Gohan's nose, sending a handful of scrap coming off of the futuristic cyborg parts decorating Gohan's face. With a mean, metallic sound singing along, Future Trunks swung his claymore-style sword sweeping by Gohan's feet, but the cyborg raised both his knees and pressed his thighs to his chest, shooting off his boots into Trunks' face and staggering him.
"What's the matter, Trunks? Don't you just want to hurry back home to rescue your mommy? She must have cursed you a thousand times already. I distinctly recall her expecting you to burst through the lab door and rescue her every day for the first few weeks…" Gohan smirked.
The converted Saiyan hunter croaked in a painful grunt as a heel the size of half his face dug into his cheek and sent him blasting off until Future Gohan spread his arms out and stopped himself in mid-air. Future Trunks turned to his side after recovering from his flinching to see Chayote lowering her leg after a dashing push kick.
"Don't lose your cool, Trunks. He's psyching you out to waste Ki. If what you said about your strength being relatively similar to his is correct, this would be just the advantage he needs to win." Chayote tried calming her partner by circumstance down. "As for you," she addressed Gohan, "I'd rather you didn't shit-talk my senpai. It might just make me go kind of wild and you wouldn't like that very much."
"Tell me, Trunks, what is it that you're after here? You've sent someone away on that spaceship, but you didn't leave yourself. Why? No one's lives on this timeline matter so why preserve theirs while you put your own at risk?" Future Gohan inquired while pressing his hands to his sides and bursting with crystal-clear Ki that took a shiny, golden stint before coloring his hair gold.
"You're wrong!" Future Trunks swiped his hand aside with dismissal. "To the people of this timeline, their own lives matter just as much as those of the people in the future matter to me. They want to protect themselves just as much, their feelings are just as real!"
"Feelings?" Gohan smirked while his flowing golden spikes rustled in the wind. In a blink he appeared before Trunks, stomping at his feet and smashing his foot against Trunks' knee, then turned to elbow the approaching Chayote straight in her face, sending her reeling back. Super Future Gohan leaned under Future Trunks' erect shotgun, evading the Ki blast coming from its barrel, and dug his cross into Trunks' gut, exploding in a flurry from that overwhelming blow.
"It's those feelings that get in your way and put your life and the lives of people you work with in jeopardy." Future Gohan exclaimed with a tone full of cruelty as he jumped up and swung his calf with a stiff shot to Future Trunks' face, busting his nose open and sending the future traveler flying weightless over the mountain range.
As Chayote soared at him, Gohan crossed his arms and locked her wrist in place, vanishing and smacking in the back of the Saiyan's head. The impact sent her smashing back down into the mountains and crumbling one impressive rocky structure after her plummet. The cyborg Super Saiyan dashed in pursuit of Trunks while the half-converted Super Saiyan recovered in mid-air.
Future Gohan's roundhouse kick sent Future Trunks flying again but the crafty cyborg hunter wrapped his free thigh around Trunks' neck, causing a violent whiplash effect from the inertia while Gohan released Trunks right after and stomped with his right leg, thrusting the rebellious Super Saiyan down into the mountain range as well while Gohan vanished in and out with rapid snaps, creating multiple afterimages to confuse both combatants and keep them from being able to intercept his offensive.
"You're wrong!" Chayote roared, expelling a pillar of emerald energy that scattered the collapsed mountain around her in all directions as she burst out from the ruin and charged toward the myriad of afterimages. "As a Saiyan, you should know that our emotions cause our wild power to reach uncontrollable heights!"
Gohan leaned back, weaving out of the way of Chayote's attack while he returned to a stationary position and whipped with a roundhouse, flipping Chayote over before sliding across the plateau of a polished mountain peak as he pressed his hand against Chayote's chest point-blank and expelled a barrage of unstable, electric Ki blasts. Future Gohan slammed his forehead against Chayote's as he brought her along for a ride before driving a furious uppercut at the bottom of her jaw and roaring uncontrollably, expelling a devastating bubble of energy as a golden shimmer enveloped the mountain range whole in fiery destruction.
"T-This power…" Future Trunks grumbled, pushing the weight of a collapsed mountain off of him as he buried out into freedom and witnessed the entire mountain range having been wrecked and standing just as a smoldering, rocky wasteland while Super Future Gohan held Chayote's stunned body by her collar in his hand, raised over his head.
"You're not entirely wrong, Chayote…" Gohan muttered with a devious counter to Chayote's argument. "Wrath such as that multiplies our power many times over for a brief period. However, it also makes you uncontrollable and burns through your stamina. You can't help it. Your flawed biology demands it."
The ruthless cyborg hunter from the future flipped Chayote over his head, smashing her weightless body against the stone floor behind him and as it bounced off of the rock-hard surface, Gohan kicked it sliding aside before turning around to the general direction where both of his opponents laid battered.
"Though what is wrath? Just a collection of the right hormones and chemicals working in a certain way in your organism. It's no spiritual mumbo-jumbo. It's cold, rock-hard science. It takes no effort at all for an Artificial Human, a natural evolution to the flesh and blood biology, to emulate such pathetic measures," Future Gohan smirked, flexing his body with a wide-open pose.
"You mean…?" Trunks exclaimed while he wrestled out from the boulders and wreckage surrounding him and took it into the clearing of the rocky wasteland.
"That's right, with conversion advanced sufficiently enough, you can stimulate the reactions of wrath, grief, and joy as you see fit. It's all just chemistry, the injection of the right chemicals after all…" Future Trunks replied without even needing to hear the rest of his opponent's sentence. "All that without losing the clear objective of staying focused on your goal. All the benefits of wrath with none of its weaknesses."
"I knew it… It was hopeless to face Gohan after all…" Future Trunks closed his eyes and shook his head, fending off despair as he drew his sword and let out a mindless battle cry of defiance, preparing to charge at his opponent.
Gohan raised his foot up and skid across the rocky wasteland floor, driving his boot into Future Trunks' throat while his sword was up and over his head. The shock to the future traveler's system made him drop his claymore and gargle blood up as he flew back. With ruthlessness befitting a cyborg Saiyan, Super Future Gohan dashed after his defenseless opponent, crashing into Trunks with his entire body behind the tackle, then turned around and stomped Trunks' head into the ground, crumbling the rocky wasteland surface around him and rupturing it with fissures.
"Wrath?" a voice came out of nowhere, causing Gohan to turn around and try to determine where this echoing, augmented through some supernatural means voice came. The futuristic scanners on Future Gohan's vizor suggested that the animalistic grumbling came from the escalating power signature calculating upward in a nearby wreckage.
"What do you know about wrath?" Chayote rose from the ruins enveloped in a bubble of emerald shine that began shining so brightly that Future Gohan couldn't keep his focus on it. His vizor began cracking in a few spots and turned off when the system could no longer keep up with the escalating boom in power. The hysterical Saiyan ripped through the dress she borrowed from Bulma after recovering in rags of her work clothes as her bodily bulk inflated almost a dozen times and her black hair spiked upward and gone feral.
"The Wrathful Form?" Gohan muttered in a vexed grumble. "This could be a problem. Reaching out to nearby Energy Absorption Models, immediate Ki absorption required."
"Your wrath… Is childish whining compared to mine!" Chayote roared as her eyes went white and her face joined the rest of her body in a network of popping veins ravaging it while her pupils reappeared and decorated themselves with gleaming, amber irises.
"I didn't expect you to trigger this transformation with this little stimulus," Future Gohan admitted, taking a fighting stance and leaving Trunks lying with his head still hanging over an open fissure with only his still active Super Saiyan transformation to suggest that consciousness still lingered somewhere in his body. "I'll just have to break you quickly before you gain too much power."
Gohan leaned back, vaulting backward as he blocked a punch delivered to him in a blink as Chayote's furious snorting snapped right up his face. The wrathful goliath continued to throw punches as she stomped her feet forward in a juggernaut-like advance, leaving the futuristic cyborg few options but to lean and soften her blows at the joints as he surrendered position to her barbaric advance. As Wrathful Chayote sought to raise her boot up for a push kick, Future Gohan stomped his own down on her knee, parrying the attack and finding his opening.
"Demon Flash!" Future Gohan yelled out, raising his cyborg arm up and locking his free arm on the middle joint as he turned and loaded it, firing a beam of white energy with electric discharges that overwhelmed the entire surrounding atmosphere of the area by drowning it in a yellow shine.
Just as the potent energy wave concluded its gleam, Chayote emerged from the smoke with a scorned expression, utterly corrupted by boundless rage as she jumped onward and grabbed hold of Future Gohan's neck, slamming both of their bodies into the ground with a rushing neck-breaker. Swinging her legs like a windmill, the Wrathful Saiyan returned to her feet, still holding her stunned opponent in her grip. With a wrathful snarl, Chayote raised Future Gohan over her head and punted him away.
The hysterical Saiyan grabbed hold of her head and bellowed in pain as wrath accumulated in every muscle of her body, demanding taxing activity that would spend all the accumulating energy lest it outright exploded forcefully from her body. As the battle progressed, without meaningful expulsion of the force that accumulated at a sped-up rate, thoughts in Chayote's head became more and more hectic, and focusing on the battle at hand became harder and harder.
Suddenly, the slowly recovering body of Future Trunks looked like quite an alluring weakling to stomp and snuff out. A few times Chayote caught herself thinking sadistic and barbaric thoughts and shook her head, growling them out from her system while she flexed in preparation to attack her opponent again.
"Piccolo's attack won't do, huh?" Future Gohan lamented, turning and reloading his cybernetic arm and taking aim at his enemy again. "Then, how about this? Super Kamehameha!"
The azure energy wave accelerated toward the Wrathful Saiyan just as she was recovering from her reeling and writhing, just as Chayote put up her arms to soften the inevitably painful blast she wasn't fully prepared and amped up for, a shadowy figure with a golden aura flashed in front of her and with a determined battle cry drove a long sword in the middle of the blast, splitting it into pieces. The cockroach whom Chayote restrained herself from crushing stood back up and joined the fight, even though the sword looked too hefty in his hands after blocking such a powerful attack and the Super Saiyan panted on his feet.
Future Trunks placed his chips behind Chayote's Wrathful Form becoming powerful enough to overpower their amped-up enemy in time and looked ready to risk his life in order to buy her the time she needed to draw the necessary strength to do so.