Meta-Cooler's radar eyes shined with a glint before Gohan's hands shot up out of sheer fighting instinct. A shimmering mass of energy sizzled over Gohan's cross-shaped block. Almost immediately Piccolo's teachings to follow the tide of battle using his Ki sensory and not his eyes scolded Gohan's back like hot water but by the time he lingered on that thought and processed it–it was already too late.
In a nigh-instantaneous dash, Meta-Cooler vanished and appeared directly behind Gohan while he still struggled against the Lock-On Buster. Gohan's eyes whited out after a gruesome thud to the back of his head, but instead of falling down, the teen stumbled forward, gritting his teeth and toughing the pain and the creeping numbness out. Gohan put up his hands again to block Meta-Cooler's overhead elbow strike, then placed them out in front of him to absorb the follow-up elbow crash to his chest.
Gohan's arms felt exactly how they looked in motion–as if they were made of lead. Meta-Cooler's diving step-in jab stunned the teen's whole body by outracing his numb arms and shooting straight for the opening in his guard. Once Gohan was wide open, Cooler shot his elbow to the center of Gohan's throat, whiting the young Saiyan out as he wheezed and crumbled to his knees. This much humiliation just didn't feel right for the silver cyborg as he stomped over Gohan's head to drill it into the floor even further.
"Don't blame yourself, runt. You were well-taught, all things considered. But even the best fighters have openings in their patterns and styles. All except Project Meta-Cooler. We grow stronger each time we are injured, evolving and adapting past our weaknesses until we have no more left. Until we become perfect," Meta-Cooler gloated of his success while toying around with the young Saiyan. His snickering attitude seemed to slip as it appeared as if though, no matter how hard Meta-Cooler stomped and wriggled, Gohan's neck would not snap nor would his neck crack.
"King Kai's Fist x20!" Gohan yelled out as his unfurling scarlet aura exploded and flung Meta-Cooler flipping backward, his radar eyes open wide in surprise. Even as Meta-Cooler's radar and analytics worked on calculating Gohan's current stats and relaying his potential patterns to the ultimate cyborg of the Big Gete Star, it was Meta-Cooler's own mind and disbelief that held the cyborg back.
With a sense of newfound calmness, Gohan exhaled and took a single step forward. With that step, the youth vanished at once and appeared right in front of Meta-Cooler, surpassing even Meta-Cooler's own hyper movement in speed. As Gohan's right uppercut dug into Meta-Cooler's abdomen, the metallic tyrant didn't even attempt to follow or intercept the attack since he already knew it to be hopeless.
Young Gohan hopped up, flinging his right foot up and whipping it into Meta-Cooler's chin. This tested the fortitude of the cyborg's neck as it had stretched out beyond how much mere human tendons could have supported it. Turning around in mid-air, blazing, Gohan forced a roundhouse kick to send Meta-Cooler crashing through the wall. This time he didn't disappear inside it as he used to in order to throw his opponents off-guard. Likely a result of Bulma's hostile takeover of Meta-Cooler's precious system.
Gohan wasn't about to let up. He only had a single heartbeat of overwhelming power and he planned to use it. Exclaiming his proud battle cry throughout the halls of the darkened Big Gete Star, the young Saiyan burst through the wall as well, pounding Meta-Cooler repeatedly as much as his wavering breath and self-doubting willpower allowed him. A lashing kick, a flurry of jabs to each side of Meta-Cooler's jaw, then a double ax handle slam to the top of his head delivered so close to the floor that Gohan blared Meta-Cooler clean through it and sent him into the service facilities.
"You'll have to do far better than that…" Meta-Cooler hissed, somehow rising on his feet while wavering and stumbling around. Lightning sparkles shot out from his damaged abdomen and his busted jaw leaked, but his metallic tendon wires worked overtime to reconnect and bolster the cyborg to prevent further analogous injury. "Your pitiful stamina and life force are limited. Meta-Cooler is eternal…!"
Before he could elaborate on that thought, Gohan disappeared in a crimson flare and appeared in front of Meta-Cooler, turning his entire body into the power blow aimed at Meta-Cooler's jaw. The metallic piece chipped clean off while the young Saiyan swept for the legs, tripping Meta-Cooler up and turning him into a twirling mess of limbs, wires, and sparks. Gohan roared, enveloped with the last ounces of King Kai's Fist he had for the moment as he put everything he had into a Ki-powered uppercut. With his aura completely snuffed out, Gohan breathed in and out a couple of times, staring down at his scraped and shaking hands while blood dripped from his face and busted mouth.
"My dad… My dad doesn't stop… He doesn't stop fighting… Not even when it gets hard… That's why he can't ever lose!" Gohan clenched his fists and broke past the limits of his willpower, decimating his own body as he ignited the King Kai's Fist scarlet once more over his entire body and converted that very Ki alongside some of his own life force into a wrathful charge. He didn't have the control or the strength left for anything fancier. Just a head-first tackle would have had to do.
Meta-Cooler grumbled as the force of impact took hold of him and didn't let him quiver an inch out of its reach. Then the intense heat and sheer power came in an upward, beam-like dome that drilled like a rising pillar, washing away at Meta-Cooler and scraping his armored shell where it couldn't outright peel the silver cyborg apart. Meta-Cooler's right peck peeled off, his left leg gave way and flew off somewhere while half of Meta-Cooler's face remained just a mess of metallic wiring that couldn't even shoot off any sparks since the intense energy had them coated with a solid layer of coal.
"Did… It work…?" Gohan panted, lacking the clarity in his vision to see straight and only seeing blurry outlines of a lesser thing than he engaged in battle earlier.
"Y-You…" Meta-Cooler hissed out from an artificial voice box that didn't require his full jaw to speak. The cyborg scooped his singed wiring out only for the dead ends to come alive and begin reconnecting. The wiring over his missing or peeled-off body parts began rustling like a nest of starving maggots, forming harder layers that would take far more punishment than their predecessors to damage and destroy. It didn't take long for Cooler's lower jaw to grow back alongside an armored shell, similar to his Super Form from when he was still of flesh and blood.
"Oh no!" Gohan yelled out as he leaned back in terror atop a metal grating platform and began stumbling back in fear. He had spent all of his strength that he thought he had, and it was all for naught. Not only did he not destroy his enemy, but he was actually growing far stronger than he initially was. "It's over… No way I can win… I'm all spent and Meta-Cooler is way stronger than he was, to begin with…"
"Gohan!" a voice rang in the young Saiyan's head, forcing the sulking teen to pick it up and look around. The voice had rung resonant and strong, almost as if someone had been speaking right behind him. No. Inside of his head! "Fight back or he'll kill you!"
"Piccolo-san! Where are you?" Gohan identified the telepathic signal.
"My body still can't move. I can't save you. You'll have to do this on your own. You'll have to win. I know you can do it, Gohan!" Piccolo encouraged his pupil.
"B-But… I can't… I've spent all of my strength trying to burn up and win like my dad always does but… I just… I'm not as strong as my dad…" Gohan winced in pain, feeling up his busted ribs and shaking from the revolting taste of blood in his mouth.
"The reason you're not as strong as your father is because you're trying to chase after your father. It's why no one could ever beat that lug. Krillin, Yamcha, Tenshinhan… Even me for a time… We all looked ahead of us and saw him, trying to do our best to be more like him, to train like him, to fight like him, to be him in order to beat him but that will never have worked! To be stronger than Son Goku, you have to do your own thing, fight in your own way, like only you can, and make him look ahead at you. Now stop whining, stand up and let's give him the best attack we've got!" Piccolo's telepathic signal awakened a spark in Gohan. The young Saiyan stood back up with shaky legs and placed both of his hands over his forehead.
"Masenko!" Gohan cried out, unleashing a beam of yellow energy roaring with a thunderous crackle toward Meta-Cooler.
"Limitations of flesh and blood…" Meta-Cooler barked out with an augmented tone, swinging his arm back as he channeled a teal-colored arc blast in an open hand and flung it at the center of the oncoming energy wave.
Gohan cried out in pain, feeling the entire monumental struggle pressing down on his shoulders. The young Saiyan winced as his body slid back and Meta-Cooler's Nest Ice began forcing the Masenko back. Nervous pain lit up in Gohan's spine as because of the struggle that he wasn't able to keep up with, he had bent it back to an unnatural degree. It wouldn't be long before Gohan lost his composure, and both blasts came back to consume him whole.
"You dunce! What are you holding back for!?" Piccolo hissed in Gohan's mind. "Come on, let's do it together! Put everything you have now! He's underestimating you. He's laughing at you with that pathetic blast he intends to beat you with. Make him eat it and get gone!"
"Wh-What's this now?" Meta-Cooler's radar began blinking and racing across the reactor chamber, filled to the brink with flashing light from the intense energy struggle. "Whose energy reading is that?"
"I won't… Lose…" Gohan muttered as he began leaning back, his Masenko growing wider and more powerful and slowly engulfing Meta-Cooler's Ki blast. "I can feel Piccolo-san's Ki as if it were my own! Both of us together can't lose! This is my… Ours… Full-Power Masenko!"
Backed up by an invisible, foreign Ki signature of a mental presence resting inside of a Capsule Corps spaceship hovering nearby the Big Gete Star, Gohan released everything he had and more, letting his Masenko unfurl into a golden dome that utterly absorbed Meta-Cooler's blast and swallowed it up, reducing it to minute sparkles that were quick to flicker away. Taken aback by this sudden development, Meta-Cooler reached both of his hands back.
"This is nothing to this one… This is nothing to this one… You hear me!?" Meta-Cooler cried out, producing twin Nest Ice blasts in both hands and throwing both of them at the roaring golden tidal wave of energy rushing his way. The two blasts collided into one, expanding massively in size, while Meta-Cooler's murky, grey aura ignited around his body with electric sparkles. "Even if we have to destroy the entire Big Gete Star… We won't let a Saiyan win!"
"Then what about a Super Saiyan?" a voice rung in from the sidelines, forcing Meta-Cooler to shift his attention to a bare-chested Saiyan with black and spiky hair. Vegeta stood in a doorway from a nearby hallway leading from the communications chamber to the massive reactor hall. On command, a golden aura ignited around the Saiyan king while his hair turned gold alongside it. Once the proud king opened his eyes again, they were glinting with a supernatural shade of teal.
"Ve-Vegeta-san…" Gohan grumbled through severe physical effort of a struggle that was once more slowly transitioning to not being favorable to him. "You need… To take Bulma-san and run… If I can… Activate King Kai's Fist x20 again… I can win this clash… But I… Might not make it."
"Run!?" Vegeta clenched his fist and took a menacing step forward, gritting his teeth in a nasty scowl aimed at Gohan. "How fucking dare you, Kakarot's brat!? Do you think a king of Saiyans would ever run away and stay indebted to some little runt brat belonging to a nobody lowlife trash? Get it into that thick head of yours, kid - with this one, we're square! You saved my life, I'll have saved yours!"
"H-How did you… Recover your strength, Vegeta?" Meta-Cooler wondered before realizing he was staring at Vegeta's open palm.
"Meta-Cooler? What a ridiculous nickname, don't make me laugh… Big Bang Attack!" Vegeta sneered at the augmented cyborg before unleashing a destructive ball of energy from his open palm that engulfed Meta-Cooler in an instant and detonated with a devastating roar that left all surrounding control panel screens shattering and blowing up in a mad chain reaction and smoke filling the cylindrical reactor chamber.
Once the devastation calmed down some, Meta-Cooler appeared from inside of its wake. Pulsing and twitching with new tendons and silver-colored plating stretching out to protect the blown-up or scraped areas. This was Gohan's opening.
"Go!" Piccolo's telepathic signal encouraged Gohan some extra as the teen was stuck in between getting over the devastating aftereffects of Super Saiyan Vegeta's Big Bang Attack and keeping up with the beam struggle he and Meta-Cooler were still engaged in. Feeling an opening with his mangled opponent stuck in mid-transformation, Gohan pressed on, letting out a roar of blinding, unrelenting wrath and desperation as he let their combined Masenko engulf Meta-Cooler and obliterate even the tiniest string of the cyborg into shapeless dust.
"Is it over?" Gohan wiped the blood and slobber off his busted mouth that was definitely missing more than a few teeth and collapsing on his backside.
"As I said before," Vegeta crossed his arms and turned his back to young Gohan. "We're even now, understand?"
"Oh… Vegeta…" an augmented, malicious voice filled the colossal, cylindrical halls of the reactor room where the battle had moved. "So quick to get even, aren't you? When are you going to give ME a chance to get even?"
"N-No way!" Vegeta turned around and began frantically looking around, scanning up and down to determine where the unison voice that sounded louder than what the Big Gete Star could produce if it was entirely a cosmic speaker came from. It was almost like the voice of billions of Coolers all speaking on an old phone or a voice box at once. Yet they all spoke in such perfect sync that their tones molded together into something unique and quite frightening. "You should be space dust!"
"His manner of speaking changed. He said "I", didn't he?" Gohan fumbled back on both feet, no matter how much his calves wobbled and how strong the gravity underneath him felt.
"Dammit!" Vegeta cursed, clenching his knuckles. "Listen up, kid, if there's even a single ounce of Cooler left in those systems, we need to purge it whole for Bulma to take full control over this damn station of his."
A peal of deafening, hateful laughter filled the reactor room as a black, cybernetic pillar in the center rotated around its axis, producing an opening as its outermost layer shot wide open, revealing rows upon rows of identical-looking cyborgs to the one that Gohan and Vegeta just destroyed. They appeared to have been based on its appearance before Gohan's wrathful and staunch advances had driven it to evolving a few times, but their sheer number more than compensated for that minor shortcoming of theirs.
"You fools, Meta-Cooler isn't some new form that I've taken. It is the grandest project of the Big Gete Star. And once a Big Gete Star creates a project, it becomes no task at all to replicate it however many times I need to until the project's goal is met. The Big Gete Star may not have wanted to use the full brunt of the Meta-Cooler army and spend so much energy and fuel on such a production, or risk the damage to its systems in an all-out battle, but the Big Gete Star is no longer in control, is it? I no longer need to abide by its regulations and decrees. I am Cooler, I am unbound and limitless! My current state reaches beyond mere power. I am intelligence itself!"
Gohan looked around, trying to determine a central location from which this voice came. Fear, hopelessness, despair, and weakness, also exhaustion. All of those things went away when elementary curiosity took hold of the young Saiyan warrior.
"This one is Meta-Cooler…" a version of the silver cyborg took a bold step forward, stopping just before the railing at the end of the stationary conveyor belt it occupied over Vegeta's and Gohan's heads.
"This one is Meta-Cooler…" another one followed while, one by one, each of the incalculable number of Meta-Coolers struck a menacing pose as they prepared to roll and stomp all over the loathsome intruders.
"What's wrong, Vegeta, your vigor seems all but vanished when faced with the true might of 10 000 000 000 Meta-Coolers," a central figure showed itself, looking identical to the rest but willing to break the mold in terms of its introduction.
"You cocky bastard, you think I'm just going to roll over and die just because you've had this ace tucked up your sleeve all this time? You can forget about it!" Vegeta burst with the full golden splendor of his Super Saiyan form and charged directly at the endless lines of conveyor belts all lined up with Meta-Coolers that seemed pleasantly amused by their target's reckless assault.
"Vegeta-san, wait!" Gohan called out to the hasty warrior, but it was far too late. Even if he had called out in time, Vegeta's nature would've made it impossible for the Saiyan king to listen to a mere youngling. Son of a low-ranking Saiyan nobody no-less.
"Shut up, brat!" Vegeta yelled out in revolt of Gohan's call to be smarter about their approach than to just recklessly charge at a hopeless battle against an infinite army of enemies that they both struggled to stop a single version of.
A resonant beam left from the tip of Vegeta's punch, penetrating through Meta-Cooler's abdomen and sending it flying like a rag doll iron scarecrow. The Super Saiyan soared high, delivering spinning roundhouses and elbow strikes before smashing his elbow into the top of the Meta-Cooler's head while sending the lone mook crashing down into the abyssal depths below while the Saiyan landed on both feet and cried out as a call for everyone who wanted some to come and get it.
Despite their struggle being a vain and hopeless battle, Vegeta was fully prepared to wage it until the very end. In his teal eyes, Gohan noticed something he himself couldn't quite fathom or relate to–excitement. It was as if the Saiyan king felt glad to have a chance to go through such a ridiculous gauntlet and looked forward to seeing just how far he could go before either his body or his strength fail him.