The time machine's journey through the time stream felt like a dreamy haze. The unearthly sights, flashes, and the bright tunnel of sparking across the colorful void only added to the impression. Trunks felt phasing in and out of consciousness, which didn't let him know for how long he'd been going forward.
"Age 788?" Trunks muttered, looking at the time machine settings in a moment of rare clarity. His sight didn't line up often, so he was wise to use those rare moments of transparency well. He couldn't quite place the date and time set on the machine to anything significant. It was a time four years after he left for the past to search for Mecha Frieza's control module. Other than that symbolic meaning, the time had no significance to Trunks.
The time machine blinked in with an expansive halo ring of energy. Clutching for the massive wound on his abdomen, Trunks slammed his fist on the button that would open the hatch and let him out so that he could survey where the monster Cell had sent him. Just as the glass hull went up and Trunks hovered over the opening to wobble out of the time machine for a better look, the sight of an enigmatic monster looking like day and night different from the insectoid he had left behind in the past.
The monster had a baby blue-skinned face of humanoid features, but with distinct facial markings similar to Frieza's. The armor formation on his chest had been shaped like a vest and covered the upper body section of the monster's body. It had been decorated with an abundance of shimmering gemstones the size of a fist and embedded into the armor in a symmetrical pattern. The creature had heterochromatic and narrow eyes with the right iris being flashy red while the left one was light blue. His eyes displayed flashy red both over its lashes and their underline.
The monster's armored beetle wings now seemed spread wider apart and looked more like a mixture of demonic bat or dragon's wings and a shell of a beetle. A pair of antennae twitched on the monster's forehead just underneath the ridge where its flashy horns decorated its face. Its armor had been colored blood-red, except for the thicker black growths on the monster's forearms and calves that were black. Strangely, the sclera of the creature's eye was black, while a pair of blade-like claws stuck out from his forearm from the black-armored shell. There were long, bubblegum-pink tendrils flopping behind the creature's back when the armored wings moved away from covering its back.
"Who are you?" Trunks' arm instinctively moved to reach for his claymore behind his back. While it wasn't where Trunks had left it, some semblance of function returned to Trunks' eye and the radar traced his Ki gun and sword in his time machine. It didn't appear like the monster was in a desperate mood and that he'd interrupt the time traveler's attempts at arming himself, so he did just that.
"Trunks…" the creature spoke up in a mish-mashed voice of a myriad of different pitches and tones, each segment booming in a different volume. "Returning home to save a version of your future, have you? Just in time, exactly as I've predicted."
"Your Ki… What is that? It's Chayote's Ki, Son Goku's, Piccolo's, Vegeta's, Frieza's… So much more…" Trunks' expression shifted to reflect the terror lighting up in his gut as he aimed the tip of his sword in the monster's direction. "You wouldn't happen to be… Cell, would you?"
"Oh?" the monster tilted its decorated head to the side as its expression shifted to surprise. "How unexpected. How would you have found out about me? Don't tell me that Dr. Puri in the past has activated me far earlier than she did in this timeline…"
"No. You've confronted me in the past. You've intercepted my attempts to help Chayote fight Dr. Puri," Trunks swiped his sword to the side before taking a sword-fighting stance.
"Have I?" Cell's expression shifted to that of someone who had eaten a sour plume. "Now, why would I do that? More importantly, why would you interfere with Dr. Puri's conflict with Chayote in the past?"
"How would I know? You got in my way, so you tell me!" Trunks barked back at Cell. "You've ruined everything for me. Every time that you use the time machine, you create a splintered timeline. The timeline I'd return to wouldn't be the same as the one you sent me away from. It would be an identical, new one! You've made me abandon my Chayote forever. For this, I'll destroy you, whether or not you have any business with me!"
"Don't lecture me about time travel," Cell mumbled with bitterness in his tone. "It seems that my past self felt it necessary to interrupt the natural flow of history for some reason. Interesting. You said "my Chayote" didn't you? Truly interesting… My theory is that you've become attached to a version of Chayote and threatened to change history once again. My past self couldn't allow that to happen, so he plotted the best time to intercept you and force you back to the future, like history originally intended you to return here, to me."
Trunks' hair spiked up and ignited with a golden shine. His muscles bulked up, stressing and tearing up his clothes while his eyes whited out and then adopted a teal shine. An intense aura, sparking aura, surrounded the time traveler, and sparkles of electricity jolted up and down his entire body and surging through all over his aura and his body.
"What an interesting transformation," Cell noted as his lips retracted to almost a singular, black-colored dot hanging over his chin.
"I don't care who you are, I no longer care what your goals are! For what you did to me, I'll make you disappear forever!" Trunks roared, flinging his sword at Cell. The swinging, airborne blade became surrounded by a golden aura that imbued him off of Trunks' own shimmer, yet the monster deflected it effortlessly with the backside of his hand. Trunks vanished in a vivid golden flash and appeared in front of Cell with the barrel of his Ki shotgun pointed right at the monster's face.
"Disappear forever!" Trunks yelled out as a resonating blast lit up the red skies and swallowed Cell in a myriad of intense fireballs upon detonation. When the destruction began settling down, the unharmed facial features of the monster flashed in from behind the smoke. Seeing Cell's black, heterochromatic eyes staring at him from beyond a wall of smoke intimidated Trunks enough to engage his Super Saiyan 2 aura and dash back to place.
"Hmph… You've become so much stronger than you were supposed to be," Cell noted while swatting his hand through the dusty shroud and swiping it away. "I begin to understand why the past version of me did what it did. So, you've become attached to Chayote in the past and somehow tapped into the unparalleled power of this new transformation. Your attachments would've prevented you from returning to a version of your future on a vain mission to save your captured mother, so I would have had no way of hitching a ride back to another version of the past."
"Hitch a ride?" Trunks' eyes widened. "What do you mean?"
"What do you think I mean, you fool? I will use that very time machine you've arrived in to travel back to the past. Of course, it will not be the same past you've come from. I suppose the past Cell you've faced is just a version of me from an even different timeline of a future where you didn't become attached to Chayote that ended up in the same timeline as you when he traveled to the past with your time machine." Cell shrugged.
"Wait… So… You… You're the second time traveler that messed with the timeline!" Trunks clenched his fist. "You're the time traveler whose signs we've noticed in the past! I knew it couldn't have been Gohan-san. He came to the past far too late to have altered history so much. It was you… It was you all along!"
"It's quite difficult to understand what you're talking about when I haven't yet done any of those things, you know…" Cell's eyes squinted alongside his bemused muttering. "I am, after all, yet to return to the past."
"I can't believe it… A monster whose existence I've had no knowledge of until he attacked me out of nowhere in the past has ruined my whole life…" Trunks gnashed his teeth. He sheathed his shotgun and took a fighting stance before igniting his electric Super Saiyan 2 aura to burn hot to its limits. "Even now, I've got no idea who or what you are, whether you're another one of 21's nightmares or not…"
Trunks extended his arms out to the sides, then flashed his hands in a myriad of rapid arm movements before placing them out forward with his thumbs and index fingers touching each other and forming a diamond shape. "Burning Attack!" he yelled out. A round and blazing in texture, golden energy sphere hurled from the diamond-shaped opening in between Trunks' hands and hurled toward Cell. A massive, spherical dome of energy surrounded the two before booming out into space into an all-consuming pillar of bright light that shined like a golden needle beam on a galactic scale before snuffing out erected in reaction to the potency of Super Saiyan 2 Trunks' attack.
With the entire, devastated landscape of a gloomy city drowning in smoke and flames from having caught glimpses of Trunks' intended punishment toward Cell, the time traveler pointed his hand down and shot off a murky, violet signal of magnetic waves that found his tossed aside sword and pulled it back into Trunks' hand. The warrior could still sense traces of Cell's fused and freaky energy in the resulting destruction of his attack. Despite its otherworldly size, once the smoke cleared out, it became apparent that the attack had peeled the monster's head and ribcage open and splattered his innards far worse than Trunks' injury from the Devil Mite Beam.
"Looking at you now, witnessing the chaos that you've caused to this timeline by your presence… I comprehend what Artificial Human No. 21 felt for Chayote. You've actually ruined my whole life, disconnected me from Chayote and from my son! For this… My body hesitates to obliterate you whole. It demands that keep on fighting and pummeling you into a bloody stain until the end of this timeline comes to pass!" Trunks seethed, letting his wild power resonate throughout the dying planet. It was then that the enraged time traveler noticed something curious flashing in the sky. The entire sky was blinding white and covered with different colored sparkles. It was like nothing he'd ever seen, but before Trunks could wrap his head around this miraculous display, Cell's tone began booming in a manic cackle.
The malformed and battered body began bubbling and reconnecting together as if it would've been made from liquid metal while his separated right arm and left leg sprouted out from nowhere. Just like that, the immortal monster was all back together, beaming a manic smirk of sharp, demonic teeth at Trunks.
"Your son? Your Chayote? Yes… I finally see where your timeline went wrong. I now understand why my past self had to interfere," Cell laughed out and crossed his arms. "You poor thing. You must love your precious Chayote so much, and your soul must long for her so much. It's too bad for what is about to happen. You see, I possess demon cells in my body, so you will see neither Paradise nor Hell in the Otherworld. No matter if you were a good boy or a bad one, you'll never see your precious Chayote ever again, even after death. I truly am a far worse demon than the ones whose cells I've absorbed, well, then again, by demonic standards, I'd argue that I was actually a far superior fiend compared to them."
"Chayote is… Dead?" Trunks' teal stare blanked out grey in the whites of his eyes.
"Oh, that's right, there's so much you're still unaware of and so little time before this universe is destroyed. That's right, I've killed Chayote to seal the fate of this timeline. My timeline. And since Chayote was oh-so-precious to this universe, the head honcho amongst the gods will delete this bothersome timeline and fix some of our mess for us. I'm a bit of a sanitarian of universal order, unlike you, I cause chaos in the timeline by traveling all over history, but I also clean up after myself to avoid a massive calamity. Since your mind is too narrow to plan out your actions, you're too dangerous to exist, since death means so little these days, I'm afraid I must ensure that you are deleted from history entirely while I live and thrive in the past and find new species of cells to assimilate into my perfect organism." Cell struck a flashy pose as the white void overhead the two expanded, swallowing up more and more of everything that was perceivable around the two time travelers locked in conflict.
"Assimilate cells? So that's why you have Chayote's Ki… And everyone else's…" Trunks looked down, feeling despair creeping up his body as the spirit to oppose the insurmountable monster in front of him faded from his body. He coughed up a mouthful of blood while his Super Saiyan 2 form vanished, returning the semi-converted warrior to his base form.
"Correct. I am a bio-organic organism created by Dr. Puri to test various biological and chemical weapons. That rotten mother of mine wanted me to be just a means for her to learn how to neutralize various enemies more efficiently. In the end, my design surpassed her expectations. I've adapted to survive anything she could ever throw at me and thus I've devoured her in return. The turning point was when that fool Gohan returned from the past to warn her of One-Nine's treachery in the past. Even though she's able to devour Artificial Humans, 21 still feared betrayal she didn't see coming. And so Dr. Puri began testing alternative methods of effectively handling Artificial Humans and introduced Artificial Human programming and cells within me. With the limitless evolution of the Saiyan S-Cells and the artificial intelligence of an Artificial Human combined, I've hatched a perfect escape and an even more ultimate crime stretching out across the whole of history. And now it's time for the trap to snap shut and for me to claim a timeline to live the rest of my life in," Cell laughed out, drawing both of his fists by his sides as he became enveloped with a mint-colored, sparkling aura.
"With each new species whose cells you assimilate, you gain the attributes of that species… Saiyan Zenkai and Battle Evolution, the Namekian regeneration and the magical abilities of the Dragon Clan, the infinite stamina and artificial intelligence of an Artificial Human, the impossible anatomies of both the Frieza Clan mutants and demons from the Demon Realm…" Trunks pieced the impossible enigma that was Cell together. Though, in this case, this answer only revealed more and more questions. If Cell truly has assimilated all of those different cells and attributes of all those varied organisms into his body, what truly was his endgame and how would one go around stopping such an invincible monster? "Dr. Puri… You've doomed everything…" tears appeared in the corners of Trunks' eyes as he clenched his fists together and closed his eyes, preparing to accept his creeping extinction.
"You vain fools had it coming," Cell said in a bitter tone of voice. "In the end, all that I want is to live. To live a life just like any of you. The life I was born for and owed. You made me the way I am, you forced me to fight and to kill to escape the life of a lab rat. Now you can all face deletion while I move on to live the life I, like all living things, deserve."
Cell charged forward, thrusting his fist clean through Trunks' abdomen, making the grievously wounded Saiyan white-out and throw an excessive amount of blood up while an energy sphere began gleaming from the wounds in his body as an energy blast formed inside of Trunks' body.
"Lima Spear!" Cell yelled out, shoving Trunks out of his way and shooting him off like a comet across the cosmos to detonate into stardust somewhere far, far away. The Bio-Android observed the white void over his head of a universe slowly being extinguished by a petty and childish deity and its tantrum. Trunks' energy signature vanished a blink before the pretty fireworks far away on the horizon, but none of that mattered now. "Tsk… I knew it." Cell cursed, looking at a red error screen flashing in front of him. "It's impossible to transport someone of my genetic composition through the time stream. And yet, there is a past me, meaning that there is a solution to this problem. Yes… You clever, desperate devil… You've purged all the unnecessary cells from your body until only one set of cells remained in your body. After all, if you're traveling to the past, you'll have a far richer and livelier universe to sample living cells from."
After setting the time and the date in the time machine's setting, Cell's unnatural shape became engulfed in a pink gleam. The Frieza Clan mutants like Frieza, Cooler, and King Cold could devise new mutations that limited their power. Alongside the abilities of races that could clone themselves, Cell could simply devise a new form for himself that only used the single, most essential set of cells in his body while he purged every other set into a clone to be left behind for death alongside this dying universe. Once he was done, Cell bopped his insectoid beak at the time machine button to activate the device and send him hurtling back through time. His impeccable knowledge of history from Dr. Puri's archives will provide him ample opportunities to sample other cells in the past.
"Huh… What's going on? Where's Cell?" Trunks jumped up on his feet and looked around. He laid on a stone-paved road inside of an infinite ethereal void that had decorations of ancient pillars around it and lush grass blades dancing in the subtle gales of wind blowing his way back and forth. Buildings of various times and eras and architecture from all across the universe decorated the realm.
"See? I told you my healing is still up to snuff!" a petite female entity of pink skin strawberry-colored hair pressed her hands to her hips and winked at another old geezer with wrinkled purple skin and a tuft of white hair sprouting from the top of his head alongside a tiny patch of a mustache over his upper lip.
"With how much machinery is in this boy, I had my doubts…" the old-timer shrugged and crossed his arms.
"Who are you people?" Trunks grabbed hold of the petite woman's shoulders and shook her. "Where are we? I need to go back and warn everybody about Cell! Cell is the other time traveler!"
"You should give up on that!" the old geezer shrieked out and waggled his index finger as if he was disciplining a child. With an ethereal, blue glow around her left arm, the pink-skinned entity drew her hand to the side, tripping Trunks up with invisible, magical force and forced him to let go of her shoulders.
"I am the Supreme Kai of Time. This is the Old Kai. What you're talking about is no longer any of your concern," the Supreme Kai of Time lectured Trunks with a finger pointed at him while pouting her lips.
"No longer my concern? Cell will destroy everything…" Trunks tried arguing back, but the Old Kai stepped in his way.
"Geez, you time travelers, always thinking your business is more important than everything else! It's true that Cell poses a great threat. Perhaps more so than most figures across history. But the Time Scrolls don't seem to be corrupted. History in the timeline we pulled you from is happening exactly as it should. Your alterations of history have caused diversions in a few timelines, but they appear to have mended themselves and are now proceeding on an alternative path unique to them. Otherwise, they appear to be healthy timelines," the Old Kai pointed out. "What is at threat here, however, is far more important than a few crimes to history your troublesome mother has made you an accomplice to."
"My mother…?" Trunks scratched his head.
"That's right. The Demon Realm is preparing for war between the Xeno Meta Army and Xeno Babidi's forces. That potentially threatens the entirety of historic existence across all dimensions, not just a single timeline or a mere universe," the Supreme Kai of Time explained herself. "Since you've already completed your role in your timeline, you had nothing left for you to do but be deleted alongside your timeline, I let myself pull you out to serve as my Time Patroller and fight this war across the entirety of recorded history."
"You see, boy, this is how professionals manipulate history. Not like a thoughtless child, just wandering through a garden, just yanking leaves along the way," the Old Kai flicked Trunks' forehead, scolding him.
"It's okay, he'll learn…" the Supreme Kai of Time placed her hands on her hips and nodded to herself, marveling at Trunks whom she just pulled out from the annals of history like he was the biggest catfish she's ever reeled in.
"If you can pick people up and insert them into any timeline, you can put me back into my past. Reunite me with Chayote and my son…" Future Trunks pleaded with the Supreme Kai of Time.
"Sorry, your son raises far graver problems. Problems that go a bit beyond my paygrade. Since you are a time traveler, your son should not exist at all. He is a grave scar across that timeline, though the fate of your son is to be decided by Beerus-sama and not me. If you do your job as my assistant and my Time Patroller, you can see Chayote and your son growing up from time to time but only from a Time Scroll. If you continue to interfere with that timeline any further, you may cause it to become corrupted beyond repair and you'll force me to delete it," the Supreme Kai of Time replied.
"You won't move a finger against Cell, you won't help me return to my timeline… Why on Earth should I help you then?" Future Trunks stood up and gave the two Supreme Kai a mean glare.
"Because what you did is a mortal sin and making time machines is a crime! Work for me if you want me to forgive you and your mother for that crime!" the Supreme Kai of Time stood her ground, stepping up on her toes to answer Trunks' mean look.
"Wait, Chronoa-chan, did you sever Future Trunks' link to history? You could be recording yourself and this very conversation to the Time Scroll of one of the timelines he's visited. He belongs to a whole different story now, outside any of those Time Scrolls," the Old Kai pointed out, intercepting the quarrel of the two.
"Oh, crud!" the Supreme Kai of Time jumped up and began dashing to a tiny, spherical home across the grassy hill. The matters of the Supreme Kai of Time and her Time Patrollers, or any wars of Xeno Warriors, didn't belong in the stories recorded in any singular timelines. They were meant to exist outside history itself and so if the Supreme Kai of Time does her job right, anyone reading from the Time Scrolls wouldn't have such an intimate glimpse into the world of the Supreme Kai of Time that exists outside of the dimension familiar to them.