"Alright!" Trunks pumped himself up for action while the giant Destron ape recovered from the irritating sting of the blinding flash. Engulfed in a clear aura, Trunks took off from the ground level and aimed his crossed arms down at the Great Ape. The boy fired multiple series of energy blasts. The yellow energy spheres bombarded the giant Destron monster, though they had little effect.
Great Ape Destron Turles turned around to face the airborne boy and roared out, emitting a violent concussive shockwave from his entire body. Trunks shook in mid-air, riding the flowing shockwave without resisting it too much so that he didn't get swept away. Turles opened his mouth and expelled a dark violet energy blast from his mouth, sweeping it across the skies and coloring them in blazing firestorms from the chained explosive reaction.
Videl stared into the sky with a quivering look. She may have trusted Trunks' determination, but she couldn't shake the feeling that all this was simply too much to stack onto the back of a preschooler. Although when Trunks' afterimages began blitzing in and out of vision, creating an entire field of illusionary blurs around the baffled Great Ape, Videl cheered in support.
Taken aback by this odd trick, burdened by a limited, primal level of intelligence in his Great Ape form, the Destron monster began violently thrashing about, stomping and smashing any general area where it could pick up Trunks' afterimage. Yelling loudly to overpower his own fear, Trunks emerged out of nowhere with a flying tackle straight into the beast's chin, throwing its head back. The young man leaned horizontally and turned backward, channeling a massive energy sphere in his left hand before flinging it forward and unleashing a tremendous barrage of Ki blasts from it.
The Ki blast barrage detonated in Turles' face, drowning the Great Ape's eyes and forehead in smoke and flashing blasts. "Alright, gotcha now!" Trunks pumped his right fist before taking off and swerving sharply to position himself behind the Great Ape and grabbing hold of Turles' tail. "Heave-ho!" Trunks chanted to himself, pulling with both of his boots firmly stuffed against the beast's rear while he pulled on the tail. Yet the tail refused to budge.
Nuzzling her aching ribs, Videl picked herself up, wanting to fly in and help the young kid out with his humongous task but just as she willed herself to hover and put force into something with her current state in mind, Trunks pulled one hand off of the pulling task and created a focused Ki sphere in it, shooting it off to the side in the shape of a full-power energy wave and letting it hit the ground diagonally downward. Videl gasped in awe when the brutal yank of the wave's push tossed Trunks sideways suddenly and with enough force to root Turles' tail straight out.
The bestial Saiyan froze in place, stiffened from the reactive muscle spasms before he shrunk down to normal size. The influx of fur and malformed, simian-shaped skull withdrew back to ordinary bald flesh and muscle and a very human-looking noggin. Though this transformation seemed different from ordinary, as Turles became enveloped in a cloud of Destron Gas that simply reshaped him into a smaller construct instead of the usual gritty affair of body morphing.
"That was amazing!" Videl complemented her pupil on an exceptional job thinking outside the box. "I was going to fly up to help you out. With enough training in focusing your Ki, you can shape it like a saucer and grant your Ki blasts cutting properties. But your way works too."
"Heh… Heh, heh!" Trunks' faked a heroic smile like the one he saw actors perform in action movies or ones stapled onto comic book hero posters while sweat still poured down his pale face and tiny crystals of tears of terror formed in the corners of his eyes. The more he cackled, the more aware the boy became that the nightmare was over and that he did well. With the realization sealing itself into stone, Trunks' smirk and childish laughter became more genuine and louder. "I wasn't sure it would work. Who knew that Destron emulated the Great Ape transformation conditions, weaknesses included?"
"Now we just need to finish this and let Bulma-san's drone absorb the Saiyan's share of the gas," Videl turned to Turles, who emerged from the noxious cloud of Destron with a sadistic grin.
Trunks pressed his knuckles to his sides, exploding with a crystal-clear Ki aura. The aura focused on the outline of his body before focusing entirely on the boy's right leg. Rolling through the sky to answer Turles' own mad charge, Trunks performed an overhead kick, releasing the pent-up energy at the point of contact and stunning Turles in place as a white crescent slash of energy dug into him. Videl vaulted over Trunks with a pain-ridden expression, she slammed her fist into Turles' face, staggering him back before turning her entire body horizontally into a roundhouse kick, then flipping over her front to drive both her feet into Turles' face and smash the Saiyan into the ground.
"That was so cool!" Trunks pumped his little fists in excitement, turning to Videl. "I've never had a friend to combo with!"
"I'm glad you're enjoying this, but I'd rather wrap this up before too long," Videl struck an innocent smile, powering through the sting in her ribs while still nuzzling them.
Stones shifted with audible thuds, alerting the two defenders of Central City to what was going on. With a smirk on his bruised face, Turles rose from the ground. A strange, distorted voice broke out in a snicker when Turles laughed. It was like Turles' real voice was somewhere deep below and thousands of different pitches and tones tried their best to emulate it at the same time. The armored Saiyan tilted his hands over his head and brought them down, expelling a sky-reaching burst of violet and black aura that crackled with charcoal electricity.
"What is going on?" Videl looked up, seeing the skies filling up with Destron Gas again. "It's like… He's producing Destron by channeling his energy into it."
"That's not it!" Trunks made a mean and desperate grimace. "This guy's getting crazy-powerful in the process. I'm not sure what's going on, but it's completely unfair! How can he just start spewing Destron like crazy and power up at the same time?"
Turles glared at the skies with an ecstatic smile when the exploding energy pillar of overflowing Destron solidified. He twitched a couple of times before looking down with whited-out eyes and veins ridden with black rot decorating his face and muscles. The Saiyan underwent some visible bulking up, his hair spiked up, and he looked all around more savage.
The Destron monster put his arms together by his chest, creating a sparkling energy ring with electricity surrounding it between his palms. Extending his arms, Turles fired it off at Trunks. Sensing the impending bad news, Trunks stiffened his back like a human arrow and dived cleanly through the center of the ring, letting the energy attack take off into space and decimate a planet somewhere in deep space. The terrifying Saiyan seemed prepared even for this move, as he vanished without a trace and appeared directly beside Trunks, shooting his knee up into Trunks' gut and making the Saiyan's stare become dull and his mouth to spew out slobber.
After rocking the semi-conscious boy aside with a double ax handle, Turles turned his attention to Videl. The injured martial artist took a defensive fighting pose and began frantically vanishing while producing afterimages in her wake. While Turles was nowhere near as primitive with his fighting style back in his normal form, an additional couple of Ki blasts in between each afterimage let Videl blind and irritate her opponent into failing to predict her next move and interrupting it. This vexing dance bought Trunks enough time to pull himself out of the rubble and wipe the slobber off of his face while trying to induce sudden death in Turles with an angry stare.
Deflecting the following Ki blast, Turles extended his hand and created a violet energy sphere in his right hand. The energy ball expanded to a significant enough size to absorb Videl's quick interrupting Ki blasts and grow even larger as a result. With a furious thrust of his arm, Turles forced the violet sphere to burst, unleashing a barrage of violet energy waves spreading far and wide in all directions. Videl tried navigating around the cluster of Ki waves but got hit by one, regardless. The intense energy wave took her away and slammed her into the wreckage of a nearby building, leaving Videl passed out, smoldering and battered.
"Stop it!" Trunks exploded in wrath, surrounding himself with a golden aura. The boy's pupils vanished in his eyes while his puny muscles bulked up rather freakishly for his age. Trunks' hair went wild, flowing upward at the mercy of his rampant aura, and attained a yellowish hue to it with a red tint. Dark lightning began streaking down around the raging boy while the abandoned district suffered the consequences of being in the way of the lashing lightning.
Not taking the boy's warning to mind, Turles turned around and exploded with a black and violet aura of his own, unleashing a choking storm of Destron into the atmosphere while driving his wild power even further into the stratosphere. The powered-up Saiyan swiped his hand, producing a shining white gale of wind that detonated with a fiery explosion point-blank in the boy's face, sending him hurling backward and dragging across the ruined Central City street. With a voice growing ever more fiendish, Turles descended and began approaching the fallen boy, who seemed to have been knocked out of his raging power-up.
Turles' eyes turned bright red, producing a visible glint that detonated with a blast underneath Trunks that flung the boy's weightless body into the air just enough for Turles to take off and knee young Trunks up into the air. Taking off with a forceful grind that reduced the ground underneath him to a demolished crater, Turles rushed after Trunks with a punch that blasted the lifeless boy's body even higher up and further away. The fearsome Saiyan vanished, appearing above Trunks, but before he could stomp the boy into the ground, the same golden aura lit up around Trunks, engulfing the boy's body and bulking him up once more.
With a sneering expression of rage and flowing, wild hair that took a red tinge to it, Trunks seemed to catch Turles by surprise, who charged with a knee strike at the boy but the maddened preschooler just raised his hand with a silent simmer to his wrath and stopped Turles' knee strike effortlessly. Turles dropped his jaw and screamed out something unintelligible and inhuman, something that had the roaring static of solar bursts and something resembling a haunting human yell alike.
The Saiyan tried pushing his foot at Trunks, but the boy leaned aside with a scornful look fixed on his white-eyed face. Turles bellowed with static again, extending his hand and blasting a purple energy wave point-blank in Trunks' face. The face of the Destron warrior changed to sadistic glee as he thought he had obliterated his opponent, yet Trunks didn't move one inch. A golden shine peeked out from the other side where the boy stood, revealing that the enraged Saiyan fired off a golden energy wave from both his hands that entered a close-distance beam struggle and began overpowering the Destron Saiyan.
Turles let out a startling scream filled with high-pitched mechanical noises and space static as he rolled back from the lost power struggle that resulted in Trunks' instantaneous Victory Cannon overwhelming him and blasting him away. The devastated Saiyan suffered disastrous damage, losing entire chunks of his body that began fuming with raw Destron and the damaged body parts became vague blobs of the noxious gas with the curious property of contorting the ephemeral. It took a brief pause of panting for the Destron warrior to regain his ordinary appearance after suffering all that damage.
Wincing and grunting, Videl rolled over on the side and pushed herself from a fallen position to her knees. She looked up and scanned the shrouded skies, seeing the Destron Gas fading away without needing much in terms of cleanup. The Destron construct's emission of new Destron shrouds had ceased too. Before Videl could draw any conclusions, her eyes lingered on the lone boy standing in front of the destructive Saiyan construct shimmering with a golden aura like the one Gohan and Chayote had when they transformed, except Trunks' transformation was incomplete. While his aura shined as bright as that of a Super Saiyan's, his body looked stuck partway.
Shining a deceitful smirk, Turles drove his right hand forward, blowing up a Ki blast in his hand to raise a large cluster of dust and debris from what he had blown up and pummeled into the ground already. Trunks stood there unbothered, staring into the dirt and the dust without as much as a blink of his white eyes. The boy leaned to the side, raising a nonchalant arm to block the incoming strike stiffly. Turles' eyes widened, and all craftiness vanished away from his face at once when he realized just how outmatched he now was.
Trunks raised his hand. Before Turles could back away and gain some distance, the golden aura around the young boy channeled through his body and focused on his raised hand, leaving it in a lone golden energy wave that punched through Turles' chest and curved upward, shooting off into space to detonate harmlessly. When Trunks lowered his hand, his up-flowing hair rested and his eyes returned to normal with his golden aura vanishing without a trace.
Gasping and emitting heaps of static and jumbled noises from the depth of his throat, Turles twitched and staggered back. His body swelled up in many places, becoming a bubbling mass of softness before blowing up into a cloud of Destron fumes that boomed up into the air. A humble buzz distracted Trunks, so he turned his head to acknowledge his mother's drone, shooting up to finish absorbing the gas of the destroyed construct. Realizing that the drone could have only come from one place, Trunks turned around and realized that Videl had woken up and was resting by a dislodged stone platform.
Unable to contain his emotions, the boy took off to hug his friend, who he thought was grievously injured. Using the fallen chunk of debris for support, Videl stood up and wrapped her arms around little Trunks with a kind-hearted smile. After congratulating each other on their victory, the two looked up at Bulma's drone, pulling in all the fumes and shooting off into the lower atmosphere to transmit the analysis results to Bulma.
"There was a big ruckus in Central City, or so I've heard…" Bulma's voice came from a tiny television set that Videl placed in front of her to the side of the fire of the camp. Given how surviving on their own was part of their training, Videl did the best she could, bandaging herself up and salvaging what she could from nature. Trunks insisted they traded some of their capsules away for urban medicine. That should help Videl make a much quicker recovery than she expected initially. "I assume that was you two."
"Yes. We've encountered another Destron Gas construct," Videl nodded.
"Are you two okay? Who was it this time? Anyone to do something like that graze on your face to one of you two should be someone we know," Bulma crossed her arms in worry over the bandage wrapped around Videl's forehead. Trunks leaned in with a few plasters stuck to his face too, but the cheerful grimace he made to his mother calmed Bulma down somewhat.
"It was a Saiyan. He wore a Saiyan battle armor, like the one that Gohan-kun's grandfather sometimes wears, but this one looked like an older model and had a black and grey color scheme. Other than that, the Saiyan looked identical to Gohan-kun's father and his grandfather, I wonder if they are related somehow…?" Videl pondered to herself, feeling up her aching bruises while correcting her numb sitting position.
"Doesn't sound like Bardock… Must be some no-name Saiyan enhanced by the Destron Gas. That's what I've been meaning to talk to you about. The traces of Destron that the drone sent back home are entirely different from the ones you've brought back from Penguin Village. These have traces of highly irradiated hydrogen and helium, also large quantities of nitrogen, oxygen, and gaseous carbon," Bulma sighed, slumping in her chair and turning around while sipping on hot cocoa. She began dragging files and complex elemental tables to the side in a chaotic manner, relatable only to a messy genius.
"Irradiated!?" Videl's lips stretched downward. "Are we going to die!?"
"Oh… No, no… I've long since stopped accounting for cosmic radiation effects on you knuckleheads. It's nothing worse than getting an X-ray to someone who trained with Kami…" Bulma waved her hand in dismissal, accidentally spilling some hot cocoa on her lap and losing her focus while working on wiping it off and nuzzling the hot scalding. "What I meant by that is… This bunch of Destron Gas came into contact with space nebulae. They aren't just drenched with rage and ephemeral expressions located on Earth anymore. Enemies that we've faced in space in the past that universe still remembers and whose emotions and dreams are etched into the nebulae can seemingly also come back with Destron down to Earth."
"Damn… That means that even someone like Broly can pop up eventually…" Videl sighed. Just when she was beginning to like her little adventure and the sense of boundless freedom of having to struggle and overcome these very simple problems like where to set up camp and how to best lick her injuries so to not skip tomorrow's training, she could feel a summon back coming from a mile away.
"That's true, that'd be scary. Which is why it's integral to collect the data in that Destron Gas and track it to the source," Bulma pointed her finger like a perky teacher reminding her students to focus on the big picture more in the future. Videl blinked a few times in confusion. She couldn't comprehend at first how Bulma still didn't demand that they returned home or send Vegeta to fetch them by force. She must've been too used to the strict control of her father. For whatever reason, Bulma seemed nowhere near as protective of them despite Videl feeling certain she loved Trunks and cared for Videl's well-being about as much as her father did.
"Huh? You mean you still can't tell where it's coming from?" Trunks scratched his head, leaning into the television's angle of capture. His lips shifted to the side in disappointment at his mother's lack of progress. That was very much unlike her.
"I've told you, dear!" Bulma waggled her finger in front of the camera. "This one's different from the first one. I need a solid third sample to even out the differences and get a more concise and stable data reading. I'd say I might need one or two more samples…"
"Jeez… This one was crazy-strong already," Trunks crossed his arms and turned away from the screen as if disowning his mother playfully.
"I know, dear. If you ever feel you're in more trouble than you can handle, just fluctuate your Ki to signal that you're in danger. Whoever's closest to you will swoop in to help you out by homing in on your Ki signature. That's the signal that the Dragon Team has used ever since they learned to sense Ki," Bulma tutored the two. "Although, if you two take too long and let things get out of hand too much, someone is bound to show up and offer you help, anyway. By the way, did you find the Dragon Ball?"
"Yep," Videl pulled out a Seven-Star Dragon Ball and showed it in front of the screen. "We kind of lucked out. It was inside a Ceratosaurus' cage in the Central City zoo. I've no clue how we'd have convinced the keepers to let us in normally, but given the extent of the Destron creature's rampage, they all fled the city, so we knocked the dinosaur out cold and retrieved it."
"Well, I'm glad you're having fun. It reminds me so much of the old days!" Bulma swooned, turning around in her chair. "Traveling the world, looking for Dragon Balls with Son-kun… Oh, almost forgot, keep up the good work, people recognized your face and the logo on Trunks' sneakers. Once Central City realizes that Hercule's daughter and the son of Capsule Corp's president saved the city, we'll shoot to the moon on the polls! Central City is where the King's Castle is, so it was the toughest district to change onto our side…"
"We'll be visiting the tropical islands southeast of Kame Island tomorrow! Maybe we'll drop by Kame House and give Muten Roshi a visit," Trunks boasted.
"That's great, dear. Don't learn too much rotten stuff from that old coot, though…" Bulma waved it off with an approving nod. "In any case, it's pretty late. You two will probably wake up early in the morning for training as early as Vegeta does to hit the gym, so I won't hold you for too long. Oh, and don't worry, Videl, I'm taking good care of your dad! He's handling the election like a champ!"
"That's reassuring…" Videl nodded with a warm smile before Bulma signed off and the TV started showing static again.
"Is it okay if I watch some cartoons?" Trunks turned to Videl.
"No, your mother was right, we'll start training tomorrow at sunrise. We'll need most of the day to look for the Dragon Ball after all," Videl shook her head and turned the TV off.
"Aww, man…" Trunks blew his cheeks out but didn't fuss too much, flopping on his side in his sleeping bag and closing his eyes for some sleep while Videl took out the fire and did the same. It'd take her a little while to doze off with those aches bothering her all over and Videl never thought she'd get used to sleeping outside but she tried intimidating herself to sleep by threatening herself with difficulties waking up tomorrow morning for the stretches and the early training session.
She had plenty of work to do to catch up to Trunks' power which was straight shooting for the stars with each crazy battle. Though it felt like the injuries she sustained only made it harder and harder to push herself and train as intensely as she wanted to. Videl sighed to herself. A thought occurred to her when she recalled Gohan telling her that his father once trained with Muten Roshi. Maybe she could slip in some more training with the old martial arts master or ask him for some advice on keeping up with the Saiyans?