Chapter Eight
King Flare's hunting arena reminded Pan of Castle Asphodel's dungeon, and not in a good way. True, there wasn't a good way to look like a dungeon, especially not that one, but the second she stepped over its rusted threshold and into a rotten pile of leaves, she felt like she'd just entered a place that emphatically should not exist. Tunnels and long-dead shackle-phlegm tangled around corrugated metal and gears. The second floor consisted of a catwalk and even that had fallen in places. It looked like a maximum-security prison down to the cells and barbed wire. Those chambers lining the ground floor must be where they held the animals. Pan shuddered. They fit her perfectly.
In the end, though, that benefitted her. It gave her a secure place to wait. She pulled the door closed behind her. Seriously, just looking at this place could give her tetanus, never mind touching anything. She selected a cage behind a second-floor walkway that had fallen and half submerged in earth. She could see the whole entrance from there, but nothing could see her. If she kept her ki repressed, she'd be effectively invisible.
Settling down against the squishy dead slime, Pan ate the rest of her tulip-potato-nuts and waited to see what midnight would bring.
She peeled a "petal" from a nut. Vegeta told her, during his travels through space with the remaining Saiyan survivors, great uncle Raditz would often get stuck taste-testing foods to make sure they weren't poisonous, and sometimes they were, with unpleasant results. Vegeta promised Pan he felt terrible, and then he laughed hysterically for three minutes straight.
Much as Pan missed travelling the cosmos with Grandpa and Trunks, she was glad she hadn't been around for that set of adventures.
She swallowed that last bite hastily. There was a presence in the cell adjacent to her. Two presences.
Pan grumbled and marched out of the cell, holding up her hand.
"Captain Ember, Officer Gelata, I don't know why you followed me here, but you've got to leave."
It was Ember and Gelata, but Pan could tell right away they weren't planning on following her advice. Mostly because Gelata threw a left hook at her.
Pan wasn't there anymore so it sailed through air, but when Pan rematerialized, she found Ember at her back. He grabbed her and lifted her from the floor. Since she was headed that way anyway, she pushed off his knee and elbowed him in the face, twice for good measure, and then she kicked him across the arena lobby in a trail of dirt and rust flakes. Gelata attacked again, and Ember regrouped soon enough and charged from the other side.
Somewhere amidst blocking and returning blows, Pan felt the shift in the air. She thought she could even hear it scraping the walls like fingernails. Perhaps she could even breathe it like foul smoke.
"I'm serious! Both of you, stop. Are you so hung up on those scouters of yours you don't feel anything?"
There was no need to feel anything. Violet fog rolled over the second-floor railing and poured to the ground. Ember and Gelata simultaneously recoiled, but it wasn't so much surprise as both their scouters violently exploding and trailing to the floor in pieces.
Out of the fog stepped Frieza. Pan thought the angle must be throwing off her perception, because he looked three times as tall as he had been before. He towered over Ember now, and bore a stronger resemblance to his father's portrait than his own. This must be that second form the Para Brothers mentioned.
"Tsk, tsk. I'm disappointed in you. Did you have to involve other people in this? I'm afraid I just don't have the head for too many complications, dear; I get frustrated and I start eliminating variables."
"Leave them out of this," Pan said, stepping between Frieza and her former assailants. "You're not here to kill them."
"I'm not here to kill you. Think about that a moment. Does Son Goku need your protection? I doubt it. Be reasonable. Perhaps you'll find I can be, too."
Pan knotted her bandanna around her arm. "I already told you, Grandpa is dead. If you didn't believe me last time, you won't now."
"Still singing that refrain. You must have been very impressed with your grandfather's tales of my cruelty if you're this eager to experience it firsthand. Tell me, did he mention how I used this very form to disembowel his bald Earthling friend? It took forever. Shall I demonstrate on one of your companions?" Frieza traced a pattern in the air, one that only made any kind of sense to him, before pointing his finger directly at Captain Ember. "You, guardsman, seem to have found yourself on the wrong floor; but then, look where I'm standing. How positively saturnine we both are. I know. Let's play a joke. You can be the first to go. Won't that be funny?"
He hadn't even finished speaking when the second-floor catwalk creaked slightly and was empty, and Pan barely saw him move, but she knew where he was heading…
She leapt in front of Ember and blocked, but Frieza sidestepped her. He struck close-handed, with perfect form, the very same attack he'd used on Pan when she'd first opened the dojo door to him. The one she'd barely survived.
But Pan wasn't the only one who'd moved. When time flowed straight once more, Ember stood unharmed, but wearing a spray of magenta blood across his face; blood still pouring from Gelata's chest. Frieza had driven his fist straight through her, armor and all. Even he looked surprised.
"Oh, that's not funny. It's just sad," Frieza said.
The room darkened, and that was no illusion. Vile energy spread over the walls, starting in patches but joining one to another until there wasn't a speck of metal or bone or dirt left. It bubbled like wet asphalt. Frieza threw Gelata at the murk.
She never hit.
Before Gelata could sink into the dark energy, the legendary Super Saiyan caught her, a luminous form with blinding eyes and hair like golden flame.
Frieza growled. Maybe he was trying to say something. It was rendered incomprehensible by rage. But for a moment, she saw it; a flicker of terror in his blood red eyes.
Pan swept Gelata to Ember's side. "Heal her."
"Gelata… I…"
"Listen. I know you followed me here for a reason and this isn't it, but do you remember that beast that stormed out of his tent and ordered me executed on the spot because I might be a hassle? That was you. I need you to be that guy again. Gelata needs you to be that guy again. I've given her some of my energy, but it's not going to keep her alive forever. You healed me. You can heal her." Pan scanned the arena and located a hall. It led deeper into the resort, but it hadn't yet been swallowed by Vile energy. In fact, the way the contamination spread from the entrance back, it looked as if that hall might be the last place to succumb, which made it at least temporarily the safest place for Ember to work. "Back there."
"Why?" Ember asked.
"Because either Frieza or the Vile Wave will kill you if you stay where you are."
"Why are you doing this?"
Pan watched Ember cradle Gelata. Her blood still smeared his red face, down the corner of his uncovered eye. "We can talk later. Just get her out of here. I'll deal with Frieza."
She turned to find Frieza facing her; or at least, standing right next to her, as he was two heads too tall to face her properly, and was hovering just above the ground besides. He neither smiled nor fumed now. His face was cold and neutral, and his voice a bare whisper. Only his hands gave him away. He clenched his fists so hard they bled.
"You'll deal with Frieza," He repeated, mocking her down to her inflection. "My, are you in for a rude awakening. It may be you've mastered the transformation that brought me down in the past. It means nothing now. I have the Vile Wave flowing through my body, a pure and perfect malice, free from the defects of lesser beings. I'm stronger even in this second form than I once was at full power. Dare you test your legends against mine?"
Dark energy bled from the walls and over the floor. Pan, too, had to take to the air to avoid touching it. Blades flew at Pan from every direction. He wasn't going to stop them this time, either; and the closer they got, the more Pan felt that sickly-sweet magnetism, that compulsion to let the Vile energy wash over her unimpeded. Now that she knew what it meant, remembered what would follow if she listened, she pushed it away with a revulsion that exploded physically in a liquid mess. It ran in chunks down the walls.
Which were closing in. What was Ember doing, moving so slow? Pan's reflexes were heightened, and he moved gingerly so not to injure Gelata further, but the Vile Wave was pouring across the room and oh hell Frieza was right behind him, hand glowing-
Pan once again wedged between them with Instant Transmission, and again, Frieza moved to avoid her. This time she was ready for it. She stayed parallel to him, batted away his Death Beam.
Ember pulled Gelata through the door just as a tremor shook the ground. Everyone paused. It was a small one, just enough that three of the four wondered if they really felt it. Pan, unfortunately, knew it had been real, and was only going to get worse.
No; not now, this couldn't start now, not when Pan couldn't power down!
"Stay in the doorway and close that door, Ember," Pan said. "I can still get through it."
"I don't care if you can't," he said, much to Pan's relief. The Captain was finally getting his bearings (and attitude) back.
Still, he fumbled with the handle. Frieza made to capitalize on the hesitation, hurling a Laceration. Pan deflected it, moved to follow. He raced her to the door.
Frieza veered and knocked Pan off course. The force of the attack jarred her, and as if in response, the ground quaked once more, heavier this time.
She faced a series of attacks so fierce she doubted Ember saw more than flashes of light. She tried to break free, and he used her own momentum to hurl her at the increasingly-toxic walls. She flipped, avoiding the collision by such a narrow margin the energy crackled at the bottom of her feet. Another tremor. This time, Pan saw something roiling beneath the Vile energy on the floor, pale pink like electric lights at the bottom of a dirty pool. She was fast running out of time for whatever game Frieza was playing…
What if it was a game?
Pan descended. Frieza fought her the whole way down.
Without looking, Pan transported through the door.
If she'd been off, she'd have splattered straight into the Vile Wave. Instead, she wound up in the hall with Ember, bent over Gelata. Frieza could have followed, but he didn't. Pan had been banking that he wouldn't.
It wouldn't be safe forever, though.
Pan returned to normal, dropping her Super Saiyan form. She hated doing it; changing back and forth took a lot out of her, and she'd have to power up again before she left this hallway, but she had no choice. She had to stop the quakes. She had to suppress that gathering pink energy before it combusted. Most of all, she needed to know what kind of game she was playing.
"Is Gelata all right?" Pan asked.
"Officer Gelata," Ember said absent-mindedly, but he nodded.
"Good," Pan said. "Flint told me the hunting lodge had rules. Tell me what they are. Now."
ooo
A carpet of leaves decayed on the floor of the long hallway. They'd been there long enough to smell bad. A crab-squirrel scuttled over and under fallen branches, darted down the corner with a series of tiny splashes, and stopped at a giant door at the far end. There it slipped through a crack and vanished. Pan sagged where she stood, trying to regain as much of her strength as she could.
"Here's what I've figured out," Pan said. "The animals were kept in those cages and then released into that lobby. Those gears I saw in the corners moved the walls, driving them into this hall and through that door, further into the lodge. Am I right so far?"
Gelata took a few deep breaths.
"Don't push her. She's healed, but she's still out of breath," Ember said.
Undeterred, Gelata groped her way up the wall, to her feet. "I'm fine. I have to be. And your observations are astute enough. There's just one small detail you've gotten wrong. What they kept in those cages… weren't animals. Why do you think the reserve is indoors, with no windows? King Flare and his friends hunted people."
The officer almost fell. Ember supported her.
"Never other Sutova, of course. They'd throw in the occasional Brenchian criminal or lost spacefarer, even the rare Saiyan when they could get it, but Flare built this place to imprison his favorite game. Ice maggots."
Pan hadn't heard that phrase before.
Gelata could tell. "Cosmic roaches. Grubs."
"I did hear Sulfuri and a shopkeeper use that last one, and I can tell from the context it's some kind of insult, but I still don't know what it means."
She pointed to her armored chest. "They're all crude ways to say Reizomorph. We can and do survive anywhere, so we tend to inhabit dead worlds. It's gotten us a reputation as pests. I've heard some argue we're not even sapient, just very good mimics; if so, I'm actress enough to fool myself, because it certainly feels like I'm thinking. When the Sutova came to terraform Ketchyn, we had already been on their 'lifeless rock' for generations. Relations between us were never exactly friendly, but King Flare, Sulfuri and Incendria's father, was the first man in power to take steps to be rid of us. These hunting parties were one of the crueler ones, reserved for those Flare truly wanted to suffer."
Pan thought back to Flint's hall of portraits, those paintings that looked so alive. "But a painter who lives in Blendarr told me…"
"The official story," Gelata said, "That the hunters were after tyrannosaurus and casualties were natural. The royal family has paid a high price in blood and treasure to make sure that's all their citizens know about this place."
"I saw Frieza's picture in the gallery."
"The Colds were taken prisoner during the sack of Cocytus. They were held for the duration of the war, and when it ended in Asphodel's favor, they were sent here to be disposed of."
Between the fight and the shock, Pan didn't have the breath to gasp. The horror of Gelata's words crept up on her so slowly she didn't think they were affecting her at all, until they did and she fell against the wall, gagging. "The bodies I found in the cave."
"One of Flare's mass graves."
"And the 'accident' that killed Queen Polrene."
"The only 'accident' was that her husband and sons survived. All four of them were supposed to die down here." Gelata chuckled. "Now we will."
"Maybe not," Pan said. "That Vile energy Frieza summoned. Did you see how it was moving? Closing in, like the walls would, if they weren't too old and broken down to work. Did you notice that while we fought, he never actually set foot on the first floor?"
Gelata caught on. She snapped her fingers. "Of course! The hunters were allowed to harass the prey to get them to move, but only if they stayed on the second floor. Like the good sports they were, they exploited the wording to its fullest extent, hanging from the catwalk and the walls. They considered themselves 'on the second floor' as long as they never touched the first floor. I see what you're getting at. Frieza's hunting us by lodge rules. I could appreciate his sense of humor if I weren't on the business end of it."
"It's foolishness! If he was as powerful as he's making himself out to be, he'd vaporize us on the spot," Ember said.
"On Namek," Pan said. "He was winning the fight against Grandpa, so he stopped fighting and started playing soccer with him instead. He likes to mess with enemies he thinks are beneath him. After that door opens, what happens?"
Gelata said, "There were two parts to the hunt. That door leads to the shooting gallery, which is self-explanatory enough: melee weapons are illegal and the hunters had to use firearms. I assume Frieza will be using ki instead of the Sutova arm-cannons. If we don't die, we'll be forced through another door, where it's reversed. No shooting, just fisticuffs."
"And if we survive both?" Pan asked.
"The hunters would leave and any remaining prey would be summarily executed and dumped," Ember said. "There's no exit on the ground floor. Daddy Cold and his brats killed the executioners and made themselves one."
"There's the spot where he'll vaporize us. It's where we're 'supposed' to be vaporized," Pan said. "We need to break out before then. You analyze the Prismasphere, right, Gelata? Could you figure out how Frieza made those ki walls he's trying to smash us with?"
"If I could examine them closely enough, and without distraction," Gelata said. "However, Frieza is going to be shooting at us, and I must confess I am going to find that distracting."
"Never mind," Pan said. "Ember, you're like this master Prismatist, right? If she figured out how Frieza made those walls, you could take them apart?"
"You pick up strategy fast, I'll give you that. You've only fought me twice and her once, and you've already figured out how we do things. She creates the spells, I use them."
"You remind me of my friends, Tien and Chaotzu." If they were both unrepentant jerks, Pan thought, but she didn't say that last part. "I think if I can get Frieza riled up enough, he'll focus his fire on me and leave you two alone long enough for you to get through that wall of Vile Energy. Once you do that, it'll be a small matter to smash the physical wall behind it. Then you guys can escape." That thing was so rusty, it wouldn't take a martial artist to breach it. A forceful sneeze could knock it over.
"We can escape. Not you," Ember said.
"I can't leave until I've stopped him," Pan said.
"I knew it. You want to fight him," Ember said. "I remember how you talked about him in the palace. I saw your face when he stepped onto the balcony just now. You don't give a damn how dangerous he is; I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of the appeal. It'd be just like a Saiyan."
Pan bit her lip. She did care about the danger, and even more now that it was Ember and Gelata who'd suffer the consequences if her gambit didn't work. Yet hadn't she told Bonpara she wanted to fight one of the Colds herself? That she wanted to meet the nut who wouldn't take 'you lose' for an answer? Wasn't that one of the last things she said before she'd been swept to Ketchyn?
She threw a pinecone at the wall. "This isn't the time to be parsing my motives. There's no telling when… it's starting."
Ember and Gelata couldn't sense what Pan did, but they knew what it meant when the door creaked. It shuddered, opened a crack. Shuddered again. Dust and gravel fell from the ceiling.
It stopped. The mechanism behind it whined, high-pitched and grinding. Pan wanted to cover her ears.
Instead, she returned to her Super Saiyan form.
The door exploded, ripped straight from its hinges by wave of ki. By the time it hit the floor, there wasn't anything left but faint ash.
"Broken garbage," Frieza said. "I fixed it. Carry on."
Another wall of Vile energy appeared behind them. Ember instinctively moved away from it…
"Look out!"
Pan shoulder-tackled him and knocked him to the ground, recovering just in time to block the death beam that would have hit him square in the chest.
Pan appreciated strong opponents. She appreciated fair fights. She had to admit, though, she'd feel a lot better about her current strong opponent if he wasn't basing this fight on such a twisted definition of "fair."
ooo
When Frieza's energy receded to become indistinguishable from the Vile barrier, Pan grew equal parts intrigued and suspicious. She knew he couldn't mask his own ki signature, nor read hers beyond a certain point; that struck her as a limitation native to Ketchyn that only Incendria had overcome. Therefore, he had to still be inside the lodge. Retreating, though? She doubted it. He was planning something. Something terrible. Pan couldn't wait to see what it was.
The inside of the lodge proper disguised its machinery well. Cultivated trees and false stone provided strategic cover. Dirt piled over the floor. Vines wove through the walls. There was a time Pan wouldn't have been able to tell this wasn't natural, that the lodge hadn't been built overtop a rocky stretch of ground. In her corrupted Super Saiyan form, she could feel the armature over which this convincing sculpture of nature had been hung, just as she'd been able to feel the false walls in the mass grave. This was no more a real forest than the "prey" trapped here ever had a real chance of escaping, or the "hunters" a real chance of being hurt.
No sign of Frieza hiding on the set, though.
"Damn, I wish he hadn't destroyed my scouter," Ember said.
"It wouldn't do you any good," Pan said. "I'm a walking scouter and there's too much interference from that Vile barrier for me to pinpoint exactly where he's gone."
"We'll have to use our heads," Gelata said. "We've already seen the kind of ambushes he prefers, with his attacking Ember from the balcony and right outside that door. We know he's going to fire on us. We'll have to think like he does. What's the most advantageous position for him to take? Where would we least expect to find him? When he strikes, it will be subtle and clever."
They emerged from a dense collection of trees to find a pulsing ball of plasma concealing the whole roof. It rested on the tip of Frieza's finger.
"Or he could just drop a Supernova on us," Gelata said.
He did drop it, too, cackling the whole time.
Pan didn't even have a split second to appreciate the sadistic brilliance of the move. He'd known, after his initial attack, they would seek cover, and that his barrier would mask him until it was too late to stop him. The Supernova wasn't just a world-clearer, it was a world-destroyer, and if Pan let it hit the ground, Ketchyn and a good chunk of its inhabitants would be torn to pieces. But if she stopped it, that would take all her strength and attention. She'd have nothing left to defend Ember or Gelata, and that was tantamount to signing their death warrants. Theirs or all of Ketchyn's. That was the Hobson's choice Frieza had left her.
Knowing that didn't give her any way out of it. In the end it was no choice at all. She had to save Ketchyn. Pan flew to meet the descending ki and caught it hard in the chest. That, too, was a trap. He'd laced it with Vile energy and it snapped at her like a thousand lashes.
"Green… wave… deflection."
Pan was overtaxed as it was, and the shield took energy she didn't have to spare. The strain on her muscles tightened to a burn. It was ineffective on top of it, as the Vile wave that couldn't get her through the barrier found her through the Green Wave she channeled to create it. The pain was a paradox of flame and ice, and it drained her and threatened to knock her back to base.
Frieza admired his handiwork, then left it.
She doubled her efforts. Ember had put up a decent fight against her. Perhaps he could hold his own until she could get free and they could fight together.
The earth echoed her frustration, shuddering. Ancient metal whined and showered the grass with rust.
Frieza stopped beside her. Maybe he changed his mind and decided to kill her first. If so, she was in a bad position.
"All right," He said. "You've piqued my curiosity. That shield is the only Prismatic technique you know, but it's a shock you know any. How did you manage to learn it?"
Pan resisted the urge to respond with, 'a little busy right now.' If Frieza was mocking her, he wasn't killing everyone else. "When I stayed in the palace, Princess Incendria taught me how to make it."
He was a little too amused. "Is that so? Your form is impeccable. I'd never have guessed you had so little practice. Not bad for a gibbon."
Some part of Pan must not have taken the compliment in the spirit in which it was given, because the ground trembled again, and this time the pink energy returned with it, spreading in perfect circles below.
"You're doing that, too, aren't you?" Frieza asked.
Pan looked away.
"I thought as much. May I apologize for my outburst earlier? I don't enjoy destroying talent like yours, and I'd been harboring the foolish hope you might be some Son family black sheep I could talk into betraying them and joining me, but no. Your great-grandfather, your grandfather, and your father were hopelessly fatuous, and you just had to be the same way."
"That's not true. My dad is really smart," Pan said.
He laughed. There was a hum to it, a sound that didn't match the giant's body he wore. "May I have your name?"
"It's Pan."
"Well, Pan, I don't know who those people are to you, but I'm going to kill them now, and there's nothing you can do to stop me. Does that sting you the way it would have stung the rest of your family?I think it does."
Ember stood his ground as Frieza landed before him. He dropped his center of gravity, testing his balance and bracing for impact.
Impact came in the form of venomous energy flaring and raining down upon them like meteors. Ember deflected them with a green barrier.
He said something. Pan was no lip-reader, but she thought it looked like 'just a little closer.'
She didn't know what it meant, but she knew it wouldn't be enough. Ember darted like he didn't know which way to go, dodging the blades Frieza hurled as if he had no idea how to really escape them. Ember had felt so strong when he fought her. What was he doing now? Protecting Gelata at the cost of his own life? But if he fell, the scientist would die seconds later, if it even took that long.
Pan struggled to fight away the ki that still held her trapped. She had to break free.
"Red Wave Snare!"
Like a hidden net, strings of red light fell from the trees and ground, ensnaring Frieza. Ember didn't even wait for them to finish. He gathered energy and fired.
"Firedrake Bite!"
Not just once, twice, then rapid-fire, until the trees snapped and the dust ballooned for the quantity. He didn't wait for it to clear, either; he attacked the spot.
"Blue Wave Razor Rain!"
Blue threads converged on the red ones glowing beneath the dust cloud, and still Ember wasn't done. He hurled himself at it full-power, springing and putting every ounce of distance and speed into his fist.
The dust concealed them both.
It settled, revealing a horrifying picture.
Ember stood with his arm extended, his knuckles at Frieza's chest. His form was perfect, his execution flawless, and Frieza had no stronger reaction to it than a bronze statue would have to a child slapping it.
The red thread holding him in place faded to indigo, indigo faded to violet, and it liquefied and clung to Frieza like muck.
Frieza flicked his wrist and it gushed from him. It struck Ember so hard he flew across the ground, carving a deep ditch through the sculpted stone the whole way. He dug his fingers into the dirt just in time to stop himself from hitting a wall of Vile energy.
That did him no good, because another hurtled straight at him.
"You have nowhere to run, Captain," Frieza said.
Ember summoned a shield, but the laceration shattered it.
Pan screamed and the pink energy simmering across the floor erupted.
The simultaneous explosions cracked the ground, dispersing the Vile energy it touched. The soupy walls merely regrew like fungus, but the laceration's blades dissolved and stayed that way.
The aftershocks had started.
An aftershock beam slammed into Frieza's Supernova and dissolved that, too. The combustion shook the lodge so hard the walls crumbled, leaving only the toothpick-house outline of the supports and the Vile walls to the lodge's shape like some morbid gelatin mold.
Another caught Pan's shoulder and burned her skin.
She ignored the pain. Pan didn't have much time before her own Super Saiyan form became as much of a danger to her as her enemy. She appeared before Frieza and kicked him hard enough to send him through two more doors. She flew to him and threw another. He met her blow-for-blow.
"I thought you were sticking to ki attacks until we reached the second half of the gauntlet," Pan said.
"This is the second half of the gauntlet," Frieza said, gesturing to the door Pan had knocked him through.
"I have something to apologize for, too." Pan said. "The lodge. I'd never have brought you back here if I knew."
It was difficult to tell what he was thinking. He didn't sound particularly angry when he spoke. "You Sons never tire of making me ill. If you're worried about my feelings, don't bother. I learned something from King Flare. I learned what he did works. It worked for the Tuffles against the Plantians. It worked for the Saiyans against the Tuffles. It worked for Flare against me and it worked for me against your ancestors. By the way; that Earth of yours? I wouldn't dig too deeply into the soil there if I were you."
An aftershock shot from the ground and they both had to move. It burned the ground between them.
Catching Pan by the arm, Frieza jammed his nails right into the spot where the aftershock had hit her earlier. "So that's your secret. You're doing that, all right, but you have no control over it."
The pain didn't cloud Pan's mind so much she couldn't clamp down hard on his wrist. "In the sense that I can't direct the aftershocks, you're right. That doesn't mean I can't get them where I want them. They've got a default target. The same default target as a Holstein Shock."
Frieza stared at her hand, and the pink energy spreading below them, and she could tell from his expression he knew exactly what she meant.
Eerie, how harmless that energy looked. Piercing the Vile dark the way it did, it was almost comforting. Pan wouldn't think so when it hit her. Neither would Frieza, though.
If that frightened him, he was doing an uncharacteristically good job of hiding it. In Pan's peripheral vision, she could see Ember dragging Gelata out of the blast radius. Good.
Frieza narrowed his eyes. "Do you imagine you're the first person to try that little trick against me?"
He broke free just as the pink energy domed, but to Pan's surprise, he didn't simply flee. He grabbed her by the shoulders and hurled her at the ground.
The aftershock burst forth and missed them both. It hit the last of the ceiling, however, and with a rumble and a scream of metal it caved in straight from the middle, some kind of horrible rusted waterfall pouring pipes and asbestos right across the middle of the hunting ground. Pan flipped and landed on one knee. Frieza descended and came to rest across from her.
There was now a massive pile of junk between them.
Frieza held his palms up to his eyes, and there it was again; blood on his skin, when Pan was certain she had not hit him. Even if the aftershock had connected, it wouldn't have left a wound like that, a slash running diagonally across his chest from just beneath one shoulder to his waist. It wasn't the only damage he'd sustained, either; before Pan's eyes, his arm also began to bleed.
"So that's your secret," Pan said.
Frieza shook the blood from his hand, dazed. The earthquake was a continuous presence now.
"Your resurrection is conditional. You haven't been attacking me when the Vile Wave crests so you'll be stronger, but because you aren't alive to do it in the daytime. You come back at midnight and you die again at dawn. Earlier than that if you get beat up enough."
"You speak of forces you don't understand," Frieza said. "Do you think this means I can't defeat you?"
"Tonight, it does," Pan said.
On impulse, she stuck out her tongue at him.
After everything Pan had seen on this bizarre planet, she was still utterly unprepared for what happened next.
Frieza, in his tattered cloak and drenched in his own blood, returned her raspberry.
"Real mature, your highness!" Pan stuck out her tongue again, determined to have the last word; which she did, because another earthquake and set of aftershocks brought down the rest of the roof and she couldn't see him at all after that.
When he didn't break through the rubble after her, Pan knew he was gone.
She should have waited until his energy completely faded, but the quaking threatened to destroy what little of the lodge their fight had left standing. So she sent the legendary Super Saiyan home and became plain old Pan once again, with eyes that didn't glow and black hair that was, at this point, a mess. She smoothed it out as much as she could before tying her bandanna back in place. The ground stilled as her heartbeat returned to normal.
She staggered to the final door in the room, where Gelata and Ember waited for her. By the time she reached it, there was no longer any need to break through the Vile energy. It had vanished on its own shortly after Frieza did. There wasn't even any reason to use the exit he'd made. The lodge was so destroyed red morning light poured in unobstructed, casting the rubble in a Martian light. The few girders and planks left hanging swayed precariously.
"What happened?" Ember asked. "Is he…"
"No," Pan said. "But we've bought ourselves another day. Let's get out of here."
"I'm glad we didn't have to take that Vile wall apart after all," Gelata said. "Have you heard of a Highwayman's Hitch? It's a type of knot comes undone instantly if you pull the right thread. That wall is like an energy version, and… without time to..."
They spoke no more as they passed through the closest rift exposing the fake hunting ground to the true moors outside. They didn't leave a moment too soon. The pitching supports tipped and crumbled, the sunken foundation gave way, rendering the place the lodge once stood as flat as the rest of the ground. The only thing left was a single metal wall, a remnant of the old execution chamber. Written on the wall in violet Reizomorph blood was a message:
Hell beyond hell comes
That fell, too. The breeze carried the rust away like bloody snow.