Chapter Twenty-Four
Dawn brought clarity Pan had not expected.
She lay on soft earth underneath half a quilt. A red shaft split the dark and cast itself like a spotlight on the center of the cistern. Frieza sat there, gazing up at the only exit. What form was this? It fell somewhere between the first and final, small and aerodynamic but also sharp and lightly armored, with a sheen that in the glare looked tarnished.
She propped herself up on one elbow.
He'd been watching for the movement. "Good morning, Pan."
"The well," She said. "Solid stone. Underground. Why didn't I think of that?"
"The Vile Wave might not have gotten in, but those wraiths surely could have. It would have been a death trap."
"And I'd make a poor hostage dead."
The spotlight and the metal sheen cast shadows all wrong as he walked. Had she made him angry? Would she have to fight in the bottom of the well after all? But he only knelt before her, not in deference, but to study her at eye-level.
"Goku isn't coming, is he?" Frieza asked.
The shake of Pan's head was almost imperceptible.
"Then I have no need for a hostage."
She'd cried herself dry last night so no new tears came, but the pain was no less raw for it. "Am I alive? Is that daylight up there, or fire?"
"You're wondering how I'm speaking to you instead of falling to pieces. I've removed the last traces of the afterlife from myself. It turns out that mirror shard wasn't just limiting my time, but also my strength. Tell me, Pan; what do you think you have to fear from the flames?"
She pulled away from him, or at least tried to, but he'd sat on the quilt so she didn't get as far as she'd have liked. "Don't pretend you didn't hear me last night. I remember. I told you how Grandpa died."
"Do you think the outcome would have been different if you weren't there? Don't you remember how he let Vegeta recover because he wouldn't fight him injured? How he let me attain my perfect form? How he healed Cell? If Goku had thought for a moment he wasn't facing this Omega at his best, he'd have given him those dragon balls himself, because otherwise the fight wouldn't have been fair."
The guilt had built up for years, so long it had taken a life of its own. That guilt insisted he was wrong. In Pan's mind and heart, though, she knew every word Frieza said was true.
"You didn't kill Goku. He died in battle with a powerful enemy, just like he always wanted. I regret I couldn't be that enemy, but at least Vegeta was denied the privilege, too. See? I'm still capable of spite."
Pan tightened her arms around her knees. Grandpa had always seen the best in everyone, and she wanted to be like him, but if Frieza believed her now, why was he here? Why hadn't he let those monsters devour her?
"You're suspicious," He said. "With good reason. Surviving a week on Ketchyn after being raised on a planet like Earth is no mean feat. It must have been quite the shock. On your world, honor is a goal to attain. Here it's an excuse to exploit so we can lie and steal and murder and look at ourselves in the mirror, confident our hands are clean because we did it all by the rules. Rules we wrote and then called the natural order. Since that fateful day your grandfather shared his own life force with me to last night, holding that list of names in my lap, I spent a lot of energy trying to keep that house of cards propped up in my head. I defended it to the last measly deuce. Now that it's fallen, though, I feel so calm. As if the worst is over. Natural order? Ha! Every annexation, every torture, every execution, was a choice we made. A choice I made. I told myself it was the only one that worked."
He removed his fist from the dirt and placed it in his lap. The ground was bloody.
"It was the wrong choice, and if it worked, I wouldn't be here."
Frieza was right; Ketchyn had made Pan suspicious. Did she dare believe him?
"However," he continued, and Pan was almost relieved there was a catch, "I'm not ready to acknowledge your path as the right one, either. I've seen kingdoms embrace compassion and crumble under its dead weight. I've seen integrity paid lip service by tyrants who make me look like an angel. I've personally crushed those who stood against me with nothing but their own bravery for a shield. Your virtue has failed before my eyes as surely as King Flare's vice. Are you willing to fight for it?"
Frieza drew closer to her. The stone amplified his voice.
"Are you willing to fight me for it, one last time, now that you've rested properly and I've perfected my Vile Form? You won't be saved by a time limit. I won't be able to regenerate; at least, no more than I ever could. There'll be no handicaps, self-imposed or otherwise, nothing to stop the battle from reaching its conclusion. If it's you, I will…" He swallowed, the words stinging his mouth even as he spoke them, "I will give up my grudge and honor the request your grandfather made after defeating me on Namek."
"And if it's you?" Pan asked.
"I return to my empire to see what I can sort out from there. If you want to come with me, the offer is still open."
A drop of water fell from above, into the last small puddle the well hadn't given up. Ripples spread from its center to its edges. The surface regained its glassy calm in silence.
"I will fight you," Pan said. She'd never accepted a challenge with such conviction before. This time she wasn't trying to fill her grandpa's impossible shoes, prove her superiority, or even test out Frieza's impressive new form. This time, the lingering memory of Eis's grinning litany of accusations mixed with the stories Frieza told her of planets like Kuhn, of anonymous kindnesses paid from the shadows. These masks had to be broken, and if her fist was the only thing that would break them, that's what she'd use. She would fight. She would win.
He jerked his head towards the opening of the well. "Up there. When you're ready. Oh, and one more thing."
He pulled from the folds of his cloak her bandanna. In the intensity of the morning, she hadn't even realized it was missing. He tied it in place.
"I said I wanted you at your best, so you'll need this. It's lucky, isn't it?"
He looked like a wraith himself as he left the well, cape trailing, leaving Pan with her hand on her head and burning creeping into her cheeks.
ooo
Pan was halfway up the mouth of the well when the stone ground. She hurtled and powered up just as the bricks collapsed in on her, pouring from above like a waterfall. She punched through them, shielding herself with her aura, and emerged into sun-like light.
Pale light it was, too; the brightest morning the old town had known in a century, sunless though it may have been. Orange light shifted beneath the branches, fell through the remnants of homes, cleaning them of primal shadows.
This town still harbored one shadow, though. Frieza hovered over a partial wall beside an overgrown forest path, his fine profile in relief, his hands reaching to the sky. It was the first she'd seen him in full daylight and the sight was impressive. The bricks poured back out of the well at his command, wrapped him in a sphere. He threw them again. This time, they tore through the air towards Pan an open-mouthed snake.
Harnessing light in her hands, she burned the stone to ash. It flaked around her and floated to the ground.
Frieza fired two lacerations simultaneously, crossing one hand over the other. The energy plowed up splinters.
One swipe and two; she deflected them both. The dirt rolled over Pan in a wave, but the Vile energy behind it was gone.
Frieza appeared beside her and delivered a blow to the center of her chest. It hurled her into the ground.
Pan got right to her feet. Eis's words still rung in her head, her every failure and misstep. This wouldn't be one of them. She wasn't adding Frieza to the list of people she'd let down.
So much conflict tangled within her; there wasn't room inside her to contain them. Golden flame erupted from her. She let it happen. From the place Pan had fallen, the dust parted, and the Super Saiyan rose.
"And there it is," Frieza said. "The one nightmare I couldn't leave behind me with this planet. A warning my ancestor Chilled passed down to me along with the gift of his mirror."
It was enough hesitation for Pan to lash out. The punch threw Frieza into a tree, and it snapped in half. He returned fire before the trunk even hit the ground. Energy blossomed in the sky and rained to the ground as they clashed.
"You call that mirror a gift?"
"Look what it's made of me," Frieza said. "The strength it's bestowed upon me."
"As bait. The mirror is a trap. That's what Cooler is so afraid of. If you keep using it, it'll trigger a planet-wide Backlash nothing on Ketchyn could survive, not even you."
"That wasn't its intended purpose," Frieza said. "Like all the worst evils, it began as an attempt at doing good."
Deep inside Pan's instincts noticed the opening before she was consciously aware of it; a thread of a crack in Frieza's stance, just enough for a Masenko to pierce. The light smote him. He fell to the ground. He lay a moment. Slowly, the ground rocked back and forth. Pan landed, her aura flickering from golden to its corrupted pink.
She held her fist in place.
"What do you mean?" She asked.
He leapt on her, trailing dust.
"Surely you've figured out what attacked you last night," He said.
Beads of sweat flew from Pan's forehead. For all his talk, he wasn't even slowing down. "I heard those phantoms of Incendria and Polrene call them Vile Wraiths, but for all I know, that was just another hallucination."
"No, that was the truth. But don't you know what they are, other than King Flare's unofficial family garbage disposal?"
Pan had been so busy watching his hands that she forgot about his tail, and was rewarded with a swat to the head that sent her flying.
The wind tore at her, but she recovered, returning to Frieza. An Aftershock bubbled. Pan couldn't stop it, but she was so tuned into the fight that she felt it coming and avoided it, navigating her own negative energy like an expert sailor would navigate a storm.
The energy boiled under Frieza. He smothered it with a well-placed boulder.
"Chilled didn't intend his mirror to be an instrument of vengeance at first. He designed it to resurrect his grandson, Kuriza," He said.
Pan shielded her eyes from the dust. "What?"
"Oh, yes; Chilled's Mirror was to be our dragon balls, the magic that would erase the scars of King Flare's depredation. And what more fitting place to test it than here, the site of one of his most brutal massacres? Only when the ritual was complete, it wasn't the slaughtered women and children who passed alive through the mirror's surface. It was those wraiths. Chilled could only revive the wickedest and most violent dead, and them only as monsters."
"What do you have to do to raise somebody?"
Frieza must have suddenly found his feet as cute as Pan did, because he stopped and fixed his eyes directly on them as he mumbled, "I don't want to talk about it."
Pan could have taken the free shot, but it didn't feel right, so she snapped her fingers in front of his face. "I mean, do you know why didn't it work on anyone else?"
"That question, I can answer. The rift he made in space to focus the Vile Wave only opens to Hell, so it is only from Hell the dead can be summoned. Furthermore, Hell keeps its inhabitants separate from their bodies, and only returns them to inflict physical torture. If you don't perform the resurrection in one of these narrow margins where your target's spirit and body are together, you get a wraith. If you do make the window, you get something like me. Well? Are you not impressed?"
The ground rolled like the sea, unrestrained, but Pan did not let it frighten her.
"Then let me impress you."
He held his hands out. Pan recognized the gesture; it was the one Ember had used to paralyze her. She was ready to deflect it at a moment's notice, but the Red Wave never came. Instead, Vile energy, the kind Frieza wove into his barriers, gathered between his hands in a pulsing glob.
He kneaded it like clay, and as he did, it grew in size and darkness, as if he held the night sky in his hands.
He thrust his hand to the sky and the darkness blotted out the dawn as it spread, glowing like a black light. Pan felt its heat on her skin as surely as she felt its dark life… anti-life?... deep inside. It took shape, solidified; and she recognized it, a Vile Supernova.
Pan remembered the last time he'd used this, how she'd struggled to hold it. This time it would be different. She crouched, focusing her energy between he fingers. She'd have to time it just right…
"Ka… me…" she said.
The Supernova shuddered and expanded again. So did the glimmer in Pan's hands.
"Ha… me…"
Frieza threw the Supernova.
"Ha!"
The light shot from Pan's fingers and crashed into the darkness. The earth shook with vigor. The aftershocks rained from below even as dust and debris rained from above. The Kamehameha stopped the Supernova mid-air, but Frieza didn't release it. He focused more energy into it. Pan lost ground.
The Supernova shuddered again and stayed in place. Then it rocked backwards, just a bit. Then more. Frieza tried to find more energy, but there was none left; the attack was at its limit, and its limit was not enough.
The golden light in Pan's hands exploded. The Supernova sailed back to Frieza. He boiled in his own attack, and then Pan's Kamehameha hit him, too.
The dust cleared and he stood, dazed, but still on his feet. He was open and Pan was about to launch another attack, but then it was unnecessary. Frieza collapsed, smoke rising from his body. Blood dripped from his mouth. Pan landed, breathing hard.
"You spoke of choices before," Pan said. "You can make a different choice this time. Get rid of the mirror."
Instead, he yelled. Pink sparks flew from his palm. It was the last bit of energy he had to fight with, but if it connected, it would be enough. Pan remembered Grandpa telling her about this; Frieza's favorite last resort, the Death Saucer.
She closed the distance between them and stood with her face inches from his.
"What? Do you think the attack won't be effective at this range? You couldn't be more wrong, Super Saiyan. The legends spoke of a ruthless warrior, the sort of living weapon the destroyers of the Tuffles would call a hero, and yet you and your grandfather present yourselves as would-be avengers of the fallen. Let me show you how far that will get you."
"Psst. Look down."
So focused on forming his saucer was he, Frieza failed to notice Pan had flattened her hand right over his chest, a Burst glowing on her fingertips.
The razor edge of the saucer was so close to her skin she could feel its spin disturbing the hairs on her arm. Yet even so, she inched closer.
Pan tasted the blood on his cheek.
The Death Saucer dissolved, the energy dissipating harmlessly. "Did you just lick my face?"
"I won," Pan said, holding her hand out to him. "Are you going to keep your word?"
Frieza stared at his palm, the dirt and blood, his sharp nails.
"I will," He said, taking it. She helped him to his feet.
Pan stroked his fingers.
It wasn't something she'd thought about doing. She just did it, and she flushed instantly. Frieza looked distinctly uncomfortable; his hand tensed beneath hers, and his face went as blank as he could make it. Pan turned away. First she'd thrown herself into his arms last night, and now this.
The ground shook and a pink dome formed under their feet, forcing them both to leap away from each other, and the Aftershock that pierced the ground and sky.
"If I might make a suggestion," Frieza said, "Consider powering down before we return to Blendarr."
"I… forgot," Pan said.
Awkward as the exchange had been, the victory surged through Pan's blood as it would have any Saiyan. Frieza fell in beside her on the forest path. She'd found a new ally in the last possible place she'd expected.
Now all she had to do was break the news to Ember, Gelata, and the Para Brothers.