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Goku inhaled slowly, urging his body to stop trembling with emotions, trying to ready himself. All of the pain, frustration, self-loathing, heart ache, regret and guilt, he brought it all up, unshackling them and allowing them to bottle up. The mental pressure was tremendous for that second he maintained that breath, threatening to implode on his state of mind and cripple him, leave him worse than dead. For one second, Goku felt everything.
He exhaled.
Dropping into his favored fighting stance, he dragged his rear foot through the dirt until he had an adequate foothold and braced against it, readied to either defend or attack, whichever the case may be. Striding out from the crater her transformation had created, Sel looked absolutely calm for the situation, and her ki felt at ease. What's more, what power they could sense was barely even higher than that of her previous form, and nobody knew what to make of that.
"Really now Goku, must you always rush into things? I'm sure you would like to savor this moment while it lasts. You: the so far undefeated champion of Earth facing off against me - the greatest threat to the planet you have ever faced." She lifted her arms and gestured broadly with her hands, now deceptively delicate looking. "Surely you take a thrill in the moments of uncertainty just before a fight. When neither side truly knows the capabilities of the other and it becomes a race to see who can get a read on the other first." She chuckled lightly, disarmingly. "I know I am. This is the first time I've actually gone up against someone whose capabilities I do not truly know. You are so full of surprises."
She cooed the last bit, as if praising a small child, and Goku blasted towards her.
Their initial contact couldn't even be seen by the bystanders, flashing by faster than the light traveled to their eyes. It actually seemed that when they reappeared, Sel blocking Goku's high kick with her forearm, they had only just started the fight. She retaliated with a ludicrously fast punch but the golden warrior jumped just over the attack, bringing both legs in tight before shooting them out again, the force of which was absorbed in outstretched palms that bent back just enough to travel the full distance that the momentum allowed before clamping down around both ankles and pushing him back and up, flipping him head over heels.
Stepping into a kick, Sel attempted to connect it with Goku's back as he fell, but the wily fighter vanished in a squeal of high speed movement, reappearing several feet away as he landed nimbly and without harm on both feet. He came rushing back with a punch that she evaded quickly, skipping back a step, but he pressed his advantage and kept he on the retreat, flying towards her and swinging fists as fast as he could. She kept up, blocking and dodging as they came, but she was undeniably being pressed backwards, though the expectant smile never left her lips.
At last, his knuckles slammed into her chin, knocking her head to the side. The next hit found her in the stomach, bringing her feet off the ground and into the path of his follow up sweeping kick. She vanished just as the leg came into contact, slashing through her dissolving figure harmlessly. Goku took pursuit and they both were invisible for a few long moments before a boom of sound came from the air above and Goku was falling at an angle thanks to a sneaky kick.
Flipping over, he darted his eyes around to try and reacquire his opponent, spotting her as she zipped down in a curve, unleashing a flurry of ki bullets in his direction. Batting at them with the front and back of his hands, Goku kept track of the absorber as she panned the island, keeping the pressure on him while searching for an opening.
She apparently found one as she turned at a ninety degree angle and torpedoed at him, following the tail end of her barrage. Goku readied himself for another offensive, but Sel threw a curve ball instead and proceeded past him, ignoring him completely. Twisting to keep her in sight, Goku was sucker punched from behind as the afterimage fizzled into nothing, opening him up for two more punches that slammed into his back with more than enough strength to pulverize rock and warp metal.
Grunting, Goku spun around and kicked at her face, blocked by a crossed arm guard but managing to break her attack. He sped off a short distance to gain some distance, but Sel was hot on his heels, arm drawn back for another devastating blow. He kept retreating, skipping backwards as he danced around the punches that came within hairs breadths of connecting. He weaved around a downward plunge and brought both fists up to collide with her jaw, craning her neck back to its limits.
Letting his feet come out from under him, he landed on both hands and brought his heels screaming up at her, crashing against her waist and flinging her away from him. Sel was stunned for half a second, and that was all the time Goku needed to flip over her head, grabbing on either side of it, and bringing her bodily over to smash face first into the ground.
Sel didn't stay grounded for long, and rolled to the side as the saiyan's foot slammed through the ground where she had just been before vanishing from sight. She made her reappearance some ways up in the air, index and middle fingers held before her forehead. Goku, having a rather understandable wariness of this attack, took to the air as well, trying to bridge the gap between them before she fully charged the Special Beam Cannon.
She grinned widely at him, and that was the only hint he had before she brought her other hand out from behind her back with orange energy blooming into life for a second as she unleashed the point blank Masenko. Taking it straight to the chest, Goku was blasted off his feet, his abused orange gi top finally giving up the ghost and falling away in the wake of the ki wave.
Landing at the other end of the island, it took him a second to stand back up, now breathing heavier than he had while fighting Gohan. Sel smugly stayed stationary, giving her opponent a chance for recovery.
'She wasn't kidding about being a whole lot stronger,' Goku admitted to himself. Sel was not even comparable to the level she had been at before, and that had already been much higher than a normal super saiyan's level of strength. Granted he was leagues higher than that himself, and had yet to tap into the full depths of his mastered power, but still, it wouldn't hurt to show some caution.
At what was tentatively a safe distance from the clashing of titans, the rest of the Z-Fighters watched in silent regard of a spectacle well above themselves. They had each seen supposedly impossible feats, and beings with power so vast that it defied logic. They had also seen someone else rise to match, and then surpass all of those threats, to become what the situation needed him to be. They had seen the rise of a hero, some from humble beginnings, others as the the larger than life figure told about in stories. Goku was the one that had saved the Earth time and time again, doing the impossible and overcoming the invincible. He was the champion of Earth, of those that could not fight the battles he could, and even of the galaxy if the situation was large enough. He was the singular point on which the cataclysmic events would hinge, the turning point that determined whether or not they would see victory or defeat.
For the complete lack of confidence they had in his decision to allow Sel to absorb Seventeen, they still had an adamant faith in him himself. All except for one...
"So, I've got to ask:" Sel spoke up, voice raised to cover the distance. "Did you actually put a rabbit man on the moon?"
This took Goku as something of a surprise. "What?"
"Gero tried to gather information on your years before you took on the Red Ribbon Army, and there was a local legend somewhere about a kid with a monkey tail who had put a rabbit person and his two cronies on the surface of the moon, and Gero guessed that was you. Is is it true?"
"I-" Goku hesitated for a moment before, crouching lower into the Turtle stance. "You won't distract me that easily!"
Sel shrugged dispassionately. "I was actually curious, but you're right: mustn't let this fight drag on more than it has to." She seemed to be perfectly at ease, but they could all tell that her power hadn't dropped at all – a viper coiled to strike.
They once again appraised each other, searching for weakness and openings that may have newly manifested. For Goku, this was a matter of difficulty, seeing that Sel refused to actually assume a fighting stance, which meant that she looked to have dozens of vulnerabilities, when she could very well be ready to guard any number of them. This meant that he couldn't rely on any of this information, lest he stumble like a novice into a trap. His only course of action apparent was to draw her into making the real first move or, barring that, keep his focus solely on defensive strategies.
They both moved so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell who had acted first. Colliding with a brief exchange of blows, they arced upwards, reappearing to the watchers every few seconds as they halted their ascent long enough to block a shin, or throw a straight. They looked to be in a stalemate, neither of them really able to get one over on the other, and nobody could tell yet who had the stronger ki energy.
Canceling a punch with one of her own, Sel moved fluidly to match her enemy, berry red eyes darting up and down, left and right to watch his body in action, reading his attacks as they came and reacting as best she could in the time she had. She had to admit that Goku truly was a savant when it came to martial artists (probably and idiot savant, but that was bordering on being nasty). His moves were polished to a crystal shine and his movements were a beautiful economy and display, stringing one into another with a flawless grace that spoke of countless hours training. Gero's records on his fighting ability marked him as top-tier, doubtlessly one of the best, but even those failed to accurately depict his mastery and control. It was like nothing she had ever encountered before, and it was the greatest exhilaration of her life, save attaining perfection. Here was somebody to whom fighting wasn't just a means or even an end; to him it was the problem, the solution, the whole of the situation. He didn't view the world in black and white, or even in grays, but as an explosion of colors, the light spectrum redefined with every fight he walked away from and every shred of strength that he earned, either through exertion or survival.
She could now see why it was that Goku was her destined adversary, why she had been directed to destroy him before she even had sentient thought: this was her ultimate challenge, this was the very pinnacle of opposition that she had to face. Anything less and she'd have neglected her duty and destiny, opting for the easy road. Screw that! She hadn't striven for perfection for decades just to skimp out now that she had it. She would use it, experiment with what she could now accomplish with all of this planet shattering might in every bone, every inch of muscle. She didn't fight for Gero, never had; she fought for herself, and she would continue to do so for as long as she fought.
Matching Goku blow for blow, block for block, Sel had never felt happier.
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Sixteen was unable to move or talk, but he was still aware of what was taking place around him. His entire frame had suffered catastrophic damage, as well as his primary and secondary operating systems. His tertiary -extreme emergencies only- systems were doing everything they could to reroute sufficient power from his crippled functions to the bare bones necessary for continued functionality.
This meant that, while his personality matrix was still functional within his CPU, a necessity to determine self-prognosis, all other features of his digital mind were inert. Specifically: his prime directive, his mission to kill Goku, no longer held any relevance while the desperate and limited self-repairs took place. He was free, for the time being, from the evil machinations of Dr. Gero and his twisted desire for revenge.
Unable to see through his actual eyes, he instead relied on his internal energy sensors to paint the picture for him. Through the code and numbers, he "saw" that he was with the other fighters, the ones he had been aligned against not so very long ago. He couldn't tell them all apart based on what were severely diminished power levels, but by his count all of the ones at the island were still present, though one was unnaturally higher than the others, even at rest. Could this be Trunks?
But what he was soon focusing entirely on were the two monolithic powers that were registering all over the place, moving faster than his sensors could detect continuously. Both were far, far beyond any other power he had ever seen, or even heard of, and were entirely stable, as opposed to the frighteningly volatile energy Trunks had exhibit with his powered up form. He couldn't see any other truth than that one of the monstrous energies was Cell – why else would a fight be taking place so soon after the insectoid's appearance? But the other was a mystery to him, and that was almost as alarming.
While he couldn't tell which was which, he did take note of something that worried him; one of the powers was exactly matching the other one, keeping up with every minute rise and fall. What this meant, he could only surmise, but his...instinct told him that it would prove to be very bad before the end.
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Goku was feeling the strain. He had been as conservative with his energy as he could, defensive where he couldn't, but he knew full well that he was deep into his reserves. His muscles seared like live wires, protesting with every motion. He had jumped from one all-out fight directly into another without any recovery, and he was paying. Sel, on the other hand, looked vibrant with energy and every blow felt equally as strong as the last. Whatever was keeping her going would doubtlessly oitlast his.
Catching a kick scant inches from his face with an upraised arm, he ducked under the next and shot to the side to avoid the third. Launching upward fist first, he was dodged at the last second and was nearly jabbed in the stomach before bringing his knee up to take the strike and open up an opportunity to bring his fist back down to hammer against her collarbone, staggering her to one side. Grabbing hold of the shoulder he had hit, the saiyan jerked her to his left even as he twisted his whole body around to intercept her movement with a back heel kick.
She reacted in a blur, both hands shooting out to latch on with painful tightness to his calves. Taking a firmer hold, she heaved with her whole body and spun him uncontrollably once, twice, three times before releasing him into the sky. It took him just a moment to regain his bearings and stop his trajectory, but that was all the time she needed to pursue after him and drive a solid fist below his ribs.
Coughing out a small explosion of spit and a few specks of blood, Goku appeared to be stunned – though he quickly proved this wrong when her follow up passed through his vanishing silhouette. Before she could even look around for him, he reappeared right behind her, his backwards kick flying true this time and smashing into the side of her skull, just above where her ear would be under the hair like protrusions. She grunted before pulling a vanishing act of her own.
Goku was immaterial under her touch as she tried to punch him at the nape of his neck, but she proved likewise when he aimed for her vertebrae. They went back and forth, one dodging at hyper sonic speed only to be dodged when they tried to counterattack, making zero progress for several seconds before they both backed off, falling quickly to ground level.
Dashing again towards each other, they entered a blisteringly fast melee, punches and kicks pelting their bodies as they both tried to whittle the other down. Goku broke the deadlock with a small burst of invisible kiai, disrupting the flow of Sel's attacks just enough for him to jump backward. She was after him in an instant, hurtling through the air like a scimitar slicing through the air.
The earth raised Saiyan continued to hop away, keeping his eyes firmly locked on the pursuing android to catch any use of high speed movement. Waiting until she had almost caught up with him, he didn't jump back again when he landed on both feet, but instead threw himself upward in a stationary front flip. He packed a payload of extra energy into his foot as it arced upwards and, with a visible yellow flash, kicked Sel under the chin and threw her back in an unexpected half rotation to tumble gracelessly onto the ground.
"You ass!" she growled as she pushed herself back to her feet. "That move isn't part of any of your fighting styles! Where the hell did you get that from?"
Goku didn't answer, and it was probably best that he didn't. Sel scowled at him in annoyance, quickly cracking her knuckles before dashing toward him, one arm held over her face to provide options if he tried any other new tricks. Goku jabbed twice at her, testing the defense like a boxer, and then he was dodging under and away from her retaliatory outburst. It only lasted for a few seconds, a scant several movements before she had snaked her arm right in between his and gripped him around the throat.
"RAGH!" She bellowed as she heaved with all of her upper body strength and smashed the saiyan into the ground. The island just couldn't take that kind of punishment and actually split into fractions with geysers of rock and dirt shooting up from the breakpoints, seven different shards of an island pushed back from the spot Goku had made landfall. The Z-Fighters were sequestered on their own remnant, drifting at a glacial speed while the waters around them rose up in agonized swells, drenching them and briefly flooding their sanctuary. Massive waves were spreading outwards in an almost perfectly circular ring, growing with distance and speed, and were sure to give some islanders hell very shortly.
"Goku!" Krillin shouted, unable to catch sight of either android or saiyan. The sea frothed, a beast disturbed from its slumber, sheets of foam rendering the surface unreachable by sight. Their senses were hardly any better – not with the fallout of the fight still lingering, acting like chaff to their detection abilities. They watched and waited, powerless to help or intervene in any way. A whole minute had already passed.
Shooting out from the water like bullets, Goku and Sel were furiously grappling as they flew blindly upwards, hands grasping to get a superior hold.
"All of that destruction...and they're not even slowed down!" Tien gawked, lying on his back with the veins taught in his neck as he bit down on the pain wracking his body.
A single ball of ki, maybe no larger than a baseball, zipped down from above and hit one of the other island fragments; immediately, a blinding flash heralded the broken rock's complete destruction. At such close range, the wind from he explosion was enough to make them all cover their faces and flinch away from the yellow light that dyed everything in its path and set everything else in jagged shadows.
The two monsters had broken apart and were flinging rapid fire blasts as they strafed each other around the circumference of where the island had been. The collateral damage from their conflict was skyrocketing, as each missed, dodged or deflected ki charge had enough potential energy to level half a city. Explosions bloomed up in every direction, quickly darkening the sky and giving everything the same flame yellow hue.
Goku knew they couldn't carry on like this; any damage they caused was bad enough, but there were innocents not too far away, and his friends were still right below them. He had to end this here and now. But there were few moves that he could think of that had enough raw force to destroy or seriously harm Sel enough for him to finish her, and the ones that could would take far too much time that he just didn't have. But...
Breaking away from the firefight, the Full Powered Super Saiyan rushed high into the sky, startling Sel enough that she broke off from her own firing to watch him. She was leery though, and didn't pursue. The others too watched in confusion as Goku seemingly left the fight behind, heading higher and higher.
But then he stopped, well above them and only visible when the light had returned to its normal color, albeit with dark clouds still rolling by overhead. He wasn't directly above Sel, but rather at a steep angle that put her between him and the remains of their battlefield. Now was the time for him to act.
Cupping his hands and bringing them in close to his waist, bending his legs even as he hung slanted in the air, and hunching his chest forward, Goku began to pump as much energy as he could, willing it to form between his hands. This is what he should have done in the first place, but his fears had gotten the better of him, and Sel had used that to use him like a damned puppet. Well, he'd just have to make u for that mistake.
"KAAAAAA!"
Below, closer to the ground than to Goku, Sel was taken aback by this unprecedented move by her enemy, but she wasn't overly concerned. Relaxing her stance, she smirked up at the saiyan from Earth, already wise to his trick.
"Nice try Goku, but I know you're just trying to scare me into moving away from your friends. You wouldn't fire at the Earth, not unless I was firing back."
"MEEEEEEEE!"
"Hey guys..." Yamcha murmured, not daring to take his eyes off of the blue dot in the sky, growing rapidly in intensity. "You don't suppose that Goku would, uh..."
"No way!" Krillin confidently waved him off. "Goku would never do something that stu-" He stopped himself. "Oh. OH!"
Everyone else had come up with more or less the same thought as well, and they all looked on in mounting dread as the distinct attack matured into resembling something they had only seem once, on a barren and lifeless planet where something similar had split the heavens.
"HAAAAAAAAAA!"
Sel's grin dropped, replaced with dumbfounded alarm. "Goku! What are you doing?! You'll destroy the whole planet!"
"Goku! You've got to stop!" Trunks hollered as loud as he could, but it seemed like the saiayn warrior couldn't hear him, or otherwise ignored him entirely.
"MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
Sel tensed, readying her body to move as fast as she could. She knew it was coming any second now, and she would only have a split second to act. Goku glared down at her, visibly struggling to contain the entire and overwhelming power of the kameamea that he'd summoned up from his very core. This was going to be one for the books to be sure.
Concentrating as hard as he could, he bypassed his normal shortcut and tapped into the dimension bending energies of the Instant Transmission, shunting his body into that in-between world.
At the very instant Goku vanished, Sel moved.
Spinning around faster than ever, she rammed her fist into Goku's stomach, even as he finished materializing, while simultaneously smashing a ball of orange energy against his cheek. The pent up kameamea, no longer under restraint, exploded.
A titanic wave of blue-white energy erupted in the sky, swallowing up both fighters completely and creating as much of a flash hurricane as anything up to that point had. Everyone for miles around was unexpectedly bowled over by the force that was released in a solid shockwave, wind screaming away from the epicenter like the elements themselves were terrified of the cataclysm in the sky.
The Z-Fighters were all pressed into the ground, pinned by the forces raging overhead. Tien had passed out from the pain, and Krillin was practically insensate himself, but the others had to ride it out as best they could, praying that they weren't about to be incinerated where they lay helpless.
Eventually, the winds petered off, and the shockwave dissipated, and the sphere of energy died away, leaving a solid curtain of smoke to take its place. The beaten and bettered fighters slowly regained their senses, shaking off the lingering effects and sitting up, feeling as though they had just been crushed under a decent sized mountain. Yamcha and Krillin moved to check on Tien, but Trunks and a mute Gohan stood up to observe the smoke, trying to catch a sign of either of the two fighters.
They didn't have long to wait.
With a fresh gust of wind that was made from a flared aura, the oppressive black smoke was forced away, revealing Goku and Sel at the heart of the cloud. Goku was broken, blood leaking from numerous cuts along his body as well as his nose and mouth, his clothes were irreparably shredded and the golden luster had vanished from his hair entirely. He was limp, and being held up with a hand once again clenched around his neck.
Sel was, impossibly, almost completely unharmed. She had received a few more scratches to the pale skin of her face and hands, and a trickle of deep purple ran down from the side of her mouth and down the line of her chin to drip away, but she was in far better condition than her adversary. In fact, she was downright grinning.
"Close, Goku, but no cigar. Remember how Gero observed your fight with Broly? Yeah, he saw that little move too, and I'm not about to fall for such a shallow deception as that. You're finished." She hissed the last, pushing him away from her and letting him drop the several dozen yards to one of the island shards that was underneath them.
She had won.
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Goku was barely conscious, and hardly felt the impact against his back as he landed in a sprawl on the shattered land mass. His breathing was ragged and pulled at something in his chest, more than likely several broken ribs. His whole body was shrouded in mind ratling pain, every inch of his skin crying out under the numerous gashes, fractures and burns that permeated him. The only time he could recall being worse off, a giant gorilla had been twisting his bones into dust.
Still, clawing through the nausea of bruised organs and tortured flesh, he opened his eyes and lifted his head enough to watch Sel descend noiselessly from the sky to stand next to his prone figure. He looked up into her cherry red eyes, seeing nothing but calm contemplation. She crossed one arm across her middle and covered her mouth with the fingers of the others. She looked for all the world like she was trying to decide what cereal to eat at breakfast.
Finally, she knelt down to talk directly to the bested saiyan, propping both elbows against her knees and resting her chin in cupped palms. "I lied." He couldn't even muster the breath to demand clarification. She provided anyway. "When I said that I would release everyone I had absorbed. I can't do that - not the way I absorbed them. I just fed on them, killing them to provide nourishment, as one does for cattle. They're gone, and soon, you and everybody on this planet will be as well."
Goku's head fell back to the ground, tears of anguish mixing with the ones of pain. It had all been for nothing. He had actually turned against his friends, against his son...on a simple lie.
"But," Sel continued, quietly taking note of the distress contorting his face, "I'm not ungrateful for your help. In fact, I feel remarkably endeared to you, to hell with Gero and his mission. That is why," she gestured with two waggling fingers off to the side without point or pretense, "I'm going to give all of you a chance to make peace before you go. I'm going to leave the planet. For how long, I don't really know, but I will be back soon, sooner than you'll want, and I will destroy the Earth and it's people. That's just what I need to do. If you, or any one else for that matter, try to escape on spaceships, I'll track you down and exterminate you."
She considered, briefly, before leaning forward closer until her lips were right next to his ear and her breath was both cool and warm against his damaged skin. She spoke in a whisper, words meant only for him and with a voice that strangely lacked her usual menace. "I'll always be grateful for what you did for me, even if you only believed it to be the lesser of two evils. You are a good man, Son Goku."
Then she was standing again, walking away from him without a second glance. She looked over to the Z-Fighters, staring back with differing levels of fear over the gulf of water between them. They would all survive the day. She could give them that much at least. Goku was the only one she owed anything, and it was for him that she didn't slaughter them there and then.
Crossing both arms, she rolled her neck as her namekian DNA started to work at repairing all of the damage across her body and replenishing her energy stores. Opting out of a parting quip, she merely smirked before rising straight up, picking up speed as she went until she was just a pinprick against the slowly clearing sky, then she was gone completely; gone from Earth and out among the stars.
Goku watched her depart, and watched the sky for several minutes afterwards. He had doomed the Earth, and condemned humanity to extinction. He had sacrificed his values and betrayed what he had tried to defend. How much more could he fail? How much more could he discard before there was nothing left of him? Who else had to die before he could finally be as ruthless as he was expected to be to keep people safe?
He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut against the tears that were now burning at him like acid. Why was it that the encouragment for him had come from the very monster he had killed himself with? What did that say for him?
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