"Super Saiyan 2… It can't be! Only the members of the royal bloodline should be able to awaken this power!" Baby Vegeta still struggled to accept the fact that a newly ascended Super Saiyan 2 stood before him.
"You…" Goku muttered with a cold look, staring at Giru as opposed to Baby Vegeta, almost as if the Neo Tsufurian was of no concern at this moment. "Don't waste your life self-destructing. You've got friends who care a great deal about you. Enough to come here to rescue you. Don't throw your life away and dismiss their sacrifice."
Baby Vegeta was about to show Giru's quartered and malfunctioning body off to Goku as a sadistic tease for the Saiyan. Maybe even put a little squeeze on the scout drone to make that loathsome golden-haired brute stop pretending to be some awesome warrior, someone of consequence. However, just when Baby was about to move his hand, he realized it was holding nothing. With a befuddled look, Baby Vegeta blinked a couple of times while staring at his bruised and shaking hand.
When the body-snatcher turned back to Goku, the Super Saiyan 2 was no longer there. Frantically, Baby began searching for the ascended Saiyan warrior and found him near Videl's limp and dying body just as a heavy, building-sized Machine Mutant roller was about to squish paste out of her. Goku didn't even interact with the incoming drone, letting it crash into his immovable back and break into millions of pieces as elementary as screws and bolts. Goku, with Giru in one hand, scooped Videl up with the other and dashed off to Yamcha, placing the pair around the injured martial artist.
"What are you doing!? How dare you ignore me!? Is this your answer to why Saiyans deserve to live? Because you've suddenly decided to pretend like you've grown a heart!? Ridiculous!" Baby Vegeta seethed and spat vitriol at Goku while the dazzling Super Saiyan 2 proceeded to ignore him and vanished in a stunning hyperspace tunnel, approaching Gohan only to scoop him up gently and off the ground. It was only when Goku looked at his son's unconscious and wounded body that his look softened and his eyes became rounder again.
"This must be some kind of trick! One of those martial arts techniques that the three-eyed Earthling was so proud of! I refuse to believe that anyone in this universe could move so fast that I, the sharpest mind hosted in the strongest body in the universe, couldn't see it!" Baby Vegeta exclaimed in pure wrath, pressing his hands together and shooting off a black Revenge Galick Gun only for his energy wave to miss Goku and Gohan entirely and beam off into the farthest reaches of the universe before detonating in a universe-shaking blast. "It… Missed… How!? I didn't even see you move!" Baby Vegeta hissed as his seething hatred began rearing corners of something else entirely — fear.
Fear that he, moreover, everything he has worked so hard to achieve, all the legacy of the Tsufurian people, would be undone and go extinct and forgotten in oblivion again. This invincible, infinitely powerful golden warrior could surely do it. He could extinguish Baby with a snap! Suddenly, even when Goku was paying Baby Vegeta no mind at all and merely making sure that Gohan joined his friends around Yamcha in the middle, the ascended Super Saiyan 2 seemed like he was a living monolith. A mountain of cosmic proportions with Baby Vegeta feeling like a mere ant before his monumental presence.
No! This was all in Baby's head. It was just some psychological trick to demean him. To belittle his ultimate power, which nothing and nobody in the universe can compare to. Goku placed Gohan close to Yamcha and straightened his back. Deafening rumble made it impossible to hear one's own thoughts. A colossal Machine Mutant cannon tank rolled up and aimed its tremendous barrel at Goku. After it fired the shot, but before the blast moved any significant distance within the barrel, Goku grabbed the end of the barrel with both his hands and squeezed it into a filtering nozzle with his hands, shutting it up. This stunt forced the strident energy blaze that should have obliterated the Super Saiyan 2 and his comrades to implode and destroy the merged Machine Mutant monstrosity by blasting its contents out from the back. Utterly destroyed, the colossal machine collapsed as burning and busted spare parts.
Goku aimed his hand down at Yamcha's back and exclaimed into a lively battle cry. A golden energy halo pulsed out from the tip of his palm and enveloped Yamcha whole, giving him more than enough Ki to sweep him back into the state of consciousness. Blinking rapidly in shock and awe, Yamcha looked around and gasped at the sight of the state that Gohan, Videl, and Giru were in. He reached out to grab them before turning back and meeting Goku's supporting gaze.
"Do it, let's go home," Goku nodded.
"Are you sure, Goku? That guy still looks like he's going to cause trouble. It's not like you to abandon a fight before it's finished. You'll regret it until the end of your days if you leave things unsettled here," Yamcha mumbled before sitting up. Baby Vegeta struggled to amplify his hatred to be clearer than the terror he was experiencing, which in turn fueled his hesitation for an all-out attack.
"Yeah," Goku nodded again. "We're done here. I've remembered what's really important just now. I don't even care if I can beat Baby or not anymore. As long as Gohan is safe and back home."
"Do you really think I'll just let you runts scamper away!?" Baby Vegeta shrieked with a voice that sounded just as whiny and pathetic as it was translating his existential hate and despair. "All of you will die for what you did to my people. Planet Earth can only be redeemed through giving up the Dragon Balls, and if it won't, I'll blow it all up in a blink!"
Baby Vegeta grunted something unintelligible and staggered back with his arms up when Goku scolded him with a stern look. "Mr. Popo and Dende should have gathered the Dragon Balls by now. Soon enough they'll bring back everyone you've hurt and boot you out from Vegeta's body without killing him. If you know what's good for you, you won't kill anyone else after that, go back to where you came from and mind your own business. If you come to Earth looking for trouble again, I'll make sure to knock you flat with this new power meant to protect that which I hold dear, and I won't hold anything back!" Goku bellowed with a robust burst of electrified golden ki that left Baby Vegeta gasping for air as a sweaty ball of misery.
"Alright then," Yamcha said, while slowly reaching for his forehead with his index and middle fingers. "You're the boss…"
Dimensions warped and the surroundings around Goku, Yamcha, Videl, Gohan, and Giru vanished, washed away like a dreary abstract painting. Goku looked around the warped dimensions with a bit of shock, as he had never peeked in between the instances of instantaneous transmission. This was so because there weren't meant to be any instances between the beginning and end of the instant transmission. The technique, exactly as its name proposed, was instantaneous. Suddenly, an ill omen made him break contact with Yamcha and rush out behind the transporting pair to swat aside an energy blast as Baby Vegeta pursued them through the Instant Transmission with his speed alone.
"You fool!" Goku grumbled, charging at Baby Vegeta and slamming his decisive fist right into Baby Vegeta's cheek. The blow dented Baby Vegeta's head and dulled his stare while sending both of the hypersonic warriors who grew bored with the instantaneous travel speed and exchanged blows during it tumbling out into a random surface at the outer layer of the Big Gete Star. "I gave you a chance to leave it all behind and move on, and you threw it all away! Now you've made me mad!"
"Mad? Don't make me laugh, Saiyan filth…" Baby Vegeta panted, coughing up blood from his grievous torso injury where Goku's Dragon Fist plunged into his gut earlier. "You know nothing of anger, you know nothing of despair. That's okay. I have more than my fair share of it inside of my heart, so I'm willing to share some of it. To teach you what true despair and rage feel like!"
As a show that he was far from done, Baby Vegeta flexed and burst with a violet flame of ground-shaking purple aura around him while Goku powered up to the limit of the strength afforded to him in his Super Saiyan 2 state. The power awakened inside him by realizing what was worth fighting for and stepping over his Saiyan brutality and bloodlust. It was ironic that the power he awakened by leaving behind the need to defeat Baby and wanting only to save Gohan would end up being the strength he would use to defeat Baby.
The pair vanished, soaring forward like two speeding comets burning in their own colors. Baby's vicious knee strike collided with Goku's kick to the midsection with a thunderous crack. Goku slipped in a knee into Baby Vegeta's chest, making him cough up slobber and almost blank out. Despite the wallop, Baby slipped the high roundhouse kick with a duck and dive under. When Goku shifted the kicking leg, perfectly transferring all the potent force into the attacking limb, Baby Vegeta put up a cross block and took the hit, flying back and smashing through communication towers and stray systems, stations, and antennae sticking out from the Big Gete Star's surface.
Baby lost track of what was real and what wasn't when Goku, whom Baby still saw almost a full continent's worth of space away from him appeared in front of him, functionally existing in two spaces at once time before digging his shot into the center of Baby's face. A barrage of chain punches demolished Baby's defenses and will to keep fighting before Goku began just flexing and switching between hundreds of striking styles and martial arts simultaneously, utterly obliterating and humiliating Baby Vegeta up close with a vicious beatdown that didn't even employ the Super Saiyan's legs.
With a passionate battle cry and his full back into it, Goku slammed his fist into Baby Vegeta's gut, turning his opponent off and leaving him hanging on his fist before switching the uppercutting arm and driving his second, follow-up uppercut into the bottom of Baby Vegeta's chin. As the newly awakened Super Saiyan 2 let his limitless power unfurl, testing its mettle, a cascade of golden bursts filled the sky as Baby Vegeta's limp body became just a rag doll thrown around by them until he flopped completely lifeless and sprawled out on his back, unable to move and gasping in pain from his shattered bones.
"How can this be? I should have been the one to awaken the power of Super Saiyan 2. The power of the royal bloodline, King Vegeta's bloodline!" Baby Vegeta cursed while lying flat on his back. His voice gained a higher pitch and his eyes became moist. The Chosen One of the exterminated Tsufurian race, the one who should have carried their legacy into a new future, felt that same future sifting through his fingers. And the one to blame, like always, was a Saiyan.
"I guess we were wrong about Super Saiyan 2 being a form reserved for elite Saiyan warriors. Then again, all that talk about bloodlines being royal or ordinary sounds like a load of crap. If someone works hard enough, they can surpass even the strongest, and the Saiyans are a race that promotes strength. You're not strong because you're in the bloodline that's in charge, you're in charge because you became strong. My father was right, the reason you weren't able to achieve the power of Super Saiyan with Vegeta's body is because you refused to accept the maturity from the experiences you've gone through in your battles," Goku replied, landing in front of Baby and sharing a few moments with his beaten opponent now that his friends were safe back on Earth.
The surprised party gathered in the Capsule Corps' yard jumped up and turned around in reaction to a sharp snapping noise. Upon seeing the battered trio of Yamcha, Gohan, and Videl slump down on the lawn and instantly begin bleeding all over it, Dende jumped up and rushed to them to examine their injuries and establish who needed help the most.
"Goku is missing," Mr. Popo observed the obvious while Dende scanned the trio with open hands that emitted blue pulses of Ki in wide resonance.
"Videl-san is close to death. I'll do everything I can to save her life. Yamcha-san is injured, but his Ki is amped up to an extreme level. Even with these injuries, his body can last for as long as his empowered Ki can sustain it. Gohan is hurt, but not as badly as Videl…" Dende reported to himself before extending his hands and letting Videl lift off the ground, riding invisible telekinetic force that kept her suspended mid-air. Wasting no time, Dende began healing her injuries in a fatal race to save her. The jarring, burnt hole in her body closed with new flesh and silky-smooth skin in mere moments, but merely healing her injuries might not have saved her life.
"Goku should have come with us," Yamcha looked around, confused as to why the Saiyan wasn't with them. "I could've sworn he was touching me and I felt his Ki when I transported us here…"
"He must have stayed behind to cover your backs," Mr. Popo suggested.
"Or he just wanted to fight it out for as long as he still can. Since Dende's preoccupied with healing duty, I'll banish that pest from my husband's body instead!" Bulma grumbled, sounding almost a little offended that Dende would drop the task of calling forth the Divine Dragon and evicting Baby to wherever he came from. "Come forth, Divine Dragon! Come forth and fulfill our wish!" Bulma chanted with her hands pointing up at the sky.
The skies dimmed in a blink, becoming shrouded with black clouds that obscured all traces of daylight. Only the bundle of seven collected magical wishing orbs glistened with bright mystical light. The energy radiating from them began levitating the Dragon Balls in a loose formation, lightly tilting them off the ground before becoming too bright and sparkly to peer into. In a hissing and violent jolt, the mystical energy shot off, wrangling and whirling across the skyline, wrapping dozens of times and forming a serpentine shape that enlightened the nocturnal sky. Starting from the very bottom, the mystical energy coating the Divine Dragon sizzled away to reveal a four-fingered oriental dragon with brown antlers, sharp teeth, green scaly skin, glowing red eyes, and an elongated, serpentine body. Olive-colored hair flowed freely across the long snout of the majestic, magical beast, while a pair of whiskers waved according to supernatural whim as the Divine Dragon leaned down to gawk at its summoners.
"NOW, STATE YOUR TWO WISHES!" the Divine Dragon demanded.
"First, get that freeloader Baby out of my husband's body!" Bulma yelled out, shaking her fist in the air. The eyes of the Divine Dragon began blinking bright red as the exalted beast became frozen in place.
"Hmm… It's rare for the Divine Dragon to take this long," Mr. Popo observed. "Perhaps the Dragon is broken? We should bring the Dragon Balls to the God's Temple for some modification and maintenance. They're long overdue for a negative energy wipe anyway…"
"How long would neutralizing the negative energy take?" Yamcha wondered.
"Give or take around a hundred years, normally. Given how much you've abused the Dragon Balls, even went ahead making a new bundle, it might take three times as long," Mr. Popo noted. "Then again, that was what the original Kami said about the original pair. With these Dragon Balls fulfilling three wishes, it might take as long as a millennium to wipe the negative energy clean."
"Yeesh! Good luck telling all the loonies, demons, aliens, and monsters of the universe to stop attacking the Earth and hurting innocent people for that long!" Yamcha waved his hand off in dismissal. "We're awfully tight with them just cooling down in a full year already… Come to think of it, maybe it was a bad idea to summon the Divine Dragon now before the conflict with Baby and the Machine Mutants is fully over with. What if they kill more people?"
"Would you shut up already with your yapping?" Bulma hissed. "How else are we supposed to remove Baby from Vegeta's body? We can't just kill them both! Asking the Divine Dragon to split Baby and Vegeta for the first wish, then reviving everyone that Dr. Lychee and his cybernetic empire have killed, is the only sensible option."
"How many people will that be?" Dende's lip dragged down as the Dragon Clan mystic became horrified. "You do remember that Elder Moori warned us against reviving a bunch of people too often, right? Reviving people from across the entire universe will definitely break the Dragon Balls for good!"
"IT CANNOT BE DONE! ASK FOR ANOTHER WISH!" the Divine Dragon decreed after a pause of blinking eyes and shimmering with his bright outline that acted like a beacon in the darkest night.
"Whaaa!?" Bulma grabbed her head and yanked on her hair in panic. "What the hell do you mean it cannot be done!?"
"I'VE ASKED BABY TO LEAVE VEGETA'S BODY BUT HE REFUSED. BABY IS TOO POWERFUL FOR MY MAGIC TO COMPEL HIM TO LEAVE, SO IT CANNOT BE DONE!" the Divine Dragon elaborated his decree. "STATE ANOTHER WISH!"
"Crud!" Bulma collapsed on the ground after her knees buckled, with Yamcha rushing to her aid. Loud, boyish grunts came from indoors before the main door leading further into the Capsule Corps building slid open, letting young Trunks fly out.
"What does this mean?" he yelled out, approaching Dende and shaking him by the shoulder. It was something that the Namekian mystic didn't appreciate, given that his concentration was necessary for saving Videl's life.
"It means that we need a more powerful set of Dragon Balls for that wish to work. Either by using more powerful Dragon Balls, or creating a new set, a more powerful one with direr drawbacks to balance it out," Dende replied, just to be left to his mystical healing in peace.
"Divine Dragon, would the Ultimate Dragon Balls be able to fulfill that wish?" Bulma wondered, pleading with the Divine Dragon to tell her with teary eyes and the whimpering voice of a wife who was losing all hope to see her husband ever again.
"YES, NOW STATE YOUR WISH!" the Divine Dragon demanded.
"Sorry, Divine Dragon, we don't really need you right now if you can't remove Baby from Vegeta's body," Yamcha made a goofy and apologetic look on his face while trying to pacify the Divine Dragon with his hands. "We'll call you later, 'kay?"
"VERY WELL, UNTIL NEXT TIME, YOU LOT!" the Divine Dragon chanted before simply vanishing and releasing the state of perpetual blinding night. Instead of rising to the sky and vanishing, the Dragon Balls simply collapsed and scattered on the lawn, rolling off in all directions until bumping into bushes, the wooden fence, or other objects found in the yard.
Bulma closed her eyes and grabbed Yamcha's shoulder. By using it as support, she stood up and approached Mr. Popo, grabbing him by his vest and pulling him closer as she attempted to peer a hole through the ancient djinn's head. "We're going to the God's Temple to use the Ultimate Dragon Balls," was all she said.
"T-The Ultimate Dragon Balls? N-No way, that's too dangerous!" Mr. Popo tried objecting before Dende came up from behind and gently patted his shoulder.
"Mr. Popo, it's okay. With Baby so close to Earth, the vile despair in his heart that threatens to consume the entire universe in his grief and hatred is too apparent. There is no other choice," Dende replied before turning back to Videl, who sat up while clapping her eyes and lazily looking around. "I've saved Videl-san's life. I'll stay here to heal you all to top shape, then I'll return to God's Temple."
"So, are you going to stand down and stop coming after the Earth and my friends?" Goku asked directly while looking at Baby's broken body as the mess of a man stared into the starry space above.
"Heh…" a chuckle escaped Baby's throat. Goku focused on Baby's actions, scanning him for any warning signs he would attack even though his battle power had dipped beneath any world where he could have posed even the smallest of threats. "Now that I consider my options, it's become clear to me that perhaps I was too ignorant and one-sided," Baby said before beginning to laugh it up as much as his shattered ribs allowed him.
Given his light and joyous mood, Goku relaxed somewhat. The intensity of Super Saiyan 2 popped away with only the perfected splendor of Super Saiyan staying in his spiky hair. While Super Saiyan 2 boosted his strength, speed, toughness, and Ki to another world of power, it was also a rather taxing transformation to maintain when not in battle. Not to mention, Goku lacked practice and polish with the form at this moment, so he by far preferred to use his perfected Super Saiyan form, which hardly even taxed his stamina anymore.
"I simply forgot how the Saiyans ended up winning against Tsufurians in the end. All of this wild Saiyan power made me forget the horror that my ancestors felt before being trampled into oblivion. You see, given your shiny Super Saiyan power, you may have forgotten this, but a Saiyan has a different kind of power inside them…" Baby burst with a golden aura around him that centered on his hand with a much more intense shimmer. Goku's hand twitched to attack, but he couldn't feel any threat behind this technique, besides, he didn't want to obliterate Vegeta's body before the Divine Dragon split him and Baby so his hands were rather tied up. "Granted, it's a power I don't think I can access at the moment, given my condition, so I took the luxury of heeding your advice, Saiyan," Baby blabbed while thrusting his hand and shooting off a sparkly white sphere directly above, nowhere near the direction of Goku or the Earth.
"You opened your mind to Vegeta's experience?" Goku gasped.
"Correct. It taught me a way to access that inherent power. The true, incredible might of the Vegeta bloodline. It's a true twist of irony, Saiyan. It's so ironic that you, a paragon of your species, shall face brutal death at the hands of the very same beast that trampled all over the hopes of my race!" Baby Vegeta began laughing maniacally as the white shiny sphere burst into a flashing orb of blinding white light that made Goku cover up until he got a little more used to it.
"What… Is that?" Goku grumbled in discomfort at how bright the light was.
"Cosmic justice, Saiyan. Also… Your end!" Baby barked out before his entire shape absorbed the radiance and turned white, contrasted by his pitch-black eyes. In a blink, it was Baby Vegeta himself who became enveloped in a singularity of golden light that flashed with painful to witness twinges and dwarfed the luster of even the aerial luminous sphere.
Baby Vegeta's hair began wrapping around his body while his face underwent a painful shift, growing a bestial snout. Baby's teeth transformed into the sharp fangs of a Great Ape while the uncontrollable energy released by the transformation elevated Baby Vegeta off the ground and began turning him vertically and horizontally while he grew wildly out of proportion, bulking up to hundreds of times his previous size.
A terrifying titan burst forth from the shining singularity, tearing it apart with its bare hands. A roaring behemoth of blue skin and at least ten times larger than even an ordinary Great Ape. Baby's white hair which had entirely covered the whole bulked-up body of the Great Ape had turned golden and shiny. The ridiculous growth in mass and bulk had wiped any trace of damage clean from Baby Vegeta's body as the beast bellowed, roared, and pounded its chest before turning its attention to Goku with a wicked smile.
"This is the Golden Great Ape! A power achieved through Vegeta's memories of awakening the form of a Great Ape and then ascending to Super Saiyan and his royal bloodline which allows a Great Ape to keep their intelligence, together with my genius Tsufurian intellect, concocting a Power Ball a thousand times more luminous than the one that triggers the usual Great Ape transformation! It appears you were right, Saiyan, true power really does come from maturity!" Golden Great Ape Baby Vegeta began bawling its chest out while rapidly trashing around in cheering for his newly awakened power.
"Heh-heh…" Goku chuckled himself with a smirk on the left half of his face while pressing his arms to the side and clenching his fists, tensing up his beaten body and pushing his power to its limit and beyond, spilling it over with a splendid, electrified explosion of golden aura while achieving Super Saiyan 2 for his climactic all-out battle against Golden Great Ape Baby Vegeta. "At least you're still obsessed with Vegeta's body. I'll take it over you throwing my old buddy out to the curb."