Kakarot was the first to react. Before the words could even finish coming out of Turles's mouth, he had already gauged his rival's strength and was ready to face it head on.
His punch landed squarely on his old foe's jaw, but they didn't budge an inch. Kakarot kept trying to push his punch through, but Turles held the entire weight of his punch back with only his chin.
"Wow, you must've gone into the tree too to be this strong!" Kakarot drew his fist back. "Who let you out?"
He created some distance between the two of them and started to prepare his death beam, when he noticed that his knuckles were soaking wet. Turles's sweat had drenched his fist.
"Uhm," Kakarot kept his finger pointed at him, ready to blast a moment's notice. "You good over there? If you're sick or something we can wait a few minutes. I'm looking for a challenge, not to waste my time attacking a sandbag."
The distance between them was one that Kakarot liked to keep up during the feeling out phase of battle. Nappa had taught it to him years ago, and beatings by Vegeta really helped to drill it in. Having about two seconds of space between him and his opponents was the ideal, sure plenty of his opponents would be faster and make it difficult to see them, but if they were around his level, two seconds of space was about all you needed.
He saw Turles's move for one fraction of a second before their fist was wrapped around his finger.
"Lord Cooler," Turles said. "He keeps talking to me, but I'll make him go away."
The first time he had fought Turles, he thought it would be more endearing than anything else to keep him alive. Sure he looked pretty similar to him and that gained him some sympathy, but he was straight laced to a tee. By the books, following orders, going through the motions of combat like he'd read them straight out of a manual and was afraid to insult it. That was no longer going to be an issue.
His rival's face was crooked and creaking, twitching uncontrollably as Kakarot looked into his eyes for a hint of sanity, only to find that his pupils had fled, replaced with a seething white. They panted out of rhythm and drool escaped past his lips, like a wild animal gone feral. Turles's hair had changed into a sheening mullet, sagging downwards from the amount of heat and sweat coming off of his body.
Kakarot tried to break away from Turles's grasp, but it only tightened as he punched and kicked at their arm. Turles's focus drifted amongst the last saiyans as he made a nervous laugh.
"It's so hot." Turles's ki flickered for an instant, violet to pure green, off completely, then back to a blend of the two. "Lord Cooler, please help me. It's so hot."
Kakarot realized the ki had a nearly identical rhythm to Broly's when he tried to heal him. He couldn't get a handle on it, and Turles couldn't either. The power that Broly quietly held in him for all those years was eating Turles alive.
"Sorry, guess we're not gonna be battle buddies after all." Kakarot said sadly as he charged his death beam in his other hand. It was always a shame to see a good rival die.
Kakarot shot the beam, trying to time it to when Turles's defenses were lowered, but it only left a smoking mark on his forehead as it dissipated harmlessly on his flesh. He'd missed the mark.
The pattern was changing, branching out each moment into forms he couldn't predict, it was fighting with itself.
Kakarot felt the hairs on his neck raise as he realized what he had gotten himself into. He was fighting an enemy stronger than himself with only one weakness, and that weakness depended completely on the luck of him hitting him at the exact right time. This was going to be interesting.
"Ohhhhhh … oh," Turles moaned in low haggard breaths, " you're going to die." He pointed his finger at the rest of Vegeta Squadron and swiped at each of their heads. "They're all going to die. I'm going to rip. Heads with no shoulders. All on Frieza's lap. Will he like yours or Vegeta's the most?"
Turles barely strained a muscle when he tightened his grip on Kakarot's finger, but the bones snapped like twigs nonetheless.
Kakarot screamed in primal anguish as Turles shifted his grip to cover Kakarot's entire fist.
Nappa's ki flared up like a beacon, and Kakarot whipped his head back to him. "Stay with Raditz!" Kakarot shouted as Turles eagerly watched them. "Get the teleporter working and get out of here!"
Turles tilted his head to the side, saw that Nappa stopped charging at them, and then crushed Kakarot's entire fist with one gentle squeeze.
"Still trying to play?" Turles said, ignoring Kakarot's screams. "You played with me. I play with you." Turles hurled Kakarot behind him, towards the flaming world outside, and chased after him.
Kakarot tried to alter his course, but even overpowering Turles's throw was out of the question. He let the full force of the toss carry him where it would, and looked behind himself to make sure he could protect himself.
As Kakarot went closed in on the trees, he took notice of the mountains and ravines made from the Tree of Might beneath him. Somewhere, deep within those mountains, were speckles of ki. They, Kakarot thought, would be irrelevant to his game.
He was closing in on a branch larger than Frieza's ship that was burning with ki when he heard a shredding howl. Turles was closing in on him, he'd have to cut this close.
Three measured spurts of ki from his good hand got Kakarot's momentum going, changing his form from a ball hurtling towards the branch to a board slowly flipping. He gathered ki in his hand and braced himself.
Kakarot's ki coated palm harmlessly grazed the bark of the burning branch as the torque of the impact sent him in a corkscrew spiral across it.
Before Kakarot came to a stop, Turles tackled through the branch with his body, plowing a hole clear through where Kakarot would have landed if he hadn't moved out of the way.
The impact almost shook Kakarot loose from the tree, but he clutched as hard as he could to the branch, and came to a one handed handstanding stop at its tip
Turles hung still in the air, wrapped in billows of smoke as he laughed to himself.
"It burns," Turles said as the smoke blew away in the wind, "I'm burning, Lord Cooler."
He'd never get an opportunity this clear again, Turles was standing completely open, distracted, and seemingly forgot they were even in a fight. If he timed it right this time, a sneak attack could actually do some damage.
So Kakarot walked over to the hole Turles had made.
Flowing through the massive branch was a stream of green ki, a river of energy higher than Kakarot had ever sensed before. He tried to stick his finger in it, but it was too strong, repelling him like two magnets pushing against one another.
Kakarot looked over his shoulder, saw Turles was still unmoving, and took a moment to think with his chin on his fist. The two of them were about equal in power the last time they fought, now he was stronger than he'd ever clocked Frieza as being. Sure there was training and zenkai boosts, it was definitely possible to get that strong, he'd be there in no time, but doing it in less than a day should be impossible.
It was impossible.
That's why his body was getting torn apart, he had taken in too much energy too fast. Maybe going back into the tree was giving him even more energy, but his body already had all it could take, it would just overload him and rip him apart from the inside if he kept going.
And all of this power came from Broly.
Kakarot smirked at the new benchmark to beat, and decided to get back to the fight.
"Okay Turles, new rule!" Kakarot pointed to the hole in the tree. "Let's try and not fight around this! I don't want you dying accidently, I want to fight you at your full power, got it?"
Turles thrashed his head left and right, then slowly rotated to face Kakarot. He stared at him, breathing heavily through his mouth.
"Got it?" Kakarot asked, pointing again at the hole in the branch.
"Games?" Turles floated towards him. "You still have more games?"
"Well yeah," Kakarot got back into the same stance as their last fight, the one he'd seen Frieza do countless times. "It keeps things fun!"
Turles charged at Kakarot again, but this time Kakarot had the foresight to jump off of the tree before he could get to him. His enemy was fast, but he was still the same guy he'd fought before. Straightforward, obvious, he just needed to think of what the very first thing they would do was, and not walk right into it.
Kakarot pushed himself to fly downwards as fast as he could, but Turles was quick to catch on, sliding off of the tree as soon as they had landed on it to chase after him.
Kakarot fired a volley of death beams, but it wasn't any good, bouncing harmlessly off of the enraged soldier's head.
Kakarot knew Turles would go for the attacking hand. So he pulled it back and began charging energy in his mouth. Turles was in for a surprise.
At least he thought, until Turles fired two lasers from his eyes that pierced through his chest.
"Games?!" Turles said as Kakarot's eyes went wide with shock.
Kakarot felt his ankle crumble as Turles closed in on him, grabbed it, and plunged them to the ground, landing with enough force that the mountains of roots shook.
Turles dashed towards the base of the tree, Kakarot threw his guard up to mitigate damage, but it hardly made any difference. Turles belted him into the tree, battering his spine relentlessly.
A bloody outline of his body formed as his skin ripped apart with each blow.
"Do you like this game?!" The barrage stopped, and Kakarot was held upside down by the ankle.
He looked at Turles, or at least he thought he did. There were eight of him floating around, and it was difficult to keep track of which was talking.
Kakarot struggled to raise his hand to the holes on his chest, and was confused to find there wasn't any blood coming from them. Turles had cauterized his wound as he hit him.
Turles kept one hand on his ankle, used the other to grab his wrist, then stretched him out as wide as he could go in front of him. Kakarot's shoulder and thighs felt like they were going to rip apart, and Turles laughed as he flailed with his one leg, the only good limb he had left.
Turles's eyes glowed again with a wrathful glimmer of violet and green. "Here's a game we can both play, Kakarot. It's called Payback."
Raditz saw his brother get flung out of the room, but he couldn't afford to pay it any attention. If he failed here, they were as good as dead anyways.
"What the hell are you doing?!" Nappa shouted as Raditz continued clacking away on the keyboard. "That guy is going to kill Kakarot, we need to go help him!"
"Oh!" Raditz said as more error messages for the password continued to pop up on the computer monitor and the self-destruction counter kept ticking down. "I would have never guessed! Maybe that's why he's trying to give us time!"
"So you're just going to let your own brother die?" Nappa dashed at him with his ki fully raised, going to levels that Raditz had never seen before, but still not enough. A little less than half of Kakarot's strength and miles away from Turles's
Nappa grabbed Raditz by the collar of his jumpsuit, Raditz raised his own ki response. Nappa didn't speak, but respected his grit. They were speaking to each other not in their chain of command, but as warriors.
"If I don't get this working, we die," Raditz slapped the top of the monitor. "If this base blows up, so does any chance we have of getting off of this planet!"
"We can just take our pods!" Nappa shouted.
Raditz smacked Nappa's hands off of him. "The one that Frieza gave us? The ones with tracking devices in each of them that we would need to take the time to get rid of? The ones that the Ginyu Squadron could shoot out of space from their ship the second we leave orbit? Those pods?"
"But the Ginyu Force doesn't even know where we are right now, we could just take the pods somewhere secret and get rid of all that tracking crap, then leave while they're on this planet looking for us, and give 'em the slip!"
Raditz ran both his hands down his face and tried to take a deep breath, but only ended up screaming midway through it, "The reason they don't know where we are is because of this base! Something in here is more than likely jamming their signal, the same reason we couldn't communicate with them on our scouters is the reason they couldn't see us! Is it coming out of that ball of TVs, this computer, some radio station somewhere deep in here that we haven't even seen yet? I don't know! But if the base blows up it won't matter, because we'll be down a teleporter off this planet, the Ginyu Force will be down here in minutes, and they'll kill all of us!"
The odds were extremely low that the Ginyu Force knew that they had betrayed Frieza, but the odds of Kakarot or Vegeta shouting it at the top of their lungs? They had their saiyan pride to stick to,their death was guaranteed whether they heard the recordings or not.
"Well then let's just blow it up now, maybe that new guy will kill the Ginyu Force!"
Raditz hesitated for a second, Nappa would never say something like that, letting his opponents take each other so that they could run away. At least he never would've before this mission.
He looked back to the computer, one minute remaining until self destruction.
Raditz could hear his heart beating in his ears and time slow down while he watched the seconds tick by on the counter. There was nothing he could do. Everyone was going to die, and it was his fault, because he couldn't do the one thing he was the best equipped to do.
He must've missed a clue somewhere, or forgotten to ask a question to someone. Would ELO-E have let it slip? If Murluck was here maybe the password would be somewhere deep in her mind and remember it, Mireau probably would have just flat out given it to him, he seemed cordial enough for a man intent on killing Nappa.
Then the idea came to him, he'd tried things like "Prince Raditz" and lists of important battles he knew saiyans and the tuffles had against each other, but not what the point of them was.
He typed in "Revenge" and got an error message. His hands were shaking, thirty seconds left.
Flustered out of his wits, he hit two wrong keys for every one right. Through his mashing of incorrect keys and backspaces, he gave it one last guess.
"Mercy"
Error. Ten seconds remaining.
Raditz watched the seconds count down, too stunned to even run away. If he ran, he died later. If he stayed, he died now. He was dead, they were all dead. They were all going to die on this stupid planet, and none of them could do anything about it.
Nappa pushed Raditz aside, and then stomped his boot through the computer monitor.
"There!" Nappa said as he pulled his foot out and glass sprinkled to the floor. "Hacked the hell out of that mainframe. Why do you always make things so hard?"
They were all going to die, and the last thing he saw and heard was going to be the stupidest two sentences in his life. He closed his eyes.
But he didn't die.
Raditz was silent as he looked around the room, waiting for an explosion to go off, but none ever came. If what Nappa just did actually worked, then it was as simple as closing the computer from running something like " .", but that was a stretch. Only the monitor was destroyed, the computer was still running fine.
"Quit wastin' time!" Nappa said. "We've gotta go save Kakarot!"
He couldn't solve the problem, and doing so wouldn't help him much anyways at the moment. They had narrowly avoided imminent death, now it was time to walk outside and run straight into a high chance of imminent death.
He followed behind Nappa as the older saiyan began running to the spot where Turles had created the hole, and they both flew into the air. They both slowed down and looked to Broly before they exited.
"I'm staying behind," Broly said. "You were able to heal me … I think I can heal Vegeta."
Raditz and Nappa looked at each other, nodded in sync, then looked back at Broly.
"Okay," Nappa said. "I trust you with his life like I trusted you with mine."
Raditz nodded. "Just be careful, I want to be able to rub it in Kakarot's face that both of you could do his own ability better than he could."
"Both of you trust me enough for this?" Broly's voice cracked as he asked Nappa, "Even after everything you saw?"
Nappa barked a laugh. "After what I saw, I believe you can do anything, kid."
Raditz's anxiety stopped rising for the first time all day. At least Broly's foolishness came from something other than a need to prove his own strength.
"Broly," Raditz said, "I've trusted you from the very first moment we met. You like baking cakes, and drawing people when they don't realize you're in the room because you're a nearly eight foot tall wallflower. I trusted you enough to take over your combat duties because I -" Raditz caught his tongue slipping and course corrected. This really wasn't the time for that. "I've always believed you were meant for better than this. So save Vegeta, protect him, do whatever you need to, but stay alive and don't die doing anything stupid. Got it?"
Broly gave Raditz a smile with so much warmth that his stress melted away, so he jerked his head in the opposite direction when he felt his ears burning. He couldn't be like this before a battle.
"Sure," Broly said.
And the two saiyans raced into battle.
They flew to the surface of the planet in silence, Raditz nursing his broken arm, and Nappa grazing his hand over the spot where he had been impaled by Mireau's scythe. There was no time to reflect, they only looked ahead.
Raditz could sense Turles's ki, but not Kakarot's.
"Raditz," Nappa said, "I can sense it too. Follow my lead and we'll get through this. Me and your dad got out of plenty worse back in the day."
The reassurance fell on deaf ears as Raditz tuned everything out, trying only to focus on what was in front of him. He couldn't afford to let his mind go anywhere else.
The two emerged from the hole and when they saw the state of the battle, Raditz came to a halt.
Turles was standing at the base of the tree, holding his brother over his head by one arm and one leg, and was about to rip him in two with ease, laughing as Kakarot's groans crawled throughout the battlefield
Nappa put his hand on Raditz's back, and guided him down near Turles. The fight was about to start, but he couldn't stop staring at Kakarot. How could someone beat him?
"Guerreren!" Nappa said, speaking in saiyan, "stop, we're on the same side! Frieza destroyed our planet and we're making our own empire against him!"
Hearing Nappa try to use logic almost shook him out of his shock, but Turles's words made his blood run cold.
"Stop chittering at me, you dirty monkey."
Raditz did not see Turles move, he only saw his brother fall to the ground, and heard the whimpering squelch Nappa made.
Turles plunged his palm deep into Nappa's flesh, diving through the same spot he had been impaled in earlier. He kept his hand still in Nappa's gut, smiling at Nappa's futile efforts to pry his hand out, and then looked to Raditz.
"Why did you come up here?" Turles said as Nappa gurgled on his own blood. When Nappa coughed, his blood landed on Turles's forehead, but the man didn't blink as the heat coming from his body caused it to steam. "Did you honestly think you could do anything to stop me?"
Turles jerked his hand out of Nappa, and the older saiyan fell forward, grunting as he clutched at his wound. The blood was coming out too fast, it was going through the cracks between Nappa's fingers, Raditz needed to help him.
But he couldn't convince his feet to move, he could only watch Turles walk towards him, stop, and laugh.
It was like looking at a distorted mirror of his own brother. He'd seen those eyes plenty of times, everyday from Frieza, sometimes from Vegeta, and now he knew what they would look like on Kakarot's face. They were eyes that took an unending joy not in any accomplishment, not from the fight itself, but from knowing the damage they had just caused to others, and thinking of how much they were about to cause next. When Turles looked at him, he knew the other saiyan was thinking of more ways to kill him than he could ever imagine.
What sort of gods let a monster like this exist?
"So weak," Turles breathed heavily as he stood over him, pausing to compose himself and force his next sentence out. "I could've killed you at any time - I stopped looking at your file years ago. So unimportant. I wondered if anybody would even notice if you died."
Raditz's mouth felt full of cotton as he quietly said, "You're more powerful than Frieza right now, y-y-you could be - You could do anything you want."
Turles's smile grew even bigger, his teeth showing as leaned forward and got so close to Raditz that their faces were nearly touching. "What I want is to kill you. I want it to be fun."
"Leave them alone!" Kakarot screamed. His brother tried to get to his feet, but collapsed from the pain, and continued to scream at them as he laid on his stomach. "It's me you're fighting with, not them!"
"Oh," Turles hand shook as he ran his hand through Raditz's hair and grabbed him by the back of his head. "But I want to fight all of you."
Turles's knee drove into his chest, and he felt his ribs break like brittle twigs.
The pain made Raditz wish he had just been killed, but Turles laughed as he let go of him. He stumbled backwards until he fell onto his back, gasping frantically as he stared at the burning sky of ki above him.
"Relax, I only broke three of your ribs. One little push harder and I would have pierced a lung," Turles said.
"I said leave him alone!" Kakarot's cry turned into a roar as he fired a death beam into the back of Turles's head with enough force that his head bobbed forward.
That was it, that was all the strongest amongst them could do. Cause their opponent's head to bob.
The bitter tears of defeat ran down Raditz's face.
Turles saw him crying and stifled his laughter, smirking as he looked down at him. "He could've killed me, you know. But that would've been too boring for Kakarot. He decided to torture me. He wanted to do to me what Frieza does to all of you. He wanted me to be just like the rest of you saiyans."
Kakarot's ki soared to new levels as he fired volley after volley of death beams into Turles's back. Soon a smoke cloud formed the bursts, one with a scent Raditz knew all too well, burning flesh.
Maybe one out of every dozen shots Kakarot landed did damage, but that wasn't enough. The gap between all of them was too large, it was impossible
Turles picked him up by his broken arm, humming happily to himself as he continued to be showered by Kakarot's attacks and Raditz let out an anguished groan.
"I want you to wait," Turles said as he held onto Raditz like a broken toy. "Think on what I do to your brother while you're gone, what I'm going to do to Nappa before he dies, and what I'm going to do to Vegeta and that pathetic weakling, Broly."
As Turles listed off everyone dear to him, Raditz forced his head upwards, ignoring every instinct in his body and mind telling him to keep it down and pray. The battle was unwinnable, but it was a fight they had to win.
Giving up meant letting his entire family die because he was too afraid to fight. It didn't matter if the enemy was as strong as Frieza, stronger than him, or even King Cold himself. They were the only people who had his back, and he would fight for them no matter what it took, no matter what the odds were, he would fight, and he would win for them.
Raditz's tears ceased as he glared, and saw something deep inside the berserk soldier of Cooler; He wasn't as deranged as when they first saw him, he was getting tired, and his newfound power was leaving him. It was burning through him.
Turles noticed something had changed in Raditz's demeanor and scowled. "Let's give you something new to cry about."
He felt his arm nearly jerked out of its socket as Turles pivoted to his side and swung him down to the ground by his broken arm. "I'll get you later."
Raditz was thrown with enough force that he made a sonic boom, blowing both Kakarot and Nappa tumbling through the dirt. He soared high into the sky, spinning violently as he kept his head pointed down to the ground, and tried to think of a plan.
There was the hole back to Broly and Vegeta, Nappa and Kakarot seconds away from death, and two revelations that he could only see with his new found height. A stream of ki through a branch and something glowing on the ground.
He sensed the glowing object's ki and knew immediately what it was, it was the exact same ki signature the Tree of Might was giving off and a close match to Turles's. If he could make it to that fruit, there was still a chance to save his family.
Raditz fired a spurt of kit to offset his spiraling and came to a dizzying stop. He shook his head to get his bearings, and raced down to the fruit. He realized he couldn't hear anyone's screaming, and it made him fly faster than he ever had in his life.
He slammed into the ground and saw a splattered mess on the soil. They were smashed to bits, but he didn't care from what and he wasn't picky. He grabbed all of the scraps of fruit that he could and shoved them into his mouth, chewing as he flew back to the battle.
He sensed all three of them, but Nappa's energy was plummeting. There wouldn't be any time for planning or tricks, he'd have to do what he despised the most, battle with everything he had.
He swallowed the fruit and lost sight of everything.
Dinners with his families, cities burning. Training with his brother, tortured by Frieza. Nappa's affection for all of them, Paragus's seething resentment that matched. Raditz felt like he was living through every moment of his life, the highs and the lows, shredding through his mind at once. Was this was it meant to experience death?
He knew he wasn't flying anymore when he felt his knees scrape the dirt, but he couldn't see a thing, he could only see a piercing green light. It would kill him, this power was too much for him, Turles was barely holding on and he was as strong as Kakarot, he was a fool to think that he would survive, let alone fight.
The flaring of his ki was enormous, uprooting the tree roots that grew next to him. It was a power he couldn't hold in, he was too much of a coward, he needed to run. He needed to go away and never come back.
The bones and muscles in his body burned hot as they shifted back together, snapping into place like a living jigsaw puzzle. But he couldn't stop it there, he could feel his blood boil as his skin steamed, the energy would be too much, he was going to be cooked alive before he could even try and save his family.
I'm sorry, everyone, Raditz thought as he gripped his skull hard enough that his knuckles went white, It's just so hot. It's so hot, it's so hot, it's so hot-
"These are for you," The teenager's voice tore him from his own thoughts. He looked up and saw a younger version of himself, he knew exactly when he was from the moment he laid eyes on the two bracers with giant blue gems in them. It was him from the mission on planet Thaw.
"My teach… Some local gave them to me, I won't really be needing them," the younger him said while nervously scratching at his hair.
Raditz stared at the bracers while he continued to feel the fire inside him consuming him. Had he really been this shy to give them to Broly?
"Well!?" The younger Raditz shoved the bracers at him. "Are you going to take them or not? They just made me think of you is all, so I thought you might like them! Don't try to make anything out of this! Just remember to stay on my good side and I'll be on yours. Got it?"
The younger Raditz whipped his head away, and Raditz stared at the bracers.
This power - the Tree of Might - It was Broly's power
If he hadn't given Broly the bracers all of those years ago, if he hadn't picked up his slack on all these missions, would Vegeta or Frieza have killed him already or would he have just ran away? If they knew about this, his raw power, he would've been their pawn from day one.
But Broly couldn't be that. He never had that lust for violence inside of him. Broly only wanted to live and learn with other people, and it was a dream that Raditz could never look away from.
In a life that told Raditz he had to be a blood thirsty conqueror, Broly was the only person who showed him there was another way. Even if they were silly little dreams of being a baker or an artist.
He would do anything to keep those dreams alive.
Raditz looked at the sleeves of his Tuffle jumpsuit, then back at the bracers and his younger self.
He could be a conqueror, he could be an inventor, he could be anything he wanted to be. Because if Broly could try and be different, maybe he could too.
"...Okay," Raditz said as he took the bracers, "I'll have your back."
As he put on each bracer he felt them for what they were, mere figments of his imagination, but he felt the burning sensation quell as his ki synchronized with Broly's. He had taken his fruit, fighting against it was no use, it wasn't something to overpower, it was a truth he could only accept as it was, and move forward with it.
Raditz stood tall as his younger self faded away like the bracers on his wrist. He controlled the ki around him as he looked ahead for Turles, a beacon of ki on the horizon, miles away from where he had been thrown.
He was upon him in an instant.
He smelled the blood of his family, saw Kakarot's twitching body still clinging to life on as Turles held him by his throat, and Nappa laying on his back as he took shallow breaths, a new hole in his stomach now next to the first one.
A serene anger possessed Raditz as he grabbed Turles by his wrist and twisted it, causing him to drop Kakarot onto the ground.
"Kakarot, Nappa," Raditz said as he held Turles in place, "are you able to fight?"
Kakarot spat blood onto the ground and smiled as he craned his weary head up to them. "Hey, you're stronger than me now!"
"The fruit only makes you stronger!" Turles said as he swung an arm up to knock Raditz's away, but Raditz released his grip before he could make contact. " I started off ten times stronger than you, and I'll stay ten times stronger than you! I know it, I'll always be stronger than you! I'll kill all of you!"
Nappa forced himself to sit up straight, ignoring the injuries he'd already been dealt plenty of times before on other planets. "Oh you're stronger, big whoop." He smirked. "That doesn't really matter for people like him. Smartie pants never really need all that strength stuff anyways."
Turles scowled and turned away from Raditz, focusing all of his attention on Nappa. What he was going to do couldn't have been more obvious to Raditz if he had screamed it out loud.
Raditz scooped his arms underneath both of Turles and locked his fist together behind his skull, forced his head downwards, and launched both of them into the sky.
The moment they were in the air, Turles shot a flurry of death beams from his eyes. Only the grapple he was in forced him off course, stopping him from landing the final blows on Kakarot and Nappa.
Turles tried to twist his head to get a perfect angle on the pair beneath him, but as they continued jetting into the sky, Raditz thrust his knee into Turle's spine. Turles reflexively curled up, haphazardly drilled a pair of holes clean into his own thighs, and stopped his attack as he howled in pain.
Raditz's grand plan was a long shot, but they were nearing it quickly, the spot from the tree where raw energy flowed. They were only experiencing ounces of the fruit's power, an entire blast of it should do the job.
Turles was too strong to just throw into the stream, Raditz would have to put both of them in there and hope he made it. It wasn't a problem he could do a calculation on or have a theory for, it was just a hope that it would be enough.
Raditz pivoted with his weight in sync with Turles's thrashing with them and rotated them in the air, forcing Turles to face the stream of energy as they got closer to and closer to it.
They got within inches of the radiant stream of green energy before Turles realized what was happening, and ground both of them to a halt.
"Are you out of your mind?" Turles said. "You're going to kill both of us!"
"Maybe!" Raditz grunted. "But you're going to die for sure!"
No matter how much ki he used, it wasn't enough to get Turles to budge. First it was a stalemate, but seconds later the stronger saiyan was pushing him back towards the ground.
If he didn't kill Turles here, Kakarot and Nappa would be slain before Raditz even had a chance to react. This was his only shot to kill him, there was only one choice left.
"Kakarot! Nappa!" Raditz screamed at the top of his lungs. "Blast both of us! Blast us into the tree!"
He waited and waited, his back facing to the ground as he watched the tree become further away, but a blast never came.
Turles leaned his head forward as far as he could, then whipped it backwards, smashing Raditz's own fists into his face hard enough to draw blood, and enough to escape the grapple when they felt Raditz's nose break on the third attempt.
Raditz only had time to bring his hand to his face before Turles turned on him.
"All of you stupid monkeys die now!" A wave of violet and green energy shot from Turles's hand, and Raditz put both his hands up to catch it.
But catching it was all he could do, it sent him plummeting towards the ground as he tried to redirect it, to detonate it, but nothing, the gap between their strengths was too large.
"Dammit!" Raditz shouted as his feet touched the ground and he felt the burning blisters begin to form on his hand. "Dammit all to hell!"
Losing was one thing, but knowing he got so close to winning was another. Now they would all die, and it was his fault. He turned his head down as he continued pushing as hard as he could, screaming until his throat burned, but he knew it was pointless.
Until two hands clasped his shoulders, their ki pooling together with his, and gave him the strength to redirect the blast, shooting it away from the Tree of Might, and far off into space.
"I don't care how close we come to losin'," Kakarot said, "I'm not killing my brother."
"Especially not when we can kick his ass together." Nappa, soaked from his stomach to his feet in his own blood, had a cheshire grin.
Raditz shook his head but couldn't hide his smile, he should've known this was how it was always going to play out with these two.
It was three against one, they had a family, and Turtles had his orders. It was time to find out which was stronger.