Just as Cell was about to blast the giant poacher tank away, he heard mechanical humming and rumbling above. Instead of obliterating the all-flattening and inferno-seeding machine containing an entire platoon of minuscule Ki signatures inside, Cell turned his attention to an entire fleet of mechanized airships above. These poachers had military-grade equipment and were moving into Monster Island in full force. All of these airships had similar graffiti-style decorations and paintings sprayed on top of their military insignia and markings.

"Surprised?" a mechanized resonance of the poacher's altered voice came from a speaker somewhere in the massive tank. "That's right, if it's to get our hands on a Sea Dragon's tooth, even this much firepower isn't considered an overkill! Besides, I'm guessing you're that fabled protector of the Monster Island, the mysterious Monster Island Ranger that's been eliminating patrols of multiple groups looking for this island and ways to reach it. We figured we'd need some serious wallop to deal with a troublesome protector such as you. We've even bought a spaceship with a satellite cannon and it's locked on this location! One blast and this whole island's just a giant lump of coal!"

"A spaceship? That must be why No. 17 isn't here to fend off this ground invasion. He must be worried about that satellite cannon," Cell surmised. He prepared to take off and flatten this tank with a single punch, leaving nothing but scattered bodies in his wake, exactly how Artificial Human No. 17 stated he dealt with scum like this.

"What? You're still going to take us on? I'll let you know that this tank's shell is built out of the same stuff Capsule Corps builds their spaceships from. It'll withstand the squeezes of black holes and star explosions, and it's lighter than plastic! That's alien firepower for you!" the misguided poacher laughed out, unaware that his body would soon be crushed by an overwhelming shockwave that'd peel his prized tank apart and fold its adamantine shell like sheets of tin.

Explosions lit up the sky in the distance. With a surprised expression, Cell turned his attention away. His futuristic radar sensors that combined bio-organic technology with advanced cybernetics and blurred the line between biological and artificial advancements registered a spike and then a dip in Pirita's vitals. Cell would have taken no time to wipe out these ground units one by one, however, an ordinary ranger armed with Earthling weaponry would have perished before long. Even if Cell pulled it off in an instant, it might have been an instant that Pirita didn't have.

Cell moved before the poachers could taunt him again. He threw a restrained punch that accumulated force from his elbow, doing his best not to uproot the millennia-old trees and do more harm than good to this invaluable ecosystem that's already been hurt plenty enough. A tunneling wind shockwave erupted from the tip of Cell's fist, where the Bio-Android stopped it without even contacting the shell of the towering tank machine.

The shockwave lifted off the tank and whirled it around as if it were just a meek aspen tree caught in some sort of horizontal hurricane. Just like the leaves of an aspen tree would have been plucked and ripped up, so did the tank's shell bend, tear, and break at the mercy of a fist that Cell didn't even connect in an attempt to hurt the Monster Island as little as possible. The raging whirlwind collapsed a rocky plateau behind the devastated tank as battered and broken, unconscious poachers lay knocked out in awkward positions that relayed the message that their backs or entire bodies were broken. Those who would survive this ordeal wouldn't have much of a life left without cybernetic replacements of most of their skeletal structures.

The tank splattered out forty tons of spaceship fuel all across the area, but Cell's concussive attack restrained the source of any potential sparks. With the immediate threat of the rolling tower station of barrels and turrets being obliterated beyond even the wildest dream of repair, Cell promptly took off to Pirita's aid.

Just eleven seconds after Cell's departure, rumbling jeeps hurled across the flattened landscape depicting the lost world of ancient forests and mountainous terrains that once hosted species considered extinct or exotic in any other part of the world. Howling and cheering poachers fired from machine guns into the air and hurled Molotovs in every direction with the pools of spaceship fuel catching fire and causing a raging inferno that dwarfed even the impressive visage of the Monster Island's millennial trees and mountain ranges when seen from the horizon.

The jeeps steered and sped up, racing against the raging infernos of their own making as these foul men and women nearly became victims of their own poaching endeavors. Meanwhile, near a burning stack of wood and bricks where once stood a cabin in which Pirita and Lapis worked and lived, stood a tall and broad mech that clutched the bruised and dirty, limp body of a Monster Island Ranger in its metallic pincers. Lifting Pirita's helpless body up, the mech's spaceship porthole glass opened up to show a chubby poacher controlling the mech, pulling out a revolver from beneath his belt as the mech's weaponry system was too calamitous to be used on one, already beaten-up woman.

"I've captured the Monster Island Ranger, boys! I repeat I've captured the Monster Island Ranger! Move on to the southern shoreline and secure the Sea Dragon, over!" the poacher reported of his success, hardly able to contain the excitement.

"Repeat… Please repeat… Monster Island… Ranger… Onboard… Singularity containment field… In shambles… Escaped… Huge casualties… Going down…" drastic plights for help and resignation to impending violent doom reached the poacher, prompting him to switch the channel as the intermittent static and the sounds of screaming on the other end were unbearable to his human range of hearing.

"What's that? Monster Island Ranger!? That's impossible! I've got the Monster Island Ranger right here! It said so on her uniform before it got all tattered and burnt up! I can't read it anymore, but that's what it said…" The poacher leaned out from his giant mech control station to try and note any insignia on Pirita's ruined Monster Island Ranger uniform, but there was nothing of the sort. Just the sorry look of a broken and defeated ranger with her uniform loosely hanging over her bruised body in tatters and her once tidy hair now flapping loosely around because of the mech's hefty emissions of compressed air from its hydraulics. "Hot-Rod Unit, have you located the Sea Dragon!?"

"Yeah… That would be a negative on the Sea Dragon… I… I don't know how to explain this…"

"What are you talking about, out with it!?" the angry poacher barked into his microphone, having completely forgotten of the dangling, powerless body of a beaten ranger he held pinched by her hair in the air before him.

"Shit… Someone's… Man… We can't pass it! Someone's put giant sneakers in our way!"

"G-Giant… Sneakers? What do you mean by giant sneakers?" the poacher became too baffled by this explanation to stay mad at the sudden disappearance of the communication skills of the fellow poacher unit riding jeeps and taking off from the carrier ported on the northern side of the island.

"They're… Massive, man! Like… Like something made for a titanic beast that's at least five kilometers tall or something! They're blocking off the whole damn road and we can't roll around them because of the damned flames! The Turret Citadel unit spilled gas all over the place and we accidentally set the whole island ablaze!" the representative on the communications link of the jeep unit of poachers reported as the confused poachers got out of their jeeps to try and cope with the fact that their path was completely blocked off by a gigantic pair of sneakers almost as tall as a mountain themselves.

"Submariner Unit, report! Have you located the Sea Dragon?" the poacher asked, but only got static in return. One by one, the signals of all the submarine units sent to chase after the Sea Dragon and drive it closer to the shoreline went out. "Damn it, hold tight, Hot-Rod Unit, I'll be with you in a moment to help you haul those… Giant sneakers… Off the road so that you have a clear path to the shoreline. The Submariner Unit needs your help, the Satellite Destroyer and Turret Citadel units are offline!"

Just as the poacher wrapped up his communications and turned to Pirita's hanging body, preparing to raise his weapon and blow her brains out, a bullet ripped through his own skull, popping his head like a grape squeezed between two pinching fingers. With a determined squint, Pirita clenched an emergency revolver in her hands, having recovered enough in between the thrashing she took previously to surprise attack her captor. With the mech operator being dispatched of, his twitching, headless body flopped back into his seat, jerking around various switches and collapsing on top of buttons on the control panel.

The staggering mech launched a volley of missiles randomly into the sky while staggering back and unloading a barrage of high-caliber gunfire into the sky and throwing jets of flames all around. The mech flopped on its back, still clenching the battered ranger in its pincers and, because of its unfortunate upside-down position, its weaponry suddenly aimed either straight at Pirita or to the ground underneath the mech. Something that was about to cause a massive explosion that would demolish both the fallen mech and the unfortunate ranger it clenched firmly on to.

Pirita closed her eyes, accepting the inevitable end as the light from the barrels spouting condensed streams of flames lit up at the other end of the barrel. A green blur flashed in front of her eyes and the next thing Pirita knew, she was being laid on the ground with the mech exploding behind Cell.

"Cell… You're alive…" Pirita muttered meekly.

"As expected from the Monster Island Ranger, you've beaten even such a terrifying foe," Cell commended the ranger, standing up and turning toward the southern shoreline. "There are more of these horrible people, causing more and more harm. By the time No. 17 deals with that satellite cannon, the damage might be irreversible. I'll get you to safety…"

"No, please. Save as many as you can. We cannot lose the island. The poachers said… They said it's all on fire… I can't imagine… The terror these… These poor creatures…" Pirita wept, lamenting her inability to save the animals, beasts, and monsters she'd been tasked with protecting.

"Fire…!" Cell's eyes widened. "Those rotten bastards! Hang on tight, I'll try something wild."

"N-No… Please… Save everyone…" Pirita begged, but she was too weak to resist in any meaningful way. Cell's tail wrapped around her as he took off toward the shoreline and then past it, positioning itself above the unsteady ocean surface. Cell spread its armored wings out, hardening them up as much as it could. It saw the leviathan perform a feat of torrential water spouts that, Pirita earlier claimed, could sink entire islands. It would undoubtedly cause a flood across the Monster Island, but it would at the very least put out the flames and wash away the burning fuel. Maybe it would even drown those abominable poachers too as a bonus.

Cell bellowed, turning around and stopping with a flap of its armored wing slapping across the ocean's surface. For a moment, the water was still. Then, a few kilometers from where Cell smacked the ocean's surface, a tidal wave rose and slammed against a pair of colossal sneakers that served as a dam for the poachers bundled behind it. Nevertheless, the water spilled over Monster Island, washing away forests, the bogs, and the desert, extinguishing flames but causing untold calamity in its wake while washing off spaceship fuel into the ocean as a means of its own horrific ecological disaster.

Seeing the gravely silent aftermath of what Cell had to resort to in order to save as much of the island as it could, the Bio-Android placed Pirita's unconscious body on the beach before ascending to confront the poachers. The tidal wave had shoved the gigantic sneakers that Cell had materialized so that the leviathan could one day walk the island and meet its inhabitants over the poachers, splattering and smearing them across the forest road and squishing the unfortunate souls at the back like pinched tubes of toothpaste.

Cell found a single soul whose lower body was squashed by the sneakers but the upper half still stuck out. With a high-pitched plastic squeak, Cell's feet touched the ground and the insectoid Bio-Android approached the trembling and whimpering poacher. Cell waggled its tail, eager to sting this monstrous man and make him experience the dread of every semblance of energy being drained from its body on a cellular level and every single cell in his body dying one by one due to being deprived of all its energy.

"You abhorrent monster," Cell hissed. "I never thought I'd meet someone more wicked than Dr. Puri in my entire life, but I may have met entire platoons of decent contenders. Forgive me, you'll have to endure this pain for a little longer. I am not gifted with your sadistic nature, so I cannot so quickly come up with a fitting end for the likes of you."

The miserable, half-squished poacher spat something in between snot and blood but, because of gravity, it returned in between its own eyes. "I don't even know what you are, you worthless freak! All we cared for was the Sea Dragon! Just get it over with!"

"And all that I have ever wanted, all that these poor animals have ever wanted, was to live in peace! To live a life of dignity, to live it to its fullest, and enjoy ourselves until the very end! Something they're entitled to due to the fact they were born! Yet you had to come here and ruin everything!" Cell flipped out, its reptilian, snake-like pupils vanished as bloody veins crawled from the edges of its eyes. The enraged Bio-Android positioned its stinger above the fallen and pinned-down poacher and froze it, ready to sting at any moment. He restrained the sting because the poacher began laughing maniacally, so hard that he began vomiting obscene amounts of blood and thick porridge of his own squished innards because of the stress to his lower body.

"You ugly piece of shit," the poacher spat back at Cell, mocking the creature's lifelong dream. "To be left alone, to live in peace and be happy… Such things don't exist for most people! Life is war… Life is conflict… Life is suffering… The only creature that gets to live in comfort and die of old age at the top of the world, living a peaceful life, is the strongest, ultimate ruler–the apex predator. For most of my life… I thought that the apex predator was man, I thought I'd get to live the life you dream of too, but… Then I found out that demons are real and walk the Earth, then–that aliens exist and that they're going to live on our planet and share our cities with us… Only the one at the top of the food chain, the apex predator gets to live free and not worry about anything else. Everyone beneath is… Fair game…"

"Hmph… In the state you are in right now, you are no apex predator. You aren't even food, because you offer nothing of value. You are just waste, waiting to decompose. Allow me to give you a hand with that…" Cell's eyes squinted in disgust, instead of plunging its stinger, Cell widened its tip and turned it into a pouring cone shape. The inner end of the Bio-Android's tail bloated with the influx of thick fluid moving all the way to the tip of the tail. With a bit of a squeeze, Cell forced a spray of Saibaman acid out of its open stinger, dissolving the fallen poacher to the bone and filling their last moments with overwhelming dread and pain that surpassed even what the man must have felt before being pinned down by the fallen colossal sneakers. The man vanished into eroded skeletal remains with his body sizzling so loud that the sound threatened to overpower his screaming.

Cell spared no time at all to scan the ruined landscape of Monster Island. It turned around with an open hand and blew away the colossal sneakers with one Ki blast, reducing them to smoldering threads falling out of the sky. With the passage to the beach being freed, Cell approached the shoreline only to see a scaled, serpentine monster with plump, fishy lips and black spikes emerging from the water.

The monster had the body of an eastern-style dragon, long and winding, snake-like yet gifted with two thick arms on the sides. The coloration of its scales was like that of the Divine Dragon, however, the green was a tad lighter in tone. The Sea Dragon's eyes were round and protruded from its skull, yellow with brown irises. It was a mixture of a dragon and a catfish in a lot of ways and gigantic. Comparable to the size of the Divine Dragon, if a little smaller.

"Sorry, this human isn't for you to devour," Cell replied without skipping a beat, thrusting its tail and stinger into the Sea Dragon's abdomen and absorbing its energy until the Sea Dragon's bodily integrity collapsed, its skin became gooey and its brittle, dry bones collapsed into the ocean. "The one that will become the apex predator, who deserves a peaceful life at the top of the food chain… Is me," Cell proclaimed after rendering Sea Dragon extinct with this attack and scooping up the unconscious Pirita, then flying off toward the flooded and desolate Monster Island.


Lapis landed on the island's surface, looking around in absolute shock. Someone utterly flooded the entire island and its countless carefully recreated biomes with ocean water and washed everything away. So many animals were dead and unique species were rendered extinct. He was the most worried about Pirita, which was why he wasted as little time as he could in protecting the Monster Island from the Satellite Cannon that the poachers brought to hold the island hostage with.

Still, natural disasters such as these didn't seem like poachers' work. Lapis' worries soothed a little when his radar system registered Pirita's life signs inside a hollowed-out cave where Cell lived. The Artificial Human thought Cell must have rescued Pirita from harm's way and used its immense strength to fend off the ground forces. He wasn't sure just what the heck had happened to the Monster Island, but, as long as they were alive and well, the island could have been rebuilt. The inhabitants could have still been rescued and taken care of.

"Lapis," Pirita muttered meekly when the Artificial Human entered Cell's makeshift cave home. Much to Lapis' surprise, Cell was nowhere to be seen. However, there was plenty of medicine from their warehouse near the cabin in the woods all over the cave's floor. All signs pointed to Cell having salvaged the medicine, brought Pirita here, and just left it to natural selection. Why would he do something this insensitive and reckless?

"What happened, where's Cell?" Lapis gnashed his teeth and squeezed his knuckles. Never has he felt so helpless despite all of his power and speed. He failed to protect the one person he cared for most of all and the home where this kind woman offered him a second chance after a life squandered working for that old hag Android No. 21.

"Cell… Cell's hurting, Lapis… Cell ran away. It's… It's confused, Lapis. Saying all those things about natural selection and apex predators, it might be dangerous," Pirita wrapped her arms around Lapis.

"That runt!" Lapis cursed. "I guess someone like Cell really can't change after all. The first sign of hardship and their psyche breaks."

"You're not like Cell, Lapis. You're not trapped in following Cell's footsteps, nor is he in following yours," Pirita pressed Lapis' forehead to her own, having already accepted the fact that she might never see him again before Cell stepped in to save her life.

With a stone-cold expression, Lapis pulled out of Pirita's embrace and stood up. The Artificial Human tightened and pulled his gloves up and began walking toward the door.

"Lapis… Where are you going?" Pirita called out.

"I promised Cell that if it was to step out of line, I'd take Cell out. I intend on keeping that promise," Lapis stated boldly. Pirita could hardly recognize the man who looked back at her. This was no longer the kind-hearted Monster Island Ranger Lapis, but the murderous Artificial Human No. 17 that was staring back at her.

"Please, don't do it, Lapis!" Pirita cried out, dipping her chin in the misery of her powerlessness. "What's the point of you running off and hunting Cell!? When is it going to be enough!? What about Monster Island, Lapis!? What about me!? The island is ruined, so many animals are missing or dead, and the whole place is flooded. I can't fix this on my own. Not with most of my body so broken and useless as it is. When you came here looking for work away from people, I gave you a chance and I asked you to choose. Whether you wanted to remain Artificial Human No. 17, who had no place in Monster Island caring for its inhabitants, or Lapis, a young and caring Monster Island Ranger recruit. I'm offering you that same choice now. You can run off hunting after Cell, acting like the Android assassin that your creator intended you to be, or you can stay here and help this island and its animals like the Monster Island Ranger!"

"Pirita-san…" Lapis' expression softened and all traces of the cold and murderous assassin vanished. When Lapis walked back up to the seated and placed against the wall, battered and helpless ranger, she offered him her shaking and bruised hand for a shake as a sign of accepting her offer. Pirita's eyes widened in shock and she whimpered when Lapis' arms wrapped around her and helped her off the ground. "I guess we better start by rebuilding our cabin. Once the communications are back up, I'll let Bulma know that Cell's gone rogue. I'm sure Goku would have flipped out at me for missing out on an opportunity to test himself against that thing, anyway. You're right, my responsibilities are here, with you."

Even if her neck felt numb and didn't seem to work how it was supposed to, Pirita tensed it and forced her head to reach closer to Lapis. Lapis jumped up in surprise when their lips connected in a kiss. One blink later, however, his expression softened, and he committed this somber moment into memory. When Pirita's head weighed down again and she whimpered in pain of her hurting neck, Lapis wondered how he ever accepted a reality in which his and Pirita's lips weren't touching like that. It was when they kissed that Lapis felt truly alive.

"Pirita-san," Lapis said while the two strolled out of Cell's cave in what was once a desert but now resembled a sandy bog. "I'm sorry I wasn't here in time to prevent all of this. I did the best I could."

"You better make it up for it and work double-time. No excuses, ranger…" Pirita grumbled while playfully nudging her numb fist against Lapis' chest and offering him a meek smirk from a hurting and bruised face.

"Yeah…" Lapis replied, looking up into the sky with clear eyes and taking off with the woman he resolved to make his wife one day in his arms.