"Your hair turned gold. This isn't the usual Great Ape transformation. What is the meaning of this?" Ledgic asked, staring at the sparkling and flushing with unchained golden aura Bardock.
"Are we going to yap and exchange stories, or are we going to scrap?" Bardock muttered with a grungy and low-pitched tone, vanishing from place. Instinctively, Ledgic's eyes shot wide open, projecting sheer intensity as the ruthless alien mercenary drove himself to the peak of his perceptive abilities, positioning his open right hand at his chest level.
Ledgic caught a punch coming right at him, but before he could cheer his success, his escalated battlefield instincts demanded that he react to an unseen threat. Taking a more defensive and retreating approach, Ledgic positioned his right arm above his head, absorbing the incoming high kick he couldn't even see. The only way Ledgic could react to these absurdly fast attacks was by relying on his battlefield instincts–by seeing potential openings in his own defense from his opponent's eyes and moving in time to correct them.
The weight of Bardock's blows made Ledgic's forearm feel numb. Almost immediately after absorbing the shock of the high kick, Ledgic winced in pain and dropped his guard. His right arm dangled by his side, leaving him wide open from the right side. With a flurry of vanishes, Ledgic began frantically racing across the pointy skyscraper tops up in the air, trying to put some distance between himself and his opponent so that he could recover his numbed arm, catch a breath, and figure out a viable fighting plan.
"You're slacking," Ledgic's eyes bulged when he heard Bardock's bemused and restrained voice behind him. The moment Ledgic turned to react to Bardock standing with his arms crossed right where Ledgic meant to retreat, the mercenary received a devastating blow to the cheek that nearly shoved Bardock's fist through Ledgic's jaw, deforming the mercenary's face for the moment Bardock's fist stayed inside and leaving a mean graze that shined long after Bardock's fist had left.
Gulping and grunting in despair at a fight that was beginning to take a nasty turn for him, Ledgic began retreating again, involving a flurry of vanishes and an imitation of his opponent's sensory illusion of leaving afterimages behind to confuse him. Extending his right hand to the side, Ledgic merged his shattered metallic shards back into the knife-like spike and connected the two spikes into a quarterstaff that added some necessary range and complexity to his defensive capabilities.
Instead of testing the mettle of his adaptable and super-durable metallic alloy with stiff blocks, Ledgic used the two sides of his staff to deflect Bardock's attacks. A slam to Bardock's wrist deflected his gut punch, and a careful slip to the side with a thwack to Bardock's back punished an overzealous flying knee strike. For the first time since Bardock transformed, Ledgic found an opening to pelt him with blitzing and relentless staff strikes, forcing Bardock to hunker down and put his guard up, receiving a hefty mauling that left ample shallow grazes but inflicted no lasting damage.
"So, you were holding back…" Super Saiyan Bardock smiled, dragging the back of his fist across his lip to wipe the faint smear of blood-red off. "For you to be able to keep up with a Super Saiyan, I have to say… I'm not sure if I should feel impressed by your skill or embarrassed for mine."
"Feeling talkative all of a sudden?" Ledgic spat some purple blood from the time the Super Saiyan decked him with a backhand jab before rushing at his opponent with his quarterstaff positioned diagonally behind him.
Turning his whole body around with a flawless transition of momentum, Ledgic delivered a roundhouse kick that connected with Bardock's knee block with a thunderous crack. Just as Ledgic was about to storm down with the staff flurry, the striking side of the staff met some lustrous interruption in the form of Bardock's Ki blast. The rowdy detonation threw Ledgic off-guard and opened him up as the mercenary stumbled with his staff thrown back.
A straight to Ledgic's jaw blanked the purple stare in the mercenary's eyes and indented the alien's cobra-shaped face. The radiant Super Saiyan started a wild flurry of vanishing around Ledgic, stunning the ruthless fighter with his incredible speed, delivering jabs from different angles, directions, and levels of elevation, all of which connected flawlessly and made Ledgic stumble. Each successive vanishing blow threw Bardock's opponent right into the next one to follow, quickly overwhelming Ledgic.
Fear and daze in Ledgic's eyes soon turned to fury, as the extraterrestrial warrior flashed back through all the humiliations he faced, accepting smaller contracts and smaller bounties just because of the circumstances of his birth. The constant yapping about how incredible, cold, and ruthless the Saiyans were and what exceptional paid muscle they'd make if they didn't strike out on their own after Frieza's demise. Bardock sensed it, gasping in surprise at the incredible shoot in Ledgic's Ki as the warrior flexed his whole body at once and threw his arms and legs out in an explosive Ki burst.
"Damn…!" Bardock grumbled, bracing himself in a struggle against a relentless tide of scarlet energy that threatened to wash him away and render him completely helpless. "His Ki just never stops rising! What an incredible guy!"
"SAIYAN!" Ledgic bellowed, expelling all his scorn and all the grievances he'd built up during his stint as an intergalactic mercenary. "I won't be patronized any longer! I won't let you! I am No. 1!" Ledgic declared with whited-out eyes as he separated his quarterstaff into two halves which promptly sharpened into the form of slick twin swords in Ledgic's hands.
Enveloped in booming scarlet Ki, Ledgic dashed toward the bracing Super Saiyan, slashing with both of his swords repeatedly before gripping them tighter and energizing them with sparkling red energy coating. Bardock made his Ki vanish, calming his spirit and clearing his mind as he lived and breathed in the tide of battle, snapping away and weaving aside from each rapid strike of the flurry before the clamoring mercenary brought both swords down on him like a lightning strike. With bulging and intimidated eyes, Bardock caught the swords with his hands glowing with the entirety of the Super Saiyan Ki he had to withdraw inside his body.
Bardock knew that Ledgic's outburst of energy couldn't last and that, because of its volatile nature. Neither could his tools of war hold up to the demands that Ledgic put on them. Knowing full well the toll of demanding too much from one's own body and fighting with strength one didn't really have reserved, Bardock weathered the storm until Ledgic's swords shattered into starlit sprinkles of chipped metal.
"ROARGH!" Bardock bellowed, spinning a roundhouse kick to Ledgic's jaw and throwing him aside once the raging mercenary lost his balance because of the shattering of his energized swords. Ledgic shot like a speeding bullet, slamming through a skyscraper and drilling into the militarized street. The crash landing left a deep ridge in the ground and had the busted building collapse on its own weight with a booming rumble.
"It's over," Super Saiyan Bardock muttered upon landing in front of the ridge that Ledgic's crashing body left in the ruined street. Bardock pushed a house-sized tank aside like he was handling empty cardboard, stepped up onto the ruined asphalt, and dug up gravel to peer inside the wreckage. "You're fighting beyond your means now. That kind of strength burns your body up. I used to fight just like that, thinking that throwing my body away for the sake of this rebellion or that one was worth it because I'm just one man fighting for a greater cause. Even if I've come to realize the wrathful fool that I was, you're not even busting your body for a greater purpose, you're merely doing it for empty pride."
"EMPTY PRIDE!?" Ledgic cried out, exploding out from under the gravel and the wreckage of scrap by forcing a beaming red energy pillar to pierce the Imeckan heavens and shake the ground. "You moron! The title of the strongest means everything to me! Even if I know deep down that I'm every bit as powerful as a Saiyan is, it doesn't matter unless the whole universe knows! If I'm not living up to my true potential, there's no use for this body or my life!"
"Forgive me for trying to impart some old-man wisdom to a hotheaded nitwit," Bardock smirked before putting his dukes up. "I'm more than okay with pummeling you into the dirt for good, but I'm a bit worried your reputation you care so much about won't be able to recover from this decisive defeat."
Straightening his back and dragging his left foot back, Ledgic positioned his open left hand by his side and manifested a screeching red energy sphere in the palm of his hand that sparkled with mustard-colored electricity around it. Sneering at the face of the loathsome fable, everything radiant and glorious about the Saiyan race manifested and incarnated into a single person, Ledgic leaned his whole body back to the left, making his unruly Ki shake the entire planet and shroud its skies with black clouds and vicious thunderstorms.
Far, far behind the quaking scene of this ludicrous confrontation, Gale snapped out of the shock caused by observing this majestic exchange of blows the scale of which felt like outside of the reach of mere mortals, even ones taking pride in being a one-man-army. Scowling, the short and fit alien commander rushed up to Don Kia and grabbed his dictator by the wrist. "Come on, Don Kia-sama! It's no longer safe here!" he grumbled.
"Are you kidding!?" Sheila bawled, pulling on her hair. "Look at it, the entire planet looks like it's going to blow up and no one's even hit it yet. Just those two being here looks like it'll crack Planet Imecka like an egg! Nowhere is safe!"
"Heh… Heh… Hahahaha!" Don Kia collapsed on the floor, dropping to his knees in an undignified position as he began madly guffawing and jerked his head while staring at the dark skies visible through the collapsed roof ceiling of Don Plaza. "Saiyans… Accursed Saiyans truly will be the end of this planet. Of my precious Imecka…"
"Snap out of it!" Gale barked out, threatening to smack his master with the back of his hand before halting his hand at the very last inch before it would have crushed Don Kia's puny head. The tyrant squeaked in terror and wrapped his arms over his head, crawling back to his throne and pressing his back against it in horror, while peeking through a tiny opening. "Don Kia-sama, we need to flee. Maybe if we take one of the confiscated ships in the warehouse, we can lift it into the outer atmosphere. We can still make it out alive, but we need to move now!"
"What about the Earthling?" Sheila pointed to Launch, who was rapidly mashing the holographic control scheme, looking for a drone that both worked and was strong enough to approach closer to the battlefield and record the fight.
"You heard what Ledgic said!" Don Kia shrieked out in a high-pitched voice, stepping out from cowering behind Gale and taking charge again once he dealt with his emotional breakdown. "If we interfere with his battle–he'll kill us all for sure. Let's leave this woman to die with that pesky Saiyan and ungrateful knob!"
"Someone with a carrier craft, come pick us up at the top floor of Don Plaza," Gale grumbled into his speaker before pointing his hand at the wall and blasting it away with an energy wave. Not too long after, a bus-sized carrier cruiser leveled with the hole in the wall and opened up to let Don Kia, Gale, Sheila, and the party of surviving soldiers comprising Don Kia's personal guard into the carrier.
Launch spared no attention to the fleeing aliens and kept switching between remote drones and cameras that were on every lamppost and attached to most blocks of flats and skyscrapers. Despite her natural shyness, the blue eyes of the kind and aloof persona of Launch were brimming with determination to find Bardock and make sure he was okay. He had to have survived that horrible wound, if he didn't, there would be no reason for the ground to be shaking this much and for the clouds to be turning dark and noxious.
"Even though I wanted your head, I'll make do with blasting you away without a trace left behind!" Ledgic yelled out as the roaring tremors around him, combined with the strident flow of his red aura and the rampant sonic boom shockwaves made it difficult to perceive anything making any lick of sense around the district. From the looks of it, the entire planet was going to hell, merely from hosting these two feuding powers on its surface.
"You're one crafty bastard," Bardock snickered, realizing that there was no running away or dodging Ledgic's attack. When an energy wave of this magnitude would come at him–it would be a raging typhoon of unchained energy that obliterates all in its path, with the only way to survive it being through overpowering it or weathering the worst it can do and carrying on with what was left behind. "Forcing me to burn through all my energy and stamina, keeping up with your suicidal fighting style, only to use something as destructive as this at the last moment. Fine, I'll dance. Give it all you've got, I'll take it all and swing right back at you!"
"Heh," Ledgic smiled with his glare softening up a little. "Whether or not you are the strongest is yet to be determined. However, you certainly are a wild one, I'll give you that, Saiyan. TAKE THIS!"
Ledgic thrust his hand that was channeling the sparkling energy orb, unleashing a full-power, tunneling energy wave. A shapeless, destructive burst of scarlet, booming energy crackling with golden electricity. Super Saiyan Bardock spread his legs and gasped in awe at the tremendous attack coming at him before snapping out of it and crossing his arms. Bracing for impact, Bardock let out all of his golden Super Saiyan aura, becoming a golden bonfire smoldering the very tips of Planet Imecka's atmosphere.
Almost immediately the uncompromising force washed Bardock off his feet, despite the immense pressure, the Saiyan kept his arms crossed. Even if he could no longer hear the overheating scorch of his aura and even if the rumbling of Ledgic's attack had temporarily deafened Bardock and caused him to see nothing but eye-raking red light all around, the Saiyan persisted in resisting. Like a persistent bar of iron, the hunkered down dazed, and overwhelmed Super Saiyan kept up his block and let his wild aura unfurl. Even as his space suit and battle armor chipped and burnt away into ashes, and the mustard electricity ravaged Bardock's skin with patches of burns.
The full-power energy wave detonated with a whirling dome that swirled up in the cosmos, eclipsing Planet Imecka as its range stretched all the way to the planet's hemisphere. When the energy of the blast finally burnt out, Ledgic stood in a complete, smoldering wasteland. No different from the abhorrent and lawless conditions that most of Planet Imecka operated under. Panting and wheezing for air, Ledgic lowered his firing hand, smoking with black trails all over his body while his strained muscles shook, affected by the cruel abuse that their master felt was necessary.
"I did it…" Ledgic coughed out. "I did it, I won! Hear me, universe, I, Ledgic, am the strongest warrior! I am the mercenary who surpassed the fabled warrior race–the Saiyans! I am… An elite warrior, at last!"
A sudden thud distracted Ledgic, making the cobra-headed alien warrior gasp with bulged eyes and a shaking, open jaw as a muscular, burnt and bruised arm plunged from beneath countless layers of radioactive and scorched sand. Just like Ledgic's muscles that begged for rest, the Saiyan's arm that emerged from the premature burial of its owner was shaking from stress. Both pain and wear. Despite Ledgic's delusional thoughts that he may have been imagining this, the arm bent down by the elbow and the hand made a solid grip on the ground.
"Heave… Ho!" Bardock grumbled, pulling his upper body out from being claimed by the wasteland and sitting up. Sand and ash sprinkled from the Saiyan's black, spiky hair while Bardock coughed and spewed it from his mouth and blew it from his nose. With a strenuous struggle, Bardock emerged fully from the burial, patting his fully exposed, severely battle-damaged body before successfully clenching a fist and laughing to himself.
If he could still clench a fist–Bardock could fight!
Right after making sure he was in fighting condition, Bardock turned behind and scanned the ruined wasteland around him with an aghast look. Something about this sight drove intense fear into the Saiyan and this fact interested Ledgic.
"Why the long face? Don't tell me you haven't seen what the extent of power such as ours can bring about. Surely this isn't your first full-power fight," Ledgic vented his bewilderment at Bardock's worries about the state of the planet that was entirely alien to him and treated him like an outlaw during his entire stay.
"You dirtbag, just how much of the planet did you level!?" Bardock turned back to Ledgic, frothing from the mouth and stabbing with burning pitchforks from the deepest pits of hell's scorn. "So many refugees gone, what if Launch is one of them?"
"Their lives don't matter to me. I've done hits on people. It's all just business. Killing you is about leveling up my stock in the universe. With that at stake, as well as my warrior's pride, the life of an Earthling female matters so little to me I forgot she was even here," Ledgic spat blood off to the side. His outfit was torn down the center, both from Bardock's beating and the stress of having to contain the swollen body of its wearer. The sweating, hurting, and weary mercenary looked like he was struggling with merely standing on both feet at this point.
"You asshole!" Bardock cried out, exploding with the golden aura of a Super Saiyan as his black hair spiked up. "You're no better than that Don Kia piece of shit! I'll tear you limb from limb for that!"
"You're welcome to try. Your bravado is fooling no one, Saiyan. You're flickering in between your golden-hair form and your natural state, meaning you can't keep up with the strain of your transformation. My body might be at my breaking point too, but I'm still stronger if it's against your ordinary Saiyan form," Ledgic flexed his muscles and drew his arms off to the side.
"When cocky dumbasses pull stupid shit like that… IT MAKES ME MAAAD!" Bardock threw his head back, pumping raw strength through his exposed muscles and a stunning white flame aura erupting from his entire body. Color faded from Bardock's spiked-up hair as the Saiyan let out a mad battle cry. Veins ruptured both Bardock's flawless warrior's musculature and his face as madness beckoned from his rolled-back and mindless stare.
When Bardock stretched his back and his eyes stared straight back at Ledgic, Bardock's spiky hair turned white, and his eyes–blood red.
"A-Another transformation!?" if Ledgic's cold-blooded body could turn pale, he would have, as the alien mercenary lost all fighting spirit and leaned back in bewilderment. "Even stronger… Than the last one?"
"This is its own unique form of growth. The evolution of Super Saiyan using the cybernetic enhancements of an Android to pump more and more energy into me, all of which goes straight into augmenting my Super Saiyan strength. This is Hyper Super Saiyan, and it will prove to be your worst nightmare that'll crush your warrior's pride like a candy wrapper," Hyper Bardock clenched his right fist, sneering back at his rival whom he had now grown to despise after seeing his recklessness and selfishness first-hand.
The calamitous battle between the elite alien mercenary Ledgic and Bardock wasn't far from its end. The only question to be solved was whether Planet Imecka would make it to see it conclude.