The gigantic ape in grey Saiyan battle armor that had expanded to fit the supersized form of the mountain-smashing titan despite its damaged state lifted whatever chunks of the mountain it had failed to smash over its head without as much as a snarl and tossed it kilometers across into another mountain range, reducing it to pebbles before pounding its chest again.
So much anger, so much fury and everything around it was so fragile, nothing concrete to vent it all out on. Everything that the goliath touched turned to dust and ashes and every roar made the fragile planet that hosted the savage titan crumble bit by bit.
"Barrage Dodonpa!" Tenshinhan and Chiaotzu yelled out in sync with one another, extending the fingers of their right hands and pointing them at the monstrous ape as a blinding barrage of bright beams erupted from them, smashing with their lethal might against the beast's exposed hide with quite a handful of them hitting it square in the back of the head.
"No way, it didn't even move!" Chiaotzu leaned back in surprise. Had the little ghoul-boy the capacity to go any paler – he'd have abused that ability to its limits at that moment as fear drained all blood from his veins.
"What ungodly strength!" Tenshinhan dragged his arm across his forehead in shock. All this training, all this hoping that he had become stronger than even Son Goku after training non-stop for seven years with an intensity that surpassed that of all of his peers and for it all to smash against an immovable rock like this…
Despite the initial impression, the Great Ape's eye twitched and it turned around to confront its attackers. Blood trickled from the beast's cracked face down over one of its eyes and from its nose and bubbled from its jaws but those injuries appeared to only make the beast wilder for the pain from the sum of all of its injuries only added to its infinite list of frustrations to fuel its world-shaking fury.
"Down!" Tenshinhan yelled out, grabbing Chiaotzu by his shoulder and diving down like his life depended on it. Judging from the titanic monstrosity opening up its mouth and unleashing a vicious beam of blue that erupted into an airborne firestorm just above their heads – that very much was the case.
"You used it…" Chiaotzu babbled looking at Tenshinhan and noticing his buff body obtaining slicker muscle tonus while chilly, white vapor streaked from Tenshinhan's pores.
"That's right, I don't see any other way of surviving this. One of us has to use it at all times," Tenshinhan confirmed it.
The three-eyed warrior was not one for names. Most of his techniques were named by the martial artists he had inherited them from. While he did know Hot-Red Mode and could effortlessly use it to power-up his techniques, it was Krillin who named them and first came to discover that branch of Ki manipulation. This method which Tenshinhan had tapped into was different entirely, whereas Hot-Red utilized arrogance and vanity, nothing else but absolute power, aggression and need to win, this current mode required one to feel at ease and emanate serene grace and control of the battle without the need to rush or defeat one's opponent.
"I'll use it," Chiaotzu looked at his friend. "It ends up reducing your combat potential and I'm weaker than you so I should use it."
"If you use it, it will be of no use to us. While his power is beyond any of our reaches, I am closer to it than you and because of that I could still manage to stay vigilant and aware of some of the beast's moves." Tenshinhan exchanged his thoughts with Chiaotzu telepathically while the Great Ape lifted its arms over its head and aimed to smash at the mountain where the two martial artists had landed.
It was impossible to see the hammer-arms of the titan smashing down, but from the immense rubble and thunderous collapse of the sky-reaching rock, Tenshinhan emerged with Chiaotzu in his arms, being able to somewhat follow the monster's movements in his chill method of Ki control. It's very essence laid in the ability to transcend the need for aggression and rely on the opponent defeating themselves, aiming to merely allow the opponent to tire themselves out or make a mistake, at the cost of a decent chunk of one's combat strength that one offered when sacrificing their aggression and offensive in battle.
The Great Ape looked up with a snarl, noticing the two pesky flies having escaped its clutches, feeling the absence of their crunchy bones underneath its herculean fists. The Great Ape opened its mouth and unleashed a burst of blue flames from it, Tenshinhan's three eyes snapped open, realizing that he'd be unable to avoid such a loose attack in time and would end up getting burnt. In an unexpected twist, however, the flames ended up taking a drastic plunge down, forming an over the top L shape before cleansing away the frost, ice, and snow from the mountain range that it showered.
"Chiaotzu, it was you, wasn't it?" Tenshinhan looked at his friend whom he still held in his clutches.
"Yep…" Chiaotzu nodded. His tiny, pale hands laid raised and open to where the flames would have consumed the pair. The ghastly martial artist had used his telekinesis to redirect the flames to another direction, with the flames being merely an elemental byproduct of Tora's Ki control, they were much easier to control than the beast itself or pure Ki attacks. Even still… Chiaotzu looked drained from redirecting the course of the flames even once.
Tenshinhan let Chiaotzu wriggle out from his grip. He raised his arms up and switched his method of Ki control from the cool white vapor emitted from his body to once more buffing out to the limit of his ability while veins continued to pop out wherever they found the chance to and evaporating sweat from his pores lit ablaze as his body was driven to the point of dehydration.
"If we mess around, we'll just end up dead! This is everything I have, Hot-Red Kikoho!" Tenshinhan roared out as he overtaxed his body a dozen times over and burnt out with a single, direct hit of a fiery beam that expanded as if passing through prisms upon prisms as it ended up massive enough to envelop the entire titanic calamity that had befallen Earth. The Kikoho, instead of gleaming in its usual bright glow of cultivated user's spirit, streamed with infernal heat of the hot-red, vain aggression pushing the body past its limits in the desire for nothing less but complete obliteration of the enemy, multiplying it even further by the drastic might of the Kikoho and fired all of his augmented spirit of need for brutality at the enemy at once.
Great Ape Tora reeled in pain, struggling to stay on his feet. Bit by bit he had raised his arms up and began pushing and swimming through the cannon of spirit flames before being overtaken by them completely and collapsing over the mountain range. Chiaotzu made it in time to recover from the tremendous heat pulsing at his face just being behind Tenshinhan when he fired that technique and catch his falling friend with telekinesis before letting him gently fall into the snow.
From their collective experience, water in any form was the best medicine against overuse of the Hot-Red Mode though Tenshinhan had never used the Hot-Red Kikoho before and therefore the full effects of this attempt to cheat fate remained unknown for now. They'd have ended up being lucky if the three-eyed martial artist could make a full recovery.
"That moon…" Chiaotzu looked up. "It wasn't meant to be dark yet, why is the full moon hanging over our heads so early in the evening?"
Before the gifted trickster could realize what the significance of the moon was, however, he trembled in the sight of the fallen and singed titan twitching in its slumber and its tail moving around while the Great Ape continued to growl and snarl, spouting out foams of blood-red from its jaws and showing off its impressive, floor-sized chompers.
"It's alive!" Chiaotzu freaked out and looked down at Tenshinhan who was completely out of it, his Ki that had burnt with the spirit of the entire planet's will to resist its extraterrestrial invaders had now gone out and his strength to fight had been extinguished like the flames he had just been burning up with. It was all up to him now, to protect his best friend, to protect the world, and to stop this calamity.
"Moon, begone!" Chiaotzu yelled out, pointing his finger up and beaming out a Dodonpa at the enigmatic moon that shined its rays over the battlefield though, in an odd twist, his beam had penetrated the holographic reflection and beamed off into the vast nothingness of space. "Huh…?" the gifted ghoul scratched his head in amazement.
The Great Ape stood back up in a struggle. A lot of its hair had either been singed off completely or remained in a pathetic, coal-black state and molten onto the flesh it had grown onto. Chiaotzu trembled in awe of the rising titan. If not even Tenshinhan's Hot-Red Kikoho could put it down, there may not have been a technique in the world that would have sufficed to cease the beast's rampage.
"That won't work!" Upa's voice reached Chiaotzu, forcing the telekinetic fighter to turn his head at the Kami who had rejoined the battle. "This moon is an illusionary projection but it beams with the light of the real full-moon. If you wish to destroy it, you need to destroy the ship projecting it."
"B-But there's no way we'll find it in this whole mountainous continent!" Chiaotzu gulped.
"That is true, though we must stop this monster regardless, if it gets careless, it'll blink out the whole Earth in an instant!" Upa clenched his fists in determination. He would not fail his planet and see it die in the first decade of his servitude as Kami. "If we could just… Restrain him somehow… I could cut off his tail,"
Chiaotzu turned his frightened face toward the growling beast which had been regaining all of its vicious incentive to maul, smash and obliterate. His frightened upward ellipses for eyes became curved as false courage to confront the beast originated in Chiaotzu's heart, bubbling up and drawing strength from his will to protect his best friend, the one who trained alongside him and believed in him when Tsuru Sennin would have considered him worthless and killed him off many times over during the early stages of his training.
"The Fist of Four Bodies!" Chiaotzu yelled out, crossing his arms in front of him and splitting into two versions of himself while both the original and the duplicate performed the same split again. With this impressive technique, Chiaotzu had formed true, physical doppelgangers instead of mere afterimages that most martial artists employed.
"Will this truly work? You're splitting your Ki in four with this technique, it will not make you any stronger…" Upa wondered but Chiaotzu soared onward like a speeding arrow, racing against the clock without letting the Great Ape recover.
"Solar Fist!" Chiaotzu's clone yelled out when the Great Ape appeared to come dangerously close to smashing one of them with a crushing blow, forcing the beast to reel backward blinded and dazed while the four Chiaotzu positioned themselves around all of the Great Ape's limbs and extended their arms and feet outward.
"Telekinesis!" they all shouted, emitting their immense telekinetic potential in visible, bright waves that enveloped each limb of the bellowing titan that the tiny martial artists have chosen, enclosing the beast in a wall of telekinetic waves focused solely upon a singular limb.
With Tenshinhan's Hot-Red Kikoho having done a remarkable number on the incomparable monster, with Chiaotzu gifting himself the ability to focus his prodigious mind on a single limb, even while his overall power remained crippled by his Fist of Four Bodies technique, Great Ape Tora roared and tried to wrestle out of Chiaotzu's control and he might have done so, given time, but Upa did not wait. He raised his tomahawk over his head and let a jolt of mystical lightning strike it and imbue it with divine energy before flinging it at the beast's tail.
The ax spun like a windmill, crackling with ecstatic thunder of the gods but the tail twitched and waggled out of its reach, given how Chiaotzu could only restrain both the beast's arms and legs, leaving the tail unattended.
"Oh no…" Chiaotzu freaked out, losing a tiny bit of control over the monster and having to dedicate every little bit of his strength in keeping the telekinetic hold going.
"As if!" Upa boldly taunted the beast and extended his arms, lightning still running up and down them and forming a network of electricity extending outward. Some part of Upa's mystical network must have still reached the ax for a single, low-pitched whistle filled the air and the tomahawk returned in the same trajectory, popping the tail off and returning to Upa's hand.
The Kami popped his weapon back to its place on his back while the bellowing beast shrunk down to human size and Tora's critically injured body plummeted into the abyss below. Chiaotzu's bodies all merged back into the original with the little ghoul floating off to check on Tenshinhan while Upa dashed and hopped over peaks of a few mountains to approach the fallen Earthling warrior as well.
"Tenshinhan…" Upa placed his hands over the unconscious warrior, allowing mystical lightning to strike down from above and imbue his hands with divine energy as he held them gleaming over the injured body of the fighter.
"Kami-sama…" Tenshinhan muttered in a weak tone, having regained a modicum of his strength. "What about the enemy?"
"We've won, with a little bit of combined effort," Upa nodded in reassurance.
"It's too bad. I wanted to tell the Saiyan that the third mistake he had made was underestimating you and Chiaotzu and the mystical powers at your possession…" Tenshinhan smirked.
Despite profound complications, the Earthlings had won this battlefield as well.
"Shugesh, Celipa… Come in, have you guys found Kakarot yet?" Leek wondered on the scouter as he had landed on a clearing in the plains and tried figuring out which battlefield he could have bolstered. While he was the weakest Saiyan in the group as he most of the time let Bardock do all the heavy hitting whenever the two ended up working on a mission together, he would have still provided some reinforcements to those that needed it.
After noticing a signal from Tora that called up the Attack Ball, Leek had settled down on the plains and tried figuring out what had been going on. His much faster and stronger peers had rushed off and had been taking on those alarming power levels on the planet all by themselves and Leek had no fight to pick by himself. Though the lack of reply from Shugesh's and Celipa's scouters as well as the disappearance of the signal from Tora's scouter alarmed him.
Could it have been that they were getting wiped out? It sometimes happened that a member of the team fell in battle but they usually looked up on such a chance as being healed up in the healing pod only bolstered one's power level significantly. In fact, it was because of the fact that he had spent years upon years of working his buttocks off in grueling missions whereas King Vegeta played his cheek-kissing political games in Planet Vegeta that Bardock believed himself capable of overthrowing the king in the first place.
But the whole squad? No, that was impossible, while the power levels of the enemy were high, sometimes higher than those of the squad members hurrying on to confront them, they still had their Great Ape forms in reserve and could have used them at any time, right? There were ample times when aliens had overwhelmed them, only to be crushed underneath the boots of Great Apes like the maggots they were.
There was no point in Leek worrying, there could have been no chance for the Earthlings to win. Leek's scouter turned on and began counting up. The Saiyan turned behind him, seeing a figure emerge from the other side of the plains and hurrying across the hills in a floating vehicle that seemed to utilize some sort of electromagnetic mechanism to float above ground and surf those hills as if they were waves of the ocean.
"A power level of 2100!?" Leek paled out. "Where did this goliath come from, he wasn't even in our original scan of the planet!"
The hovercar halted, tilting its behind while its nose took an uncomfortable and almost cartoonish bend forward, bending out the entire corpus of the car like a twig. A chubby man with long, spiky, dark hair and a sleeveless, brown yukata jumped out from it.
"Say, ya wouldn't know anythin' 'bout no West City, would ya?" the sword-carrying bruiser scratched the back of his head, looking at the petrified Saiyan. "I'm tryin' ta collect the Dragon Balls in case some of dem guys get killed or else Korin ain't feedin' me anymore but I need Bulma's help on dat an' she's in West City, some place called Capsule Corp… You look like some city guy, all shiny an' neat…"
"N-No… Sorry, I'm not from around here… Those Dragon Balls, what would those be? Perhaps I might be able to help you look for them?" Leek chuckled without being able to shake off the feeling of overwhelming dread inside him. When confronted by someone stronger than him, all fighting spirit just seemed to leave him. There wasn't that much of a difference between him and this brawler but… Then why were his teammates all disappearing left and right?
"Nah, you wouldn' be able ta find 'em without the Dragon Radar… Guess wish-fulfilling orbs gotta be hard 'ta find, right, though, given that Kami's da one ta make 'em, how come he can't snap his fingers an' just make 'em happen, ya know?" Yajirobe scratched his head, throwing handfuls of dandruff and dead hair flying with each scratch while he grumbled in unrest. "Well, sorry 'ta bother you, Mr. I guess I'm off to look for 'dem balls, right?"
"Ummm… Sure…" Leek nodded, smiling with a shaky grin that was his attempt to act polite. The sword-wielding bruiser jumped back into his hovercar and started it while Leek hurried past it and tried to get away from it with a hasty step.
All went black for a second, then searing pain in his back and taste of blood in his mouth. The vision turned shaky and began floating around, single figures changed into triplets and then molded back together while things were beginning to turn dim. Sharp pain in the shape of a back-sized gash that sprayed warm blood all over his body persevered to remind Leek that he was still alive.
"Ya think I can't sense yer crazy strong for a city slicker? Yer a Saiyan, ain'tcha? What with da tail and all… Jeez though, yer pretty strong, I could sense dat I'd have some trouble with ya, figured I'd take ya out from behind and spare the trouble…" the sword-wielding Earthling grumbled, leaning over twitching and writhing in pain body of Leek before jumping back into his hovercar and speeding off.
Someone had to know, if his squad was to get obliterated and if they were to get wiped, someone needed to know, that much was protocol. A planet dangerous enough to wipe out Bardock's squad would have been of some interest, in addition, manpower could have been saved by not wasting time with weak fodder sent to colonize an inhospitable rock producing such monstrous locals.
"P-Please… If anyone's listening… My name is Leek from Bardock's squad… We're getting massacred down here on Earth, come in… Does anyone hear me?" Leek sent out a transmission for reinforcements out. Given their remote location, it would have been years until someone would have picked up but Leek felt his final moments creeping up and thus he was getting desperate.
"Yeah… We hear you alright, low-class trash…" a rocking and arrogant tone filled Leek's ears before his fading consciousness took him away and prevented him from taking in all of the implications from his signal reaching him, of all people.