The giant body of Dr. Wheelo leaned onward, lowering the massive stump that hung on a handful of elongated yet thin limbs as the entire body accumulated in speed and blitzed right at the unexpecting group of opponents. Tenshinhan and Yamcha took it up to the skies while Krillin and Chiaotzu vanished in a zigzag avoiding the wrath of the giant robot as it shook the entire icy rock it stood on.
"It's insanely fast!" Yamcha turned to Tenshinhan. "It's slow to start moving but its acceleration is mad! Just what does this robot run on?"
"It's odd. I can't sense any Ki coming from it, there's no way of tracking it with our senses other than seeing or hearing it…" Tenshinhan scowled, realizing the immediate complication in front of them.
"Ka… Me… Ha… Me…!" Krillin prepared his attack while continuing to vanish away from the devastation and racing debris that Dr. Wheelo sent his way in his maddened rampage. Once the attack was charged, Krillin and Chiaotzu changed places spontaneously, having lulled Dr. Wheelo into a false sense of security, Chiaotzu extended his palms in an attempt to lock Dr. Wheelo down using his telekinesis.
While Chiaotzu worked on keeping the enemy in place, Krillin snapped away to a point over Dr. Wheelo's entombed brain as he thrust his hands out, unleashing not a single destructive Ki wave from his palms but an entire storm of smaller ones, scattering into a downward petal that rained down onto Dr. Wheelo who was locked in place and could not even cover-up to protect his brain from the damage.
The resonating blasts littered the area, spreading quakes and shockwaves all across and even forcing Yamcha and Tenshinhan to buckle up so that the air pressure did not sweep them away. Tenshinhan kept his third eye focused on the battle and noticed the threat far before any other combatant did. Dr. Wheelo was completely unharmed from the attack. It didn't look like Krillin's attack as much as scratched the coating of whatever armored alloy covered Wheelo's brain.
"Whoa! That's was an amazing attack! Krillin took the Kamehameha this far, huh!?" Yamcha cheered on his team, oblivious to what Tenshinhan dreaded the most at the moment.
"This is terrible. How are we meant to fight this thing…?" Tenshinhan muttered. Yamcha turned to his ally in confusion before turning away to look at Dr. Wheelo's armored body, it was then that general features of the mech emerged from the smoke, shocking Yamcha.
"It's that tough, huh?" Yamcha muttered.
"It's not just tough. Krillin's losing energy by fighting it but it doesn't appear that Dr. Wheelo's mechanical shell is getting weaker at all. Its stamina may just be infinite!" Tenshinhan grunted.
"Run?" Dr. Wheelo taunted his fleeing opponents as Krillin and Chiaotzu attempted to escape the wrath of the recovering mech by vanishing away in quick bursts. In his escalating accelerations, riding the draft of the Ki jets shooting out from exhaust pipes littering the back and the sides of the massive core part of the mechanical body, Wheelo caught up to the two fleeing combatants. "No, it is far too late for that!"
Wheelo's long claws shut tight around Krillin's heel and around Chiaotzu's body as the wrathful doctor slammed the two martial artists against one another and adopted a wide stance, bursting with a massive shockwave from his body that expanded to an area dozens of times larger than him. Krillin and Chiaotzu were at Dr. Wheelo's complete mercy, flung about by the storm of air pressure that he ventilated out from his robotic body.
"The only place I can offer you a hasty retreat to is your graves!" Dr. Wheelo yelled out as he extended his limbs outward, opening up the claws that covered his limbs and unleashed a hail of Ki waves homing in on Krillin and Chiaotzu and decimating the entire frozen rock where the fight was taking place.
"Chiaotzu!" Tenshinhan cried out, having lost the sense of his old friend's Ki, maddened by a possible loss, the three-eyed martial artist dove right into the fray and past the line of reason where Dr. Wheelo's attention could not reach him.
"Damn, what about…" Yamcha looked back, realizing how dangerous it was for Bulma, Puar, and Oolong to be in this frozen hellhole but he couldn't see or sense them anywhere nearby. The only thing keeping Yamcha from losing his mind and lashing out as Tenshinhan did was the fact that he could sense Bulma, Puar, and Oolong farther off, all the way on another island further in the distance. He turned to check up on them but then realized that if Wheelo decimated Krillin and Chiaotzu with just a single attack, Tenshinhan wouldn't fare all that much better alone either.
"Huh… What happened?" Bulma whimpered, opening up her eyes only to yell out in wonder as Muten Roshi's soaking wet body stood in front of her.
"I should be asking you guys that, honestly, you don't give an old man even a second of reprieve, do you?" Muten Roshi huffed as he stretched his pummeled and frigid body that was now exposed to the elements.
"You took us to safety? Not bad for a pervy old man!" Oolong cheered on Roshi's first decisive action after thawing out from his icy tomb, something that Puar was to be thanked for.
"You really shouldn't be calling him that, you know…" Puar sighed.
"C-Could you maybe… Not transform back yet?" Muten Roshi sneezed and rubbed his topless, frail, old body as he snickered looking at Puar. "I could use a few more flames coming my way…"
"No way!" Puar wheezed as he poofed back to his normal shape and fell flat onto the snow. "I'm all tuckered out from that!"
"That's too bad. We could really use a phone call right about now…" Muten Roshi grit his teeth after sneezing again. "It doesn't look like Tenshinhan and Yamcha can pull this one off."
True to Muten Roshi's words, Dr. Wheelo swatted Tenshinhan and Yamcha alike with one of his elongated and unnaturally moving limbs each time they tried to move into the range and strike at him together. Dr. Wheelo's claws snapped open, allowing for man-sized drills to pop out through the openings in the mechanical arms that the supersized mech used to decimate his paired opponents with. Yamcha exclaimed in pain as Dr. Wheelo's drill penetrated his gut and spun around, causing general mayhem however deep inside the martial artist's body it could get before Wheelo's tail wrapped around Yamcha's neck and began swinging him about, bashing him at the shifting water surface or just generally trying to suffocate the injured fighter.
"You bastard! You'll pay for what you did to Chiaotzu!" Tenshinhan growled, being the only martial artist around with enough battle power to go toe-to-toe with the dreadful mechanoid and not break in the process. Tenshinhan's body flared with blazing aura, gambling away the integrity of his body for just a bit more power that could have covered the difference between them.
"Marvelous! What a spike in energy!" Dr. Wheelo exclaimed while tossing Yamcha's limp body aside to slam into the ocean, covering the grievous wound on his gut. "Well, well… Maybe this experiment has not been completely ruined yet. Three-eyes… Perhaps you aren't a mere human at all, maybe I can still work on your body and make a worthy temporary vessel yet."
"Go to hell!" Tenshinhan roared as he crossed his arms out in front of him and concentrated so much energy in one place that his entire body bubbled with popping out veins. The shoulder blades of the concentrating martial artists popped up and sprouted like wings before taking the shape of tremendously muscular arms. Thus, Tenshinhan's Four-Witches technique had been complete.
"Four arms too? Are you sure you're not a bio-engineered human?" Dr. Wheelo admired Tenshinhan's display, his scientist nature allowed himself the luxury of entertainment even if Tenshinhan's skyrocketing battle power troubled him.
"Special Bankoku Bikkuri Sho!" Tenshinhan roared out as he crossed both of his usable pairs of arms in front of him and weaved his fingers, creating sparkling jolts of electricity between them before extending both pairs of his limbs and unleashing a supercharged and double-voltage version of Bankoku Bikkuri Sho that used four arms instead of two.
"An electric attack? Amusing…" Dr. Wheelo mocked Tenshinhan as he dashed backward fast enough to race with the lightning surges fired from Tenshinhan's hands. The mechanical brawler extended his arms outward, forming an explosive Ki wave that deflected Tenshinhan's electricity, pulling an tearing the electrical surge apart jolt by a measly jolt as if it was merely a woolen net in the hands of a capricious tiger testing the mettle of its claws.
"N-No way…" Tenshinhan's eyes fluttered and began weighing down heavily as his body hunched over, just barely letting the valiant martial artist resist falling down and going to sleep from weary. "I could track your movements and trade blows, our battle powers shouldn't have been this far apart!"
"Leave the thinking to the genius, dear boy, your attempt at exploiting my weakness was elementary and beyond predictable," Dr. Wheelo mocked Tenshinhan by extending his mechanical limb and shutting his claws tightly around Tenshinhan, putting a sufficient squeeze around the exhausted fighter to make him sing in torment. "Ah, all that spirit seems to have faded away. That's a pity, a flaw in the human body, no doubt. You can muster up so much power, such potential all at once but you can't seem to maintain it for too long, can you? Fickle and fragile like all ordinary humans, why can't you accept your place in the dumpster and evolve already?"
Tenshinhan could neither wrestle out of the chokehold that was crushing him, crumbling his ribs while churning every tendon and muscle in his body all at once nor could he move his arms to use the Solar Fist to blind the enemy or to put up any other form of meaningful resistance. Desperate to keep on fighting for Chiaotzu's sake, Tenshinhan spat blood onto the bowl protecting Dr. Wheelo's brain in defiance.
"This is dire indeed…" Muten Roshi stretched his limbs but then fell on his butt, realizing that he was powerless to help his pupils in any way in his current state of frigid fatigue.
"You said you need a phone, right?" Oolong pulled on Muten Roshi's baggy pants to get the old man's attention.
"That's right but Dr. Wheelo didn't let us take any capsules and Puar is exhausted. We shouldn't have let him fly off by himself but you know how he is with Yamcha…" Muten Roshi spoke with a drastic tone. Oolong crossed his arms and snickered with a smug grin of his face.
"Transform!" he croaked, becoming a wire-phone hooked on a large battery.
"Oolong! Your transformation ability recharged already?!" Bulma clapped her hands. "That's great!"
"Yeah, but it's a complicated transformation, I won't be able to hold it a full minute so make it brief…" Oolong grunted through the physical effort to keep his transformation intact.
"Hello, hello!" a gentle, feminine voice came from the other end.
"Launch-san? You're in your blue-haired form now?" Muten Roshi went pale as this will complicate things due to them having to explain everything to her again.
"Yep, did something happen? Where are you guys? The signal says you're calling from all the way north from North City... Son Goku's waiting for all of you, he's gotten really grumpy and I don't remember him having a scar… That's what you get when you fight so much…" Launch occupied the line with her banter.
"B-Bardock's there!? Quick, Launch-san…!" Muten Roshi was about to complete his request when Oolong poofed back into his normal shape, lying sprawled across the ice with his tongue out and a sorry look on his face.
"What was that? You barely lasted forty seconds!" Bulma objected, stomping on the poor, lifeless piglet with a desperate mug.
A Ki blast slammed right into the core of Dr. Wheelo's protective, glass dome, prompting the doctor to shift his attention away from the subdued Tenshinhan and see Yamcha on one knee, still clutching the wound on his abdomen but still maintaining some fighting spirit in him. The martial artist then reached down into the freezing ocean and helped Puar pull Chiaotzu out but the little ghoul was out cold. The sight of his friend alive delivered some peace into Tenshinhan's punished expression.
"There's no way we can fight back!" Krillin muttered, his Turtle School uniform in tatters as burns and bruises littered his body. The bald martial artist barely had the strength left in him to sit up on the remote glacier where the Dragon Team was preparing to recover. "I've got no Ki left…"
"We need to pull our weight, Krillin…" Yamcha grunted through pain as he just barely wrestled himself onto his feet, although standing wobbly. "Muten Roshi can't use the Mafuba with Tenshinhan in Dr. Wheelo's grasp."
"It's no use!" Muten Roshi contacted the pair telepathically. "I'm too weak to use the Mafuba in this state. There's always a chance for a misfire with the Mafuba and it's all but guaranteed in my current state."
"What's wrong!?" Tenshinhan roared out, releasing a transparent shockwave of Ki from his body that formed a bubble around his injured body just barely wide enough for him to slip out from Dr. Wheelo's grasp and float off onto the glacier where the rest of his friends were recovering. "If that's all it takes to do us in, Wheelo's right, martial artists are worthless and better off sacked in favor of his bio-warriors."
"You copied my technique?" Dr. Wheelo muttered in pleasant surprise at Tenshinhan's mimicry ability.
"That's right, I'm at a level where I can copy a martial arts technique after seeing it just once," Tenshinhan smirked but the bubble of false courage soon burst when he collapsed on one knee in pain over his broken body.
"Heh, not unlike someone else we both know, huh?" Bulma squinted, looking at Dr. Wheelo who floated in mid-air and loomed over the glacier island, preparing to obliterate it to mere icicles for the ocean to scatter away.
"Are you implying something with this baseless accusation?" Dr. Wheelo wondered. "I will let you know that unless I can hear you validate that hypothesis, I will reconsider bringing you back to your second-rate scientist father."
"I mean… Isn't bio-engineering your thing? This thing you're wearing now isn't bio-engineered. It's flat out engineered. You're stealing Dr. Gero's gig here," Bulma mocked Dr. Wheelo and, judging from the seething hatred emanating from the static mechanoid, he did not appreciate being mocked most of all.
"Silence, worthless woman. You are a third-rate chick brought up by a second-rate rooster, I will not stand here and…" Dr. Wheelo posed as rampant sonic booms burst forth from his flexing, mechanical body.
"It's convenient for you, isn't it? Since Dr. Gero is dead and there's not a single scientist around to call you out. You don't really want to be acknowledged by your peers, it would be too much trouble because then you'd have to act according to the etiquette, wouldn't you?!" Bulma pressed on, raising her voice so that Dr. Gero would still hear her, no matter how difficult he would find it.
"Shut up!" Dr. Wheelo snapped, throwing his mechanical limbs about in a fit as they whipped at thin air. And yet, inside his mechanical shell, Dr. Wheelo couldn't even be freed by the salvation of tiring out as he lashed out at the air around him. Soon enough, his limbs fell by his sides, hanging limp as the core in which the supersized brain resided tilted downward in a sulking angle.
"You… Tenshinhan…" Dr. Wheelo pointed his claw at Tenshinhan, a man he could vaguely remember the name of since he was not a champion of any World Martial Arts Tournament he could recall and only came as a passing mention, a brilliant competitor but just that much wasn't enough for the genius doctor. He needed only the very best. "You said you can copy any martial arts technique after seeing it just once?"
"That's right," Tenshinhan nodded. "But it wouldn't be of any use to you. I can mimic martial arts techniques because of my skill, not because of my body."
"I don't care about that…" Dr. Wheelo stated bluntly. "I merely wished to make sure before I annihilate all of you. I can do so as long as it is with a technique that you will not survive seeing once, I suppose…"
"W-Wait… What about me!? I justified my call-out!" Bulma's face twisted in terror when she realized that Dr. Wheelo intended to obliterate the entire continent if need-be, even if he needed to compress more than enough energy to decimate this planet several times over in order to do so while overwhelming the martial artists opposing him.
"Wow, Bulma… Real class act…" Krillin squinted, looking up at the frightened woman from down below where he could only sit up at his current level of remaining strength.
"You did as you claim," Dr. Wheelo admitted before moving his arms to the side and revealing ventilation pumps all over the main structure hosting his brain on his mechanical body. "Perhaps you're even right, I don't really give a damn about the scientific community. All of this has been pointless. There is no body worthy of hosting my brain, after all, wearing any other body, whether it's bio-engineered or human, would be a downgrade. None of you deserve to host my genius. I am cursed by sharing this planet with a race of inferior simpletons that ruin everything they touch. Suffer and lament your idiocy."
Dr. Wheelo curled his mechanical body together, accumulating Ki all over that granted his frame a certain golden shine to it. Wheelo threw his hands and legs out, expanding his body and straightening his back out as an overwhelming, scarlet burst blinded the reeling Dragon Team. Before anyone could say their farewells and embrace unavoidable oblivion, however, a streak of emerald cut through Wheelo's Planet Geyser and dispersed the blast into a harmless light show with one blow.
"I got tired of waiting for you guys, what's taking you so long? When are we going to eat?" Bardock looked down at the beaten and dragged through hell bunch with an apathetic stare. The man, having nothing but rags to wear, had seemingly scooped up one of Turtle School uniforms from Kame House, making him a spitting image of Goku, had it not been for the scar and the headband that he wore.
"Son Goku!?" Dr. Wheelo lost his cool, realizing that his experiment might not have been ruined after all as a bona fide champion of a World's Martial Arts Tournament appeared before him.
"Launch said that we can't eat until you guys return from your field trip, I came to bring you back so that we can start getting to the grub already and… Who the heck is this asshole and why does this brain-bastard speak the name of my son?" Bardock was scolding the group like they were unruly children before Dr. Wheelo spoke his trigger word and took over all of Bardock's attention.
"Dead… Son?" Dr. Wheelo muttered, confused as all indicators showed the man before him to be Son Goku with a near-perfect accuracy of recognition based on the man's features. His face, his hair, his attire, even his unnatural strength, it all checked out. "Do not lie to me, Son Goku, not even a father can resemble his son with a 98% accuracy!"
"That name, stop saying that name!" Bardock roared out, letting his Ki go wild as he unfurled with wild wrath and a crystal-clear aura filling the air. "Say that name again and I'll pull that stupid brain right out of that fancy jar."
"That's foolish, how can Bardock be so confident when he's not even sensing his opponent's strength?" Krillin grumbled from down below.
"Yes… With the body of Son Go…" Dr. Wheelo was about to deliver his grand speech but that was before a pair of feet dug right into the front of his mechanized body and sent it flying back and crashing through multiple glaciers in the path of destruction left in his wake.
"Now you've done it…" Bardock clenched his fist, it shook of anger and only the tightening of the headband around his forehead could soothe that fury just a little bit. Just enough for the Saiyan to stop seeing red all over.