"My, my… What's this here? Two scamp monkeys that survived until now while avoiding running into the Ginyu Special Squadron. How did you manage that, I wonder?" Frieza's black lips turned upward as the space emperor became more sheepish in his approach to his chance meeting with the two petrified Saiyans.
"Damn it…" Bardock cursed, grinding his teeth so hard that it seemed like he'd shove each row all the way down into his gums. "Frieza, you bastard…"
"What was that?" Frieza raised the bony ridges hanging over his beady eyes as he turned his head to the side and placed an open palm by the hole at the side of his head that served as his ear. "I didn't quite hear that, but I can't help but think it sounded like something that wasn't very nice."
"Gine," Bardock turned half of his attention to his wife cowering behind his left side and trembling. It didn't take a grandmaster of combat to realize that meeting Frieza wasn't just bad news–it was a death sentence. "I want you to haul ass as hard as you can. I want you to run toward the old abandoned hospital facility. That's where Kakarot and his friends are holed up. Just tell them your name and they'll be happy to help you. They're a trusting lot, obnoxiously so. Pisses me off sometimes."
"B-But… Bardock…" Gine tried muttering something. Bardock's glare widened in terror. He dived toward Gine and tackled her to the ground. He was just a few seconds early before a rocky hill flew and grazed across the planet floor with velocity intense enough to shatter either of their bones upon impact. The black dots in Frieza's eyes had a malicious, violet gleam to them that died out not too long after the telekinetic hill stopped moving.
"I understand you are just barbarian primates with no understanding of manners, but ignoring me is just plain rude. You must forgive my outburst. I must admit that this day could have gone better for me," Frieza chuckled to himself while his tail whipped about in excitement. It was as if he fed on the dread that he inspired in his subjects and soothed his own insecurities and toxic personality by seeing others scared of their peril.
"Go! I've been lucky enough to meet our son. I'll die before robbing you, his mother of a chance to meet him too! Get the hell of my sight, Gine! Find Kakarot!" Bardock roared out, giving the absolute fewest amount of shits if anybody heard him or if Frieza understood what he was talking about. The Saiyan warrior lifted himself off the ground, rising to Frieza's level in mid-air.
"What is this supposed to mean?" Frieza bent his head to the side, looking baffled for a few blinks, but his bafflement faded away and became exasperation.
"Damn it, why is it that whenever I run into you scum bastards, I always find myself beaten to a pulp and unable to draw out my full power?" Bardock clenched his fists, recalling his clash against prince Vegeta back on Planet Earth. An intense, transparent aura blasted out in violent ignition as the rebellious Saiyan did his best to build up his Ki as high up as he could so that he could put up all ounces of resistance against Frieza that he could and that he could give Gine all the time he could for her escape.
She wasn't quick enough, nor was she strong. If he dies immediately, Gine would be screwed as well. Frieza would take no time at all catching up to her and killing her. That meant that Bardock had to show Frieza some real good time if his wife was to finally see her son. Over twenty years ago, exactly twenty-five years ago, Bardock had a nasty feeling that he might have died rebelling against Frieza. For whatever reason, this dwarf rascal halted the destruction of Planet Vegeta back then, which Bardock was sure he'd bring and made him into a fool in the faces of his fellow Saiyans. Yet now, when he had the sacred duty of reuniting a mother with her son, this asshole shows his face. The absolute nerve… Bardock smirked, transitioning into a subtle laugh.
"Hmm?" Frieza broke out of his grumpy exterior. "Is your answer to my question supposed to be somehow funny? Maybe we should make a game of it. If it is funny, I'll let you run along. Go ahead, try me, monkey. Be warned, however, that this day has provided me with many bumps in the road so entertaining me might be a daunting challenge."
"Damn it, I see no other option. I'll have to rip-off that three-eyed runt…" Bardock grit his teeth, placing his hands over his face and extending his fingers. "Solar Fist!" he yelled out, unleashing a flash of bright light that overwhelmed even the almighty space tyrant and sent him reeling and rubbing his eyes as he hissed in the torment of wetting irritation.
"Damn you! What in the hell is this, monkey!? Forget any dreams you had for a hasty death! Even if I let every surviving Saiyan flee this planet, I'll ensure your death personally!" Frieza cursed and lobbed insults at him, but Bardock only looked down to where Gine was supposed to be. She wasn't there anymore. Her petite, smoldering Ki took off and was a decent distance away from there already. She was off. Good girl.
"Frieza!" Bardock roared out, ripping the distance between them with a crystalline blaze of clear Ki as he launched himself at the reeling space emperor. He felt dirty about exploiting an opening like this, but Bardock just went blank sometimes and fists started swinging in all directions. Who could've blamed him, he was a Saiyan.
Pain. Hitting Frieza felt like smashing one's hands against a block of titanium. Torment resonated throughout Bardock's fists. It spread all the way to his elbows and his joints. Just smacking this undergrown tyrannical personality was the best that Bardock could have hoped for. Trying to push and set the terms of battle with his strength the way it was now would have resulted in broken arms. Bardock had never killed himself from punching a tough opponent, but this was an obvious chance to try it for the first time. All of his blows, all of his kicks, smacks, and blows. All of it bounced off and Bardock couldn't get any offensive in.
A crushing pressure halted Bardock in place. Frieza's tail had wrapped around his wrist and it didn't let go. Recalling the torture that was trying to punch him, Bardock couldn't even begin to imagine the effort it would have taken to slip out of Frieza's grasp. Before he could even try, however, Frieza yanked him in with his tail and everything went white. The first feeling that returned to Bardock was the knowledge that he had no more oxygen in his body. The desperate need to breathe, but his body was so entirely invested in belching blood and slobber that thinking about breathing was the best he could do.
The tyrant's grip pulled Bardock in closer as Frieza's left hand smacked his face left and right with an almost automated rate. Each humiliating smack felt like having one's head smashed with a hammer. Everything was white. Gine's cheerful voice cackled somewhere far off in the distance, Kakarot's childish laughter was nearby. Bardock could almost feel them near, all he had to do was rub his hazy eyes so he could see them clearer and walk toward them.
A crushing pressure that came with a grim crunch returned Bardock to reality. Or, perhaps, it was he himself who wished to return to his punishment and impending death. To return to ensure that he would never meet Gine in the Otherworld or, at least, for hundreds of years. Breathing felt like being perpetually stabbed in the ribs by eight blades thrusting in random intervals or all at once. Air brushed and rustled Bardock's hair, but the whited-out Saiyan halted himself in mid-flight and let out a vicious battle cry.
"Oh… How unexpected. Who could have thought that a pathetic ape could have survived an attack by me? I congratulate you, primate. Not even your king could survive a single blow from me. Frankly, I almost feel a little embarrassed, this rarely happens to me. Makes me… A little… Mad." Frieza's voice turned more and more sour the more words came out from his mouth. With the ultimate declaration, the space emperor threw his hands to the side and exploded in pink aura from his entire body. A bubble-gum-colored flame of toxic wrath that enveloped his being.
"Mad? Shut your ugly mouth about anger, Frieza!" Bardock wheezed and panted as speaking felt as gruesome as trying to fight in his current state. "You've no idea what it's like to see your entire kind sold away and treated like animals. You may have labeled us monkeys and savages, but it was that bastard king of ours that made us exactly that. To live like that for most of your life, to be treated as nothing but a lowly monkey and know deep down that you don't have the strength to change anything about it. That, Frieza, that is what rage is all about. And you better believe my fists are itching!"
"You appear to be under some sort of illusion that this is a fight you can win," Frieza's bony ridges dipped, leaving him in a bitter squint as his black lips stiffened as well. "That is what happens when you give mere gibbons any leeway. That is what your kind does over and over again. Whenever they find an inch of space, they squeeze their ugly tails in without failure!"
"I guess both of us have some steam to let out, huh, Frieza?" Bardock smirked while fixing his torn-up wristbands and preparing for the most hopeless yet the most satisfying fight in his life. Even if he knew that he'd most certainly be dead by the end of it, only meeting his son and coming to know the family he had created on Earth compared to the feeling of punching Frieza in the face, whether or not the lousy rat felt it.
"Yes, perhaps you are right, monkey. Your unruly toughness and refusal to die may just be something amusing after all. Prepare to soak up my frustrations toward your ugly, rancid, ungrateful, and impudent race!" Frieza bowed his upper body lightly with an elegant pose of his arms stretched to the sides as his tail wrapped around Frieza's legs.
Problem was, Frieza was crazy strong. Unbelievably so. Just a mere couple of wayward smacks already made Bardock's brain feel like a puffy shake and his bones brittle and rattling as a glass statue placed inside of a box and kicked around for one's amusement. If he got hit like that again, not even the wrath he felt for Frieza and his holier than thou smugness or the desperate need to save Gine would bring him back from the glimpse of the Otherworld he got back when.
"King Kai's Fist X 10!" Bardock bellowed out, clutching his arms beside him as he let his pent-up fury explode at once. He was an outright madman for using King Kai's Fist without rest and full recovery. All of his muscle tears lit up like sweet hellfire, all of his wounds burst spitting red like a pouty volcano. None of it mattered anyway, he was a dead-man so he could treat his body however he wanted on his way out.
"Eat shit, Frieza!" Bardock howled as he snapped away in a crimson pulse emphasizing his blink. Bardock appeared right in front of his shocked opponent as he thrust his cross right into Frieza's gut, making the little space emperor flinch in place and wince in pain. He felt it. He felt it! It felt oh-so-good and Bardock would make sure this little shit-stain feels it all. All the pent-up Saiyan aggression, all of their bubbling frustration and need to break free of his chokehold.
Bardock snapped again, with his inhuman, bolstered power space itself was his plaything. The Saiyan appeared over Frieza's head and landed with a diving double ax handle slam to the tyrant's head. As impressive of a noggin as he had, it snapped down from impact and Frieza's grunt of pain reached Bardock. It didn't just reach him, but it made his heart sing. A prideful roar emphasized the sudden explosion of violence and force as Frieza smashed against the decimated landscape of Planet Vegeta and bounced off of it. Bardock was already there, stuck like a wet leaf to this little shit. The unrelenting Saiyan swept Frieza's shaky legs, leaving the tyrant spinning in mid-air.
A solebutt kick sent Frieza soaring like an arrow. Bardock was once again hot on his opponent's trail with stiff, mid-section kicks and crosses. The loud Saiyan slipped in a U-shaped arc underneath his opponent and thrust both his legs upward, blasting Frieza even higher into the sky. Frieza coughed blood up as Bardock's head drove into Frieza's gut, piercing through the heavens like a living arrow. A flurry of brutal punches and kicks left Frieza reeling while Bardock formed a Ki blast in his left hand and shoved it right into Frieza's chest, detonating it.
His own hand gave out, Bardock lost the feeling in it but that only meant that that was that of precision blows. It was time to get creative. Bardock whirled like a gyroscope with backhand slams, feeling and loving every moment of the softness of Frieza's flesh, comparing to the immovable wall he was punching before. If the high of the King Kai's Fist only worked for a heartbeat, Bardock would make this sweet serenade of violence the sweetest heartbeat of his life.
Frieza slammed against the ground, falling through and reducing a nearby futuristic establishment to rubble while Bardock landed on the ruined and burning streets of the vacant Planet Vegeta. As much as he feared for Gine, for Kakarot, as much as he lamented the colossal loss of life in his home this day and would have wept alongside his fellow Saiyans had he any tears left to weep, at this point in time he lived only to lay beat down on Frieza and love every second.
"See? That's what I hate about you furry herd," Frieza rose off the ground in a telekinetic and precise move. There were a few bruises on his face but overall the space emperor didn't look all too rattled by Bardock's all-out, everything left behind offensive. "You've got no appreciation, no culture, you are just wild things, utterly incompatible with the values of the Frieza empire."
"You know what, maybe you're right?" Bardock chuckled, wincing in pain and clutching at his ribs as blood dripped out from his mouth in a long, droopy line. "When you first hit me, I felt the sweet warmth of Heaven calling out to me yet, for some reason, I said screw all that! I crawled and swam back down to you, just so I could inflict a beating so downright horrendous that I'd end up burning in Hell for eternity. That way I'd never get to see Gine out there and suffer knowing that my wife and kid are dead. I think I'm a bit mad, but I like it that way."
"What absolute rubbish," Frieza's face turned sour as he snapped away, wielding even more power than Bardock ever did before without the need of stressing his body. A shotgun-like blast of Frieza's fist digging into his gut left Bardock reeling and bending over while Frieza's tail whipped him upward and sent him flying. The space emperor leaped up to chase his opponent and kicked Bardock away, taking aim with his index finger. "If you're in such a rush to die, I'll make sure to send you to the comfortable scorch of hell you so desire."
With Frieza's face lighting up with a delectable smile, the tyrant's eyes and his entire face lit up with punch-pink star gleaming at the tip of his finger. The tiny star became a ruthless laser as it homed in on Bardock and pierced the Saiyan's chest. Before Frieza could cackle in joy, however, Bardock's image rippled and faded out, revealing itself to be a mere afterimage.
"Not yet! Not until you're still breathing, Frieza!" Bardock roared out with whited-out eyes as his body became lit up with a thick, red flare that made wine-colored clouds rotate over the battlefield site. The cloud split, rich with holes that it beamed the crimson light back down to the dirt it drew it from. It was amazing how good of a caretaker Gine was that she scrounged this much of Bardock's old power back in so little time. "King Kai Fist X 20!" he yelled out.
As Bardock took off with a roar sealing his last resort, however, he halted in mid-charge, unable to move a muscle. Frieza floated in front of him with his right hand open and his left hand wrapped around his right wrist. Invisible waves resonated from around the tyrant as he unleashed his telekinetic powers once more, entrapping Bardock in a telekinetic hold until his sole heartbeat let out its thud and his King Kai's Fist was no longer.
"That is an interesting technique, savage. I'll enjoy extracting it from you where you lot nabbed it from. Then, I'll obliterate the entire loathsome race that created it. I'm oh-so grateful you showed it to me. It might have been quite worrisome if someone more refined and powerful than a mere Saiyan used it against me…" Frieza smiled as he raised his hand and manipulated Bardock up into the sky while the flaming aura around the Saiyan began dying down.
So this was his fate? Broken and paralyzed, in Frieza's mercy? No. The Saiyans have lived this way for far too long. While Bardock never meant to be a trailblazer for his people, he'd do it if that meant freeing the Saiyans from this putrid, androgynous dwarf. Frieza's eyes twitched as he felt grand, escalating resistance booming from within his telekinetic hold, and then, just like that, it shattered like a wall of gentle glass.
"What!?" Frieza's usually reserved and elegant face twisted in a disturbed expression of shock.
"King Kai's Fist X 50!" Bardock yelled out, knowing full well that his body couldn't handle the strain. To him, it didn't matter. All that mattered that he'd be going out on his own terms. As the red, booming flame, erupting with scarlet pillars clearing the clouds around them and littering the rundown and obliterated Planet Vegeta city street, died out, Bardock raised two middle fingers as he plummeted down with lifeless eyes and a shaky smirk on his face.
"So, you'd rather kill yourself than be crushed by me? What a pathetic show of disobedience," Frieza slowly walked up to the fallen corpse of the Saiyan he felt sure he'd crush in no time flat.
"You're done for, Frieza…" Bardock's raspy wheeze still reached Frieza's ears. While the Saiyans whited out eyes couldn't see any longer and his body was on the verge of passing on, the Saiyan still had a few precious seconds until his self-inflicted destruction caught on to him terminally. "The power… I had… It shook you. I challenged you… The Earthlings… Kakarot… They're way stronger than how I am now… King Kai's Fist, they all… They all know it. Tuck your tail and run, you bastard… No matter where you run… You're done for…"
"Humph…" Frieza's disgruntled expression accompanied the swipe of his two fingers that formed a crescent energy projectile slashing through the Saiyan that thought he'd defy Frieza of the pleasure of killing him. "You know oh-so little, monkey. Laughable and blunt, like your entire race." The tyrant chuckled to himself before turning to where his scouter registered those signals. "Now then…" he muttered.
Frieza's black lips parted way, revealing an angry scowl of shut teeth underneath while his eyes twisted in a disgruntled expression. The emperor turned toward the split body of the Saiyan he just finished off and extended his hand, unleashing a powerful energy blast that reduced all of Bardock's remains to rubble but even as nothing but smoke and ashes were left behind, Frieza couldn't find serenity. He just huffed and panted, realizing that Bardock made him break a sweat.
"Hmm… I'll hand you this much, pathetic primate. You somehow robbed the hobby of killing insolent Saiyans of its joy. Curse you, damn monkey!" Frieza clenched his tiny, pale fists as he seethed in wrath. "Maybe that woman meant something to him. I should make sure I make her scream loud enough to shatter this curse of pointlessness this brute cast on me. My useless subordinates, to leave me alone and make me resort to this labor…"
Frieza took off with four times the speed and anxiousness to get to the banding place of Saiyan survivors and blink all of them out. Not all of them at once, but each of them individually. Getting to see life fade away, breaking them and sucking that obnoxious defiance right out. Never again will a monkey's life fade away, still soaked with insolence. He'll make them cry, he'll make them grunt, he'll make them defy that monkey nature of them through punishment and torment, and only when they know the grace of admitting their primitive inferiority will he grant them the mercy of death.