Piccolo's arms lit up with crackling bursts of energy. With potent thrusts, he unleashed a hail of Ki blasts with semi-competent homing that arced around before homing in on Frieza in his hideous new form. The tyrant continued to float in mid-air while the blasts laid a siege on his defensive ramparts but it was for naught as with just a glimpse of Frieza's through the dust cloud it became all too clear that he was not about to cave in to such a manner of attack.
The oval-shaped alien overlord blinked away from the cloud while Piccolo channeled a greater amount of energy into a Ki blast. With the Super Namekian sending it hurling toward Frieza, the tyrant vanished away with the mighty sphere of concentrated energy ripping through a mere visual mirage while Frieza blinked an entire distance between them to deliver a crunchy right hook to Piccolo's jaw that made the Namekian's eyes grow dull as they extended his neck more than it would have been possible for a mere human to do so.
When Piccolo's sight next returned to him, he clenched his fist, sending the final, most powerful Ki blast he had just launched vaulting right back, aiming to hit Frieza in the back but when the flat-faced alien just turned his lips upward and vanished away, Piccolo realized that he'd need to deal with his own Chasing Bullet. The Super Namekian dashed up, having experienced a similar type of trickery already, but as a tax of this evasive maneuver, he lost the track of his opponent.
Piccolo closed his eyes, sensing the most subtle of aerial vibrations before exclaiming a proud battle cry and throwing a wayward, stiff push-kick to his right. His foot hit something adamant, like an egg trying to break through a brick wall. Frieza stared at him with a minor grievance that the Namekian had stopped his rapid motion assault, but Piccolo's counterattack didn't cause any semblance of pain or irritation in his opponent that would have made the emperor flip his switch from chillingly polite to frighteningly sadistic.
A rough grunt left Piccolo's chest when Frieza's tail wrapped itself around his heel and dragged him over his head. Everything whited out when with a shrill shriek the sadistic emperor began treating him like a punching back while Piccolo hung helpless and subdued on one leg. Frieza lacked the ingenuity and fighting chops to keep at him for long. Soon enough the tyrant flung Piccolo up and rotated around with his legs extended, smacking the Namekian aside before extending his finger that lit up with a vibrant glow of hot pink.
Instead of sending a beam of a relentless barrage of them, Frieza dragged his finger like a pen across a white sheet, dragging a line out in space and sending his overflowing Ki in a slashing Ki projectile hurling toward his airborne opponent. Piccolo roared in pain with whited-out eyes as the crescent projectile slashed through his violet Gi and exposed his body with a gruesome, bleeding scar across his chest. Somehow, the Super Namekian held himself together and maintained his body weight while dragging the back of his hand across his mouth where he felt a bloody taste. As expected, more than a smidgeon of it stayed on Piccolo's arm when he did so.
"Enjoying yourself? I certainly hope so. I would hate to bore a treasured guest who did his best and pushed me to a workout of my life," Frieza chuckled to himself in a grumbling, fishy tone. All the results of him lacking a proper pair of nostrils to filter air through.
"Humph," Piccolo grumbled, extending his arms out to his sides. "I hate the thought of powering up to my very limit before you. It sickens me to my gut that I have to work my hardest against a complete amateur who lucked out to be born to such immense power. Still, as a martial artist, it is my duty to prove that no matter how powerful you are, you will never taste victory like someone of profound skill does."
"Oh? So, you have been holding something back even now? Well then, let's see it if you aren't bluffing this time," Frieza whipped with his tail, resolving himself to wait just long enough until he grows bored until he next begins punishing this Namekian insect who got this far.
"You should be more mindful about what you're asking for because when you get it, it'll be more than you can handle. To be honest, I'm a little excited myself. Ever since becoming one with Nail, I have never powered up to the deepest extents of my limits. Even the thought of it makes me shiver with excitement," Piccolo chuckled, feeling glad deep down that Frieza delivered on the hype that King Kai sold him as a challenge. Knowing that someone like this guy existed in this universe, someone strong enough to challenge Piccolo even now and push him to the very edge made it feel like training and looking to new horizons to improve his skill was still worth it.
This pride in being a martial artist left Piccolo's lungs in a triumphant roar as his exploding power left his body in a white, intense aura and his build began swelling up drastically, popping out bubbling veins all over while the eyes of the powering up Super Namekian whited out completely. In his moment of scratching through the deepest layers of power, Piccolo looked his most ferocious and demonic to date as it seemed like the very skies had blackened out, making Frieza turn his gaze at the world-shaking power he was at the presence in.
With the final shout, Piccolo sealed the deal, regaining his beady stare as he turned his head down and his build stabilized, coping with his sudden surge of power while the blood that sprayed down his chest and his mouth had dried out to a mere trace. Frieza bent his head to the side. As someone who wasn't capable of sensing Ki at all, he had absolutely no measure of how much more powerful Piccolo became, if at all. The Super Namekian certainly looked the same old him.
"Am I to believe that you are finished with your silly yelling fit?" Frieza raised the right bony ridge hanging over his eye while his tail lashed in a snappy whipping motion, forming air pockets.
Piccolo vanished, moving in the air and sliding across the skies over Frieza's oval head. He dived right in front of Frieza but then disappeared again; it wasn't that he had snapped away in hi-speed motion, he merely swept at the tyrant's feet, disappearing from his field of vision while leaving Frieza whirling horizontally while Piccolo's stiff kick sent the tyrant soaring across the entire ruined battlefield while Piccolo raced after his opponent, enveloped in a transparent, minty aura as Piccolo continued to decimate Frieza's defenses with a flurry of long and sharp kicks aimed at every opening that his shoddy stance left in his body.
Spinning kicks, push kicks, thrusts of his feet and stamps, Piccolo employed the entire kicking textbook, showing every variety of kicking that the world of martial arts knew before one, thunderous push kick socked Frieza right in the center of his face, where his nose would have been, had he had one, sending the tyrant hurling across to some cleaner fields of rocky soil and dried-out trees. Piccolo extended both his arms, grabbing his opponent by his horns as he pulled Frieza back in and shoved both his feet once again into Frieza's face as his arms locked back into place.
Piccolo's uppercuts left little to be desired as the Super Namekian continued his merciless mugging of his wide-open and overwhelmed opponent. A rising knee strike sent Frieza spinning vertically into the air, exposing the center of his spine for Piccolo's diving kick. With a blurry barrage of thrusts of his feet, Piccolo hit every vertebra at once, thrusting his feet downward at every available spot on Frieza's exposed back. A vertical kick to keep his opponent airborne.
With a snapback down to ground level, Piccolo dashed through stone pillars littering the area further away from the ruined temple to deliver an uppercut to the right, where Frieza was about to fall, then vanished and kicked Frieza away from behind, driving his whipping leg straight into that decimated spine of Frieza's. The space emperor had disappeared on the horizon, though the Super Namekian still had a confident track of his opponent's location through Ki sensing.
While his opponent was gone, Piccolo looked down at his shaking fist, clenching it as hard as he could before exhaling and gritting his teeth in a miff. He had attacked with his full power, and yet he still felt a rocky resistance from Frieza's body, as if he had been armored with a coating layer beyond Piccolo's level of power. From here, Piccolo could still say that Frieza's Ki was higher than his. This made little sense though, Piccolo's full power should have been enough. How come he had powered up so little after letting all of his Ki explode like that?
A fuchsia-colored beam split the space between Piccolo and Frieza, crashing its way through Piccolo's flesh with a meaty thud, a spray of purple shot out from Piccolo's left peck where the beam had pierced through him and the Super Namekian blanked out for a second, grabbing hold of his wound and howling out in pain once his senses returned to him while his clutching hand sunk in a stream of purple blood. With eyes beaming bloody murder, Piccolo turned his head back up to Frieza, who had launched a sneak attack before returning to the battlefield from far, far away.
"Was that all the measly effort you had?" Frieza wondered. "You seem to have a particular gift for violence. Such a gifted fighter would have been useful working for my empire, but you have inflicted enough transgressions against me today to warrant the extinction of your entire race and everyone that has ever known you fondly."
"Damn, I guess I've got no choice but to start fighting on borrowed time," Piccolo grit his teeth. Crossing his arms up while the blood leaking from the wound on his chest thickened and would slowly become almost gooey and gelatinous, ceasing the bleeding and giving way for his regeneration to kick in over time. Gine and his clone had only been away from their goal by a couple of steps. The time he needed to buy here was almost up.
"King Kai's Fist x 2!" Piccolo yelled out, firing up with the most powerful version of King Kai's Fist he had bothered to learn from Chiaotzu during their trip here. Frankly, Chiaotzu hadn't shown them anything beyond x2, and, apparently, they weren't meant to use anything higher than x2, and even if they used x2, they had to use it sparingly in battle. Judging by the wild Ki spurts, pretty much everyone had gone past that limitation already. Still, Piccolo hadn't ever banked on using the King Kai Fist at all, so x2 would have been just enough.
"This technique again!?" Frieza's eyes widened in surprise while his long lips stretched out and his lower jaw dragged downward.
"To be honest, I didn't want to learn it at first. I had never thought that somebody as powerful as me would ever need to use it, but everyone on the ship had been working hard on it. A skilled martial artist like me couldn't have helped but learned a few things absorbing them as he listened in," Piccolo smirked before stretching his neck out, feeling the burning strain tearing his cells apart from within, for now, however, only on a shallow and limited level.
The two opponents rushed at each other, exchanging blows. This time it was Frieza who grunted louder and in a much higher-pitched tone when meeting Piccolo's blows. He had been struggling to weather the storm of Piccolo's fists now and while the fusillade of shock waves littered the battleground, the tyrant couldn't help himself but resort to wrapping his tail around Piccolo's neck and flinging him aside. Now that he had gained some space, Frieza raised his finger and fired a couple more of his Death Beams in Piccolo's direction, all of which connected but, unlike the first, couldn't even get through the skin anymore. All that Frieza's signature technique could accomplish at this point was leaving scrapes and bruises.
"He knows how to fight against the King Kai's Fist. He's not much of a martial artist but he knows he needs to bide his time and keep his opponent at bay, he's timing the King Kai's Fist out. How did he learn that?" Piccolo wondered to himself. When his attention fleeted back to Gine and his clone, they had been even closer to the ship, and yet still not quite close enough to where Piccolo could abandon the fight.
"So, you and those two monkeys were working together. You even use the same crutch technique. What's the matter? I thought your own power was so incredible that I could never measure up to it? What happened to that great fighting skill of yours, you mollusk?" Frieza chuckled while he flinched his fingers up, putting both of his indexes up to prepare for a wild barrage of his signature Death Beams.
"I'll give you power, I'll give it to you in spades!" Piccolo hissed after crossing his arms up and exploding with a booming scarlet aura, "King Kai's Fist x 3!" he yelled out.
"So much for your fighting skill, you gastropod savage," Frieza's mouth shifted to a position of an ecstatic and a little psychotic grin while his eyes turned full on maniacal. The first couple of beams flew out from the emperor's fingers like arrows, slamming into Piccolo with a hammering thud but drawing no blood. This wasn't even the beginning of Frieza's assault as the tyrant continued his relentless barrage of Death Beams that were so focused and round and so rapid that they would have been better defined by calling them Death Bullets.
Piccolo wheezed and hissed in pain as a barrage of deadly bullets of Ki continued to flick from Frieza's index fingers and hammer into his body, ripping through his tattered clothes but failing to draw blood, only leaving mean-looking scrapes and blowing up dust. Frieza continued to cackle maniacally as he fired his deadly barrage of bullets on and on, waiting for Piccolo's surge of power to burn out and for his bullets to finally meet some soft flesh too weak to harden itself sufficiently but Piccolo hadn't cranked his technique up nearly high enough to burn out this quickly. Once this became apparent, Frieza had ceased his barrage attack of Death Bullets and breathed out, having grown a tad weary of his own relentless assault.
Piccolo knew that Frieza thought himself one step ahead of the Super Namekian in terms of battlefield strategy and control over this battle. To be fair, he might have been if Piccolo had been fighting to overwhelm and kill his opponent and not biding time. Struggling with low-powered King Kai Fist power-ups against Frieza's weaker but continuous techniques, more fitting to torture one's opponent than kill them outright suited Piccolo and his goals just fine. He had no hopes of beating Frieza here, especially when he still had another transformation reserved.
"They're there!" Piccolo realized when he checked on Gine and his clone with his Ki sensory. This was his chance to go big and scram out of here. The Super Namekian put up his hands and placed them by his forehead, stretching out his fingers as he closed his eyes and prepared to blind his opponent. A tight lock followed by a wet crunch and the wave of pain washing over Piccolo's entire body distracted the Super Namekian and broke his focus.
Frieza's tail had wrapped around Piccolo's arm and bent it off to the other side, breaking in by the elbow to where his bone had punctured through his forearm and stuck out, spraying showers of purple blood that Frieza tried catching with his tongue and licking it off his face. An overwhelming cross to Piccolo's gut sent the crippled Super Namekian smashing down into a crater on the ground while Frieza wiped his face off of the blood and flexed before his opponent.
"That pesky primate already blinded me with this technique once. I'd rather not go through this hassle again. Thanks for the offer though, slug. Just where is it that you think you were going after insulting the mightiest in the universe–Lord Frieza himself?" Frieza cackled and burst in a vigorous rush of powerful aura that shook the very ground Piccolo smashed into, making it difficult for him to dig and claw out.
Piccolo roared in pain and exhaustion. His booming power widened the crater and sent showers of pebbles over into the atmosphere as the Super Namekian burst forth from his stony tomb and landed on the ground beneath Frieza's position. He grabbed his busted arm and yanked it off, promptly replacing it with a new and functional arm. It was a mean affair, regeneration on such a scale cost him heaps of stamina every time.
So, Frieza had encountered the Solar Fist too before. It makes sense, Bardock likely used it to give Gine the opportunity to slip away while he occupied Frieza. Piccolo should have put two and two together. But that only meant that he had no efficient way of escaping his opponent now. He was effectively trapped. In any case, Gine and the rest should take off from this planet soon enough… No… Something still plagued Piccolo. Those beams he shot at him from all the way beyond the horizon. His psychokinetic abilities, his long-reaching Ki attacks, and alien anatomy. Frieza was a monster. If he as much as got a whiff of a spaceship taking off–that spaceship was as good as gone.
Merely slipping away was no longer an option. Frieza had to be defeated here or driven to the point of complete exhaustion. If he focused all the energy he had, cranked up the King Kai's Fist, Piccolo felt like he should bully this form of the emperor around with minor problem but once he transforms again… Who knows how insanely more powerful and ruthless he'll grow? What new techniques will become available to him?
Still, Goku and the rest didn't know their folly, they'll likely try taking off not too long after Gine returns to the ship. They'll think that Piccolo will try to slip away, they'll wait for a few minutes, but then they'll be taking off. And if Frieza sees it–they'll all be as good as dead. Not only was this battle looking hopeless, but now a deadline time frame began wrapping its long body around Piccolo's throat. What a hassle!