Gohan's face grew direr proportionately to the increasingly perilous conditions he had witnessed on his rush toward the West City area. His bright Super Saiyan aura contrasted the black and mahogany shrouds, making the young teen a bright and hopeful arrow piercing through the devastating uncertainty. Not even the lashing lightning and whirling rivers of magma beneath him that sent jets of sizzling vapors where they contacted the ocean overwhelmed Gohan's brightness.
The last thing that the teen expected to see before him was a pair of youths with tattered clothing and scratches. There was no sensing the Artificial Humans coming until one came into contact with them, which was why the pair seemed quite excited to meet him whereas Gohan froze in terror. He didn't even notice when his hands started shaking, but they wouldn't stop no matter how many times the young man demanded them to in his mind.
"My, my… Gohan-chan, isn't it?" Artificial Human 18 teased the teen with a playful wink and an air kiss. "What made you wander so far away from safety, I wonder…? Worried about your mother, maybe?"
"Y-You're… The Artificial Humans… Don't tell me… Did you hurt someone!?" Gohan clenched his fists and overpowered the terror smothering his throat enough to strike a pose of a martial artist willing and able to stand up for himself. He couldn't even begin to think about losing someone from his friends to these two, which was what inspired the courage to fight back if he had to.
"I wish…" Artificial Human No. 17 ran his hand through his messy black hair. He looked far worse for wear, suggesting that he had picked a far more perilous battle. "I had my ass handed to me pretty badly. I wouldn't rush to the battlefield if I were you. With your battle power, you'll probably get dealt the same hand I did."
"So… You have killed no one?" Gohan scratched his head and broke his fighting pose as the nonchalant body language of the two Artificial Humans threw him for a loop.
"Come on, now… I'd like to think we killed someone…" Artificial Human No. 17 shrugged. "With all the fun times we had, all the games and boundless entertainment. I'm pretty sure I killed Mecha Frieza, at the very least, even if the old hag got his parts."
"Calm down, brat," Artificial Human No. 18 stopped with the teasing body language. Her voice turned serious in a snap too. Without the ability to sense Ki, Gohan could not tell the state that these two were in, even if the signs of battle were self-evident in them. Lazuli, at the very least, looked like she could still fight with her top shape. "We're tapping out for today. Though I'd advise you to follow our advice and go home to mommy too. The way you are now, you wouldn't be much help."
"What do you mean? You've abandoned Dr. Puri? Why don't you help fight her then if you're so strong?" Gohan objected.
"Sorry, kid," Artificial Human No. 17 shrugged and shook his hand in front of his face, signing himself off. "If we pitched in, the old lady would just end up slurping us up, and we'd actually just strengthen her. Trust me, we're doing you guys a favor by going our separate ways."
"Not to mention, the old hag would get a lot prettier…" Artificial Human No. 18 stroked her chin and ran her hand through her hair to fix her look as much as she could. "Though as much of a drag as it is to admit it, we're thankful to Piccolo and Krillin. Who knows, maybe in the future, if you ever need a hand, we'll pitch in for the assist. It won't be cheap though…"
Gohan gulped while the two began slowly advancing toward him, looking as if they intended to pass right around him and then split up, heading their separate ways. Just as they would've come face-to-face with the teen, Android 17 stopped in place, prompting his sister to do the same.
"Say, you haven't told us where you're actually off to…" Lapis wondered.
"I'm looking for Dr. Puri's son!" Gohan said.
"Huh? That old lug?" Lazuli's face stretched out as if a bullfrog had fallen on top of it. "What for?"
"He's the only one that can stop Dr. Puri!" Gohan insisted. "I know it, Dr. Puri's made a lot of mistakes, but she's not an entirely evil person. Just like Piccolo and Krillin gave you a second chance, we can still give one to Dr. Puri too!"
"Let's make one thing clear, brat," Android 18 approached Gohan and leaned so close to his face that Gohan could almost feel the woman breathing on his face. "That baldy didn't "give me a second chance", I could've killed him any time I liked to. I just didn't want to. I'm not a goofball like my brother and I don't much care for games, so killing him would've done nothing for me. I just want to always look my best, dress in fancy clothes, and live the high and easy life, got it?"
"R-Right…" Gohan staggered back, feeling obliged to take a defensive stance at the woman's threatening siege on his personal space. "But you know where he is, right?"
"Android 16's in Dr. Puri's personal offices. She's barely moved that guy ever since putting him together. All she's been doing in her spare time when she's not planning a successful course for the world is run tests on him and upgrade his body. She keeps waking him up, doing whatever with him, and then wiping his system clean and putting him back under. I feel a bit bad about the poor lug…" Lapis shrugged.
"Oh, no… Dr. Puri's personal offices?" Gohan leaned to the side, gazing at the emerald shine and the bright flames eating up the entire horizon far out.
"That's the Puri & Co tower, but it ain't where the old hag's got 16 at," Android 18 said, with a somber look on her face. "She built that tower as a mechanical control beacon and a command center, also she planned to fight Chayote there when that hysterical broad finally braved up to take a stand. That tower isn't where 21's office is. It's in a much smaller and much better-protected compound in West City. We'd take you there, but it's too dangerous. If Puri gets a whiff of us, she'll eat us up, and then nothing's gonna be strong enough to stop her."
"Come on, Lazuli, where's your sense of adventure, don't you feel excited at all?" Lapis smirked, giving his sister a look with a malicious glint to the corner of his eye. "The old lady must have her hands full with Chayote and Son Goku. We could see that freaky, mysterious guy waking up for good. There's so much to find out. What's he like, how strong is he, would the old lady actually eat up her own son for power?"
"Shut up!" Lazuli grabbed hold of her brother's loosely hanging strip of the shirt and pulled him in, only to push him aside right after. "All this time, you and your stupid games have been holding me back and getting both of us into trouble! It's because of you and your stupid "sense of adventure" that we ended up stumbling into the old man's lab started out working as his lab aides in the first place! None of this would have happened if you didn't feel adventurous that time and went way farther into the woods than we should've!"
"You're just as much to blame. You wanted the candy too, don't lie. Plus, what are you so fussy about? You love the eternally young and super-powered body you've got…" Lapis crossed his arms.
"Ugh! I'm so done with you. This is stupid, can't you sense it? Chayote's power swelled up to the moon and back. She's going to trash that old hag if you just give her the time. Puri's done for already!" Android 18 freaked out at the two, taking her own angle at the triangular formation that the three had made in the air.
"Yeah, but we can solve this conflict without Dr. Puri having to get destroyed. If she dies, no one will want to bring her back. Plus, no one knows if the Dragon Balls would even bring an Artificial Human back in the first place. Like… Are they more human or machine, are they living or are they more like weapons?" Gohan shrugged.
"What are you implying, twerp?" Android 18 showed her canines with a grumpy growl.
"Nothing!" Gohan shook his hands out in front of him as an excuse. "It's just… We can save Dr. Puri. Deep down, she's a good person. She's just grieving and she's made so many bad choices. Still, even now, some part of her is doing these things just because she wants to save the world. Ever since I was a little kid, dad's told me about all of his fights and about how he met all his friends and… Most of them started out similar to Dr. Puri. Most of them were lost in life and it would've probably been the right call to kill them, but we spared them and they found themselves and their happiness by just living their life to the fullest. Dr. Puri can be the same way, I know it!"
"You just want to be more like him, don't you?" Artificial Human No. 17's voice cut through the impressive sheet that Gohan had hung out. A colorful flag that he'd been waving for all to see. "You want to rescue Dr. Puri like she's some lost puppy, why? Because you want to prove to yourself that you can do what your dad does and save the world like he's done before, or do you genuinely care about that rotten old hag's life? Who knows, she might just be "a weapon" for all we know, an Artificial Human, just like you said, right?"
"Please… If you don't want to help me, just tell me where I can find Artificial Human No. 16!" Gohan pleaded with the pair. "This isn't just about Dr. Puri either, we can still save 16 as well! He's just like you, except he might have actually had it way worse than you. Dr. Puri never even gave him a chance to live at all. Even though she's done this whole thing for him!"
"Ugh… Kids are so annoying…" Lazuli rolled her eyes. "Come on, the sooner we take this brat to 16, the sooner we can go our way and live our own damn lives."
"Yeah…" Lapis nodded. "This is going to be so cool, you won't regret it, sis!"
With a resonating battle cry, Gohan charged across the gloomy West City skies and crashed into a colossal, square-chested mech. The charging collision bent the stalwart steel giant out of shape and the following beatdown with Gohan's punches ravaging the mech before he transitioned into a flurry of kicks and smacked the titanic mech aside didn't help matters. The Super Saiyan dashed across toward his intended target, overflowing with a golden aura that formed a hopeful arc of light in between where he dashed off from and where he collided with the mech again. Spinning around on his axis, Gohan smacked the decimated mech down with a spinning backfist, leaving it to crash down in shambles.
Android 17 crossed his arms around him, exploding with emerald electricity that overwhelmed even the thousands of drones patrolling the skies over the Puri & Co laboratories hosting Puri's personal offices. Lapis connected his hands together by positioning his arms side by side and formed a salad-green color energy blade around them before slashing with it at thin air. The motion propelled the energy in a crescent-shaped slashing projectile with a potent electrical field. The crux of the energy slash decimated all the cybernetic drones it touched while the electrical field shortened out those that weren't destroyed immediately.
"Wow, who knew this would be so much fun? Now I know why you guys keep bashing those things around. It's pure carnage with no moral repercussions whatsoever…" Lapis ran his hand over his hair to settle it back into place while marveling at the resonating chain of explosions around him.
"Infinity Bullet!" Lazuli extended her open hands at the hordes of cybernetic soldiers and various airborne war machines coming in at them like a swarm seeking to protect their precious hive. "Hmph…" the artificial woman pulled a strand of hair from obstructing her eyes before turning around and firing a swirling pink energy sphere at a rushing cybernetic speedster that came in from behind her. "That's odd, I thought you guys worked really hard to clear that trash out. We'll be cleaning up here the whole day at this rate…" she added.
"Yeah… Something's not right here…" Gohan winced with a dire look. He placed his arms by his sides and burst out with a deafening yell as his golden aura swallowed him up in a nova of golden light that seemed to expand throughout the entire town, with not even the peak of the horizon serving as its limit. When the golden shine cleared out, the surrounding cybernetic soldiers had been battered and malfunctioning, with minor bursts leading up to total system failure and self-destruction.
"Wow, not too bad, are you?" Lapis whistled with a smirk. "I may have misjudged you earlier…"
"A martial artist's battle power depends a lot on their emotions. My power is that same way, although this effect seems to work much greater for me. Piccolo-san thinks it's similar to grandpa's ability to explode with power responding to a strain to his bonds with his loved ones," Gohan answered without sparing a look for the Artificial Human he was talking to, still busy seeking for targets to eliminate.
"Stop chit-chatting already, you two…" Lazuli scolded the two while pointing at the dome-shaped building. "Quick, before the swarm fills up again!" With this encouragement, the trio took a dive toward the round building, seeking points of entry. Gohan followed the two Artificial Humans as they guided him toward the building.
"Wow… All the fighting has done a number on the city. It looks like the underground complex is just visible right there, like an ant nest or something…" Artificial Human No. 17 pointed at the splintered ground platforms. The two plunged deeper into one fissure until they stopped by a cut and busted opening to a service facility. Gohan followed the two Artificial Humans as they navigated the system of pipelines and elevated toward a specific office.
The door to Dr. Puri's office had been firmly shut and locked in place, but it was nothing that a swift flash coming out from Android 17's hand couldn't fix. The two reinforced titanium sheets flew aside like cardboard caught in a tornado. Gohan couldn't stop looking around, like a little kid in a toy store. During peaceful times, he'd have loved to work inside such a place and get to understand and know how everything here works and what these various gadgets do.
"Hey, this is the storage unit you're looking for…" Lazuli called Gohan, snapping him out of his curious daydreaming session. With a hasty step, the young man rushed to a tall and round steel pillar with the Puri & Co logo on it and the number "16" at the center. On the top, where this man's face would have been, provided there was indeed a humanoid man stored in this tall container, was just a hardly transparent, polished, and black-tinted gem protrusion. Through it, vague details of a man's face could've been made out.
"This is… Dr. Puri's son…" Gohan muttered to himself, dragging his hand across the container before it settled by a control panel with a big, red button on it.
"Yeah. Radiation had sped up the decay of the original body. There wasn't much left of him in just a few years. Either way, the hag collected samples of the radiated remains and tried building an artificial shell resembling her son's old body. Who knows what sort of experiments she's been running with this poor guy but she keeps saying she's not finished yet each time we asked her about this one," Lapis explained. Even the usually eager to press all sorts of buttons Lapis looked hesitant to cross the Rubicon in this case.
"I've got to warn you, twerp," Lazuli crossed her arms and planted her round bottom on a nearby table to rest. "If you open this thing up and activate 16, I'm not sure what sort of effect you intend for it to have on that old freak, but she'll lose it completely. This thing's her baby and she's let no one work on it for decades. Even if this thing doesn't kill you, that old hag will make it her life's mission to unravel your life like she's done with Chayote."
"Dr. Puri is a mother. All she wants is to have her son back. Awakening Artificial Human No. 16, or whatever his true name is, that has to be the answer that'll put an end to all of this with no one having to die!" Gohan seemed resolute as he pressed the red button.
Immediately upon activation, a light lit up from inside the container as its lid slightly tilted. Through the cracks, spews of redwood-colored smoke came out. Beaming with light glare penetrated the tinted gemstone as the eyes of the man contained within opened up long before the container set him free. An absolute unit easily doubling the size of either Lapis or Lazuli laid within the container with an amount of bulk to match his enormous size. With the beacons of light halting and dying down within his eyes, an icy-blue stare pointed at the ceiling could've been made out.
The lid slid off completely, forming a static angle up by the office's ceiling compared to the open iron sarcophagus. A bald, square-shaped head of strong, masculine features and a chiseled jawline emerged from the sarcophagus, taking baby steps. Ring-shaped, golden earrings clanged from the sides of his ears as he emerged with a lime-green vest and a skin-tight black bodysuit pressing against his whole bulky physique. A Red Ribbon Army logo hung over the right breast of Artificial Human No. 16.
"Hello, big guy…" Lazuli winked at the dull-faced colossus of muscle and a flamboyant, militaristic outfit.
[Personality profile missing…] a cybernetically augmented voice came out from the mouth of Artificial Human No. 16 as his eyes lit up with a sky-blue light and his mouth opened up to speak though his lips didn't move while speech came out from his mouth. [Activation acknowledged… Objective… Undetermined… Updating personality profile with the default objective… Operation complete… Objective: Capture Chayote.]
"Oh, no…!" Gohan's eyes widened as he leaned back from the activated bruiser.
[Error… Chayote is not present… Updating personality profile with the secondary objective… Operation complete… Objective: Kill Son Goku] a monotone cybernetic tone spoke through Artificial Human No. 16's narrowly gaping mouth.
"No way! That's way worse…!" Gohan grabbed hold of his head, dashing back to put some space between him and the awakened giant in case he'd need to fight it to stop it from trying to kill his father.
[Error… Son Goku is not present… Scanning for personality profile updates…] Artificial Human No. 16 looked down with his eyes ceasing the sky-blue shine and his mouth finally closing.
"Jeez, Puri sure left this guy as a complete mess… I guess she wiped his brain after her last experiments like always," Lapis sighed and turned around, having seemingly lost interest in the big guy.
"Come on, brat, I don't think this guy's moving anywhere…" Lazuli approached Gohan and gently patted him on the shoulder to ease his tension. "He's a complete bust. Just like the old lady kept telling us."
"Target acquired…" Artificial Human No. 16 tilted his head to gaze straight at Gohan out of nowhere, speaking with his own lips and a masculine, very human tone. "Target analysis: 84% probability to be Son Goku."
"Huh?" Gohan cocked his head to the side in bafflement.
"Satisfactory odds. Proceeding with termination," Artificial Human No. 16 declared before buffing his chest out in front of him and exhaling a deep yell from the bottom of his lungs as his body dyed with a bright redwood glow, sinking the entire laboratory complex with a pink shine. In a mere blink, the entire building became swallowed up in a dome explosion, swallowing up the entire region in an expansive, infernal flash.