Videl thrust her right arm up, shooting a white Ki wave at a buzzing Machine Mutant drone fashioned after a wyvern, though one relying on laser engines and a rotor support platform to stay in the air. A handful of its duplicates swooped in to drop mechanical bombs in a synchronized air raid but Videl eluded a pair of incoming bombs while kicking one back and reflecting a few more with her palm strikes and causing more explosive mayhem amongst the air-raider Machine Mutant models.
A Machine Mutant comprising a torso and a helmet and a massive cannon's barrel attached to its back took aim to accomplish its one and only purpose for which it was built. Electrical surges rushed down into the depths of the large barrel where they converged into a sole energy mass that glowed with light visible from the outside. Before the Machine Mutant could fire, Trunks dashed out in front of the line of fire and flung a Ki blast into the depth of the cannon, causing a violent detonation that destroyed the cannon Machine Mutant.
A rolling fortress of a Machine Mutant came in from the back lines, swinging a gargantuan drill arm to slam Videl onto the ground where the rolling military base could grind her to the dirt. Instead, the rampaging martial artist effortlessly weaved around the swings of a dozen drill arms, only to blink away and appear in front of the top control base of the rolling Machine Mutant fort. Videl punched the control base unit once, taking it off the whole structure, at which point she plunged into the exposed depths of the mobile machine base.
The living structure flinched and collapsed in place. One by one, bright beams of energy burst out from within its facilities until the structural damage was too much and the sky-scraping mechanical behemoth blew up. The overwhelming rip of the blast devastated many more Machine Mutants in the moving army while throwing discarded and detached body parts of the destroyed mobile tank base all around the ruined city.
Crawling mechanical spider-drones aimed the turret barrels attached to their backs at Videl, seeking to provide some anti-air support. That was before Trunks appeared before a ground drone and demolished it with a single punch, then vanished and appeared behind another drone and destroyed it with a careless kick. Seeing the drones unbothered by his intervention and continuing to unleash fire at Videl, Trunks vanished and appeared in front of a turret drone, ripping the turret part off and aiming it at a handful of other drones. Once the battlefield lit up with domes of flaming detonations, Trunks hopped off of the hijacked Machine Mutant and finished it off with a kick.
A fearsome mechanical soldier with a plasma rifle and two cybernetic platforms with jet propulsion rings and two turret platforms attached on each side of the back rolled into the battle, firing a barrage of tremendous plasma bolts at Videl. The bolts flew off unimpeded and only leveled buildings, and landscape decorations, or flattened some heaps of debris to the ground. The mechanical giant looked around, scanning the environment for his opponent, but Videl struck first, grabbing hold of the titan's torso while stuffing her leg into it for support, then pulling it up from the back in a karate-style rolling back throw. Sparks and machine fuel sprayed in all directions as the Machine Mutant fell eviscerated into two parts.
Splattered machine fuel lit up from the flocking sparks, creating a field of fire though despite being utterly drenched in machine oil Videl appeared unbothered by the heat and protective measures of Ki control prevented her drenched clothes and skin from lighting up. Trunks appeared in front of his partner, thrusting both his arms forward and firing a yellow energy wave to decimate a field of rolling Machine Mutant tanks.
"What do you think these guys are? They look like robots, but they came from outer space. Alien robots?" Trunks wondered out loud, but Videl was not in the mood for discussing the nature of her opponents. Ripping them apart with her bare hands felt satisfying but also… Strangely visceral. Videl had the chance to ruin some training equipment back home in her father's mansion, but this… This felt different. With each opponent she ripped apart, Videl felt her consciousness pushing back and struggling against her raging instinct to wrestle it down under control.
She didn't want that. These monsters killed so many people. They may have killed her father and Navy. Someone like that couldn't have been alive. They could've only been mindless drones, robots, just like Trunks suggested. Someone just fulfilling commands. Like a human weapon of sorts. Feeling vindicated by this train of thought, Videl charged recklessly through the battlefield, engulfed in a white aura and tackling her way through humanoid Machine Mutant foot soldiers like an uncompromising bulldozer. Arms, legs, and helms flew off into the air while the colorful robotic soldiers flinched and turned around.
"No way! Are they… Afraid? That's not very robot of them…" Trunks blinked a few times before realizing that he allowed the terrified retreat of the round and colorful foot soldiers to distract him from the apocalyptic giant appearing on the horizon. A cosmic-sized Machine Mutant with a spaceship-sized cannon attached to the shoulder and powering up, ready to wipe the continent clean of feeble human opposition.
Everything turned bright cerulean in a flash of light. The howling electronic currents rendered the two martial artists temporarily numb and deaf. When Videl and Trunks next opened their eyes, they were staring at a red and bloodied sky shrouded in smoke and surrounded by a decimated city landscape.
"Impossible! Not even Metro Cannon Mark-2 unit couldn't neutralize these Earthlings!? This is completely opposite to the intelligence relayed by the Sigma Force!" a round-bodied Machine Mutant foot soldier with thin limbs freaked out by grabbing hold of its tiny protruding round head.
"How did Metro's blast not reduce this planet to a scorched rock in an instant? Is Metro Mark-2 malfunctioning?" another Machine Mutant soldier wondered.
"Negative, it's these two warriors. Their bodies absorbed most of the cannon's energy, leaving little to nothing for the landscape. They are truly terrifying, contact the Sigma Force at once! We risk losing our entire ground army against them," another Machine Mutant foot soldier reported.
Spinning like a human cannonball, Videl slammed into the front of the Metro Mark-2 goliath before rolling through the sky again and finishing her attack with a rolling leg slam to the top of the mechanical giant which caused it to erupt in hundreds of system failures and implosions before reducing to collapsing heap of rubble in one mighty blast. Meanwhile, Trunks scrambled back on his feet, dashing across the battlefield and crashing into hundreds and thousands of individual round Machine Mutants and augmented models equipped with cannons and other long-range plasma weaponry.
True to the predictions of the Machine Mutant troops, their platoon meant to overwhelm the entire southern region of the planet was being reduced to ruin in a snap. Most of their significant suppression units had been leveled while the surviving ground soldiers began frantically fleeing for their lives.
"Wow, these guys are real pansies… Mom never built any robots with self-preservation programmed into them. Sounds like a waste of space…" Trunks scratched his head.
"No!" Videl clenched her fists, shaking her hands in pent-up frustration that had nowhere to escape to now that the Machine Mutant army decided to flee for their lives, scattering frantically. "They're not soldiers, they're just mindless weapons, tools! Nobody alive could do something like what these monsters did!"
Just as the infuriated young woman threw herself after the fleeing Machine Mutant platoon, a red flash rippling in front of her made the teen flinch. So one note was her wish to obliterate every trace of the alien invaders that she didn't wait to fully comprehend what she was now facing, Videl just threw a strong right at the interloper only for it to stop at the open hand of a robot clad in red and white armor with a blue vizor and sharp fin-like protrusions at the side of its head.
"Mega Cannon Punch!" Commander Nezi reported with a mechanical tone as he thrust his right arm deep into Videl's gut with such relentless force that it indented her body and nearly punched a hole through the Earthling martial artist, sending her flying and instantly dispelling the white light she's been engulfed in. Trunks gasped, overcome by shock as Videl whizzed clean by his right and slammed into a bent out-of-shape skyscraper far away, leading to the building's collapse.
"Huzzah, comrades in arms! The Sigma Force has arrived to assist us!" a brown Machine Mutant pumped its thin arm into the air. "I knew that Commander Nezi and the Sigmas won't leave us to die!"
"Huh? Who are you?" Ribet, the fusion between a recycling bin and a morning star in robotic form, turned to the cheerful Machine Mutant.
"R-Ribet-san… I sent the distress signal that led you here…!" the baffled Machine Mutant shrugged, wondering why a member of the idolized and unbeatable Sigma Force was treating him with such indifference when the entire Sigma Force came here to pull them out of the fire. "When I sent the distress signal, I didn't expect that the whole Sigma Force would come rushing to our aid. We hoped that at least a single member would have come… Honestly, just one should've been enough to deal with these unruly Earthlings."
Just as the brown Machine Mutant was finished speaking, Bizu's hammering arm squished him from above, reducing him to a pile of junk, torn, sizzling wires and broken microchips. Trunks gasped in shock that the Machine Mutant elite would treat his own comrade whom he came here to rescue like scrap this way and just coldly execute him. Knowing that these Machine Mutants experienced human feelings like cheer, fear and admiration only made this act feel more hideous.
"The piece of junk must've been malfunctioning, thinking we would come here to pull some useless drone out of the line of fire. The place of all junk is in the scrapyard…" Bizu explained himself to Ribett and Natt, who were looking at the Machine Mutant giant funny. "We came here because DB4649T2006RS tracked six entire Dragon Ball signals in this direction. This is the most important battlefield on this planet. You scaredy cats can all scamper away because we're here to take care of business now."
"You mean… You don't care at all about the lives of your troops? Aren't they alive? Don't they feel happiness, pain, and fear for their lives…?" Trunks called out the handful of newly arrived Machine Mutant elites.
"They do. Unlike your outdated gadgets and machines that you employ on this hick-ville of a planet, Machine Mutants are a sentient synthetic race with every attribute you'd assign to an organic living being. Our artificial life is achieved through unparalleled breakthroughs in bio-engineering technology. Though I find it strange that you're so worried about the life of a no-name drone when you've bathed yourself in fluids of so many of its allies…" Commander Nezi turned his attention to Trunks, frightening the young Saiyan to stumble back a few steps after seeing how easily the Sigma Force commander handled Videl.
A rumbling shockwave ripped through the demolished city district as debris from a downed skyscraper flew off wildly in all directions. Videl's scream filled the stage as the furious Earthling blazed with a sky-reaching explosive white aura, emerged from the rubble. The teen's eyes were whited out and her messy hair spiked and ruffled in all directions. When she took off as an answer to the challenge of the elite commandos of the M-2 Star, she rode a jolt of white ethereal lightning to her target.
Videl's swinging down kick slammed into the side of Commander Nezi's head, forcing it to cock to the side while the rest of the Sigma Force flinched in awe that this Earthling they've all counted out returned the favor to their esteemed commander and landed a clean blow on him. The passionate maiden was looking to do more than just land a blow, as she pulled her entire body back and took a low position, shoving her foot into the side of Commander Nezi's knee plates. A strike like that would've slowed down any organic warrior with a remotely human-like anatomy tremendously.
Seeing the red-and-white M-2 commando soaring backward from the devastating blow, bent forward as his lower body took the worst of the impact, Videl pursued the M-2 elite with a flying roundhouse before transitioning into an overhead elbow slam. A pillar of pink energy beamed out from the thundering elbow slam that delivered a walloping crack to the Commander's mechanical body. Drawing her fists back in a showy manner that had her arms move so fast but also so elegantly that they produced mirages.
The Earthling martial artist drew her right arm back while raising the left for a block if her opponent would recover unexpectedly, then drew her right leg back as well. Chanting with a resonant Kiai shout, Videl delivered a karate-style straight punch while expelling a tunneling Ki wave from the tip of her fist that bolstered the aerial shockwave and dealt further damage. Videl switched the dominant arms and legs, repeating the same sequence while firing pink Ki waves through just the swings of her fists alone and battering the Machine Mutant elite without physically touching him. The final blow slammed into the core of Nezi's body and sent him flying away while Videl returned to a karate-style stance and her eyes returned to normal, racing across the battlefield to scan her opponents and await their responses.
"Awesome!" Trunks pumped his fist. "This martial art looks sluggish and primitive, but there's so much power behind those strikes!"
"It's called karate. It's a martial art my dad had me learn and practice while beginning my journey. Before I met Chayote-san," Videl answered. "I used to think that it's completely worthless because Chayote-san and Gohan-kun completely blow my old karate masters out of the water but… The martial art itself is solid and can be improved with the principles I've learned from every other martial arts master I've studied from."
"This Earthling thinks she can take on the Sigma Force?" Ribet threw his thin metal arms up in surprise. "Let's show her how wrong she is!"
Ribet rushed forward with a flurry of strikes from his thin arm. Despite the size and bulk of her challenger not looking like anything much, Videl didn't let this fool her. She couldn't sense any Ki signature coming off of this opponent, but basic martial arts carried her a long way, and, judging from the speed of these strikes and the shaking airwaves surrounding them, if she skipped a blow–she'd feel it. Ribet's front head section slid back, revealing a rocket sticking out from inside. A ring of smoke puffed to the sides as the rocket lit up and took off toward Videl.
Focused on the incoming missile, Videl took a defensive stance and kicked the rocket aside but, once the rocket was dealt with and hurtling off into space, Ribet was nowhere to be seen. The rest of the Sigma Force mocked Videl with their arms crossed, twitching in what resembled a robotic cackle. Trunks cried out a warning, but he didn't have enough time to make anything intelligible before Ribet slammed Videl with its rear from up above her and pinned her to the ground.
"Get off Videl!" Trunks yelled out while charging at the recycling bin lookalike, but the massive Bizu rushed in defense of his Sigma Force comrade. Despite facing off a much larger and more intimidating threat, Trunks didn't relent, bursting with a transparent aura as he threw a flurry of blows to Bizu's thick hands, though the powerhouse of the Machine Mutant squad seemed to absorb Trunks' fury.
Then, something odd happened, it was as if there was nothing at all opposing the weight of Trunks' blows. This sudden shift had lulled the inexperienced fighter into a stumble and, before Trunks knew it, his whole body became merged with Bizu, as if Bizu was a lump of jelly and Trunks had slipped into its malleable insides. Thrashing for some precious air, Trunks' face emerged from the liquified shell of Bizu's massive body, panting for breath.
With a loud yell, Trunks expelled an explosive wave of energy from around his body and burst out from the giant with a malleable body, shoving Bizu away and forcing him to solidify and cross his arms to defend himself. Even then, the heavyweight Machine Mutant skid back from the significant push of Trunks' force.
"Y-You cruel monsters!" Trunks yelled out with whited-out eyes and a cruel sneer. His mouth gritted the teeth and twisted from the inhuman pressure of the disgusted scowl on the boy's face. "What kind of leader hurts their own people? My dad isn't like that at all! He loves and works hard for the Saiyans, even when they're crude and when they act out, everything he does is for them to live happier and easier lives!"
"T-Trunks…" Videl stopped struggling against Ribet's pressure as she couldn't believe the skyrocketing battle power that was coming off of the preschooler. A golden aura was surging around him while his hair was shifting in between spiking up and falling back by his sides. Violent lashes of lightning cracked all around the district, electrifying the air around the battleground.
"To kill them off yourself, treat them like garbage, and abandon them for something like the Dragon Balls… As leaders, you should be BETTER THAN THIS!" Trunks bellowed while letting the strain of the overflowing Ki overcome him and engulf him in a bright golden flash. White sizzling sparks washed up his whole body, coloring his spiked hair golden while clear, teal-colored irises formed in his intense eyes.
A rip of burning fuel brought Commander Nezi back from the ruined pile of rubble to the battlefield. Numbers and complex calculations ran up the vizor display of the mechanical commander as he tried running probability simulations that would help him understand what had just happened. The boy's battle power and danger level had just escalated to unheard-of levels.
"W-What is the meaning of this…?" Natt's semi-liquified body emerged from an area behind Trunks, where he planned to fire at an exposed weak spot before the ticked-off Super Saiyan turned his head around and peered straight at the sneaky Machine Mutant, frightening him enough to disappear underground and regroup with the rest of the Sigma Force.
"You just had to get your asses whooped for what you did to your own people," Trunks replied with a calm tone, yet one that was seeping with ill intentions. "As a Saiyan prince, I felt responsible for punishing your misdeeds but… I just… Didn't have the power to do that. It annoyed me and… I snapped. Now you've done it."
Having well-established that the Machine Mutants were capable of feeling fear for their lives, there was simply no other way to interpret their sudden retreat and regrouping as the shorty Ribet rolled off of Videl's back and scurried back behind the solid wall of his comrade Bizu and the confident back-up of the trustworthy Commander Nezi.
The battle for the six Dragon Balls had taken an unexpected turn, yet this exact type of twist was necessary to give the Earthlings a fighting chance in the face of an overwhelming mechanized menace.