As Super Hatchiyack levitated out of the smoke cloud left after his transformation, it wasn't just the birth of his shiny new form that drove the struggling Super Saiyans to hesitate to engage this monster in battle. It was the fact that fighting it may have just been as pointless as Dr. Lychee said it would be. Usually, when madmen and tyrants threatened with something like that, they meant it more in a broader sense, that the threat they were describing was too powerful to fight. Rarely, if ever, they used this tactic to describe true immortality and battle evolution.
"Be it giant or super or whatever… I will smash you into pieces! My pride as the super-elite amongst Super Saiyan is on the line!" Super Saiyan 2 Vegeta exclaimed, entering a state of reckless abandon as he threw himself at the newly transformed Super Hatchiyack.
Engulfed in a vivid golden flare, the royal Super Saiyan 2 dashed at Hatchiyack, smashing into his cheek with an uppercut that sent the rampaging monster flying. With a golden arc, Vegeta dashed around his opponent and drove both his feet firmly into the monster's back, pushing him higher up only to appear over Super Hatchiyack's head and smash him back down with a double ax handle slam.
"It doesn't matter how many times you transform, how many times you evolve, or how many times you revive yourself! The grief and feelings of a long-extinct race of weaklings are lightweight compared to the peak potential of the most powerful warrior race in the universe!" Vegeta swore, stretching his arms and legs out in a star-like shape as his electric golden aura surged violently around him and blinded all beholders with its shimmer.
Crashing down at Super Hatchiyack with a double-fist flying charge, Super Saiyan 2 Vegeta slammed into Super Hatchiyack's straight and flat body, creating a ripping, dome-shaped golden whirlwind that flung stardust and debris in all directions while roaring with all the volume of a supernova. Goku and Gohan clenched themselves to weather against Vegeta's storm. Grunting and struggling to stay afloat in the air while faced with such calamitous aftereffects.
It was rough for them to find their opponent to assist Vegeta. It may have been deliberate on Vegeta's part to attack with uncompromising, limitless power and to leave no spots for anyone to assist him. As if the Saiyan super-elite was making a statement that his ultimate power was unchallenged but also impossible to add to. There was also the matter of different fighting philosophies. Whereas Vegeta burnt bright with full power flares, Goku and Gohan, unable to access his Super Saiyan 2 form, favored mastery of their Perfect Super Saiyan forms instead, fighting a marathon as opposed to a sprint. Therefore, it was tough to assist a sprinter when you were running a whole different track.
A wide red hand emerged from the smoke and grabbed Vegeta's head, pulling it into the wreckage while Super Hatchiyack rolled over and slammed Vegeta's belfry into the ground, flooring him. The gemstones covering Super Hatchiyack's body lit up emerald green, about to burst with a pelting storm of energy blasts before a scattershot of energy blasts slammed into all of them simultaneously, sending the colossal powerhouse into a stagger.
"Alright!" Goku muttered. "Now it's time for me to go all out!"
"Dad…" Gohan turned to his father with a wavering teal look in his eyes. "You're making a mistake."
"Nope," Goku smirked while Vegeta engaged Super Hatchiyack in a frantic series of brutal exchanges, with each berserker seeking to plunge their fists through the other. "I'm betting it all on you, Gohan. Vegeta's the strongest out of all of us, but he's a hothead. Fighting head-on is the only battle he knows and I've got a feeling this won't do this time. I'm pretty tough myself, but I can be a bit of a blockhead. You're different, Gohan. You're not too far behind us in terms of strength when you want to be. When you cut loose, and you have the noggin to figure this thing out."
"I don't have much stamina left, Hatchiyack's ace move hit me pretty hard, dad!" Gohan objected.
"That's your brain talking. You've got an amazing body and fists every bit of hefty as those of your old man's or your grandpa's and you've got a mind as sharp as Bulma's to boot. Your problem is that you don't know how to balance those two. Sometimes your mind gets in the way of letting your body cut loose and defy limiters you set for yourself and sometimes you start seeing red and stop putting that mind of yours to work. That's what you need to work on, Gohan… Find that balance or else we're smoked here!" Goku smiled with his lips though his eyes relayed a dire look.
"Dad… You're putting this all on me? That's… Not fair!" Gohan objected with teary eyes.
"Yeah, I know it ain't," Goku nodded. "I'm expecting you to outwit this crazy brainiac from outer space and this invincible monster he's created all the while fighting harder than either me or Vegeta but… That's the only way we'll be getting through this and… I must admit, I actually believe you can do it. Now, let your old man cut loose and smack this guy around, give you as much information as I can before burning up. Don't leave us hanging for too long now, Gohan."
Gohan sniffed and wiped his tears with his wristband, nodding with a false sense of courage that he used to fill his body with a filler mass that would drown out the uncertainty and unimaginable despair. These expectations to figure out a winning strategy all the while showcasing enough strength to defeat an invincible monster that not even a Super Saiyan 2 could defeat decisively were choking Gohan up. But his father said he could do it and Gohan trusted his father. Ever since Gohan was a kid, his father was always there, he was always fighting with his unbelievable strength to inspire pure awe, no matter the odds. Everyone else believed in him too… Gohan used to stare at his father's back with awestruck eyes when listening to Krillin's, Yamcha's, or Tenshinhan's stories about him.
If that man from those wild stories said Gohan could do this, it would have been rude not to believe him!
Goku pressed his arms to his sides, pulling his knuckles to opposing directions while his body bulked up and networks of pumping veins littered them. As Goku exploded with a marigold flare, even Vegeta turned around to see this unbelievable burst of power.
"Preposterous! This is… Kakarot's battle power!?" Vegeta gasped as a vein popped on the right side of his forehead while his shocked eyes threatened to bulge out from their sockets. "It's even to mine… How can this be… A mere Super Saiyan!?"
"HATCHIYACK!" Goku clamored out as his vicious marigold aura flared up around him with so much intensity that it began disassembling the entire Dark Planet station bit by bit. Incapable of pulling back the tremendous strain this power-up caused his body, Goku charged forward with a right cross.
Vegeta stumbled out of Goku's way as the blazing flare enveloping him shot forward without taking Vegeta's presence into consideration, just like Vegeta didn't consider his allies when fighting. Stunned, Vegeta staggered and gave up the floor for Goku's rampage to take place. Super Hatchiyack's neck extended, testing the mettle and the integrity of the core appendage of the monster's body. Vanishing with a destructive halo and appearing behind the machine of vengeance, Goku slammed his elbow into the back of Super Hatchiyack's head.
Goku appeared overhead and crashed straight into Super Hatchiyack, unleashing a machine-gun pummeling of fists before driving his right hand hard into Super Hatchiyack's gut and shutting the monster's floating down. Unfortunately for the engine of Tsufurian despair, it collapsed straight into Goku's rising uppercut, which sent Super Hatchiyack flying even higher.
"Incredible…" Vegeta blanked out before realizing he was admiring his low-class rival and shifting into a disgusted scowl. "That Kakarot… Never able to keep up with the Saiyan super-elite naturally, but always finding some dirty trick to keep him relevant. Here I thought he was reserving strength with that piss-poor cream-haired Super Saiyan when he was actually storing it for a sudden burst of it. I guess since he's been saving it up for all that time we spent fighting those drones and now Hatchiyack… He's stored up heaps of power that's able to put a mere Super Saiyan on even my peerless level."
Goku curled into a fetal pose, burning up with a golden nova of sparkling energy that threatened to rip his body apart but preserving its relentless burn into a sparkling bubble around him. This way, Goku created a star of golden energy with him at the very core.
"Hmph… Looks like you're not really able to keep this going or sustain it at all. It's more of a get it all out and get tuckered out situation with it, isn't it, Kakarot?" Vegeta snickered, crossing his arms and watching in spiteful amusement. There was certain entertainment in seeing someone so impaired and so talentless, managing to surprise everyone and fight amongst the peak warriors of the universe, even if it was just for a second.
Goku roared in a combination of pain and a spiritual exclamation of his amazing energy. In a blink, the Saiyan appeared before Super Hatchiyack and unloaded a vicious rush of punches coming from all sides and angles that utterly pummeled the destructive engine of despair into a wheezing and mushy mess before crashing an overhead haymaker that flattened Hatchiyack into the ground while sending a tremorous golden pulse that nearly split the entire mechanical star into two.
"KA… ME… HA… ME…!" Goku chanted out, drawing his hands back while still shining up with the final traces of his accumulated reserve power. The sparkling golden star around him shrank down, yet the Super Kamehameha in his hands only expanded wider and wider, emitting blinding pulses of white light that drowned everything away before fading out.
"W-Wait just a second now…!" Dr. Lychee lost his cool, grabbing hold of his grey hair and pulling on it while his face stretched out to a despairing frown. "If you unleash this attack, you'll blow up the entire star system like nothing!"
"Hmph… Too bad for you, Lychee," Vegeta turned to the desperate Tsufurian scientist with a cocky smirk. "You made a crucial error challenging us on your own home turf. Not even a soft-hearted imbecile like Kakarot is worried about blowing YOUR planet up!"
"B-But… You'll die… All of you…!" Dr. Lychee gasped, shaking in disbelief at the lengths to which Saiyans would stoop just to win a battle. "You'll choke on the vacuum of space!"
"FULL POWER!" Goku cried out, closing his eyes as his face swelled up crimson and the veins bubbled with an unhealthy strain that should've, by all means, given him a heart attack. With an all-powerful, strident blast, everything went white. Super Hatchiyack leaned backward, trying to swim against the overwhelming current of flowing white energy that was slowly chipping flesh and chinks of armor off of him and obliterating them to ash.
The garish light show consumed Hatchiyack whole until his form became black. Just one degree of raw force higher kicked the strongest Super Kamehameha ever fired into overdrive and swept Hatchiyack away. Not even a trace of ash opposed the strident beam of energy and the vicious Super Kamehameha ripped clean through the Dark Planet's side and blasted off into the distance, thinning out until it was just one, meek azure ray of light and then disappearing completely. Just a trembling crater and a devastated cybernetic space station remained as proof that the annihilating energy wave ever existed.
Dr. Lychee looked down, completely ignoring the devastated inner core laboratory and only paying attention to his trembling hands and tattered clothes. It wasn't the fact that he suffered minor bruises by just being near that immensely powerful attack; it was the fact that he was alive that shocked the cybernetically augmented Tsufurian scientist.
"W-We're alive…?" Dr. Lychee muttered. "The Dark Planet star is in critical condition, but it's still intact too. What is the meaning of this?"
"Hmph, for a guy who acts like this perfect genius and claims to have astute knowledge about the Saiyans and how the universe works, you sure are a dumbass," Vegeta smirked. "Kakarot focused on the destructive potential of his attack to only affect Hatchiyack, without destroying the star system or even this oversized junkyard of yours. Not only did that restrain the level of destruction and prevented Kakarot from getting all of us killed, it only made the attack that much more powerful since it condensed the destructive power onto a singular point."
"And you knew that would happen all this time?" Dr. Lychee's face soured because of the Saiyan king's trickery.
"Of course, the opportunity to see you soil your pretentious pants was too priceless to pass up," Vegeta smiled, softening the dire look in his eyes for a second to admire his own cunning. "I almost wish just a bit that Kakarot did blow all of this up. As pleasing as it was to see your façade crumbling down, it'd have been that much sweeter to see you sweat over your mistake moments before your demise."
"Come on, Vegeta…" Goku squeezed some words out while panting in front of a hefty cloud of dust and colorful nebulae shuffling and dancing in reflective starlight before him, where he launched an attack aiming to obliterate Super Hatchiyack's body. "You wouldn't have been able to be resurrected with the Dragon Balls then unless Dende made a set of new ones."
"I suppose you're right, Kakarot. As sweet as it would've been to see this pretentious asshole wet himself before blowing up with his precious star and fighting robot, it's not worth losing my family over," Vegeta bit his tongue despite having to admit that Goku was right. "I still got to see you lose your cool though, Lychee. What's the matter? Afraid your impeccable plan was going to fail?"
"D-Don't delude yourself, King Vegeta!" Dr. Lychee barked out. "My Four-Stars Plan is perfect and every individual piece of it is expendable. Even me! The plan is so much bigger than me now that even if I were to die at your hands, unlikely as it seems, you would barely inconvenience the plan at all."
"SAIYANS… KILL… REVENGE!" a resonant growl spread from within the smoke, shocking Goku, who floated right in front of the resounding outcry and the rumbling sonic shockwave that it sent in all directions. Having spent all of his channeled and super-charged energy, Goku was now stuck in a weakened and tranquil Perfect Super Saiyan state with numbed arms and a downpour of sweat, unable to defend himself at all.
"Wh-What!? You mean that monster still lives!?" Vegeta went pale, gasping at the prospect as eight whole copies of Super Hatchiyack emerged at once from the dust cloud, slightly dirty but otherwise completely unscathed by Goku's strongest Kamehameha that matched even Vegeta's Super Saiyan 2 power. The octet of Super Hatchiyacks surrounded Goku with one of them kneeing the Super Saiyan in the stomach, with the rest pounding on him from all sides in a brutal and one-sided beatdown.
All Super Hatchiyacks became constructs of lava-textured green light before merging with the central one which bellowed with a vicious green aura emanating from around it. Radiating a corrupting shroud all around it, Super Hatchiyack leaned forward and snapped its jaw open while its eyes lit up bright red. A pumping stream of Destron Gas began drowning out the laboratory, engulfing everyone inside and crawling up their airways to burn and poison their lungs while drastically weakening anything that breathed the raw form of the gas in directly.
"Damn it…" Vegeta coughed out before taking a knee to the gut and a double ax handle that knocked him down on the ground. The Saiyan royalty suffered extensive damage from this attack since he failed to get up promptly and writhed on the ground. The King of Saiyans found his energy better spent pounding the ground and lamenting the complete mastery over Destron Gas of his transformed adversary. The electric sparkles around him vanished and the golden gleam in his hair soon sizzled out too, returning the Saiyan king back to his base state.
A stiff right kick rocked Goku's head before the rampant engine of destruction slammed its left hand diagonally hammering down on the Super Saiyan and smashing him into the ground too, knocking the Super Saiyan out of Goku too. Gohan coughed up the Destron, feeling the Super Saiyan state in him slowly giving way to severe weakness.
"Heh," Goku chuckled with heavy eyelids threatening to put him to sleep in a second as he lay knocked down on the ground. "Sorry, Gohan, I thought your old man still had it in him to destroy at least this body. I guess I couldn't show you anything new in the end…" A frantic and bloody cough overcame the crippled with weakness Saiyan who lacked the strength to even get off the ground.
"Tsk… How are we supposed to fight like this?" Gohan muttered to himself after extending his hand and trying to form a mere Ki blast, only for it to fade out. The overwhelming flow of Destron that flooded the station seemed like too drastic of a disadvantage to overcome and the boy's mind was shooting blanks. Having dispatched of his father and the proud Saiyan king, Super Hatchiyack loomed over Gohan by hovering up to him face-to-face.
"Saiyans… REVENGE!" Super Hatchiyack bawled with the synchronized voices of billions of dead Tsufurians united as one dreadful cacophony while he flexed his body and indomitable power in front of the taken-aback half-Saiyan teen.