Rapid snapping filled the air. Trunks' image appeared for a few passing moments only for a Death Beam or a slicing fuchsia-colored projectile to pierce it and reveal it to be an afterimage. Videl had her hands full, swooping and rushing over several Coolers scanning the skies with eye beams. It may have been her imagination, but she could've sworn that these Ghost Warriors were just toying around with them. Their faces were full of sadistic ecstasy and they awaited for one of these attacks to shed some blood with deep anticipation that only made the physical chase and torment that much sweeter.
Just when Trunks at long last found an opening and extended his hand to fire a Ki blast barrage, a Frieza snapped up in the path of the Ki blasts, deflecting them aside with just a faintly visible pink psychic barrier. Even facing these guys one on one while being fresh and with full access to their strongest techniques and power-ups, Trunks and Videl felt like either of these three would've been a challenge. All of them together felt more like torture.
Gritting his teeth, clad with an adamantine resolve, Trunks employed a series of snap vanishes while racing upward. A yellow energy bubble formed around him. With a shocked look on his face, Trunks turned around only to see a Frieza having vanished and formed a psychokinetic bubble around Trunks while slowly infusing it with more and more of its Ki. With a robust kinetic push, Frieza sent Trunks careening off toward the ground, causing a massive shroom-shaped explosion that picked all the dust of the decimated landscape up.
Videl's attention shifted to her distressed companion. The eye beams that were keeping Videl occupied and pinned down in a fruitless race against her own fatigued body ceased, making Videl feel more cornered and confused. A couple of Coolers dispersed into a cloud of Destron Gas, merging and reshaping into something much larger and bulkier. Before Videl now stood several times larger version of Cooler, equipped with a spiky, bony helmet that concealed the face of the merged Ghost Warrior entirely.
Swiping his hand, this Super Cooler created an energy storm of sharp, needle-like energy blasts that hurled toward Videl like a blizzard of busted glass, embedding into her whole body and stiffening it up from painful twinges all over before every scalpel-thin and precise shards began popping and detonating, opening up grievous wounds where they caught her slacking. Fuming with black smoke and bloodied, Videl crashed back down on the ground.
That would not be the end of her worries, as not too far behind his tyrannical sons, King Cold crashed down on Videl's gut with a crushing knee dive before flipping back and dive kicking her in the chin, gliding across kilometers worth of space while grinding the head of the young woman in the dirt with his foot. Having inflicted enough torture and seeing blood accumulating from Videl's cracked head underneath his foot, Cold aimed with an open palm down, releasing a violent energy blast that decimated not his own foot or Videl's head that was trapped under it, but the very ground underneath them. With the ripping violet energy bursts blasting out from underground, a wave of warm destruction washed over Videl from down below, flinging her into the air once Cold pulled his foot off of her face and let her fly off just to admire the view and cackle to himself.
"Damn it!" Trunks shrieked out with wild wrath that he had nothing to target with. His hair flickered with a golden twinge as they flirted with their spikier stance. The boy pulled out from the rubble with a fist imbued with sparkling yellow energy, crashing it into the gut of the nearest Frieza to him. After smacking the Ghost Warrior, Trunks released the energy blast to send Frieza flying away and crashing into the Destron Tower with a loud detonation.
"Don't get involved with those Destron monsters! They're just a distraction, just power through and give that tower everything you've got!" Trunks yelled out with his eyes closed. Following his own advice, the boy spread his arms out and formed two Ki blasts, one in each hand, before bringing them back together and merging them into a single energy wave. "Double Buster!" he yelled out.
A Super Cooler took off the ground and rammed the energy blast with his forehead, knocking it aside to beam off into the atmosphere and fizzle out in the merciless vastness of space. Trunks braced for a tough fight, only for Super Cooler to dash up to him and grab the boy by the back of his head and shove his fist into Trunks gut, then double ax handle him down on the ground. Laughing out maniacally, King Cold unleashed a combination of Death Beams, all shooting down in Trunks' general area, though neither of them did much aiming.
These Ghost Warriors were just entertaining themselves, it was more than likely that all of them were tied to immensely malicious emotions aimed toward the Dragon Team or their individual members, which in term led to these twisted and psychotic versions of these alien tyrants that fired wildly and chuckled into their hands waiting to see if at least one of their deadly beams hit the mark. They were in no rush to kill the two warriors trying to destroy the tower they were manifested to protect. The evil emotions that gave them shape overrode the purpose of protecting the tower that created them.
Seeing this gave Videl a wild idea. It was the longest shot she's counted on and it was bound to be even more tormenting than their trip was until this point but as she wobbled back to her feet with a busted and swollen face and drooling with blood, tasting it in her mouth and feeling her teeth loose, she simply couldn't find a better option. They've tried to just push through without strategy, against innumerous copies of much more powerful opponents, but it was fruitless. It was because of that obvious fruitlessness of such an approach that the enemy allowed themselves to be this callous.
If they were to topple this tower, it would be by outsmarting these mindless, sadistic drones. By playing them instead of letting them play on Videl and Trunks' desperation to finish their quest. Clenching her fists to where they squeezed trickles of blood as if squeezing the water out of mashed fruit, Videl took off and fired a blind flurry of Ki blasts everywhere to catch the attention of as many opponents as she could.
"It didn't hurt!" she screamed out. "It didn't hurt at all, you weaklings!"
With confused looks, the vast majority of Friezas, Coolers, and the Ghost Warrior of King Cold turned to the defiant teen. Ripping a piece of her top off, Videl tied it over her busted forehead to ease the blood loss somewhat so that she didn't pass out before getting everyone's attention.
"I don't even know who any of you are!" Videl followed up, attracting more and more curious eyes that, the longer she continued her tirade, the more they became bulged out, shaking and bloodshot with wrath. "Neither Gohan nor Chayote ever told me about any of you, that's how meaningless any of you were to them! Now look at you, whoever you were in your past lives, it takes a whole army of you to bully a pre-schooler and someone who only learned Ki control at the start of the summer. Now I can see why they didn't bother teaching us about you…"
Just to seal the deal of her defiance, Videl spat some blood on her right before putting her dirty and bloodied dukes up. "Come on!" she taunted the frothing army of Ghost Warriors. "You ain't that bad. I'll take all of you on!"
"Wh… What are you doing?" Trunks blinked in disbelief. His own vision tripled and often blurred far worse than just that as he laid on a ridge of dirt on the floor. Only after seeing the entire horde of the Cold family launch themselves with howling shrieks, demanding bloody satisfaction from Videl, Trunks realized what his friend was doing. She was playing with the malicious emotions that comprised the core of these Ghost Warriors against them. She was pulling their strings, robbing them away from the control of the Destron. These Ghost Warriors were more the ephemeral, ill thoughts that let them persist in the universal memory space than the Destron that shaped them into their current forms.
"Alright, I can't hold back, this has to be my everything!" Trunks clenched his fists and brought his upper bending down, calling out to the deepest parts of his body and mind. Igniting the blazing golden aura around him, Trunks became a Super Saiyan and raised his hands over his head. Putting all of his Super Saiyan energy into it, the boy created a massive energy sphere that he then launched howling toward the Destron Tower as an energy wave.
In between kicking and passing Videl in the air between one another, choking her with their tails just close enough to dying only to let her go and continue bullying her, the distracted Ghost Warriors turned aghast to witness a tumultuous golden energy dome shaking the very foundations of the Destron Tower. The chained reaction of explosions detonated at various floors and sides of the tower, ripping with electrical discharges and ignitions of the emitted Destron leaks that caused the gas to instantly burn up in the atmosphere turning the skies blood-red accompanied Trunks' attack while the tower teetered on the brink of collapse.
But it didn't collapse.
Realizing that they've been played, as much as Ghost Warriors could realize anything, the Destron manifestations lashed out with seething, vengeful fury. Surrounding Videl and Trunks like a shaken hornet nest. A Frieza elbowed Videl in the stomach, turning her ability to stand or hover off while the tyrant wrapped his tail around her legs, flopping her about and throwing the teen flying with her back exposed. A Cooler caught Videl with a backhand fist before slapping her to crash down on the floor with his tail.
A Cooler charged up to Trunks who tried putting his arms up to defend only to be overwhelmed by a knee strike to the gut before being double ax handle slammed down onto the ground. A Frieza charged down to pursue Trunks and hook-kicked the boy deeper into the collapsing ground as a result before withdrawing only for another Cooler to finish the punishing beatdown up with an explosive energy blast that sent Trunks soaring and rolling on the ground like a rag ball.
A Frieza raised his hand over his head, forming a Supernova above the palm. The blazing star-like sphere grew larger and larger alongside the sadistic excitement because, out of all of his brethren and doppelgangers, it would be this Frieza who would finish off the fallen and pummeled husks of their former selves. A cruel chop from the side sent Frieza flying, shocked, the rest of the Ghost Warriors turned to King Cold who punished the reflection of one of his sons so brutally. Then, collectively, the Ghost Warriors turned to the teetering Destron Tower, realizing that obliterating their enemy with a calamitous blast was the worst idea now that just about any shake could topple the tower and finish the endless pumping of Destron into the Earth's atmosphere.
Trunks wept, fallen on his face, while a handful of Friezas and Coolers descended near the crawling boy and began stomping and kicking at his ribs. King Cold landed near Videl and picked her off the ground by her head with his massive hand, raising her weightless, coughing, and twitching body off the ground. This was by far the worst beating Videl has ever taken. She could scarcely hear anything, just the aimless shrieking in her own mind. Her head pounded with so much weight behind seeking to break through from within her own skull that the battered teen felt certain that if she opened her eyes and felt the horrid sensation of light seep in, it'd be the same as stuffing her eyelids full of busted glass.
Videl cupped her shaking hands together. She could barely see anything from her swollen face and the blood that was pouring down her face and into her eyes, burning them and making it even more difficult to see beyond general blurs. A tiny Ki particle swerved in frantic eights between her quivering hands. Cold only observed her puny show of strength with a sense of sick curiosity about what exactly his crippled opponent sought to achieve with such a puny speck of energy. From the last of her strength that remained, Videl thrust her hands out and sent the minuscule particle of Ki floating like a glow-worm at the cluttered mass of enemies in the sky.
A Frieza leaned forward, pointing with his index finger straight at his cheek as if challenging Videl's pathetic last resort attack to hit him head-on only to prove how useless it all was. As if having extinguished all remnants of her life with this final attack, Videl slumped in King Cold's grip. Frieza opened his eyes, realizing that he hadn't felt even the tiniest sizzle of the world's most pathetic Ki blast touching his cheek. Collectively, the Ghost Warriors looked around but couldn't find a sign of where the Ki blast went. It was just buzzing around in an irregular trajectory, so tiny that it was difficult to even see it from so far away.
Rearing his teeth in psychotic glee, King Cold straightened his palm and prepared to plunge it clean through Videl's chest to finish her off. With the last of her Ki having been thrown out with reckless abandon, she'd have no chance of continuing her miraculous feat of surviving these abhorrent beatdowns for much longer. In her current state, she may not have lasted long even if left alone, but after the humiliation, these two children put them through, the Ghost Warrior force was going to make certain they suffered brutal ends. Neither of this pair deserved a calm death by bleeding out.
Before Cold's palm could pierce Videl's limp, unresisting body, however, a vicious quake trembled the ground. The quake resulted in King Cold tripping over himself and dropping Videl on the ground, nearly stumbling to his knees himself. With petrified stares, the dozens of Ghost Warriors turned to the Destron Tower that was up in flames, torn asunder by another chain of vicious blasts, though this time it flung far larger and more important chunks of it out after each calamitous blast. In one final purge, all the venting Destron Gas burnt up in a deep crimson flame, expanding at the cloud level and, just like that, the threat of the Destron Gas was over.
That being said, this merely made the production of Destron Gas and the inevitable end of the Earth as its current inhabitants knew it to no longer be possible. The Destron that was already produced still lingered in the air, not to mention the countless Ghost Warriors persisting and wreaking havoc around the world. With thunderous final throes, the Destron Tower fell apart, quickly reduced to being only a pile of scrapped Machine Mutant technology.
Seething and twitching with overflowing tension, the tricked Ghost Warriors who could scarcely even understand what had happened, knowing only that whatever their goal was, these two insufferable kids once again got one over them, turned their attention to inflict as much pain as possible before finishing these younglings off. Trunks curled himself into a ball, realizing that whole dozens of Friezas and Coolers had swarmed him from both sides and began stomping whatever traces of life remained out of him.
They came so close to succeeding. It was infuriating. After everything… After gathering six Dragon Balls, Trunks finally became a Super Saiyan and even after they've successfully brought down the biggest, baddest, and the final Destron Tower that the alien invaders brought with them to Earth, they would come up short so close to success. Even if the Ghost Warriors weren't quite aware of it, they left Trunks and Videl so distraught in what would be their final moments over how close they were to winning. The Ghost Warriors actually returned the favor, getting just one up over these two, but it was always the final laugh that mattered.
Rumbling hovercar noises made King Cold turn to his right, seeing a faraway trail of smoke on the horizon. Having finally realized that there were simply too many distractions that ended up costing them too much in the end, King Cold resolved to finishing off Videl before dealing with this mysterious interloper. He tilted his leg over the laid-out teen's head, ready to stomp into a red puddle.
A deafening clang and a flicking spark knocked at King Cold's temple, baffling the monstrous tyrant and making him turn to the racing hovercar on the right. An entire barrage of flicking machine gun fire that barely even registered to the confused alien tyrant drowned him in the vexing cacophony of automated fire nonetheless. A scan of the racing hovercar revealed that a man with a curly afro, a thick mustache trimmed sideburns, was shooting from a submachine gun while standing up from his seat alongside a curvy blonde with a red ribbon tied over her curly blond hair.
Cold waved his hand, throwing a careless red Ki blast hurling at the Earthling vehicle that would undoubtedly obliterate this handful of buffoons. His assumption may have been his last, as a thick grip wrapped around the back of Cold's head and slammed him into the ground hard enough to shove it half his own height in depth. With a crude clenching of his hand, Bardock crushed the head of the Destron monster in his hand and straightened his back out while patting his hands off of the puffs of Destron fuming out of the ground.
With a shrieking swerve, the hovercar finally reached the battlefield and hurried to drag Videl's battered body in while Bardock cracked his knuckles, approaching the endless horde of Friezas and Coolers.
"Sorry 'bout my poor timing, brats. I had to take a lady home after my date, but it turned out that the Earth got attacked and my lady can spontaneously switch into a badass commando chick," Bardock rolled his knuckles before cracking his neck to both sides.
"Showoff, I coulda cut dat monster in two too, ya know, if dat harpy didn't suddenly abandon de wheel and make me drive de car!" Yajirobe shook his fist over his head, halfway sprawled in between the passenger seat and the driver seat while the recently legally renamed Mark Hercule and Launch covered Videl being dragged into the hovercar with rounds of blind suppressing fire that just ended up confusing the airborne hordes of Friezas and Coolers more than anything. "Do ya think I could eat dat smelly stuff? I once tried dat Kinto stuff, and it wasn't too tasty, but maybe dis stuff's different?"
Yajirobe flopped out of the hovercar, dropping face-first on the floor and flattening his face only to crawl up to King Cold's corpse and feel up the Destron that was leaving his body, trying to carefully get a lick of how the toxic fumes tasted. Bulma wrestled out from behind Mark's and Launch's thick rears obstructing her view and leaped out from the car, racing across the field toward her beaten son.
A Frieza with a sly smile aimed his finger at the mother, only for Bardock to snap in front of him and catch Frieza's wrist, crushing it in one press. With a vicious battle cry, Bardock dispersed the Frieza into a cloud of Destron with one blow to the chest before giving the rest of the Ghost Warriors a chilling stare. Bardock almost challenged them to give him an excuse to obliterate their whole ranks in one blast.
"Videl… My poor Videl…" Mark stroked Videl's hair and nuzzled her swollen and bloodied face with care, pressing his child to his chest. "I should've been there for you, I should've not gotten involved in that politics stuff… I'm so sorry…"
Bulma grabbed her boy off the ground and dashed back to the hovercar with him in her hands while Bardock held the Ghost Warriors shaking and in line. All he needed was Bulma's permission to tear them apart, and he'd have done so. Currently, he was acting on orders to refrain from doing so wherever possible, so to prevent them from regenerating and evolving into even stronger new forms as a result.
"Drones away!" Launch barked out, letting a handful of mechanical buzzards take off into the skies and begin slurping up the Destron Gas that was leaked until now from the tower and the Destron that would disperse from the destroyed Ghost Warriors.
"Yeesh… Even with my taste for demon meat, this stuff tastes rancid!" Yajirobe ran back to the hovercar, spitting out froth that had the consistency of machine oil from his mouth. "Are ye sure ya wanna face dese runts alone, man? Dey're scary!"
"Trust me, this is a dream come true for me," Bardock replied with a quietly bubbling broth of righteous fury he was about to unleash on these unsuspecting Ghost Warriors that had the absolute most unfortunate faces to have in front of him. "I won't let any of you butt in for a second. These are all mine, as were all those other ones on the way. Just give me the word."
"The drones are airborne, rip them apart!" Bulma turned to Bardock with teary eyes while still caressing her unconscious son in her hands.
Those were the words Bardock wanted to hear the most. With a rich smile, he charged straight at the endless ranks of Friezas and Coolers that drowned out the blood-red sky of ruined Destron.