"This transformation… You just devoured your own soldiers with no remorse?" Piccolo gnashed his fangs, spitting out sweat from his forehead as he stood in awe of the new and shiny version of the strongest foe he ever stood in front of. It took calamitous power and confidence just to keep oneself from trembling in the face of Hyper Meta Rilldo, who now looked more like an action figure than a physical entity. A mash between man and construction machinery in a lot of ways.
"Heh, what do you think? I've done to the Sigma Force what every Machine Mutant has been doing to obsolete pieces of tech for centuries–I've assimilated it and evolved further than either of us could ever soar on their own. In that way, I've given the scrap that the Sigma Force was reduced to some meaning. Whereas previously they were losers, beaten and trashed by some Earthling lowlifes, as part of me they've become a crucial element in bringing Earth to its knees. The exact task they saw and failed to fulfill," Hyper Meta Rilldo laughed. The helmet obscured everything but his eyes and covered his mouth up fully. Still, the voice of the Machine Mutant commander filtered through several voice boxes and came out distorted and artificially washed out.
"And there's no way to reverse this transformation and release them? Machine Mutants seemed artificial enough to where one should have been able to repair them. You took away that possibility from your trusted comrades forever," Piccolo adopted a wary fighting stance, knowing full well that sooner rather than later Hyper Meta Rilldo would succumb to the itch to test his newfound might. Piccolo and Rilldo would have had more in common with a martial artist than Piccolo would've cared to admit out loud.
"I've incorporated every piece of the Sigmas that ever mattered. Their power…" Rilldo clenched a fist of his right hand out in front of him, flexing his sinewy arm to showcase his vitality. "And their utility…" Rilldo pulled his right arm back to push the massive drill on his left arm out and let it rip through the empty air as a demonstration. "The zaniness and the rest of the chaff went away and I say good riddance!"
Hyper Meta Rilldo leaned forward, positioning the metallic wing blades sticking out from his back vertically and letting the venting fumes lined up behind them spit out a pair of triplets of flame jets as he dashed forward at ludicrous speed. Piccolo's eyes bulged in surprise as his body shifted to react to the rapid approach of his enemy, but it didn't shift anywhere close to being in time. His flinched and stiff body was stuck somewhere mid-motion with Rilldo fully wound back and ready to rumble. Even though Piccolo couldn't see most of Rilldo's face under the metallic mask, the sheepish look in Rilldo's eyes relayed he was smirking with a malicious grin.
That dreadful drilling sound ripped through the air. Rilldo shot his left drill arm diagonally up, seeking to obliterate Piccolo's head in one shot. Piccolo leaned backward, but the intense speed of the drill seemed to draw the air in. Everything went black for a second and then it all flashed red for Piccolo. Grunting, the Ultimate Namekian warrior stumbled back in mid-air with a bruised front of his face and tattered gi. The drill sucked his head and chest in for an abrasion on the side. It didn't deal too much damage, but it still hurt to an infernal degree.
Hyper Meta Rilldo shot a knee out only for Piccolo to cross his arms in a butterfly block and absorb it. He needed both arms to compete with Rilldo's unruly physical strength and he lacked the speed advantage to evade Rilldo or to outmaneuver him. The problem with using both arms was that Rilldo now had two arms to work with and a tremendous speed and power advantage while Piccolo had teary eyes and a grazed face. Rilldo swung his right arm down like a hammer, bashing Piccolo flat down onto the ground.
"What's with the outrage, Namekian? Doesn't your species use the same assimilation method where the superior soldier merges their consciousnesses with the inferior one, with the dominant member prevailing and absorbing both of their power, intelligence, and experience? Without the benefit of your entire race embodied in you, you'd never have lasted one second! It is the pinnacle of your species' evolution that propelled you to the heights of being able to contend against the commander of the Machine Mutants!" Rilldo loomed above Piccolo who laid sprawled out and flattened inside of the crater that his opponent left him in, before plunging down right after.
Scooping Piccolo out from the ground with his right hand, Rilldo slammed his drill arm into Piccolo's abdomen but failed to penetrate it. Instead, the thrust left a bloody blunt force scrape and sent the Ultimate Namekian warrior flying across the boundless grasslands all the way to the ocean. Not feeling like letting his opponent get away, Rilldo vanished without a trace and appeared directly in front of Piccolo, driving his right arm into Piccolo's gut and nearly plunging it all the way through. Realizing that Piccolo had too much Ki to bolster his body with and that merely plunging his drill all the way through won't work until Piccolo was weaker, Hyper Meta Rilldo swung his left drill arm like a club, bashing the Ultimate Namekian away, deeper into the ocean-filled horizon and further from land masses.
"It's only thanks to evolution that we have come this far and those we trampled on our way to the top did not. We are here because we are strong! They are all just food for us to grow even stronger and if we don't eat and challenge ourselves enough, someone stronger will trample and devour us! It's a kill-or-get-killed universe out there, as you're about to find out!" Hyper Meta Rilldo snickered. With a metallic clang, his drill opened up, revealing four cross-shaped plates that became fingers to his changed drill arm and let him cross his arms over his chest.
"You nitwit! Don't you dare compare your predatory scumbaggery to the plight of the Namekian race!" Piccolo flipped out, wiping the traces of blood off his bruised face and twisting his expression into something spiteful and more akin to Piccolo's demonic origins. "Whereas you kill and devour your own kind for something like mere power for power's own sake, the Namekians were forced to surrender themselves to someone more capable of bringing their race to a new future! It was never about evolution to us, it was about survival in the face of calamity after calamity! Neither half wanted to willingly absorb the life of another being, but that was the only way to ensure punishment of the wicked and the future of the Namekian race!"
Overcome with an influx of his bottomless wrath and feeling the spirit of every Namekian warrior raging from deep inside of him, pushing him to inflict punishment upon the tyrannical commander of the Machine Mutant forces for twisting the meaning of their fusion, Piccolo burst with a level of King Kai's Fist he never dared of approaching ever before. King Kai's Fist cranked up to the max, Red-Hot swelling Piccolo's body well past the certain point of his absolute limit. Piccolo was just a flaming streak of crimson light slicing through hyperspace before slamming his elbow firmly into Hyper Meta Rilldo's face. Even if it took a King Kai's Fist x 200, Piccolo and all the spirits of Namekian warriors contained within the grander sum of just Piccolo alone all agreed to fight like this was to be their final bout.
"Someone as ruthless and joyous to step over your own comrades would never understand the plight of a warrior that cannot serve their purpose and protect their home! A warrior who devoted their entire life to being as strong as they could be for those they wished to protect and came up short to some self-entitled prick with ludicrous mutation or someone who built themselves into a perfect fighting machine through tinkering and egregious shortcuts rather than paying the toll and possessing the patience to achieve strength!" Piccolo cried out before thrusting his elbow into Hyper Meta Rilldo's gut and bending his opponent over as the skies turned black and dark clouds swirled over their head.
Skyscraper-sized crashing tides rose and washed the two combatants while shimmering thunderbolts lashed across the skies. The Ultimate Namekian warrior transferred all of his strength into the strike, sending a tunneling crimson rip straight through Hyper Meta Rilldo's gut without leaving a hole in it, with energy squeezing through even the most adamantine of armor plates. Rilldo's wide and shaken eyes trembled in terror. Tackling his wobbly opponent with a shoulder charge, Piccolo dragged him further toward the land before delivering a devastating uppercut that exploded with the clamor of a planetoid-sized asteroid and a scarlet flash of about the same size.
Joining Hyper Meta Rilldo in the stratosphere, Piccolo swiped his arms with a careful focus of his Ki to become like energy blades elongating his nails with rapid slashing that grazed through Rilldo's armor and sliced through the platinum-colored flesh underneath. In no way could one describe the Machine Commander's flesh as being soft, but compared to the Sigma Force's armor outer shell, it was like cream inside of a biscuit.
"Do you have any idea of the despair that a warrior that's too weak to protect their home and their tribe feels? Have you the smallest clue of the sacrifice they'd be willing to make in merging with another, one that can offer the strength that they need? You can trash-talk the vague concept of the Namekian race all you want, but I won't give a spare crap because I know you're just a conveyor-built powerhouse with not even the slightest trace of what you're talking about, but when you disrespect the sacrifice of all the Namekian warriors by calling them weak, that's where I draw the line and fight to the end of this universe and back to crush you with all of our combined might!" Piccolo seethed before flexing over his opponent with stiff and masterful kicks and stomps and finishing him off with a full-body high vertical kick to Rilldo's jaw that shot the Machine Mutant clean through the moon and off further to the endless vastness of space.
Piccolo hissed and grumbled, grabbing hold of his chest and spitting up blood as the unfathomable toll of Red-Hot King Kai's Fist x 200 left on him. While the Namekian regeneration permitted him to push double-edge power-up techniques further than most Earthlings or Saiyans could, with this much strain, Piccolo felt like an ant holding the weight of the entire world on his shoulders. Vision became blurry and no matter how many breaths Piccolo took, his lungs just wouldn't have enough air to satisfy him.
He had to bring himself lower to, at the very least, increase the level of oxygen available to him. His blown fuse beatdown gave him a few precious seconds to get himself back in the game and figure something out. He simply couldn't have competed against Rilldo fist-to-fist. As much as Piccolo hated to admit it, not even the collective might of the Namekian warriors put him on that impossible level. Looking at his blood-stained and shaking hands, Piccolo felt like a disgrace to all those disgruntled warriors offering their essences to him and merging into one ultimate being.
"An Ultimate Namekian… What a joke…" Piccolo boiled with grit fangs and turned his head up as a fiery halo appeared in the sky, like a shooting star, except this one was shooting right at him. An incoming crimson nova was about to smash right into Piccolo with the fiery aura around Hyper Meta Rilldo having adopted a drill-like shape. The raw intensity and speed of Hyper Meta Rilldo allowed him to just shoot right back to Earth from a remote corner of the galaxy Piccolo bashed him off in no time at all.
"Stop!" Piccolo extended his hand in a desperate plight. This was so sudden that Hyper Meta Rilldo actually stopped with a turbulent expression. The drilling nova around him became a scorching twister, shooting off tunneling rays of energy in all directions and dissolved at once with the stunned, grazed, and littered with cracks in his Sigma armor, Rilldo stared at Piccolo waiting for the Ultimate Namekian explaining himself.
"Look at the sky. It's pitch-black despite it being early evening. It should be noon, approaching sunset right now, but it's dark and calamitous. Initially, I thought it was just the Earth struggling to contain my rampant fighting spirit. It couldn't have been your energy since you don't radiate energy like everyone else, being a Machine Mutant. Now that I powered down, it's become clear that this black sky is because of the Dragon Balls," Piccolo pointed out. "Once the Dragon Balls are collected and the Divine Dragon is called forth, the sky turns black. That's it, you've lost!"
"Hmm… What do you mean? How are you so certain that it was the Earthlings that collected the Earthling wishing orbs and not one of our own?" Hyper Meta Rilldo rolled his knuckles and cracked his neck to the sides, taking the brief intermission to whip himself back into fighting shape more than just lashing back out of sheer wrath of being pummeled.
"Get real," Piccolo snickered at the very idea. "You've just assimilated your Sigma goons, haven't you? You said they were the strongest there were. Do you truly believe that one of the lower-ranking goons could've gathered the Dragon Balls? Even if they did, do you think they'd have neglected to inform you? How would they go around summoning the Divine Dragon, and why would they do that all by themselves?"
Rilldo's eyes squinted and bulged out as faint tracks of veins popping out appeared in the gap between the cracked helmet and alongside the areas where the helmet had chipped off. Piccolo's clean explanation of the defeat of the Machine Mutants truly got to the Machine Mutant commander. It became all too apparent that Rilldo didn't know how to lose. His creator didn't build him for such a purpose, if asked before coming to Earth, he'd have told you he didn't know how to suffer defeat as they did not program such a function into him.
"I guess that makes you obsolete now. If your philosophy is so sound, why don't you go get gone yourself?" Piccolo's beady eyes stabbed at the very heart of the faltering mechanical powerhouse. "Once the Dragon Balls are used, they become ordinary stones, indistinguishable from any other piece of rock for a whole Earth year. That means that your entire invasion is through. Knowing Videl, she probably brought Chayote back to health. With Bardock still around and Chayote recovering–you're fresh out of time, let alone having a full year to spend here…"
"Hmm… Disappointing…" Hyper Meta Rilldo closed his eyes, relieving the tension around his face to where the popped veins vanished without a trace, and when the general's eyes opened back up, they were full of that signature bloodthirsty malice of his from earlier. "It's simply disappointing that you would become so hypnotized by the bigger picture out of nowhere, Namekian. What's wrong? We were having so much fun!"
With a sadistic expression, Rilldo thrust his drill arm straight through Piccolo's chest. Piccolo's eyes widened in shock as a yellow outline shimmered around the perforated Namekian. Just as a sign of extra mockery on top, the merged Machine Mutant general revved his drill arm a few times to force more damage and bloodshed to leak out from Piccolo's impaled body. Except nothing but ethereal gold ash sprinkled from Piccolo's wound.
As if reeled backward by a fishing hook, Piccolo's body dragged off the drill arm and slammed against the original body of Piccolo, merging, and revealing the doppelgänger to be merely a Tri-Form copy body with halved Ki that swooped back into the original body upon being destroyed. "Sorry, I just needed some time to recuperate and catch my breath!" Piccolo smirked before halting directly in front of Hyper Meta Rilldo and extending his arm. With a clamorous shout, the Ultimate Namekian sent a rippling violet Kiai shockwave that propelled Hyper Meta Rilldo away.
Tricked, Hyper Meta Rilldo began looking around and scanning the environment and different energy signatures, looking for his opponent. Piccolo swept in from the side, kicking at Rilldo's feet from down low and tripping the Machine Mutant commander up. A backhand chop to the chest stabilized Rilldo in place while a rolling thrust kick to Rilldo's face cracked more of his Sigma helmet. Feeling the flow of his second wind pumping through, Piccolo began viciously stomping at his opponent before descending on top of him with a driven elbow slam and a violent knee shot to the face.
With his hands stretched to the side, Piccolo channeled a Ki blast in each hand and then unleashed them flying in all directions. Rilldo stopped his uncontrollable flight and shook his head to snap back into it, only to realize that the entire ocean was full of airborne Ki blast mines and Piccolo had effectively trapped him in place. With a seething look, Hyper Meta Rilldo turned to Piccolo, who only snickered in defiance.
"I'll make you pay for underestimating the fighting spirit of thousands of Namekian warriors fighting alongside me! Hellzone Grenade!" Piccolo barked out, crossing his arms and ordering his stray Ki blasts to all converge upon one spot where Hyper Meta Rilldo was. With the whole ocean flooded with Ki blasts, there was nowhere to evade the pursuit or the chain explosion. Thus, Rilldo hunkered down crossed his hands up, and braced for impact.
A cloud of smoke full of piercing yellow energy rays beaming in all directions puffed in front of Piccolo, who could only pant in front of the destructive scene and hope that he inflicted enough damage to turn the tide back in his favor. While he couldn't have kept up the wild King Kai's Fist x 200 he needed to apply pressure in this bout for more than a few exchanges, he definitely could've tricked his opponent into making enough mistakes to where the total damage inflicted upon him reduced his battle power to levels where Piccolo could have challenged him.
"Hmph…" Hyper Meta Rilldo reared a smug grin from within the clearing smoke and fading rays of light. "Is it wrong that I want this fight to never end? You said that the other miserable Earthlings had already used the wishing orbs? None of that matters, can't you see? The only thing that matters is our fight! Our collision, finding out which one of us is stronger! More importantly, which one of us is right? After all, in this kill-or-be-killed world, might makes right. Two plus two equals whatever the strongest person says it does."
Piccolo's eyes twitched, he didn't expect Rilldo to suffer this little damage from one of his strongest attacks. It may have just been that it was Piccolo who made a mistake here by not tapping into King Kai's Fist x 200 before attacking. Even if such strain would've left Piccolo completely tapped out and merciless, it may have had a puny speck of a chance to win him this fight and it may have been wiser to rely on that chance rather than try to gain control over this battle methodically.
"You're a real enigma to me, Namekian. Can't you see? You are strong! Strong, just like me. Why cling to weakness? Why bend over bugs and accept being stomped on just to protect vermin? Straighten your back and bark back at the universe like the mad dog that you are! Yes, I am strong. You are strong. This… This is weak!" Hyper Meta Rilldo grumbled while grabbing chipped and broken pieces of Sigma armor still equipped to him and ripping it off with his bare hands. Piccolo's jaw dropped. He could have never expected his opponent to resort to such a mad move just to emphasize his philosophy, then again, he was just matching the pace of mad polka set by Piccolo himself.
To both of them, this battle meant more than just the title of being strong. Both were willing to cross lines and throw lifelines away just to prove their point. Even if Piccolo was relying on it as a trick, it made him sick to his stomach that he relied on trickery before, and pleaded his opponent to stop and listen to reason. To hell with reason! He was Piccolo, the descendant of Demon King Piccolo who specifically reincarnated into the mightiest martial artist he could produce. The chosen Ultimate Namekian warrior carrying on the will and future of all Warrior Clan Namekians. The protector of his own home, Planet Earth, just like the Warrior Clan of Namek protected theirs.
"This planet is ripe with metal. Booming with technological advancement!" Rilldo who ripped his armor plating and advanced weaponry and gadgets of the Super Mega Turbo Sigma combo off and scattered the scrap off to drown to the bottom of the South Sea, now stood bare before Piccolo and flexed his mechanical body with a smirk of content. "I wonder how you'll fare when the very world you fight to protect will betray and choose me as its champion?"
"Wh-What? What are you on about?" Piccolo shook his head, hissing in bewilderment while Rilldo clamored with manic laughter, knowing something that Piccolo wasn't aware of yet. It both terrified and excited Piccolo to know that before this fight could reach its resolution–he will find out what that thing Rilldo clutches to is.