Piccolo and Lapis took off at once, rotating around one another and making it impossible to ascertain which one of them would deliver the first blow. It was Piccolo who thrust a quick elbow jab before switching places with Lapis, who jabbed high while Piccolo thrust his elbow into the gut of a Meta-Rilldo. Just because Rilldo had split into five separate bodies, it didn't discourage either of the two from wailing at the nearest one.
Like an uncaged beast, Piccolo took off toward another Meta-Rilldo and drove a lariat slam that sent the metallic body flying while Lapis drove his knee into the first Meta-Rilldo and then turned around with a roundhouse that grounded the original into the city streets causing a catastrophic wreck. Bursting with a crystal-clear energy aura, Lapis took off and slammed his head against another Meta-Rilldo, erupting in a rapid beatdown of jabs, knee strikes, and kicks before hammering it down too with a double ax handle.
Meanwhile, Piccolo collided with the fourth Meta-Rilldo, exchanging blows with it before swiping a hand with an electrical Ki discharge crackling in between his nails and causing a flashbang shock that blinded the Meta-Rilldo. With a few swipes of his hand and overhead stomping kicks, Piccolo quickly gained an unlikely upper hand against a Meta-Rilldo body before punting it away with a stiff whiplash kick. As the buildings that Meta-Rilldos slammed into collapsed and clouds of dust began accumulating in the air, the two warriors retreated side-by-side.
The broken buildings and malfunctioning advertisement screens began rippling like mirrors made of liquid mercury, propelling new and reborn Meta-Rilldo bodies out into the rotation. Even the Artificial Human defined by his infinite stamina, Lapis, looked aggravated by the visible lack of success in their effective combined assault.
"We've put a dent in his energy output, but it's like the city itself is sustaining him. He's recovering and generating new bodies as he fights," Lapis relayed what his sensors let him in on. Being someone capable of using the best radar and sensory technology available to Artificial Human No. 21 when she still kept updating the pair of her assistants, Lapis was much more effective than Piccolo in tracing the tide of the battle against a Machine Mutant opponent rather than someone purely relying on Ki sensory.
"In that case, we need to take him off the city. Send him flying and get him into the wilderness or out into the ocean. Any place with as little metal as possible will do. He comes from a planet that's all cybernetics and metal, like Bulma's Capsule Corps Star, meaning that fighting in the city is like a home-field advantage for him," Piccolo replied. Nodding to each other, the two fighters prepared to take another shot.
"Scheming, are you? That's the tool of the weak! Pathetic! To think that you would stoop so low as to accept outside help and rely on silly plots to stay in the battle. You're a disgrace to the warrior people you claimed to represent!" Meta-Rilldo mocked Piccolo with the confident smile of someone who had no conceivable way of losing the game they were playing.
"You're the one who decided he needs the crutch of an immortal body and a transcendental mind to win!" Piccolo lashed back at his opponent. With a wide swipe of his hand, he forced Meta-Rilldo to block. A kick to the bottom of Meta-Rilldo's feet made the semi-liquid metallic mass of Meta-Rilldo slurp and twirl in mid-air before Piccolo whipped his antennae, producing a widespread electrical pulse that shorted out the power of the entire city at once. "Now!"
"What do you mean now?" Lapis mumbled. "Which one of them should I push? He's got dozens of dummies all over the place!"
"Tsk!" Piccolo turned around and scanned the chuckling Meta-Rilldos, realizing that his protégé in the world of martial arts had a decent observation. Frustrated, Piccolo burst with King Kai's Fist aura and vanished, appearing behind the Meta-Rilldo he was nearest to and kicking it aside before pressing his index and middle fingers to his forehead, then shooting them out.
"Special Beam Cannon!" he roared out, shooting off an energy beam from the of the nails of his thrust arm with a smaller, spiraling energy beam rotating around it. It penetrated the Meta-Rilldo body he had slammed away and sent demonic electricity surging through the overwhelmed Meta-Rilldo body but platinum-colored liquid metal tendrils extended from the city down below and quickly provided the body more than enough metal to regenerate on the spot.
"Damn it! We'll actually need to blow this city up to get anywhere!" Lapis cursed, throwing himself at random Meta-Rilldo bodies all over the place. The doppelgangers merely mocked the unfocused Artificial Human. One of them blocked Lapis' driving elbow thrust with two open palms, and another one became a malleable ball of liquid metal and started rolling and bouncing all over the place, evading a leg sweep.
Lapis spun his arms around, producing twin energy spheres, one in each hand, and dashed forward. After approaching the nearest Meta-Rilldo, he thrust his arms out and unleashed the two energy spheres as Ki waves, but the Meta-Rilldo crossed his arms up and absorbed the shock with minor scrapes and burns. Another Meta-Rilldo tackled Lapis from the side, engaging him in a hi-speed hand-to-hand exchange, and by the time Lapis kicked that interloper aside, the Meta-Rilldo he had showered in his energy was wrapped up in wires and regenerating.
"Damn it!" Lapis cursed, shaking in frustration.
"Heh, you're way too green, kid!" Meta-Rilldo taunted Lapis with a drag of his thumb over his throat. A triplet of Meta-Rilldos rushed in all at once. Their upper bodies became malleable and liquified as they wrapped around Lapis. The overwhelmed Android managed to spread his arms and erect an Android Barrier just in time before Meta-Rilldo could try his hand at assimilating him as he did with the Sigma Force. "You've got initiative and vigor, I'll give you that, but you haven't experienced a real battlefield, so you lose your head when shit gets tough!"
"You're the one that's just joking around!" Lapis yelled out, expanding his Android Barrier in a supersize boom in an instant and splattering the Meta-Rilldo bodies, causing them to burst into a shower of liquid metal that splattered all over the devastated city down below. "Stop your games, then come out and show me what a tough guy you are!"
"Hmph… A pathetic attempt!" a Meta-Rilldo body from further away turned from the disappointing sight of the seething Android. Just as Lapis turned around and fired an energy wave at Meta-Rilldo from afar, a gigantic wave of pure liquified metal shot out from the city. It was like a tsunami of metal and faceless technology that was threatening to crash down and overwhelm everything. Lapis blanked out just before the wave decked him with a very solid crack and sent him crashing down, then split into thousands of elongated, punching tendrils and weighed downward for a pummeling.
As Meta-Rilldo began morphing the island city more and more, making tendrils, elongated limbs, and crashing waves of pure metal, both Piccolo and Lapis found themselves hunkering down on the defensive, employing all of their strength and toughness just to withstand the incoming storm of strikes and metallic calamities.
"We've got no other choice," Piccolo huffed, bringing himself down closer to Lapis who panted on one knee on the floor level and stared at the rampaging Meta-Rilldos commanding the technological storms and the metallic typhoons that began overwhelming them bit by bit and returned the upper hand back to Meta-Rilldo's side of the playfield. "This is an island city. If we blow this island up whole, we'll leave Rilldo stranded in the middle of the ocean with nothing but sinking rocks to play with. He may be able to create metal with his technique, but he'll be distracted while he's doing that, and it will give us an opening to finish him."
"Forget about it!" Lapis dismissed the possibility. "This island isn't just this pesky city. It's got a bunch of wildlife on the outskirts too. The ecosystem of each island is too precious and unique to blow it all up and let it go extinct! We just need to hit them all with an attack powerful enough to kill them all in one go and leave nothing to regenerate from!"
"An attack like that might still end up blowing up the island…" Piccolo squinted before sighing in submission. "Sheesh, you really took up that role of protecting nature seriously, huh?"
"Of course!" Lapis turned to the Namekian, who gave him a chance at redemption and introduced him to the wonderful world of martial arts and striving for perpetual self-improvement. "After the old hag got kicked out into space while we were left stranded here with no further purpose, both of us needed new identities. If I am no longer pretending to be some businessman type while having little to no idea of what I'm even talking about or catching and bringing people in to be converted, then what am I? You showed me it's up to me to find my new identity and after I found this job, I realized it may as well be that!"
"You two should just keel over and die already! I'm growing so sick of your continuous refusal to admit defeat that I think I'll just begin leveling the surface of this pesky planet and terraforming it into a husk suitable to make a cybernetic star out of while I'm killing you two!" a Meta-Rilldo hovering far above the morphed and bent over city that threatened to slam down like a needle wall with skyscrapers serving as the needles mocked his grounded opponents while commanding the bent city landscape to do his bidding and crush the pair already. Imbued with Meta-Rilldo's own featherweight and adamantine metallic alloy, the buildings were as good as spears, even to invulnerable martial artists who would've brushed ordinary buildings aside like dust.
The burgeoning number of Meta-Rilldo clones all slouched over and flexed their muscles, letting their malleable platinum-colored bodies bubble while a tremorous mint-green aura leaked out from them together. The combined intensity of their surging power blackened the skies that were only beginning to recover from turning black because of the appearance of the Divine Dragon. The Rilldos bellowed while powering up to their limit and making the ground beneath their feet tremble, fracture, and spew showers of debris like bullets into the skies as entire buildings vanished in the appearing fissures of the overwhelming cataclysm. The surrounding ocean raged with tidal waves that leaked into the city streets and bubbled from the tension present on the island.
"This is just the beginning…" Meta-Rilldo snickered, flexing his swollen from battle tension right arm that spewed noxious fumes from the black exhaust holes on the shoulder. "This entire planet will become a cybernetic star to replace those that your ceaseless meddling has squandered!"
The quaking ground burst, releasing geysers of liquid metal of shiny and reflective, mercury-like texture that formed house-sized fists at the top. Piccolo and Lapis took off into the sky to have an easier time avoiding these terraforming and calamitous attacks. With flurries of snap vanishing, clever positioning, and agility, they avoided the sky-bound fist limbs of liquid metal, though this evasive action didn't come without severe physical strain.
"As if I'd ever let you replace all the precious green with boring metal and cumbersome technology and Earth's diverse fauna with some stuttering robots!" Lapis seethed, clenching his fists by his sides and preparing to charge at the dominant Meta-Rilldo head-first. A surprise attack of skyscrapers elongating and shooting down like electronic moles appearing from their holes smacked Lapis aside. Parasitic masses of liquid metal flooded the abandoned and collapsing buildings, making them far more dangerous than a mere downfall of skyscrapers would've been.
As Meta-Rilldo clamored with over-the-top guffawing, orchestrating the brutal assault of the Earth's city itself turning on Lapis and Piccolo, slamming more and more buildings on top of the grounded Android and burying him under more and more rubble, Piccolo reared his fangs with a hopeless look. He felt utterly helpless since any attempt to attack Meta-Rilldo right now would've only reminded Rilldo that Piccolo was still somewhat in this game. Even a direct attack felt hopeless right now. Unlike before, in his previous forms, Meta-Rilldo no longer had a true, original body to attack. All that Piccolo would tussle with if he were to attack would be a mere drone of the real transcendental existence of the Machine Mutant commander.
Meta-Rilldo roared out with maniacal laughter, directing a tidal wave of liquified metal to chase after Piccolo now. The disgruntled Namekian fled the chasing masses of metal chasing after him but it seemed like more and more waves of liquid metal came crashing down from the bent city horizon or shooting up from the metalized underground section of the city. The metal began washing like a flood, infesting the surrounding oceans and turning them into metal too as Meta-Rilldo's crazed expansion to convert Earth into a cybernetic planet akin to either of Dr. Lychee's Four-Stars took a new racing direction.
Piccolo cried out in torment as a wave of free-falling metal splintered into spikes and skewered him with a handful of the fragments impaling him from above. The spikes kept on rotating and moving to connect with more metal fragments down below. The waves of metal danced like sewing needles, beginning a sick and twisted game of trying to infect and establish the new, metallic world order upon as wide of an area as possible. Having caught Piccolo and utterly perforated him on a dozen of spike fragments, Meta-Rilldo abandoned his excessive skyscraper battery of Lapis.
"Heh, don't worry, I still intend to make you into a metal statue, just like I promised. You were a true warrior, though you were misguided and unfortunate enough to inhabit a meek organic body as opposed to the engineered perfection of a Machine Mutant!" Meta-Rilldo's face manifested upon one of the frozen solid waves of molten metal that splintered into the rods impaling Piccolo and keeping him suspended between the sandwiched layers of the city landscape above and below.
Just as the Meta-Rilldo face snapped its jaw open and prepared a Metal Breath jolt, Lapis' uncompromising yell filled the cybernetic nightmare of the converting island city. Looking baffled, Meta-Rilldo's face vanished into the metallic wave while Lapis' white aura ripped through the rubble and blasted the severed metal sarcophagus, keeping him buried underneath hundreds of skyscrapers and cybernetic beacons away like trash. With reckless abandon, Lapis ripped through the metallic mausoleum and dashed to the center in between the cybernetic sky and the urban floor, preparing to fight on.
Eager to provide that fight, Meta-Rilldo lowered in a blobby cocoon, manifesting his face from up above. Lapis extended his hand and sent a flashing energy wave that obliterated the pudgy cocoon, but this didn't seem to achieve anything of note. The urban ground shimmered with the electricity of the Metal Breath, creating a pool of liquid metal as thousands of Meta-Rilldo doppelgangers began shooting up and down, blitzing between the ceiling pool of metal and the floor pool while battering Lapis who was stuck down in the middle.
Despite the relentless and brutal battery, Lapis persevered and clung against the seemingly insurmountable odds. One of the Meta-Rilldo revealed itself to be hosting a more significant portion of Rilldo's consciousness than the rest of the chaff. It shuffled in between the legion of plunging and soaring drones and wrapped a stranglehold around Lapis from behind with a sadistic smile to boot.
"I'm not sure what to do with you yet, though. Your infinite energy reactor feels like an interesting upgrade, but there's so much organic on you that I can't fully assimilate you. I would have to rip that out of your body and assimilate it separately, which is fine by me. The future of Earth is metal, the rest can burn!" Meta-Rilldo snickered while raising a left arm over his head and converting it into a blade from the forearm down.
A blinding energy wave penetrated the layer of cybernetics obstructing the sky and blasted clean through the cybernetic floor, emanating with golden shockwave flares that ripped apart any semblance of cybernetic order and functionality that Meta-Rilldo was establishing. This stunned Meta-Rilldo long enough to save Lapis from having a blade arm rip into his body and assimilate all the cybernetics while leaving a discarded fleshy husk for ruin. Another energy wave engulfed Lapis and Meta-Rilldo and burnt the Meta-Rilldo drone away into cinders.
Piccolo and Lapis regrouped, wondering just what might have begun this apocalyptic barrage of completely random destruction. Meta-Rilldo torsos, heads, and faces began appearing all across the cybernetic hellscape he had crafted from the island city. The Machine Mutant did his best to determine where this cascading energy fusillade was coming from, as leaving it unattended would have meant catastrophic damage to the structure he had already built.
"Hey, hey…" a bitter, masculine voice came from the hole that the golden energy wave had just ripped through. Shimmering with a crimson aura that had adopted a blazing, star-like texture to it, Bardock descended from the chasm of his own making, ready to wreck some more crap he didn't understand. "You're being awfully noisy in here. Plus, all this scrapyard of yours is becoming an eyesore to the rest of the planet. I'm afraid I'll have to bust it all down and send you packing while I'm at it."
"Bardock?" Lapis gasped, pushing his hectic hair back behind his ear to see clearer. The catastrophic beatdown he had suffered at the hands of Meta-Rilldo and his metal control ability left the Artificial Human with plenty of scrapes and bruises and tore up his jacket, the shirt underneath, and Lapis, jeans. Though Lapis rarely wore a pair of those that were fully intact so the damage wasn't as much of a tragedy.
"More and more meddlesome Earthlings!" Meta-Rilldo grumbled, dropping like an extending snot down from a skyscraper hanging upside down from the metallic artificial ceiling. "I think I'll prioritize the part of the conversion where I drill into the planet's core and let it hollow the planet out, cooking the surface with unruly temperatures that only machines can withstand. That way, I won't need to deal with any more party crashers!"
"You might wanna fix those eye-sockets of yours, invader," Bardock fixed his wristbands and tightened his headband to prepare for going wild. He was in a good mood after busting all the Friezas and Coolers he could want with the bonus of a King Cold to boot. Ironically enough, just like it was with a good night of love-making, a good banquet, or a good time of any sort, it put Bardock in the mood for a good scrap. "I ain't no Earthling. I'm a SAIYAN!" he clamored, igniting a golden shine in his hair and spiking them up while Bardock's cybernetically enhanced eyes beamed red. "And while I haven't yet met your race, one thing you need to know about us Saiyans is that we're great at genocide. We don't even need much in terms of a reason for it. So, invading a planet we live on wasn't the brightest idea on your part."
"A Saiyan…" Meta-Rilldo's eyes sank into the shade as light shuffled and danced across the reflective, metallic body of the Machine Mutant's ultimate form. "You'll have to forgive me for my mistake. I've just never seen or heard of a Saiyan employing technology they haven't marauded off another civilization. If Saiyans began augmenting their bodies with implants, this mission might become even more fun than it already is!"
"Great, even more rivals of mine to laugh at my face for failing to seal the deal with this guy," Piccolo hissed to himself. "Now all we need is for Son to come back and I'll have my bingo card full."
"Don't grumble," Lapis smirked while turning back to his mentor. "Puri always counted on Bardock as an effective wild card. He has no idea about what's going on most of the time, but that's never stopped him from blasting in all directions and smashing everything in sight anyway. We might just have some use of some of that right now."
"Hmph… So, you've heard of me then?" Bardock sneered at the Machine Mutant.
"Our race has been built a bit after your greatest hits. That being said, Dr. Lychee and Dr. Myuu installed a deep-seated hatred and terror for the Saiyans and the destruction they wreak. The chaos they seed across the galaxies. Though, frankly, none of that's quite busting through that thick skull of mine!" Meta-Rilldo beamed a maniacal look in his eyes accompanied by a brutish smirk. "All I can think about is destroying you and proving that you ain't that bad! That the engineered perfection of the Machine Mutant race has long since left you space bonobos in the dust! Deadly Metal Needle!"
The legion of Meta-Rilldo's shot out from various metallic surfaces that a splash of Rilldo's corrupting cybernetic revolution had blessed. More and more Meta-Rilldo drones reared from skyscrapers, cybernetic beacons, and artificial towers by appearing halfway, some of them merely showed from the torso up while others barely manifested their chests and arms. A wild cyclone picked up around each of the hateful Meta-Rilldo drones. It didn't take long for a bright pink light to envelop them as each of the Meta-Rilldo drones swiped their arms aside, sending hundreds, into thousands and totally combining into millions of tiny fuchsia-colored lasers that sliced through metal like they were knives cutting through cream cheese.
Each of the splintered pink needles caused a devastating explosion of a pink energy dome that all connected into a cascade of ripping pink blasts, obliterating the entire area, and sinking it into smoke. The smoldering aftermath of Rilldo's attack revealed a perfectly leveled scrapyard that required a full reconstruction. Still, despite the widespread devastation and spending so much energy to obliterate two battle-worn opponents and a mere Saiyan, the rich smile on Meta-Rilldo's face suggested that the Machine Mutant general considered the sacrifice of his total expenditure worth it.