Clouds blitzed past Chayote's sides as she sped up through the skies toward the God Temple in the Sacred Land of Korin. She hoped that Baby's parasites hadn't yet reached Kami Upa, though he might have been the very first person to be infected. After all, he was the reigning Kami of Planet Earth. Controlling him would have given Baby's crew unparalleled access to everything Earth offered and all of Kami Upa's sorcery.
In the middle of her flight, Chayote froze up and turned her attention to the east. Somewhere in the vast metropolis of the East City, Gohan, and Videl's Ki were elevating. Chayote could sense Son Goku's energy there as well. Chi-Chi's too. All of it indicated that some combination of those four might have been fighting another. It could have been Videl and Gohan fighting Goku and Chi-Chi or some even wilder conflict. Dr. Puri had already signed Goku off to the side of the infected.
Chayote gritted her teeth and clenched her fists. She should've just turned away and flown off to the God Temple. There was no use in pursuing side quests and saving anyone. As long as she secured the Super Holy Water and handed it to Super Artificial Human No. 21, all the infected would return to normal. A meek energy signature was moving toward the East City too. When they last parted, there was a bit of a fight between Chayote and Mark, with the latter being dead-set on finding Videl and learning if she was infected or not.
"That asshole's gonna get himself killed!" Chayote looked down and shook her head, struggling against her own better judgment to just fly to the God Temple and take what she needed to get. That was the only important conflict here.
Grunting loudly, Chayote darted off toward East City, having resolved to save Mark's life since it was doubtful that Baby would have spared a second thought and spent the time needed to infect him when he could just crush Hercule like a bug. Granted, Chayote wasn't entirely sure what Baby's end goal here was, but she couldn't leave Hercule's life up to a chance when he was so important for her future and the future of Navy.
Gohan stared at a giant screen with a face that he had stretched wide in all directions. All the way in front of him in a drive-in theatre there was an afternoon screening of a chilling horror movie and while Gohan didn't have a car and Videl wasn't yet old enough to drive either of hers, the pair had settled above the filled square of parked cars sitting on the Kinto cloud and watching the grim happenings on the screen.
Whereas the scene of a young adult playing a teenager nestled in his bed and shaking in fear while glimpsing at the shadow of a haunting figure at the corner of his room at night had Gohan covering his mouth and shaking in fear, Videl looked baffled by the scene more than anything. While the haunting moonlit scene transpired on the big screen, Videl gently poked Gohan on the side, making him jump up and exclaim in terror.
"Are you insane!?" he shrieked out at Videl, earning a few wayward stares from the young couples and people with nothing better to do gathering at the drive-in movie session. At first, the folks were stunned and unable to believe the sight of two teens seated atop of a magical golden cloud up in the air over their heads, but, as with many things in life, the youths grew accustomed to the pair. "I could've had a heart attack! This is where the tension's straight choking me up," Gohan whined out in complaint.
"I don't understand how you can be scared by something like an actress in a messy wig, pale makeup, wrapped in unwashed old-time bedsheets, Gohan-kun," Videl scratched her blushing cheek with a cringing curve to her lips. "You're one of the strongest people in the universe. Haven't you fought actual demons?"
"Well…" Gohan looked up with a sense of pure and childish bewilderment while raking his black, spiky hair. "I guess, but movies are different. You get so enthralled by these lifelike effects that you root for these characters and don't want them to get hurt. You really feel bad for how weak and helpless they are. It's difficult to keep myself from trying to jump into the screen, somehow, and try to save them."
"Lifelike? This movie is like 20 years old…" Videl squinted, looking at her date like he was the lamest person alive. Just as Gohan became embarrassed and began chuckling awkwardly, her expression changed to joy as she wrapped her arms around Gohan's and pressed herself closer to him. "You're so kind-hearted, even if you can be a bit of a bumbling dummy sometimes!"
"Hmm? What's wrong? There should be plenty of space on Kinto, are you cold?" Gohan looked around, trying to see if Videl wasn't in danger of slipping off and feeling her forehead up, confused why she would suddenly wrap herself around his arm like that.
"C-Cold!?" Videl let go of Gohan and moved her seething face close enough to bite him on the cheek, rip it to the sides like a cute crocodile, and never stop tearing. "Well… Maybe I'm scared too?"
"You don't look scared. You were just giving me a hard time for being so caught up in the movie's atmosphere and visuals. Honestly, sometimes I just don't get you," Gohan pouted, scratching his chin as he glared up as if Videl posed him a complicated math problem.
"Gohan!" Goku's voice made Gohan stiffen up and turn around. He had never expected his father to look for him out here. After he reached a certain age, Goku simply stopped monitoring what Gohan was doing at all times and merely suggested things to do when the two met at home. "Is this what you're wasting your time on? Some stupid moving pictures?"
"Dad? M-mom!?" Gohan gasped, realizing his parents had been hovering a fair distance above the drive-in theatre. "What are you doing here?"
"We've told you a few times already, Gohan, to stay home and train with your family. We even extended the invitation to Videl too, because clearly she means a lot to you. But all this… Ferris wheels, amusement parks, movies…?" Goku barked out with aggression that was very much unlike him. "Pointless waste of time, all of it!"
"What's going on here? You're not acting right!" Gohan stood up on the Kinto cloud, looking straight up at both of his parents while Chi-Chi moved farther away from Goku and the two straightened their backs and elevated their Ki to prepare for a fight. The last thing on Gohan's mind would have been to attack his parents, so he wouldn't make the first move, but he signed himself up for defending himself and protecting Videl if necessary, even against his own parents.
"Gohan, didn't you get your parents' permission to see this movie?" Videl looked up, still naively sitting on the magical cloud, thinking this was the issue's extent.
"I did, something's wrong here," Gohan replied with utmost seriousness. "My dad's not acting like him at all, and Mother has not said even a single word. Usually, she's the one taking initiative in the pair."
"Hey, you dumb hicks! Can you take your family drama somewhere else? We're trying to watch a movie here!" some delinquent with a sports jacket and a pompadour haircut flung a soda can halfway up to Goku's height though his voice had reached the Saiyan where his trash could not.
"Worthless Earthlings, scram," Goku extended his hand at the cinema screen and shattered it with a thunderous telekinetic pulse that made it explode from the inside. With stretched, overblown faces, the horrified moviegoers began scrambling with their hover car keys, desperate to flee the scene with their lives while they still could.
"What are you doing!?" Gohan called his father out. "My real dad would never act this way! What's going on with you two!?"
"I've gotten sick of waiting is what's going on," Goku offered his son a malevolent smirk while extending his hand and channeling a flickering Ki blast at the tip of his hand. "It makes me sick to my stomach that Baby-sama chose that asshole Vegeta over me. I intend to defeat him and make Baby-sama see that I'm the superior host. To do that, I will need backup from my precious family. I've offered you to train with me, hoping that I'd accidentally cut you open during training so that I can make you join us, but you keep turning me down and wasting time with this Earthling."
Videl gasped and flipped backward and off the Kinto cloud, dashing away from Chi-Chi's aerial diving kick. With the kick dispelling the cloud into useless fluffs, Gohan and Videl split apart while Videl put her arms up to defend herself against Gohan's hostile mother.
"Maybe if it's her offering you the choice, you'll finally join us," Chi-Chi said with a hazy and possessed tone and a blank expression. "Teenage boys distance themselves from their families and become increasingly reliant on their own friend groups and girlfriends, all the magazines and TV shows about family life say so."
"G-Girlfriends!?" Gohan and Videl looked at each other, becoming flustered and confused for a second. Chi-Chi exploited this opening by assaulting Videl with a flurry of kicks and putting the teenage girl on the defensive. Knowing about a noticeable strength difference between them, Videl kept her distance rather than attempting to block the flurry of kicks. This proved successful as she navigated around the trees in the park surrounding the drive-in theatre and keep Chi-Chi from landing a single blow.
Realizing just how fast her opponent was and how Chi-Chi held nothing back in reserve put Videl on the back foot. The maddened woman just thrashed trees, chopping them down like nothing with strikes that didn't as much as graze her back. All of Chi-Chi's wild strength and speed, her martial arts technique gained training with a distinguished student of one of the greatest martial artists on Earth her entire youth and then bolstered through polishing spars with one of the strongest men in the universe and her experience immediately made Videl break a sweat and rely on cheap distancing tactics rather than to attempt to match Chi-Chi's pace one-on-one.
Where Videl used trees to put barriers between herself and her relentless pursuer, Chi-Chi used them as battering rams to entrap and batter Videl on their way down, putting her in increasingly unfavorable situations. This couldn't go on. Videl shut her eyes and grit her teeth, tensed her body up, and vaulted over Chi-Chi's right hook with a soaring overhead kick to Chi-Chi's neck.
She hated the idea of hurting Gohan's mother. This was the last thing that Videl planned to spend this afternoon doing and yet… If she didn't do this, Chi-Chi most definitely would've done it to her. Not to mention, if Videl were to hit Chi-Chi, it was best that she hit her once with a definitive blow and ended this quickly. Having struck Chi-Chi at a vital pressure point, Videl backed up and took a fighting stance up.
Videl's eyes widened in shock. Chi-Chi was chuckling after just having Videl's best kicks hit her straight into the side of the neck where the kick should have put her to sleep. That was a crazy precision of Ki control, to focus it all into a single artery and make it sturdy like iron, completely invulnerable to damage. It was nigh impossible to land a pressure point blow on someone this disciplined in martial arts. Even if one did, Chi-Chi had enough awareness to know her pressure points better than Videl and to bolster them up into an immovable fortress in an instant with additional Ki pressure.
Videl better start fighting back like her life depended on it because this silent doom oozing from of Chi-Chi's eyes made Videl realize that it most certainly did.
Soaring through the air, Goku thrust his knee, forcing Gohan to put up a block and grit in pain. Grunting, Gohan let the unrelenting force of impact carry him back rather than resisting it. Crashing through a drive-in theatre screen felt like busting through a paper wall. The moment Gohan recovered, he put his crossed arms over his head and took another dive kick from the air that sent him crashing down into the ground.
"D-Dad! What's gotten into you!?" Gohan coughed up in pain while scrambling to rise from the crater of asphalt his father left him crashed in. All this damage he took was from blows he blocked, imagining what a connected blow would do made Gohan's mind wander off to dark places and demand that he surrendered control to his fighter's instincts rather than staying in this as his kind-hearted self.
"Have you ever wondered why, despite being the strongest, we were treated as second-hand trash by that asshole Vegeta? Think about it, we can kick his elitist ass and take over! Now Baby-sama has also accepted Vegeta as his vessel. It's up to us to show him why Baby-sama is wrong! I'm stronger than Vegeta, I should be Baby-sama's vessel! That's okay, we'll show it to Baby-sama together, once you accept him as a part of you, that is," Goku smirked while descending to ground level.
"Baby?" Gohan stumbled, clutching his backside. "What are you talking about? Wait… Baby, that's the perfect Tsufurian that Dr. Lychee was talking about!" his eyes shot wide open in a sudden realization of something he kept closeted off and thought they had already dealt with.
"That's right. As you are now, unbelievably powerful and talented, yet so afraid of your own power, you're of no use to Baby-sama, but together, who knows, maybe Baby-sama will come to prefer your body over even that of mine?" Goku snickered with a malicious look on his face.
"So, this is what's going on here…" Gohan mumbled to himself. "My dad's not doing this on his own. Baby has somehow brainwashed him."
"You should stop defying your own father, Gohan. Baby-sama's guidance will help you live up to your potential! You were born so wildly powerful and intelligent enough to match Bulma, yet you're too kind to claim the rightful spot as the strongest martial artist and too shy to show your intelligence to the world, which is why you're wasting your life and your potential! Baby-sama is kind too, but fair. Baby-sama has the accumulated intelligence of the entire Tsufurian race throughout all of its history, augmented with Dr. Lychee's unruly knowledge. There is nothing you possess Baby cannot make better," Goku adopted a wide and straight-back stance. This wasn't a disciplined stance of a martial artist willing to clash with an equal foe. This was the stance of a bully, looking for a scrap. To take and dish out some blows in return.
"If you're any example of what Baby is all about, I'd rather pass up on this offer!" Gohan clenched his fists bursting with a flame of golden energy surrounding his body. His hair sizzled with bright sparks, spiked up, and turned golden while the boy's eyes lingered on black for a few seconds, then brightened to a shade of teal. "Now I'll beat you and get my father back!"
With a sassy chuckle, Goku put up his fists and surged with a golden aura, igniting his own hair to spike up and color them golden. Gohan's bright Ki exploded around him with a wildfire burn, becoming pure light rather than a translucent aura as the young Super Saiyan charged at his father with a stunning flying kick. Goku's teal eyes nearly blanked out, but the Super Saiyan quickly recovered and caught Gohan's follow-up punch. Undaunted by this, Gohan whipped his right leg into the side of his father's jaw and sent him smashing through the drive-in wall and dragging across the city street, throwing cars left and right where he burrowed through the asphalt.
"Ka-Me…!" Gohan heard a loud clamor from a full district away and gasped, snuffing out his angry flame. "Ha-Me…!" it went on.
"Wait, Dad! Not here! Not in the middle of the city!" Gohan pleaded.
"Ha…!" Goku thrust his arms out, sending a tunneling destructive energy wave that, while condensed to only obliterate his target and focus his Ki solely through his opponent, rather than inflicting its entire destructive potential, would have still obliterated the entire city and killed everyone in it.
"Jelly-Beam!" a strict voice distracted Gohan as an azure beam hit the incoming Kamehameha wave and turned it into a horizontal pillar of ice that flopped to the ground and shattered while another beam hit Goku head-on and exploded into a turbulent, fiery vortex. When Goku's hand sifted through the flames to cut himself out, a couple of bright yellow beams hit him square in the forehead and busted it open with electric shocks that shocked the Super Saiyan.
"Chayote-san!" Gohan exclaimed with a cheerful expression.
Instead of answering the teen, Chayote turned around and clashed her elbow with Chi-Chi's, who stared at Chayote with dead eyes and an apathetic look on her face that Chayote simply couldn't recognize. It's as if any emotional response in this woman had been utterly turned off and Baby's parasite was just using her as a superpowered puppet from deep down inside. Entirely different from Son Goku's case. The two exploded in a high-octane exchange of punches and kicks, vanishing around and popping in and out of vision while clamorous shockwaves shattered surrounding windows and made people flee their workplaces in horror. By the time Chayote and Chi-Chi stopped and Goku approached Chayote from behind as if showing his opponent that she was cornered, Chayote felt around for Gohan and Videl's Ki.
They were gone. Fleeing toward Mark's Ki, that might have still been twenty-something minutes from reaching these two. He was traveling in a jet, most likely.
"You shouldn't have interfered. You're of no use to us, Saiyan idol. You have no place in Baby's empire. You will take no part in the New Planet Plant's prosperity. We know well that we cannot kill you, but we can still make your life into the living hell you deserve," Goku hissed with a seething hatred that was something new for Chayote. It was primitive, almost as if Goku hated her guts not because of who she chose to be as a person, but because of what she was born as.
"If there's any trace of Goku and Chi-Chi listening, I'm going to fix all of this without killing any of you. There is a way you'll all go back to being a happy family, I promise," Chayote boldly stated while looking straight back into Chi-Chi's deadpan stare.
"Right… The Super Holy Water on God's Temple, right?" Goku snickered. "You simple-minded ape! All of us have spent years training there. We all know about that! The moment any of us feel you getting anywhere near that place, we'll swarm you with the fury of Baby-sama's devoted army and break you apart. Any allies you gather for your cause, assuming you can still trust anyone at this point, we'll adopt into our fold before your very eyes before we gouge them out. You can only observe and get out of the way!"
"I see, so my previous plan wouldn't have worked. Thanks, glad to know that. Really was eating myself inside out for coming back here…" Chayote waved for the pair. "There're many questions I still want to ask, but I feel like neither of you will answer any of them for me. There's no further use talking to you two."
"You think we'll just let you get away after you interfered with our business? We'll break your back for what you did and leave you crawling for the rest of your miserable life. Your accursed spawn has too much of your scent in him, so we'll never let him serve Baby-sama, but we'll take him as a hostage in case you ever plan on getting in Baby-sama's way again. We'll snap his neck like a little rabbit for the stew right in front of your eyes unless you stand down," Chi-Chi hissed, dialing her outburst up to eleven out of the blue.
"I guess there isn't much Chi-Chi left. She's the last person to have ever spoken these words. Whenever I punch either of you, my consciousness will be clear. Shatter Solar Fist!" Chayote reached for her forehead, extending her hands in front of her eyes while she cast an enhanced version of the Solar Fist technique, splitting the flash into thousands of focused solar rays that reflected off of the countless glass shards scattered in the district and turned her technique impossible to avoid because of the complexity and focus of the untraceable system of solar rays beaming in all direction. Even if one saw the speed of light as a joke, there was no escaping this technique.
Goku and Chi-Chi cried out in pain, reeling back and covering their eyes, while Chayote took off after Gohan and Videl's signatures. They'll likely be looking for them, but by then they'll suppress their Ki and hide before planning their next moves carefully. To think that they'd ever need to suppress their Ki on their own home planet like this… Things really took a turn for the worse.