Tenshinhan dragged his feet to the side, spreading his legs. His back hunched down while he brought his fists and forearms up and turned his body stiff with tension. This, in turn, swelled up his muscles and tested the mettle of his Hanfu robe, tearing it in a few places where the stress was the most strenuous. Tenshinhan's eyes widened as his skin donned a redder hue and veins bulged out on his forehead, his shoulders, biceps, and his chest.
"Red-Hot King Kai's Fist x 100!" Tenshinhan exclaimed while straightening his body out like a board and drawing his forearms down. For one entire second, it seemed like nothing at all was happening. Then, a crimson pillar burst forth and engulfed Tenshinhan whole, drowning him in its luster while throwing pulsating heatwaves in all directions and flinging Baby Vegeta back while clutching to maintain his balance.
The luminosity that Tenshinhan's power-up radiated with became so intense that the Machine Mutants could register it from an entirely different quadrant of the universe as if it was happening outside their porthole. Baby Vegeta struggled to keep his shocked expression fixed on his opponent while Tenshinhan simmered down, still radiating with a sparkling red aura with fiery outlines and emitting vapor from his body from intense, Ki-induced, full-body dehydration.
Tenshinhan vanished with a blink, appearing before Baby Vegeta with a wound-back left arm and driving it with a vicious hook. Instead of taking it or blocking it, the Tsufurian straightened his body out and expelled a desperate burst of Ki from his entire body, creating a bubble of black energy sparkling with golden lightning around him and punting Tenshinhan aside.
By the time the three-eyed martial artist recovered, Baby was charging at him too. This boldness caught Tenshinhan a bit off-guard since common fighting experience would have demanded a warrior to stay clear of his opponent and try to last their life force and stamina-draining desperation power-ups out while maintaining as close to a safe distance as possible. Baby, meanwhile, was challenging Tenshinhan's power-up head-on.
When the two approached each other, enveloped in their auras, they began circling around each other, becoming a turbulent and radiant typhoon that raged across the desolate world. A mixture of red and gold whirling together like a shake while tearing the surface of the entire planet asunder. Inside the raging whirlwind of auras, Tenshinhan threw a straight jumping high kick, which Baby slipped. Enveloped in the flaming, crimson aura, Tenshinhan rode the entire whirlwind with a flying kick, but Baby whirled a full rotation around, extending his arms and spitting out a hail of Ki blasts into Tenshinhan's back which flinched the martial artist for a second. This made the raging red and gold ethereal tornado halt for a second and wobble like a spinning top that was about to stop.
Tenshinhan exploded with a second breath of his wild power up and dashed across, straight up to Baby Vegeta's face, and threw a furious low kick at his shin. Baby raised his knee, blocking the kick with his entire side and feeling the tremendous pressure and impact force resonating throughout his entire body. The bald-headed martial artist put his entire force into a hook to the gut, but Baby Vegeta punched it to the side by striking Tenshinhan's wrist with a Ki-imbued palm strike.
Baby Vegeta ducked under a double roundhouse kick combination from Tenshinhan and outright disappeared when Tenshinhan turned around with a double ax handle swing and swept through mid-air, expelling a forceful energy shockwave that sliced through the energy tornado and snuffed it out. This left Tenshinhan panting and clutching his aching diaphragm while his swollen body would have killed someone for the ability to sweat and vent the heat it was operating under but couldn't, because it couldn't offer even a drop of water.
"Over here!" Baby Vegeta taunted Tenshinhan from up top, making the petrified martial artist look up only to see Baby Vegeta surrounded by an entire sky full of golden energy spheres that all converged into the sparkling mass of his radiant shine while Baby extended his arms in a pose similar to the Final Flash and channeled a yellow energy sphere larger than his body. Baby Vegeta let the Ki blast hurl off toward Tenshinhan who could only spread his arms and legs out to bolster his body just microseconds before it enveloped him whole.
The Ki blast colored the entire planet's hemisphere in a violent, sparkling storm of flashing lights. When the overwhelming flash dimmed down and the dust settled, Tenshinhan was panting in the explosion's epicenter, with his whole body pumped up into a state of hi-tension and panting heavily. A Kiai barrier at the last second, amped up by his Red-Hot King Kai's Fist, allowed him to withstand the blast with only minor grazes, but it blew his robe off and his baggy trousers were in tatters.
"It's incredible how your power swelled up like that in an instant. You made me stress out and put me on the run there for a second," Baby Vegeta chuckled, wiping the slobber off his lip from the intense exchange of blows with his opponent.
"You are the incredible one here," Tenshinhan admitted, allowing his injured and overtaxed body a moment of reprieve. "King Kai's Fist only powers a body up for a single heartbeat, and you wasted it by throwing me off-guard with your decision to rush me in the beginning. Then, you stressed your body to the extreme to flee and avoid every strike like the plague. You faked me out with your unnatural reaction before switching to the right way to react in a snap. That might have just helped you gain an edge in this fight."
"To be honest, I truly didn't know what I was doing at first," Baby Vegeta chuckled. "I rushed you because I believed the body of Vegeta, King of the Saiyans, to be the unbeatable No. 1 in the universe in terms of battle power. With the first exchange of blows, I found out how wrong that notion was, prompting me to rely on this body's fighting instincts to survive what might have been a crippling beatdown. I must say, I better power up to the top or you may just knock me out in one go."
"What do you mean!?" Tenshinhan gasped. "I brought my power beyond my natural limits and you weren't fighting seriously from the start!?"
"Hmph… To be perfectly honest, one reason I took you up on your challenge is exactly because I know of the incredible, universe-shaking power contained within this body. I just am not too experienced with fighting and lacking in fighting instincts to draw it out. That being said, Dr. Lychee and Dr. Myuu have gifted me with profound intelligence and studying aptitude. I think that our little dance here should have taught me how to bring out more of this body's power," Baby Vegeta examined his own chiseled musculature like an aficionado marveling at their deluxe sports car.
"This… There's no way that this is Vegeta's natural power. The Saiyans can't possibly be this far ahead!" Tenshinhan clenched his fists, shaking in disbelief. Yet deep down, he also knew that Baby Vegeta had no reason to lie to him, either.
"Oh, no… I don't think that Vegeta would be quite this strong without my consciousness," Baby shook his head with a sly smirk. "Dr. Lychee and Dr. Myuu intended for me to be the perfect organism. Whatever body I wear, I bring out the best of its potential and then some. By assimilating myself more and more with a body, I transform them into a perfect organism bit by bit. For example, the Saiyans Son Goku, Son Gohan, and Vegeta somehow managed to defeat Hatchiyack, however, if I were to possess Hatchiyack with my true body and mind, it would become unstoppable and nothing in this universe could stand up to it. Dr. Lychee intended for me to rule over the Cyber-Verse that way after all…"
"Tsk… I'm sorry, Chiaotzu. I'll be doing a dishonor to your legacy by reneging on my promise to abandon fighting as a hero, but… If I don't stop this creature right here, the entire universe might very well be at its mercy," Tenshinhan pressed his fist to his chest, muttering to himself while Baby Vegeta hunched over and brought his arms up, swelling up and preparing to go wild with overflowing power, just like Tenshinhan did earlier.
Baby Vegeta growled and grunted in reaction to the strain falling on his body while the skies over the heads of the two warriors became pitch black and the ground began rocking. Baby's body swelled up with his muscles, becoming more pronounced as the innate tension made him hunker down in place more and more. The violent earthquakes took their toll and made the surface of the desolate planet crumble and levitate to the skies as Baby Vegeta's unraveling power canceled out the very gravitational forces governing the star system, sending all the surrounding planets into a fritz.
"This atmosphere… It's becoming so thick, it's almost impossible to breathe!" Tenshinhan gritted his teeth with a stern and desperate stare. Then, looking horrified, he looked to the skies above and blanked out when he saw the surface of the moons orbiting the abandoned planet peeking through the dark clouds as they were falling down toward where Baby Vegeta was powering up.
Absolutely floored, Tenshinhan scanned the skies, witnessing hundreds of moons from the planets of the system they were fighting in being robbed from their host planets and hurling toward the one where they were fighting. They posed little to no threat, however, as they collided halfway to the planet and shattered into blazing stardust, just like the native moons of this planet became a stardust-spitting firestorm just over their heads.
A blinking white nova of flashing light emerged and faded in and out of view around Baby Vegeta's body as the artificial Tsufurian super-organism was powering up. Eventually, it became a rounder and more compressed sphere of pristine, glistening, golden light while Baby Vegeta's whole form became white as if Baby Vegeta became an ethereal avatar of light himself. In a violent outburst, the energy emitted by Baby Vegeta took up an electric shape and became a lightning storm, shooting jolts off in every direction. The electric discharges were more than potent enough to decimate entire hovering mountains and crumbled continents of destroyed moons whole.
When the electric radiance around Baby Vegeta settled somewhat and became a more ethereal golden shroud sparkling around his body, it became clear that Baby Vegeta's eyes had been whited-out and that he entranced himself with the process of drawing out his own unruly inner power. Cosmic thunderbolts as thick as an entire town ravaged the surface of the desolate planet, terrifying Tenshinhan with each lash and stroke while Baby Vegeta elevated his battle power higher and higher at a rate that was impossible to wrap one's head around.
A combination of swirling and rowdy gales and chaotic gravitational waves sent Tenshinhan flying back away from the epicenter of this unbelievable power. If this powering-up process occurred on a smaller and softer planet, the entire planet might have been crushed under the massive gravitational outburst of this booming battle power at once.
Baby Vegeta's pupils returned to his eyes, alongside the red crosshair patterns around them, while Baby Vegeta's body hovered, surrounded by a narrow golden outline, and colored the atmosphere of the entire planet with just his unchained power alone. Without a warning, Baby Vegeta threw his arms up and let out a masculine battle cry full of berserker's madness that surrounded the northern hemisphere of the planet in a field of violet energy, sparking with city-wide golden lightning jolts shooting out into the cosmos and decimating whatever caught in their way with an incalculable voltage of power.
Tenshinhan gritted his teeth and leaned back, feeling the overwhelming, torrential push of the violet energy field that was out there to take no prisoners. Powering up to his max himself in its wake, Tenshinhan didn't struggle against the uncompromising energy field, but let it push him back while protecting himself with a Kiai bubble the entire time. It felt like opening his eyes with lustrous flashing this intense would have straight out molten them out of their sockets. Then, in a flash of violet and gold, transitioning into blinding white light, it all faded away.
Blinking with irritated and tearful eyes, Tenshinhan looked around and gasped in disbelief almost immediately. Baby Vegeta's unruly power-up had flattened the entire northern hemisphere of the desolate planet, leaving only a dying southern hemisphere floating and showering with magma storms and geysers and rumbling with thunderbolts like unrestrained curses of a dying man. The three-eyed martial artist looked down at his hand and felt it shaking, pressing it to his thigh to restrain it so that his fear couldn't be seen. Whatever sundered pockets of the breathable atmosphere remained on this decimated planet wouldn't last very long. Tenshinhan already felt air raring out even compared to the thickness of the intimidating pressure of Baby Vegeta's power.
He could protect himself with Ki bubbles for a time, but only until his Ki dips below a certain threshold. In a completely out-of-this-world bout such as this, Tenshinhan didn't see an easy victory being in the cards for him, so even if he won, it might have left him defenseless and at the mercy of this dying planet.
"Well, well…" Baby Vegeta panted, wiping the slobber off the corner of his lip with the back of his hand and a cocky smirk stuck on his face. "It was a good call to ask the Machine Mutants to transport us to a remote planet devoid of life. Even I couldn't have predicted such bottomless reserves of power and the calamitous results of wielding it. If I powered up on Planet Earth, I might have crushed that poor little blue marble like a grape in my hand. I wouldn't want innocent Earthlings to suffer and die for the sins of the Saiyans they are hosting. Not to worry, I've gotten the feel of this power now. Next time I power up and go even further beyond, I won't let my power unfurl unchained like this. It was just all… A bit overwhelming just now."
"Hmph… Maybe possessing Vegeta's body made you just as obsessed with power as he was?" Tenshinhan swiped his hand in dismissal of Baby's vanity and adopted a fighting pose. "If you love the feeling of your own strength this much, why not just revel in it and let it all go?"
"I told you already!" Baby Vegeta howled out with a clenched fist out in front of him, completely losing it. "I am nothing like the Saiyans! I have taken over this body out of necessity to survive and I am merely using it as a face to have the Saiyans work for me to redeem themselves and spare themselves the extinction they rightfully deserve!"
Extending his hands out to the sides, Baby Vegeta channeled a pair of sparkling energy masses in both hands before flinging them at Tenshinhan, then proceeding to generate more and more and hurl them like a barrage of colossal Ki blasts while Tenshinhan ramped up the King Kai's Fist again and vanished in rapid succession crimson halo bursts, letting the stray energy blasts to fly off into space and pop with galactic-scale wounds bleeding golden quasar bursts rather than blood.
"Extinction they rightfully deserve? That's not too different from something Vegeta would believe. You're leeching off of his body, why don't you check up on it?" Tenshinhan appeared far off from the last tremendous Ki blast that could have left him critically injured and taunted his opponent further.
Not too much differently from Vegeta, Baby Vegeta had unbelievable talent and battle power but wasn't too emotionally stable. Even if Vegeta was a true prodigious genius in terms of fighting strategy and instincts, a good verbal jab tended to have him throw those talents out the window and come out swinging madly like some brutish slugger. It was ironic that two species that couldn't have been more different from the sounds of it showed such primitive and perfectly mirroring behavior when it came to their war.
"I couldn't be more different from him!" Baby Vegeta barked out, blinking in right up in Tenshinhan's face and thrusting his jab into Tenshinhan's gut, which snuffed out the flaming crimson aura blazing around the three-eyed martial artist and made him collapse onto Baby Vegeta's fist with rolled-back eyes. "I fight to revive my people whom the Saiyans exterminated and the planet they stole and squandered with their ceaseless wars! No matter the body I use to achieve those goals, I will never forget what I'm fighting for!"
Pulling his fist out of the swollen black and mushy torso of Tenshinhan, Baby Vegeta put him through a vicious beatdown, swinging his fists with little skill or technique before knocking him flying with an overhead one-arm hammer smash. Seeing his opponent thoroughly pummeled within an inch of his life and completely broken, Baby Vegeta extended his hand and let out an air-bending pulse of Kiai that formed a protective bubble around Tenshinhan and stopped his fall, keeping him hovering and laid out in mid-air.
"Hmm…" Baby Vegeta grunted, feeling considerable resistance against the walls of the energy barrier he formed around the three-eyed martial artist. A masculine bellowing made Baby Vegeta cover up as Tenshinhan sprung back to life and exploded with a robust burst of crystal-clear aura around his body while strength seemed to seep back into his body from out of nowhere. "What's going on? He burnt himself out like a candle to a point where a few blows laid him out, and yet right now he's surging with power that's coming completely out of the blue."
"I told you already, didn't I?" Tenshinhan grumbled after powering up, surrounded by a clear aura, and straightening his relaxed body, letting battle tension slowly ooze out and relieve the strain over his overworked muscles some. "My Spirit Cultivation Method. All the energy and stamina that I burn off with double-edged techniques like the Red-Hot Mode and King Kai's Fist. It doesn't disappear. You compared me to a candle just now. If that's the case, then I am a candle that can reignite its flame off of the heat it burnt out!"
"Ludicrous!" Baby Vegeta scoffed. "Even if you can resuscitate yourself with a ridiculous technique like that… Just what do you intend to achieve being so out of your league here?"
"I told you that already too," Tenshinhan smirked with a bruised face before punching his open palm. "I'm going to make you pay for making light of my pride as a martial artist, my resolution to only practice martial arts as a teacher and a mentor to the new generation, and for corrupting the minds of my precious students. Even if you're the strongest in the universe, I'll make you bleed, I'll make you hurt, and I'll make you regret ever messing with me and my students!"
"Tsk, insufferable…" Baby Vegeta hissed in response.
Both warriors erupted with radiant, yet comparable, blazing auras. While Baby Vegeta was an incredibly fearsome warrior whose power shakes all the surrounding galaxies and carves through planets like gravel under his feet, in a way, he was just like the candle he compared Tenshinhan to. Some of his unchained power had burnt off already, whereas Tenshinhan was recycling his power through the Spirit Cultivation Method, even if it was inferior to Baby Vegeta's.
This was the battle of a marathon runner against a sprinter and the man fortune favored to be the victor in this free-form, figurative running competition would be revealed before too long.