A faint Ki signature touched Baby Vegeta's senses. The Earthling was still alive. Most likely as a result of the young hybrid jumping out and taking the most of the blast for himself. He didn't just cover the girl up; he absorbed the overflowing Ki inside his body. Similar to how skilled fighters could channel incredible force and make it flow solely through the body of their opponent, without harming the surrounding environment, the boy streamed the calamitous energy contained within Baby's attack to stream just through his body. It was an amazing show of Ki control, even if it did nothing to reduce the amount of damage he took from it.
Quite the opposite, it drastically boosted it.
With a scornful look on his face, Baby Vegeta extended his hand and prepared a Ki blast to do away with the fallen and unconscious Earthling girl. Before he could blast her limp body away, a cascade of loud bangs made Baby Vegeta cover his face with his hand. A combination of Ki and heavy gunfire came from within the widespread cloud of dust and finer. The forceful shots ripped through the dust, revealing a white scout-type Machine Mutant model with two large weapon barrels aiming from its exposed mid-section.
"Giru-Giru! Videl is Giru's friend! Giru won't let Baby hurt Videl!" Giru proclaimed, revealing the Earthling military technology that he's assimilated into his body by eating up the military-grade weaponry the criminal gangs he and Videl had stopped used. Merely shooting at Baby wouldn't have worked, though if Giru applied just a bit of energy from his artificial Ki engine and imbued the bullets with it, he could make the shots sting a little more.
"Hmph… Now is the time you decide to grow a consciousness? I was practically begging you lot to make a mind of your own back on M-2!" Baby Vegeta hissed, swiping his hand and creating a destructive wall of Ki that blasted Giru rolling aside. Unlike the Earthlings and the Saiyans, even if they were disobedient, Baby Vegeta still pulled his punches against Machine Mutants. Especially one he still desperately needed. "When I finish off that Earthling and her mutt friend, I'll wipe your consciousness and memory and reset them. You will lead me to the Dragon Balls yet!"
A powerful blast shook the very foundation underneath Baby Vegeta's feet and made him wobble while a concussive force knocked at him from the front. It was a golden burst of energy that swept the accumulating dust and black smoke aside and revealed a bloody and bruised Super Saiyan with a torn uniform burning up with wrath while standing beside the body of injured Videl.
"You monster, you could have killed her!" Gohan bellowed, exploding with a radiant burst of Ki that overpowered even the artificial lighting all throughout the station and sank it in streaks of golden light and its pitch-black shade. "Now you've made me mad!"
Gohan took off in a berserker charge at Baby, crashing into the Tsufurian with an elbow strike, which Baby Vegeta blocked with his own elbow. The two began rapidly exchanging strikes, with neither side giving way. A devastating golden energy bubble erected around the two fighters, expanding and burning through even solid steel while its potent electromagnetic field shortened out various Big Gete Star systems it came into contact with. Baby Vegeta caught a strong cross from Gohan's side and pushed the teenager's arm aside with superior physical force.
"Mad? You think you're angry? You've experienced nothing yet. Try confronting me after I've exterminated all of your species and when I'm the only one who can help you undo that catastrophe, only to hear me deny your plight and fight with all my strength to prevent it from happening!" Baby Vegeta answered Gohan with a left-hand cross, then a right-hand step-in hook to the gut, and a double-arm ax handle slam to the back of Gohan's head.
Baby Vegeta's foot stomped on top of the back of Gohan's head, violently grinding his face into the steel grating and squeezing more and more blood from the grazes and cuts all over his face. "Your childish naivety almost makes me want to leave you alive just long enough to see both your races wiped out at my hand and make you feel my despair, feel my need for retribution, only unlike you, I won't get the sweet release and a welcoming journey to my predecessors in the Other World! I've been tasked with their resurrection, so I don't get to just fail, kick back, and die!"
Seething, Baby kicked Gohan in the head and socked him into the air, bouncing off of the broken steel ceiling while Baby ignited a purple Ki aura around him and charged through the wreckage, delivering a vicious beatdown to the hopelessly outmatched Super Saiyan teen. Gohan's wrath exploded completely out of nowhere. A golden pillar pierced through the wreckage, blasting out from the Big Gete Star's shell both in the northern and southern hemispheres, while the radiant energy pillar threw Baby Vegeta aside. After the thunderous crackling subsided, Gohan's enraged battle cry chilled Baby Vegeta's blood and sent frosty tips through his nerves all the way to the bone.
With tearful eyes, Gohan ripped through almost the entire planet's distance and crashed into Baby in a blink. Baby Vegeta's jaw dented in according to the demand of Gohan's fist. The rest of his body complied momentarily, shooting off toward the northern hemisphere and smashing through various laboratories, hallways, and compartments of the Big Gete Star.
"Masenko!" Gohan cried out, placing both of his hands above the head with the palms facing his airborne foe, one hand against the other, with the fingers pointing in opposite directions. Thrusting his hands forward, Gohan fired a beam of orange energy that blitzed toward Baby's location, engulfed him, and detonated with all its might at once.
"Your emotional power-up seems to last even shorter than your grandfather's, though yours is far superior in terms of surging power you can muster up," Baby Vegeta observed, emerging from the smoke and the rubble while wiping the dirt and ash from his face, covered in minor bruises with tattered trousers. "Regardless, it's temporary nonetheless, and I've powered up a great deal since first awakening this form. Rage, cry, and whine as much as you want, you're just a brat pointlessly lashing out at things you cannot comprehend, let alone change."
As a cruel testament to his response, Baby Vegeta blinked to Gohan's location and thrust a right arm into Gohan's gut, spacing the young Saiyan out and leaving him to blink out of his Super Saiyan form and plummet down to the engine chambers that were working overtime to supply the damaged station with the power it needed despite great levels of damage to the engines themselves. Raising his arms over his head, Baby Vegeta created a fuchsia-colored energy bomb above his head before thrusting his hands down rapidly and expelling a cascade of Ki blasts from it, splitting it apart and bombarding the fallen youth with vicious and relentless Ki blasts.
"Hmph… I've wasted enough time on this. I've had entirely enough of this, die!" Baby Vegeta hissed out before a painful pulse forced him to grab his chest and cough up slobber from somewhere in his chest. With a face twisted in pain, the Tsufurian wheezed, heaved, puffed, twisted, and bent over. With bulged-out eyes and a stressed face, covered with pulsing and twitching veins, Baby Vegeta began descending downward ever so slightly.
"What's going on? Did he suffer this much damage?" recently awakened Videl meekly whimpered while sitting up and rubbing her dirty and bruised face while Giru tended to her.
"Giru-Giru. No chance! Baby must be close to reaching adulthood!" Giru cried out. "In his adult stage, Baby will be almighty! We need to leave this station as soon as possible!"
Baby Vegeta clutched his arms and spread his legs while they twitched with intense tension. Invisible concussive bursts emanated all throughout the atmosphere while ethereal wisps of energy surrounded Baby and ignited a golden aura around him. Baby Vegeta curled himself into a fetal position while crimson light emanated around him and became the nebula to his singularity. Inside this raging scarlet supernova, a tight black bodysuit surrounded Baby Vegeta's body with his gloves becoming hardened and solid, turning golden and attaining red metallic sides. Baby Vegeta's boots morphed to match his gloves while his adjusting golden shoulder pads became thicker and wrapped around his shoulders as opposed to spiking behind Baby.
Baby's tormented grunts filled the Big Gete Star, spreading far and wide from the swirling crimson nova he was evolving inside of. The physical body structure of the Tsufurian changed drastically, transforming his body beyond any resemblance to King Vegeta, whose body Baby inhabited. Instead, Baby Vegeta became a muscular adaptation of his own humanoid version. A white armor layer covered Baby Vegeta's chest all the way to his upper abdomen.
With a single resounding roar, Baby Vegeta dispelled the swirling ethereal nova of energy and emerged from inside it. In a blink, the raging crimson wildfire blazing around his body snuffed out. Unable to believe in his incredible power and the fruits of the awakening of his adulthood, Baby Vegeta examined his transformed body which was just a mimic of his own adult form.
"After all this time, it is finally mine," Baby Vegeta smiled with entirely sapphire blue eyes. "The strongest power in the universe! The Adult Stage and the peak of my power, the peak of potential that I can draw out from this body!"
"D-Damn it…" Gohan winced, rising to his knees while shaking in pain. Defiantly to the odds presented, the golden shine of Super Saiyan manifested around him as he prepared to fend off his invincible enemy and protect Videl and Giru until the last. "Not even a single instance of good luck on our side, huh? Videl, Giru, you need to run away! Look for a way to transport yourselves to Earth! I'll hold Baby off for as long as I can. Victory here isn't something we can even dream of…"
"Sorry, but I don't intend to let you leave. Now that I have awakened into my Adult Stage, abandoning King Vegeta's body would certainly kill him. That means that I have no leverage over Bulma anymore and can simply force her to give me another Dragon Radar. I think I'll simply blow all of you up instead!" Baby Vegeta laughed out before raising his arms above his head and calling forth wisps of black energy that merged into a terrifying black sphere looming above Baby Vegeta's head. "My despair and my grief are so bottomless that forming a Revenge Death Ball takes no time at all. Drown and disappear in my infinite pain, Saiyan mutt!"
Baby swept his arms downward, sending the rumbling Revenge Death Ball hurling toward Gohan. Its awe-inspiring power and impossible size and density blanked Gohan, Videl, and Giru out. There was no hope of trying to escape it. There was not even the slightest hope of ever holding it off or pushing it back. Just like Baby Vegeta said, this Revenge Death Ball may as well have been packed with the surging might of bottomless despair that knew not even a single ray of hope. Baby's mind and his consciousness were simply that dark deep down.
Snap!
A pair of tall, masculine backs appeared in front of Gohan, covering up the rumbling dark void that was coming in his direction. A long-haired martial artist with an orange gi jumped toward the Revenge Death Ball without hesitation, becoming a surge of bright particles that washed like a torrential wave at instantaneous speed, accumulating peerless force of acceleration to put into the force of collision. The Instantaneous Movement let Yamcha gather enough force to just temporarily halt the advance of Revenge Death Ball with an infinite mass palm smack while he pressed the index and middle finger of his right hand to his forehead.
Snap!
Yamcha and Revenge Death Ball both vanished without a trace. Only the warm and welcoming back of a spiky-haired Saiyan with an orange Gi without a logo rustled in the artificial atmosphere of the banged-up Big Gete Star. A golden burst washed upward Goku's body, transforming him into a Super Saiyan while his Ki evened out and then withdrew inside of his body, perfecting the Super Saiyan transformation by eliminating all traces of Ki usage while withdrawing and perfectly focusing its incredible power.
"You did great holding out for this long, Gohan!" Goku encouraged his son without turning his eyes away from the enemy. "I guess there's no use in trying to avoid fighting now that Baby's an adult, huh? Man… It sucks. I promised Bulma we'd bring Vegeta back in one piece and I always fulfilled my promises. I also wanted to fight Vegeta again, if only just one more time… I guess your old man's not what he once was, huh? Anyway, I'm taking over this fight. Don't hate me for it, Gohan!"
"R-Right…" Gohan nodded, surprised to see his father so serious and so focused on the matter at hand. Did he truly expect to win? He felt much stronger than before, but his power was just a droplet that would have evaporated in the star of energy that Baby now represented. Then again, Gohan knew his father concealed most of his strength until the moment of attack, so trying to gauge his strength now would have been pointless. "Is Yamcha-san going to be okay?"
"Yeah… Yamcha's amazing! Before he brought us here, he launched a Spirit Ball into the sky. Back then, I wondered why he'd diminish his Ki like that before the battle. Now it came to me that he produced a source of Ki that he could track in space. If I were to guess, he used Instant Transmission to bring that massive energy bomb away to where his Spirit Ball was in space, using its Ki as a beacon," Goku snickered in excitement, punching his open fist. In an instant, Yamcha appeared by his side.
"All taken care of!" Yamcha nodded. "Though the Spirit Ball's all fizzled out. Flew halfway across the galaxy and I've never maintained it at such a range. This trick won't work twice."
"That's fine. Bring Gohan, Videl, and their robot back home. Leave Baby to me," Goku nodded in acknowledgment of the tremendous help of his old friend.
"What!? Are you sure?" Yamcha's face dragged out. "This guy's like crazy powerful! You and Vegeta were like rivals or something and this guy makes Vegeta seem like a grain of sand and a mountain on top!"
"Yeah, this guy's giving me the shivers!" Goku stretched his smirk across his face while staring Baby Vegeta down. "But if he didn't think much of my strength, he'd have blasted me away long ago. He's gauging us out and being all careful like. Even if it's going to hurt like hell, it's going to be the best fight I've ever been in."
"Alright," Yamcha shrugged, turning to Gohan and helping him up while the two made their way to Videl and Giru. "Grab hold of me. I'll take you guys home."
"Yamcha-san! My dad will need help! Please…" Gohan clapped his hands together.
"You should have brought Chayote-san too," Videl muttered. "The two of them together… Not even Baby could have beaten them both!"
"It wasn't like that. We didn't come here to fight. Goku rushed to me to pull you two out. If we raced to Chayote before coming here, we'd have found a pile of ash to bring home," Yamcha brushed the concerns off before preparing to bring the teens and their robot home. An azure energy pillar engulfed Yamcha out of nowhere, drowning out both the martial artist and the two teens around him.
"It's the Machine Mutants, they're trying to bring us somewhere else!" Gohan cried out, trying to overpower the rumbling of the transportation beam with his voice.
"D-Damn it! It's like every cell in my body's being pulled apart!" Yamcha grunted.
"How is the beam not working?" Videl gasped and cried out, overcome by the strain of immense gravitational tug and pull working interchangeably to both pull her apart and then shove her back together.
"Giru-Giru! It's Yamcha! He's using Instantaneous Transmission to transport us back here every microsecond, resisting the beam!" Giru identified the source of why the beam wasn't working.
"Shit! I can keep this up, but someone needs to deal with those Machine Mutants or else I won't be able to transport us home!" Yamcha grunted, rapidly Instant Transmitting himself, Gohan, Videl, and Giru to the same place to counteract the effects of the transportation beam.
"N-No way! If we let go, the beam will take us away! It's got to be… Dad…!" Gohan grunted.
"Gohan!" Goku turned his attention away from his stare down with Baby only for the matured Tsufurian to pick this moment as the opening he needed to attack.
"I've got you, Saiyan! You're in no position to make mistakes, your opponent is me!" Baby Vegeta called out, slamming into Goku with a headbutt and sending him flying away with a bruised forehead, crying in pain. "Nice work, Machine Mutants. Don't let those insects escape! I'll deal with them after I eliminate this pesky Saiyan!"
"Giru-Giru!" Giru beeped out, opening up its mid-section and letting a pair of mechanical rods holding missiles branch out from his back. The swirling missiles homed in on the source of where the transportation beam was coming from, sinking the entire hallway in a scorching firestorm.
As the destruction settled down, Yamcha, Gohan, and Videl scrambled on their feet, facing the rest of the Machine Mutants lined up and regrouped in an army of enough scouts, foot soldiers, and heavy infantry machinery to inhabit the entirety of M-2 and Big Gete Star combined.
"It doesn't look like these guys are planning to let us leave. We'll need an opening if we're to Instant Transmission back to Earth," Yamcha huffed while staring at seemingly insurmountable odds of machinery.
"Fighting the Machine Mutants on the Big Gete Star is perilous. The conveyor belts and all the different laboratories will keep pumping more and more Machine Mutants, no matter how many we destroy, just like it did with Meta-Cooler," Gohan panted, putting his dukes up to defend himself and Videl and fight for his chance to bring them back to Earth.
Still, fending off an army of Machine Mutants with the destroyed models instantly being rebuilt and pumped out back on the battlefield and new, superior models being put together in thousands of residential labs all across the Big Gete Star, based on the combat data collected by their predecessors, sound like miraculous odds compared to fighting Baby Vegeta. For that reason, Gohan's eyes kept wandering off to the sides and fixing on the invisible cascade of thunderous bursts from where his father clashed with the adult Neo-Tsufurian.
"Don't worry about your old man," Yamcha snickered. "Even if the enemy seems invincible, these are the exact odds he loves the most. Even if he's being pushed to the edge, this is the exact type of fight he can't live without. I bet he's having the time of his life. Now, let's not disappoint your old man and get you three back home!"
"Right!" Gohan and Videl nodded in sync. Following the example of Yamcha's Instantaneous Movement, they hurried to crash into the Machine Mutant hordes to fight through it and establish themselves an opening to use to return home to Earth.