Defiant of his opponent's monstrous strength, Vegeta took off, shimmering with the electrifying Super Saiyan golden aura and sparkling with electricity that accompanied the advanced second level of that form. Meta-Cell merely smirked, following its opponent with its eyes. For some reason, the monster wasn't defending itself. In any case, this would only work out for the better for Vegeta.
Weaving around a counter-attack that didn't even come, Vegeta slammed his fist into Meta-Cell's gut. While this didn't bend the monster over, or have any noticeable devastating effect, it did appear to hurt the creature by making Cell flinch for a moment. Turning his whole body around, Vegeta drove his forearm vertically into Meta-Cell's upper body, then, continuing his onslaught, tripped the metallic monstrosity up and push-kicked Meta-Cell away into a free glide.
Vegeta curled his fingers and placed his hands around his chest, facing the same direction with one palm on the back of the other. The golden aura shining around the regal Super Saiyan 2 received a radiant purple outline and became more sparkly and jagged. "Galick Gun!" Vegeta yelled out, thrusting his hands and firing a fuchsia-colored energy wave toward his airborne foe. The devastating energy wave beamed full-force and tunneled through the planet's surface, until it left the planet entirely and beamed off into space, making the planet quake, rumble, and its ground shatter as it spewed a storm of pebbles from the ruptured fissures.
"Not bad," Meta-Cell sneered, dragging its backhand across its cheek. There didn't seem to be a hint of scratch on its adamantine chrome outline, and it shimmered just as brightly, reflecting any trace of light around it as before. Vegeta scoffed in disdain. It would have hurt his pride to believe that a Galick Gun fired in Super Saiyan 2 form could have failed to even scratch this nigh-invincible abomination. Instead, Vegeta wondered if Cell somehow used its uncanny regeneration to just try to psyche Vegeta out, making him think his attacks had no effect.
"If you liked that one, you'll LOVE this!" Vegeta flashed a malevolent smirk, blitzing toward his opponent while enveloped in a radiant field of golden static. The Saiyan's flying side kick slammed into the black core, pulsating instead of a heart on Meta-Cell's chest, seemingly stunning the creature. Before Meta-Cell could respond, Vegeta shot his knee up to Meta-Cell's chin, making Cell's neck extend upward to a painful degree as his belfry shot up like a football after a good punt.
Rolling over his front, Vegeta shot a high push kick from an upside-down position, ramming it into Meta-Cell's gut. After snuffing his aura out, Vegeta twirled ten thousand times around his axis in the span of a second before positioning himself above Meta-Cell and slamming his elbow at the monster's back, sending Meta-Cell crashing down to the ground.
"Hmph…" Vegeta scoffed after landing in the dusty cloud raised by Meta-Cell's crash-landing. "Just as I expected, you're all talk. After all this time chasing the power of other species, even after you had your mommy's fancy robo-home build you a shiny, new, perfect body, you're still nothing compared to the real deal."
"Oh, Vegeta…" Meta-Cell laughed out, emerging from a fissure covered in slight bruises and scrapes over its chrome plating. "You wound me. As someone who wrote the textbook on empty bragging, I consider you somewhat of an expert, after all."
"You might not be a whining coward, but it looks like you've got a genuine death wish…" Vegeta sneered at his opponent after lowering his head while he shook with simmering wrath. The boiling bitterness blew up with a barbaric battle bawl. Demanding Cell's immediate death, Vegeta mindlessly charged at his opponent before something solid, flexible yet completely invisible thwacked him aside and left Vegeta skidding on both feet and stunned, with a gash on his cheek.
Before Vegeta could shake off the shock of being knocked aside and made loopy by something he couldn't see, the sunlight of the alien world he was fighting on became obstructed, making the Super Saiyan 2 gasp as he turned around and saw gigantic metal forearms sticking out from the ground. Before Vegeta's mind could accept this strange fact, the two hands weaved together and slammed down with a hammering smash at where Vegeta was standing, crumbling the ground and sending Vegeta to a deep collapsing pit.
As he was plummeting, Vegeta felt Ki inside the very walls of the pit and, just in time to react, its walls sprouted metallic spikes that sought to skewer the Saiyan on them. Weaving around them by letting his Ki sense guide his movements, Vegeta soared upward before the pit spewed metallic wires that wrapped around his heel and kept him in place. A pair of Meta-Cells descended from two sides, laughing it up before putting their fists to work and delivering a beatdown upon Vegeta from two sides with the bound Super Saiyan 2 having no better way of dealing with them than covering himself up as broadly as he could.
When he saw he had no less straining way of escaping this predicament, Vegeta roared out, flexing his body and emitting a powerful destructive energy wave from his entire body that incinerated the wires and the surrounding spikes. When Vegeta ceased radiating energy from every pore in his body, the two Meta-Cells seemed nowhere to be seen, allowing Vegeta to dash out from the pit and confront his foe truly.
"Took your sweet time, Vegeta?" Meta-Cell smirked. "Don't give up just yet. I'm still nowhere near done warming up and testing the limits of this new form. Well, more like seeing if it even has any…"
"Now who's bragging?" Vegeta spat back at Cell with perfect hatred. "Your cheap parlor tricks just caught me off-guard, that's all."
"Parlor tricks?" Meta-Cell turned its head to the side like a curious puppy. In an instant, Vegeta gasped in terror, seeing spilling blue ethereal pixels and thousands of rifts across the fabric of space-time as ten-thousand Meta-Cells emerged through them, flashing their cocky smirks at the vastly outnumbered and sadly outgunned Saiyan King. "Tell me how the strategy of denying the existence of a fist that's pummeling your face works out for you…"
The ten-thousand Meta-Cells all rushed toward Vegeta at once, enveloped in shiny, golden Super Saiyan aura. Bracing for a collision with an entire army that polluted the sandy-colored skies of the alien world they were fighting in, Super Saiyan 2 Vegeta employed every dirty trick in the book, flurries of After-Images and a confusing series of snap-vanishes and hi-speed evasive movement to elude clashing with even a single one Meta-Cell.
"Damn it, it's like evading droplets in a downpour!" Vegeta exclaimed, looking back at the rushing army of Meta-Cells before realizing they vanished just as suddenly as they appeared. The Saiyan royalty exclaimed when he turned back and saw Meta-Cell beaming a grin right in front of him. Terrified and booming with the electrified Super Saiyan 2 aura, Vegeta raced away and below, desperate to put distance between himself and his opponent. The breathing of the Saiyan warrior was heavy, for the rapid series of evasive movements, the suddenness and the sheer scale at which Meta-Cell had attacked him took the King of Saiyans aback.
"Did this catch you off-guard too?" Meta-Cell laughed out. "At some point, it should stop being my fault and you should acknowledge it as your problem of letting down your guard too often, or am I wrong?"
Vegeta frothed and simmered in rage. He just couldn't get a read on his opponent's moves. From his perspective, it truly seemed like the bastard could do anything at any point it wanted to. Manifesting cybernetic limbs, tools, and weapons and sprouting them through the surface of the planet he inhabited, creating or extinguishing an entire army of clones, existing or not existing whenever it pleased it. Meta-Cell truly felt like a different breed of opponent from what Vegeta was used to fighting.
"Stop flattering yourself, you're just stealing Meta-Cooler's tricks, that's all," Vegeta lashed back. While these tricks weren't entirely alien from Meta-Cooler's overwhelming fighting style, Meta-Cell's ability to bring the Big Gete Star anywhere it was, instead of being confined to its interior, made Cell a whole different category of threat altogether. While the Big Gete Star could produce ten billion Meta-Cells in no time at all, it was Cell's ability to bring them anywhere it wanted them to be that was dangerous.
It occurred to Vegeta that everything he just saw could have been explained by the same switcheroo trick. If Cell can manipulate the size and density of its limbs, the merged Four-Star could have produced a Meta-Cell and sent it underground, on this planet, making it enlarge its arms and attack Vegeta. Then, he sent a platoon of more clones to attack him by liquifying their bodies, turning them into spikes, and solidifying them in an instant, then two more to flank Vegeta from the sides. Still, even if he knew how the trick was done, that didn't mean that Vegeta knew how to put a stop to it.
It wasn't like he could destroy the Four-Star from here. It could have been just about anywhere in the known universe, bordering two colliding black holes, for all Vegeta knew. With Meta-Cell's ability for Instant Transmission, combined with Big Gete's transportation beam, any of the Four-Star's tricks could have been projected anywhere else in the known universe and Dr. Lychee spent centuries mapping out the infinite expanses of the universe.
"You're trying to come up with a way to destroy the Four-Star, aren't you?" Meta-Cell snickered.
"How did you…!?" Vegeta gasp. For the first time yet, the Super Saiyan's heart shook. Whenever he fought, Vegeta always felt safe in the confines of his sharp mind. If not even that dimension was safe anymore…
"Don't look so crushed, Your Highness, thoughts are, after all, just electrical and chemical signals inside your brain. Reading your mind is as simple as translating these signals into a coherent language I can understand. Surely you can't be surprised that a bio-mechanical life form such as I can feel electronic signals, even ones occurring at a minuscule level, such as those inside the neurons of your brain?" Meta-Cell explained while tapping its forehead. "In any case, your feeble attempt at strategizing is just as laughable as your hairdo. Don't forget that, even without the Four-Star, this body has the genetic material of all the species Dr. Puri and Dr. Lychee had records of inside it. That is to say, even without the Four-Star, I'd have the genetic abilities of over eleven million species in the universe."
"It doesn't matter how many third-rate losers you can copy, the Saiyans are the greatest, most elite fighting force in the universe!" Vegeta growled, charging off in attack. After covering the distance between him and Meta-Cell, the Super Saiyan 2 wound back his fist and threw a devastating cross, only for Meta-Cell's body to become malleable and shift around Vegeta's fist, before solidifying around it again. Freaked out, Vegeta tried pulling the fist out, only to realize he was trapped.
Meta-Cell's knee dug into Vegeta's gut, flinching and shutting the Super Saiyan 2 down for a blink. Meta-Cell lashed its leg with a kick to the Super Saiyan's mid-body, before spinning over him and swiping with a knife-edge chop of Cell's arm into Vegeta's throat. After seeing the stunned Saiyan King frothing from the mouth and breathless, Meta-Cell kicked him away.
"I hope you haven't forgotten that Saiyan genetic material was among the first I've acquired after arriving in this timeline," Meta-Cell shook its head, looking like a disappointed teacher after his favorite student failed an elementary quiz. Just to prove his point, Meta-Cell burst with the golden aura of Super Saiyan and dashed toward Vegeta, driving his fist into Vegeta's jaw, then delivering a couple of knife-edge chops to the chest, before jabbing into Vegeta's ribs to grind them into powder and slamming a tyrannical downward elbow to the top of Vegeta's head, sending the Super Saiyan 2 crashing down on the ground face-first.
"Hot-Red, King Kai's Fist, Super Saiyan… All of those clutch tricks you martial artists use to power up, I too can use. Not to mention that whenever this body takes too much damage, I can just reconstitute it on the most fundamental level or switch it out with another one in an instant, perfectly transferring my consciousness between them. Do you now see what a pathetic, inferior life form you are compared to me? The best claim you can make is being a standout member of one out of eleven million species that comprise me, despite offering nothing of interest to me at all," Meta-Cell continued to pour salt into Vegeta's wound by stomping over his head and grinding it into the rock with a mocking stomp. "No longer will I or my descendants live in fear of your retribution. Cell has nothing more to fear from this entire universe. I am free to live my life the way I want to, defining my own natural order."
"Congratulations," Vegeta scoffed, pushing back against the pressure on his head by forcing himself up on his knees, moderately surprising Meta-Cell with the fight still left in him. After swiping Meta-Cell's leg away with the back of his hand, Vegeta jumped up and placed both his hands on Cell's chest while looking the ultimate life form in the eyes. "But I'm a Saiyan and I live my life fighting, I don't care about killing you, I just see you before me so we must fight. It's as simple as that!"
Yellow energy began shimmering in Vegeta's hands, making Meta-Cell's eyes widen in shock at the brutality Vegeta's savage mind conceived of as the King of Saiyans fired a point-blank energy wave from both of his hands pressed against Meta-Cell's chest in the form of tremendous twin, merging energy waves. The resulting smoke cleared out around Meta-Cell's surprised expression before it revealed his thin body with both of his pecks, shoulders, and arms completely blown off by Vegeta's savage attack.
Before Vegeta could say something snappy and mock the miserable state that Meta-Cell was in, the metallic strands of wires rushed to extend from the core and reshape the skeletal form of the Bio-Machine God while grated white light relayed the outline of Meta-Cell's body before it completely reformed out of thin air as if printed onto the fabric of space-time in a blink of an eye. Vegeta backed up and took a defensive battle stance to be prepared to defend himself if Meta-Cell wanted a pound of Vegeta's flesh in return for the grievous bodily harm inflicted upon him.
"That's what I was always afraid of," Meta-Cell said after looking up with a longing stare, surprising Vegeta and snapping the Super Saiyan out of his peerless focus on the fight at hand. "Ever since I was conceived in Dr. Puri's lab as a mere test subject for her to test ways in which to dispose of all of you, or break you and bring you to her heel, everything I've always wanted was just to live my life freely, as the rest of you did. In some way, I was even jealous of the cockroaches that crawled in the lab sometimes. I wanted to have my freedom, my life, and my purpose beyond merely to be sliced, blasted, blown up, molten away, poisoned, irradiated, and then revived again to be killed a thousand different ways another day. But even after I dared to dream of such things, I knew you would see it as a challenge, as an insult, and seek to destroy me."
"Didn't you sneak around behind our backs and kill people for decades? You kind of have it coming…" Vegeta replied bluntly. "Don't get me wrong, I'm no hero. I'm just looking out for the best interests of my people and my royal family."
"I was such a fool…" Meta-Cell sighed, closing its eyes and taking its time, enjoying the breaths of absolute freedom. The Bio-Machine God indulged in the sweetness of fresh air that only ultimate power and existence of being one above all things in the food chain provided with. "Back then I thought I just had to get enough power to deal with you lot so that I wouldn't have to fear you anymore. So that I could be free of your violence and threat to my existence. Lapis and Piccolo convinced me that there might be another way, and, for a time, I believed it. I was happy. But… That happiness was so fragile. All it took was one freak accident to rob it away and remind me just how vulnerable I was and how fragile the life I've killed to ensure was. In the end, a lowly, sniveling Earthling reminded me that the only creature that is truly free to live its life and doesn't have to worry about violence and being hunted is the one that sits at the top of the food chain–the apex predator."
"What of it?" Vegeta scoffed. "The Ultimate Dragon Balls, this pathetic midlife crisis quest of yours… Is that what it's all about? To prove you're the top dog?"
"That I am the life form above all things. That my life is precious, in fact, the most precious in all the universe. The most powerful threat in the universe is martial artists, if I can defeat the most powerful martial artists alive, I can finally prove that I am the apex predator and live my life freely, to live the life I've fought for so long for. No longer will I be bound to a lab tube, the sadism, and the oppression of my creator, nor will I answer to a predator that hunts me. I and my descendants shall be the dominant life form in this universe, above all else, we will be alive. The Dragon Balls are merely a bargaining chip to those restrained by such limited concepts like home and family."
"Oh? So home and family don't sound right to you?" Vegeta sneered with a bloody mouth. "See? That's the kind of stuff people say that pisses me right off."
"Family is, of course, important," Meta-Cell shrugged. "In a way, you could say, I fight to protect my legacy, my descendants, my species, the same way you fight to defend yours. Just like the wish to protect your son has led to you sending him away on a spaceship, knocked out and hidden from my sensory, I do a lot of the things I do wanting my Cell Jr's being born into a different life than the one I had to lead to ensure them their liberty and carefree life."
"In that case, what we have here is a typical fight for survival that occurs every day in nature," Vegeta said. "One member of a species fights another, each seeking their own survival and the continuation of their legacy. Color it whatever sweet language you want, it's the most barebones thing to have ever occurred."
"Is that what you believe you are doing here, Vegeta?" Meta-Cell wondered, leaning its head to the side with an inquisitive look. "Fighting for the survival of your race?"
"My people and my family live on Planet Earth. That same planet that will be destroyed if we don't bring the Ultimate Dragon Balls together in nineteen days' time. Not only will the destruction of Planet Earth put the future of my people, the Saiyan race, in jeopardy, but it will also endanger my family. My Bulma and my Trunks. That's why I must destroy you here and take your Ultimate Dragon Balls, then take them back to Earth," Vegeta explained.
"Heh heh heh…" Meta-Cell snickered. The shiny, metallic body of the Bio-Machine God bubbled in a semi-liquified form before producing a set of three Ultimate Dragon Balls in its chest. "You're right, you will have to destroy me to claim those because I need to make sure that the remnants of martial artists back on Earth play by my rules. With their precious Earth in jeopardy, they won't risk cheating on me and will come to fight me wherever and whenever I call them."
"What?" Vegeta shook his head.
"And after I crush you here and claim your set of the three Ultimate Dragon Balls you and Trunks have gathered, I'll have the six, and Planet Earth will just have the one Tenshinhan sacrificed himself for," Meta-Cell said before crossing its arms out in front of him. "Now, how about we continue my warm-up? Don't break before I'm done, or else I might just have to kill you."
"Cocky bastard, just come and try!" Vegeta scoffed.
The rowdy battle continued to rage at the farther edge of the universe for the ownership of six Ultimate Dragon Balls between the Super-Elite Saiyan King Vegeta and Meta-Cell. Each of the two combatants fought for more than just the triumph of victory over their ultimate enemy, but also for the continuation of their legacy and the survival of their kind. This made the battle extra heated and passionate between the two, and also all but ensured that it would not end before reaching its ultimate conclusion.