After sneering at Vegeta with a sly grin for a brief pause, Meta-Cell took off in a straightforward charge. The simplicity of Cell's attack threw Vegeta through the loop as the Saiyan royalty felt uncertain whether he should have devoted all his attention and effort toward defending against this direct assault or expect more trickery. Putting his dukes up and adopting a defensive stance, Vegeta decided purely to protect himself while keeping his eyes open for now.
Instead of attacking Vegeta with a punch or a kick, Meta-Cell stopped in a snap motion and thrust its arms out. A bright flash resembling the shine of a heated star in peak activity shot from somewhere deeper inside Meta-Cell's armor, radiating beams of light from within that made Vegeta curse and cover up his face. As tough as he was, dealing with finding himself just a meter away from something as hot and as bright as a shining star made Vegeta avert his gaze and spread his defenses as broadly and widely as he could.
This wasn't merely a technique meant for blinding, like the Solar Fist. Instead, Meta-Cell thrust this radiant starburst energy from inside its body, becoming red-hot on the outside as if its metallic shell struggled to deal with the internal star fire. Vegeta cursed and braced for impact as the heated energy bubble blasted him away. Some part of the Saiyan felt glad for being flung aside and found lacking to withstand the brunt of Meta-Cell's celestial outburst. When Cell was burning up right in front of him, Vegeta felt unable to do as much as inhale once. As if the very oxygen in his lungs was being burnt away while billions of hot needles poked through his pores in some demented acupuncture session.
With melting, red-hot wires shining their overheated state cleanly through Meta-Cell's face, the perfect life form halted in the sky with eyes burning with stellar plasma and blasted ocular beams toward the sky-bound Saiyan. Vegeta crossed his arms, taking the brunt of the blast and feeling how it scorched through his gloves and torched his skin, seeping neutering heat through to the bone.
Extinguishing the light in its eyes, Meta-Cell blasted off and pounded Vegeta with an aerial uppercut. The Saiyan's arms felt too numb to react, leaving him wrapped around himself as his opponent's uppercut hit the epicenter of Vegeta's block and sent him flying further away while opening him up completely. Extending its arms to the sides, Meta-Cell shed the metallic gauntlets covering them and revealed forearms made of pure, scorching-hot plasma energy. Aiming at its airborne opponent, Meta-Cell fired beams of this concentrated star-power, propelling Vegeta higher and higher up, before combining his arms and forcing out a singular destructive wave of starburst that left Vegeta's battle armor singed and covered with holes where his armor shattered and his bodysuit tore up.
Not about to respond in kind, Vegeta vaulted backward and slipped off the flaming ride of concentrated star-fire, erupting with the radiant Super Saiyan 2 Ki and splitting the skies in a mad dash toward his opponent. Vegeta was screaming his lungs out with a wound-back right, forcing his way through the pain and the burns and screaming his hurt away. Only the prospect of hurting his enemy sustained Vegeta's participation in the fight now.
While Meta-Cell's ruptured face returned to normal and its forearms coated with liquified metal once more, Vegeta interrupted the monster's recovery with a soaring knee strike to the face. After vaulting backward, Vegeta repurposed his momentum into a flying uppercut at Meta-Cell's chin before grabbing its face out of the air and plunging down, through the protective glass-like dome of the little town of the local people and smashing Cell into the ground.
The horrific rumble of protective shell coating the town ruptured and fractured so hard it spat shards of glass as shrapnel in the devastated schisms melded with the rupturing quake of Meta-Cell and Vegeta slamming against the epicenter of the town and utterly flattening it. While the push through the top of the protective dome doomed the glass to fail and collapse at its own pace, the internal eruption of roaring concussive force split the glass aside like a watermelon shattered with a sledgehammer. There was not a single house left standing when Vegeta and Meta-Cell both dragged their bodies off the floor within fist-slobber-knocking range.
"You're dead, you bastard!" Vegeta bellowed out, winding back both of his fists by his sides and preparing to claim his share of Cell's flesh demanded by the supreme authority of his sturdy fists.
"I have transcended so far beyond death that your meek, limited brain couldn't even comprehend the gap!" Meta-Cell lashed back, looking like it was having a time of its life as Cell had everything it had ever wanted–a powerful opponent, an entire universe of skills and techniques stored inside its limited digital storage unit, and an endless body that didn't fear injury or death to experience a thousand battles like this one that were still to come.
The two warriors began battering each other with invisible flurries of fists that raised such a calamitous gale that it overwhelmed the surviving local extraterrestrials of humanoid shape and skin color and curly or spiky, green-colored hair and flung them aside, ripping them off the ground like a raging tornado and sending them flying when the whirlwind has had its fun with their measly lives.
Breaking through the mutual beatdown, Vegeta grappled with Meta-Cell, pulling the creature's head in for a pounding of the royal knee. After a few knee shots, the Super Saiyan kicked the back of Cell's shins and reduced the perfect life form to a seated position before kicking its chest and face with high kicks. When Vegeta felt the sting of exhaustion in his thighs, he vanished in a snap and appeared behind the beaten monster, punting its seated body away to drag halfway across the planet in a deep furrowing ridge.
Vegeta panted with heavy eyes, looking down at his twitching and burnt arm with a sorry look as if excusing his own body for putting it through this punishment. His eyes then wandered off to the decimated landscape of the town that he and Cell destroyed while barely even targeting it at all. Just a futuristic alien settlement caught in the crossfire of the two heated rivals, each fighting for what they saw as a fundamental aspect of their survival. Not letting the loss and the destruction get to him and risk it making him weaker, Vegeta brushed his regret aside and stared off into the horizon. Hyperventilating and slouched, sweating and having taken his fair share of licks.
If he didn't give Meta-Cell his everything and saw where it took him, he'd never get the chance. Now was the time, now was when Vegeta's power roared the loudest and soon enough his pyre would begin to simmer down until it had withered away to a tiny rustle.
The shine of the star of the local star system became snuffed out by something massive obstructing the light in the area. Vegeta's tired teal eyes snapped wide open, as did his jaw when he saw an entire mountain floating in the air and hurling toward him. Vegeta extended his hands and fired a few Ki blasts in a flurry, obliterating the mountain before it could smash him and the remnants of the wrecked alien town, now fully exposed to the elements.
"What the…!?" Vegeta gasped when the obliterated mountain remained floating in the air, enveloped with a cerulean psychokinetic glow before the entire storm of rocky shrapnel and boulders hurled toward Vegeta. The Super Saiyan grunted and exclaimed in pain as the stony blizzard began pelting him with vicious psychic force, guiding them from afar. The cruel psychic phenomenon only ceased when Vegeta and, indeed, the entire town remained buried underneath a crumbled mountain worth of rocky rubble.
With a forceful roar and a ripping golden energy jolt piercing the shrouded skies and shooting off into the planet's atmosphere, Vegeta blasted the mountain's worth of rubble off him with an explosive energy wave expelled from his entire body. Immediately after emerging from the rubble, Vegeta's gaze met that of Meta-Cell who slowly strutted toward him from the ridge it furrowed away in.
"Yes, that's more like it, Vegeta…" Meta-Cell exclaimed with boundless excitement. "I have so much more power to test. Struggle your hardest and don't you dare disappoint me!"
"Getting cocky!" Vegeta clenched his fist and crudely dragged his knuckles across his busted lip. "You haven't shown me anything fancy yet! You're just hard to get rid of, like a cockroach!"
Erupting with the electrified Super Saiyan 2 aura, Vegeta rushed toward Meta-Cell while the transcendental one merely continued its leisurely walk. Vegeta's shape became blurry, just a stack of rays of light, all beaming toward Meta-Cell with a devastating haymaker aimed to knock its jaw clean off. Meta-Cell leaned its head off to the side, avoiding Vegeta's blitz punch while glaring back at its opponent, bemused.
Vegeta shot his knee up, but Cell stopped it with a mere raise of its hand. Like some kind of royal space Cossack, Vegeta transitioned from a knee shot to a flying kick, assaulting Meta-Cell with a flying flurry that only pierced through an After-Image with the true Meta-Cell left nowhere to be seen. The King of Saiyans threw his head around, frantically searching for his illusive foe. It was only a sharp jolt and a thunderous crack from behind that made Vegeta turn around, but it was too late.
Shaking, Vegeta realized he tasted blood in his mouth. In a passing moment, it all came down with a mouthful. A vomit of red. Vegeta's hand raced to cover up the wound somewhere in his gut. When the Super Saiyan 2 next moved his hand off the wound, he noticed a stain of red in his hand. It was almost as if Vegeta was shot by an Earthling gun. Except such a thing should have been impossible!
More and more gut-churning cracks made Vegeta bend over, jerk and bend in awkward positions as he realized that something tiny and incredibly tough was shooting around and causing havoc inside Vegeta's body. When Meta-Cell felt like it had had enough, it burst out with a spray of blood from Vegeta's chest before growing back from a bullet-sized insect to an ordinary-sized monster, covered in blood. While a few shakes helped splatter some of it off Meta-Cell's reflective armored coating, it appeared like the shine was tainted until Cell polished its armor or shed this body and restored it from scratch.
"As expected, the high and mighty King Vegeta is just a big softy on the inside…" Meta-Cell smirked, mocking the bent-over, bleeding, and tormented Saiyan King. "Disappointing. Of all the martial artists, I expected you to be the one with the animal instinct necessary to survive in a universe governed by the laws of nature."
"Cocky bastard, don't think you've won yet!" Vegeta bellowed, lashing out at Meta-Cell only to get kicked aside straight in the jaw and bounce off several wrecked alien houses like a water-skipping pebble before crashing into a faraway mountain.
"Won?" Meta-Cell laughed out while hovering up to the mountain at a leisurely pace, with its arms crossed over its chest. "I'm afraid you severely misunderstand what's happening here, Vegeta. Winning or losing implies that we're actually fighting. Fighting means putting some effort on my part. What we're doing is merely a test for my new perfect body and abilities. You're not my opponent, Vegeta, you're just my lab rat. You should be grateful for having been graced with a chance to witness the power of a transcendental life form such as myself."
Completely lost in his wrath, Vegeta exploded with a destructive burst of aura that leveled the mountain he crashed into. Appearing from inside it, the Super Saiyan 2 rushed at Meta-Cell, unleashing a combination of ruthless hooks and haymakers with the speed of jabs at such ludicrous speed that Vegeta's body became a blur, accompanied by a blank, golden afterimage.
"What's this…!?" Vegeta gasped in shock, realizing his punches phased through Meta-Cell who didn't even drop its mocking cross-armed stance. Despite the speed and peerless power of each blow, they all phased through the monster as if it were just a holographic projection or something.
"Hmph… Have you completely given up already?" Meta-Cell exclaimed in profound disappointment, blitzing in from the side with a baseball slide that knocked the ground from underneath Vegeta's feet. Flashing behind the stunned Super Saiyan, Meta-Cell slammed its elbow into Vegeta's back, forcing a tormented cry out of from the injured Saiyan royalty.
Meta-Cell's movements became nigh untraceable, the creature only manifested within the range of vision to deliver a strike and then promptly vanished afterward. A vertical high-kick to Vegeta's chin kept the battered Saiyan in the air while Meta-Cell turned its forearms into blurry collages of fists and beat its opponent down with thousands of punches delivered in the tiniest fraction of a split moment.
The creature's movements became a wild rush, as it positioned itself around the radiant Super Saiyan 2, Meta-Cell caused a silver-colored whirlwind to pick up and throw Vegeta around in mid-air, keeping the Saiyan King suspended. With an amused peal of laughter, Meta-Cell relaxed and allowed the gale to suck it inside and drag the transcendental creature along for the ride. Extending its leg, Meta-Cell assaulted Vegeta with a spinning aerial tornado kick while riding the current of an actual tornado.
With its arm electrified from the intense reaction of moving so fast across the air, causing a build-up of volatile static field, Meta-Cell swooped out from the eye of the storm and pounded Vegeta's jaw with a Superman punch, keeping full contact and shoving Vegeta's head back down, slamming it into the ground as the static electricity built up from Cell's unmatched speed erupted in a golden lightning storm. Vegeta laid on his side with rolled-back eyes, twitching, with his arms and legs sprawled in awkward positions.
"Come to think of it, you would be deluded enough to think we're fighting," Meta-Cell scoffed after crossing its arms and sneering at Vegeta's knocked down, battered, and bruised body with disdain. "It seems like you shall require a severe case of a reality check. Just knocking you out cold won't do. That's your usual excuse–you don't need to face your weakness, because your enemy kills you or knocks you cold. No. This time you will witness the immeasurable difference in our power!"
Just as Vegeta was beginning to regain a semblance of sense, and dragged his body back while wiping the blood and slobber trailed across his lip, Meta-Cell placed its arms by its sides, exclaiming with a deafening and proud battle cry and erupting with crystal-clear white Ki that paralyzed Vegeta with its intensity and dragged him across the floor like a discarded wet rag.
"This is merely my ordinary power. Even if you were to hurt me or even destroy me in this state, my body would simply reconstitute itself, denying you your victory. Destroying me is merely wasting your energy. Even if you were to destroy the Four-Star before destroying me in this state, I possess the genes of at least 11 different alien species capable of reconstituting their physical bodies upon being destroyed and regenerating either from a single cell or merely from the remnants of their bodies, such as their odor in the air," Meta-Cell pointed out while Vegeta struggled to return to a one-knee kneeling position, sneering at his opponent's boasts.
"Even from this position, I can further multiply my energy two, three, five, ten, twenty, fifty… Even a million times like Krillin did, using King Kai's Fist!" Meta-Cell exclaimed, erupting with a vivid scarlet aura and a visible red tint to the reflective chrome layer of its armor.
"You were holding back on me all this time, you runt?" Vegeta hissed, struggling to believe that he was beating at an immovable wall while only being able to perceive one layer of countless stacked behind it. It was like Cell existed in a whole different dimension of strength.
"If your legs are shaking already, just wait," Meta-Cell smirked before letting out a potent yell from the bottom of his lungs and bursting with a golden aura while changing the color of the reflective outer coating of its armor to radiant gold. "I can further increase my power by forcing my Saiyan genes to turn Super Saiyan."
"To think that the proud and mighty Saiyan race and its fabled Super Saiyan transformation would be reduced to some cheap imitation!" Vegeta pounded the ground in despair. Even an arrogant fighter like him knew when there was absolutely no chance to win. He often continued fighting hopeless battles when he was outmatched five or ten times, but there was a limit to how far mere hubris could have brought him.
"You better staple that busted jaw of yours, Your Highness," Meta-Cell looked down with a condescending glare before flexing its metallic muscles more. "Because I'm going to show you a power beyond your wildest dreams. A power that a basic life form such as yourself can never achieve in a trillion lifetimes."
"Now who's bragging?" Vegeta hissed, yet he kept his eyes on Meta-Cell, knowing that as a warrior he'd lament for however long he still had to live if he closed his eyes now.
"HAAAAAAH!" Meta-Cell cried out in pain. Evidently enough, even a being that transcended the concept of life and death itself, the perfectly ultimate warrior in every way, felt strain when accessing such wild power. Retaining his golden chrome gleam, the monster exploded with a golden aura with external scarlet outlines and pulsating red shockwaves. Chunks of the alien world Vegeta and Cell were fighting on began ripping off the core and hovering in the air as the planet's continents and tectonic plates submitted to the authority of Cell's energy as opposed to the pull of the planet's core.
Floating on a weightless, loose tectonic plate, Vegeta's face went blank while the Saiyan stared off at completely nowhere, choosing to fade out from a reality in which someone as powerful as Cell existed as Meta-Cell effortlessly combined Krillin's King Kai's Fist x 1 000 000 with the Super Saiyan transformation, skyrocketing its already ridiculous battle power 50 000 000 times as a flex.
In the face of such incomparable power, Vegeta's Super Saiyan light snuffed out, leaving him broken in both body and mind, shivering at Meta-Cell's wild power. A magma geyser boosted the tectonic plate Meta-Cell stood on up to Vegeta's level, letting Cell step onto the same continental plate Vegeta suffered his breakdown on.
"Now do you understand, Vegeta? You're no fighter, you're prey. You may be King, but you're the King of Chow and I'm always bored for another hunt!" Meta-Cell laughed out, relaxing its strained body and letting its peerless regeneration dissolve it into pixels and rebuild it in an ethereal light show.
Unable to stammer out a single word, Vegeta just pounded the rocky continental plate he groveled on in defeat. This wasn't like it was against Frieza or Android 21, Meta-Cell didn't just beat him or kill him, he was out to humiliate him and crush his very spirit. Turn him from King to prey. Frieza's oppression may have made Vegeta feel like a dirty monkey, but Cell made Vegeta feel like mere cattle for Cell to do as it pleased.
"I think that's about enough warming up, don't you think?" Meta-Cell snuffed out his aura while looking down at the completely senseless and beaten Saiyan before him. There were no doubts about it, the fight was Cell's. As was its ultimate conclusion and Vegeta's fate. Not just that, but the fate of the universe too…
Meta-Cell's reign as the apex predator was nigh and there was no conceivable end to its rampage in sight.