Cell Max sneered at the pair of reunited lovers with absolute hatred known only to those who sat atop the universal food chain and considered themselves the supreme life form, only to find out how truly fickle and irrelevant they were on the grand scale of things. The fact that this new Time Patroller Trunks froze Cell Max in time so effortlessly was just any other opponent to him appeared to be driving the apex predator mad.
Clenching its fists, Cell Max erupted with a violent expulsion of the sum of its unfathomable power, sending concussive shockwaves across the battlefield that shattered continents, crumbled mountains, and caused calamitous vortexes across the Earth's vast oceans. A shockwave caught Chayote head-on, sending her flying while another barrage of invisible concussive bursts pummeled her mid-air.
Chayote blanked out for a second, even in her Super Saiyan state, the hit nearly completely shut her down. It was raw and uncompromising like getting walloped with the deadly end of the sledgehammer straight in the face with follow-up shots battering you all over, except you felt too dead to count the blows. The pain and the shock were just a constant, such an integral part of you that you forgot how it felt like to live without it.
Raging with a transparent, crystal-clear aura that radiated with countless punishing pockets of folding space-time that would have been as dangerous to collide with as Cell Max's own fists, the rampant aberration charged forward, pursuing Chayote mid-air. Seeing Chayote crumbling even in her powered-up Super Saiyan state, Cell Max saw a chance to even the odds and eliminate Chayote, then stay with Trunks. The ability to freeze Cell Max in time like that rendered Trunks a far more dangerous threat right now.
In a sharp snap, Trunks appeared before Cell Max, halting the advancing powerhouse in place and shocking it with the time patroller's speed. "I'm your opponent too," the Time Patroller muttered before throwing a backhand flicker jab at speeds that defied Cell Max's comprehension of what jabs should have been capable of. Led by pure fighting instinct, Cell Max caught the jab in an open hand, feeling its instant sting, like the jab of a knife.
The Time Patroller leaped forward with a flying knee strike, only to be met by Cell Max's defiant backhand that sent Trunks flying alongside Chayote. While the two warriors regrouped closer to one another to be able to back each other up more confidently, Cell Max let out a pant, feeling surprised that a Saiyan in his base form could make even the greatest life form in the entire universe feel pain.
"That guy's a real problem," Chayote wiped the blood off her lip and dragged the back of her hand across the nasty scrapes across her cheeks to alleviate the pain. Just about everywhere in her body hurt from that rowdy eruption of Cell Max's Ki. It felt incredible that a mere revelation of the monster's power could threaten Chayote's life like that. In her Super Saiyan state no less… "Why don't you just freeze it again so we can tear it a new one already?"
"I shouldn't do that," Trunks replied, regulating his breathing and preparing for another round. "Zeno-sama wishes to see an entertaining battle, and if we disappoint him, he'll just erase us and this entire timeline. Needless to say, if this whole timeline is erased, so will be your time and your past. There'll be nowhere to run off to, no Dragon Balls to fix things. You may think that Goku-san is fighting the most important battle against Meta-Cell, but the real battle that no one's going to know about is occurring right here. The battle to preserve your timeline."
"So that's why you're not just transforming and obliterating this guy in an instant?" Chayote chuckled.
"I see…" Time Patroller Trunks smirked. "So you've realized that I'm not exactly the Trunks that you've met earlier, huh? Well… You're more or less right, but… Based on that last exchange, I believe it should be safe for me to crank it up little by little. Cell Max truly is an absurdly powerful monstrosity…"
As a testament to his words, the Time Patroller Trunks flashed with a golden gleam that spiked up his long hair and tilted it to reveal the majestic white and golden steampunk cybernetic enhancements decorating his face. Cell Max's eyes widened in surprise at the drastic escalation of Trunks' power. Indeed, the tide of the battle had shifted to an extremely opposite side, with Chayote being by far the weaker link in this team in just a single shocking development.
"You said you weren't the Trunks that faced me in this future. In that case, what on Earth are you?" Cell Max inquired, teeming with curiosity to find out how Trunks had gathered so much power and such incredible toys in seemingly no time at all and gained the favor of the King of Everything himself.
"I am a time paradox pulled from a doomed future. A Saiyan of no legacy or importance. A warrior chosen by the Supreme Kai of Time to protect the countless timelines across all of existence from changes and paradoxes. I am not just Trunks, I am the embodiment of all my versions from across the timeline. Every Trunks, in other words–Xeno Trunks!" Trunks declared while raising his fantastical-looking sword and pointing it at Cell Max with a solemn stare at the creature Trunks targeted for deletion.
"Ooh!" Zeno, the King of Everything, clapped his tiny hands together. "So shiny… So cool!"
Super Saiyan Chayote and Super Saiyan Xeno Trunks rushed at Cell Max together, unleashing a barrage of punches in perfect synchrony, returning to their time training in the Sacred Land of Korin in preparation for the Android Conflict and Dr. Puri's forces. Regardless of their skill working together, their power, and their speed, Cell Max weaved and deflected every strike before grabbing the wrists of the two warriors and slamming them together. With a careless swing of the arm, Cell Max tossed Xeno Trunks aside while kicking Chayote right in the face.
Having successfully stunned the Super Saiyan, Cell Max switched the kicking leg and unleashed a wild flurry of mirage-like kicks that must have ranged into hundreds of thousands, coloring an entire blurry cone with Cell Max's legs that struck with the crack of a thunderclap and the weight of an entire universe behind them. Switching the kicking legs again, Cell Max kicked Chayote in the face, then in the back of the head as it recalled the kicking leg. Vanishing and appearing behind Chayote, Cell swung its right arm back, smacking Chayote away in a demeaning manner before turning around and opening its jaw absurdly wide for someone with such elegant and slick features.
A fuchsia-colored energy wave spilled out in a torrential strident burst from Cell Max's open mouth while the monster's eyes gleamed blood-red. Chayote braced for impact, correcting her position in the air and erecting a jade explosive wave barrier around her, only for the tidal mouth energy wave to crash into her like a tsunami against a stalwart log cabin, shattering Chayote's explosive energy wave and blasting the Super Saiyan away.
"Chayote!" Trunks exclaimed, still wincing in pain mid-air, reaching out for the ground-shaking epicenter of the aerial explosion that consumed his beloved before clenching his fist and bellowing out something unintelligible and wholly defined by pain. "Dammit, she can't keep up without divine training… I need to settle it soon while keeping Zeno-sama entertained!"
Grabbing the hilt of his divine sword, Super Saiyan Xeno Trunks took off in a headfirst charge toward Cell Max, attacking the monster from above with skillful sword strikes, only for Cell Max's wrists to harden like volcanic rock and emanate with fractured gleams of bright orange energy through the crevices in the armor as the creature blocked every sword stroke, then kicked Xeno Trunks in the chest, sending him flying.
"Heh, without your time-manipulation tricks, you're not all that either," Cell Max laughed out, toying with the Time Patroller as it vanished and appeared from behind and above Xeno Trunks and backflipped with an overhead kick to knock Trunks flying to the opposite side. Opening its mouth, Cell Max launched a barrage of mouth energy waves, only for Trunks to pull out his sawed-off energy shotgun and fire a handful of energy waves from its barrels to detonate the mouth blasts prematurely, then hit Cell Max with a stray energy burst and force the creature to cover itself with a one-armed block to protect its head.
"More explosions, more boom, flashier!" Zeno clapped its hands, chuckling like a child in a candy store.
"Not bad, Zeno-sama is entertained. I can bring the battle up a notch. Hopefully, Super Saiyan 2 will be enough…" Super Saiyan Xeno Trunks gulped while correcting himself to an upright position in the air and regulating his breathing after an intense exchange with his opponent.
"Hmm…?" Cell Max squinted with an intense glare, focusing on Xeno Trunks as the monster identified a powerful spark of energy burning within Trunks' core.
Trunks' eyes widened and his lone biological teal pupil diluted to a dot, then vanished in a bright white eye as the Super Saiyan let out a vocal battle cry and burst into a dome of golden light that soon became a vivid, golden shimmer of aura, surrounded by ripping white thunderbolts, dancing around him. The vivid transformation shook the ruined ground and sent violent gales, carrying long-settled dust all across the place and surrounding the ruined Ginger Town in a wall of dust, raging and whirling like a sandstorm.
"Gkh!" Cell Max grumbled, surrounding itself with a protective emerald energy dome and covering up from the unfurling calamity of Trunks' transformation. "This escalating power is becoming troublesome. It might be better to take care of Trunks before he powers up much more, even if Chayote is much weaker…"
"HAAAAAH!" Xeno Trunks bellowed, turning the entire planet blinding white and covering it in the flash of his transformation. However, unlike Chayote's violent ascension, the power of Super Saiyan 2 didn't destroy but nurtured and dispelled the dark shrouds surrounding the planet, clearing up its skies and making the bright cyan heavens send cinders of starlight while the ascended Super Saiyan 2 completed his transformation, hovering mid-air in his ascended state. "That's just about enough of you, don't you think, Cell?"
"Hah!" Cell Max laughed out, finally feeling confident enough to lower its protective energy barrier to meet the intense gaze of Super Saiyan 2 Xeno Trunks eye-to-eye. "Are you suggesting that this meager transformation has placed you in my world of power? I think most definitely not!"
"Why don't we find out, then?" Super Saiyan 2 Xeno Trunks reached for the hilt of his sword while leaning forward subtly for a swift dash. The two forces of nature vanished, rushing at each other in a split instant, but, before they could collide, something heavier and much less elegant dashed in between them, slamming her hand against Cell Max's face and shoving the monster away, crashing through some ruined and abandoned buildings.
"Chayote?" Super Saiyan 2 Xeno Trunks exclaimed in shock, witnessing his beaten and tattered beloved returning to the battlefield, still shimmering with strong fighting spirit and a vivid golden aura, despite the streaks of crimson running down her face.
"I'm not some damsel you need to look out for, you got it?" Chayote made air stop circulating in Trunks' lungs with one intense glare his way before turning her attention back to Cell Max. "This monster's threatening to ruin my past again. And that bratty dork up there is gonna delete my time if we don't put up a good show for him, is that about it?"
"It's a bit worse than that. This version of Cell Max is aware of the world of Time Patrollers, the Kais, and the Gods… It has the potential to cause a far greater amount of damage if it successfully flees to the past with that information. No matter what, Cell Max has to be deleted here, in this time!" Xeno Trunks said with absolute certainty.
"Well then, let's give that dwarf a good show," Chayote gnashed her teeth, bursting up with a salad-green aura that expanded wider and wider with each pump of raw force.
"Well, well… The Legendary Super Saiyan state is about to make its appearance… About time," Cell Max laughed out after blasting the rubble over it away with a Kiai pulse and soaring up in the sky above Ginger Town again.
"Shows what you know!" Chayote exclaimed, pointing her finger. "I've spent the equivalent of countless decades sparring with a clone of mine with the power of Legendary Super Saiyan, each of us growing drastically in power with each second of our universe-shaking battle! In the process, I've discovered a power that surpasses that of the Legendary Super Saiyan–a controlled state with all the benefits, and none of the drawbacks!"
Chayote's eyes became bloodshot, her gaze widened with uncontrollable madness. Stiffened and bulked up, she cried out into the skies above, surrounding them with clouds again and calling forth a drizzling rain as her body became surrounded by a teal shroud of ephemeral shine. The rampant quakes stretched out across continents, causing whirlpools in the deep oceans and tsunamis on the faraway shores. Even remote moons and planets trembled like dice thrown into a jar and shaken from the indentations and ripples across the fabric of space-time.
"Careful, Chayote, you'll rip the dimensions apart! Just… Power down and let me handle this. It might not be worth it to go this far! In trying to protect this timeline, you may end up destroying it yourself!" Xeno Trunks tried calling out to Chayote, but it was too late–she was already waist-deep in madness. Continents began splitting and shattering apart into drifting rocks, collapsing into a bottomless abyss and vanishing into the boiling Earth's mantle.
Gravity became just a meaningless plaything, converging on skyward-pouring rivers and driving rocks as tiny as smashed pebbles and as large as continental shards alike to drift into the sky. Chayote's eyes whited out as she roared with a bestial cry that merged the roar of a Great Ape with the cry of a hurting Saiyan. The skies blackened completely, leaving Zeno looking around with an O-shaped mouth as blue thunderbolts ripped all across the planet with the entire solar system becoming surrounded by cosmic storms to match the intensity of the calamity ripping through Earth. The blue thunderbolts began focusing on Chayote as if trying to smite her down but only becoming part of her escalating battle power.
A devastating burst of a teal-colored energy dome surrounded Chayote, radiating with destructive green energy rays in all directions and sending rampant quakes in every direction that prompted both Xeno Trunks and Cell Max to surround themselves with their auras and intensify their powers to where they would protect them from the raging quake, ripping the dimensional fabric asunder. Pulsating quakes passed across the entire universe, temporarily ripping apart the dimensional fabric and revealing a new dimensional background, only for that dimensional layer to be ripped apart and substituted with a new, tripping sensation of kaleidoscope-like mind-freakery.
"Ooh.." Zeno muttered to itself, extending its hand as some bubble, reminiscing of that which bounced around inside of a lava lamp gently brushed against its hand and then floated off elsewhere while another inky black pulse painted a new picture, one more reminiscent of the ordinary dimension where the battle originally took place. "So weird…"
Chayote stood bulked up to extreme proportions of musculature and an absolutely excessive haystack of spiky greenish hair. Her face relayed blind madness and berserker wrath while her tattered clothes rustled according to the beat of the drum of raging jade aura around the transformed Legendary Super Saiyan. Instead of settling down the unfurling energy, Chayote let out another mad scream and intensified the shine of the torrential jade aura.
"She's… She's transformed into Legendary Super Saiyan, there's no doubt about it, but… Why is she still going hysterical? What's going on? Is she going somewhere further with this?" Xeno Trunks scowled, feeling almost as threatened by Chayote's show of force as he did with the threat of Cell Max on this future.
"RAAAAAAGH!" Chayote cried out, becoming surrounded by a white orb of destructive energy while shimmering with a flaming jade aura in the core of the fierce energy sphere. The jagged, spiky outline of Chayote's jade energy extended far to the edges of the white energy dome around her, causing the abandoned buildings of Ginger Town to crumble into pieces and disappear into dust from the intense air pressure around the area. A blue field of static electricity formed slashing projectiles of blue lightning, exuding in all directions and causing unimaginable damage in their rapid burst outward from the epicenter of the calamity.
The dimensions began drastically shifting again, this time Chayote's rampant energy drowned them out and ripped them apart, like water from a hose ripping through and dissolving a sheet of paper and moving on to the one stacked behind it, making short work of it too. White light, Green light, blue light, red light, then… A violent outburst of raw, unchained destruction ripped through that rocked everyone unfortunate enough to get caught in its wake back to reality as everything material crumbled and charred when touched by Chayote's spilling full power.
Just as suddenly as the destruction spilled out, threatening to consume and obliterate all of existence, it ceased, as if nothing had happened at all. Cell Max and Xeno Trunks both squinted with drastically different emotional stimuli. Cell Max looked elated, while Xeno Trunks looked troubled. Chayote stood in the burst's epicenter, surrounded with dust, but her drastically spiked-up hair now gleamed salad-green, and gentle jade shockwaves still emanated from her.
"Amazing! So much boom! So many colors!" Zeno clapped with a wholly ecstatic, wide smile on his face while his slender and tall guards looked taken aback. Almost as if they considered the raging outburst a potential threat or something to warrant Zeno to step in and delete Chayote on the spot for causing such a ruckus across the entire universe. They gulped with ease, realizing that this show of noise and flash only entertained their master.
Tears began streaming down Chayote's cheeks as veins rippled across her face and swollen with muscle body. "Na… vy…" Chayote stammered out with a voice that had both the grunge of the Great Ape's beastly roars and grunts and her own, more gentle and feminine tone. "I'm here, my son. Everything will be okay!" Chayote proclaimed all of a sudden, manifesting cyan irises in her eyes and blinking so intensely that it splashed her tears across.
Cell Max and Xeno Trunks observed in awe as Chayote's body became surrounded by a swirl of golden and emerald colors. This time, while Xeno Trunks observed the energy typhoon in awe, Cell Max gnashed his teeth and clenched his fists. When the twin-colored energy whirlwind subsided, Chayote emerged from it sleeker and leaner than her Legendary Super Saiyan state, but still drastically taller and buffer than her Super Saiyan state.
"Unbelievable… She's brought herself to the limits of the Legendary Super Saiyan form and then broke through! It's like… Super Saiyan 2 for Legendary Super Saiyans!" Xeno Trunks exclaimed cheerfully, pumping his fists for his beloved as she used the mental focal point of her love for her son and her fear of hurting him or losing him to pull herself out from the swirling madness and control the unfathomable power of a Legendary Super Saiyan while kicking it through the roof even higher.
"Legendary… Super Saiyan 2? Ridiculous garbage!" Cell Max scoffed, with sweat pouring down its forehead. Even a Perfectly Ultimate state of Cell Max with the combined cells of all worthwhile creatures in the universe might have had its hands full against Super Saiyan 2 Xeno Trunks and Legendary Super Saiyan 2 Chayote…