An elongated, bloody drool of Cell's viscera connecting the splattered body parts began thickening until it became almost gelatinous. Vague features of the elements comprising a humanoid face surfaced to the outer layer with a pair of eyes opening up and blinking separately from one another and a deformed, pouted mouth, wheezing breaths in and out. As if drawn by some lone singularity point, the bio-goop withdrew to a center and dragged the twitching body parts alongside it, reconstituting Perfectly Ultimate Cell Max's body as the revived creature burst with a vivid, golden aura.
"I can understand Chayote being too thick to get the message, but not you, Trunks…" Cell Max smiled, flexing its perfected body of maximized genetic potential, carrying within it all traces of genetic material from species Cell Max considered worth its exalted attention and assimilation. "The more we fight, moreover, the more injuries I sustain and recover from, only bolster me in battle!"
Testifying the truth of this statement, Cell Max called forth the sum of its power, emitting a universe-shaking pulse of energy that colored the entire dark void separating the space-time between the gargantuan black and white holes spanning what was left of the doomed future bright gold. Cell's own exceptional power turned on the light for the entire universe to its boundless edges.
"If that were true," Chayote clenched her fist in front of her with a mocking scoff. "Why do you keep on yapping about it, as if hoping we'll stop hitting you?"
Mastered Legendary Super Saiyan Chayote took off in a straightforward dash toward her opponent, slamming with a dashing shoulder tackle, but, instead of allowing Cell Max to blast off away, she grabbed hold of its chest and lifted the monster over her head, turning around and seeking to slam it on the other side. For the trouble, Cell Max swept at Chayote's feet, quickly repositioned itself upside-up, and palm-slammed her away.
Growling, Chayote exploded with a vivid jade aura and dashed at Cell Max, unleashing a berserk series of pounds that Cell Max effortlessly deflected and blocked, engaging Chayote in a mad dance of stone-walling her boundless calls for violence before responding with a more measured counterattack. Before Cell Max could do so, however, Super Saiyan God Xeno Trunks swooped in from behind, swinging his Key Sword upward with a burning God Ki trail behind it.
Turning around, Cell Max pinched the blade's edge, stopping the swing before exclaiming with a loud battle cry, turning off the dark in the universe once again, only for the outlines of all remaining matter to become a bright, powdery trail. Like a swarm of fireflies attempting to position themselves in the shape of an artistic depiction of the figures that survived the universal descent into the black hole era.
When Chayote and Xeno Trunks recovered from almost being displaced and scattered on an atomic level by the intense torrential blast of Cell Max's aura, they heaved and panted with their bodies feeling too heavy to move and their lungs frozen in place like they were pinned to the wall by their edges with needles. Appearing before Chayote in a shrill snap, Cell Max unleashed a flurry of kicks before flipping back and kicking her away while stiffening up in place. Twin tails erupted from behind Cell Max's back, underneath its wings, hurling toward Chayote. Instead of a needle to drain energy from, this tail had a metallic pair of tweezer-like pincers that pinched Chayote before the tails lit up with a streak of blue bio-electricity, lustrous enough to light up the quadrant of space the battle was raging in and surround Cell Max and Chayote with a gigantic cosmic lightning storm that shot off electromagnetic flares in all directions.
Meanwhile, a doppelganger of Cell Max appeared behind Xeno Trunks, kicking him in the back and sending the Super Saiyan God flying, then appearing in front again and kicking him flying in the opposite direction. Surrounded by a trail of a starlit, tunneling shockwave of the fabric of space-time folding and wrapping around Cell Max's rocketing body, Cell Max appeared before where Xeno Trunks should've been flying to and pointed its hand, expelling a rocking emerald Kiai pulse that undid the space-time-bending warp and set the fabric back into place, at the same time rejecting Xeno Trunks and pushing him backward.
The pair of Cell Maxes then swirled together, like coalescing black holes absorbing one another, and merged back into one shape, returning to full power as opposed to halving Cell Max's energy to take on both of his opponents at once as divided bodies. Having left Chayote floating smoldering and burnt in a remote corner of space, and Xeno Trunks knocked around for a loop in another, Cell Max couldn't help itself but strike an elegant pose and bow before Zeno, who was observing the match.
"Wow, so flashy and loud!" Zeno cheered like a child being shown a new toy, clapping its little hands.
"Heh, I could get used to this unequivocal praise," Cell Max smiled. "At last, someone appreciates my flawless perfection. Someone on an unmatched, divine scale, no less…"
Before Cell Max could become too self-absorbed and lost in the moment, the rumbling of raging jade aura made it turn its bemused look toward Chayote who dashed across entire devastated regions of space, under the pressure of trillions of supermassive black holes pulling and tugging from all directions, she rushed back to battle, pulling on the fabric of spacetime like a sheet of cloth, using it to swim ahead and gain more and more speed boosts to get to her hated enemy as soon as possible.
"You may be my equal in terms of there being virtually no limit to your rage and power, sadly, your body is still susceptible to damage, unlike my eternal body. You bleed, you suffer, you bruise and you tear. An unbefitting sight to our divine audience, don't you think? If you keep on meddling, Chayote, I'll finish you off without mercy, despite the slight modicum of gratitude for donating a sample of your Legendary Super Saiyan cells to me in this timeline," Cell Max adopted a fighting stance before getting pelted with fiery Ki blasts from behind and glancing toward them, brushing the smoke away with strokes of its hands. Xeno Trunks also recovered and returned to battle.
Trunks glanced at Chayote for a second. He said nothing, but Chayote was as lucid in her Legendary Super Saiyan state now as she was in her base state, so the sentiment didn't completely pass her by.
"Don't you dare tell me to sit this one out or to sit back!" Chayote growled at him. Her clothes may have been ripped and tattered into freely flapping strands of cloth, her body was seeded with bruises and wounds, and streaks of trickling red decorated the tense and muscular body, but the energy output that radiated off her was perhaps the greatest it's ever been thus far.
"Cell Max isn't immortal," Xeno Trunks replied. "Don't fall for its taunts that it will recover from any damage and power-up each time we attack. If we fight on and strike him with our full power, we'll find our breakthrough and defeat Cell Max for certain! Cell Max has a core that we can use to make it unstable, but it can switch the position of that core around in its body, meaning that we need to find it and destroy it if we want Cell Max's own body to help us destroy it for good."
"Less yapping and more SMASHING!" Chayote exclaimed, curling up into a ball as she grabbed her head and tensed up stiffly. Pumping her arms and legs out, her head back and her chest forward, Chayote manifested a minefield of jade energy bombs, like a micro-scale version of a universe of giant green energy spheres.
"Wh-What!?" Cell Max exclaimed, looking around, wondering which one of those would be the first to hurl toward Cell Max. That was an essential piece of information, since right now the energy bomb field left no openings to slip through, meaning that Cell Max would have to count on evading the first bomb, and then use the opening it left in the formation to slip away from the rest, lest he suffered another near-disintegration.
"GIGANTE GREEN!" Chayote bellowed, shooting forward like a stream of bright green energy, surrounded by sparkling white star-like dots as she smashed into Cell Max with an open hand and grabbed its face.
"Urgh!" Cell Max grumbled, feeling the tight squeeze around it and trying to pull Chayote's hand off its face before realizing that the raging Legendary Super Saiyan was out-muscling it. At that point, Cell Max fired a straight, blind energy wave in front of it, only to realize that Chayote was gone and the wave hit nothing but the void of a devastated universe. Instead of locking onto Cell Max's face, Chayote's arms wrapped around its waist from behind.
"You said earlier that my body feels pain and gets hurt, unlike yours…" Chayote grumbled while Cell Max attempted to throw backward head butts and thrash to struggle its way out of Chayote's hold in vain. "You were right, but since you don't get it, let me let you in on a little secret–IT ONLY MAKES ME ANGRIER!"
With a hysterical battle cry, Chayote suplexed Cell Max into one of the energy bombs, causing it to burst on impact and send Cell Max flying away, bouncing off of a couple of the energy bombs as Cell Max slammed into them face or back first. After a few of those bounces, the rest of the jade energy bombs all converged onto Cell Max, squeezing it inside them as they didn't burst and instead attempted to crush it between them. Appearing above this infernal pile of energy bombs, Chayote plunged with an open hand, expelling a point-blank shapeless energy burst from her hand upon touching the topmost energy ball, obliterating the entire structure in a chain explosion reaction with Cell Max trapped inside.
When the lustrous light show subsided, Cell Max emerged from inside panting and coated with bruises and chinks to its external layer of red and black armor. The creature was wincing in pain and had a shiner of a swollen chin with a streak of violet goop drooling down its lip that required a brush with the back of Cell Max's hand to smear away. With a click, Cell Max's busted jaw fixed back into place and the swelling healed, but the bruises stayed and it was apparent that the sky-high battle power of the monster had taken a significant dip and wasn't as limitless as Cell Max bragged about.
"What about your anger? What about your pain? It doesn't change the fact you're just a weak and fragile Saiyan!" Cell Max exclaimed, pressing its index and middle fingers to its forehead before thrusting them outward and firing a Devilmite Beam toward Chayote.
"N-No!" Xeno Trunks exclaimed, pressing the hilt of his Key Sword tighter and freezing the Devilmite Beam in space-time, dashing between the spiraling pink energy beam and Chayote, Xeno Trunks swatted it away with its Key Sword.
The moment the ordinary flow of time resumed, liberating Xeno Trunks of the disproportionately stacking God Ki cost of manipulating time with the Key Sword, Cell Max flashed directly in front of Xeno Trunks, as if having predicted that the Super Saiyan God would react this way. Stretching its arms and legs out, Cell Max let out a chilling howl, bursting with a supermassive pink energy barrier with an intense black outline and thread-like black energy strands, similar to inky strokes, floating freely inside the max power barrier that engulfed Xeno Trunks and pushed Chayote away.
"T-Trunks!" Chayote barked out, bracing herself as the ever-growing Max Barrier surpassed the side of the gargantuan black holes buzzing and swirling with deep green halos in the center of what used to be large star clusters before the universal calamity struck. Being so close to Cell Max when the barrier erupted, Trunks wouldn't have been flung out of its range like Chayote was, but engulfed and swallowed inside, alongside Cell Max.
Cell Max's Ki could only rage for so long. Eventually, the Max Barrier began drawing back, before collapsing and dissolving into a flutter of pink cinders. As the energy bubble collapsed, Cell Max lowered its guard by dropping its heavy arms and exhaling a deep heave of air from its lungs, sweat dripped and instantly turned to frost on Cell Max's face, chipping off and floating away to vanish inside one of countless black holes that now reigned in this new universe.
Standing before the worn-out Cell Max was Super Saiyan God Xeno Trunks with his Key Sword in hand, completely unharmed, holding the sword out in front of Cell Max while taunting the creature with a smile.
"Wh-What!? Our energy signatures aren't so different, how could you be unharmed by my Max Barrier!?" Cell Max frothed in disbelief.
"Hmph… You seem to have forgotten that you can only sense my normal Ki, not my God Ki, Cell," God Trunks swung his sword off to the side before kicking Cell Max flat in the face and sending it flying away into one of the surrounding black holes. Only when Cell Max burst with a ludicrous amount of energy that overloaded the black hole's intake and forcefully converted it into a white hole, spewing light and radiation out instead of drawing it in, did Cell Max escape from its clutches by ripping the booming white hole apart with a violent burst of Cell Max's aura.
"I used this," God Trunks spun his Key Sword around in his hand before sheathing it behind his back. "The Key Sword allowed me to preserve the memory in time of the state of my being for a brief time in exchange for some of my God Ki. That is the power of the Key Sword–the power of Gods and Demons to manipulate time. That includes the temporal record of someone or something in a timeline."
"It's that blasted sword again… And this accursed form…" Cell Max's left eye twitched in disdain for Super Saiyan God Xeno Trunks' unique transformation that, alongside a ludicrous battle power boost, also granted him full access to the Key Sword's real powers and abilities. "I'm just wasting my energy fighting you here. Even if I kill you right now and claim that sword, without God Ki, it will be just a hefty lump of iron for me to swing around. Heh, then again, I intend to go on quite a hunt, ripping and tearing through the ranks of Gods and Demons alike. So perhaps that sword will come in handy, eventually."
"Hunt Gods!?" Chayote swiped her beefy arm aside in dismissal of Cell's declaration. "You can forget about that! Not until I make you pay for separating me from my love and from trapping me here away from my son!"
Chayote crashed with a dashing right hook, forcing Cell Max to block with both arms on the right side. A quick jab from the left opened Cell Max up and then a running clothesline flattened the monster. Seeing Cell Max laid out, Chayote punted it away from her and toward Xeno Trunks, who dashed forward with one hand behind his back and on the hilt of the Key Sword.
Drawing the sword, Xeno Trunks slashed toward the exposed black core in between Cell Max's horns. Cell Max's expression stretched out with a goofy and long downward hang as if the hit directly cleaved through Cell Max's brain. The black core cracked, emitting white light through the cracks, but God Trunks pressed on, by pressing his hand to the back of the sword and making it flare up with the wildfire coating of God Ki, Super Saiyan God Xeno Trunks cleaved clean through Cell Max, splitting the monster into two parts.
Clenching the hilt of his Key Sword, Super Saiyan God Xeno Trunks froze time, performing a dozen rising Ki slashes to slice the cleaved monster into more horizontal pieces before undoing the time freeze and sheathing his sword, only for Cell Max's body to splatter with the same pink goop from before and its body parts to split, while the purple goop hardened and thickened. Not intent on allowing the goop to retract and regenerate Cell Max, God Trunks unleashed a vicious pummeling with his fists, sending rending fiery bursts with each punch before knocking Cell Max's gooey remains down.
Like a spinning drill, Chayote came tunneling in and punched clean through the purple, gooey mass that held Cell Max's parts clamped together. After energizing her fists with jade-colored flares, Chayote pummeled the gooey mass before uppercutting it back to her beloved, who was plunging in pursuit of his opponent. Chayote's uppercut and Xeno Trunks' diving punch connected, sending a rippling shockwave throughout the thickening goop and splattering it, releasing the hold over Cell Max's body parts and scattering the monster's bits and pieces away, wherever the ringing ripple across the universal fabric of space-time brought them.
"Take that!" Chayote staggered back, riding the backlash of the same shockwave resulting from her and Trunks' colliding fists, smirking with excitement as this was by far the most explosive and devastating blow they'd delivered to Cell Max so far. One that scattered its body parts far across the universe and only left bloody violet splashes floating in dead space with black holes quickly beginning to slurp Cell Max's remains up, splitting it apart.
"Hmm…" Super Saiyan God Xeno Trunks descended with a solemn look, his hand holding the handle of his sword and his eyes racing across, scanning for any remnants from which the monster could still return. "H-Huh…?" he then drew his Key Sword and looked at it shining with yellow light.
"Huh? Why's your sword shining, Trunks?" Chayote pointed at it.
"It's… Time is changing… Somehow," Xeno Trunks replied with a stumped expression. The universe became coated with a thick bronze filter as the sounds of shifting clockwork rang in the ears of everyone close enough to the scene.
Cell's body parts emerged from the black holes, the splattered goop collected together, bubbled, and loosened its consistency before turning to liquid and then retracting the splattered body parts back together–connecting back to Cell Max.
"Wh… What's the meaning of this, Cell Max!?" Xeno Trunks exclaimed. "You restored your body by manipulating time, didn't you?"
"Oh, I'm sorry, my dear old friend Trunks… Did you think you were the only one able to play with time?" Cell Max mocked his foe with a diminutive tone as if he were talking to a toddler. "I'm sorry I made it all seem so confusing. I'm afraid, however, that you'll have to try again if you want to defeat me. I hope you didn't put too much energy into those shiny, hard hits you two threw, because, unlike my body, which has been recalled back to its previous state in time-space, the effort you put into those blows was wasted!"
Mockingly, Cell Max burst into megalomaniacal laughter while Xeno Trunks seethed with a tight squeeze on the hilt of his Key Sword, still waiting for answers from the time-shifting monster.