With a pink ignited Ki blade, Dr. Puri charged at the newly transformed Bio-Android. Cell's bottom right arm blocked the incoming swing with an emerald Ki blade of its own. Vaulting over the goliath of stone, metal, plasma, and flesh, the Ultimate Android slashed with a combined, double-hand Ki blade slice, merging the two blades to create one longer and stronger energy sword. The upper pair of Cell's arms crossed their Ki blades together, catching the incoming slash and halting it with superior physical power.
Cell's bottom pair of arms pointed down, expelling powerful Ki blasts from the hands and propelling the monster upward for a rocket headbutt into Dr. Puri's gut. The Ultimate Android belched slobber and flew back, bouncing off an airborne traveling chamber platform and blitzing right back into the fray. This time she targeted Cell's lower section, having realized that she was out of her depth trying to dice Cell up, attacking the upper section and competing with double the amount of Ki blades.
The thrusting Ki blade slipped in between Cell's legs, another follow-up diving slash might have severed Cell's legs had the Bio-Android not thwacked Dr. Puri away with a slam of its tail, imbedding one of its countless stinger spikes into her flesh and spreading more of its cell-degrading infection for Dr. Puri's body to compete with. Meanwhile, Cell snapped right up in Dr. Puri's face, delivering a wicked blow to the gut, then a slam of its upper arm to knock the Ultimate Android down.
A snapping sound alerted Cell that Dr. Puri vanished and appeared behind it. Cell's eyes glistened with sadistic glee as the Ultimate Android's Ki blade penetrated only a blurry afterimage with Cell having positioned itself behind Ultimate No. 21. The two engaged each other in a series of rapid snap vanishes, attempting to catch the other off-guard multiple times in rapid succession. However, it was Cell who gained the upper hand by lulling Dr. Puri into a false sense of security with a handful of snap vanishes from behind before staying still and breaking the pattern. Instead, the Bio-Android turned around with a backhand smack that sent the Ultimate Android flying away, deflected by the force of the hit.
The next time Dr. Puri bounced back from an unsuccessful attack, Cell appeared bolder. The Ultimate Android engaged in a confusing myriad of vanishing tricks, with Cell's eyes carefully tracing its opponent. When Dr. Puri appeared behind Cell with an attempt to blast the transformed goliath with a point-blank energy wave, Cell did not respond in kind, turning around and unleashing a brutal wave of plasma that hit the stunned Artificial Human like a torrential wave and washed her off to the side, reeling.
Having suffered substantial damage from the beatdown, Dr. Puri shook her head, wincing in pain and taking the time to get used to the shallow burns and bruises. Instead of giving its opponent the luxury of downtime, Cell moved up to the Ultimate Android in a snapping instant, driving a hook into Dr. Puri's gut before thoroughly smacking her down with a relentless flurry of horizontal swings from its upper pair of arms. Cell concluded the beatdown by raising all four of its arms and expelling a destructive emerald Ki bubble around it to blast Dr. Puri crashing through multiple labs and hallways.
Still surrounded by the destructive Ki shield, Cell soared in pursuit, crashing through like a living meteor and slamming Dr. Puri through the other side of the room she got stuck in while utterly obliterating it in an explosive blaze. Still standing on a magnetized floor platform amongst scraps of debris, Cell emerged from the flames, glaring at its target, finally feeling powerful enough to overwhelm and defeat her.
"This power truly appears to be something else," Cell reflected out loud, marveling at how its hand bent and how tightly its fist clenched. "I can only hope that I have not become too strong and that there's still enjoyment to be had in my hunt for the spot of the apex predator."
"Vanity is a realm in which intelligence wanders off to die!" Dr. Puri barked out, turning around and using her stilettoes as a medium to produce a barrage of slashing crescent pink Ki projectiles. Cell quickly dropped the parade of self-adoration and put up its dukes to block the incoming strikes, suffering cuts and bruises from them. Mere chinks in its adamantine armored layer. On sight, gaseous strands connected the cut pieces of armor and the gas quickly solidified into silky, web-like strands that stuck them together.
"I will take you up on your word. You would know that," Cell grumbled after flexing the minor cuts away and adopting a wide-open and imposing wrestling-style fighting stance as if newly reborn. "Hmm… I wonder just how fast this Power Form is. If it's all power and toughness, it would serve me no use…"
Immediately after expressing its curiosity, Cell vanished, appearing directly in front of Dr. Puri and stunning the Ultimate Android with monstrous speed. A straight to the center of her face sent the Artificial Human soaring, but not too far, as, enveloped in a lively emerald aura, Cell dashed behind where Dr. Puri would have flown off to, and knocked her back. As if engaged in some kind of sick dance, Cell dashed around the dazed and overwhelmed Ultimate Android, throwing an incalculable number of straights at her with all four of its arms with so much speed that it had created a blurry scarlet tornado. Dr. Puri spread her arms and legs, forming an ultimate Android Barrier since she was incapable of tracking Cell's speed or responding to its blows. After having sufficiently tested its unparalleled velocity, Cell halted its beatdown and grabbed Dr. Puri's protective Ki barrier from the air, scooping the energy sphere up and flinging it down with a scooping dunk.
Dr. Puri's ultimate Android Barrier detonated with a vocal rip and a booming firestorm that deluged upward like a pillar. Cell moved back to avoid its brunt while admiring the destructive fireworks. All that momentum Cell built up allowed it to burst the Ultimate Android's bubble. Dr. Puri sneered back at Cell with a torn dress and her dark blue skin showed plenty of signs of bruising, showing reflective metallic plating underneath. What Cell loved the most was the infuriated sneer that its battered opponent offered. It was enough to lick its lips over underneath the protective plating that covered Cell's face.
"That's a good look you have. I've been wondering when I'd be able to see it. Nothing gives me the shivers quite like seeing you staring back at me like cornered prey. Natural order and cosmic justice have been restored, albeit through highly unnatural means!" Cell exclaimed with cheer, letting its wild new power unfurl without compromise and erupt with a destructive rip of aura throughout the entire inner configuration of the mega-structure they were fighting it out in. "This has been an amazing warm-up. But I would like to test the full extent of my power now, so I think I'll be coming at you with full strength now."
"You runt, what did I tell you about getting cocky!?" Dr. Puri sneered, cupping her arms together and drawing them back while channeling a fuchsia-colored Ki wave similar to a Kamehameha wave. Without warning, the Ultimate Android thrust her arms out and unleashed her devastating Ki wave with the full extent of her power, making the whole galactic mega-structure tremble in its wake. The energy wave was too powerful, so thick and wide that there was little dodging it even in a space as wide as the merged Puri Star. A pink energy storm devoured Cell whole, as the rowdy rumbling swallowed up Cell's grunts and deafened them.
Puri's arms, sparking and trembling from damage, went numb and slightly lowered before her while the Ultimate Android panted after having unleashed such a powerful attack and spent so much Ki all at once. The Infinite Energy Reactor of an Infinite Energy type Artificial Human would have covered for those losses, but the Infinite Energy Reactor was still at its most efficient with balanced, light expenditures rather than wasting a whole lot of energy all at once.
Cell's hand appeared from thin smoke, having moved an incalculable distance separating the two. With the revelation of the Namekian ability to extend its limbs, Cell grabbed hold of Dr. Puri's face and pulled her in, but not before a wide sideways swing, smashing her through dozens of moving platforms and chambers. By the time the Bio-Android reeled the weakened prey in, it bellowed out in severe physical strain and ignited the King Kai's Fist aura around it.
A devastating blow bent Dr. Puri's body out of shape, nearly plunging a cumbersome fist all the way through Dr. Puri's gut. Cell followed this body shot with a relentless beatdown, putting the heartbeat of King Kai's Fist it had to good use and battering any semblance of defense away from Dr. Puri. A tight clutch of Cell's arms wrapped around her head and throat while Cell's lower pair of arms restrained Puri's body and arms and the Bio-Android's legs neutralized those of the Ultimate Android. The artificial woman screamed out in torment as the stinging morning star plunged into her chest, dusting her ribcage while embedding a handful of stingers that instantly began to pump energy away from her in droves.
Dr. Puri's yellow eyes whited out and rolled back, her jaw slumped open and her ultimate body began losing body mass, becoming slender and frail while drool dripped from the corner of her lip. Her hands could only twitch meekly as Cell's hold on her felt immovable. Losing awareness brought flashing images of One-Nine playing with her dolls and Android No. 16 browsing countless images of wildlife all across the universe with a serene smile. Dr. Puri's eyes beamed red, igniting new life inside them and her loose jaw clenched with a wrathful grind of her teeth. Bulk pumped through the Ultimate Android's body, stressing Cell's indomitable hold like never before.
"Not bad, but resisting is futile. I'm stronger than you and I've already drained a fair deal of your strength. You've got nowhere to escape to but more punishment. I'll only let you off when I see you completely defeated, miserable, and helpless, so resisting will do you no favors!" Cell grumbled in the Artificial Human's ear, only to feel an escalating heatwave around her. "What the…?" Cell muttered in bewilderment as a crimson energy sphere surrounded both of them at once with no need for Dr. Puri to liberate herself to fling this devastating nova of energy at Cell.
"S. S… Deadly Bomber!" the Ultimate Android screamed out, reaching the zenith of physical strain and torture that she could bear, stretching out straight as a plank and stiff as a bar of iron, Dr. Puri surrounded herself with the crimson energy bomb, turning herself and Cell into the core of the energy attack and effectively bombing them both.
Dr. Puri and Cell both plummeted, weightless and temporarily unconscious, tumbling through the black void with the emergent electromagnetic field around them, pushing away all the incoming chambers, platforms, laboratories, and hallways. Despite everything: the atmosphere poisoned with various substances that should have been deadly to most species Cell had absorbed; the structure being showered with energy dampeners that suppressed the aura of the Legendary Super Saiyan cells, despite Dr. Puri's Ultimate Android power, she was the most outmatched she's ever been. This was where her final ace in the sleeve would come into play. The last gambit.
A shifting laboratory containment unit, reconfigured to be attracted to the specific electromagnetic waves of the static energy field surrounding the plummeting Dr. Puri and Cell, rather than being repulsed by it, caught both of the descending combatants. Before either of them could crash through and continue their descent, a bronze-colored electric static field broke both of their falls and left them hovering between a pair of colossal metallic hands.
"A suicidal desperation move, huh? You were right, I paid the price for underestimating your resolve. However, you've inflicted every last bit of damage onto yourself that you dealt to me, and, unlike you, I possess multiple sets of the strongest regenerative cells in the universe. Your desperation move may have helped you escape my grip, but it only bought you some time…" Cell taunted Dr. Puri while scanning the dimly lit laboratory they ended up in and examining the energy field that held both of them trapped and suspended in place.
"You're right, it was a desperate move. One that not even the future version of me would have resigned herself to. It takes the knowledge of the kind of love a mother has for her children to devote yourself to pain like that," Dr. Puri replied, still reeling and suffering the damage that left her battered and tattered, sparking with excess jolts coming out of shorting out internal systems with no amount of diagnostic tools being able to calculate the full extent of damage she's suffered. "Ultimately, that is the difference between you and me, Cell. You strive to become an apex predator, a ruthless hunter, and killer that will never know freedom because it is too obsessed with its strength to enjoy it for a single heartbeat. Whereas I am many things, but first and foremost, I am a mother… A mother who won't allow any harm to come to her family."
"What is this place?" Cell looked around, letting the protective shell covering its face unroll while the Bio-Android tried peering through the dark. "My diagnostics can't fathom these calculations. What is this programming language? This energy field… Its tethering is unlike any sort of energy I've ever encountered before."
"You, of course, remember the lecture I gave you about the classification of Artificial humans? Then again, you might not, given how entirely self-obsessed you tend to be," Dr. Puri managed to squeeze out a tormented smile. "Well, back then I dropped the lecture prematurely before I could elaborate on the final class of Artificial Humans I've encountered through my decades of studies into Artificial Human technology and voyages across the universe."
"The God Class Artificial Human!?" Cell gasped. "The Artificial Human, the potential of which transcends even the peak of all possible scientific breakthroughs and veers into the area of magic. You said that the Four-Star has the ruins of a God Class inside it. Could it be…?"
"Perceptive, despite my future self's best efforts to keep you otherwise, it seems," Dr. Puri nodded as two luminous projectors of light opened up to the left of both entrapped Artificial Humans. The eyes, beaming with a lustrous purge of light, illuminated the four-armed fiendish shape of a statue put together from cheap-looking scraps. Square-jawed and more demonic looking than godly. The four arms of the rumbling mechanical entity moved into position, making the creature appear as if it was meditating.
"What is this?" Cell bawled out, seeing undecipherable gibberish in its attempts to read into the code of this entity's programming. "What is it doing?"
"This creature is known as the Machine God Luud. My family had to overcome it to claim the Luud Star, one of the Four Stars. I didn't allow innumerable centuries of Dr. Lychee's research to get lost–it rebuilt Luud from the scraps it left behind, studying the God Class Artificial Human technology in the process. While I am yet to understand what makes it tick, possibly being decades away from being able to replicate something like this, I've been able to limit the Machine God's power with countless inhibitors, to the range of energy output I can tap into and control," Dr. Puri explained, calmly observing Luud surround the static energy field containing Dr. Puri and Cell with all four of its arms, like it was some precious jewel that the Machine God strived to protect at all cost.
"Control… A Machine God!?" Cell trembled.
"Well… Not quite control. But I can activate it in a sort of power-saving mode and let it do its thing. The first thing a Machine God does when activated in a power-saving mode is realize it lacks power. That's what it's doing now–powering up," Dr. Puri explained as Luud's hands began emanating a gigantic bubble of luminous energy, amping up the static field that contained Dr. Puri and Cell together. "Of course, because of my inhibitors, it will not be able to power up for a proper boot-up. It will run into the issue of power shortage and shut itself down again, just as I intended."
"What are you planning!? If this creature runs out of power, we'll be released and I'll tear you apart for this. Surely you must have accounted for that!" Cell shook its fist, looking completely enraged by the sudden loss of control over the situation.
"Correct. However, given that Luud powers up by turning people into helpless dolls, parting their doll bodies of the energy their old bodies contained, and powering itself up with that energy, Luud's shutdown will do you no use. Instead of an apex predator, you'll spend the rest of your days as an action figure," Dr. Puri laughed in defiance of the indomitable threat that Cell represented. "No matter how advanced, you are still just a machine, Cell. Perhaps no longer a machine I can absorb and assimilate anymore, but even one such as yourself has to bow to the power of a Machine God."
"Damn you! Damn you, Puri!" Cell bellowed out, its face twisted with incalculable fury as Luud's Machine God power sparked a blinding energy storm where the static energy field kept Dr. Puri and Cell entrapped. After sparkling and shooting off stray energy jolts in all directions for a little while, Luud's lustrous eyes went dark, and the rumbling, colossal Machine God went cold again. Only a lone dolly in the curvaceous shape of a woman with long, bushy auburn hair and glasses flopped onto the laboratory floor.
A swirling cloud of silver-colored gas turned into a whirlpool that flushed itself away into a lone obsidian metallic orb, gleaming with neon patterns. The liquid metal then oozed back into Cell's form that it had adopted before its transformation. Trembling in fear, Cell checked if all of its body parts were intact before erupting into triumphant laughter.
"Thank my good fortune for that Gudrochan brainpower! I knew you'd have an ace up your sleeve. For such an occasion, I kept the genetic trait of the Phanteran cells to turn into the incorporeal gas a secret for just such an occasion. Though I have never imagined it to be something like this… Thankfully, gas cannot be turned into a doll. Must be because gas is utterly unmarketable," Cell joked to itself, approaching the dollified Dr. Puri and pinching her up to Cell's eye level by the collar of her checkered red and blue dress. Cell attached the doll to its waist, hopeful of realizing its promise of showing Dr. Puri the utter eradication of her beloved family before Cell crushed the doll and cast the memory of Dr. Puri into oblivion forever.
"I feel that I'll be needing the incredible technology aboard this station, however, I will not be needing you," Cell turned to the dormant statue of the Machine God. "I'll make sure to dump you into the nearest black hole in the vicinity."