"Why are we in a train station again? We can fly," Krillin complained, looking around an old-timey station that still ran underground trains that were updated in the age of hover cars and magnetic train technology. "I thought your brother was the one that liked to play games."
"You heard what Son Goku told us over the phone. We need to get our hands on the spawn of the Legendary Super Saiyan to hold her in line. Hercule and Videl took him away to a safe house and we can easily reach it from an underground train station at the end of the line. It must be one of the abandoned locations from when people fled cybernetic conversion," Lazuli crossed her arms and hopped into the subway tunnel, looking around to see if no trains were coming. "We can still fly, we'll just need to fly through the tunnels."
"Alright, alright... Man, if only the Legendary Super Saiyan was just one of the ordinary savages... Not to mention, her life being tied to the existence of the universe," Krillin whined out again after jumping down into the railway line and preparing to follow his fiancé down the tunnel before leathery taps came from a stairway in the back. They were loud enough for one to assume that whoever was coming wanted to be heard.
"Huh? Didn't we make everyone get out of here when we busted in?" Lazuli turned to the staircase that led from all the way up in the station before gasping. "Lapis!?" she exclaimed.
"What's up, sis?" Lapis waved his hand casually in the air after pulling it from his pocket.
"Lapis? What are you doing here? Don't you have a job to do?" Krillin tried shooing the unexpected interloper away like he was some scaredy wild dog.
"Sorry, I hope this doesn't ruin our relationship when you two get better," Lapis sighed in frustration before jumping up in the air and wrapping both his legs around Krillin's bald head. With a backward flip, he flung Krillin smashing through the ceiling and into the main station hall before extending his hand and firing an energy wave straight at Lazuli.
With a painful grunt, Lazuli extended her hands to stop the energy wave in its tracks, but the wave didn't explode at first. The artificial woman entered a power struggle against the destructive energy wave while Lapis turned it upward and swept Lazuli multiple floors through the ceiling and crashed her into the top of the station building. While Krillin and Lazuli coughed and dusted themselves off, Lapis elevated himself through the collapsed station hall floor to where the two infected fighters were.
"Tsk, I've got no clue what's gotten into you, but I'm glad you're here," Lazuli smirked while patting down her platinum blond hair for handfuls of pebbles and dust to fall out. "I couldn't easily reach you when you were all isolated on your mystery island. I always intended for us to serve Baby-sama together."
"Hmm... Chayote was right, you're really off your rocker. The Lazuli I know would never be excited to serve anyone but herself," Lapis observed, rolling his knuckles and taking a fighting pose.
"You're insane, Lapis," Krillin smirked with a malicious look on his face. "You've grown incredibly strong with your infinite stamina not impeding your training, sure, but you don't stand a chance against both of us. Not to mention, all we actually need is even a tiny scratch..."
"Just a scratch?" Lapis dropped his guard while he processed what he just heard. Using this opening, Krillin reached for his forehead with his open hands and closed his eyes.
"Solar Fist!" he yelled out, casting a blinding flash of light. Lapis reeled back, scolding himself for dropping his guard and leaving himself wide open for an attack.
Before Lapis could return to his defense, Krillin dashed at him with a driving elbow slam to the side of his head. Sweeping with his leg, Krillin forced Lapis to take flight while the bald martial artist slipped the response of a semi-blinded and still irritated Lapis for a devastating cross to Lapis' solar plexus that snapped Lapis out of it with the sheer force channeled into the strike and made his body resonate with pain far surpassing the irritation in his eyes from Krillin's Solar Fist.
Lapis came in from the right, already dashing in the air in pursuit of Lapis. She turned her whole body with an aerial roundhouse, but Lapis caught his sister by the heel and spun her around, whacking Krillin aside with his own fiancé's body before flinging his twin to crash into an abandoned station terminal. The destroyed heaps of scrap shifted when the livid blonde burrowed her way out of the pile of trash only to see her twin brother waiting for her on the other side.
Before Lazuli could as much as gasp for help, Lapis drove his elbow into her gut, leaving his sister gasping for air and about to collapse on all fours. Instead, Lapis answered with an aerial roundhouse, kicking her through the terminal and into the city street. Exploding with a clear aura, Lazuli smashed back in through the decorative stained glass window on the top of the station hall and collided with Lapis, bouncing all over the place and exchanging fists left and right. Here and there Lapis found some openings to slip a jab in before slipping a cross and driving a stiff boot into his sister's gut that sent her flying into the sky.
Krillin came charging in from the side, out of sheer instinct, Lapis responded with a Ki blast but he merely dispelled an afterimage. With his tracking systems registering where the real Krillin was coming from, Lapis vaulted over his head with a soccer-style back-flipping kick, but instead of being grounded, Krillin flew back and collided with another version of him. This impressive use of the Afterimage and Multiplication technique impressed Lapis enough for a smirk, even if he realized he was being played here.
Krillin curled into a ball, rolling off into the air before extending both his hands down and firing a blazing energy wave down which hit Lapis head-on and made the Artificial Human brace for impact. The readings suggested that the potential damage it could cause was smaller than the loss of energy to put up a barrier, so Lapis chose to just stonewall it. After the flash of the energy wave subsided, Krillin surprised Lapis by appearing from his left with a jab and a flurry of kicks before he extended his hands out and released another Ki wave point-blank.
This time Lapis had to spread his arms and erect the Android Barrier. He didn't think he'd be taking much damage from this attack, but Krillin seemed awfully excited about his "one scratch" so Lapis thought it to be smarter to not give him that chance. After blocking the point-blank energy wave, Lapis increased the radius of his barrier, causing the expansive shockwave to send Krillin flying into the station wall with a crude shove. The chill Android ran his hand across his hair with a placid expression.
"I came here just to save Lazuli, but I must say, fighting you is really exciting, Krillin. Your experience with martial arts shows me all kinds of interesting stuff as a beginner. Like how you adjust your Ki signature in battle to make your true self indistinguishable from the afterimages or how you mask your Multiplication technique with the flashes of energy waves," Lapis offered his opponent a couple of slow claps before taking a fighting pose again. "You, on the other hand..." Lapis glanced back at Lazuli, who levitated close to the ceiling level behind him. "You've been wasting your time fooling around, I see. You've hardly grown that much stronger since breaking free from Dr. Puri, even if some of Krillin's experience rubbed off on you accidentally."
"You're here to save me?" Lazuli smiled with a livid pair of eyes seeking to stare a hole through her brother. "What exactly are you here to save me from? Ever since joining Baby, I've realized that I've been wasting my life living it for myself. Our bodies will last so much longer than anyone else's, we can devote that enduring lifespan to something so much greater than ourselves!"
"I guess reasoning with you is like asking a sick person not to cough, huh?" Lapis sighed in disappointment. "Devoting your prolonged lifespan to something great is cool and all, but there's no need to make some space-born parasite hive that something special, you know."
"Don't you dare trash-talk Baby-sama! You'll be regretting it to the point of drinking a kettle of boiling water to scold that tongue of yours when you join him!" Lazuli lost her cool completely. Yelling from the bottom of her lungs, she put her arms up and to the side and spread her legs, expelling a violent explosive wave from all around her body that expanded into a pink energy dome that utterly leveled the metro station building and buried the tunnels below.
Lapis floated above the city with a noticeable scar in its center that trailed with black smoke. Krillin fled the destructive zone at the same time and positioned himself somewhere nearby. Right now, both of them looked astonished at the level of strength that Lazuli put out and the reckless abandon she threw it out with. Krillin had a particularly wavy expression of bulged eyes and profuse sweating, realizing how close his fiancé was to seriously hurting him with that move.
"H-Hey... Lazuli, you nearly blew me up with that fit of yours," Krillin scratched his cheek with a goofy chuckle, almost as if he was telling his fiancé a joke he expected her to laugh with him at.
"Of course I did," Lazuli wiped the dirt and slobber off her lip as she rose into the air, beaming a death-inducing stare at her brother, not even bothering to look at Krillin. "You or I are expendable. I would waste you in a second if I thought it would benefit Baby-sama, wouldn't you?"
"W-Well... I suppose..." Krillin pondered on this moral inquiry hard and spent a good couple of seconds before offering his reply.
"When I converted you, I imagined we would serve Baby-sama together. But you're just goofing around and pulling your punches here. I guess you never intended to take serving Baby-sama all that seriously, so I don't care if you get blown up," Lazuli scolded her partner before turning her attention to her brother.
"Tsk, look at what you did!" Krillin flipped out, turning his attention back to Lapis. "You turned her against me and made me look incompetent before Baby-sama!"
"I should have been filming this," Lapis rolled his eyes. "This would have been a laugh and a half to show you guys when you snap out of it. Now you'll never believe me when I tell you about how you've been acting all this time."
"Maybe this will convince you how serious I am taking this and how much I wish to serve Baby-sama," Krillin clenched his fists and hunched up. Veins popped out on his bald forehead as the corrupted martial artist began shouting in stress and pain at the overflowing surge of power. A vibrant crimson aura surrounded him and expanded drastically with potent pumps of raw force.
"King Kai's Fist X50 X2!" Krillin chanted out, crossing his arms up in front of him and becoming a lustrous nova of red light that colored the skies and consumed the entire surrounding city in the robust crimson glow.
"Hey, hey, now..." Lapis clenched his hand out in front of him and struggled against the immense power. They were lucky to be elevated into the lower levels of the Earth's atmosphere, or else Krillin's mere power-up would have threatened to crush the planet like a rice ball in the hand of a fussy eater. "This could be trouble!" he grunted.
When Lapis finally pushed through the indomitable force shoving against him, Krillin had multiplied into two identical versions of himself. Both of them were overflowing with a tremendously massive crimson aura that crackled with pink lightning and the stress of the King Kai's Fist upon the bodies of both Krillins made his skin swell up to a reflective, more intense pink hue as if the martial artist was being boiled by his burning soul from deep inside.
Bellowing with a ferocious battle cry, Krillin charged forward, shuffling with his doppelgänger. Lapis shot forward to answer Krillin's call to aggression. The last thing he wanted was for his amped up to the impossible degree opponent to dictate the pace. He needed to threaten Krillin as well and make him think about his defensive options with at least a portion of his fighter's instincts. The two collided in the middle and entered a power struggle. The second Krillin vanished and zipped from behind, hitting Lapis with a stiff push kick.
Lapis grunted but began exchanging blows with the first Krillin as the amped-up martial artist began assaulting the Android with a relentless flurry of strikes, having only a single heartbeat of time to do his worst before having to put his body through absolute hell to produce a matching power-up again. Lapis pushed himself to the limit as well, calling forth every ounce of strength and speed and using every martial arts move that his peerless processors procured and proposed. He did his best to position himself in a way where one of the Krillins was always in between Lapis and the second, avoiding getting flanked from the back, which would enable a ruthless pummeling from Krillin's part.
This wasn't always successful, on top of being able to crank up power to match Lapis, Krillin had a lot of martial arts experience. It wasn't just raw martial arts skills. That could have been replicated and programmed, but, at a certain point, when a man practices martial arts for most of their life, their very brain, their state of mind changes. They stop being a man and they truly become a martial artist, not just in terms of skill, but the very wavelength of their thoughts. They improvise, they don't just read off of a bottomless encyclopedia of moves, processed and generated in femtoseconds. They fight. They fight like a martial artist and no artificially programmed databases and skills could replace that.
Lapis could feel his body temperature picking up. With every skipped blow, he feared that brush of wind against something wet. He feared bleeding and as the exchange that should have been shorter than a heartbeat extended into what felt like an eternity; he took some nasty smacks and couldn't quite land anything in return, lest he would fail to position and defend himself. Putting it all on the line for a perfect game was so much different from just fighting to win. Too much depended on just protecting himself.
He got lost in thought again! Krillin vanished into dozens of afterimages and drew his arms back to his sides. What was to come was a move that Lapis knew to the point of nausea, but one should've left it to Krillin to make it seem like a brand new, revolutionary attack he had just invented. The countless shuffling afterimages floated all over the place with their arms drawn back. By the time Lapis' energy radar picked up the real deal, Krillin finished putting everything he had.
"Super Kamehameha X50 X2!" Krillin roared out, thrusting his hands forward and nearly making Lapis go blind with the sparking Kamehameha sphere he caressed in his hands before releasing it all in a mad energy wave that was more like a tunneling field. Far too massive to outrun at this rate.
"Shit!" Lapis blanked out immediately after realizing that right behind him, another Krillin had finished charging this same move. The two Kamehameha tunneling energy waves collided with Lapis in the middle, forming a pure quasar burst of energy that dissolved with a deafening hum and shattered every window in that hemisphere. Everything was bright white, with the outer layer having a tint of azure and the outermost layers of the explosion shining red that bled pink thunderstorms into the booming and earth-shattering chaos.
"How's that!?" Krillin pumped his fist before rejoining his doppelgänger and multiplying his strength by whatever reserves his other self had left. Though the returned fatigue compensated for that amp of power from pushing King Kai's Fist rather far in one go.
"Not bad," Lazuli ran her hand through her hair to settle it back into place. "You're going to be of use to Baby-sama yet. I'll make sure to whip you into shape."
Krillin gulped just trying to imagine it before nearly snapping his neck with a quick turn to where the two Super Kamehameha connected and should have left very little left to infect with Baby's flesh. Right in the epicenter of the Super Kamehameha collision, Lapis hovered, surrounded by a Castleton green energy barrier that showed glowing, ethereal cracks in it.
"It cooled down just in time," Lapis panted, showing just a few mean shiners, but no cracks through which Baby's parasite could dig in yet.
"Good, so you won't be able to dodge this!" Lazuli exclaimed, swooping into the air and bringing her hand down. With quick fade-ins and outs, a yellow energy sphere manifested around Lazuli's hand and continued to grow larger with each additional pulse of energy. "Sadistic Blitz!" she called out, expelling hundreds and thousands of energy beams that arced and curled all around, racing across the city and exploding with vicious blasts upon coming into contact with a building or any other obstacle.
"Damn it, this attack is out of control!" Lapis clutched himself together, faced with a devastating but not very accurate attack. Looking back at how far and wide Lazuli's bombardment went, hurling far across the horizon and sinking entire islands that harbored unique plants and wildlife. The sorrow of this loss made Lapis distracted enough for a beam to blitz past his cheek, drawing a sprinkle of red.
"I'll get him!" Krillin pumped himself up, opening his mouth to hurl a mass of reflective, metallic sludge at Lapis who was still recovering his ability to use Android Barrier and could no longer protect himself against the incoming corruption because of the limited movement in the beaming hell that Lazuli had created. The metallic parasite wrapped itself around Lapis' whole head before seeping through the cut on his cheek whole. Just a few seconds later, it didn't seem like anything hit Lapis at all.
Black bags formed around Lapis' eyes as they gleamed with a malicious flash of red and the usually cool and reserved Artificial Human cackled alongside Krillin and Lazuli. Lapis more than held his own on this frontline, but he couldn't quite pull off a perfect fight.