"What the...!?" Bardock turned around and stared off into the green skies of Planet Imecka, blinking rapidly as if he were refusing to believe what his other senses were telling him. Two powers completely dwarfing his own were colliding out in space, with one of them rising to an utterly ludicrous degree. Bardock's sweaty and spaced-out expression shook in awe of it. What was even harder to believe was the fact that he knew whose Ki had escalated over the moon just now. It was Krillin, one of his son's Earthling friends. But how could that have been possible?
"Bardock, what in the hell are you doing!?" Launch barked out, rolling up to the stunned Saiyan with her jet bike and skidding below him to halt it while keeping the engine rumbling. "Those bowl-heads are getting away with our ship! If we don't get it back, it won't matter if we find the Dragon Ball or not!"
"Right..." Bardock turned away from the skyrocketed battle power that shook even the corner of the universe in which Planet Imecka was situated in, more than a dozen solar systems away. An awe-inspiring power-up such as this would have likely spread much further and washed away even at the edges of the universe with a rowdy echo.
Bardock never saw the Earthlings as competition in terms of battle power. He never counted them out. They were powerful fighters, to be certain, but never a direct competitor to him. Not after he's awakened the power to become a Super Saiyan and then developed it further into the stage of the Hyper Super Saiyan. And yet, somehow, Krillin sent the peak of his strength so far over what Bardock would have deemed acceptable and beyond what he considered even being possible, that ignoring this power was flat-out impossible.
"Let's go, I don't have time to waste on this!" Bardock gnashed his teeth and pressed his knuckles to his sides, vanishing away a few times in rapid succession before appearing in front of the rumbling heavy-weight machinery put to work by the Imeckan military that towed away their ship. "I've got training to do!" Bardock declared before punching his arm through the armored shell of the tank and ripping a poor, unsuspecting Imeckan military officer with a bowl-shaped metallic helmet out of the vehicle and flinging him a handful of kilometers away.
Bardock ripped into the heavyweight products of the Imeckan military industry with a passionate battle cry, ripping all the heavy weaponry apart with his bare hands while sending the under-prepared and weakling soldiers flying like feathers from a fat bird that was being ripped apart and devoured where it stood. By the time that Launch sped up to the place of brewing conflict, there was nothing but scattered bodies and smoldering piles of scrap laying about with Bardock staring off into the sky with his hand on the precious and secure Capsule Corps vessel that nearly got stolen by these bowl-headed mooks.
*****
"Wha...! What is that!?" Piccolo blanked out, turning his attention far off into the sky after the rising battle power had broken even his ironclad concentration. "It feels like Krillin's Ki, but... It can't be, can it? This must be Cell's battle power, somehow..."
After hovering down to the ground level, Piccolo walked out from the shady palace grounds and into the clear, joining the awed group of martial artists glaring off into the sky and sensing the incalculable vastness of power that's surged up all of the sudden. Kids and adults, novices, and experienced martial arts masters all paid respect to their peer who managed to take their craft to the heavens themselves and then label the Gods that occupied said heavens unworthy.
"Amazing, Krillin..." Goku snickered, with a sheepish smile on his face. "I've actually forgotten that you've been walking this path beside me all this time. It's been so long since I've felt you breathing down my back that I never expected to barely even see your back on the horizon anymore. Sensing this incredible power makes me want to fight you again..."
"K-Krillin!? You mean this power is Krillin's!?" Piccolo hissed in disbelief. "Heh..." Piccolo showed his fangs with a devilish smirk. "Hmph... Cell's going to pay the price for underestimating Earth and its martial artists."
"Alright, back at it, guys!" Goku punched his open hand, addressing the martial artists preparing for whatever Cell had in store for warriors of Earth now that it's embarked on its quest to become the Apex Predator of the entire universe.
"Hmm? But what's even the point of training?" Goten pouted. "That crazy guy's gonna knock Cell flat in no time at all!"
"Even if that is so, we don't train to defeat the opponent that's standing in front of us. We train to grow stronger and then seek the edges of a world of even greater strength," Goku rested on the ground in front of his young son, patting his head of black spiky hair. Like a dog being petted, Goten's round and soft cheeks inflated, and he winced the right eye on the side where his father nuzzled his head. "Training isn't something we only do when times get rough. We keep it up during times of peace too. Training ain't something we do just to stay strong enough to protect the Earth when the time comes either. We merely fight our enemies with the power we've already got after training to improve ourselves and sharpen our skills."
"Let's go, Muten Roshi-sama!" Sharpner turned to the old Turtle Hermit after respectfully listening to Goku's lesson meant for his son, teeming with inspiration to train even harder.
"You've gotten all lively all of a sudden, haven't you?" Muten Roshi stroked his beard before turning to Goku, who resumed training with Chi-Chi and Goten. "My precious student seems to have matured into quite the teacher himself. Even I can't brag about being able to inspire the young to train as hard as he is and yet, despite working harder than anyone I know, Goku can also inspire others to keep up the pace he's set for them with his example. Without Goku's precedent of what it means to be strong, I don't think Krillin could have become anywhere near as powerful either..."
Little by little, training resumed on the God's Temple.
*****
Vegeta turned around, in awe of the soaring battle power that was brimming somewhere far away in the universe. It was in the same galactic quadrant, but just the fact that it reached Planet Kabocha was impressive enough. That was to say nothing of the actual size of the swelling battle power itself. Trunks, powered up and engaging a battalion of browless humanoid Kabochan warriors and felling them rather easily, somehow managed to miss the surge of this incredible battle power.
"Tsk... It's that blasted Earthling!" Vegeta seethed, clenching his fists. "It's not enough that a low-class piece of garbage like Kakarot as well as some hysterical battle-ax of a woman are making a mockery of the Saiyan super-elite warrior class, now even ordinary Earthlings are staking their claim?"
Trunks and the Kabochans alike froze in fear when Vegeta tensed his body and colored himself golden, lashing out with a battle fury that incited a merciless storm of lightning bolts in all directions. To the uninitiated it would have seemed that it was the striking thunderbolts that struck down the resisting Kabochan warriors, when in fact it was Vegeta striking them down in an instant by adapting his strikes and concealing his attacks behind the flash and the stroke of a thunderbolt, making the fact that he had moved from place utterly impossible to perceive.
"Dad!" Trunks objected, powering down and hovering up to his family patriarch with a troubled look. "You took them all out by yourself, I didn't get to break a sweat!"
"Hmph," Vegeta sneered after powering down himself. "We're wasting our time on garbage like this. It doesn't matter how many fruits from the Tree of Might these losers eat, they'll never provide us with an adequate challenge. Let's slow down our quest for the Dragon Balls and focus on training harder. We've already collected three Ultimate Dragon Balls and the Earthlings are looking for them too. Let them put some work in too while we're training."
"Hmm... So those aliens got this strong by eating some fruit?" Trunks wondered, looking around the desolate and drab landscape of dirt-colored wasteland and a sky obscured by a thick shroud of avocado-skin-colored clouds. "That must be that massive tree we saw sticking out from space, huh?"
"Ridiculous!" Vegeta barked out, dismissing the brewing thoughts in his son's head of eating the fruit themselves. "As if a super-elite Saiyan warrior would ever rely on something ludicrous, like some fruit, to make them strong! A warrior with any shred of Saiyan pride in them will earn their strength through hard work, not by taking shortcuts and eating magical fruits."
As a testament to his hatred for the Tree of Might, Vegeta extended two fingers, aiming them at the tree that had been draining Planet Kabocha's energy for decades since Turles had first planted it there. The tree's continent-thick bark cracked open with light that was gleaming from inside, leaking absurd amounts of energy from inside before exploding into a glorious firework show and dissolving in a blizzard of cinders.
"So cool!" Trunks' crystal-clear eyes beamed admiration for his father as the young boy ran after Vegeta, who began strutting back to the spaceship they came to this planet in. Trunks' legs weren't as long as his father's, meaning that he lacked the width of his step to keep up with him unless he ran after him, and slowing down to help his son keep up with him just wasn't Vegeta's style. Either way, running after his father was fine with Trunks, as long as he got to train with his dad like he always wanted.
*****
"Krillin..." Lazuli whimpered while staring at the broadened and constantly tensed, muscular back of her husband. The restrained yet constant burn of his aura and the swelling of Krillin's skin color worried Lazuli greatly. Even if him pulling off this seemingly impossible technique was a miraculous display of the man's experience and skill in martial arts, Lazuli couldn't help but wonder for how long could he keep it up.
"Hmm..." Cell let out a low-pitched hum from its beak. It was evident that Krillin's impossible show of power tempted him to repeat this same combination, however, he hesitated before even trying. The reasons could not have been more varied. Maybe he realized Krillin knew of Cell's ability to copy techniques after just a single look at them, therefore he must have had an ace hidden when he used this drastic power-up. Or maybe Cell was still unsure if he could perfectly imitate and pull off Krillin's flawless seaming of the King Kai's Fist and the Yardratan Cloning Technique.
"So, you've split into a myriad of copies, all of whom share from the same pool of Ki. Then, you had each individual copy amp up King Kai's Fist to the limit before calling them back into the original body. Because the expanse of the common pool of Ki shared between the clones had expanded exponentially, the resulting original body powered up with the sum of all the monumental increases of power, resulting in this outlandish power-up of one million..." Cell muttered while cowardly staring back into Krillin's eyes in a lily pad of defiance thrashing about in an ocean of uncertainty. "Weren't you worried that I'll become able to follow your example and use this combination on your friends?"
"No, because I'll defeat you here and now," Krillin put his fist out in front of him with silent rage boiling underneath his calm façade. Like a sky-splitting arrow, Krillin took off toward Cell. His movement was so rapid that Krillin became impossible to perceive, moving in an instant with just a crimson laser beam of his after trailing slicing through the space separating Cell and Krillin.
The resulting punch resulted in a cyclonical dome of detonating explosive impact that sank the scene where Krillin decked Cell in dust and rubble. The entire atmosphere of Planet Caterpillia turned blood-red with the images of every living being on the planet becoming mere shadowy shapes drowned out by the red light. Even the surface of the planet itself turned charred and coal-like as the resulting burst of energy from the impact zone either rooted out or leveled every tree in every forest and burned it down into massive lumps of charcoal.
Krillin's look brimmed with focus when he noted Cell hadn't moved from the spot he was standing in. Only when some of the light show mellowed out and some of the dust had settled could Krillin witness the fact that his fist had collided with a dark violet barrier, humming around Cell. It wasn't merely just a copy of Lapis' Android Barrier; it was a flat-out improvement by squeezing some of Frieza's psychokinetic powers into the mix and reflecting the very soul of the attacker, as opposed to merely resisting them on the physical plane.
"Heh, how do you like my Perfect Barrier?" Cell mocked Krillin from inside his impenetrable, soul-rejecting protective bubble. "Your King Kai's Fist only works for a single heartbeat, meaning that you'll have to pay the toll for it with the integrity of your body every time your heart beats. I imagine paying up times one million will be remarkably painful to a little whirl of rabbit turd like you."
Without wasting his breath for a reply, Krillin merely twitched his fist forward. Cell was about to guffaw something about Krillin's effort being wasted, but Cell's Perfect Barrier became covered with shimmering cracks. Krillin thrust his fist further and further, shoving it from his shoulder before flexing his whole body. Another thunderous crack spilled the red paint over Planet Caterpillia's atmosphere, submerging it in the vivid flash of blood red. Krillin employed a flurry of chained punches and, while none of them broke through the barrier, each of them successively squeezed Cell more and more inward.
"Gkhh!" Cell grumbled in pain as the Perfect Barrier it had erected was quickly turning into his tomb. "What are you doing, you fool!?" he taunted Krillin, but the super-powered Earthling refused to back down and accept defeat. Instead, Krillin threw a vicious elbow strike that threatened to break Cell's body by squishing it in the grip of its own shrinking barrier, forcing Cell to let the Perfect Barrier shatter.
Before Cell could fully recover, however, Krillin flew in with a level right cross, aimed straight at the center of Cell's body with more than enough strength to splatter Cell like a beetle crushed against a pavement by a rolling tank. "Barrier!" Cell exclaimed, erecting the standard Android Barrier around him and weakening the impact of Krillin's strike on his body as much as possible. A deafening shattering noise filled the air as the merciless tide of force smacked Cell, soaring all the way to the different hemisphere of Planet Caterpillia while Krillin gave chase.
"Multiple Afterimage!" Cell squawked out, splitting into incalculable phantom images of itself in a desperate attempt to stall for time, with each Afterimage racing to get as far across from each other as possible. Krillin became the living light-ray arrow, piercing through the planet's atmosphere like a blitzing sewing needle patching up through a sheet of cloth. Wherever Krillin blasted past, ripping explosions, resulting from the sheer force of his impacts, followed, drowning out the entire atmosphere of Planet Caterpillia in a cascading chain reaction of fiery bursts.
After a snap, Cell's image froze in mid-air, hovering above the decimated landscape of Planet Caterpillia, frantically turning its crowned head to the left and to the right as, somehow, Cell managed to lose track of Krillin in all this ruckus.
"Damn it, damn it... Should I do it now? Should I pull the trigger on THAT technique? No... It's too early. After just this much time developing it, I'll only become two times stronger at best..." Cell mumbled to itself while scanning everywhere for Krillin with bulged-out and bloodshot eyes. A snap made whatever passed as blood freeze inside of Cell's veins as the horrified Bio-Android looked up and met Krillin's gaze. Still glowing with a cosmic, scarlet shine, Krillin wound up for the finishing mother of all punches that would punch every atom from Cell's body and send them scattering to the different parts of the universe if it connected.
Having run out of tricks and worn itself out to the point where Cell could no longer maintain its Super King Kai's Fist anymore, Cell crossed its arms, winced, and braced for impact, realizing that there could have been no way for him to survive this punch. "Damn it, damn it! I should have been invincible! I was to become... The Apex Predator!"
Krillin's fist pounced straight into the center where Cell had crossed its arms for a block. Splat! A gut-churning, meaty splatter filled the air with hot blood showering in all directions. Cell's eyelids twitched. There was no pain that Cell was certain would follow. Could Krillin's power have been so vast that he settled it all in an instant before the pain could even register in Cell's brain?
"Krillin!" Lazuli's chilling scream made Cell open its eyes. Before the horrified Bio-Android, frozen in an undignified position, Krillin stood with an utterly decimated right arm. It was as if the shock of impact from Krillin's punch completely backfired and reflected backward, breaking every bone in Krillin's arm simultaneously and turning it into a hotbed of scattering shrapnel of ripping bone chunks with the remnants of Krillin's arm sticking out and slicing up Krillin's muscle and skin. The force of impact then resonated further, causing vicious rips and bursts in Krillin's body and splattering it where the bubbles of pent-up force were too great for the martial artist's body to bear.
Krillin was twitching, equally drenched in his own blood as Cell was. Because his King Kai's Fist X1 000 000 timed out just before his finishing blow connected, it was as if Krillin punched Cell with a completely zeroed-out battle power, resulting in a complete backlash of force. Most of Krillin's right side had been utterly crushed, churned, and ripped asunder with the jerking and splattering martial artist's body still struggling to fathom all the ways in which his foolhardy attack had backfired.
Bit by bit, the complete shock on Krillin's face was beginning to fade as his expression was beginning to cool off. Cell's disposition shifted radically since the Bio-Android was desperately fleeing for its life against Krillin's uncompromising offensive. The Bio-Android closed its eyes and took a pleasant whiff, enjoying the jittering excitement of victory before extending his arm to blast the miserable leftovers of Krillin away.
"Well, thanks for teaching me to never do that," Cell teased Krillin. Who didn't seem to retain enough of his consciousness to understand everything that Cell told him. Before Cell could dispose of Krillin, a soaring kick crashed into its chin, pulling Cell's neck to the side and threatening to snap it outright. Lazuli put all of her body behind her leaning side palm strike that sent Cell flying where she directed her initial kick.
Grabbing Krillin's bloody and mangled body with her left arm and extending her right where Cell flew off and crash-landed, Lazuli expelled a raining barrage of pink Ki blasts that formed an explosive pink energy dome in the area where Cell landed. The expanding dome burst into a booming sky-pillar expulsion of energy after Lazuli fed the dome too much energy. The desperate Android took this as her chance to flee.
"Heh, heh, heh..." Cell emerged from the blast zone, wiping dust and minor scrapes from its cheek. "Silly older sister. Didn't you know that it's a pointless effort to play hide and seek against the apex predator? Hunting is the one thing they're the best in the universe at..."
Regardless of how low her chances of eluding Cell were, clutching her bloody mess of a husband to her chest, Lazuli blasted off to get as far away from Cell as possible and look for a way to sneak back into her ship and take off somewhere. Who knew, with Krillin's battle power having shrunken down to nearly non-existent, maybe Cell couldn't track them once they were far enough away in space? No matter what, Lazuli would make sure that Krillin would survive. He had to survive, even if she didn't.
Krillin had to live!