DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN DBZ OR AND OF THE CHARACTERS THEREIN. I AM NOT RECEIVING ANY MONEY FOR THIS. THIS FICTION IS PURELY FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY.

WARNING: THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS VIOLENCE AND PROFANITY AND HAS THEMES RELATED TO RAPE. IF THIS OFFENDS YOU, DON’T READ.

"Toussan?" Goten said anxiously.

"Piccalo? Dende?" Gokou said aloud. His eyes were open, but Goten could tell his father’s mind was ranging billions—trillions—of miles away.

"They’re not answering," he told them. "I think they’re discussing my idea with the other Kais."

Bra had recovered consciousness moments before. Now her eyes grew slightly unfocused. "Is that what I hear in my head? It sounds like dozens of voices arguing." She took both Chi-Chi an Goten’s hands, pulling them into the tenuous mental tap she’d established through Gokou on the council of the gods. Goten started as his mind was suddenly filled with the din of a hundred anxious, angry voices, all speaking at once. They winced slightly as one voice rose above all the others, clear and strident.

A dry mental chuckle Goten couldn’t quite place rippled through the sudden silence. Dende’s finally ready to kick some ass.

Piccalo-san? Goten realized belatedly.

You can all sit here and debate etiquette and celestial legalism until our one best chance to end this has passed us by! Dende’s voice rang out. Frieza will continue to annihilate and conquer system after system, then galaxy after galaxy until he holds everything in the corporeal plane under his sway. And then he will come after us. Is that what you want? What will your fine points of law matter when we are destroyed and the entire universe lies enslaved by the Tsiru-jin Empire? I call for a vote, now! The time has come to take action, and frankly, I’m sick of the sound of your bitching!

‘Bitching?’ Gokou sent uncertainly.

I’m a bad influence on the kid, Piccalo’s mental voice smirked.

They waited as the Kais, one by one, began to cast their votes.

Gohan stirred and moaned. He had been dreaming that something terrible was happening very close by, but he had been powerless to fight his way up through the deep waters of unconsciousness to prevent it. He opened his eyes and stared into the sweet face of his daughter. She had grown up beautiful, with her mother’s dainty, tom-boyish grace. Now, when he examined her features closer, he decided she more resembled his mother than his wife. He tried to sit and a wave of dizziness held him down. His hand groped for the senzu pouch and found it. Pan smiled and gently took it from his fumbling fingers and placed one of the beans in his mouth. He lay, gazing up at her heart-shaped face, feeling life and health return to his body. He glanced around. Of Bulma-san there was no sign. He closed his eyes, praying she was still alive.

Good luck, Kid The sense of a roughly affectionate touch on the shoulder, and the voice in Gohan’s mind was gone.

"Pan?" He said, sitting up. He took her small hand in his, studying her. She silently allowed this. "Where did you learn shunkan idou? He couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

"The Yardatsei-jin taught me," she said. "They were very kind. I was sad to destroy them, but my Lord commanded it. Their mental powers were dangerous."

The Yardatsei-jin. Gohan’s heart sank. His father’s old friends, the shy, good-hearted little intellectuals. And Pan had killed them all.

"You’ve grown up so pretty," he said sadly. "I wish your mother could see you."

"They told me she fought very hard when they came to take me," Pan told him. "She must have loved me very much. They said she killed nearly half of the soldiers my Lord sent to take me before she died."

"…died?" Gohan began to shake uncontrollably. "Videl’s—Videl is—"

"They have strong fighting spirits, these Chikyuu women," Frieza said idly. "Amusing in such a weak race."

He was standing directly behind Pan. Gohan could not believe he had blurred into view so fast. But then he couldn’t see more than a few feet in the foggy, icy air of this great, hollow room.

"I’m taking my daughter back," Gohan said.

"Oh my, such bravado!" Frieza smiled, delighted. "Very well, then." The white hands shot out like a snake striking and gave the girl’s head one vicious twist. The sound her neck snapping was like a gunshot fired inside Gohan’s head.

"No!" Gohan heard himself shriek as Pan’s small body fell to the cold floor.

"Take her," Frieza snickered. "You are free to go if you wish, Son Gohan. Unless—" He laughed softly. "Unless, of course, you’d rather stay and fight."

"Damn you to Hell, Frieza!" Gohan screamed in a voice he barely recognized as his own. He flared up to Super Saiyan 3 in an instant, and grabbed the Tsiru-jin by the throat, throwing him upward through the ceiling as though it were rice paper.

I think so, Gokou replied.

This may have quite a kick. Piccalo warned.

A ‘kick’ was an understatement The others watched in wonder and concern as the energy that began to pour into Gokou’s body through his link with the Kais shook the Saiyan as though he’s grabbed a live current. The white light that burned around him was blinding.

"What’s happening to him?" Chi-Chi cried.

"The Kais are giving him their energy," Bra’s voice sounded awed. "So he can fight on Frieza’s level."

"How long will it take?" Goten asked.

"I don’t know," Bra replied.

Gohan shattered the spire of the mountain peak and crashed head-first into the frozen tundra. Above him , a speck of white on the steel-gray sky, Frieza laughed delightedly. "My physician tells me an expectant parent should always take regular exercise." He dove downward and drove one foot into Gohan’s back as he tried to rise. The young warrior went flying, rolling to a painful stop several miles away. He tried to stand, lost his balance. He craned his head around and looked down in shock. As in childhood, whenever his body and emotions had been traumatized beyond the point of bearing, his primal Saiyan nature had reasserted itself.

His tail had grown back.

The blinding, agonizing blood rage of his father’s people, the source of power he had first tapped into completely during the Cell Game, that he had not touched on in the years since the fight with Majin Buu, had sustained him thus far.

And still he was being beaten. Too quickly.

Frieza landed beside him and rammed a fist into his stomach. Then he grabbed the half-Saiyan by the hair and tossed him upwards. Gohan felt cold air rushing all around him, freezing and biting his skin and sweat-soaked hair. He could neither move nor do anything to stop his ascent. It had gotten noticeably colder in the last half hour. To the west, he saw the Tsiru-sei sun slowly beginning to sink below the horizon.

He felt rather than saw Frieza rushing at him and somehow know that this would be the death blow. The sound of his own heart had become painfully loud to his own ears.

I’m sorry, Toussan. I did my best. Videl…oh, Pan-chan…

He opened his eyes one last time, determined to spit in the monster's eye as he died. Above him, Tsiru-sei’s three moons had bloomed in the evening sky, luminous and full.

Gohan began to chuckle through bared fangs, the warm brown of his eyes bleeding into red. And for the first time in his life, he welcomed the Oozaru change with a glad heart.

What?! Said Goten and Bra simultaneously.

Gohan just found a level beyond Super Saiyan 3. Piccalo murmured. I knew he was strong, but damn!

Is he winning? Chi-Chi asked.

He’s…back in the game. Piccalo said.

Gokou was burning like a candle as the power of the gods poured into his mortal body. Piccalo had explained that it had to be done slowly or the Saiyan would simply ignite from the onslaught.

Hang on, Gohan! They heard Piccalo whisper. Just a little longer.

The clean, perfect madness of the Oozaru rage was merciful in its forgetfulness. There was only the earth and the sky and the need to kill the enemy before him. Sweet in its simplicity, blessed in its absence of pain and human grief. He lunged and caught the hateful white thing a glancing blow, driving it into the sheer face of a stone cliffside. He roared and stomped forward to strike again and again and again. It was not enough to strike the white thing once—a million times would not be enough. He would burn down whole worlds if they stood between him and this enemy.

No pain, no sorrow, no loss.

He snarled, his golden fur arching up on his hackles in something like a shiver. It seemed he had forgotten something important.

Thought and memory came rushing back and he screamed, beginning to change again, shrinking, power concentrated and compacting into a humanoid form.

The haze cleared from his eyes, and Gohan faced Frieza, red fur lining his human torso, tail lashing. The Saiyan killing rage rang in his ears like a song forgotten since childhood, the crimson aura of Super Saiyan 4 burning blood red in the darkening sky.

Vegita felt the tidal swell of Gohan’s ki as he set the Crane down in the deadly cold Tsiru-sei night. He shook his head in grudging admiration. The brat had surpassed even Kakarott, now. The potential had always been there, the boy had just been to gentle-natured to bring it out of himself. He flared ki around himself in a shield of heat as he stepped out of the ship into the night air. He would have frozen to death in minutes otherwise. The dark weightless feeling he remembered so well from the end of the Majin Buu disaster, that free-falling sense of having lost everything there was to lose, had left him. He still had a great deal left to lose. He had been given the exquisite torture of having several hours in which to imagine every conceivable thing that might happen to Bulma if he was too late—if she was even still alive.

He caught the dim spark of her ki, so blurred and indistinct he knew she must be unconscious or nearly so. But she was alive!

Hope returned, and with it terrible fear.

He gazed into the night sky, where balloon bursts of incandescent thunder claps marked the movements of the two combatants. The man he had been several years ago---no, he amended—several days ago, would have been bitterly jealous of the younger man’s new power, now so much greater than his own. Now, Vegita felt only a wild, desperate hope that Gohan might actually keep Frieza’s attention long enough for him to get Bulma safely away. Another black surge of ki as Frieza effortlessly powered up a notch to keep pace with Gohan. Frieza was toying with the boy. He had to hurry.

He strode into the White Hall of the Tsiru-sei palace, remembering almost too late to watch his footing on the ice floor. He had not stood in this hellish place in sixteen years, except in his nightmares.

It seemed deserted, but he knew without sensing even the faintest wisp of ki that this was not so. The white ice breathed a vapor that limited the vision of any race not of Tsiru-sei, and there was a device, Zarbon had once told him, wrought inside the foundation of the ancient palace that masked ki readings of any kind. Anyone entering could be surrounded by literally hundreds of guards without sensing them until it was too late. They were there, he knew, just outside the edge of his sight, lying inside the white fog like Chikyuu sharks beneath the water’s surface.

He stumbled, lost his footing, and fell to one knee. When he saw what he had tripped over, he realized sickly what had triggered Gohan’s rise to Super Saiyan 4. The tiny girl who had once been Son Gohan’s infant daughter lay on her back like a broken doll, frost already forming on her cold face. She had grown into a pretty child. He reached down and closed her eyes.

The flash of Bulma’s presence, a little stronger this time, and he bolted to his feet. He skidded to a halt when he caught the dim outline of fair skin and blue. He knelt down beside her broken body. They had beaten the hell out of her, but she was alive! His hand was already groping for the one senzu he habitually wore inside his armor.

"Ve-veg—"

"Shh. Senzu, Bulma. Eat."

He put both arms around her and gently sat her up, watching as the senzu did its work. Her skin was ice to the touch, almost as blue as her hair with the cold. Her arms tightened around him convulsively as her strength returned. She was trembling uncontrollably. Then his mind finally registered what it must have refused to acknowledge at first. She was completely naked, her clothes lying in tattered, bloody shreds around her.

"Oh no," he whispered. "Nonononono…" He was rocking her like a child.

Her soft, fragile hand touched his mouth, his face, brushing away tears. He hadn’t even realized he was weeping. "Hush," she said gently. She was comforting him? Gods, to think he had ever been fool enough to think her weak.

"I’m taking you out of here," he said, his voice breaking.

They were surrounded. He knew it before he even moved. He bared his teeth and snarled as the circle of familiar faces closed in around them.

"I’ll say one thing for you, Vegita," Jeiyce chuckled. "You sure know how to pick a great piece of ass!"

Vegita screamed and powered up. He had the brief satisfaction of seeing the smug look on his enemy’s face turn to horror. Then he blasted the White Hall and the palace into a million pieces, incinerating everything and everyone inside except for himself and Bulma.

Just a few minutes more! Gokou gasped. Hold on, Gohan! Hold on!

Vegita gazed up from where he knelt holding his wife in the burning rubble of metal and bone that had been Frieza’s ancestral fortress. They had run out of time. Above, Gohan fell out of the sky like a shooting Star, and the ground buckled as he struck the earth.

"It’s too late to run, isn’t it?" Bulma asked. Her shaking fingers were locked around the smashed wreck of her tool belt. She decapsulated two pellets, and he snatched up the heavy coat that had suddenly appeared and wrapped it around her.

"We’ve got a few seconds before he arrives," he told her truthfully. "If we take the ship, he’ll just shoot us out of the sky.

She grabbed the two silver rings and laser drill that had emerged from the second capsule, and began pecking at the tiny control devices on the sides. Her jaw was clenched, dark circles under her eyes stood out starkly in her blanched face. He recognized the look of someone fighting off the onset of deep shock by sheer force of will and held her a little tighter. His gut twisted again with the sick knowledge that there was nothing he could do to make it any better.

There came one last resounding boom from far to the west. Then nothing. It was over.

"He’s coming," he breathed.

Bulma twisted in his arms and pulled back a little, facing him. "Vegita, do you trust me?"

He bowed his head, placing his forehead against hers. "Yes."

"I know a way to make this all end," she whispered. "I need you to bring me the Red Dragon Balls. Frieza’s wearing them around his neck." Then she kissed him.

"I will bring them," he said.

She watched as he shot into the sky to meet the oncoming bullet of Frieza’s energy signature. Then she turned away, teeth gritted, and focused the full force of her mind on the task at hand.

He stood in the air, facing the father of every agony and evil in his life from childhood to this moment, and for the first time, he felt no fear.

"Vegita-chan," Frieza purred. "You blew up my house! Dear me, did you find something there that upset you?"

Vegita was silent, taking in the Tsiru-jin’s altered appearance.

"Jeiyce and his men enjoyed your woman greatly, I think," the mocking voice went on. "Again and again and again. I’d have taken a turn myself but, as you can see, I’m indisposed at the moment. Though I am toying with the idea of keeping her alive for later."

Vegita clenched both fists, digging his nails deep into both palms in an effort to beat down the blood din ringing in his ears. She could end this, Bulma had said. In all the years he had known her, she had never once conceived of or set her hand to and engineering feat she could not accomplish. She did not know it, he wasn’t sure he could say the words aloud even now, but everything he was he had built on the touchstone of his faith in her. He would trust. And he would do as she asked. He must fight stone cold and rational in the face of Frieza’s taunts, or he would fail her—and everyone and everything.

Frieza’s white face twisted irritably. His words had not had the effect he had hoped for—that of driving the little ape into one of his trademark blind rages the Tsiru-jin had always found so amusing. He pursed his lips spitefully. "How did it feel, Vegita, to kill your son?"

Again that unnerving silence from the Saiyan prince. And something else equally new and disturbing—a complete lack of fear.

"Stupid monkey!" Frieza screamed suddenly. "What’s wrong with you?! Say something!"

"You forgot your own lesson, old monster." Vegita’s voice was soft and deadly calm. "One of the first things you ever taught me." He would get one blow—and that only if he was very quick.

"Oh? And what would that be, monkey?"

"Never make yourself vulnerable with caring." Vegita clenched his fist and did the one thing Son Gohan, for all his greater power, could never have imagined doing. He drove his fist into the monster’s swollen belly.

"Done!" Cried Gokou. The light burning inside him was too bright to look at directly.

You’re going to have a battle on two fronts if Frieza raises the dragon, Piccalo said grimly. Daruma’s death didn’t destroy his dragon balls like it should have. Probably because there was more of Daruma in the Red Dragon Balls than there was left in Daruma himself. You’re going to need more backup than you have now.

Far away, on the green world Bra could barely remember, she saw a mental vision of a small, kind-faced man with odd dotted tattoos on his forehead standing at the feet of a great, green dragon. The dragon balls of Chikyuu chimed inside her head as the little man’s wish was granted.

In the dark room behind them there was a soft glow and Trunks body suddenly arched and gasped, filling his empty lungs with air. Goten rushed to the other young man with a glad cry.

Gokou took Chi-Chi’s hand. She squinted, trying to look into his shining face. He kissed her, something she couldn’t ever remember him having done when there were other eyes to see. Not since their wedding day. She gasped as she felt the rush of power flowing out of his body and into hers through the kiss. "Gokou-saa…" She said breathlessly.

"Give me your hands," he told the others. They gathered around him, Bra, Goten, and a still dazed-looking Trunks, and laid theirs hands on his arms and shoulders.

The musty dark room faded away and winked into the bitter cold of Tsiru-sei night.

Frieza doubled over with a shriek of horror. In the same instant, Vegita tore the silver chain that held the dragon balls from around Frieza’s neck.

"My baby!" Frieza cried.

"Are you bleating to me about your brat’s life?" Vegita grated. "To me?! " He raised his fist. "Another lesson from your primer, Frieza: Always kick your enemy when he’s down!"

The blow never fell. Faster than thought, Frieza spun, still hunched protectively over his mid-section, and lashed out with his tail. Vegita flew backward and crashed into the ground with bone-shattering force. He still held the dragon balls clasped tightly in one bloody hand. He hadn’t even lasted one round. A thousand new stars had suddenly winked on overhead.

"Dodoria has brought the fleet from the second moon, I see." Frieza landed beside him, his posture no longer distressed. "He must have seen the fireworks. He so hates to miss a party." He slammed his fist into Vegita’s chest, shattering the breastbone. "Did you think you would use my last wish against me? Fool. Red Soraku’s dragon balls become keyed to whoever uses them the first time—unless one willingly concedes the right, as my priests did to me. No one can use them now but me!" He sighed in mock regret. "You were always my favorite, darling boy. I would have laid entire galaxies at your feet if you had only given me your loyalty."

Vegita drew a painful slow breath and spat blood in the Tsiru-jin’s face. So much power. So crushingly strong. He had never stood a chance, not then, not now.

Frieza raised his open hand. "Poor, stupid animal."

The blast streaked toward him---and rebounded off madly into the night. Vegita somehow found the strength to laugh. "Show off," he murmured to the man who now stood between him and Frieza’s pale, shocked face.

"Frieza," Son Gokou said quietly. "I’ve come to kill you."