Dragon Ball Z: The Beast Within - CH87

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Frieza's power jumped once more.

His energy was so dense that my feet actually sank into the ground beneath me, the dirt compacting under the sheer weight of his ki.

He was truly a monster to behold.

"Not bad," I muttered, grinning under my breath.

His hand came up in response, one single finger extended as a beam of purple energy shot toward my face. I jerked my head to the side — it missed by an inch, close enough that I felt the heat cut my cheek — and then there was another one. And another. The bastard was firing death beams in rapid succession, each one a thin, precise line of lethal concentrated energy, each one aimed at a vital point.

He wasn't spraying and praying.

I moved. Zigzag, low, fast, feet barely touching the ground between each change of direction. While he currently had the upper hand in raw power, I had the upper hand in technique, making it a bit easier than normal to dodge his attacks. That said… his aim was getting close enough that one had managed to clip a strand of hair from my head.

My body wanted to go faster. I could feel it — the power sitting just below the surface, screaming at me to use it. Every instinct I had was telling me to stop playing around and end this. A single burst of real power and those death beams wouldn't even be worth dodging.

“Just a bit longer,” I said under my breath, dodging yet another attack at the last second.

Then he spread his arms and the single beams became a barrage.

I threw my arms up and activated an energy shield, a technique I had blatantly copied from the androids, and the first wave hit me like a shotgun blast. The shield held, but the force pushed me back, feet dragging through dirt, and then the second wave came and the shield cracked.

This, while effective, wouldn't last long, so I dropped it and dove to the side as the ground where I'd been standing turned into a crater.

I came out of the roll, dodging one last attack before launching a ki blast of my own — a big green ball soaring toward Frieza. He didn't move. Didn't even blink. He just held up one finger and the blast split in half around him like water around a rock, two halves going wide and detonating harmlessly in the distance.

I threw three more. Same result. He swatted the first one aside with his tail, let the second one graze his shoulder without flinching, and caught the third one in his palm. He held it there for a second, looking at me with a smile, as the green energy sphere crackled against his hand, and then he crushed it.

"Boring," he said. "Is this all your legend can amount to, little monkey?"

This pompous bastard. He'd just gotten the upper hand and he was already sucking his own dick… wait, does Frieza even have a… nevermind that. Not the time.

Jokes aside, he had a point. I was holding back a lot, and that made this fight look disappointing. If I wanted to, I could put enough power into a single blast to make him take me seriously. But that would mean revealing my hand, and I wasn't ready to do that yet.

The plan — such as it was — was to make Frieza think he had the upper hand, learn how he fights, and use that to close the gap in our power. I hadn't managed to reach the Super Saiyan transformation, meaning I had to rely on technique, tactics, and experience to overcome the difference.

Frieza was strong. His latent talent was quite possibly the biggest this universe had ever produced. But he was lazy. He'd never put any real effort into anything in his entire life, and that complacency — that absolute comfort with what he already had — was his biggest weakness.

I knew from the anime that Frieza couldn't fight at full power for long. It drained him fast, and based on that I could make an educated guess about how much power he could use comfortably without suffering the drawbacks of his 100% state.

My estimate? Around seventy to eighty percent. That was the ceiling before his body started working against him.

I didn't have a scouter strong enough to read my own power, but I was pretty sure I was stronger than Goku had been when he faced Frieza in the original story. So, all I had to do was really learn how the emperor fought — every tick, every habit, every tell — and use that knowledge to overcome any power gap that came after I revealed my full strength.

"You will regret your very existence soon, little monkey," Frieza laughed, and he pointed at me. A death beam hit me before I could react. Not a killing shot — he'd aimed at my shoulder. Instinctively, my body shielded itself just enough to avoid any lasting damage, but I still gasped, and looked down at the blood running down my arm.

Superficial at best. Painful nonetheless.

Still, seeing my own blood, my ki flared involuntarily — the power inside me lurching upward like a dog straining against a leash — and I had to clamp down on it hard.

"Is that all you know how to do?" I shot back, firing a ki blast from my right hand, big and fast, aimed at his center mass. Frieza dashed to the side and appeared above me. His leg came down in an axe kick that I blocked with both arms. The impact drove me to my knees as the ground cracked beneath me in a distorted pattern.

He kicked me in the face before I could stand up. My head snapped sideways, blood spraying from my mouth, and then he was above me again, palm down, gathering energy.

"Imprisonment Ball," he said casually, and a sphere of pure ki appeared around me. Then he kicked the ball. Hard.

I went flying — trapped, spinning, the walls of the ki sphere grinding against my skin — and Frieza chased me through the air, batting me back and forth like a cat playing with a mouse. Each hit sent me in a new direction. Left. Right. Up. Down.

The sphere held, but I could feel my body taking damage from the impacts. Annoyingly creative technique, I had to admit.

Frieza landed beside me, stopping the ball with his feet. He squatted down, tilting his head, looking at me the way you'd look at something stuck to the bottom of your shoe.

"Having fun?" he asked.

"You really know nothing about my people, do you?" I replied, grinning at him through the blood. "I'm having the time of my fucking life!"

Not happy with that answer, he stood up and kicked the sphere again, sending me skidding across the ground for a hundred meters before it finally shattered. I rolled to a stop and cracked my neck.

I was learning a lot about how he fought. He was overly reliant on energy-based techniques. He had good enough control at a base level to create somewhat complex structures — his death beams, imprisonment balls — but his waste of energy doing them was massive. So massive that it made my own waste from a few months ago look efficient by comparison.

It made sense, though.

Why would he ever need to learn proper energy management? The only beings above him in the food chain were Lord Beerus and Majin Buu, and one of those two was sealed away while the other spent most of his time sleeping. That made Frieza the biggest fish in the pond we call the universe, and big fish don't learn to swim better when nothing in the water can challenge them.

Either way, this worked well for me.

His general lack of experience in combat made it painfully clear that he wasn't built for long fights — the kind where the winner isn't decided by who hits harder, but by who tires out last. He would exhaust himself before long.

I think I've learned more than enough.

Time to start the real fight.

“Ahhh!” I roared, as the power erupted out of me like a dam breaking, as the force of the Great Ape flooded every cell in my body at once. My muscles swelled. My eyes shifted to gold. The green aura exploded around me, violent and wild, and the ground beneath my feet didn't crack — it vaporized.

Frieza's smile didn't waver, the blessing of him being unable to feel ki. Meaning he was still operating on the assumption that I was the same bug he'd been batting around for the last few minutes.

He raised both hands and fired. A massive barrage of ki blasts —

I took off, and flew straight through the barrage.

The blasts hit me and broke apart like waves against a cliff. Some scattered off my aura. Some vanished on contact. One or two clipped my body and did absolutely nothing. I didn't slow down. I didn't flinch. I just kept moving, closing the distance between us in a single heartbeat, and Frieza's expression finally started to change.

His eyes widened.

I hit him in the gut.

He doubled over my arm, mouth open, a sound coming out of him that wasn't a scream. Just air forced out of lungs that had been punctured.

I pulled my fist out and put my right hand flat against his chest.

"Eraser Cannon."

The beam fired at point-blank range. Green energy erupted from my palm and consumed Frieza's upper body, tearing through him and continuing on behind him, a massive pillar of destruction that carved a trench into the landscape for miles.

The dust settled.

For a moment, nothing moved. The trench I'd carved into the landscape was still smoking, chunks of earth cooling in the aftermath of the Eraser Cannon.

Then something shifted in the debris.

A hand emerged first, fingers digging into the broken ground, followed by another. Frieza pulled himself out of the rubble slowly, bleeding from his head, his chest, his arms. He was nowhere near death, but his body showed enough to make it clear that the blast had done real damage.

He stood there, hunched forward, purple blood dripping from his face onto the dirt in a steady rhythm. His breathing was heavy.

His mutilated tail struck the ground.

The impact cracked the earth beneath it, a clean split that ran ten feet in either direction. Then again. And again. Each strike harder than the last, like a whip cracking against stone, his whole body trembling with something that wasn't pain.

"I'm done toying with you," he said.

I grinned, green aura flickering around me.

"Who's been toying with who?"