ESCAROT

I moved first, closing the distance between us in a blink and throwing everything into a straight right aimed square at his ruined face. My fist connected and the impact cracked through the air like an explosion distorting his features to one side — cheek flattened, eye squinting, blood spraying from his split lip.

Frieza's head snapped back.

His expression hand’t changed at all. That raw, unfiltered rage was still burning behind his eyes, etched into every line of his face like it had been carved there.

His tail whipped around, trying to strike me. I ducked, and came up with an uppercut that he leaned away from by a hair.

Frieza's counter came fast. A barrage of strikes — palms, fists, elbows, knees — all of them laced with enough ki to make each hit explode on contact. I weaved through the first three, slipped the fourth, caught the fifth on my forearm and used the momentum of the explosion his ki fueled attack had created to spin into a counter of my own. My elbow caught him in the ribs and I felt something crack.

He didn't flinch.

His return strike caught me in the chest. A open-palmed thrust packed with energy that detonated on impact and sent me skidding backward, feet carving trenches in the dirt. I stopped myself a few hundred meters back, and he was already there, firing a death beam so close to me that I tilted my head to avoid it, almost losing an eye in the process. Another one came immediately after — I deflected it with my forearm, the beam scattering off my aura in a shower of sparks, but not without leaving some damage behind.

This was getting hard to manage, and he still had more power to show.

I grinned, this was it, this was what my body craved, the pain, the danger, the struggle! This is what it meant to be a true Saiyan!

I closed the gap again, throwing a jab to his face, however— he caught my wrist and tried to pull me in for a knee to the gut, but I twisted out of his grip, using the rotation to add power to a spinning backfist that clipped his temple.

He stumbled. Just half a step. Then a ki blast hit me in the side, point-blank, and I felt my skin blister.

“Fuck,” I hissed.

Right. Energy attacks. He loved those.

I ate the hit and threw myself into his guard before he could follow up. My shoulder drove into his chest, pushing him back. He fired another blast into my back — burning, searing — but I ignored it and headbutted him square in the face. His nose flattened, as purple blood poured.

“You filthy monkey!” Frieza hissed, grabbing my throat.

His fingers closed around my neck like a snake and lifted me off the ground. I could feel the energy building in his palm — he was going to blow my head off at point-blank range if I didn’t escape out of this one. So, knowing it was do or die, I slammed both hands down on his wrist, prying at his fingers, and kicked him in the stomach with both feet. His grip loosened just enough for me to tear free, flipping backward and landing in a crouch.

We stared at each other across twenty meters of scorched earth. Both of us bleeding. Both of us breathing hard. Frieza's rage hadn't dimmed. If anything, it had gotten worse. His aura was flaring erratically, pulses of purple energy crackling off his body like static discharges.

I was sweating. Not from exhaustion — not yet — but from the sheer effort of keeping up, the art of fighting a stronger opponent meant making next to zero mistakes. He had the upper hand in raw power. That wasn't debatable. Every exchange, every clash, every trade — I could feel the difference. Each block I made rattled my bones a little more than the last. Each hit I landed seemed to do less than the one before.

I was making up the gap with skill. Technique. Timing. Every dodge was calculated, every counter was placed where his guard was weakest, every movement was designed to get the most out of the power I had. It was working — I was still standing, still fighting, still in this — but it was costing me.

A lot.

"I will admit," Frieza said, his voice raw and grinding, he was trying so hard to appear composed, yet even the dumbest tool on the shed could see how pissed he was, "your power caught me off-guard one too many times."

He wiped blood from his face with the back of his hand.

"But I can clearly see you have reached your limits."

I was breathing harder than I wanted to be. My arms were heavy. The hits I'd taken — the blasts, the imprisonment ball, the death beam through my shoulder earlier — were adding up. Saiyan biology was great for recovery, but recovery happened after the fight. During the fight, damage was damage.

"While I," he continued, "am barely at seventy-five percent of my power."

75% was roughly around as much as I expected he could use without exerting himself into his buff form, meaning theoretically speaking… he was at his maximum power.

"And yet," I said, grinning through the blood, "I'm still alive."

He didn't like that. His eye twitched.

I launched myself at him again, closing the distance and throwing a right hook at his jaw. He disappeared. One second he was in front of me, the next he was gone, and my fist hit nothing but air.

I felt him before I saw him. Ki sensing was the only reason I didn't get blindsided — his signature flared somewhere above and behind me, massive and concentrated, and I looked up just in time to see it.

A sphere of energy. Easily ten times my size, easily, and growing, boiling, hissing with so much condensed power that the air around it was literally catching fire. Purple and black and white-hot at the core, casting shadows that stretched for miles.

Death Ball.

"I am done playing these games! You insignificant worm!" Frieza's voice echoed from somewhere inside the glow. "You can die alongside this pitiful excuse of a planet!"

He pushed it down at me.

The thing fell upon me like a meteor. The sheer weight of its ki pressed down on me before it even got close, crushing the air out of my lungs, flattening the ground beneath me into a bowl shape. I barely had time to cross my arms and brace.

It hit me.

The heat was instant. Unbearable. Like being submerged in magma but hotter. The sphere pressed down on my crossed arms, grinding against my guard, and I felt my feet sink into the ground as it pushed me deeper and deeper, knowing very well that if I let it touch the planet it would explode killing everyone. My aura flared wildly, trying to push back, but it wasn't enough. The Death Ball was too big, too dense, too heavy. It was engulfing me slowly, the edges curling around my body like a closing fist.

I couldn't overpower it. That was obvious. Even with everything I had, even at full output, this thing was above my weight class. Pushing through it with brute force wasn't an option.

So I did the only thing I could think of.

I shifted it.

Instead of trying to force the Death Ball away from me — which would've been like trying to push a mountain — I decided to change its angle. My arms screamed as I adjusted my guard, guiding the sphere upward by a fraction of a degree at a time. If I moved too fast, it would crush me and destroy the planet. If I moved wrong, it would crush me and destroy the planet. Either way, crushing was on the menu unless I was perfect.

An inch. Another inch. The Death Ball tilted, its trajectory shifting from straight down to slightly diagonal. I kept going, gritting my teeth so hard I thought my jaw would crack, and slowly — agonizingly — the sphere began to rise past me.

It was still burning my skin, while trying to swallow me whole. But it was moving in a direction I wanted it to move, and that was enough.

Once it was safely above my head, I threw everything I had left into my arms. Every drop of ki. Every reserve. Every ounce of power Surge gave me — all of it, dumped directly into my arms in one reckless move.

My arms screamed. Blood ran from my wrists where the skin had split under the pressure. The Death Ball shuddered, slowed, and then launched upward — away from me, away from the planet, screaming into the sky.

I watched it go. 

A shrinking purple dot rising into the atmosphere, growing smaller and smaller until it was just a speck, and then nothing.

I let my arms drop.

They were a mess. Skin burned down to the raw meat in places, blood dripping freely from my forensarms, fingers twitching involuntarily from the nerve damage. I couldn't feel my left hand.

I heaved a sigh of relief.

That was close. Too close.

“You’re getting desperate, Frieza…” I grinned, pointing a bloodied hand at him. “Are you… perhaps scared of what I might be capable of if this continues?”