Escarot Vs King Cold
"Now, monkey," Cold said, "no more courtesies."
“Not bad…” Escarot whistled.
Wasting no time, the Tyrant struck, and the blow came faster than anything he'd thrown all fight, and Escarot barely got his forearm up before it landed, the impact driving him back three full strides, boots carving furrows in the dirt as Cold pressed after him, and the two of them met in a blur of blows that cracked the air like thunder, neither giving ground, shockwaves rolling out across the plain with every exchange and flattening what the fight hadn't already ruined.
Escarot ducked under a hook tilting his body to the side before snapping a punch into the tyrant's ribs, taking a knee to the gut for it, before the emperor's tail caught him across the jaw and sent him flying.
He caught stopping his momentum by digging his remaining hand on the ground, spat blood, and grinned.
"Not bad at all," Escarot said, rushing back in. "For a second there I thought I'd be bored again."
They clashed in the center of the plain, forearms slamming together with a crack that spun them both, and broke apart, and came together again, trading heavy blows at a speed that turned them into little more than golden and white streaks tearing across the red sky. Cold caught one of Escarot's punches and answered with an uppercut, but the Saiyan rolled with it and drove a heel into the emperor's neck on the way down.
Cold grunted, seized his leg, and hurled him into the ground, following with a blast from his palm, but Escarot was already gone by the time he did that, bursting out of the dust behind him to hammer him with his arm, into the back of his skull.
Cold spun in the air, grunting in pain, faster than his bulk should have allowed, and caught the Saiyan with the back of his fist across the face, followed by a blast at point-blank that sent Escarot tumbling end over end across the plain.
The Saiyan skidded to a halt on all three, and shook his head, and launched himself straight back in before the smoke had cleared, where they met again in a storm of blows, the sound of the impacts rolling out over the planet, until eventually the Saiyan gained the upper hand in the exchange, with Cold crashing down into the earth, tearing up a crater several miles into the crust of the planet, before flying out of it unhurt, his eyes narrowing.
"You should not be able to keep pace with me," the emperor said, wiping blood from the corner of his mouth as he looked at the Saiyan. “I am impressed…”
"Thanks," Escarot cracked his neck. "That said… this doesn't really work in your favor, does it?"
The tyrant's expression soured, and he came again.
There was no elegance to their fight now, their fight had simply turned; it was two forces trying to grind each other into nothing, blow for blow, crater for crater, explosion for explsion. From a purely physical point of view, Cold was stronger and had a clear upperhand, however, despite this… Escarot met his every move head-on, matching his attacks blow for blow, while shrugging off the ones that he couldn’t, his golden aura flaring brighter each time a hit got through.
Dodging a kick from the Saiyan, Cold caught him with a straight punch to the chest that cracked something inside him and launched him backward across the mountains, but Escarot twisted in the air, planted his boots against a jutting slab of broken rock, and rocketed straight back off it into the tyrant before he could follow up, driving a shoulder into his midsection and carrying them both through what was left of a hillside. They came apart on the far side of it, Cold lashing out with his tail, as Escarot ducked under it, answering with an kick to the jaw, and for a few seconds neither of them so much as touched the ground, trading strikes in the air faster than the eye could follow, shockwaves hammering out across.
Cold went for the stump.
His fist drove straight into the seared shoulder where the arm used to be, and white light burst behind Escarot's eyes, a bolt of pain so pure it nearly folded him. But he'd learned by now what to do with pain, and instead of buckling he snarled and let it feed the fire, snapping his head forward into the emperor's already-broken nose with a crack that sprayed purple across them both.
"You keep going for that arm," the Saiyan ground out, grabbing Cold by the tail before hurling him down into the dirt. "It's like you think it slows me down."
"Evidently… it hasn’t," Cold spat, tearing back up into the air.
"Exactly."
“Let’s cut your head this time, shall we?”
Cold conjured the Cold Saber again, and swept it at the Saiyan's throat. Escarot leaned back from the first cut, caught the second on his forearm, using his ki to stop the attack as he drove his fist through the tyrant's guard, forcing a wet cough out of him and buying the room to twist the blade aside, shattering a second time, glittering shards scattering into the dirt.
"That won’t work on me twice," Escarot said, spitting into the ground. "Besides, you're better than that."
"Insolent—"
Cold formed two of them, one in each hand, and came at him and this time Escarot had to give ground to avoid the attacks, weaving between the blades with only one arm to guard, taking a shallow cuts across the his body before he caught the emperor's wrist, wrenched it wide, before delivering a point blank blast at him, blasting him away, while also dissipating his energy sabers.
"That could’ve been dangerous…" Escarot admitted, looking at the cuts across his body. "Can’t let you do that."
From below, the tyrant loosed a torrent of ki from his open mouth toward the Saiyan, and Escarot flared his aura using his hand to slap the blast away, burning the back of his hand in the process as the ground behind him vanished under the attack he had deflected.
“You insolent vermin,” Cold muttered, and there — for the first time — he gasped.
A single hard breath, dragged in through his teeth as he watched the Saiyan. But Escarot caught it, and something behind his grin sharpened.
Because he'd been watching for it… Cold had spent his whole life being the strongest being in the universe, and he had never in all those centuries fought anything long enough to show him the problem with his 100% state, the stamina.
In fact, based on how the fight was going, it was clear that he didn't know how to pace himself in a fight against an equal.
"Are you getting tired?" Escarot asked.
"I’m barely getting started," Cold snapped, and rushed him.
But he was, and they both knew it now.
The emperor's strikes came just a hair slower than they had a minute ago, and Escarot met them cleaner, turning a punch aside and answering with one that snapped Cold's head back, ducking under the tail and driving a knee into the tyrant's stomach that folded him around it.
Cold caught himself and threw a backhand, however, Escarot took it on the shoulder rather than dodge, closing the distance, refusing to let the emperor create space to breathe, before headbutting him once more.
That was the whole game now, and Escarot played it without mercy.
Every time Cold tried to fall back, to gather himself, to build the ki for something big, the Saiyan was on him, chest to chest, giving him nothing but the privilege of meeting him head-on.
"That's the thing about you people," the Saiyan said, hammering him back across the plain, blow by blow, each one landing where Escarot wanted them, as Cold struggled to keep up. "All that power, and none of you ever learned how to actually fight! Frieza couldn't take a real fight either!"
Cold roared in anger and threw everything into a single haymaker that Escarot caught with his forearm, the shock of the strike buckling at his knees, as a crater bloomed out beneath their feet as the Saiyan held, his teeth bared, refusing to give an inch.
The tyrant tried to disengage after that, shoving off and hurling himself skyward to buy the distance he needed to breathe for a moment and reassess his position, but Escarot went after him, already expecting the emperor where he was going.
Cold twisted and fired a scattering of ki blasts to cover his retreat and the Saiyan bulled straight through them, the small explosions bursting harmlessly against his aura, and caught the emperor by the tail before he could climb higher, before slamming him back down into the ground, dropping after him boots-first into his chest, the impact hammering a fresh crater into the crust that spanned for several miles away, knocking the wind clean out of the old tyrant.
"Need a hand?" Escarot asked, looking at his missing arm as if it was a joke.
"Silence!"
Enraged at being the subject of ridicule, the emperor tore free and hurled himself back into the air, both hands rising, gathering a lot of energy into a growing sphere of roiling, purple light.
"If I cannot kill you," Cold hissed, his chest heaving in a way it had not at the start, "Then I will END this rock beneath you. I will finish what I came to finish, and there will be no Saiyans left to mourn their king."
Escarot's grin dropped, as if suddenly the moment he was reminded the fight had more at stake than just him, it stopped being funny.
"No," the Saiyan said quietly, and set his feet, and raised his one arm, palm out, toward the emperor. "You don't get to do that."
“Death Nova!” Cold hurled it.
The massive sphere of energy fell out of the sky howling towards the planet, with enough power to destroy the entire planet many times over.
Escarot met the attack with a blast of his own, gold erupting from his open palm to slam into the falling moon sized ball of energy, and the two attacks ground against each other, the shockwave of them meeting, tearing the clouds off the sky and lighting the whole hemisphere into a mix of the two.
But despite both attacks being somewhat equally matched, Escarot was one-armed, and couldn’t gather as much ki for his attack as his opponent, and it wasn’t before long that the gold began to lose ground. The falling sphere pushed him back a step, then another, his boots plowing furrows in the dying soil, the heat of it searing the front of him, the light of it drowning out everything else.
"I won’t lose," the Saiyan breathed through gritted teeth, using something he had yet to perfect but considering the situation, he had no other choice.
Super Saiyan Grade 2.
Pouring everything he had left, every bit of energy he had, every bit of anger built in him blow by blow, he shoved up the golden beam at once, and it surged, and Cold, who was already spent, running on nothing but desperation, could not answer it, as the gold punched up through the center of his attack, and the sphere came apart from the inside, and the emperor's own attack detonated around him in a wave of light that swallowed the sky and turned the whole ruined plain white for one long, roaring moment.
When it cleared, Cold was falling.
He hit the red ground hard, one arm, almost poetically destroyed by the explosion, the other trembling at his side, his chest dragging in breath after breath. His once immaculate white body was streaked with purple now, cracked and burned, and the power that had pressed down on the whole planet had shrunk to a miniscule fraction of what it once was.
Escarot dropped down in front of him, gasping, tired, but in much better shape than him.
"Impossible," Cold rasped. He tried to rise and couldn't. "I am — I am the strongest being in the—"
"That… would be Lord Beerus if we are honest," Escarot chuckled. "If anything, we are competing for second… or third place actually."
He walked forward, and realizing what was to come, Cold lashed out with the last of himself, a desperate blast from his palm, and Escarot let it break against his guard and kept walking, right up to the kneeling emperor, close enough to look him dead in those flat, terrified eyes.
"I learned something last time I did this," the Saiyan said, and there was no grin now, none at all. "I told you that on this planet, you would only find death…"
"Wait—" Cold's composure broke completely, his elegant confidence and demeanor cracking into something small and pleading. "Wait, you cannot, I can give you an entire solar system, you can be my son, you—"
"No," Escarot's aura flared one last time around his fist.
Cold opened his mouth.
Escarot didn't let him finish. The blow came down through the emperor's guard and through the emperor, a single concentrated burst of golden ki at point-blank range, and King Cold, the patriarch of the Cold Clan, the ruler who had held the universe in his fist for the last few centuries, came apart in a flash of light.
The silence afterward was nearly absolute.
Escarot stood over the scorched patch of ground where the emperor had knelt, and let his aura die. The gold drained out of his hair, and so did his strength, as he dropped to one knee in the dirt, the stump of his arm throbbing and bleeding, as he gasped for air.
“I… think I need to stop being so overconfident,” Escarot chuckled, turning to meet Okara as she teleported in front of him, kicking him into a mountain without any mercy.
"You fucking BASTARD," she said, and her voice cracked in the middle of it. "Your ARM…. what is the actual fucking hell is wrong with you?!"
"I’m not sure there is a medical professional qualified enough to give me a diagnosis…" Escarot muttered, as he looked up at the empty sky, and let out a long, tired breath, watching as Okara approached to carry him. "I think… I am about to… go to sleep.”
“You are big fucking idiot…” Okara muttered.
“I am…” Escarot admitted, and as he said that, the darkness came up over the edges of his vision, and the King of the Saiyans let it take him, slumping into Okara's arms with the dumbest, most satisfied grin still on his face.
“When did I become the smart one in the group?” Okara sighed, taking flight to the castle to deliver the wounded King to the doctors.