Goku's good-natured smile faltered, instantly replaced by a serious, focused expression. The light banter vanished in a heartbeat, and everyone's attention shifted back toward the empty northern sky.
Goku: *He folded his arms, his brow furrowed.* "It's unusual for Goten to be late. Melody, too."
Piccolo: *He nodded, his green features darkening with concern.* "Especially considering the circumstances. This isn't like them."
Piccolo's words had barely been spoken when nearly a hundred invasion pods shot downward through the cloud cover.
The sky erupted in streaks of roaring fire as the metal pods tore through the upper atmosphere, descending like a rain of meteors—each one a harbinger of pure destruction. The heroes tensed instantly, dropping into their respective battle stances.
Goku: *He clenched his fists, energy humming beneath his skin.* "No time to wait anymore!"
Vegeta: *He scoffed, powering up with a crackling surge of golden aura.* "Finally. I was getting bored standing around."
Helix: "Wave 1, annihilate all life-force. Wave 1, annihilate all life-force. Wave 1, annihilate all life-force..." *Helix's voice bellowed through invincible, high-frequency speakers overhead, ringing clearly across the desolate plains.*
The cold, mechanical command sent a sharp chill down every fighter's spine.
Goku didn't hesitate for a single second. He shot forward like a unleashed bullet, his fist pulled back just as the first pod cracked open mid-air—releasing a monstrous, jagged-limbed creature with glowing red eyes.
Piccolo was already on the move, slamming his palm into the earth to send massive shockwaves ripping through the incoming pods before they could even hatch their horrors onto the soil.
The battle had begun—and it was brutal from the very first second.
Within moments, the wasteland was burning. Goku traded heavy, lightning-fast blows with a towering opponent, each impact cracking the air like thunder. A few hundred meters away, Vegeta glared through a thick wall of smoke, ruthlessly tearing apart anything that dared to get close. The Z-Fighters were scattered across the broken ground, locked in their own intense skirmishes, with no time to look up or regroup.
Then, the sky literally screamed.
Four final, massive pods punched through the heavy storm clouds, trailing black fire and slamming into the earth one after another with catastrophic force. The ground heaved violence. Dust rolled outward in a thick, choking wall that swallowed the entire battlefield, and for one strange, eerie moment, every fight came to a dead halt.
Goku lowered his fist. Vegeta's smirk faded. Something inside that rolling dust cloud was moving.
Rot and Vex emerged from the first pod as a single, wet, stretching shape that was actually two distinct bodies joined together. Rot led the way—hunched, grey-skinned, his yellow eyes burning from within a face resembling a smooth, featureless black mask. Thick black ooze dripped continuously from his jaw and claws, leaving a glossy, smoking trail across the stone. Vex followed closely behind, pale and skeletal, her white eyes wide, hollow, and unblinking. Long, sticky strands of tar stretched between them like taffy, never quite snapping. They giggled and whispered over one another in disturbing, overlapped tones, speaking in rhythmic, eerie riddles.
The second pod split open with a metallic screech, and Bogy rose out of the smoke like a bruise given physical weight. His body was a bloated, swollen purple sphere cracked with glowing seams of unstable, molten light. Fifteen blood-red eyes rolled independently in every direction across his frame, and three distinct heads jostled for space on his upper surface: one snarling viciously, one grinning with far too many jagged teeth, and one still lumpishly forming. Dense ribbons of volatile violet smoke curled off his skin. Even the Z-Fighters felt the raw instability radiate off him—he was a living bomb that could detonate at any second, and he didn't seem to care who was caught in the blast radius.
The third pod opened with no sound at all.
Creep was simply standing there—a tall, shifting silhouette of pure ink and torn shadow, its ragged tendrils drifting like a cloak in the still air. Two glowing violet eyes scanned the battlefield without blinking. Its razor-sharp claws hung long and motionless at its sides. Nobody had seen it emerge from the pod, and when someone finally turned toward it, the shadow had already vanished from its spot. It didn't hunt directly; it waited for the exact fraction of a second you looked away.
The ground shuddered violently as the last pod tore apart from the inside.
Beast pulled himself out of the metallic wreckage—a towering mountain of cracked stone-flesh with jagged bone spikes jutting out along his spine. Superheated steam leaked continuously from the glowing seams of his massive, stone mouth, and his burning orange eyes swept over the fighters. Each step he took left a deep crater in the bedrock. Small, spider-legged surveillance drones scattered out from beneath his massive feet like frightened insects.