Kaido's feet ground two deep furrows into the cracked lakebed. Every step made the tectonic plates beneath him groan in protest. Resting the broken half of Hassaikai on his shoulder, he tilted his head back to look at Frieza floating in the air.
Purple-black blood continued to drip from the stump of his horn. It was hot. It was agonizing.
But it felt so damn good.
"Uwororororo." Kaido laughed, dragging his club forward. It carved a long trench into the earth. "You little runt, you kick off one of my horns and now you're just floating up there, too scared to come down? What, afraid?"
Frieza said nothing. His hands clasped behind his back, he stared down at the blood-soaked monster laughing maniacally below. A flicker of subtle intrigue crossed his blood-red eyes.
Across all the countless planets he ruled, the number of creatures capable of still standing after being beaten into such a state could be counted on one hand. And those who could still laugh?
Not a single one.
"I am beginning to grow curious about your anatomical structure," Frieza finally spoke, his tone returning to that chilling elegance. "You are not a Saiyan, not a Namekian, nor do you belong to any known species recorded by the Frieza Force. That black scaled armor of yours... my Death Beam could only pierce it once. The second time, your regeneration speed caught up. Intriguing. Truly fascinating."
Frieza's tail swished slowly behind him. It was completely disproportionate to his seemingly delicate frame—thick, hard, covered in a white exoskeleton. You could even see purple veins pulsing at the joints.
Kaido noticed the tail. His Observation Haki shrieked in warning. Instinct told him that tail was infinitely more lethal than Frieza's fists or feet.
But he didn't retreat. When had Kaido of the Beasts ever retreated in his life?
A purple aura seeped out of Frieza's body. Not the thin barrier from before, but an explosive surge resembling a volcanic eruption. The density of his aura doubled in a single second. Then tripled.
Namek's ground began to vibrate. Using Frieza as the epicenter, every piece of rubble, clump of dirt, and broken tree within a two-hundred-meter radius was ground into molecular dust by the sheer atmospheric pressure. No explosion. No flash of fire. They simply vanished quietly. As if they had never existed.
In the ruins of the collapsed dormant volcano far away, Kaido was crawling out of the rubble. He was in terrible shape. The ribs shredded by Frieza's tail hadn't fully grown back. The bone shards that had punctured his lungs were only just beginning to be wrapped by regenerating muscle. With every breath, a wet, gurgling sound echoed in his chest—the sound of blood and air churning together in ruptured alveoli.
But Kaido was smiling. He had drawn blood. To hell with 530,000 or 5,300,000. My fist landed on your face. You bled, Frieza. That was enough.
Just as Kaido pulled his lower half free from the debris, Frieza vanished from his sight. It wasn't a fast movement. It was an outright evaporation. Observation Haki caught absolutely nothing. No fluctuation in ki. No displacement of air. Nothing.
Then, the pain arrived.
A crisp snap echoed from his left temple. The remaining stump of his severed horn was sheared off completely by an unknown force. The cut was as smooth as a surgeon's scalpel. Purple-black blood geysered from the hollow in his skull.
Before Kaido could even react, a massive section of Demon Dragon scales on his right shoulder exploded outward. They weren't smashed from the outside; they were torn apart from the inside. The kinetic impact bypassed his armor, detonating directly at the junction of muscle and bone. His shoulder blade shattered into three pieces. His right arm instantly went numb. Hassaikai slipped from his powerless fingers, hitting the ground with a heavy thud.
The third strike landed on his left knee. The entire joint was pulverized. The connection between his femur and tibia was completely severed.
Kaido's colossal frame lurched violently. The ten-meter-tall Demon Dragon Hybrid Form collapsed like a tower whose foundation had been swept away, crashing heavily onto his left side.
Three strikes. Left horn. Right shoulder. Left knee.
All within a single second. Kaido's brain couldn't even process which direction the attacks had come from. Above? Below? Left? Right? He had no idea. His Observation Haki hadn't captured a single fleeting shadow from start to finish. This was no longer a difference in speed. This was a dimensional slaughter.
Frieza reappeared in front of Kaido, hands clasped behind his back, his posture identical to when the fight began. It was as if he had never moved. The only difference was a few drops of purple-black blood staining his toes.
Kaido's blood.
"Do you understand the difference now?" Frieza looked down at the kneeling Beast. "Your body is indeed intriguing, I will grant you that. But between 'intriguing' and 'powerful' lies an entire universe."
Kaido rested on one knee amidst the rubble. His left knee no longer existed. Only a mass of violently writhing flesh remained. His regeneration was working frantically, attempting to piece the bone fragments back together and regrow muscle fibers strand by strand.
But it was slower now. Visibly slower. The absurd regeneration speed that healed gaping holes in two or three breaths was gone, replaced by a strained, sluggish mending process.
"Oh? Your regeneration speed has declined?" Frieza tilted his head, amused. "Just as I thought. Your regeneration is not limitless, is it? Every recovery drains your stamina. And stamina—"
Frieza raised a single finger. "—ultimately has a limit. Like a pool of water; no matter how fast it fills, if the drains are large enough and numerous enough, it will eventually run dry."
He spoke with the detached tone of a researcher dissecting a rare specimen in a laboratory.
Kaido kept his head down. His vision was filled with his own thick, tar-like blood pooling on the ground.
Frieza was right. His regeneration came at a price. The restorative power of his Demon Dragon Body stemmed from the SSS-rank reward and the Rayquaza template integrated from the Pokémon dungeon. These granted him recovery speeds far beyond common sense, but they ultimately relied on his stamina as fuel. And his stamina was bleeding out at a dangerous rate.
Those three strikes had each caused structural damage requiring massive amounts of energy to repair. Pulverized knee. Shattered shoulder blade. Completely uprooted horn. Regenerating all three simultaneously had drained at least twenty percent of his reserves. Combined with healing his shredded ribs, the energy wasted reverting from his dragon form after his failed Bolo Breath, and the continuous bleeding from the very start of the battle... Kaido estimated he had less than sixty percent of his stamina remaining.
Sixty percent stamina against a monster with 530,000 battle power, whose full-strength blow could only leave a red mark on his nose.
Heh.
Kaido grinned, blood frothing between his fangs.
"You're goddamn right," Kaido croaked. His punctured lungs hadn't fully healed, and the bubbling of blood could be heard with every word. "My stamina definitely has a limit. So what?!"
Kaido reached out with his functioning left hand, digging his five thick fingers deep into the bedrock. His nails splintered, tearing the flesh at his fingertips down to the bone, but he relied entirely on the strength of that single arm to support his massive frame.
He couldn't reach Hassaikai with his right hand. Fine, he wouldn't use it.
He pulled his left hand from the earth, curling his five fingers into a tight fist. His knuckles cracked like gunfire.
"A lifetime ago, Rocks broke half the bones in my body, and I crawled back up. Whitebeard gouged a chunk of flesh out of me with his bisento, and I crawled back up. That bastard Oden left a scar across my chest, and I crawled back the fuck up! And when Manager Blake strung me up on a crooked neck tree for three days and three nights..."
Kaido paused. "I didn't crawl up that time, I was let down. But I volunteered to be the security guard."
Kaido's left knee bent agonizingly. The regenerating limb let out a sickening crunch of grinding bone and flesh. The half-formed kneecap cracked under the immense strain of his muscles.
He didn't care. He couldn't wait.
Gritting his teeth, Kaido forced his left leg to straighten. The ten-meter-tall Demon Dragon staggered back to his feet. His newly formed knee fractured further under the weight, sending spikes of agony shooting straight to his brain. But Kaido merely spat out a mouthful of bloody phlegm.
His right arm hung uselessly at his side. His left hand balled into a fist. His horn was gone. Half his scales were shattered. He could barely stand. He looked like a broken doll that had been battered for three hundred rounds.
"530,000 is just 530,000!" Kaido's dark gold eyes locked dead onto Frieza. "I won't die on my knees."
Frieza stared at this blood-drenched monster—a creature who could barely even stand, yet was still grinning like a lunatic. A highly complex light flickered in his blood-red eyes. Disgust, perhaps, mingled with something he refused to acknowledge.
He opened his mouth to speak, but abruptly stopped, his head turning slightly back and to the right.
In almost the exact same breath, Kaido's Observation Haki exploded in warning.
An aura. Coming from the northeast. Closing in at high speed in a dead-straight line.
That aura was violently berserk to an unnatural degree. It wasn't the brute-force savagery of the Beasts, nor was it the bone-chilling oppression of Frieza. It was the volatile, sizzling rage of a red-hot iron plunged into ice water. It was wrapped in extreme humiliation, extreme fury, and wildly inflated confidence. The three elements twisted together like a bomb on the verge of detonating.
Kaido and Frieza turned to look at the exact same time.
Namek's green sky in that direction was violently ripped open. A white aura, trailing a massive wake, burst through the rift. Wherever the aura passed, the clouds scattered, and the atmospheric pressure carved a miles-long trench into the earth below.
He was here.
Kaido licked the blood from his lips, his dark-gold pupils narrowing. He recognized that aura. It was that arrogant brat in the blue spandex he had stomped into the dirt earlier.
But this ki was on a completely different scale. It had inflated to absurd proportions.
At the center of that white aura, Vegeta's figure drew closer and closer.
----
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