บท 132: Ch. 132: Frieza's Terrifying 25% Power!

Glancing at the sky, it took Vegeta actual effort to not drop his jaw when he saw the orb that Raditz was creating. It was easily thirty meters in diameter, and if it got any bigger, it would blot out the sky like a second (or maybe third or fourth? Vegeta had no clue just how many suns Namek had, but he knew it was more than one) sun.

"Just a little bit longer." He muttered as Frieza tossed him into a crater like a sack of potatoes, not for the first time. By now, his mouth was flowing with blood and the world around him would lose focus the moment that his concentration slipped. But it didn't matter. If something could kill Frieza, Vegeta would throw even his pride to the wind.

Grabbing the rocks around him, Vegeta extricated himself from the crater. He couldn't back down now. If Frieza got even a single moment of peace, he'd look up and notice the Spirit Bomb.

Ignoring the girl falling to the ground somewhere behind him due to Frieza's tail attack, Vegeta burst up from the ground once again to attack Frieza head-on with all his might, but the tyrant wasn't amused by the foolhardy rush.

With a flick of his wrist, the tyrant caught Piccolo's arm, which had been elongated to try to bind him from his blind spot, then he spun the Namekian in midair, smashing him against Vegeta's full-powered charge before cruelly and effortlessly ripping Piccolo's arm off.

"Why do you keep up these foolish attacks? You know you're just throwing yourselves into the fire? Amusing as it is, it's beginning to get old." Frieza was getting the urge to simply destroy the planet and move on. His ship was useless, anyway. He'd wait on a nearby planet or something for another one of his ships to come by, searching for him. But just as he sighed, Frieza looked up at the sky and saw it. "That's... not a sun!"

For the first time since this fight began, Frieza actually panicked. That thing was huge... strong enough to destroy the entire planet if it was dropped down haphazardly. As the expert on planetary destruction, Frieza knew this better than anyone. If that was dropped on him, not even Frieza's power would be enough to allow him to survive unscathed. "You cut my cheek... You cut my tail... I'm sick of these annoying secret techniques! Just die, all of YOOOOUUUU!!!" With a scream of anger, Frieza unearthed another twenty percent of his power, upping his strength to twenty-five percent of his absolute maximum, unleashing an incredibly powerful wave of energy that caused such damage to the immediate area beneath him that lava shot from the ground through a few cracks, but Frieza didn't care.

"No! Raditz!" I screamed as Frieza rocketed toward the source of the Spirit Bomb in order to stop it.

Activating my Grey Mode times 15 in a rush, using energy stolen from Frieza's power up, I blasted toward Frieza, managing to catch up to him just as he landed, kicking Raditz into the ground with a sickening squelching sound.

"Uncle Raditz!" Gohan shouted, but Frieza simply raised a hand to him, his foot firmly planted on our uncle's chest.

"Die." Mercilessly, Frieza shot his signature death beam at Gohan, but I managed to get in the way just in time.

Naturally, I couldn't stop Frieza's beam with my body. Even at my absolute maximum strength, surpassing the power of even Raditz at his strongest, I didn't stand a chance against 25% of Frieza's full, overwhelming might. After all, his power output right now was around 40 million. So instead, I used my power to quickly absorb the beam through my left hand, redirecting it into another Death Beam aimed directly at Frieza with my right. It caught a surprised Frieza right in the chest, leaving an ashy black mark on the purple plate in the middle of his torso. Unfortunately, it didn't do anything more than that. Frieza's power was just too immense. Another unfortunate repercussion of my impulsive move was that it revealed the secret of seemingly endless wellspring of energy to Frieza.

"So... you're absorbing my energy, huh? I've run across techniques like that before, you know." Frieza noted, brushing at the black mark in minor annoyance. It'd probably hurt him about as much as a bug bite, but I didn't even have to look to know that the path that Frieza's energy had taken across my arms and torso had turned black due to the sheer power behind it. Absorbing that kind of power wasn't a big deal in and of itself to me normally, but the problem was that absorption was a terrible technique by itself. No matter how you did it, there was a limit to the amount of foreign energy that you could control. The only reason I'd been able to surpass that limit with Frieza's death beam was because I'd given up a certain amount of control in exchange, and it'd taken its toll.

A weak enemy with an absorption technique was absolutely worthless, and that was roughly the power gap between Frieza and myself. Now that he knew the technique, it wasn't worth anything to me.

"They all have a flaw. If one can absorb energy attacks, then..." Suddenly, something like a sledgehammer hit me right in the gut, but I didn't fly backwards into Gohan, because Frieza's left hand had already grabbed my face before his right hand's attack hit. Instantly, my internal organs were torn to shreds. I had to actually do some minor stomach surgery in the moment to keep myself from bleeding out and dying on the spot, but the blow still left me on death's door. "They tend to have a weakness, when it comes to physical attacks." Frieza whispered into my ear, pulling his fist back in preparation for another blow. This one would blast right through my gut. I knew that I'd not be able to defend against it.

But I wasn't finished yet.