Universe 11, God of Destruction's World
"Justice Chokehold!"
Gohan had just slipped past Toppo's finger beam when the Pride Trooper seized his opening. In a blink he was behind Gohan, both arms clamping down across the boy's throat.
"Kh koff…" Air refused to enter Gohan's lungs. Toppo's grip tightened and tightened; bones all over Gohan's body creaked under the pressure.
In his Godly State, Toppo already outmuscled Gohan's dark-gold Super Saiyan 2. No matter how Gohan twisted, he couldn't break free.
"Whis, it seems this is the end," Belmod said, smugness curling his lip.
"What's the rush? That kid hasn't shown all his cards," Whis replied, serenely slurping his cup noodles.
"Son Gohan, I told you justice will shatter evil! Now die! Hah!" Toppo bellowed, pouring every ounce of strength into the hold.
The sermon made Gohan's stomach turn. Disgust tipped into anger.
"Screw you!"
He stopped caring about "comprehending godly power." His brows vanished, brow ridge jutting hard. Searing dark-gold ki erupted, blasting Toppo off him; a net of lightning stitched across Toppo's frame, numbing him to the core. Gohan's hair surged down his back to his waist.
The 800× spike in power cracked the world around them.
Marcarita's staff tapped the ground; a sapphire barrier rose, shielding the three deities. Even that detonation couldn't budge it.
"Toppo, today I'm going to smash that self-righteous 'justice' of yours," Gohan said, choosing the brute force of Super Saiyan 3 to crush that near-deranged creed.
Boom!
He spun and drove a fist into the stunned Toppo, then rocketed after him. Air smeared into a blur wherever he passed.
Bam bam bam!
A fist. A kick. A beam. The three-hit string sent Toppo careening so hard he forgot where east, west, south, or north were. He plummeted into a broad lake.
Gohan hung high above, hands drawing to his hip.
"Kamehameha!"
A thick blue column tore down toward the water.
Flat on the lakebed, Toppo saw the blinding light and felt the terror in that wave.
"Justice Impact!"
Still supine, he leveled both forearms. A one-meter orange sphere condensed in an instant and screamed up to meet the kamehameha packed with all the God Ki he could muster.
Gohan's kamehameha was monstrous, but still a mortal technique. The Orange Impact gnawed into it, eroding and pushing it back.
Like a battering ram, Toppo's blast drove the kamehameha uphill.
"Damn forgot about the God Ki," Gohan thought, face tightening.
There was no time to reset. The orange sphere was already at his face.
To hell with hiding Gohan reached to unseal the Power of Destruction and snuff the blast
Toppo read the moment and snapped, "Detonate!"
The orange sun spasmed
KRA-THOOM!
The explosion swallowed Gohan whole. The God-laced blast was nightmarish. Whis set the noodles aside, expression suddenly grave. For a heartbeat, even he couldn't sense the boy through the churning storm.
Toppo burst free of the lake, chest heaving.
"Evil ultimately shattered!"
With Gohan "defeated," his extreme justice swelled again. Even his aura and pressure climbed self-hypnosis weaponized as power. One misstep, though, and it all collapses.
His reckoning arrived at once.
As the smoke thinned, a lone figure stood in the sky scalding, mysterious, crushing in presence.
Gohan had changed into a form he'd never used before: red hair rippling like flame.
Super Saiyan God.
His hairstyle matched his base form, but he looked slimmer, his features chiseled and clear. The feral edge of his dark-gold forms was gone.
"Toppo, I owe you thanks," Gohan said, battle spirit soaring. "Let me answer your 'justice' with the power of a Saiyan God."
At the last instant, his Destruction power hadn't erased Toppo's blast but it had shielded his body. And when the sphere blew, its God Ki lay naked before him. Gohan fell into instant comprehension. The godly threshold he'd been brushing against finally broke.
He felt his life-state climb, his strength explode, his dimension rise.
Molten-red ki flared around him. His aura dropped to base, then flowed up red. Everything about him was calm. Serene.
The form surprised even him. He'd assumed the strange qi and primal breath in his body would twist Super Saiyan God into some aberration. Instead, it was pure God Ki refined to its simplest state, no trace of impurity.
Whis's solemn face brightened. "Oh-ho-ho… round two begins."
Belmod's pride froze, then curdled into dislike. From that instant, he took a set against Gohan because the boy had made him lose face in front of Whis.
"Impossible. Impossible! No one could've survived that," Toppo stammered. His God Ki, which had been rising, collapsed back to its earlier level.
"Toppo, what am I in your eyes now? Still 'evil'?" Gohan stepped and vanished. He reappeared point-blank, gaze level and quiet as Toppo's eyes shook.
"A disguise! Just another mask of evil," Toppo forced out, stubborn to the last. Even with Gohan's God Ki ringing clean and orthodox, he refused to accept it.
"Heh. A man who won't face reality," Gohan said, smiling lightly.
He lifted a fist and seemingly slow, actually blinding buried it in Toppo's gut.
KRUMPH!
Toppo rocketed backward into a mountainside, punching a crater into the unyielding rock. Gohan stepped once and was there again.
Bam-bam-bam-bam!
Gohan's body barely seemed to move, but pits bloomed across Toppo's frame punches too fast for the eye to track. The rhythm gave Belmod a prickling déjà vu Jiren.
Toppo's fighting spirit snapped; his creed caved. He went limp and blacked out.
Gohan let the red fade and returned to base. The drain shocked him.
He couldn't hold Super Saiyan God long shorter than even SS3. The multiplier was simply too extreme: 4,000×. With a base around ten billion, the form hurled him to 40 trillion in an instant.
That sort of leap demanded a colossal foundation to sustain it. His current base wasn't enough for drawn-out God-form combat. If he wanted duration, he'd need a base in the hundreds of billions.
In breaking through, he also understood: Super Saiyan Blue didn't multiply as hard as Super Saiyan God. Blue's edge was efficiency low drain, stable output, stamina for long fights. No wonder, he thought, that in the anime he'd found it odd: SSG looked overwhelmingly strong, while SSB felt… mortal again.
A hundred-billion-point base? Even the canon Goku and Vegeta in their SS2 days didn't have that. Hence Blue.
Maybe only GT's kid-bodied Goku achieved it centuries of grind pushing his base into the hundreds of billions. After all, at GT's start, he fought Uub in base to a near draw. And Uub, trained by Goku, was at least Fat Buu tier if not higher. If Uub was at or above a hundred billion, and base Goku matched him, then GT Goku's base had to be past that mark.
Super Saiyan God still had depths to mine. Gohan would have to test and refine it step by step.
"All right, you've met your goal. Time we headed back," Whis said, rising to drift to Gohan's side.
"When are you coming again?" Belmod asked, unwilling to let it end.
"Oh? And by that you mean…?" Whis prompted.
"The strongest mortal in Universe 11 isn't Toppo," Belmod said through clenched teeth.
"Gohan?" Whis didn't answer he handed the choice to the boy.
"Lord Belmod, relax. Within ten years, I'll face the one you're talking about," Gohan said.
"Ten years… not long. I'll be waiting," Belmod replied, composure returning.
"In that case, we'll take our leave."
Prismatic light rose as Whis whisked them home to Universe Seven.
"Hmph. Useless," Belmod snorted, leaving Toppo where he lay.
Marcarita did at least tend the man's wounds. When Toppo woke, despondent, he bowed his head. "I'm sorry, Lady Marcarita."
"The 'justice' you cling to does it work? It's a castle in the air. Think it over," she said, and departed.
Toppo's eyes unfocused. Belmod's words from long ago echoed back to him…
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't forget to add this story to your Library, drop a review, and leave a Power Stone if you enjoyed it!
Craving more chapters? Join my Patron to unlock advance releases and dive deeper into the story!
[email protected]/_theon
Change @ to "a"