The Saiyans' spaceship streaked through the sky, easily slammed through the thin curtain of metal, which fixed itself in their wake nearly instantly, and crashed into the ground like a gift from God descending to the Earth.
The Saiyans inside opened the hatch and stepped out of the ship. Including Vegeta, there were around fifteen of them. They were greeted by a dark void-like pit, only illuminated by the weak lights from their spaceship.
Vegeta scoffed. Undeterred by the dark, dank atmosphere, he looked around. Most of the scouters that they'd brought with them, by this point, had been destroyed, so the group was essentially flying blind, but that was simply a mild annoyance to the Prince.
Unable to see much, though, he flew upward. Whatever this darkness was, it wasn't natural, which meant that the inhabitants of this planet would likely use artificial lighting of some sort to navigate it. From there, he could track his brother down.
But roughly halfway to the metal ceiling of the world, Vegeta stopped in his tracks, catching a glimpse of something just beyond the horizon.
Interested, he raced toward it.
"Vegeta?! Where are you- Nappa, stay here with the others. I'll go after him."
"Got it." Nappa agreed to Mel's order without hesitation, as was how things usually went. With Nappa's confirmation, Mel blasted off after the light of Vegeta's aura.
Meanwhile, Vegeta had gotten closer to the movement that he'd seen, and it stopped him cold. "What the-?!"
The scene in front of Vegeta was like this: Slug had grabbed ahold of Zeck's face and was dragging it across the ground, carving a massive trench in their wake as the Celatian warrior desperately worked to free himself, finally succeeding with a well-placed kick that bought him around fifty meters of distance from the Namekian warlord.
Without hesitation, the Celatian warrior-scientist used that time to unleash one of his special techniques.
Bright white light rippled out from both of his open palms as he pushed them together in front of his chest. The force from the lights colliding in Zeck's hands lifted the Celatian's hair up, but he continued undeterred, as the ball became more and more unstable in his palms with every passing moment, the energy building and building until it could no longer be easily contained by Zeck's energy.
The motion looked rather like the Kamehameha in style, but slightly different. More volatile.
Then, Zeck unleashed the energy in front of him, creating a bright wave of energy that rippled unlike any ki attack that Vegeta had ever seen, streaking straight toward Slug's aerial figure. "RESONANCE CANNON!" The Celatian shouted the name of his technique, a powerful ability that transformed ki energy into vibrational force, then blasted it at the target in a focused blast capable of instantly shearing apart anything in its wake, and even leaving vibrational aftereffects.
"HAAH!" Slug wasn't impressed by the science behind the attack, though. Instead, he simply raised his hands above his head and unleashed his own blast to cancel it out.
The collision of energies was epic in proportion. Rocks and trees were ripped out of the ground below. The metal ceiling above buckled a bit in response to the pressure, before smoothing itself out once more, and Vegeta was knocked right out of the sky.
Both Zeck and Slug noted the presence of the Saiyan, but neither recognized anything other than 'some weakling in the way', so neither paid him any mind.
Zeck raised a hand to his temple. It came away bright red with his blood, causing him to grimace.
"Z…k! C… n, Ze…! Y… Jured… Get O… Ck…!" Bulma's voice came in through the implant on the back of Zeck's neck, which had clearly broken during one of the many times that Slug had punched Zeck in the face.
Despite the fact that the communication function was broken and her voice was garbled almost beyond recognition, Zeck knew exactly what she was saying.
From the perspective of ki-sense, both combatants seemed to still be running in top-form, but the truth was an entirely different story.
Most of Zeck's power came from an external source, and couldn't be sensed. His real power level was actually being almost entirely supported by the Converter implant inside his body, which was the only reason that it wasn't flagging. In truth, he was about two steps away from completely collapsing. His body was battered with bruises and blood, both internal and external, and his muscles were already feeling the strain from his full power.
Meanwhile, Slug still seemed to be in top form. His ki hadn't dropped a bit, and his regeneration healed anything and everything that Zeck threw at him almost instantly.
Even the Resonance Cannon, his strongest technique, didn't even seem to wind the Namekian.
But things still weren't quite hopeless. At the very edge of his senses, Zeck could feel Tarble's energy flying his way at an incredible speed.
If he could just last a few more minutes, he knew that Tarble could bail him out.
Slug wasn't exactly ecstatic about the idea of giving the Celatian that sort of time, though.
The Namekian's arm shot forward like a bullet, aiming at the Celatian like some sort of grappling-type bullet. Immediately, Zeck began a series of high-intensity hyper-motion techniques to dodge the Namekian's hands as they flew at him.
It wasn't easy. Physically, Slug was far beyond Zeck in every way, shape, and form. But Zeck managed to hang in there. For how much longer, though, he wasn't certain.
There were several reasons that, despite the sheer, uncrossable power gap, Zeck was still standing.
First, Zeck's ki control was at least a tier above Slug's, thanks to the fact that it had been Tarble who'd originally taught him.
Admittedly, the gap had been closer to two tiers at the beginning of the battle, so Slug was catching up, but the course of the fight was also favoring the Celatian warrior quite a bit, as well, which made up for it.
Over the last few minutes of getting beaten mercilessly, Zeck had completely seen through Slug's combat style. Unsurprisingly, it was filled with the arrogance of someone who'd been born so strong that getting actual combat experience was an incredibly difficult construct. While he used energy attacks, his combat style leaned heavily toward grappling-type attacks, with a particular penchant for grabbing Zeck's face and upper body.
What that meant, in reality, was that he was exactly the type of fighter that Zeck dealt with best. Zeck's reflexes had been extensively trained to deal with mid-ranged attacks from fighters around one tier stronger than him. Plus, even though he'd mostly adapted to it, Slug was still a bit wary of Zeck's electricity-imbued close-combat.
Though the weaker warrior-scientist didn't have the capacity to actually harm the stronger, incredibly evil Namekian, he was holding on… at least for now.