Juuhachi-gou watched, stunned and horrified, as building after building exploded and shattered into a million pieces. Glass flew, flames leapt, and people were tossed from open windows and lay broken on the sheets. Chunks of heavy concrete and steel beams rained down onto the city streets and smashed into the pavement with shaking booms, sending rocks and whips of metal slashing through the air. People dove to avoid the falling debris, but it was everywhere and the smoke was so heavy and black that they could not see what was falling or where to run. Most died in the streets, unable to escape the rush of concrete and glass that rained down upon them. Those that had been able to escape the crash of the buildings and the thickness of the smoke were trapped by the hungry flames and incinerated in seconds. The screams were no longer heard over the roar of explosions and smashing of concrete into concrete. The only other thing that Juuhachi-gou was able to hear was herself --- laughing.

The other Juuhachi-gou was laughing as she did this, her hands outstretched in another attack and her head held high. This evil Juuhachi-gou thought it was fun, thought that killing innocent people was a source of entertainment. She thought that killing innocent children as they wept at their bleeding mother’s side was hilarious. Again and again she laughed, and the sound of it was familiar and frightening all at the same time. Another building exploded, another innocent person was killed as it came crashing down in a blur of fire and smoke.

Enough! Juuhachi-gou screamed silently, unable to take it anymore. Stop, stop, stop! Leave these people alone!

But the other Juuhachi-gou --- the one that wasn’t her, continued her destruction, spurred on and even encouraged by the pleas for mercy. She stretched out her arms again and aimed straight for a child. The little boy was already limping and bleeding, and tears could be seen in his eyes as he struggled to move through the sea of concrete and bodies. When his head turned to see the evil jinzouningen in the sky, his mouth fell open in a cry and he ran, only to fall, clinging to a damaged streetlight as his leg gave out. The other Juuhachi-gou, the one that wasn’t her, seemed to find this intriguing. She flew closer, and stared down at the little boy as he cried incoherently and whimpered for his mother. He was no longer able to run, and fear had frozen his limbs to the dusty, broken streetlamp. His little body was shaking violently with both sobs and fear, and he buried his face against the cool metal, shielding his eyes from the horrible jinzouningen before him. The evil Juuhachi-gou tilted her head slightly, her mouth curling into a smirk.

Trapped inside, Juuhachi-gou screamed like she had never screamed before, and fought and clawed against the evil with every ounce of strength and heart that she still had left. With only her mind as a weapon, she lashed out at the evil violently, pushing it back as hard as she could, wanting to crush it, obliterate it. The evil fought back as well, its power almost overwhelming Juuhachi-gou as she struggled against it, her mind shaking from the pressure. But she fought back, knowing that her heart was stronger, knowing that if she poured every ounce of herself into this fight, she could win. She had to win. She couldn’t take seeing one more person die by her hand. She couldn’t face another whimpering child like this and watch the other Juuhachi-gou snap his neck. Enough was enough. Loss of control or not, Juuhachi-gou wasn’t going to take this anymore.

Terrified, the little boy clung to the twisted streetlamp with shaking arms. His family had died, crushed under the big rocks. He had been the only one to escape, but he had fallen and hurt his leg. He was bleeding and he was hurt, but his mother wasn’t there anymore to kiss him and make everything better. He was too young to know a lot about life and death, but his mother had told him that when people died, they went to heaven. He also knew heaven was a pretty good place. There were no fires in heaven and no falling rocks. The big kids wouldn’t get to pick on him anymore in heaven and his sister wouldn’t steal his crayons there, either. He wanted to go there now, wanted to get away from this awful woman and all of the big booms and falling rocks. He was afraid that it would hurt, though. Dying probably hurt pretty bad. It was probably even worse than his leg, or that time when he had to get that big shot. He cried loudly and waited for the evil woman to kill him, consoling himself with the fact that he would get to see his mother in heaven.

Then he heard the evil woman shout out in a strangled voice: “I’m not going to take this anymore!”

It was a strange thing for the evil woman to shout, and she said it in a strange voice. She didn’t sound mean anymore and wasn’t laughing like an awful witch anymore either. Though his young mind couldn’t possibly comprehend everything that was going on in the mind of the blonde jinzouningen, he summed it up in simple, easy to understand terms: Something had happened. The evil woman had changed. He wasn’t going to die today.

The little boy turned his head just in time to see Juuhachi-gou fall out of the sky.

There were voices all around him, seemingly surrounding him on all sides, wrapping themselves around his body and his mind. They were quiet voices, but voices that held volumes of tension and anticipation. He couldn’t understand what these voices were saying to him, or even if they were speaking to him at all. He simply heard snatches of sentences and bits of words, too scattered and slurred to make any sense to him. These voices floated in and out of his head as he struggled to wake up, to gain a sense of being. He had no idea where he was. He couldn’t feel his arms, couldn’t feel his legs, couldn’t feel his heartbeat echoing in his chest. There was no longer a need to breathe. His lungs, wherever they might be, seemed to fill with air on their own. It was dark here --- the kind of thick, sickening darkness that was impenetrable and unchanging, hanging over him like a warm, wet cloth. There was no pain, there was no anger, there was no sadness. There was nothing.

Juunana-gou struggled in this new, strange world, attempting to open his eyes and be able to see what was going on around him. He could no longer feel that his eyes were there, however. There was nothing but darkness and the garbled voices, which had since grown louder and more assertive. Uneasiness began to creep over him like a dark, ugly, ominous cloud. It felt as though he were alive and awake, but he had no body. His mind was living on, but it no longer had a place of rest. Had he died? How could he have died? Why couldn’t he remember anything?

A sudden sharp pain shot through him and his mind quivered in response, the hurt echoing through him. For the first time since he had started to become aware of his situation, he realized that there was another presence with him. There was something else here, something evil. He could not see it, but it crept in and out of the shadows, lurking in the dark corners of his mind. Though his eyes could not have been able to see this evil, he could tell somehow that this evil was smirking at him. It was mocking him, playing with him, taunting him.

You lost. It seemed to say to him. You are no longer in control.

Again, fear crept into his mind, sliding past the evil and cowering in a dark, lonely corner. Now that he knew the evil was there, he began to sense other things as well, such as the fact that his body still did exist. It was lying still and quiet, but it was there. He could hear the shallow breathing and the gentle heartbeats that came with sleep. His body was unconscious, but living and well. His control over that body however, was gone. It belonged to someone else now. Someone who wasn’t going to use it for anything but killing and causing fear. The evil thing had control of his body now, and it would never relinquish its prize. His body was no longer his, but he was still trapped inside of it, forced to live through every sin that this evil thing would commit. He knew now that his body was not asleep, not like the evil thing wanted the others to think. It was merely waiting. That was why he could not see. Though this evil thing was awake, it refused to open its eyes, waiting in secret until the others let their guard down.

Who are ‘the others’? I don’t remember being with anyone but Marron. Juunana-gou thought, fear churning sharply and angrily in his mind. Marron? Had the evil thing hurt her?

You lost. The evil taunted again, stepping out of the shadows. One ice blue eye stared back at him beneath a curtain of silky, jet black hair. It was him. The evil thing was him, the part of himself that he had never been able to completely control. The part of himself that had always been there, no matter what anyone did or said. It slept inside of him like a waiting tiger, crouched and hidden behind a row of trees. The part of him that wanted to kill, that craved to kill. It was what the doctor had given him; what he had fought to keep at bay ever since he had woken up with his back flat on a metal examining table, his body ripped open and a maniac standing over him with a scalpel and a smile.

If Juunana-gou still had his eyes, he would have cried. After all these years, the doctor had finally won. After all the fighting and the struggling and tears, the doctor had finally managed to wield him as his puppet after all. There was nothing there to stop the evil; he had nothing left to fight with and nothing left to give. It was over. He was helpless, lost and doomed. And it had been that way since the very beginning. The doctor had known that this would happen all along, had known it since the first time he had cut open their bodies and started his sick, demonic experimentations. Everything in his life since then had merely been a show. His family, his hobbies, his home, his whole fucking life. It had all been a lie. It had all been part of a disgusting, wicked game. Death would be kinder than this --- kinder than knowing that everything he had ever known had been counterfeit. He had been a pawn all along, someone else’s puppet. Death would be kinder than knowing that his own hands had most likely already killed his niece and were about to kill others as well. His mind trembled, then sank into a delirious, thick insanity. Death would be kinder than having to watch it all now, unable to shut his eyes, unable to turn away.

Alone and trapped in a body that was no longer his, Juunana-gou silently screamed.

Mirai Trunks flew over the burning city, his heart breaking over and over again with every new death that he saw. He turned his head from side to side, surveying the damage. It was horrible. Unspeakable. His sky blue eyes took it all in slowly, and his stomach began to churn with nausea and disgust. As he passed over the bodies of a mother and her two children, a new wave of fear and horror swept over him, so strongly that it took his breath away. He didn’t exactly know when it happened, but at some point during the course of his life, he must have forgotten how awful and sickening it felt to see this. Looking at the horror in front of him now, he couldn’t understand how this had ever floated out of his memory. How could he ever have forgotten what it felt like to have the heat of distant flames caressing his cheeks, or what the thick black smoke of burning concrete and flesh smelled like? How could he forget walking over the rubble of buildings and seeing all of the horror and the death spilled out in front of him, a wall of fire in the background? This was completely unforgettable. This was completely unforgivable.

How could anyone look at this atrocious display of evil and say that the jinzouningen did not deserve to die?

Flying slowly down to the earth, he dropped onto a chunk of charred concrete and stood there for a moment, looking all around him. He brought a hand up to brush the lavender strands away from his eyes and realized that he was shaking badly. He stared at the hand for a moment before dropping it to his side, his chin trembling. It was all too familiar. The most horrendous memories of his younger years were all coming back to him, surrounding him on all sides and swallowing him up, just as the wave of flames ate up its unknowing victims lying in the city streets. He caught a glimpse of himself in a shard of glass that was protruding up from the rubble and was surprised at how old he looked in his reflection. He had been a man for a long time now. He had grown up far too quickly and his childhood had been whisked away from him and shoved into some impossible hiding place. He had lived his life as an adult, accepting things the way an adult would and acting the way that an adult would act. His mother often commented on the fact that he had always been even more mature than she was. It was hard to remember a time when he had been a child; when he was scared and insecure and weak. But as stood there in the center of this obliterated, burning city, he was suddenly thirteen years old again: scared to death and fighting back tears of anger and fear.

The jinzouningen had hunted him like an animal back then. They stalked after him, taunted him, played with him. They knew that he was strong, but they also knew that he couldn’t win. Their power was much greater and they knew it well. He could not fight them. He could not hide from them. Everywhere he ran, they seemed to be waiting for him. They were amused by his persistence and his anger and often laughed between themselves, debating whether or not they should let this object of their entertainment live. They knew that he was only a child and that his strength would grow with age. One day he would be a great fighter, just like the ones that had come before him. They were bored and they craved excitement. They craved a good fight. They were tired of taking down victims easily --- they had destroyed the whole world this way. They wanted to fight for their victory.

In the end he had given them their fight. He had fought them to the death, just as they thought he would. But he had not been the one to die. Rightfully, they should have killed him long ago and spared him all of the pain that he had gone through. He had to admit that he wanted to die. At times he had gone out looking for them, suicidal thoughts plaguing his mind. It was only these times when the evil twins had not hunted him and he had not been able to find them. He was destined to live, destined to fight them, destined to win.

Victory however, had a high price. A tear slid down his cheek and he straightened up slightly, brushing it away bitterly with the back of his hand.

He would never, never let the jinzouningen destroy his world again. They would hurt nothing, no one. No one else would ever have to find their best friend lying dead in the street. No one else would ever have to know what it felt like to have the woman they loved die in their arms. Sons would grow up knowing their fathers; mothers would never have to worry if their children would be coming home alive. And these people would not have to live underground, their whole lives consumed in fear and sadness. His life was horrible. No one else knew how horrible it really was. No one else understood how important it was for him to end it before it started.

Mirai Trunks paused for a moment, listening carefully. For some reason, the explosions had ceased. There was still the occasional crash as another piece of a building fell and the roar of the fire could still be heard, but other than that it was silent. Nothing moved except for the fire that swept around him in bright orange and red waves. He stepped down from his perch and into the ash and dust that swirled around in the empty streets before him. He concentrated for a moment, heightening his senses. He could hear everything, see everything, smell everything. There was no other way to find the female jinzouningen. Stealthily, he slid in and out of the wreckage, dipping into shadows and following the trail of destruction to its source. All the fear that had been in his heart quickly dissipated and was replaced by anger and determination. Now he was the hunter.

Death was on his mind, but sadness was there as well. He wanted to kill Juuhachi-gou and Juunana-gou, wanted to hunt them down and murder them, just as they had murdered everyone else in his life. But a small part of him, the most humane part, was sad that it had to come down to this. Truthfully, he was tired of death. He was tired of seeing people die, whether they were enemies or not. He just couldn’t understand why things couldn’t be peaceful and why fate kept shoving death and destruction into his face like this. He wasn’t certain, but he had always thought that things were supposed to be better than this. Maybe in this vast universe, there was a place where lives were actually happy and the only death that came was a result of old age; a place where lovers stayed in love forever and no one even recognized the world ‘guilt’. Unfortunately for him, his life was not that perfect and somehow he was certain that it never would be. He had been destined to be a fighter.

A movement to the left caught his eye and he turned, his hand flying back to grip the hilt of his sword. He narrowed his eyes and looked up into the sky. They were flying above him; a group of people. It was not the jinzouningen; they usually flew in synch and they were much smaller. Plus, there were three of them, not two. The third seemed to be carrying a body in his arms. He squinted up at them quizzically, then searched for their ki. It answered him back happily, and his heart lightened.

Gokuu. Piccolo.