Okara

He was finally coming… I could feel his power coming closer and closer to Planet Vegeta.

"Sit down," Nail said, his arms crossed as he looked at me. "Please."

"Can't."

"You have been pacing for the last two hours."

"Yeah yeah."

From what I could feel, Cooler was strong, but weaker than both his father and brother. But perhaps like them, he had a form locked inside of himself.

Either way, I was fucking delighted to test my might against an opponent of this level! I want him to be strong. I want him so strong that when I put him in the dirt, nobody in the entire galaxy gets to say it was luck.

"You think you can beat that?" Nail asked.

"Yep."

"What if he’s stronger than you?" I knew what he was actually saying, what if he has transformation of some kind.

"I dunno!"

"Okara…"

"WHAT?" I threw my hands up. "I don’t know! I’ll figure it out as I go, don’t worry."

Nail put his face in his hand. If he had a problem he could go Super Namekian and fight the guy.

I stood up and shook out my arms and stretched.

"He is entering the atmosphere," Nail said, standing.

"FINALLY." I cracked my neck, then my knuckles, then my neck again. "Time to kill the last fucking lizard of this family."

"We count on you, Okara…”

"Don’t worry green guy, I’ll take care of this," I watched the black shape of his ship come down through the clouds, heading for the exact patch of dirt where King Cold had died… that had to be on purpose, and if it was, it was quite lame.

The ship eventually touched down on the plain.

I grinned so wide it hurt.

"Let's go."

Okara Vs. Cooler

Cooler's ship arrived, dropping through the atmosphere, landing exactly where King Cold had died, as if choosing that particular place was a joke some would appreciate, perhaps for Cooler it was, the place where the end and the beginning of an empire started.

Okara was waiting for him before the hatch opened, arms crossed, standing on the hilltop above the landing site with Nail a few paces behind her.

Cooler stepped out alone.

"I remember you," he said, looking up at her with mild interest. "The King's little companion."

"That's me, shitface."

"How charming." He glanced past her, toward the castle, and something in his face settled into satisfaction. "I've come for your King, and your people. I don't intend to make a spectacle of it, I owe him a great deal after all, and I'd prefer to pay that debt in kind. So, I'll make sure he doesn't suffer, that's more mercy than my brother would have shown, and considerably more than your kind has ever shown anyone."

"That's really generous of you," Okara said, cracking her neck.

"I take it you won't let me go past this point without a pointless fight, right?"

"And here I thought you were an idiot."

Cooler smiled at that.

"Oh, little Saiyan," he said. "You are beneath consideration now as you were then, but if you wish to die first, I am happy to oblige." He started up the slope, walking at a steady pace. "That said, I am not one without mercy, so step aside, and I'll let you live long enough to bury Escarot."

"Yeah," Okara said. "No."

She uncrossed her arms, planted her feet, and clenched her fists.

And then she started to shout.

Cooler stopped walking, more out of confusion than anything else. The girl had dropped into a crouch on the hilltop above him and was straining, teeth bared, her whole body locked rigid, and for a moment he genuinely believed he was watching some primitive Saiyan intimidation display.

Then the ground began to crack under her boots.

Her power came up in shuddering, uneven lurches, climbing, stalling, climbing again, and the air around her started to distort, and Cooler's amusement began, very slowly, to fade.

"What," Cooler said, "are you doing?"

Her aura was spitting off her in ragged bursts of white that flickered, for half a second, into gold, just as her hair flickered between two colors.

Black.

Then gold.

Then black again, until the hilltop came apart beneath her with a harrowing scream.

"AAAAAAGH—"

The transformation swallowed the area around her as the light climbed her arms and ran up through her hair and lifted it straight off her head, and her eyes went green, and the shockwave rolled down the slope and flattened everything on the plain that hadn't already been flattened by the last fight that happened there, and when the dust cleared she was standing in the middle of the plain, with gold burning off her in a column, breathing hard, grinning.

"Sorry," Okara said, rolling her shoulders. "Still not great at that part. Takes me a second."

"...You."

"Me." She flexed her fingers, and the gold flared brighter. "Yeah, turns out this won't be as easy as you thought, lizard."

Cooler took a step back.

"Something wrong?" Okara asked, and then she vanished.

His head snapped up a full second too late, because she was already above him, and the heel that came down into his shoulder drove him a body-length into the rock and blew the entire slope apart.

He came out of the dust, twisting away from the follow-up, and her fist punched a crater into the ground where his skull had been. He put distance between them, landed on the ruined plain, and had perhaps a second to register that his shoulder was numb before she crossed the gap and was on him again.

"You—"

She didn't let him finish, instead she kicked him through a mountain.

He flew out of the rubble on the far side of it in a spray of stone, bleeding from the mouth, and hurled a blast back at the hole he'd come out of, aiming at her. However, the blast detonated against nothing, because by the time he had charged the attack, she wasn't there, she was already behind him, and he only knew it because he felt her ki right as he turned into a punch that folded him around her fist and sent him tumbling across the sky.

Cooler caught himself, and before Okara could attack once more, he powered up. His ki flared out around him, the pressure of it flattening the ruined ground for kilometers in every direction.

Okara stood in the air across from him with her arms loose at her sides, and waited for him to finish.

"Hm," she said. "Was that all of it?"

He came at her, and to his credit, he was fast, faster than most beings in the universe, and certainly faster than anything she'd fought up until this point. He crossed the distance instantly and struck at her chest, however, she leaned aside from it, took his knee on her hip, and drove her elbow down into the back of his neck hard enough to send him to the ground like a shooting star.

He stopped himself a meter above the dirt, using his own momentum to spin, and fired.

The blast came up at her in a column of pale purple energy wide enough to destroy the planet. That said, Okara simply raised one hand and slapped it off course into the sky, where it detonated against the upper atmosphere and turned the whole northern horizon purple.

"I want you to know," she said, "that I'm actually kind of disappointed. I've been getting ready for you for four months. FOUR MONTHS. And you give me this shitty performance, you're weaker than your brother, and much, much weaker than your father… this is just sad, no wonder you needed Escarot to get your worthless empire, without him… you would've always been under another, like a bitch."

Cooler said nothing.

He had built his entire strategy on a single assumption. That Escarot was an aberration. A once-in-an-age freak whose power had nothing to do with what he was and everything to do with who he happened to be, a lucky monster, born wrong, unrepeatable. That assumption was the reason he had let the Saiyan live long enough to kill Frieza.

It was the reason he had aimed his father at him.

It was the reason he had felt safe planning around him at all.

And while he knew other Saiyans could achieve this transformation, he never expected the results to be nearly as remarkable as this.

"...That is an interesting theory," Cooler said, chuckling.

"Yeah?"

"It has one flaw." He lifted his head, and there was no anger in his face at all, which should have worried her more than it did. "You have assumed that what you are looking at is all there is."

He stood.

"I have never had a reason to correct it," he said. "Until today." And then the pressure began to climb. "You will be the first to see this transformation…"

The pressure climbed, and kept climbing, and showed no signs of stopping.

Okara had felt a Cold Clan transformation before, their transformations felt more like releasing a seal than anything else. This was not that.

This was Cooler's body changing, his frame swelled, plates of bone forced their way up out of his shoulders and forearms and split the skin as they came. A mask of it crawled across his face and locked over his mouth, leaving nothing but two red lights burning where his eyes had been, and a great blade of horn punched out of either side of his skull.

The ground for a kilometer sank, evenly, as his power continued to rise.

"Huh," she said.

"You are wondering what this is." Cooler's voice came out layered, two tones at once, one of them lower than a voice should go. "You should. Nobody alive has seen it."

"Not looking good, Frieza 2.0,"

"My family does not transform," Cooler said, ignoring her obvious attempts to get a rise out of him. "Every form we normally wear is a restraint." He flexed one enormous hand and the bone plates ground against each other. "Frieza never earned a single unit of power in his life. Neither did my father. They simply removed what they had been born wearing, and called it growth, and died believing there was nothing above it."

He took a step forward, the earth cracking underneath his massive frame.

"I am the first of my line," he said, "to actually get stronger."

"Congratulations."

"It took me decades to reach this level, in secret, because if my father had ever learned that such a thing was possible he would have killed me to protect his precious heir." The red lights narrowed. "Do you understand what that means, girl? Every other member of the Cold Clan reached the end of what they were the moment they were born. While I went past it! I am the only one of my bloodline who has ever built something!"

Okara rolled her shoulders and let the gold come up brighter.

"So you did your homework," she said. "Congratulations, now let's grade it!"

She vanished.

She reappeared above and behind him with her heel already coming down, the same opener that had put him through a slope five minutes ago, however, this time Cooler's hand came up without him turning around and caught her ankle out of the air.

"Oh," Okara said.

"Oh, indeed," Cooler replied, before slamming her down hard enough to bury her several miles into the earth.

Cooler followed her into it, took a fistful of gold hair before the earth stopped her, and drove his knee into her stomach with a sound like a building collapsing. She came off his knee, folded, and he hit her twice more on the way down and then blasted her out of the hole entirely.

Okara tore across the sky, hit a mountain, went through the mountain, and stopped herself a kilometer past it with blood in her mouth and her ears ringing.

She had about a second to appreciate the size of it before he was in front of her, she got her guard up, but the blow came through her forearms and folded them back into her own face, and the next one caught her across the ribs and she felt something go, and then she was falling again with the whole world spinning.

She caught herself twenty meters above the ground. Spat red. Stood up in the air on legs that didn't want to hold her.

"There," Cooler said, drifting down toward her, entirely unhurried. "What's my grade, little Saiyan?"

"Round two's not over yet."

"Round two ended when I stopped indulging you." He tilted his head. "May I tell you what I've learned in the last ninety seconds? I think you'll find it interesting. I certainly did."

She didn't answer.

"When I landed here," Cooler said, "I was afraid of your king. Genuinely afraid, I'll admit that to you, since you won't be repeating it. After all, he killed my father, whom I could not have touched."

He stopped a few meters from her, and the red lights looked down.

"And then you showed me the Super Saiyan," he said, "and I have to thank you, because I have been wrong for months. I overestimated him."

Okara's head came up.

"This is it?" Cooler spread his arms, and the bone plates ground. "This is the legend? This is the thousand-year monster your entire species tells stories about? This is pathetic, if this is what defeated my father, I should've killed him myself…"

He drifted closer.

"Which means Escarot was never a threat." The two-toned voice went almost gentle. "And my father was nothing but an old emperor who ruled the universe for four centuries on nothing but reputation, and the moment something genuinely difficult stood in front of him, he could not do it, and I never knew because nobody ever made him try." Something like disgust moved through the layered voice. "I have spent my whole life waiting for that man to die so I could take what was his, and it turns out he was never worth being afraid of at all… I have wasted a great deal of patience."

Okara wiped the blood off her chin with the back of her wrist.

"You done?"

"Nearly." Cooler raised one hand, and the black light gathered in it. "I still have to kill you and your King."

"Yeah, see, that's the thing, fucker." Okara cracked her neck from side to side. "You won't."

"I won't?"

"Yeah, see… You've made two mistakes in the last few minutes." She held up two fingers. "First one: you think you can beat me."

Cooler tilted his head. "And the second?"

"Thinking you're the only one that can strategize," Okara said, before vanishing out of sight.

Cooler's senses reached for her and found nothing at all, no signature, no direction, no lingering trail, as though the girl had simply been deleted from the world. He turned once, fast, and found nothing, and in the quarter-second that took, something enormous hit him in the side of the head.

He registered two things as he went through the mountainside.

The first was that the blow had come from behind him, from a place she could not possibly have crossed to.

The second was that the fist that struck him had been the size of a small spaceship.

Cooler came out of the rock, turned around, and stared.

Okara stood on the plain below with her right arm returning, shrinking, the impossible bulk of it running back down her shoulder, until it was back to its normal size.

"Yadrat," she said, and flexed her hand. "Remember? Little planet, weird people, absolutely no fighters worth a damn. Escarot and I trained there for a while, all thanks to you."

"...So you learned their techniques…"

"I did, wanna see it again?"

She vanished again, and this time he felt her arrive, a full second after she'd already got there, her ki appearing at his flank out of nothing at all, and he swung and hit empty air because she was gone again before the movement finished.

"Instant Transmission," Okara's voice said from somewhere behind him. "Quite handy if you are creative using it."

He fired at her, missed once more, and was hit by a giant foot in the face.

"Gigantification," Okara said, watching Cooler hit the ground. "This one took me a while, as it requires more spirit control than the first technique, but I am fucking awesome, so not only did I learn how to use it, but I worked out you can do it in pieces. One arm. One leg. Half a second, right at the end of a swing, when you've already decided where the punch is going to be, it increases the power behind the strike exponentially."

"This won't help you," Cooler said, launching himself at her, only for Okara to teleport out of sight once more.

"See, you're a counter-fighter kind of warrior," Okara said, reappearing at his shoulder. "You read the attack, you position, you take the opening."

She drove her knee up into his ribs, changing the size of the attack to a boulder before it landed.

Cooler folded around it and went down into the dirt.

"Problem is," she said, standing over the crater, "You're fighting ME!"

He came up out of the ground with a roar and swung, and she caught his forearm, then she hit him in the mask with the other fist and broke it, the crack ran from his cheekbone to his jaw. Cooler tore free, put half a kilometer between them, and touched the fracture with two fingers as though confirming it was real.

"Not bad… but it won't be enough," Cooler said, looking at Okara. "You either find a way to kill me, or die when I learn your patterns…"

"Good luck with that, I don't even know my next move," Okara snorted, looking down at Cooler.

Cooler was right and she knew it, none of her attacks actually hurt him. The energy coming off him hadn't dropped at all. She could dance around this thing all day and eventually she'd get tired, and he wouldn't, and that would be the end of it.

She needed her hits to count.

"We'll see," he said, and came at her.

She let him come. She let him get close enough that she could see her own reflection in the bone of his mask, and she waited until his fist was already moving, and only then did she move her own, an unimpressive punch that carried no visible power whatsoever, that his senses read as nothing, one that he did not even bother to block.

It hit him in the chest.

And with a massive shockwave, Cooler left the ground backward at a speed that broke the sound barrier many times over, and he did not stop until he had gone through two hillsides, eventually coming to a stop with his hands and knees in the dirt, purple blood coming out from behind the mask, and for the first time in the entire fight he could not immediately stand up.

Okara stood in the crater she hadn't moved out of and shook out her hand.

"Spirit Control," she said. "With enough Spirit Control, a simple attack can become so much more."

Cooler lifted his head.

"Cool as shit, isn't it?" Okara said. "You could measure it with a scouter and it'd read like a love tap. But it just does more… much more when it lands."

Cooler got up.

It took him longer than it should have. When he was upright the two red lights found her across the ruined plain, and the layered voice, when it came, had lost every trace of its earlier warmth.

"You are not the same as your king at all," he said.

"Nope."

"But at the end of the day… you are both—" the bone plates of his body made a sound as his hands closed. "—a problem."

"Damn right we are!" Okara wiped her mouth, set her feet, and let her golden aura roar back up around her.

POWER LEVEL SECTION

Okara (Base): 3,900,000

Okara (SSJ): 195,000,000

--

Cooler (Fifth Form): 215,000,000