The brilliant sparkles of crystal-clear water reflected the dying sunlight in a ruby crimson while Chayote and Goku flew their way across the gulf between the two parts of the continent, heading straight to the heart of West City. Their fateful encounter with Android 21 was just a few blinks away, having in mind that traveling now was significantly easier, compared to the problematic aerial conflicts they ran into when Puri's army was still in peak efficiency and tightening their iron grip around the entire world.

"Someone's coming..." Chayote's stare sharpened as she picked up a familiar Ki signature headed on a collision course toward them from West City. While the Ki signature must have always been there, it was only because it sparked vivid activity now that it had become so easy to pick up on.

"Yeah," Goku nodded, becoming serious all of a sudden.

"That Ki... Kakarot," Chayote turned to her traveling companion.

"Yeah," Goku repeated with a nod. "When he reaches us, keep going. I'll handle my old man."

"Are you sure? The fight against Dr. Puri is as much yours as it is mine. She wants revenge against you just as much as she does against me. I may have handled the Red Ribbons, but you devastated the Rainbow Brigade. Plus, it's her that exploited your father's pain, so I'll understand if..." Chayote began drifting into long-winded excuses.

"You heard Bulma. She said not to waste any time and move as fast as we can. Crash into Puri. I'll handle my dad," Goku repeated himself. Just as Bardock made itself apparent by coming into a sudden halt in front of the pair.

Dr. Puri truly went to work on the Masked Saiyan. His buff physique was still apparent, yet he wore a skin-tight black bodysuit that hid away any modifications that Dr. Puri may have done on his body internally. Bardock wore a cumbersome alteration in the usual Saiyan armor. A black and golden one with a large neck decoration. The most striking difference from how the Saiyan was before was his mask that obscured the clear view of his face entirely, leaving just a mystery of a black, cross-shaped shroud from which two red lights gleamed.

"Bardock..." Chayote muttered out, feeling bad for what the Saiyan resigned himself to in order to take control over his own fate and that of his family. Or, at least, what he thought would let him do that thing.

"What are you waiting for, Chayote? Go!" Goku scolded the female Saiyan with a clenched fist. Chayote couldn't recall the last time she heard the oaf she wanted to employ in order to conquer the universe together as part of Frieza's Army this infuriated.

Still, he had a point. Chayote pulled in her knees and placed her arms by her sides, preparing for a quick dash. Just when Chayote burst with an aura of transparent Ki, the Masked Saiyan took a glide sideways to block her path, but Goku shot in from the side with a flying kick and swatted him aside by forcing Bardock to absorb the attack with a blocking motion. After the cross-shaped block of his arms moved down, Chayote was gone and the father and son were left alone to settle their differences.

"It's horrible what Puri did to you, dad," Goku's face shifted in disgust and desperation. "But we'll fix it. Bulma's the smartest person I know and she's got some weird space station thing now. If that doesn't work, we can always ask the Divine Dragon to fix this."

The Masked Saiyan sold his son's word with complete silence. Staring ahead with the two red, unblinking dots of light shining with intense focus straight on his son. Like a treasure hunter that has found the gemstone he has sought for and hunted his entire life, it didn't seem like there was any force in the known universe that would make the Masked Saiyan look away from his son now that the two reunited.

"Why? Why'd you do that, dad? Why'd you let Puri do this to you?" Goku called out, moving past the spite on his face and letting go of it. The Saiyan called out to his father like one of his own. All he received in return was a flying kick to the front of his face.

The Masked Saiyan shined with a blueish aura that lit up around his body once in a while, but then drew right back. Despite it, it didn't seem like the Saiyan's power dwindled or was at all proportional to the aura he put out. The Masked Saiyan blinked away again, appearing in front of Goku and swinging his elbow to turn his son around while he threw methodical and devastating punches and roundhouse kicks, aiming for all the pressure points that his sensory system showed him. The kidneys, the most sensitive parts of the ribcage and the spine.

An overwhelming blow bent Goku from behind, sending him soaring over the ocean like a skyward missile before the Masked Saiyan vanished and appeared overhead to plunge down with an elbow dive that socked his son straight into the center of his face between his eyes horizontally and his forehead and his nose vertically. With a painful grunt, Goku plunged down underwater. Just as the caught by surprise Saiyan recovered underwater, his father dashed in from behind him with another flying kick that knocked Goku aside. Bardock vanished again, appearing in front of the flinched warrior to kick him diagonally upward, then snapped behind Goku's flight trajectory and knocked him aside with a cross, then appeared in front of him with a double ax handle slam that once again sent Goku crashing down.

The masked warrior attacked at the perfect moment. As if some sort of infallible system, scanning battlefield conditions alerted him of the best time to unleash his attack. Just when his son's defenses were at the very bottom of how down they could be. It all happened in an instant, before Goku could realize anything or that his father sought to duke it out and take this to the very end of this fight. The Masked Saiyan kept his eyes on his prize, tracking Goku's energy signature that moved underwater.

A booming expulsion of water shot out in a mad geyser as a resonating battle cry of the Saiyan Son Goku broke out from the bottomless depths, splitting the gulf waters as the Saiyan shot forward like a bullet. Just as the Masked Saiyan tightened his frontal defenses by entering a defensive fighting pose, Goku snapped away from vision, appearing behind his opponent with a high kick that flicked his opponent away. Abusing the extensive open area they clashed in, Goku vanished again, appearing behind his father as the spinning Saiyan delivered a series of high and low kicks that sent Bardock flying. The airborne Saiyan rolled in mid-air and recovered promptly. By the time he turned to defend himself, Goku was gone again.

With a determined face, the younger Saiyan appeared in front of his father and threw a cross into the Masked Saiyan's gut, flinching him and leaving him staggered and clutching his abdomen while Goku extended his open palm with Kiai blast that rocked Bardock and sent him flying. In a flurry of vanishing strikes, Goku snapped away behind his opponent to deliver another, then another Kiai blast from afar while deflecting his altered father in a round aerial pattern. Goku produced a good dozen of afterimages as he homed in for the finishing strike. Even if Bardock's sensory systems let him determine the correct Son Goku in between his afterimages, the speed and power of his son's attack sent Bardock shooting like a rocket through a nearby lighthouse located atop of a rocky pillar.

"I see... You're here to fight," Goku hopped on air pillows, initiating and canceling flight to stretch out and engaging his Ki control in a warmup exercise. "That's fine by me. If Puri made you unable to talk, maybe we can talk it out with our fists?"

The Masked Saiyan returned to face his son mid-air by soaring around the tall stone pillar platform on which the lighthouse he just toppled down stood on. Bardock put his arms by his side and leaned his front down. Goku's focus on his opponent's pose sharpened.

"There's no way you agreed to this. Puri's making you use Frieza's fighting style now?" Goku gnashed his teeth, feeling a little jealous of Chayote who will be the lucky person to get her hands on the strayed member of the Dragon Team who was, evidently, just out for revenge the whole time and only wrapped her warm embrace so tightly to make the incoming knife in the back that much more painful. "Can't you see she doesn't care about you or your family? She's just taken you in to make a mockery out of everything you stand for and believe!? Even now, she's still getting her revenge on us!"

Bardock dashed forward, flipping over his front just like Frieza could when he was whipping with his tail. Goku's moves set in like muscle memory but it was his folly–his opponent didn't have a tail, so Goku couldn't really exploit the moves that his muscles had learned as an efficient way of dealing with this specific attack. Goku corrected his course just in time by bobbing aside, but Bardock's spinning high kick caught him in the chin and sent him flying upward. Goku rolled in mid-air and repurposed his momentum into a diving kick that returned all of Bardock's force to him tenfold and sent him plummeting to the uneasy ocean below.

Goku flew in a wide arc, driving his elbow into the Masked Saiyan's face, hoping to crack through the armored accessory to get to look his father in the eyes for once. A soaring uppercut left Bardock rolling vertically in mid-air and opened him up for a flurry of roundhouse kicks, all of which Goku promptly delivered, before crashing into his flinched father with his other elbow, flipping over his back while whipping his legs into a vertical backflipping kick and transitioning into a sweep that opened his father up for a devastating Kiai wave finisher.

The Masked Saiyan would've gone all the way to West City had he not clutched and stopped himself. All of that beat down put a few cracks on the masked warrior's mask. Goku felt a smidge of creeps run down his back as the faceless manner of his opponent and the almost automated way he responded to physical pain by just straightening himself up and coming back for more, as well as lack of any sign of any fatigue in his motion made Goku's gut tingle in an exciting surge of adrenaline he only experienced when faced with an opponent he wasn't entirely sure he could upstage.

Bardock's voice boomed in a cybernetically enhanced pitch as he drove his arm by his side and drew it back, producing a violet energy sphere surrounded by a shady black outline and violent jets of black Ki radiating off of it while the warrior let this violet energy engulf and drown him out. Goku couldn't help but clutch himself from the leaking out battlefield pressure around his opponent as he prepared to do his best to deal with the technique.

The Masked Saiyan roared out with an almost mechanical-sounding noise as a result of his cybernetic augmentations as he extended his hand with the channeled Dark Rebellion Trigger and unleashed his wrathful attack in a black and beet red energy blast while the surrounding aura changed color to mirror that of his attack. Goku tightened all of his bodily muscles and drew his arms by his side, engaging his Ki and drawing out all of his power before flexing his arms and clutching them together. The younger Saiyan smashed the energy wave with a double ax handle strike and swatted it aside after a brief power struggle with its intensity.

"That's more like it..." Goku panted, letting his overtaxed arms weigh down while his muscles twinged in cramps from the potent pressure he put them through by forcing the struggle against his father's attack. "I think I understand it a little now, this strength you've got, the lack of wear or cost for it in a fight... It's amazing. So, you think it will help you protect your family against something like what happened to mom happening again, huh?"

After performing a martial arts kata, Bardock moved his arms to a better-suited position to defend himself. With his Ki exploding in an intense, white glow, Goku rushed toward his father with a crashing elbow strike that made the bodysuit tear up around Bardock's neck, exposing metallic reel wiring that let out a grunge from this forceful test. Goku kneed his father in the face while grabbing hold of his head and drawing it down to enhance the strike, hoping to shatter that blasted mask whole. When it didn't work out, merely deepening the fractures present currently, Goku swept the leg with a dragon tail sweep kick and then straightened his back out and pushed his father aside with a backhand slam.

"Don't you understand? There are some things in life that brute force can't ever solve? I know it hurts, as a martial artist, to know that no matter how strong you get, you just can't fix some things or control your fate, but the worst thing you can do is to just chase after power anyway!" Goku scolded his father, wondering just how much of his words broke through to him. "I don't always make the best moves myself. I'm not always making the right choices when it comes to my family either so I shouldn't be too hard on you, but that's exactly why, dad... That's exactly why I can't let you keep on going the absolute worst route that'll only lead to you hurting your family even more!"

Goku soared across the space, separating the two warriors with a gut punch that seemingly disabled his opponent and left him hanging over on his fist. Propelling his opponent's limp body onward, Goku dived into a low thrust kick before transitioning into a roundhouse and another flurry of kicks aimed high and low. Each attack felt like he was reaching his father more and more, almost as if no matter how much his fists hurt and how close they felt to breaking apart and trickling down with blood, he came closer to busting down the wall between them with each one of them so Goku kept on going.

Another power strike, another thrust kick. This time, his father recovered and blocked each attack. The Masked Saiyan caught Goku's punch and absorbed his thrust kick with his knee, tearing up the bodysuit in that area and exposing a fleshy, bruised knee. Goku roared out while exploding with a white aura and rushing toward his father with a flying super-punch finisher. The Saiyan then vanished and leaned down while thrusting both his feet in the air, kicking the Masked Saiyan from behind before vanishing again and appearing in front with an overhead spin of roundhouse kicks, vanishing and kicking his opponent around rapidly before appearing overhead and finishing his beat down with an overhead double ax handle slam that crashed his father into the ocean below that was quaking and foaming with a stormy surface as the crimson skies of the sunset became obscured with gloomy storm clouds.

The world's most loud and hectic family quarrel was affecting the entire planet it was going on in. Goku returned to a neutral fighting pose while staring down at where he thought his father to be down below. He hadn't expected to be seeing this much resistance. Something was still inhibiting his father from showing his full power, but from the lackluster response that Goku got pummeling him with full force, the Saiyan knew deep down that his father had crazy amounts of power that his limited Ki signature didn't alert him of.

Just like it was the case with Future Trunks, the Ki signature the Masked Saiyan emitted only alerted one to the tip of the iceberg of their true combat potential as the rest of it laid behind an untraceable artificial power-up, similar to the impossible to sense energy of the Artificial Humans. The clouds over Goku's head began turning pitch-black, drowning the entire landscape in a pitch-black night far too early for when it was meant to happen while bright lightning bolts began connecting the shady shrouds of the conflicted heavens and the stormy, foaming seas below. Each lash of lightning drowned the area it was cracking on in a blinding flash.

A cybernetic roar bellowed from down below. The stormy oceans began twisting in a violent maelstrom as the Masked Saiyan emerged from the perilous and hectic depths enveloped by a vivid, golden aura, and his hair spiked up and gleamed gold. The golden shine didn't seem to agree with the tainted aura of the Masked Super Saiyan warrior, which resulted in a violent mix of lava-red aura closer to his body that crackled with black jolts passing up and down.

"So... You're willing to go this far, huh? I guess there really is no other way to prevent you from making a mistake than to knock you flat and clean this junk out from your body..." Goku grit his teeth and clenched his fists in reaction to his father's booming power and transformation into a Super Saiyan. He had never expected to face the necessity to face another Super Saiyan in battle as it always just kind of felt like this sort of dire power-up was reserved for the direst of threats and not sparring, training, or settling one's differences.

Certainly not family...