Dragon Ball Z: Paradise Found

From Bad To Worse

"Shit! It's like someone poked my eyes out!" Bardock cursed, scratching the back of his eyelids as the contrast of walking through a shimmering portal of pure light into complete darkness was too much for the Saiyan.

Without saying a word in return, Piccolo formed a ring of energy around him and created a pair of Ki spheres that rotated around him by following the ring's energy trail. By doing so he created a source of light that was luminous enough to provide complete clarity within hand's reach around the two and even lit up bits and pieces of the faraway corners too.

"A lab?" Piccolo voiced his observations while the two walked on. "That Ki up ahead..."

"Yeah, it's almost familiar, but not really. Like someone we know but... Different." Bardock focused his stare toward the Ki signature while the two walked onward, down a narrowing row. Given the orbiting Ki spheres that kept the light alive, Bardock let Piccolo walk first while the Saiyan stayed behind until the tunnel widened again as it merged with a titanic hall. The very edges of this chamber were unreachable, even to Piccolo's luminescence.

With loud grunts, Bardock flung a handful of Ki blasts in all directions, clenching his fists right after and stopping them in place. Thusly he extended the reach of light in the lab chamber. Piccolo looked around, trying to figure out the best way to reach the Ki signature that both of them sensed inside this chamber. Meanwhile, Bardock walked around the lines of computers, lab tubes, and gadgetry.

"This tech's all over the place. Some of it looks ancient even by Earthling standards while other may not be several years old since someone moved it." Bardock observed.

"Ice..." Piccolo muttered, approaching a large glacial protrusion and touching its frigid angles and ridges. "I think I know this place. The technology, the idea to hide so much equipment deep into the glaciers of the Northern Region, it's exactly like Dr. Wheelo."

"H-Hello?" a husky voice lingered in the air long after Piccolo and Bardock jumped up and froze in place. Despite being beings that could challenge the mightiest in the universe, the pair still had the instinctual need to preserve their own lives, which caused their pulses to spike up when the forced, wheezing call for help reached them. "Please... Help me..."

"That voice..." Bardock clenched his fists. "I know that voice!" he grit his teeth and rushed onward. Piccolo was about to reach out for his partner to not rush ahead into what could have been a trap, but then he lowered his hand and began walking after the charging brawn-head at a controlled pace.

Piccolo's eyes shot wide open, and he lost the finer control of his jaw when he walked out from the library-like queues of servers, computers, and test tubes and witnessed a two-men-tall and three-men-wide entity hanging atop of sparking tesla coils that sent occasional jolts from one to another. The poor creature had been utterly eviscerated, and it looked like its muscles had been torn out one by one with crude plier-work. Someone had replaced some of its organs and ripped chunks with electronics, but then it was as if they had abandoned the work halfway and the architect of this monstrosity had left its unfinished work just hanging. Had it not been for half-intact, horned head with an angular jaw-line, a nose that may have once been sharped but now ripped from the face and a purple gemstone over his head, surrounded by white, bone-like bio-helmet, the person calling out for help would have been nigh unrecognizable from mere nightmare fuel.

"Great King Cold?" Bardock muttered, similarly baffled as Piccolo was, albeit possessing some greater insight into the personage they've stumbled into. Piccolo turned to his partner, wondering about what it was exactly that Bardock knew, but before he could ask, Bardock's face changed to a furious scowl and he raised his hand up to obliterate the disemboweled ceiling accessory.