"O-"
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!" Zeck only had a moment between the time Bulma's scream echoed through his neck implant and when the pressure from Slug's full aura slammed into him with force comparable to one of Pepper's Blitz Explosion attacks.
His mouth used that moment to make a scared, whimpery 'oh'-like noise.
His brain used the moment much more effectively.
Immediately deciding that limiters were worthless against this, Zeck activated his trump card. Ki exploded out of his body like a bomb… but the larger 'bomb' that exploded in front of him caused the Celatian to uncontrollably slide back nearly ten meters through the upturned dirt.
Through sheer effort, and a power multiplier of 2.5, Zeck managed to stay on his feet.
The Saiyan who, while much further away, was still both in the 'blast' zone and already unable to fully stand, wasn't so lucky.
The newly-made clearing expanded on its own, trees uprooting themselves and flying into the air from the force of seventy-five million units of Slug's aura exploding out in an uncontrolled clash with fifteen million units worth of Zeck's own aura worth of pressure.
Vegeta was sent flying once more. His body flipped midair as he desperately tried to stabilize himself.
His foot… or something on his body that existed, at least, was the fulcrum that he used to stabilize his midair tumbling.
For its diligence, the ankle, or whatever body part it was, Vegeta couldn't feel enough of his body to be completely certain, snapped with an auditory Crack!
Then, his back slammed into a tree.
Then, another tree slammed into his front side. For a moment, Vegeta was pinned between a barely-grounded tree and a flying tree, before the latter lost its momentum and fell to the ground with a thud.
Vegeta's body landed beside it with a groan, critically injured.
…
Slug wasn't in the mood for talk anymore. For a moment, Zeck had made the Namekian warlord sense death.
As such, the battle had turned from a 'warm-up' to something genuinely dangerous in the evil green alien's eyes.
Zeck's eyes widened as he sensed the aura… he'd never felt anything like it before. It wasn't just evil anymore, it was completely and utterly overwhelming.
He instantly fell into the familiar combat stance that he'd had slammed into him for years. Then, he moved first.
Slug's eyes tracked three Zecks moving backward in three different directions as the Celatian attempted to use the Afterimage Technique to hide which direction he fled toward with his Hyper-Motion technique.
For a moment, Zeck actually felt confident. Slug's eyes didn't seem to be tracking him. Perhaps his 'Ki Optimization' technique had actually managed to bump his speed up to a level that could match the seemingly endless power emanating from Slug's body. Not his actual power, but at least his speed.
Ki Optimization was a technique that Zeck had created several years ago, back when he'd first learned how to mimic ki-electricity conversion.
The principle was simple. The Celatian nervous system was marvelously fast and adaptable. Especially Zeck's. It allowed them to think quickly and clearly, even under pressure.
By combining principles from Master Roshi's 'Pump Up' state with a special, careful form of electric stimulation, using his special nervous system as a medium, Zeck could essentially streamline his entire body. From muscle fibers to chi channels to resource consumption and thought speed, the technique maxed all of it out, pulling the absolute maximum performance out of his body in every single area. The result was a comprehensive enhancement that pushed his average power level from 10 million all the way up to 25 million. It felt like even more than that, in practice, though the sharp shooting pain that accompanied it was a constant unwelcome distraction, as his body began immediately and loudly protesting against the horrible abuse that it was currently suffering in exchange for the power.
…The suffering would be worth it for survival, though. Zeck didn't dare hold back against this thing.
…Not that it mattered.
From one instant to the other, the Celatian warrior-scientist's perspective shifted.
What happened next happened frame-by-frame for him.
For one frame, Zeck was racing backwards across the plains of dirt, which had been a lush forest less than twenty minutes ago.
The next frame, the Namekian was in front of him, grabbing at Zeck's arm with a cold, unfeeling claw, as Zeck instinctively sent a current of high-capacity electricity through the back of his neck, in order to short out the half-broken implant still sending data back to Bulma's terminal in West City at a steady stream.
That was a moment of clarity.
Zeck's regrets all tied back to stopping Tarble from getting the data right away. If he had, the Saiyan leader would likely never have allowed him to fight against this monster with his untested Infinite Energy Converter implant, true, but he wouldn't be staring into the face of his own, Namekian-style death right now.
He didn't regret any of the actions he'd taken since then, though. He likely could have escaped during the initial part of the battle when he'd found out that Slug's power level was in the million class, sure, but in doing so, he would have allowed the thirty-something evil underlings that he could still sense inside Slug's ship to disperse across the planet. Each had a power level in the hundreds, and if even one slipped through the cracks, they'd be able to destroy an entire city without much effort at all. Even the rest of the team would have struggled to round them all up… but now they wouldn't get the chance.
The moment that Slug's power level had exploded, so had Tarble's. What had been minutes until the Saiyan's arrival was now going to be seconds… seconds that Zeck didn't have.
…The next 'frame', Slug ripped Zeck's arm off without hesitation.
Zeck didn't even have time to feel the pain, or scream, before the final frame of his life came in… a blinding, white light.