Future Trunks' Timeline
The mushroom cloud thinned, peeling back from the sky.
Cell stared at the devastation he'd wrought, giddy and deranged.
"Damn them all cutting off my path to perfection. Damn it damn it!"
BOOM!
A brutal surge of ki erupted from ground zero, blowing the lingering cloud to tatters.
"Mom… Mai… Aaaah!"
At the instant of the blast, Trunks had thrown up a cocoon of ki and survived but only just. Cell wasn't as strong as he was, yet the Kamehameha's detonation hit like a near–Super Saiyan 2 strike. Had Trunks not awakened Super Saiyan 2 earlier, he would have died there as well.
Now, with his mother and the girl he loved gone, reason snapped.
His aura raged skyward. His brows vanished, blue-white lightning crawled over his skin, and his hair exploded down to his waist. The brow ridge rose, carving a savage mask across his face. The pressure that rolled off him made the entire planet shudder.
He had leapt by fury alone into Super Saiyan 3.
The architect of it all Cell stared, horror-struck.
"Impossible. He survived No!"
He bolted, streaking for the horizon.
"Run?" Trunks' pupils whitened out, his world narrowing to a single command: kill.
ZIP.
He was there before Cell, blocking the path.
Cell skidded to a halt. "Destructo Disc!"
Even in panic, his battle sense knit together the Z-Fighters' arsenals. The spinning blade of ki screamed toward Trunks
Screeeee whrrr!
and Trunks raised one hand, pinching thumb and fingers together. The blade shrieked like a saw biting steel, but it couldn't cut through the flesh of that hand.
"Impossible!" Cell flinched, feinted, and pivoted to flee in another direction.
Zip. Zip. Zip.
No matter where he turned, Trunks was there waiting.
"Out of my way!" Cell snarled, flinging a point-blank shockwave.
"You're the one who dies, trash." Trunks' face twisted, and he answered with a shockwave of his own that crushed Cell's then tore Cell in half at the waist. Purple-black blood pattered to the dirt.
But Cell's body held Piccolo's regeneration and the obscene vitality of Frieza's stock besides.
Shff
New legs budded and knitted beneath him.
"Kehehe…" Trunks monster-browed, hair to his waist cackled as if he'd found a toy. He flicked a palm. A formless wave of ki smashed Cell out of the air and into the ground.
Trunks straddled his chest and brought his fists down.
THOOM!
Cell's skull bent, driven into the earth. Trunks' grin sharpened. He seized both of Cell's arms and pulled.
Rrrrip!
Both arms tore free. Pain yanked Cell back to consciousness with a scream.
"It hurts ah! Mercy! Please!"
Mercy had no purchase here.
Legs came next. Then the tail. Then the wing-pairs along his back ripped off one by one, each piece pulverized to pulp beneath a wash of ki.
Trunks made of Cell a renzhi a limbless, living stump.
He rose, stepped back. A sliver of green returned to his eyes.
"You regenerate."
Cell trembled. "N–no. I won't "
"You. Regenerate." Trunks' hand filled with a football-sized sun. Refuse, that light promised, and I erase you.
Terror broke him. "I'll regenerate! Don't "
The stump levitated, shuddering. Arms, legs, wings, tail… all crept back, strands at a time. Not the instant rebirth from before; the damage was too deep.
"Heh-heh…"
Trunks' laugh curdled the air.
THUD-THUD-THUD!
He beat Cell unconscious and did it all again.
"It hurts ah Kill me! Kill me!" Cell howled, voice needling the brain. The purple-black spray spattered Trunks' face and chest until he looked every inch a demon risen from hell.
Again the command: "You. Regenerate."
Time became a loop tear, scream, regrow, tear again until Cell refused, gasping:
"Never again. Kill me if you dare just kill me!"
The last thread of Trunks' sanity frayed. Darker thoughts slid in, whispering.
He hooked Cell with his left-hand ki, lifting him like a butchered carcass. With his right, he shaped a razor-thin blade of energy.
Then he began to slice lingchi, slow cutting paring away sheets of flesh. Each ribbon he shaved off burst to dust in the shiver of his aura.
Cell's torso shrank, boneless and obscene, a lump of purple-black meat. His screams faded to raw wheezing; pain knocked him out and dragged him back again and again.
"K… kill me. End it," he breathed at last, voice a thread.
Only his revolting head remained.
Trunks dismissed the blade. Two fingers speared forward, gouging Cell's eyes.
Pop. Pop.
He crushed both orbs between his fingertips.
"Kill… me…" Cell rallied one last shout then slumped into the dark. Even self-destruction was beyond him now.
That last cry struck Trunks like a hammer. The white receded from his eyes; green irises returned. He stared at his hands, horror rippling across his face at what they had done.
But the horror died as quickly as it came.
"You murdered my mother. You murdered Mai. There isn't enough pain in the world for you," he hissed.
Cell couldn't hear him. Trunks dropped the head, set his heel, and stamped.
CRACK.
The skull shattered yet a faint beep-beep persisted.
Trunks looked down. A thumb-sized core chip lay amid the gore, pulsing. Filaments of flesh already spidered from it, reaching to rebuild.
"Filthy thing. You even put your life in a chip?" Trunks grimaced. "Then disappear."
A lance of ki flashed. The chip vaporized.
Cell was gone.
Trunks hung there in the blood-warm wind, suddenly hollow. The world was saved, and he had no idea where he belonged.
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