"First, a bit of cleaning. I'll erase you bugs and be done with it."
Cooler gathered energy in his hand, leveling it at Lisette and her allies. There was no playfulness in his gaze, no sadistic urge to savor their suffering. Unlike his brother, Cooler possessed a chilling, mechanical ruthlessness.
Lisette knew that if she left him alone for even a second, Goku and the others would be slaughtered before they could blink. She decided then and there: Cooler was the priority. Frieza was a monster, but he liked to play with his food; he enjoyed the struggle. Cooler simply wanted them dead.
Without warning, Lisette slammed an invisible Kiai Cannon into Cooler's chest, sending him hurtling backward.
"Piccolo! I'm taking the older brother. Watch over the others for me!"
"Tch... Easy for you to say!" Piccolo snarled.
Lisette sprouted her wings and took to the sky, chasing after the flying Cooler. He regained his footing mid-air, but Lisette was already there for a follow-up. She drove a knife-hand strike into his gut, slipped past his counter-punch by a hair's breadth, and smashed a palm strike into his face.
As Cooler's arm remained extended, she grabbed his wrist with her left hand and hammered his elbow joint upward with her right. A sickening crack echoed, but his arm didn't break. He's tough, she thought, but he's not indestructible like Mira.
She twisted his arm, swinging him in a massive arc before hurling him toward the ground, layering a telekinetic push over a Kiai Cannon for extra velocity. Cooler was "launched" like a missile toward the surface of Namek.
"Gwah...! You...!"
"Kinect!"
As Cooler fell, Lisette solidified her energy, creating five translucent Valkyries armed with spears. They swarmed the descending tyrant, boxing him in from all sides. Cooler snarled and punched through the first one—only for it to detonate instantly.
It was a classic "first-time trap." Unless you knew the Valkyries were essentially sentient mines, you were guaranteed to trigger the explosion. Staggered by the blasts, Cooler found himself ensnared by rings of energy.
Lisette didn't let up. She buried a kick into his exposed midsection and used a combined telekinetic-Kiai blast to blow him away again. Cooler skipped across the ocean, carving a path through the water toward the horizon.
Lisette opened a Gate, stepped through sub-space, and reappeared instantly in his path. She materialized a blade of energy and swung it like a bat at Cooler's approaching back.
I've got him! But at the moment of impact, Cooler twisted his body just enough to avoid a lethal blow. The blade of light carved through the skin of his head and back and severed his tail, but failed to cut him in half.
Lisette didn't fight the momentum of her missed swing. She spun, adding centrifugal force to her next move, and hurled the energy sword at the passing Cooler. The tyrant finally shattered the energy rings holding him, only to be impaled through the flank by the flying blade. He coughed up purple blood, his eyes wide with shock.
His back was flayed, his tail was gone, and his side was skewered. It was likely a level of pain the prince of the universe had never known.
Lisette gave him no time to recover. She raised her hands, tearing open holes in sub-space around him. She fired a rapid succession of energy waves into a Gate in front of her; simultaneously, they exited through Gates surrounding Cooler.
It was like a high-speed pinball machine. Cooler was bounced from one blast to the next, unable to regain his footing. Just as he began to adjust to the rhythm, Lisette opened multiple Gates at once, unleashing a focused "omnidirectional" bombardment.
Engulfed in a sphere of fire and light, Cooler could only curl into a ball and endure.
As the explosions died down, Lisette appeared in his blind spot. Her hand, moving with the fluid grace of a master, slipped through his guard and delivered a palm strike to his jaw.
Protect the head, lose the gut. Protect the gut, lose the head. Counterattack, get countered.
The sheer difference in martial arts "refinement" was staggering. Lisette was dismantling him piece by piece. When Cooler tried to turtle up, she delivered a "whip-strike" slap to his forearm.
"!!!?"
The pain was agonizing. It wasn't just a physical impact; it felt as if her strike had stimulated his nerve endings directly, peeling away his skin. It was the sensation of a torture master's lash, capable of making grown men scream until they died of shock. Lisette had reproduced that "lash" by striking from a state of total relaxation, snapping her palm like a whip.
His guard broke. It was a natural reaction to such intense pain, but it was a fatal mistake. Lisette concentrated her energy into her fingertips and thrust them into Cooler's solar plexus.
"Ugh...!"
He doubled over, and she immediately followed up by driving her fingers into his ear canal, pulling them back out slick with purple blood.
"GAAAAAAHHHHH!!"
Cooler screamed, throwing wild, desperate punches. Lisette, calm as a frozen lake, countered every single one.
First strike: She slipped inside a straight right and smashed her palm into his nose.
Second strike: She ducked a high left and drove a knife-hand into his ribs.
Third strike: As he swung a heavy right, she rose into it, parrying as she moved and burying her palm into his chin.
Fourth strike: He swung a blind left; she ignored it, letting it pass through empty air as she slapped him across the cheek.
Fifth strike: He threw a desperate right hook. She shifted her weight, letting it graze her chest, and delivered a precise strike to his elbow joint, shattering the bone.
Sixth strike: A "telegraphed" haymaker. She slipped under it and delivered a zero-range palm strike to his chest. The sound of his sternum cracking was audible.
Seventh strike: With his arms useless, he tried to kick. She hopped over it and chopped him across the neck.
Eighth strike: There was no eighth. Cooler was doubled over, hacking and coughing.
Lisette began to rain down blows. Her thin arms moved like lashes, pummeling him from every angle.
Left! Right! Stomach! Jaw!
The moment his head was exposed, she dragged her energy-coated fingers across his face, slicing through his right eyeball.
Cooler was in a state of total cognitive dissonance. What is this? What is happening? Am I being beaten? No... I'm being disassembled!
This woman, this fragile-looking "human," was taking him apart with a cold, professional efficiency he had never encountered.
I have to get away. This distance is death. I have to—
(Escape? Am I... trying to run away?)
The thought hit him harder than any punch. I am Cooler, the strongest in the universe! And I am afraid of a bug?
"DON'T YOU MOCK MEEEEEEEE!"
"!"
Cooler's entire body erupted in white light. His muscles bulged and expanded, his head elongated, and a bone-like mask snapped shut over his mouth. His eyes glowed a murderous crimson as his severed tail and ruined eye regenerated in a flash of bio-energy.
Lisette immediately leapt back, creating a sword and hurling it at his throat. But it didn't pierce. The aura surrounding Cooler was so dense it simply disintegrated the energy blade on contact.
Cooler's transformation—his Fifth Form—was complete.
"You... you dared to make a fool of me," Cooler growled, his voice muffled behind the mask. "Don't think for a second that your death will be a quick one!"
"A transformation, then..." Lisette wiped a bead of sweat from her brow. "I was hoping to end this before it came to that. Life is never quite that simple, is it?"
She analyzed the gap. Even at 40x Burst Limit, Cooler was roughly twice as strong as her. It wasn't a "three-to-one" gap like Goku vs. Raditz, but it was dangerously close. She could win, but the window of opportunity was narrow.
She couldn't maintain 40x forever. Her self-healing was fighting a losing battle against the strain on her cells. She had three paths to victory:
The Decapitation: A high-speed, maximum-output "Destructo-Disk" style blade to the neck. It would have to be her absolute limit to cut through his current hide.
The Overload: Pushing her Burst Limit to 80x for a single second. It would erase him, but the backlash would leave her paralyzed—an unacceptable risk with Frieza still on the field.
The Exile: Using Heavens Gate to dump him into deep space or the sun. He could survive in a vacuum, but he couldn't fly back from lightyears away without a landmark.
"Let's go!" Cooler roared.
In a flicker of motion, his massive frame was in her face.
(So fast!)
He threw a punch. Lisette barely evaded it, counter-punching his face with a palm strike. It didn't even budge him. He threw a second strike, then a third.
Dodge, hit. Dodge, hit. Dodge, hit.
On paper, it looked the same as before, but the "ease" was gone from Lisette's face. Every one of Cooler's blows was heavy enough to end the fight. She was landing counters, but they weren't breaking his posture anymore. He was simply tanking the hits to find an opening. Worse, the pain she had inflicted earlier had only served to acclimatize him; fueled by rage, he was now ignoring his injuries.
After twenty exchanges, Lisette's concentration flickered for a millisecond. That was all Cooler needed. His tail swept her legs out from under her.
"I've got you!"
Cooler's massive fist finally connected with her ribs.
Lisette threw herself backward to roll with the punch, but the impact was still monstrous. She was sent skipping across the terrain like a stone, smashing through rock formations until she finally slammed into the dirt.
She couldn't move. Her body felt as if it had been shattered into a thousand pieces; a paralyzing numbness spread from her abdomen to her fingertips.
"Gah... huff... a-ah...!"
This is bad!
Dominating the pain with sheer willpower, Lisette tore open a Gate beneath her and let herself fall through. It was a tactical retreat. She reappeared in a cave ten kilometers away—the same cave she had used to hide from Frieza previously. She dropped her power level to zero.
Looking through her "Far-Sight," she saw Cooler reaching her previous location. Enraged by her disappearance, he began vaporizing the entire area with energy blasts.
(That was close... if I'd stayed, he would have finished me.)
She coughed, tasting copper. (I suppose I'm not as durable as a Saiyan. Goku takes beatings from enemies ten times his strength and keeps going... but one solid hit from Cooler and I'm falling apart. Even with immortality, my base is still human.)
She realized she had to play a perfect game. One hit was a crisis; two hits were death.
(Round three, then.)
Lisette stood up and began to strip. She removed her shoes and her long silk gloves. Finally, she unbuckled her heavy cape—the weighted gear she had never once removed since arriving in this world.
Without the cape, the shoulders of her dress were exposed, but she didn't have the luxury of being modest. She felt a surge of lightness as the "limiter" of her weighted clothes vanished.
She opened a Gate and stepped through, appearing directly behind Cooler.
"Over here!"
"!"
As he turned, she unleashed a point-blank blast. The smoke cleared, and the final round for the fate of Namek began.
***
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