If Naruto's combat power had genuinely been lower than Turles, Naruto might have needed to rely on strategy to turn the tables. But with the roles reversed, Turles stood absolutely no chance against a superior fighter who actually knew martial arts.
"No way, no way, did someone actually think I was lying?" Naruto mocked smoothly, continuing to grate on the Saiyan's frayed nerves.
His psychological tactic worked perfectly. Turles was so enraged his eyes bulged, looking ready to burst a blood vessel.
"You think I'm helpless just because your combat power is higher?!" Turles snapped, glaring desperately up at the sky. He didn't find the celestial body he was looking for.
'No moon... but I still have this!'
Turles grabbed his left wrist with his right hand and squeezed hard. A strange, dense sphere of light, crackling with intense artificial energy, flew from his palm and shot high into the atmosphere.
"I can't unleash my absolute maximum this way, but it'll be more than enough to crush you."
*BOOM!*
The sphere detonated, spreading an unnatural, pulsing glow across the entire sky.
The Namekians bathed in the pale light remained completely unaffected. Naruto felt nothing either. Only Turles body reacted, beginning to swell and contort violently.
Thick brown fur erupted from his skin, his eyes snapped blood-red, and a massive, heavy tail tore through his armor.
Oozaru Transformation.
"Do you see it?! This is the true, unstoppable power of the Saiyans!" Turles laughed uproariously, his voice deepening into a monstrous register as he grew.
Saiyans possessed the biological trait to transform into Oozarus upon absorbing specific lunar radiation, cleanly multiplying their combat power tenfold. It was the race's ultimate trump card.
If a planet lacked a moon, elite Saiyans could forge a substitute. The artificial energy ball Turles created was a specific technique designed to perfectly mimic that lunar radiation.
While the artificial method couldn't boost combat power by a perfect multiplier of ten, it still reliably provided a six to eight times increase.
Turles combat power had just shattered the one hundred thousand mark.
More precisely, he was now sitting at roughly 140,000.
"ROOOOAR!!!"
The colossal Oozaru beat its chest and bellowed at the sky, a shockwave that threatened to tear the clouds apart. A faint, blinding white glow gathered in its massive jaws. Beams of terrifying energy sprayed erratically from its mouth, incinerating the surrounding landscape into a raging sea of fire.
Once the transformation stabilized, the Oozaru completely ignored Naruto and the injured Namekians, instead rampaging mindlessly through the valleys.
This was the fatal downside of the transformation: the immense power boost came at the complete cost of sanity. Although Turles had forcibly raised his combat power by eating the divine fruit, a low-class warrior remained a low-class warrior genetically. Losing his reasoning during the transformation was biologically inevitable.
He was now nothing more than a rabid beast with a power level of one hundred thousand.
"Naruto, he's completely lost his mind." Puru had managed to recover, thanks to the racial trait that prevented death as long as the brain core remained intact. However, regenerating half his body cost him a massive amount of ki, dropping his combat power well below 2,000.
He stared helplessly at the towering monster, wincing as it crushed the fragile saplings the locals had painstakingly cultivated. "We can't let this beast continue. The planet cannot survive this kind of structural damage."
Beings with power over 10,000 could easily destabilize a planet's core. If the Oozaru ran wild for long, Namek would shatter. The world had barely survived its previous environmental collapse, between the parasitic Tree of Might and this rampaging titan, the crust couldn't take much more punishment.
"Leave it to me. I'll handle him," Naruto said calmly, his eyes tracking the Oozaru's erratic movements.
In truth, Turles had become significantly easier to deal with by trading his tactical mind for raw, unguided power. Naruto knew the transformation's singular weakness perfectly, he just needed to sever the tail.
Without waiting for Puru to argue, he shot into the air, flying straight toward the beast.
"Puru, who is that guy?" the other Namekians asked, limping over shortly after Naruto took off.
Puru watched the blonde warrior streak across the sky. "He's a friend from Earth."
"Hey, big idiot!" Naruto flew directly into the Oozaru's line of sight and fired a sharp ki blast straight into its massive snout.
Having successfully drawn the beast's aggression, Naruto continued to taunt it, carefully leading the rampaging giant toward a specific location.
Though the Oozaru had lost its sanity and couldn't process the words, its primal instincts still wanted Naruto dead. To the towering ape, he was nothing more than an infuriating fly that refused to stop buzzing around its head.
"ROAR!" The Oozaru unleashed a devastating mouth blast. The searing beam, several meters wide, grazed past Naruto's shoulder.
The scorching beam struck the thick branches of the Tree of Might instead, sending massive wood splinters and sparks raining down. With a combat power exceeding a hundred thousand, the stray blast dealt severe structural damage to the parasitic tree.
"What a pity. You were so close, really just a centimeter away from hitting me. Try a little harder next time." Naruto smirked, gathering ki between his index and middle fingers. "As a reward for your effort, let me treat you to this."
A concentrated ki blast slammed squarely into the Oozaru's eye. The beast howled in blinding pain, the injury only fueling its mindless fury as it wildly chased Naruto.
Among the Saiyan race, only the royal bloodline and high-class elites retained their tactical intellect during the Oozaru transformation. An Oozaru that kept its mind was the true terror of the universe, and Turles clearly didn't fall into that prestigious category.
Turles had known this glaring weakness, but without the transformation, he couldn't physically overpower Naruto. He had been forced to gamble everything on raw destruction.
The two, one flying gracefully, one thrashing wildly, soon reached the thick base of the Tree of Might.
"Come on then, idiot." Another ki wave struck the Oozaru's jaw, making it snap its teeth in frustration.
Oozaru hated Naruto to his very core.
A standard ki wave couldn't pierce the Oozaru's dense fur head-on, so Naruto refused to play fair. He exclusively targeted the vulnerable spots, the eyes, the nose, the ears, places where even the most heavily armored warriors felt pain.
Despite its terrifying speed, the giant ape simply couldn't catch him.
Or could he?
The Oozaru suddenly seized a micro-opening and swung his massive arm in a wide arc. His sheer size was deceiving, the limb moved with a velocity that left Naruto no time to evade. The giant palm slammed heavily into him, but the instant contact was made, a soft *poof* sounded, and Naruto's body vanished into a thick cloud of white smoke.
A dozen meters away, another Naruto seamlessly burst out of the canopy.
"Big idiot, you completely missed!" Another ki blast struck the Oozaru's other eye. The beast bellowed, thrashing its arms as it squinted in pain.
The Oozaru roared in bewilderment.
Every time the Oozaru crushed a Shadow Clone, another seamlessly took its place, creating the maddening illusion that the blonde warrior was completely untouchable.
If Turles were still in his human form, he would have recognized the energy trick immediately. But in his mindless Oozaru state, he lacked the capacity for logical deduction. Without understanding what was happening, he could only blindly chase the nearest target.
Naruto steadily led the furious beast higher up the massive tree.
The second major weakness of the transformation: once a Saiyan becomes a Oozaru, they lose the delicate ki control required for sustained flight. They can leap incredible distances, but they cannot soar.
The dozens-of-meters-tall Oozaru looked like a tiny, wriggling insect next to the cosmic scale of the Tree of Might.
While the shadow clones kept the beast hopelessly occupied, the real Naruto reached the upper branches first. He grabbed a particularly thick, resilient limb and held tight, waiting in perfect silence.
The Oozaru finally hauled itself onto the main trunk and triumphantly snatched a hovering Naruto clone. Thrilled by his catch, the beast let out a victorious roar, his red eyes full of savage glee. But before he could squeeze, the figure went totally limp, turning into a puddle of soft, dripping mud in his palm.
Earth Release Clone.
The Oozaru stared down at the mud leaking between his fingers in confusion. He genuinely thought he had squeezed his opponent so hard he had liquefied.
In that exact moment of distraction, the real Naruto let go of his grip. The massively tensioned branch *whooshed* back to its original position with the force of a giant whip. Turles happened to be standing directly in its violent trajectory. Before the beast could react, the thick timber slammed brutally across the Oozaru's face.
A deep, bloody gash tore across the ugly ape features, and fresh blood poured down its snout.
The Oozaru let out a mournful shriek, losing its footing and tumbling heavily from the high branches.
===============
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