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Broly punched straight through Slug's chest, his arm bursting out the tyrant's back without the slightest resistance. He landed a short distance away, still carrying that icy, merciless expression he'd worn ever since transforming.
"Ugh—!! I, Lord Slug, still haven't fulfilled my dream of ruling the entire universe! I can't… I can't fall here!"Slug's heart burned with endless rage and unwillingness, yet he couldn't stop the life draining out of him faster and faster.
Eventually, he calmed down. He knew it was over—there was no surviving this. But the calmer he became, the crazier the look in his eyes grew.
"Heh… hehehe… If I'm going down, I'm dragging all of you into hell with me! Hahahahaha!"Completely consumed by madness, Slug prepared to take as many people as possible with him before he died.
A black energy sphere formed in his palm. As soon as it appeared, it began sucking in the black mist covering the sky. In mere seconds, the dark clouds vanished and the heavens cleared again.
But the energy sphere didn't stay small. As the mist vanished, the sphere swelled until it became a massive, pitch-black bomb. Slug hurled it straight at Broly—who hadn't so much as twitched or acknowledged anything he'd done.
Broly had already noticed that Slug was running on fumes. Pulling off this move must've drained what little life he had left.
Just before the enormous sphere hit him, Broly raised the corner of his mouth, stretched out his left hand, and tapped upward lightly.
The giant energy bomb froze in place.
"Tsk tsk… This is your grand final move? Honestly, your regular punches were stronger."
"Oh? Really?"Slug's expression didn't change at all—as if he'd expected this outcome. But a strange glint flashed in his eyes, and Broly caught it immediately.
Ah.He'd been tricked.
The black sphere suddenly burst apart. Countless shards of dark energy shot in all directions—most of them converging on Broly, the rest scattering toward the Z-fighters around the battlefield.
Broly simply ignored them. His body was strong enough that these blasts couldn't even scratch him. But the other fighters were exhausted and badly injured—each hit left them worse than before, pushing them to the edge of death.
A sense of irritation crept into Broly's chest. Something about this wasn't right. These attacks weren't strong enough to threaten him at all. They felt more like…A distraction.
"Hm?"He snapped his head toward Slug—
And froze.
Slug, who had already grown dozens of meters tall, had swelled even further. He was now over two hundred meters, his entire body bloated like an overfilled balloon ready to explode.
Balloon… explosion—Oh no.
Broly reacted instantly, teleporting beside Slug, trying to drag him out of Earth's atmosphere.
But he was a second too late.
Just as Broly reached him, Slug triggered the explosion.
"Ahahaha! Broly, you fell for it! I know my self-destruction can't kill you—but the humans on this planet? They're all going to die with me! I'm taking—!"
Boom.
Even though Broly's mimic Super Saiyan form was far stronger than Slug, a full-power self-destruction fueled by every last drop of life force—combined with Slug's gigantic size—forced Broly's energy barrier to stretch far wider than normal. The bigger it got, the thinner and weaker it became.
He managed to block most of the explosion…But some of it escaped through the top and bottom of the barrier.
And unfortunately, that leak hit the Z-fighters directly.
Broly himself didn't bother defending—he was too busy suppressing the raging aftermath of the explosion to rescue anyone behind him.
Luckily, Goku and Vegeta were close enough to survive.
Piccolo, Krillin, and Gohan weren't so lucky.
At the critical moment, Piccolo—the man who acted more like Gohan's real dad than his real dad—somehow found hidden strength. Despite being heavily wounded, he smashed open a pit in the ground, threw Gohan into it, and used his own body to shield the entrance, taking the full blast head-on.
"Uncle Piccolo!! Piccolo! Gohan! Krillin!"Gohan's desperate scream overlapped with Goku's panicked shout.
When everything finally settled and the smoke cleared, the ground where the three had stood was blasted almost two meters lower. Piccolo, Krillin, and Gohan were nowhere to be seen.
"Damn… I really messed up. Should've just killed Slug instantly instead of giving him a chance… way too careless…"Broly rubbed his temples, annoyed with himself.
"Gohan! Piccolo! Krillin!"Goku's emotions exploded. Without realizing it, his power surged wildly upward as he rushed to the site.
He dropped to his knees and began clawing at the dirt frantically, muttering to himself, begging for some sign they were alive.
After digging for a long time, he finally found a scrap of white cloth—Piccolo's cloak. But the deeper he dug, the clearer it became: it was just a leftover fragment that survived the blast.
Nothing else remained.
"They're… dead. All dead…!"Goku's voice cracked. "I'm useless… I couldn't protect Earth… I couldn't protect any of you… I can't protect anything…"He collapsed backward, trembling and blaming himself as despair swallowed him.
"....."