Frieza hovered in midair, the dazzling radiance of his Golden Form still churning and rising around him.
Just moments ago, he had been ready to mock the Saiyans for holding hands in a circle and performing some inexplicable ritual. Then, in the blink of an eye, the smile on his face froze. Son Goku's eyebrows and hair had both turned red, carrying a sacred sheen that differed from the Super Saiyan transformation. What felt even stranger to Frieza was that although Son Goku had clearly undergone some sort of ritual, he could no longer sense his energy at all.
By all rights, with the reckless force Son Goku had shown earlier, this power should have been crashing about wildly as before. The thick ice beneath his feet should have shattered inch by inch under the pressure. Yet Son Goku merely stood quietly on the ice, and not a single shard of broken ice beneath his feet had moved. The storm clouds still pressed down overhead, the wind still blew, and seawater still surged up through the cracks in the ice. Everything was the same as before, except Son Goku was not.
And that was not the end of it. Frieza had fought countless opponents and seen every kind of strange fighting style, but this was the first time he had faced someone whose true depth he could not grasp. Son Goku felt utterly empty, as though there was nothing there to seize onto, yet a chill kept crawling up Frieza's back, all the way to the tip of his tail, leaving even that stiff.
Aboard the spaceship, Cheelai and Lemo stared intently at the monitor. The red-haired figure on the screen had a power level reading as low as that of an ordinary farmer. They exchanged a look, but neither