Beerus had the social skills of a porcupine at a balloon festival — and yet he'd survived this long. Raw power was part of it, but having a sharp mind was just as important.
He understood exactly what Grand Zeno and the Grand Minister wanted to see. So after claiming victory, he made a great show of magnanimity: he would share the Seventh Universe's cuisine with Champa and the others, and on top of that, he wished to help restore the Sixth Universe's Earth — revive its people, let them rebuild their homeland, and develop their own culinary tradition.
"Well? How about that, you fat pig? Moved to tears yet?" The words were casual enough, but his smile dripped with provocation.
Champa's face — already generously proportioned — went round as a ball with fury.
He wasn't quite stupid enough to miss what was happening, though. He could see perfectly well that Beerus was being politically flawless right now. If Champa dared utter a single "no," that would be uncivilized behavior — and Grand Zeno had zero tolerance for anything uncivilized.
So Champa put on a long-suffering grimace, forced out a dry laugh, nodded, and accepted the Seventh Universe's assistance with profuse thanks.
"You two really know how to make work for me," Ino muttered. As she saw it, Beerus had just handed out a promise he had no intention of personally keeping. He'd sketched a gorgeous pie in the sky — sure, a Destroyer could fight, but when it came to actually creating anything, the man was utterly hopeless.
The real work would fall to Ino. Beerus had thrown around a few fine-sounding words and walked away looking like the hero. That man was infuriatingly cunning.
The Big Eater Contest had never been the most serious of affairs to begin with. Nobody had gone collecting Super Dragon Balls beforehand. If anyone was actually going to fulfill Beerus's pretty promise and restore the Sixth Universe's Earth, it would have to be Ino herself — Supreme Kai of Time.
She took out her Scroll of Time and browsed through the Sixth Universe's records. A flick of her finger, and she had selected the Sixth Universe's Earth — the one that had been laid to waste by human civil war and left barren for over a hundred years, its people long extinct.
She rewound that Earth's timeline, snipped out the subsequent century or so entirely, then synchronized the adjusted timeline with the main timeline. The result: the Sixth Universe's humans and their homeland effectively came traveling back through time together, returned to the eve of the moment they had been about to launch nuclear warheads at each other.
Ino set the timeline in order. Everything after that was someone else's problem.
She turned her gaze toward the Sixth Universe's rotund Supreme Kai, Fuwa.
That Supreme Kai, sensing a rare opportunity to make himself look useful, wasted not a single second. He vanished back to his Sixth Universe on the spot — and whether through playing the prophet, or deploying a truly inspired bout of Mouth Release, his tireless persuasion managed to talk both sides down from the brink. The fingers hovering over the launch buttons loosened, and the Earth was dragged back from the edge of annihilation.
Grand Zeno responded to all this with a simple nod of approval. He wasn't the sort to deliver stirring speeches — if pressed, the best he'd have managed was probably something like "Epic, slay!"
The Grand Minister, by contrast, delivered a thorough and eloquent address on the importance of solidarity and mutual aid between the two universes.
"And for this, we must also thank the Supreme Kai of Time for her assistance." He gave Ino a slight inclination of his head.
Ino had never quite managed to get him to adopt her as a goddaughter, but she'd always placed herself in the same generational tier as Whis and Vados. She was entirely respectful toward the Grand Minister.
"It was only what needed to be done," she said.
With the Big Eater Contest concluded, it was naturally time for Grand Zeno to head home.
He felt he'd had a wonderful day. He'd made several new friends.
Setting aside Ino, whom he'd known for a while — he'd taken a great liking to both Mr. Satan and Gure, and gave each of them a cheerful wave farewell. He hadn't exchanged many words with Son Goku either, but he'd been thoroughly impressed. To the visible alarm of nearly everyone present, Grand Zeno rose into the air and — smiling — reached out to clap Goku on the shoulder.
Then he cast one final glance toward Frieza.
And with that, he followed the Grand Minister and his two silent, towering guards back through a column of prismatic light toward his palace.
The assembled gods fell into formation to see him off once more, holding their composure until he had fully departed before finally allowing themselves to breathe.
Two universes had narrowly escaped disaster. They'd actually managed to send him home.
Ino shot Beerus a look. Beerus followed her gaze and spotted Frieza — moving with exaggerated caution, clearly hoping to slip away quietly back to his ship.
Beerus gave her a questioning glance. Grand Zeno had literally just looked at Frieza. Wasn't it a bit soon to act?
Ino shook her head. What was this "we" business? This was entirely on Beerus.
"Hmph." Beerus had now gotten a thorough education in a certain someone's capacity for petty revenge. All he'd done was ask her to restore the Sixth Universe's Earth, and she was already getting even...
He took one swift look.
The next instant, a blazing orange shockwave swallowed Frieza whole — along with every alien soldier in the Frieza Force and their massive warship.
The Majin cells and Demon Clan cells did nothing. Dragging along a body riddled with severe injuries, Golden Frieza looked no different from any other alien caught in Beerus's attack. He managed one gesture — turning to shout back in fury — before the sound never made it out of his throat, and the vast wall of energy consumed him entirely.
Of the entire Frieza Force that had come to Earth, not a single one escaped.
Tarble, clutching Gure, stood with his mouth hanging open. He'd already suspected Frieza's scheme wouldn't succeed — but he hadn't imagined the Emperor of the Universe would die quite this cleanly, quite this without dignity.
"Heh. Didn't even use your Destroyer power, did you?" Ino remarked, identifying what Beerus had chosen not to do. "Looks like you're leaving him a chance. Hope you don't regret it." With that, she called to her wife and daughter and headed home.
...
Frieza was dead.
Beerus had not used the Destroyer's exclusive divine technique — Destruction: the absolute erasure from existence to nonexistence. That technique, while not touching the past or future and thus avoiding certain causal entanglements, was otherwise effectively equivalent to the total annihilation used by Ino, Aeos, and Kuronoa. He had held back, choosing an ordinary attack instead, out of deference to that final glance Grand Zeno had given Frieza.
When Frieza arrived in the Underworld, he was finally free of all that chaotic genetic baggage — cells that had provided no benefit and only dragged him down. King Yama prepared him a new body for the afterlife, built entirely from his own native cells, then gave his brush one decisive stroke and sent Frieza off to Heaven.
Frieza was hung inside a white tree cocoon, with only his head poking out. As Heaven's gentle breeze stirred the branches, his cocoon swayed along with them.
He had escaped execution only to find a living sentence waiting for him.
Heaven was all birdsong and flowers, teeming with life. Palm-sized little sprites fluttered around him at regular intervals to frolic and play. Down at the base of the tree, rows of small bears, deer, and sheep — moving in an eerily human fashion — banged gongs and beat drums, apparently celebrating something.
Frieza endured their noise pollution through sheer force of will. Surely they'd tire of this after a day? But no — they came every single day. Every day they surrounded Frieza and performed those bright, bouncing children's songs. And Frieza, strung up in his tree, body completely immobilized, could do nothing but grit his teeth and bear the most insufferably infantile music in existence. He was starting to think he was going mad.
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