For a moment, King Piccolo halted, confused as anyone would be to find their quarry suddenly collapse to the ground, bleeding from the face.
Even on the ground, Krillin's energy signature continued to plummet like a stone. Even at a glance, it was obvious that he was dying.
Honestly, King Piccolo didn't care. He could feel the strain from all of the energy he'd wasted chasing the bald teen down, and he wasn't happy about it at all. Seeing the kid just randomly die in front of him after he'd wasted all of that effort felt deeply unsatisfying in a way that the old Namekian couldn't even bring himself to accurately articulate.
Annoyed, King Piccolo walked up to the body and opened his palm, holding his hand only around a foot away from the boy's prone near-corpse, as Krillin's body occasionally twitched, his lungs trying to pull in breath, only to partially fail due to the fact that his ki had been almost entirely sapped by the damage to the boy's soul.
An energy blast gathered in King Piccolo's palm, to destroy the boy's body while he still clung to life by a thread.
Then, the blast spluttered out. The old Namekian's eyes widened. Krillin's body was still on the ground, barely breathing, but his arm had shot out. Then, Krillin's torso moved, lunging forward. His left arm clamped on to King Piccolo's outstretched right arm, the boy's head shooting up, his eyes locking with the ancient Namekian with a new fire in it that hadn't been there before.
The old Namekian tried to pull back, his brows furrowing in shock as the fingers of the boy who'd been a near-corpse a second ago dug into his wrist with a force that caused his brittle old bones to protest with a slow crackling sound.
Instinctively, King Piccolo flared his aura with everything he had, trying to pull his arm out of Krillin's grip.
But the moment his power rippled through the air, it suddenly muted. Instead of destroying a city-wide area, it only destroyed a few trees, then faded into the atmosphere. "What?!" He exclaimed, realizing what was happening.
By now, it was a visible phenomena. The dark purple energy of King Piccolo's ki was being visibly drawn of his body through his physical connection to Krillin, who was enveloped in a completely white aura, which climbed in intensity with every moment.
Inwardly, every moment brought new changes to Krillin. The soul-deep pain vanished. The blood on his face crusted over instantly. The leftover fatigue went with it after a moment, then the pain in his shoulder, as he pulled the energy from King Piccolo's body and purified it, converting it into his own, positive-aligned energy that flooded his teenage body.
With every moment, Krillin's energy rose. It felt limitless to him. The positive energy surged so brightly that his body couldn't even contain it. New skin appeared under the burn on his shoulder, the old, burnt-away skin peeling off and fluttering to the ground, the positive energy completely healing his injuries and restoring his body to peak condition in a single second.
King Piccolo did not feel the same way, though. His already-ancient face aged even further, veins popping out of his body as the energy suddenly completely and thoroughly left it.
Krillin's focus deepened. The instinctive usage of the technique that'd just been forcibly downloaded into his brain… patched into his soul, wasn't enough to finish the job, so he was forced to concentrate deeply on each and every bit of energy that he purified, to keep it from spiraling out of control and destroying him from the inside. It was a long, grueling process. King Piccolo's body slowly disintegrated into ash, but the energy continued to come, no longer restrained by a physical body.
According to Krillin's new instincts, he understood that this didn't mean that he was finished. He'd gotten to the most important part of the ki exorcism.
The old Namekian's power had been stripped away… but the soul, the Namekian's connection to his own ki, had not.
Currently, King Piccolo's soul had a soul-deep connection to the vast majority of the energy inside Krillin's body, and it was screaming against him. Without ironclad willpower, all of the energy inside the boy's body would revolt, potentially striking directly at his own soul, killing him or worse.
Even now, the boy's own power was pulling against him, being siphoned into a deep, black ball of negative-aligned, black ki, swirling around the 'soul core' in the boy's hand. With every moment, Krillin's momentarily-supercharged power level dropped, siphoned back into King Piccolo's soul core, along with all of the organic material from the Namekian's body.
If Krillin lost control, King Piccolo's life force would steal Krillin's entire being, integrate it into his own, and use that to become some sort of super-demon on an entirely different level from what it'd been before.
But Krillin would not allow that. Slowly, he dug his heels in and peeled the energy protecting the evil soul back, slowly, one layer of energy at a time.
After a long struggle, he managed to create an opening. Immediately, King Piccolo's soul, bared, began fighting against Krillin's influence as he worked to slowly release the old Namekian into the afterlife.
It felt fundamentally wrong, rifling through another's soul like that. And not just because it was trying to influence his own, change the boy's fundamental beliefs to match its own, assimilate Krillin into itself, or at least leave a bit of itself behind inside him.
Krillin didn't see King Piccolo's memories or anything like that… but something more primal. Deeper. The core of what the Namekian was, unbiased, raw. Krillin filtered it carefully, slowly pulling it apart and sending it along to the afterlife, bit by bit.
The outer layers of King Piccolo's soul were dense, black with malice and hate. It tried to pull Krillin in, corrupt him… which made it easy to ignore.
Then, he got to the core of the Namekian's soul… The light, which the malice protected.
There wasn't a bit of evil inside of it. The evil was… an armor of sorts. Protection that'd slowly become the truth.
The truth of King Piccolo's existence was heartbreaking. Born from everything that Kami considered 'negative'... without truly understanding it. Pride in oneself. A desire to be acknowledged. Fear of being alone. A deep desire to be loved and accepted. Hope for a home.
These emotions, inherently good in nature, had been slowly warped and weaponized… but they existed, pure and true, in the deepest core of what the ruthlessly evil Namekian had been.
They clung to the connection that connected the evil Namekian's soul-core to his other half, Kami's, pitiful and dim, barely hanging on without the malice that'd protected these feelings for so long.
For a moment, Krillin hesitated, unwilling to snuff out such pure emotions.
That was all King Piccolo's core needed.
In an instant, Krillin's entire aura turned black and exploded, as the tiny core of the ancient Namekian pulled all of the teen's power into its own influence.
WHOOMP!
King Piccolo's soul was essentially gone. There wasn't enough of it left to reconstitute itself and take over the boy's soul, but it could use Krillin's energy as it saw fit, for a single moment.
So, it did. A massive black cloud of malice suddenly erupted from Krillin's body. The soul containing King Piccolo's memories and core identity wrapped a thick cloud of malicious, dark ki around itself, ripping it directly out of Krillin's body, which instantly began withering at a rapid rate, the final spark of consciousness from a dying old Namekian far too powerful for Krillin's momentary lapse to hold back.
Then, there was a loud, inhuman screaming sound, and Krillin felt his connection to the evil soul snap like a rubber band.
Krillin barely had time to scream before all of that dark, malicious energy streamed back into its 'rightful' body… his own.
He was dead before he hit the ground, the cloud of black, malicious Namekian ki far too much for him, all at once like that.
But killing its host only shaved a bit of energy off the top of the mass of dark, evil energy.
The rest of the power exploded into the air in search of a new host.
Left in the small clearing were only two things. The corpse of a short, bald teenager, and a small, purple egg, pulsing with the barest traces of life.