One advantage to sending the most gung-ho ahead was that they get to be the ones to test out the parameters of their temporary immortality. Did it function on invulnerability, or regeneration? If the latter, how quickly did it work? What about exhaustion, did it grant unlimited stamina as well?
Gohan carefully approached the battlefield where Dad and Vegeta were… getting their butts kicked. Freiza looked different: larger, more intimidating. Some of the offhand mentions from the Freiza Force troops bubbled up in his memory: Ah, changing power levels wasn’t what surprised them, it was changing power levels without transforming that surprised them.
Feiza’s power level… it was immense. Around… seven or eight times as high as his own? At least, at the level of power he exerted against Guldo. He didn’t need to invoke any hysterical strength there, so… he’s still probably boned.
He reached out with his telepathy, trying to get an image of how Freiza thought this fight was going. “How? How are they still coming back?” On cue, Vegeta folded in half from a tail strike, bonelessly crashing into one of the many rock formations around. “Are they truly immortal? Where did that darkness go? Was that the dragonballs? Am I too late?”
Ah, good. Vegeta’s power surged to a greater height as he burst out from the rock formation and charged back into the fight. It wasn’t a big increase in power, but unless he had been holding back against Recoome, he’s had at least six more of those boosts, currently running at about forty percent of Freiza’s strength. Dad, on the other hand, was running at about half of Freiza’s strength, but was using King Kai’s secret technique to triple it for short bursts.
“How’s the fight going?” Krillin asked, whispering as they hid behind a small hill. Dende was with him, presumably to lend his healing support.
“Eh… Dad’s holding his own, but Vegeta should be dead.” Gohan summarized. “Prounga’s magic is pulling its weight.”
“WHY! WON’T! YOU! DIE!” Freiza shouted, each word punctuated with a savage blow to Dad’s chest as the tyrant’s tail held him in place. Dad wasn’t raised to be an honorable warrior, though, as he immediately resorted to biting the flexible appendage.
“I’m having way too much fun to die!” Dad boasted, “Besides, you’re too late anyway! The dragonballs won’t be active again for another year!”
Freiza recoiled from those words more intensely than he did the dirty move. “W-what? N-no! It can’t be over!” Fear turned to fury and Freiza’s power started growing again, his biology twisting into something substantial more alien than his previous forms, head now jutting forward from his chest with his skull pulled all the way back in a way that vaguely suggested a biological inclination towards rolling as a form of locomotion. But his limbs were all more or less the same, which ruined the effect. “DIE!”
While the two saiyans were able to put up a fight by working together and exploiting their immortality, with this new level of power from Freiza, that was no longer possible. “Okay, we gotta help.” Krillin said with uncharacteristic bravery. “Give them some breathing room. If I’m immortal… then I should be able to use this without a problem.” Krillin flew above the battle and slammed his hands together, then separated them to create a triangle shape.
Gohan, seeing an opening, brought Dende to where Vegeta was convalescing again. “Ugh…” Vegeta groaned, “No one said immortality would hurt this much…” One of the new tricks this third form of Freiza, unless he missed one, did was sending a barrage of needle-thin energy blasts after Vegeta’s prone form, and his body was riddled with holes.
Dende hesitated, but at Gohan’s gesture, approached the villainous prince and used his healing power to accelerate Vegeta’s recovery. A much larger surge of power accompanied this recovery, which is good because he’ll need it. “Alright, round nine!” Vegeta shouted as he rushed into the air. Oh, so he has been counting.
“HEY!” Krillin shouted from his position high up. Both Freiza and Vegeta both looked up, confused. Gohan pulled Dende to go heal Dad, who had also been downed. “THAT’S MY BEST FRIEND YOU JUST NEARLY KILLED! YOU MESS WITH GOKU, YOU MESS WITH ME! TRI-BEAM! HA!” Krillin’s power, a mere fraction of Freiza’s, multiplied twentyfold as he shot a massive energy blast downward at the galactic tyrant. Vegeta, as he was capable of actually sensing what Krillin was doing, immediately flew out of the way.
Freiza shuddered at the impact as a diamond-shaped sinkhole suddenly appeared underneath him. Ah, Gohan remembered this from one of Krillin’s stories. Apparently, Tien had developed something that was technically a suicide technique, burning the vital ki that represented one’s strength. After each use, you were permanently weakened, taking years of cultivating one’s body and soul to recover from. Well, Gohan wasn’t quite clear on the specifics on how much vital ki represented this much power, but given that Krillin’s power level plummeted to one tenth as strong before returning completely, he was clearly using enough to be a suicide technique in a more conventional sense.
Krillin launched repeated attacks, firing three shots rapidly before pausing to let his immortality restore his life force. Freiza was now inside the hole, being blown downward into it as he struggled to not get launched all the way into however deep Krillin was making that hole.
Unfortunately, while Dad and Vegeta welcomed the reprieve to recover, Freiza couldn’t be kept down forever by that. His power surged even more as he transformed yet again. How many transformations did he have?
Krillin’s head left his body as Freiza ignored the Tri-beam and threw both pieces far apart from each other. “What does it take to kill one of you?” Freiza roared. The new form of the tyrant was startlingly inoffensive in appearance. While before, he still looked mostly organic, his new alabaster-white skin with purple accents looked more robotic than anything else. But his face’s natural movements, that rictus of rage, dispelled the illusion of mechanical perfection.
“Krillin!” Dad yelled, shocked. Gohan flew towards the body, as it was closer, and caught it, proceeding to fly to reunite it with his head.
“I got him, Dad!” Gohan shouted, as there were two options: Either Dad fixes the problem while Gohan and Vegeta distracts Freiza, or Gohan fixes the problem while the adults distract Freiza. Easy decision.
Goku’s expression of grief subsided into relief. “Good job, son!”
Dende had already fetched Krillin’s head, which was still moving and panicking. “By the merciful Bhudda I can’t feel my anything!” He whined. The head was placed on the body and Dende used healing to re-attach it quickly. “Ow. Ow. Ow.” Krillin continued, muscles twitching as his brain recalibrated.
“So that’s how you rats have been doing it.” Freiza’s voice, brimming with hate and fury, sounded from right behind them. Dende’s chest caved in from a negligent wave of Freiza’s hand, air pressure alone enough to inflict lethal damage to the noncombatant.
“Play dead.” Gohan instructed the young namekian telepathically. “No!” Gohan said, faking despair. With casual effort, Gohan brought out the well of power that he had always possessed, the hysterical strength of a human backed up by the innate energy manipulation of a saiyan. It made sense, after all: If the most worldly warriors, interstellar raiders, were surprised by a trait that Gohan had made his trademark in two different lives as humans, it must be a special trait of humanity.
Gohan roared as he was sheathed in a white aura, faintly blue-shifted as he tackled the tyrant away from the downed namekian. It felt a little bit like breaking a mountain with his head, but fortunately this was not a new sensation, so he unhesitatingly pushed forward, crossing miles in mere breaths. “You’ve been fighting Saiyans.” Gohan drawled as Freiza recovered from the attack.
“You’re a monkey too!” Freiza insisted. “The stupid monkey’s your father, isn’t he?”
“Half.” Gohan corrected, “You just saw what a human can do when brought to the limits of desperation. Krillin’s always been weaker than Dad, but for just a moment… he held you back.” Freiza seemed to connect the dots of what Gohan was saying, dread forming in his expression. “Tell me, Freiza: Have you ever heard of the term: hybrid vigor?” Gohan pulled even deeper into his wells of strength, pulling the Argent out to play for the first time in over fifty years. Golden cracks emerged in his sight, visual hallucinations as the ringing of church bells replaced the blood pounding in his ears. A tingling sensation emanated from his absent tailbone, drawing on the ancient power that he had thought outside his reach. The world shifted as a golden hue colored his vision, and the bangs from his atrocious bowlcut no longer taunted the top of his vision. Gohan laughed, the refrain of a madman, as he went for the kill.
As usual when he went all-out, the hard part wasn’t destroying his enemy: it was stopping afterwards. Fortunately, when you had an immortal loved one willing to throw themselves on your fist, that tended to be a large enough shock to the system that a reboot was allowed.
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Unfortunately, Freiza was a bit of a sore loser. He had successfully destroyed planet Namek, or to be more specific damaged it enough that it could no longer sustain a biosphere. Or even much of an atmosphere, to be honest.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
But they were able to get the Earth Dragonballs to resurrect the namekians, and everyone was able to evacuate with the wish immediately instead of needing to, say, spend weeks using a spaceship with inadequate supplies for a return trip for the number of people who needed to use it. Dodged a bullet there.
Vegeta tried to immediately steal the spaceship and leave the planet… but Bulma had installed remote controls and Vegeta wasn’t technically proficient enough to stop it. The girl had then had the absolute gall to dangle that ship, as well as a promise to fully supply it for his trip, in order to get him to do… something. Gohan wasn’t quite clear on that point. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know either.
The Grand Elder managed to cling to life with hope for the future for just long enough to promote his successor, who now controlled the Dragonballs in his stead. Grand Elder Moori agreed to dedicate the next set of wishes so they could fulfill their original intent with them, resurrecting Tien, Yamcha, and Chiaotzu, before using the cycle after that to get themselves a new homeworld and teleport everyone over there, with the last wish to be given to Gohan personally as a reward for his actions (and, told secretly, as an apology from the first Grand Elder for waking Tanya up).
But before he could do anything with that, he had to handle someone that was much scarier than a giant wish-granting dragon: Mom.
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There were a few things that Gohan sorely missed about being young. A mother’s loving embrace was near the top of the list, though. “It’s good to see you, Mom.” Gohan said, grinning widely. “Everything went great, we’re all back safe and sound.”
“Yeah, you should have seen Gohan, Chi-chi.” Dad said excitedly. “He was so strong! I’ve got some catching up to do!” He picked up both his wife and child and hugged them tightly while laughing happily, although he used not a trace of his energy so as to not crush Mom. It was something that he presumably was quite practiced with.
After a moment of familial bliss, Mom startled and looked back at the house. “Oh! I haven’t gotten started on dinner!” She exclaimed, worried. “You should have called ahead, Goku.” She added, annoyed.
“It’s okay, Mom.” Gohan said placatingly. “I’ll help you cook, okay? I want to talk to you about some stuff anyway.”
Dad immediately floated into the air. “I’ll go hunt something as fast as I can, don’t worry!” A crack of displaced air put truth to his words, he was all business about his dinner.
Mom took some preparatory breaths as she readied herself for the labors ahead. “Okay Gohan, I know you’ve never cooked before… What should I have you do…”
“That’s kind of related to why I wanted to talk to you.” Gohan said, smiling but speaking evenly to accentuate the seriousness. “I met a guru who unlocked memories of my past lives.” Chi-chi was immediately skeptical. “It wasn’t like I think I’m suddenly three hundred years old or anything,” Gohan said, not entirely lying. “But I really tore through those study guides you sent with me. It was like remembering how to do something instead of learning it.” He was mostly reframing things. He still wanted to make his mother proud… but he knew now that what she wanted… something had to change if everyone was going to be happy. “I also know what kind of scholar I want to be when I grow up.” He added, to soften the blow.
“You do?” Mom asked, surprised. “Oh, that’s wonderful, Gohan! I know you’ll do great in it, earning a living with your brain, instead of being a broke thug, like your father.”
Gohan winced. Yeah, this was not the first time she’s disparaged Dad behind his back like that. He knew they got their money by asking Grandpa, who was a King (which, in this world with a unified world government under King Furry, meant he was really more of a governor), to give them a stipend (which, in the grand scheme of things, was not very much money given their rural lifestyle supplemented by lots of hunting and fishing), but Gohan had gotten the impression, with fresher eyes, that Chi-chi had expected more out of life when she married the World Martial Arts Champion. “I want to be an astronaut!” He said in his best ‘excited child’ tone. “Space was so cool! Now that Bulma has a working spaceship, there’s going to be a huge push for space exploration, studying alien planets, studying plants, animals, rocks… everything!”
As Gohan had expected, Mom’s first reaction to his declaration was a souring of her expression. She had already made a mental association of Space with ‘Goku’s thuggery’, but Gohan’s excited rant on the academic facets of space exploration, selling it as an endeavor for renaissance men, chipped away at her resolve. “Is there any money in that?” She asked, trying to more subtly discourage it.
Gohan almost laughed. She wanted him to be an academic for money? Even if nothing else indicated that Son Chi-Chi was a hick, that would do it. “Bulma said she’d pay me and Dad to run a mission to get her an asteroid to mine in a month or two.” To punctuate the point, Gohan telekinetically lifted the entire fifty kilogram bag of daikon that was presumably bought for their return. “Thirty percent stake just for bringing it to Earth for her with telekinesis.” Thirty percent of the gross, to be clear. It was pretty fair, in his estimation, given how little work they’d be doing for it.
Despite being a hick, she was still the daughter of a governor, so Chi-chi understood that much. “Thirty percent stake of… a mine?” She said, thinking she should be impressed but wondering what the catch was. “...How big?”
Gohan shrugged. “She didn’t have any asteroids in mind, but each one we bring down would be bigger than the biggest mine on Earth.” In his third life, asteroid mining was what catapulted her wealth to being history’s first trillionaire in dollars. “We’ll be rich with just the first one.”
That sold her on it. “If you want to be an astronaut, baby, you can be an astronaut.” Mom said definitively. “But you have to study!”
Heh. Easy.
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Something that Gohan always knew, even back in his first life, was the simple fact that fighting was fun. Sure, at first he got that pleasure through video games, first person shooters primarily, but even as the horror of realizing just how large the rivers of blood she was responsible for crept into her thoughts in the later years of the war, Gohan had always found the actual fighting parts fun. Sure, it was scary, but the feeling of having survived a battle was always a euphoria that he had never found a nonviolent way to match.
One of the ways he had fulfilled that need in his third life was sparring with Dad, or rather, Agent Nein. He had rather quickly eclipsed Sakura’s parents in skill, so he didn’t get to do that much with Kizashi before he begged off from any father-daughter bonding fights. It was a little sad, but Sasuke quickly filled that need for her much more eagerly than he did for less violent requests. A regular fight schedule kept their relationship together far more tightly than any amount of sex, although to be fair most of the latter was preceded by the former. Gohan considered himself lucky that he was quite capable of preventing any undesirable mental associations from forming if he was cognizant of the problem in question.
In this life, his newest father, for the first time, actually enjoyed the spars more than Gohan did. It was awesome. Mom didn’t really approve of this hobby, but accepted that if ‘her boys’ went off to have some father-son time for a good chunk of the day, which occurred about four times a week, there was going to be some combat training thrown in for fun. Sure, she tried to add conditions like ‘don’t ruin your clothes’ or ‘stop coming back covered in blood and bruises’ but once the money started flowing in from Capsule Corp’s newest mining venture, it was not difficult to arrange for disposable fighting clothes, nor for a bath before showing back up at home. The immortality wish handled the injuries.
Once that ran out, though… Well, that’s what his wish was for. “Porunga! I wish for an endless supply of senzu beans!” Telepathically, he relayed his intent, to always have a way to save himself, his friends, and his family from injury.
“It is done.” The dragon declared, shortly before vanishing and following the Namekians to New Namek.
A small bag of beans was placed in Gohan’s hand, with a note attached. “This bag will make 1 senzu bean every hour, up to twelve such beans can exist at once. Say ‘Senzu Bean’ (in Namekian) to call the bag to you.” That seemed a little anemic compared to what Gohan knew he could do with immortality, but it was plenty for his purposes. And it came with anti-theft, too! “Perfect.” Actually, now that he thought about it, with such limited throughput he wouldn’t feel guilty about not making thousands to pass out, while still being perfectly capable of tossing them casually to a homeless person to give him a week’s reprieve from hunger.
It did kind of make him feel guilty for not wishing for anything grander and less selfish, but eh… he was 90% sure that King Furry’s ancestor got his position via the Dragonballs anyway. This world was fine.
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Apparently, the golden state that he had unlocked by letting the Argent off her leash was the legendary ‘super saiyan’ (which sounded a lot cooler in Saiyago, actually), which they learned when a time traveler came to stop Freiza’s family from taking revenge on the planet, killing sixty percent of the population before they could respond. Until the plucky super saiyan decided to take a sword and cut both Cooler and King Cold apart before they could do so.
Fortunately, with the time traveler’s intervention, that particular fate was averted, even if in that boy’s original timeline they did just fix it with the dragonballs. The actual reason he came by was to warn them of an additional threat that even the legendary state was insufficient to win against: a pair of cyborg warriors that were given the task to protect the Earth from all aliens… Saiyans and Namekians included. After exterminating them, the cyborgs went rogue, killing their creator and going on a sixteen-year orgy of destruction while Bulma created a time machine in a last-ditch effort to salvage things.
The fact that this time traveler was apparently the son of Bulma and Vegeta, of all men, was just… great. Oh, he understood the appeal, the man was basically Sasuke on steroids in a very literal sense, given that he was far angrier, crueler, and with the beginnings of baldness to go with the increased musculature. But the similarities didn’t stop him from being profoundly disappointed in Bulma’s life choices. Worse, due to the integrity of the timeline, he was now obligated to not do anything that could stop the pairing. Hopefully, his negative opinion wasn’t crucial to that forming relationship.
So once Trunks left, they had to train even more intensely: While Gohan knew that he never wanted to be a soldier again, this seemed far more righteous a cause than anything wrought by human nations. The actual training battles were fun, and while he didn’t expect to particularly enjoy the actual life-or-death battles for the fate of the planet, refusing to participate would just be rank stupidity when he could influence things in a positive manner.
Attaining the state of a super saiyan without losing all restraint was a little tricky, but eventually all three saiyans managed it by focusing on intense emotions for the initial catalyzation and then using the same meditative techniques used to control the Oozaru transformation Vegeta learned from his father to give clarity to their thoughts in that state.
The date of the mechanical menace’s arrival, which Trunks knew precisely from his preparations for his time travel, was May 12th, year 767. This was six days before Gohan’s tenth birthday. He didn’t know the details besides the city that was first destroyed and the rough time of day Kami noticed the loss of life, as all of the fighters that went there died, but he knew enough about them from later encounters that he was able to provide a description when Gohan prompted him during the interrogation.
Five days before that, though, was something that no one expected: the 24th World Martial Arts tournament was announced. It was not in the same place, in fact the reason why it was resurrected was because a professional wrestling company decided to branch out and revive it, hiring the same announcer and contracting the same temple that ran it before to have the monks handle the security and other administrative matters, and more importantly to allow them to declare it the 24th tournament without getting sued.
However… they didn’t contact a single previous contestant or champion to notify them of the event’s revival. It was a bit understandable that they wouldn’t contact Tien, as he didn’t have a permanent residence, but Master Roshi had the exact same mailing address as before, and Yamcha had started to become something of a baseball star. The only reason Gohan found out about it was because he had bought his own television, paid for satellite service, and he liked watching professional wrestling. Sure, it was just as fake as any of Mom’s TV dramas, but that didn’t make it any less entertaining. The current “champion” was Hercule Satan, and although his fights were all fake, his strongman contest wins were completely real, and it was nice to remember a time when dragging a city bus or three was an impressive feat of strength.
“I was kind of hoping that I’d be able to win this one, Goku.” Krillin joked as Dad gently helped Mom off of Nimbus. “Think you can take things a little easy on me, for old times sake?”
Dad laughed. “I promise, Krillin: No Super Saiyan during the tournament.”
“The transformation is truly a magnificent edge, but there’s not much value in using it against friends.” Gohan said, stretching to bleed off some energy. “We only train with it once a week to maintain our familiarity with the effects.” It was no coincidence that this was also how often they train with Vegeta. Dad’s vagabond upbringing meant that he needed to be pushed to actually meet with his friends on a regular basis: on his own, he’d not bother to even pick up a phone to keep in touch with any of them for years at a time. “Also, Vegeta isn’t due back from space until tomorrow, so he’s not here.”
“Well, I guess that’s all I can ask for.” Krillin said, laughing ruefully as he gained one small kernel of hope. “Come on, let’s register.”
Gohan grinned. “Oh boy! This is going to be great!”
Unfortunately, there was one little problem with Gohan’s dreams of beating his father’s record of being the youngest champion.
“Y-y-youth tournament!?”