"So, do you understand now, little boy?"
Chronica asked it casually, her high-pitched voice making the question worse.
Goku stared at her, eyes wide.
His fist was still pressed against her jaw.
The ache spreading through his shoulder proved the impact had been real. He had struck
her cleanly and she had not moved so much as an
inch. No bruise on her flawless skin. Not even the smallest twitch of discomfort.
A million thoughts tore through his mind.
"Hello~?" She waved a hand in front of his face. "Are you still with me?"
Goku blinked. He had been so stunned he had frozen completely.
Then his familiar smirk returned, though this time it sat awkwardly on his face. More mask
than confidence.
He ripped his fist away and twisted his shoulders. His hips followed, turning with such
explosive force that a miniature tornado formed around him, dust and shattered stone
spiraling into the air.
Using the rotation, Goku launched his leg like a whip.
His heel broke the sound barrier.
"Don't you understand?" Chronica sighed. "It's useless."
The devastating kick seemed almost motionless to her.
She raised the staff.
Heel met staff.
The collision detonated. The ground buckled and the sky shook as though struck by thunder.
Air trapped between Goku's heel and Chronica's staff compressed past its limit, went
white-hot, and erupted vertically in a razor-thin line of force.
Above them it split the clouds.
Below, it carved a narrow trench through the earth that ran to the horizon.
Far away, Queen Vegeta and Paragus heard the detonation and turned toward it as one.
The heat burned through Goku's shoe and scorched the fabric around his ankle. He kicked off
the staff, flipped backward, and landed several dozen meters away in a low stance, fists
tight.
A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead.
His eyes moved between three things: Chronica. The staff. And Broly, floating unconscious in
a translucent bubble above her.
Chronica examined the head of her staff, rubbing away a speck of dust with her thumb.
"I truly do not understand what Aionia and Azmina see in you."
*Azmina?* Goku thought.
He straightened, forcing confidence back into his face.
"What can I say?" A tiny sphere of golden ki appeared above his open palm. "Being this
perfect is a blessing and a curse."
Her head snapped toward him.
"Pardon me? *Perfect?* You?" Her face twisted. "Yuck."
"That's because you're still a kid. You don't recognize refined magnificence the way your
friend Aziman and that other woman do."
"Kid?!" Her grip tightened. "It's *Azmina!* And I am not a-"
Golden light erupted from his palm.
The sphere expanded into a roaring beam that tore across the battlefield, ripping a trench
through the ground beneath it.
Chronica sighed.
"You never learn."
She rolled the staff between her fingers, spun it once, and struck the beam from the side. It
veered away toward the distant mountain range.
Goku's eyes narrowed.
*She deflected it.*
The beam vanished into the peaks. A heartbeat of silence.
Then the horizon turned white. A spherical explosion swallowed three mountains and the
shockwave came rolling back across the plain, raining debris out of the sky.
Goku didn't look at it.
*She let my fist land. She didn't let that land.*
*Coincidence?*
"For your information," Chronica said, brushing a strand of silver hair from her face, "I am not
a child. I am old. Far older than you."
Goku's eyebrow twitched.
Then his smirk became genuine.
*Gotcha.*
He relaxed his stance and planted both hands on his hips.
"Old or not, I still see a little girl."
She stared at him.
"That is completely idiotic. And utterly illogical. Age is the primary factor determining whether
someone is a child."
Goku tilted his head, pretending to weigh the argument.
Then, very slowly, his eyes drifted downward.
Chronica followed his gaze.
Her eyes widened. Her teeth clenched.
"CHEST SIZE IS NOT A PREREQUISITE FOR BEING A GROWN WOMAN!"
Her voice thundered across the ruined landscape, the cold dignified mask finally shattering.
*Thank goodness for insecurity,* Goku thought.
At that moment Queen Vegeta and Paragus dropped out of the sky and landed at the edge of
the battlefield.
They took in the scene. The earth ripped open. Mountains burning on the horizon. Goku's
clothes scorched and torn, his body marked from the fight.
And the small woman standing in the middle of it, completely immaculate.
Paragus's jaw tightened.
Queen Vegeta's eyes narrowed.
Goku folded his arms.
"I mean…" He glanced at the two of them. "Excellent timing."
He pointed.
"Look at those two. There's no ambiguity there. You can tell immediately
who the grown woman is."
Queen Vegeta looked at Paragus.
Paragus looked back at her.
Neither understood how they had been dragged into this.
Chronica made a strangled sound.
"Gah! You stupid monkey!" She jabbed a finger at them, her attention swinging completely
away from Goku. "Those are impractical! Unattractive! Inconvenient! Unnecessary!
Unbalanced! *Un*-"
She kept going, working through every negative word beginning.
"In a few decades they will drag across the floor behind you!" she shouted. "Those
proportions are vulgar and excessive. A woman's body should be refined, controlled, and
properly toned. I will show you exactly-"
She spun back toward Goku.
A second golden blast was already in her face.
Her staff snapped up in a panicked blur. The beam struck it and ricocheted into the sky.
"Stupid mortal!" she shouted through the smoke. "You never learn!"
The haze thinned. She lowered the staff.
"Out of ideas?"
Her expression changed.
Goku was gone.
She looked left. Then right.
Queen Vegeta and Paragus were no longer watching her. They were looking at something
behind her.
Chronica followed their eyes.
Goku stood behind her, two fingers still pressed to his forehead. His other hand was drawn back at his waist, a sphere of blue ki blazing in his palm.
He was smirking.
"What the-?!"
"HAAA!"
The world disappeared beneath blue light.
The wave erupted at point-blank range. The recoil drove Goku backward, his boots carving trenches each time he forced himself down to steady it. He angled the beam
upward, keeping it off the planet.
Terror crossed Chronica's face.
*Dodge!*
She threw herself sideways, both hands pushing against the air like it was a wall.
She remembered.
White corridor. Endless. The throne.
"Talk to him. Bring him here."
"Yes, Supreme Overseer." Chronica's chin lifting. "I will bring him by force if I have to."
Horalia's blindfolded face turned toward her. Slowly.
"Be careful, child. Do not overestimate
yourself. You must be careful."
"Y… yes, Supreme Overseer."
And walking back down the corridor, the thought that had followed her the entire way to this world:
*Why careful? Mortals cannot hurt us.*
Back at her dodging.
*She knew.*
The realization arrived in the same instant as the light.
*She knew and she didn't tell me what-*
The edge of the beam grazed her cheek.
Chronica gasped.
The Kamehameha continued past her and speared into the heavens, a blue pillar that
punched through the clouds and vanished into space.
The beam narrowed. Then it was gone.
Silence spread across the battlefield. Everyone stared up at the glowing trail scarring the
atmosphere.
Then Queen Vegeta and Paragus turned toward Goku.
Chronica raised a hand to her face.
Her fingers came away wet.
She looked at them and could not make sense of what she was seeing. Blood. Blue starslight, but blood.
Goku raised his head. A smile spreading across his face.
*Bingo.*
—
Chronica touched her cheek.
*She told me not to fight him.*
Goku popped his neck. Left, then right. Shook out his hands.
*She told me not to let his ki attacks touch me.*
*She never said what would happen if they did.*
He caught her staring and smirked at her, and the thought that had been assembling itself behind Chronica's eyes finished assembling.
*I can die here.*
*This mortal can erase me.*
She had never had that thought. There had never been an occasion for it.
*Stay calm.* Her grip found the staff. *His fist did nothing. The kick did nothing. Only the
energy. Keep him from aiming and he is exactly what he was ten minutes ago.*
*He already knows that.*
*End it now.*
"Release my daughter!"
Paragus stood at the crater's edge with her fists at her sides and her eyes locked on the
bubble drifting above the field, Broly curled inside it, small and still.
Chronica turned toward the sound then back at Goku.
"I SAID RELEASE HER!"
Paragus launched.
"Don't rush, imbecile!"
Queen Vegeta's voice, sharp from the right. Too late, Paragus was already crossing the ground, fist chambered, closing.
Chronica's golden eyes slid to Paragus.
"Stay out of it."
The staff swept low and came up in a rising arc, tip angled at Paragus's stomach. The same
strike that had folded Goku in half and thrown him into the sky.
Paragus read it while it was still rising.
*This is too fast!*
*I can't dodge!*
Then golden lights appear between them.
Goku.
Two fingers at his forehead. His hand snapping out, closing on the fur at her collar.
The grab took a millisecond longer than it should have.
The staff caught Goku across the ribs, and the sound of it rolled out across the plain like
artillery.
They were gone before the dust moved.
They came down forty kilometers out, tearing through the shoulder of one mountain and out
the other side of a second before the ground took them and dragged them to a stop in a
furrow two hundred meters long.
Goku was on top of her. One hand flat on the dirt beside her shoulder, holding his own weight
off her. The other pressed to his side. His breathing had gone careful, shallow, evenly
spaced.
Paragus stared up at his face, eyes wide open in shock.
"Foolish man." It came out quieter than she wanted. "What do you think you're
doing?!"
He looked at the hand on his ribs. Then at her. Then past her, toward the horizon.
"Protecting my wife, …Ouch."
Her eyes went wide, and she turned her head to the crater wall.
"Those foolish traditions again."
He got himself upright. Stood as straight as the ribs would allow, which was not straight.
*Broken… but nothing in the lung.*
"Stay here and hide. I'll bring Vegeta and Broly to you and then-"
Two fingers to his forehead.
"NO."
She was already up.
"I don't take orders from a man."
She closed the distance in one step and locked both arms around him.
Before he realized he instant transmitted with her again.
They landed beside the Queen. Paragus let go, stepped back.
Goku's knee hit the dirt.
The Super Saiyan aura had been bleeding out since the mountain and it finished now, gold
draining from his hair strand by strand until there was only black, only a man on one knee
with his hand pressed to his side.
Queen Vegeta looked at him.
She had watched him take Frieza apart. Had watched him absorb things that would have
ended her and keep walking. Somewhere in there she had stopped thinking of him as a mortal.
Her thumb found the ring. Rough metal, rough diamond, made by his hands.
*Then your queen will protect you.*
"Paragus." The queen spoke. "We work together or we die separately."
"Tch." Paragus didn't look at her. "I don't have a choice."
"Get back." Goku's voice, low, from behind them. He had his hand on his knee and was
pushing. He made it halfway and went down again. "Both of you. You don't understand what
she-"
"Saiyans don't get back."
The Queen stepped in front of him.
Paragus stepped in beside her.
Neither announced it. They simply put themselves between him and the thing across the
field, took their stances, and stopped talking.
Chronica watched them do it.
She looked at the two women, and past them at the man kneeling in the dirt, and something
in her chest turned over.
*First reincarnated in the wrong universe, then have abilities beyond mortal realm...*
*Aionia. What are you planning to do?*
Chronica looked at them.
"What is the meaning of this?"
It came out louder than she meant. Neither woman answered. They stood in their stances
and looked at her, and the not-answering was worse than anything they could have said.
"Do you have any idea what I am? Do you? I have watched species like yours appear and rot and be forgotten, and you're standing there, you're standing there in animal skins with your arms up like that means something-"
"Just shut up," said Paragus.
Queen Vegeta lifted her chin. "You talk too much."
Something behind Chronica's eyes came apart.
She drove the staff into the ground.
The plain split. The geysers erupted all at once.
Columns of boiling water exploded into the air, filling the battlefield with steam and white fog as the earth trembled beneath them, and within seconds the battlefield was a fog bank.
Visibility collapsed to ten meters.
Goku's head came up.
*This might be good.*
Paragus moved first.
Queen Vegeta followed immediately after.
Both Saiyans tore through the mist from opposite directions, converging on Chronica before she could fully recover.
Paragus reached her first.
Her fist came crashing toward Chronica's face.
Chronica twisted aside and caught the blow against the shaft of her staff.
The impact cracked the ground beneath them.
Queen Vegeta appeared from the other side a heartbeat later, driving a brutal kick toward Chronica's ribs.
Chronica spun.
Her staff knocked Queen Vegeta's leg aside with effortless precision.
Then the weapon continued through the rotation.
Chronica's golden eyes narrowed.
The end of the staff shot straight toward Queen Vegeta's exposed chest.
Too fast.
Too close.
Queen Vegeta's eyes widened.
She could not dodge.
A golden light suddenly burned through the fog.
Chronica's expression changed.
A concentrated beam of ki screamed out of the mist directly toward her head.
She abandoned the counterattack instantly.
Her body snapped backward, narrowly avoiding the beam as it tore past her face and vanished through the geysers behind her.
Queen Vegeta stumbled away, realizing only a moment later that the attack had saved her life.
Chronica landed several meters back and stared into the fog.
A silhouette appeared through the steam.
Then Goku stepped out.
One arm remained pressed tightly against his broken ribs.
His other hand was still extended, golden ki fading from his palm.
Chronica's eyes widened.
Goku lowered his hand.
"Almost."
He looked at the wall of steam where the two women were.
"Let's go!"
Neither woman looked back. Paragus came in from the left, the Queen low and right, and
Goku took the center, three lines converging on one point.
Chronica let out a breath.
She back-handed Paragus without turning her head and Paragus went spinning away into
the white. She extended the staff and poked the Queen in the sternum, one economical jab,
and the Queen left the ground and did not come back down nearby.
Then she turned to the last of them.
Goku was already inside her reach, fist cocked.
Chronica lowered the staff.
She opened her arms.
"You're slower than you were earlier." Her voice had steadied. "Did you understand *nothing*? Your fist cannot touch me. Go on." Golden eyes, perfectly certain. "Show me."
The punch landed.
"See, noth-BLUH!."
Her head snapped back and a sound came out of her that she never heard, and starlight blood burst from her nose and sprayed across the fog.
She staggered. Caught herself on the staff.
One hand went to her face and came away luminous.
She stared at it.
Then up at him, at the man standing in front of her with his fist still out and his aura guttering.
Her eyes moved to his hand.
To the last thin curl of gold burning off his knuckles.
Her mouth opened.
"You coated your fist with ki?"
Goku shook his hand out. The last of the gold burned off his knuckles.
"Yeah." He said calmly. "When I figured out you kept dodging all my Kikoha but stood there and proudly took every physical hit I threw, I had to
trick you into holding still." He rolled his shoulder. "Wasn't hard."
Chronica's face twisted.
"You *puny mortal*-"
"Since I learned to control my ki, I've found it easy to shape. I can do pretty much whatever I want with it." He looked at his own palm, turning it over. "And when I learned to sense ki, I noticed something about mine. It has an odd feel to it."
He looked up at her.
"It doesn't feel human. And it doesn't feel Saiyan either."
Something changed in Chronica's face.
She got up. Slowly, one hand still cupped beneath her nose, and wiped her nose across her forearm without taking her eyes off him.
"That is because it is not, you dimwit."
"You do not possess regular ki. What flows through you belongs to a higher order of beings in this universe." Her golden eyes were steady now. "Something Son Goku is not supposed to possess… at least not now"
The plain went quiet around them.
"Son Goku," he repeated.
"Yes."
"Why? Why was I reincarnated here at all? Why as him? Was it Aionia?"
"It doesn't matter anymore."
She said it flatly.
"This universe will be reset."
Behind Goku, Queen Vegeta's head turned sharply. Paragus's hand tightened on the fur at
her hip.
Goku didn't move.
"Over my dead body."
"That," Chronica said, "will be quite easy."
She began to walk. Unhurried. The staff turning slowly in her fingers with each step.
"I have been extremely accommodating. Do you understand that? This entire time I have been standing here, in your territory, on your plane, bound by your dreary little rules, because I was instructed to talk to you and I assumed that would be a five-minute errand."
She stopped.
"I am done being accommodating. I am going to use my own plane of existence now." Her chin lifted. "I should warn you. It's a bit unfair."
Paragus moved first.
"Enough talking! Just give me back my daughter!!"
She launched from a standing start with a crack that shattered the ground behind her, and Queen Vegeta went with her a half-second later.
Chronica watched them come.
She raised her hand.
Snap.
Paragus stopped.
Mid-air. Mid-motion. Her fist still winding, her hair frozen in the shape of the wind.
Chronica turned her head, toward the second one.
Snap.
Queen Vegeta stopped.
Two flicks of two fingers.
She let herself enjoy it for exactly one second.
Behind her, Goku smirked.
"Talk about unfair."
He launched.
Chronica turned to face him with the expression of a woman closing a book.
He came in low and fast, one arm clamped over his broken ribs, the other winding back, shoulder loading, hips coiling, the whole ruined body committing to one more punch.
She raised her hand.
"Don't worry," she said. "It was a lost battle from the very beginning."
Snap.
The world stopped.
Chronica lowered her hand and let out a breath.
Then a fist arrived in her face.
Her head snapped back. Her feet left the ground and she went down hard, flat on her back in the dirt, the staff bouncing away from her hand.
Silence.
She lay there.
Above her, the frozen droplets hung motionless in a stopped sky.
She stared up at them.
Then she rolled her eyes sideways.
Goku was standing over her. Chest heaving. Sweat running down his jaw and dripping.
Chronica lay in the dirt with light bleeding out of her face and her mind entirely elsewhere.
The concentration went first.
She didn't decide to release it.
The geysers roared back to life. Suspended water crashed down.
And everything that had been holding still in mid-air stopped holding still.
Paragus hit the ground shoulder-first at the speed she'd been charging and tumbled through
the dirt.
Queen Vegeta came down hard ten meters away, rolled, and came up on one knee.
Above them, the bubble popped.
Broly fell.
She was awake before she was halfway down, and Goku was already under, one arm out, catching
her against his chest.
Her hands found him immediately.
Both fists closed in the orange fabric at his shoulder and clenched, and the gi tore, a long strip peeling away down his back, taking the turtle kanji with it.
She hauled the scrap against her face and breathed in.
Goku looked down at her. At the torn piece of cloth crushed to her nose.
Five points of white fire came down through the upper atmosphere in a tight formation.
Every head on the plain turned.
Paragus was on her feet in an instant, staring up. Queen Vegeta straightened slowly, and her expression did something complicated.
"Pods," she said.
Goku counted them. "Five."
"Five." Her breath went out of her. "Two crew. Three empty."
They came in low across the plain and hit the far ridge one after another, five impacts.
Goku turned around.
Chronica was still on the ground. Still in shock. Silver hair hanging in her face.
He looked back at Broly, still buried in the scrap of cloth.
Then he crossed to Paragus and held her out.
Paragus took her.
For a moment both of their hands were on the baby at once, his forearm, her fingers, the
backs of their knuckles touching.
Paragus pulled back first.
"Take her and go," Goku said. "Both of you. Get to the pods."
"You're not coming."
"No."
Paragus looked at him. At the ribs. At the ruined gi with a strip torn out of the back.
"Tch."
She turned and lifted off, Broly clutched against her shoulder.
Queen Vegeta didn't move.
Goku turned to her.
"When you can," he said, "contact Eve. Tell her not to wait for me. Tell her to go back. She'll understand."
"…Fine," she said.
Then she grabbed two fistfuls of the front of his gi and yanked.
The kiss was terrible. She came in at the wrong angle and pressed too hard, her nose crushed against his cheek, no technique in it
at all, only force, the same way she did everything.
She broke it and shoved him back a step.
"You'll come back," she said. Not asking.
She was in the air before he answered.
The five pods sat steaming on the ridge, hatches open.
Nappa stood at the front with her arms folded, enormous against the skyline. Bardock beside
her, one hand still on the rim of her pod, scanning the horizon.
Queen Vegeta came down in front of them and both women dropped to one knee.
"Your Majesty."
"Get up."
They got up. Bardock's eyes went past her immediately, out across the ruined plain, tracking.
"Majesty. Where is the male?"
"Who cares?" Nappa's hand came down on Bardock's shoulder plate hard enough to stagger
her. "The Queen is alive, your people are waiting for you, Majesty."
Bardock didn't look away from the plain.
Queen Vegeta followed her gaze.
Far out, past the craters, a small figure stood over a smaller one.
"He'll be back," she said.
Paragus came in fast and hit the ground beside the second pod without slowing. She threw
the hatch, dropped into the seat, and pulled Broly down against her chest in one motion. The baby was still clutching the torn orange scrap in both fists.
"Paragus."
Her hand stopped on the hatch.
Queen Vegeta was looking at her.
"When we've settled," the Queen said. "You can come. You and your daughter. There will be
a place."
Paragus looked back at her.
She looked at her for a long moment.
Then she pulled the hatch shut.
The pod fired and went up and out, and it did not follow the heading the others were setting. It bent away on its own vector and kept bending until it was a point of light going somewhere else entirely.
Nappa made a disgusted sound. "Traitor."
"Get in," said the Queen.
Three pods went up in formation and punched through the cloud layer.
Goku watched them go until there was nothing left to watch.
Then he sat down in the dirt beside Chronica, hand pressed to his ribs, and let out a very long breath.
In the pod Queen Vegeta was watching the planet getting smaller, her hand had found the ring. She was turning it around her finger, over and over.
*You'd better come back.*
---
Back in the present, on Earth, everything was in motion.
In the garden behind Goku's mansion, under a sky with nothing wrong with it, five women sat
in the shade and pretended the year was passing normally.
Bulma had the scouter in pieces on the table in front of her.
Raditz's scouter. Or what was left of it. Bulma had been rebuilding it for eight weeks.
"THIS THING IS GOING TO DRIVE ME INSANE."
Chi-Chi didn't look up from her tea. "Are you still trying to fix that?"
"It's been two months," said Mai. "Give up."
Bulma turned her head.
"Two months already."
Panchy came across the lawn with a tray, cold drinks.
"Yeah," Mai said. "Two months since they left."
Lunch drifted over from the house and settled into the last chair, blue hair loose over one
shoulder, chin resting in her palm.
"The year's going to be long without him."
Nobody had anything to add to that.
"That Eve girl had better not be seducing him," Chi-Chi said abruptly.
"He does not need another wife," said Bulma.
"Oh, I wouldn't blame her for trying." Panchy set the tray down and began handing out glasses. "He gets that look when he's interested in something. It's completely unfair."
"Mm," Chi-Chi admitted, against her will.
"For me, it was the thickness."
Bulma's head came up.
"Your father never had anything like that. Goku's is so much thicker, and surprisingly heavy when you hold it-"
"MOM!"
Panchy blinked at her.
"-his tail, dear. So furry. So soft." She pressed a hand to her cheek, entirely serene.
"Mine's when he uses his-" Lunch added.
"I WANT A DRINK~!"
A small body collided with Panchy's leg and clung to it.
Nappi looked up, tail wagging behind her, blonde and beaming and covered in grass.
Behind her, two more came across the lawn at a considerably more dignified pace.
Gohana walked with her hands clasped in front of her, spine straight, expression already
disapproving. Bra walked beside her with her hands behind her head and her chin up.
"Nappi. How many times must I say it. Manners. You spend far too much time with Rori."
"Why don't you just relax?" Said Bra. "If they want to behave like savages, let them."
Behind both of them, Mina.
Panchy handed Nappi a glass. She drank the entire thing in one go, came up gasping, and
then brightened.
"Oh! Rori! I forget about Rori, where is she again? I miss her."
"*Forgot*," Gohana corrected, pmwiping her
sister's chin with a handkerchief. "And she is off training. With Mr Piccolo and that savage Saiyan woman."
Mina had made it around the edge of the group. She climbed into Mai's lap and pressed her
face into her mother's shoulder.
"Mama," she said, very quietly. "Is Papa coming soon? I miss him."
Mai's arms came around her.
Bra looked away across the garden, arms still folded.
"Such a baby," she said. "Just be patient. He'll come back. There's still nine months and twenty-six days."
Every adult at the table had turned to look at her.
"SHE COUNTED THE DAYS," Bulma howled.
"I DID NOT-"
Bra's face had gone scarlet all the way to her ears.
The laughter carried across the garden and up over the wall.
His family was waiting for him too.
---
High above the clouds, on a floor of white tile at the lookout, four men trained under Mr Popo.
Krillin. Yamcha. Tien. Chiaotzu.
---
Far below, in a stretch of broken red rock where nothing lived but scrub and lean animals, a
fire burned low.
Rori slept beside it on her back, arms and legs flung out in four directions, mouth open,
covered in dirt from the day's beating and completely unbothered by any of it.
Above her, on two separate rock pillars, Piccolo and Raditz sat facing opposite horizons.
"You don't need to save her every time," Piccolo said. "She'll never get stronger that way."
"I don't need advice from a Namekian." Raditz didn't turn around. "I do what I want to do."
"Do you." A beat. "Or is it what Son wants you to do?"
Raditz's hands tightened on her own biceps.
"Say one more word, Namekian, and I'll kill you."
The fire popped. Neither of them moved for a long time.
"How strong are the ones coming?" Piccolo said eventually.
Raditz was quiet.
"Very strong," she said. "Ten times me. No… more than that. Far above me." Her jaw
worked. "Nappa is stupidly strong. And tough."
"And the other one?"
Silence.
"Princess Vegeta." Raditz's voice changed. "…I don't know."
Piccolo turned his head.
"You don't know?"
"She never spars. I've never seen her fight. Not once, in all the years I served under her." Her
tail curled slowly against the rock. "The scouters never gave a true reading on her. Never.
Not one time."
"She's learned to suppress her power."
"Not only that."
Raditz was quiet again, and when she spoke, it was lower.
"She's hiding something. Something she learned after our planet was destroyed. I don't know
what it is. Nobody does." Her fingers dug into her arms. "But sometimes she says it to herself
when she thinks no one can hear her."
"Says what?"
"*This is for Goku.*"
Piccolo said nothing at all.
*Son,* he thought. *He went into the past. He must have met her there, met all of them.*
*The blond transformation. Is that what she's chasing?*
His eyes went to the sleeping child by the fire.
*It doesn't matter. We can't afford to wait for him and hope.*
*I have to get stronger too.*
The fire burned down, and the night went on, and so did their year.
---
And on a very small world at the top of everything, a world of green grass and pink trees, a young Saiyan woman stood panting in a field with her fists still up.
"Kakarot!"
The little blue man crossing the grass toward her had his hands behind his back and an
expression of genuine bewilderment.
"Why do you keep training like this? It has been two months. You are already twenty times
stronger than that sister of yours."
Kakarot stopped. She braced her hands on her knees and breathed.
"Kaio-sama." She straightened up. "Raditz isn't my goal."
"…Then who ? Those two Saiyan coming-"
"Goku is."
She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and looked out at the horizon of the tiny
world.
"And I'm still nowhere close to him."
King Kaio watched her walk back to the middle of the field and set her stance again.
*Goku,* he thought. *I have never met him. I find that I would like to.*
He watched her begin the sequence over from the beginning.
*She has made astonishing progress. Astonishing.* His brow creased faintly. *I have never
seen a rate of increase like it. Not in anyone.*
*It is almost strange.*
Everyone was waiting for the Saiyans to come.
And everyone was waiting for Goku to come back.