Leaving aside Aira's sudden, chilling void of worry—a feeling she couldn't explain and fiercely resented—Rhode was already gone.
He had vanished from the primary world, not through teleportation, but through a subtler, more profound tear in reality itself. This was the culmination of his research: after successfully locating a spacetime node using Porunga's methods, he had pushed beyond mere observation. He had tried to dissect its principles, to apply the hard-won resistance he'd built against time stasis in an attempt to grasp the node's power.
But spacetime was a higher order of existence. His mastery over frozen moments did not translate to control over dimensional gates. In a moment of intense, laser-focused analysis, his probing energy brushed against the node's core a fraction too deeply.
Touch.
There was no sound, no flash of light. One moment he was in his study, surrounded by equations and the hum of Earth, the next he was... elsewhere.
Deep space. An oppressive, absolute silence. No familiar stars, no galactic swirl of the Milky Way. Just the endless, cold black dotted with unrecognizable constellations. He floated in a void between solar systems, perhaps even between galaxies.
"Which world is this?" he murmured, the sound swallowed by the vacuum. His senses stretched out, searching for the ki signatures of planets, of life. He found... nothing of significant power in the immediate cosmic neighborhood. Puzzled, but not yet alarmed, he turned his focus inward.
The moment of transition had left an imprint. As he concentrated, feeling the subtle vibrations within his own cells, a wave of exhilaration washed over him.
There it is.
His body had been bathed in raw spacetime energy during the transition. It wasn't harmful; it was transformative. His very physiology now resonated on a frequency that made the presence of spacetime nodes sing to him. What had taken months of painstaking calculation and sensory deprivation to find before now felt as obvious as a bonfire in the night.
He didn't waste time. He began to move, not through physical flight, but by focusing on that new internal resonance. His form flickered, reappearing light-years away in another patch of empty void. And there it was—another node, pulsing with silent energy, clear to his enhanced perception.
Finding a way back was no longer a terrifying uncertainty. He could sense the pathways now. The immediate panic of being stranded subsided, replaced by the thrill of discovery.
He settled into a meditative posture, floating in the cosmic dark. His consciousness dove deep, mapping the changes within. The energy wasn't just a sensory boost; it had left a seed, a sliver of true temporal authority woven into his being.
His mind focused on that sliver. He willed it to awaken.
Buzz~
An invisible field, centered on his body, pulsed outward—a sphere of altered causality with a radius of one hundred meters.
A lone speck of cosmic dust, a microscopic wanderer traveling at a significant fraction of light speed, entered the sphere.
It stopped.
Absolutely. Instantly. Not slowing. Not decelerating. It went from relativistic velocity to perfect, impossible stillness.
Time Stop. His own. Not from a machine.
Bang!
The effect lasted less than a heartbeat. The dust particle resumed its journey, slamming into Rhode's impervious skin and vaporizing.
Less than a second, he calculated, his mind racing faster than the particle ever had. The duration was laughably short, almost insignificant.
And yet, his heart hammered against his ribs with pure, undiluted triumph.
This was his power. Born from his will, carved from his understanding. In a battle between beings who traded blows in nanoseconds, even a fraction of a second of absolute temporal control was an eternity. It was the difference between life and obliteration.
This was just the beginning—the first, fragile spark of a flame that could one day burn through the chains of time itself. He could envision it: not just stopping time, but bending it—accelerating his own perceptions and movements to impossible speeds, perhaps even peeling back the layers of causality to reverse a fatal wound.
Master time, and the limitations of a mortal lifespan would become irrelevant. He wouldn't need magic or genetic tampering. He would become the master of his own clock.
The boundless, silent universe around him was no longer a prison. It was his laboratory. His crucible. And within it, the first true fruit of his ambition had just ripened. The research was far from over; in fact, the most important work—learning to cultivate and wield this nascent, god-like power—had only just begun.
With that decision made, Rhode didn't move. He remained a silent statue in the cosmic graveyard, legs crossed in a meditative pose, eyes shut against the infinite starfield. He turned his formidable focus inward, exploring the new dimension of his being. He probed the sliver of temporal power, not as a blunt tool, but as a new limb, feeling its contours, its triggers, its limits. He practiced in the ultimate isolation chamber, willing time to stutter for a nanosecond longer, experimenting with shaping the field, trying to isolate its effect on a single molecule of interstellar hydrogen.
Time, unmeasured by any planet's rotation, flowed around him. He lost himself in the work. When he finally opened his eyes again, a subjective age later, the power responded to his thought as naturally as flexing a muscle. He could halt time in a perfect, meter-wide sphere around his fingertip, or stretch the effect to its maximum radius for the fleeting instant he could sustain it. He had even discovered minor, clever applications—creating a temporal "lens" that briefly accelerated his own synaptic firing to process information at a phenomenal rate.
A slow, satisfied smile touched his lips. The foundation was laid. Now, to see what world he had washed up on.
"It's time to explore," he murmured to the void, his voice a vibration in the stillness.
He focused, extending his newfound spacetime sensitivity like a sonar pulse through the cosmos. He sought a familiar resonance—the unique vibrational signature of a small, blue-green planet in a backwater galaxy. And there it was, faint but unmistakable, on the three-dimensional map of reality now painted in his mind.
Swish.
He vanished from the deep void.
On the edge of the Lookout, high above the Earth, the guardian deity, Kami, stood with his eternal attendant, Mr. Popo. Their faces were etched with deep concern as they gazed down at the planet below, where faint but terrifying bursts of energy flared like distant, malevolent fireworks.
"Don't worry, Kami," Mr. Popo said, his voice a low, calming rumble. "Goku and the others will prevail."
"I hope so," Kami sighed, the weight of his helplessness heavy in the words. As Earth's guardian, he should be its shield, yet in the face of this cataclysm, he could only watch.
Swish.
The air beside them rippled, displaced by an arrival that bypassed all their divine wards and alarms. A tall, powerfully built figure with wild black hair and a tail materialized out of nothingness.
Kami and Popo whirled around, instantly on guard. The intruder's power was... not hostile, but vast and deeply contained, like a still ocean over a trench.
"Yo! Gentlemen, long time no see!" Rhode greeted them, his stern features breaking into a disarmingly gentle smile.
Indeed, in his own timeline, he hadn't visited the Lookout in over two years. Seeing this universe's versions of Kami and Popo felt oddly nostalgic.
"You are?" Kami asked, confusion warring with caution.
"Kami," Mr. Popo interjected quietly, his black eyes wide. "This person... is immensely powerful."
Rhode just smiled, offering no explanation. He stepped past them with a casual grace that spoke of absolute confidence and walked to the very edge of the Lookout platform. He looked down.
A familiar, yet profoundly different, scene unfolded below. Instead of the sprawling, peaceful continents of his Earth, he saw patches of devastation, cities in ruins, and in a specific, blasted area, several powerful energy signatures clashing violently. Among them, he sensed one he knew intimately, yet... younger. Fiercer. More desperate.
Just as I thought, Rhode mused, the final piece clicking into place. The temporal resonance, the feeling of a "younger" universe... he hadn't sensed wrong.
He had not traveled across space, but across time. This was an earlier point in his own universe's history. The battle raging below was one he knew only from legend and from the fragmented visions granted by the time machine's data.
The Saiyans had arrived.