Yes I know I said Sunday, well this time I've got no excuse, I was just really lazy and upset the chapters I wrote disappeared.
----
The recording played for the third time.
Not the negotiation. Not the part where the Saiyan mechanic asked to be considered worth watching, which was audacious enough on its own. Frieza had processed that part. He had filed it under useful arrogance and moved on.
What he kept returning to was the ask for Whis.
He listened to it again. This was not the kind of performative bravery Saiyans usually mustered when they were trying to impress someone above their station. It was a logical argument. Delivered quietly. Timed perfectly. Built from the specific reading of the room that only someone who had been watching very carefully for a very long time could have constructed.
Frieza set the playback device down.
He looked at the ceiling of his private quarters. Outside the viewport, Planet Vegeta turned slowly, red and unremarkable, the same rock it had always been.
He thought about the mission record. The squad's success rate since the restructuring. Zero casualties across seven deployments. Every difficult situation resolved cleanly, efficiently, without the kind of spectacular collateral damage that usually accompanied Saiyan operations. No reports of insubordination. No reports of anything, really, which was itself a kind of report if you knew how to read it.
Tools that worked this well without supervision had a tendency, in Frieza's experience, to eventually start deciding what they were for.
He wasn't alarmed. It was too small a thing for alarm. Just a thing that needed watching.
He pressed the call panel.
Zarbon arrived in under a minute, which was correct. He stood at the threshold with his hands clasped and his expression professionally neutral.
"Pull up the active deployment list," Frieza said. "Outer rim. Something unresolved."
Zarbon moved to the console. His fingers worked the display. "Planet Frieza 117. High resistance cell operating in the mountain ranges. Elevated power signatures.
Frieza looked at the mission parameters on the screen. He looked at the squad roster beside it.
"Assign it to them," he said.
Zarbon paused. "Shall I adjust the support allocation? Given the terrain and the elevated—"
"No," Frieza said.
Zarbon noted the assignment and left without asking anything else.
Frieza looked at the screen for a moment after the door closed.
He moved on to other business.
He didn't think about it again.
---
Planet Frieza 117 was cold, which nobody had mentioned in the briefing.
The mountain air bit through the armor at altitude, thin and sharp and tasting of nothing. The peaks were jagged and pale, stripped of anything soft by wind that apparently never stopped. Below the ridgeline where I was hovering, the canyon dropped away in a series of broken ledges, good cover for a resistance cell that had been here long enough to learn the terrain.
I ran the assessment through the scouter.
Two clusters. One at the canyon mouth, dug in behind a natural rock formation that would need to be flanked rather than hit directly. One deeper in the pass, smaller, probably a command element. Power levels elevated but not outside what we could handle, the briefing had flagged them as challenging, which in Frieza Force language meant difficult for a standard unit. We were not a standard unit.
Ruca was beside me, her hair whipping in the wind, checking her own readings.
"Canyon mouth first," I said. "Then push through."
"The pass is going to be ugly," she said. "Tight quarters. If they have anything with range in there it limits our—"
"Broly," I said.
She looked at me.
"Range advantage," I said. "Open approach, he fires from distance, we push on the distraction."
She looked back at her scouter. "That works." A pause. "If he keeps it together."
"He will."
She didn't argue. She'd seen him hold it together enough times now that arguing would have been for the sake of arguing, and she didn't do things for the sake of things.
Nappa landed on the ridge beside us with the impact of a man who had never once considered landing quietly. He looked at the canyon. He looked at the tactical picture for approximately three seconds, which for Nappa was a thorough analysis.
"I'm taking Zuto and Toma up the west face," he said.
"The west face is—"
"More fun," Nappa said, and blasted off.
Zuto and Toma followed without looking back. The sound of their departure faded into the wind.
I watched them go.
"He's not wrong," Ruca said. "The real resistance is up there."
"He's also leaving three children unsupervised in a warzone."
"They're Saiyans." She looked at me sideways. "You've been drilling them for months. Either it took or it didn't."
I looked down at the base of the ridge.
The three of them were standing there. Vegeta at the front with his arms crossed, already scanning the canyon with the specific energy of a person who has a plan and is waiting for permission to execute it that he doesn't actually intend to ask for. Raditz beside him, checking his scouter, tapping the side of it, checking it again. Broly slightly behind them both, very still, looking at the canyon entrance with the focused patience of someone reading something the others hadn't noticed yet.
I dropped down.
They looked at me. Even Vegeta, who technically made a point of not looking at me when he could avoid it, looked at me.
"Listen," I said. "Not to tactics. To the situation. If something shifts faster than you expected, you pull back and signal. You don't push into an unknown variable because you're too proud to ask for help." I looked at each of them in turn, landing on Vegeta last. "The canyon mouth approach has a ledge on the left wall. Mid-height. Check it before you commit to the entrance, I don't care how clear your scouter reads, check it with your eyes."
Nobody said anything.
"If it gets bad," I said, "you call. I'll hear it."
I looked at them for a moment longer. I blasted off east with Ruca at my shoulder.
---
The sound of Cress and Ruca leaving faded into the wind and then there was nothing but the cold and the canyon and the three of them.
Vegeta turned immediately. "Canyon mouth. I go first, you two cover the flanks."
"Cress said to check the ledge before we commit," Raditz said.
Vegeta looked at him. "Cress isn't here."
"I know he isn't here," Raditz said. "I was also standing there when he said it."
Something about the way he said it made Vegeta go still for a half second. He was used to Raditz folding. Raditz had been folding since the first day, on every front, from every direction, and the absence of the fold now sat in the air between them like a change in temperature.
"Fine," Vegeta said, clipping the word short. "We check the ledge."
They looked at the canyon entrance. The left wall rose steeply from the canyon floor, broken by shadow and overhang.
"The ledge," Broly said.
They looked at him. He was looking at the left wall, halfway up, where a natural shelf jutted out from the rock face. In the shadow of the overhang above it, nothing was visible.
"There's someone up there," Broly said.
Raditz checked his scouter. A faint signature resolved at the edge of the reading, right at the ledge position.
"He's right," Raditz said.
"Flanking approach," Vegeta said. "Left side wide, come at the ledge from above. You—" he pointed at Raditz, "—keep distance and cover. You—" he pointed at Broly, "—hit it from range on my signal."
"That's basically what Cress said to do," Raditz observed.
"It's what I said to do," Vegeta said.
The scouters beeped.
All three of them looked at the readout at the same time. Incoming signatures from the eastern approach, fast, multiple, not from the canyon, from the ridge behind them.
The quarrel ended. The three of them turned to face the same direction without discussing it, which was itself a kind of answer to a question nobody had asked yet.
---
The canyon mouth fell in twenty minutes.
The pass took longer, tight quarters, restricted movement, the resistance using the terrain well enough that Ruca and I had to work for it rather than through it. She took the right wall, I took the left, and we compressed them toward the center where there was nowhere left to go.
By the time we linked back up with the kids at the extraction point, the mission was done.
They were standing together at the base of the ridge. Vegeta's armor had a new scorch mark on the shoulder. Raditz had a cut on his forehead that had already stopped bleeding. Broly was untouched, which was consistent.
I checked them over without making it obvious I was checking them over.
"Canyon?" I said.
"Clear," Vegeta said. He didn't elaborate. He also didn't complain, which told me the operation had gone well enough that he'd gotten what he needed from it.
"The ledge ambush?" I said.
"Handled," Raditz said. He said it with a steadiness he hadn't had three months ago.
I looked at Broly.
Broly looked back at me.
"Distance," he said.
"Good," I said.
Nappa landed behind us. He had blood on him that wasn't his, which meant the west face had delivered on its promise. Zuto was limping slightly. Toma looked deeply satisfied with herself in the way she only looked after something had genuinely fought back.
"Done?" Nappa said.
"Done," I said.
"Good." He looked at the mountain. He looked at the kids. He grunted something that might have been approval and was definitely not going to be repeated. "Let's go. This cold is getting on my nerves."
---
Far far away, on a blue planet, a canyon sat in the early morning dark.
The rockfall covering its mouth was undisturbed. Above it, on the plateau, something that had not moved in eight months moved.
The first breath was the deepest thing the canyon had heard in a long time, something pulling from the bottom of a very deep place, reaching up through layers of hibernation like a hand feeling for the surface. The birds in the nest behind my left ear launched into the grey dawn sky in a panicked cluster. The ones on my shoulders lifted and settled twice before abandoning the shoulder entirely. The deer at the canyon floor were gone before the second breath finished.
The moss on my shoulders cracked as the muscle underneath shifted.
Mr. Popo stood up from his rock.
I opened my eyes.
Gold. I didn't know that yet — I had no mirror and no reason to think my eyes were anything other than what they'd always been. I looked at the sky first, then at the canyon below, then at my hands. Massive. Clawed. Covered in patches of green moss with the texture of something that had been growing undisturbed for months because it had been growing undisturbed for months.
I sat up.
The movement felt like relearning a language. My body remembered the mechanics of it, sitting, shifting weight, engaging the core, but the scale was wrong, everything translated through a frame that was significantly larger than I was accustomed to, and the recalibration happened in real time as I moved, each adjustment arriving slightly after the movement that required it.
Rock crumbled from my shoulders. The abandoned nest fell from behind my ear and landed somewhere in the dark below the plateau.
I changed back.
It wasn't violent. It was the most natural thing I'd done in months. What was left wasn't quite the shape that had gone into the hibernation.
Taller. Broader. The density in the frame was different, not heavier exactly, more settled, like weight that had found its right distribution after a long time being carried wrong. I stood on the plateau in the early dawn and my eyes were still gold and my hands were completely still and I felt an absolute, structural calm that had nothing to do with anything I was doing consciously.
I looked at my hands for a while.
The gold faded slowly, the way light leaves a room when the sun moves, gradual enough that you don't notice the specific moment it's gone. The Ikari residue bled out of my muscles, the last of it settling somewhere deeper where I couldn't feel it but could feel the shape of where it had been. The extra size normalized. The density stayed.
I exhaled.
Then the link lit up.
All of it arrived at once, not organized, just the raw weight of eight months of the Clone's experience hitting me in a single compressed moment.
My knees didn't buckle. It was a closer thing than I'd like.
I stood through it.
When it settled I looked at the sky. The first light was coming over the eastern ridge, pale and unhurried, doing what it always did regardless of what was happening on the ground below it.
'A lot has happened lately,' I thought. 'Coincidentally when I wasn't there.'
I looked at Mr. Popo.
He was standing on the path below the plateau, lantern in one hand, Kami's basket in the other, looking up at me with the expression of a person who has been sitting on a rock since before dawn and is relieved that the thing they were watching has finally done something worth watching.
"Hello," Mr. Popo said.
My voice came out rougher than I expected. Eight months of nothing will do that. "Hello."
I looked down at myself. Moss on my forearms. Dirt on everything. The remains of what had once been a boot still attached to my left foot, the leather cracked and bleached from weather. I smelled like soil and old fur and the specific mineral scent of a canyon that had been rained on repeatedly.
"I need a bath," I said, "And I'm starving!"
---
Kami was at the edge of the plaza.
He wasn't standing there waiting dramatically. He was just there, the way he tended to be when he'd been watching something approach from a distance. He looked at me for a long moment without speaking, which was his version of an assessment.
"Eight months," he said finally.
"I didn't expect it to last that long," I said.
"The time you spent inside the abyss of your mind reflects how important it was." Kami looked in my eyes, "The gold was still present when you crossed the cloud layer. I saw it from here."
"It's gone now."
"It left a residue," Kami said. "In the way you're standing. The way you came across the plaza just now." He tilted his head slightly. "What was it?"
"Ikari," I said. "I think it bled through the hibernation. The Oozaru form held it long enough for it to settle into something more stable, and when I changed back it came with me." I looked at my hands. "I didn't plan that."
"No," Kami said, with the tone of someone for whom unplanned arrivals were a lifelong area of study. "But it settled correctly, which is more important than whether it was intended." He turned toward the inner sanctuary. "We have a great deal of ground to cover."
"I need a few days first," I said.
He stopped. He turned back.
"There are people I need to see before we resume," I said. "A week at most. I got eight months of memories in one hit on that plateau and some of what I got requires me to be moving rather than meditating. I'm not dismissing the training. I'm telling you I'll be more useful here after I've handled what I need to handle."
"What the clone experienced while you were gone," Kami said carefully. "It alarmed you."
It wasn't a question. He'd felt enough of it through the connection between us to have a shape of it.
"Some of it," I said.
"And the rest?"
I was quiet for a moment. The memories were still settling, still finding their right weight and placement.
"The rest I need to sit with," I said. "Which is also part of why I need to move first."
Kami looked at me for another moment.
"One week," he said.
He walked inside.
I stood at the edge of the Lookout for a while. The wind was quiet up here.
I dove off the edge.