"Alright, it's like this."
Little Gohan was still looking directly at Piccolo. He wore the highly focused, slightly suspicious look of a smart child carefully performing due diligence on a very questionable business proposition.
"If I actually agree to become his martial arts student," Gohan said slowly, his small brow furrowed as he carefully worked through the complex architecture of the idea. "Then I am technically not training with my Dad. Which means it is technically allowed by Mom's rules."
"Technically," Jordan agreed with a completely straight face.
A long pause followed. Something sharp flickered across the small boy's face. It wasn't doubt, exactly. It was more the sudden, dawning awareness that a four-year-old was actively catching a massive logical gap that an adult had very deliberately left wide open for him to find.
"But," Gohan said, pointing a small finger at the towering Namekian. "Isn't the green uncle supposed to be a really bad person? Why would he ever want to teach me anything?"
Jordan looked down at the boy with the highly specific expression of someone who had just been caught red-handed being entirely too helpful. He wisely chose not to answer the question immediately.
Out on the rocky battlefield, the brutal fight continued.
"Hey! That's it!"
Goku had just landed hard on the red dirt from another violent, high-speed exchange. His left arm was hanging at a completely wrong angle, the heavy physical damage accumulated over the last few brutal minutes finally settling into something that was definitely going to need serious medical attention later. But something bright had suddenly lit up behind his dark eyes that had absolutely nothing to do with the physical pain.
He was grinning widely.
Piccolo and Krillin both immediately turned to look at him. They wore the deeply concerned expressions of veteran fighters who had long ago learned the hard way that Goku's sudden, mid-battle ideas tended to be either absolute tactical brilliance or catastrophically, suicidally simple. There was almost never a reliable way to tell in advance exactly which one you were currently dealing with.
"Piccolo! Krillin!" Goku urgently beckoned both of them in closer. The frantic gesture carried the heavy urgency of a desperate battle plan that needed to be shared before he even finished fully understanding it himself. "Come here quickly! I have something!"
Piccolo's green jaw instantly tightened in annoyance at the casual nickname. He quickly glanced over his shoulder at Raditz. The armored Saiyan warrior was currently standing about twenty meters away, his heavy arms crossed over his chest, actively watching them huddle up with an expression of open, arrogant contempt. Piccolo sharply felt the specific, burning indignity of being casually summoned for a team conference directly in front of a deadly enemy.
Then, his bruised ribs fiercely throbbed, forcefully reminding him of exactly what Raditz's physical output had felt like during the last three agonizing minutes of fighting. He swallowed his massive pride and quickly walked over to the huddle.
"Do not ever order me around like that again," Piccolo said flatly as he arrived, glaring at Goku. "Once these alien invaders are permanently dealt with, you and I still have deadly business to settle."
"Right, right, sure." Goku waved the death threat off casually without breaking his intense tactical focus. He leaned in close. His voice dropped to a frantic whisper.
Krillin listened closely to the rushed explanation. His dark eyes rapidly went from highly cautious, to deeply interested, to completely bright with desperate hope.
"Okay," Krillin finally nodded, tightly clenching his fist. "I understand exactly what to do!"
Piccolo listened to the chaotic plan with his arms still tightly crossed and his facial expression carefully neutral. His dark eyes, however, had completely shifted. They now held the highly specific, sharpened state of a master tactician rapidly processing complex battlefield geometry.
"Tch." Piccolo looked away, annoyed that the plan was actually good. "Fine. Let's do it."
Twenty meters away across the red dirt, Raditz watched the desperate little huddle with tightly folded arms and a deep, certain suspicion. They were actively plotting right in front of him, entirely out in the open. They moved with the specific, highly annoying confidence of weak people who either possessed a tactical plan genuinely worth protecting, or were just incredibly, terminally stupid. From absolutely everything he had personally seen of this mudball planet today, the former option was at least a distinct possibility.
If it weren't for the terrifying Jordan standing quietly on the sidelines, Raditz absolutely would have violently rushed them during the pathetic conference. That would have been highly efficient and very satisfying.
Not worth the risk, Raditz firmly reminded himself, for what felt like the fourth agonizing time today.
The three Earth warriors finally broke their tight huddle and rapidly spread back out into their combat positions.
Goku immediately came charging forward again. But this time, something fundamental was entirely different about his approach. It wasn't a sudden spike in his raw power, and it wasn't an increase in his physical speed. The difference was entirely in his violent intent. The usual martial restraint was completely gone. He launched himself directly at Raditz with the fully committed, total-aggression of a desperate man who had entirely stopped caring about his own self-preservation, and was actively making that fact his entire combat strategy.
"Is this pathetic rush really your grand plan?" Raditz sneered. He easily intercepted Goku's opening attack. It was a powerful, twisting high kick that the Saiyan casually blocked with his armored forearm, immediately answering with a brutal, driving punch directly to Goku's chest. It was the exact same physical exchange as their first clash. Goku took the heavy hit with a grunt and violently surged backward to create distance. "How incredibly simple."
But Goku absolutely didn't stop attacking.
He launched the next violent exchange. Then another. Then another.
Every single time Raditz hit him hard enough to shatter bone, Goku came right back significantly faster. Every single time the massive, undeniable power differential violently showed itself, Goku immediately found another creative angle of attack, another desperate approach. He was completely ignoring the heavy physical damage rapidly accumulating on his body in ways that made perfect logical sense to a Saiyan, but felt increasingly, terrifyingly wrong from Raditz's arrogant perspective.
He absolutely knows he cannot possibly win this fight on pure power, Raditz thought, blocking another frantic flurry of punches. So why is he not just giving up like a rational warrior?
"Afterimage Fist!"
The loud shout arrived completely without warning, and then Goku was absolutely everywhere at once.
There were hundreds of him. It was not a visual exaggeration. The glowing afterimages were stacking on top of each other with a sheer physical density that only actually worked at this extreme level of speed. Each individual image was perfectly crisp, completely present, and utterly impossible to instantly dismiss as an obvious fake. They completely filled the red Imaginary Space in absolutely every single direction. Some were standing perfectly still, some were frozen mid-motion, and some were violently charging from completely different angles simultaneously. And terrifyingly, every single one of them carried the exact same, distinct ki signature as the real Goku.
The advanced martial technique had been specifically designed to perfectly exploit exactly this Saiyan weakness: reading ki to locate the real target still fundamentally required matching a specific energy location to a specific physical moment in time. When the real fighter was moving fast enough between the static images, the residual ki traces all blended together and looked completely identical to a scouter or a natural sensor.
Raditz's panicked eyes swept frantically across the crowded battlefield and came back with absolutely nothing useful. Hundreds of furious Gokus. All of them looked exactly the same.
He violently attacked the three images closest to him. He hit absolutely nothing but thin air. He moved rapidly to adjust—
The real Goku came directly from the red sky above him.
Both of Goku's hands were tightly clasped together. It was the classic, devastating double-axe hammer strike, aimed with lethal precision directly at the vulnerable base of the Saiyan's thick neck.
Raditz's ingrained combat instincts were the only thing that saved his life. It was not his superior eyes, but the automatic, unconscious body-reading of a lifetime of brutal warfare firing wildly before his visual cortex had even finished fully processing the threat. He desperately dropped his right shoulder, violently interposed his broad, armored back, and took the massive, crushing blow directly across the thickest part of his spine instead of his fragile neck.
The massive shockwave visibly compressed the red air in a perfect sphere. The brutal impact forcefully drove Raditz downward exactly like a heavy sledgehammer driving a steel nail. He went straight down, incredibly fast, the rocky ground of the Imaginary Space rushing up to meet him at terrifying speed.
The violent collision carved a massive crater into the bedrock.
It was a proper, devastating crater. The jagged edges were sharp-cut, the smoking center was incredibly deep, and large stone fragments were still actively arcing outward through the air when Goku finally landed lightly in the sky directly above it. Goku settled heavily into his ready position, breathing incredibly hard, his dark eyes intensely watching the rising dust cloud.
There was sudden movement deep inside the crater. Raditz furiously pushed himself upright, violently shook his ringing head once to clear it, and launched himself back into the sky with a roar of pure rage.
The brutal fight immediately renewed in the open air above the ruins. Two screaming figures became blurring streaks of light tearing across the Imaginary Space in highly erratic, violent flight paths. The massive physical impact of each high-speed exchange left deep, glowing new scars in the strange geometric terrain far below them. Solid ground violently shattered. Massive, block-cut stone ridges completely collapsed into rubble. The barren plain was actively being completely reorganized by pure, unadulterated violence in real time.
Goku was definitely losing the battle of attrition.
This grim fact was completely clear to everyone watching. In every single individual physical exchange, Raditz always got the better of it. The massive gap in raw power was entirely real, and Goku's superior martial technique gap was simply not quite wide enough to fully bridge the terrifying distance.
Goku's left arm had been hanging completely wrong ever since an early, desperate exchange. A brutal, sweeping whip kick from Raditz had landed squarely across his blocking forearm at the absolute wrong angle, and the strong bone had loudly given way. The broken arm now hung completely limp and useless at his side. He stubbornly fought on with only his remaining good arm, continuing to aggressively engage the alien with the fully committed, terrifying intensity of a man who had completely accepted that excruciating pain was just a mandatory part of the tactical equation, and was furiously doing the math anyway.
Raditz watched this impossible display of willpower and felt something cold and heavy violently shift deep in his chest. It was an emotion he was absolutely not going to put a name to right now.
Why won't this pathetic trash just stop fighting?!
"Futile struggle!" Raditz finally roared in frustration.
He rapidly gathered massive amounts of ki in both of his hands. The blinding pink energy crackled violently outward, heavily ionizing the strange red air immediately around his armored fists. Arcs of pink lightning played erratically across the empty space between them as the lethal compression built to its absolute peak. He had officially had enough of this humiliating game. "Die!"
Both of his glowing hands violently discharged.
Twin, devastating energy cannons lanced screaming across the open space directly at the heavily damaged figure in orange.
And they hit an afterimage.
Raditz stared in absolute, frozen horror at the slowly dissipating ghost of sparkling ki-residue exactly where Goku had just been floating a millisecond before.
The freezing chill of pure dread arrived on his skin well before his arrogant brain fully understood exactly what had generated it.
A sound came from the empty air directly behind his back. It was not a loud shout, and it was absolutely not a heroic battle cry. It was a high-pitched, vibrating hum. It was the highly specific, terrifying resonant note of massive, highly concentrated energy that had been slowly building for a very long time in complete, absolute silence, and had only just now finally reached the absolute threshold of becoming audible.
He spun around in a panic.
Piccolo stood floating in the red air exactly forty meters behind him. Two green fingers were pressed tightly together directly at his brow. His left hand was firmly gripping his right wrist. It was the exact, highly specific martial stance that had preceded absolutely nothing in the entire fight until this exact, fatal moment.
Because Piccolo hadn't fired a single ki blast yet. Because he had been completely silent, furiously charging this single attack ever since the brief huddle on the ground. Because while Goku had spent the last several agonizing minutes actively being the bloody distraction—taking massive physical damage, keeping Raditz's arrogant attention fully and completely committed, and constantly demanding a violent response at every single moment—Piccolo had been quietly doing the absolute only thing that required the one resource they didn't have any other way to creatively generate.
Time. He had been charging.
The blinding yellow energy trapped between Piccolo's two fingers was violently compressed into something that had absolutely no physical business looking that small. It was a vicious, crackling spiral wound impossibly tight around a blindingly bright drilling point. It was heavily layered, impossibly dense, and it was the absolute culmination of five solid years of intense, solitary development aimed at solving exactly one specific, massive problem: the seemingly impossible problem of how to severely hurt something that was significantly, overwhelmingly more powerful than yourself.
Piccolo's cruel smile was absolutely not warm.
"Special Beam Cannon!!" Piccolo roared.
The devastating beam launched.
It was a highly complex, terrifying helix of pure destruction. It was absolutely not a simple, concussive energy wave. It was a heavily layered, spiraling energy drill. One blinding yellow beam rapidly rotated completely around a central core beam. The entire deadly structure turned violently as it traveled through the air. It was specifically, maliciously designed to pierce straight through solid matter rather than just blasting it apart. It was designed to concentrate its lethal force into a single, microscopic point rather than dispersing it over a wide area.
It completely crossed the forty-meter space between them in the exact time it took Raditz to breathe out a single gasp.
Raditz desperately moved.
Absolutely everything he had left in his tank—every single ingrained combat instinct carefully developed across a long, bloody career of interplanetary violence, every lightning-fast twitch reflex that had miraculously kept him alive in impossible situations that had easily killed significantly better warriors than him—absolutely all of it deployed in the tiny, terrifying half-second between the weapon firing and its arrival at his chest. He violently burst completely sideways at his absolute maximum physical output. The agonizing burn of the sudden effort tore through every single muscle in his body. The outer edge of the spiraling beam actively tracked his sudden movement exactly as if it possessed strong, malicious opinions about exactly where it wanted to go.
He almost made it out of the path.
The violently spinning outer edge of the energy spiral cleanly caught his right shoulder.
The advanced Frieza Force combat armor covering that specific area simply ceased to exist. The sheer, impossible heat had completely removed the material from reality. The tough Saiyan skin directly underneath the armor registered the horrific information immediately. The massive wound burned with the highly particular, agonizing intensity of raw energy that had been heavily compressed down to a microscopic point, rather than safely spread across a wider surface area.
The screaming beam continued completely past his twisting body and violently hit the distant, block-cut mountains at the very edge of the Imaginary Space. The solid stone mountains instantly became gray dust. The massive cloud of dust settled slowly and silently in the bloody crimson light.
Raditz hung suspended in the red air, his left hand pressed desperately tightly to his smoking, ruined right shoulder. Cold, terrified sweat was running freely down his face as his arrogant brain finally finished fully processing exactly what had just miraculously failed to kill him.
"So that was your pathetic little plan," Raditz gasped, his chest heaving. His raspy voice had completely lost the absolute, arrogant certainty it had started the afternoon with. He was absolutely not broken yet—elite Saiyans did not break easily under fire—but he was heavily adjusted. He had entirely recalculated the threat level. "You were actually trying to severely hurt me. It is just too damn bad that your best trick still came up completely short."
"It's absolutely not over yet," a voice called out.
Goku came flying steadily forward again.
His left arm was completely fractured and hanging useless. He was breathing heavily in short, highly controlled bursts to manage the blinding pain. He had taken significantly more combined physical punishment in the last ten brutal minutes than most normal people received in a full year of hard, unyielding martial arts training. Absolutely none of this was factually arguable by anyone watching.
And he was still smiling.
Raditz stared at his younger brother. He actually, truly looked at him for the very first time since landing this afternoon, without any arrogant combat calculus intervening in his perception. And then he violently drove Goku backward with a brutal, desperate punch that absolutely should have ended the physical engagement permanently.
Goku hit a solid stone ridge hard, violently rebounded off the shattered rock, and immediately turned back around in the air.
He was still coming forward.