(Authors note, first person is only for the introduction, it will switch to third person rather soon.)
I just died I'm pretty sure, I was hit by a speeding truck, damn people were always treating my street I lived on like a racetrack, maybe this will teach some of them a lesson, though I doubt it…
Everything is black, is this the afterlife? Nothing but my own thoughts and darkness?
Suddenly I feel a sort of tug as if on my very being and i feel as though something is being overwritten deep within me, and the next thing I know I hear voices.
"My child, My son has been born! Quickly doctor, hand me a scouter, I must see my boy's powerlevel!"
Power level? Scouter? That's way too familiar, don't tell me…
"Surely being the son of a mid tier warrior like me my son would at least have a power level of 50."
"Sure thing, here you are Korn."
The man puts a device on over his eyes and seemingly scans me, who by the way, has barely opened my eyes just enough to see the people around me with tails wrapped around their wasts which further fuels my thoughts of what could be happening.
"N…No, that can't be…"
He presses a button on the device again as if doubting it.
"DAMN IT, HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN!?"
"What's wrong dear? Is it a little low? That's fine as long as he trains seriously it will climb I'm sure."
The woman holding me speaks up, in a soothing voice.
"A little low? A LITTLE!? WOMAN, THIS CHILD CANT BE MINE HE IS TRASH LOWER THAN EVEN A COMMON LOW TIER WARRIOR! A POWER LEVEL OF… TWO!"
The doctor next to him starts laughing.
"Two? What a disgrace but you know Korn, the machines don't lie, that is definitely your son."
The woman, my new mother shakes, perhaps out of fear, sadness and regret for me and my possible future life.
"Don't call him trash! Even with such a power level he is still our son! I can tell what your thinking, I always have been able to, at least before you try to abandon us give him a name! Like a father should to his child, despite of circumstances!"
My new 'father' who I now refuse to admire as such spits on the ground next to him and speaks once more while turning around.
"Fine, a worthy saiyan name is all he shall get from me. From now on this child shall be called…Xanth! I want Xanth, this disgrace deployed to a far away planet right away, as soon as he has had enough nutrients! I never want to see him and I never want him to be among our kind as he will only bring disgrace and disappointment."
My mother sighs and speaks as if having expected this outcome.
"Very well… but remember this, if this child somehow grows into a strong warrior, and returns one day… he is not your son but mine and from this day forward I will bear no more children for you. Find another woman, Korn."
After my now former father left the room my mother whispered to me.
"Don't worry my sweet Xanth, I shall pick a planet where no harm will ever come apon you. Live your life however you want in the future, if you're destined to be a warrior so be it, a scholar so be it, or a nobody… so be it. As long as you live on and have a good life, I will be happy."
From that day on I was put into a clear glass container full of green liquid, which my body absorbed at a decent pace, and as I was floating in the liquid I processed everything I had learned so far.
I was delighted to know I was definitely a saiyan, which means I'm in the world of dragon ball, but that delight turned into fear of what could be the future, will I be shot into space before the planet blows up, what year is it pertaining to when frieza destroyed this planet?
...
(Swap to third person)
A few days after Xanth was placed in the nutritional solution, his body was now that of a toddler and if he got out and tried he could probably walk on his own two feet, albeit with a bit of effort mind you.
He flutters awake to the sound of blaring alarms and the incubation room he was in was also strangely empty.
Xanth's mother bursts into the room not long after and desperately pushes buttons on his pod, draining the remaining fluid and pulling him out of the glass case.
"M-mother?"
Xanth barely manages to speak, his throat burning due to forcing such noise out of his young vocal cords.
"Xanth you just spoke! Doing so at such a young age after only a few days in the solution! You will probably grow up to be a smart boy…"
She quickly shakes her head…
"Doesn't matter right now, what matters is your safety, our home world is doomed, king vegeta should have just listened to Thanos, but then again we are a proud race by default. You were set to be launched anyway so there is a pod ready for you, you must live."
She speaks as she rushes somewhere with him, eventually coming to a sort of launch pad with a round pod that Xanth recognizes from dragon ball as a saiyan ship.
Wait a minute, he thinks…
Did she just say Thanos not long ago?
He doesn't have much time to mull over that as his mother quickly shoves him into the pod, but not before putting a sort of armor on him, which bears his name on the chest plate.
"This armor will grow as you do, it will fit you even as an adult, you can choose to keep it or not, but it is that stubborn father of yours last gift to you. He seemed to have known this would happen to our world and commissioned it for you. He must have felt if you are to be his first and only son, then you should have a saiyan warriors armor. Perhaps he had a change of views, seeing you as a potential hope for his bloodline surviving."
She inputs a destination in the pod and then speaks one last time.
"You shall be sent to a small planet named earth, it has been documented long ago but it was deemed low value so the saiyans never took interest in it. It is on the complete other side of the galaxy as well. Thanos and his minions won't arrive there for quite some time, if they even do. Good luck my son, I hope you have a good life. With your low power level I doubt they will even target you like the other pods."
She hugs him and then closes the pod door, pressing launch and sending him off.
Xanth's mother was right, none of Thanos's entourage took interest in the fleeing pod of his they scanned it and determined that the lifeform abord wasn't even worth worrying about, thinking it may have even been an accidental launch with an empty pod due to the low power level.
Xanth watched as the scene he remembered from dragon ball z plays out before him, of course with extra characters added in, such as Thanos.
It seems in whatever crossover reality he was born in, frieza was either a subordinate or partner of Thanos as frieza is still the one to destroy the planet.
As the explosion takes place the pods sleep drugs kick in and puts him to sleep for the duration of his trip across the galaxy.
...…
June 14th, 1991
In the dead of a dark and stormy night, in Central Park within New York City.
Boom!
A space pod lands somewhere in the middle of Central Park.
However due to its propulsion systems it doesn't make much of a impact crator.
The pod opens and Xanth rubbing his eyes climbs out, mind still a little hazy from being half awake but that soon fades after a thunder clap wakes him wide up.
Xanth takes in his surroundings, he appears to be in the middle of a park within a city which outlines itself in the not so far distance.
He, being in a very young body and not able to think too much or move around for too long, decides to get as far away from his landing site as possible. If this is a crossover world, who knows what kind of organization could come running at the sight of a spaceship crashing into a densely populated city's park.
He moves his tiny legs as fast as he can, walking for the first time which then turns into running for the first time.
Eventually he comes out of the park and not thinking straight, with only getting far away on his mind, runs straight out into the street trying to get across it and deeper into the city.
He suddenly is blinded by a strong pair of lights and hit by a sudden impact knocking him down, but not out. Injuring him pretty bad though.
A middle aged man steps out of the car that just struck him and frantically walks up to the young boy worried about the thought that he just hit a kid.
"Dear lord, what have I just done!"
The man goes to pick up the boy who was intending to rush him to the hospital.
Xanth speaks up with effort pointing to his tail at the same time. "No hospital, discover me, bad."
The man, unsure of what to do and astonished by the tail connected to the young boy just now noticing it, decides the only thing he can do is take him to his house for now then. After all, his sense of responsibility makes it impossible to just leave the boy here and definitely impossible to let such a young child be dissected by doctors which he now doesn't doubt will happen upon seeing the tail.
Not long after the man parks his car in a driveway and barges into his small house.
"MAY! May, get the med kit!"
"Ben? What's going-, Oh Ben, what happened to that child!?"
She immediately noticed the tail but doesn't mention it right away more worried about the boys condition.
"He came out of nowhere in the middle of the street, he is so young clearly only a year or two old and yet he still spoke to me telling me no hospitals."
May rushed to get the med kit while Ben placed Xanth who was on the verge of passing out, on the couch.
While may was treating his wounds Ben tried asking questions.
"Son, what's your name?"
The barely conscious Xanth answered by pointing to his chestplate nametag.
"Xanth huh, strange name. Ok Xanth can you tell me where your parents are, or how I can help you?"
Ben was basically betting on the child being a bit intelligent, at least enough to tell him what to do.
"No parents, no home… All gone. Help, keep hidden."
Xanth was no fool, even barely conscious he still knew that if he was discovered by a government or something it would be bad, especially with his tail.
He passed out after saying those words and Ben Parker looked at his wife May, and they both focused on taking care of the strange boy.
It was only a day and a half later, when Xanth woke up.
He noticed he had been stripped of his armor and was in a baby blue shirt now, he was also embarrassingly enough wearing a diaper.
He tried standing up and noticed that oddly enough there was no pain and he felt slightly, SLIGHTLY stronger, not much, a insignificant amount. Could this be a saiyans body at work?
He was in a bed, in a mostly empty room. He sat his tiny body up and got down from the bed, and he noticed a mirror in the corner of the room and for the first time in his life he saw his own reflection.
His hair was medium length and shaggy, he tried messing with it and it always went back to the same position.
Then he looked at his tail in the mirror.
He frowned.
This will cause his many problems in the future, if he ever becomes a super saiyan like goku did in dragon ball, and if he wants to become a super saiyan four then he needs the tail. But… he doesn't care about super saiyan four right now, if anything he may not need it.
Sure it seems promising, but ultimately the tail draws too much attention.
He has made his decision.
He looks around the room for anything he can use.
He grabs the lamp on the bed side table, and proceeds to smash it against the mirror, shattering it.
Meanwhile downstairs.
"Ben, what are we going to do with him."
"I don't know may, but we obviously can't take him out in public if we do decide to raise him. We can probably take him to a government official and have him adopted under us if they find no record of him. But again we can't do that even, the tail is the issue."
"I know Ben, but it's not like we can just get rid of-"
Smash! Shatter!
The sound of something breaking startles them both.
"It came from upstairs, you stay here I will go see what it is, it could be someone breaking in!"
Ben hurriedly yet sneakily headed upstairs, worried that a burglar got in. Also worried about the boy if a burglar did get in and harms him.
He checks every room and after finding nothing in them he comes to the last room.
The room Xanth was in.
He opens the door slowly and what he sees makes him scream.
"MAY GET THE MEDKIT AGAIN, ALSO IT SEEMS OUR TAIL ISSUE IS SOLVED."
If it doesn't grow back that is, he thinks to himself.
Xanth lay on the floor, slightly bleeding from where he cut his tail clean off, it hurt like hell but he did it.
He smiles and passes out again.
A few days later he was somehow adopted by the Parkers, after the government declared there was no records of him and deemed him an orphan and the Parkers suitable parents.
Then years passed…
...…
1998, seven years after Xanth landed on earth…
"Mom, I wanna take martial arts classes."
*Pfft
May spit out her drink as Xanth said this.
"Why?"
"Because it sounds fun!"
That wasn't entirely a lie, you see Xanth only recently started actually training himself, for the first few years of his life he was just sitting back and enjoying childhood as a 'human' again. But the saiyan blood in him won't keep quiet, and he found himself starting to workout and train his muscles, what little a kid his age can train his muscles that is.
He also realizes that Thanos lurks somewhere out there and while maybe not soon, eventually earth might become on his radar. Not to mention what other kinds of powers may be at play in this world.
So Xanth wants to get stronger, and he has a dream now.
That dream, is to become the strongest there is, no matter what it takes!
Well maybe not no matter what it takes, as there are some lines he wouldn't cross, but pretty close to 'no matter what it takes' anyway!
Recently Peter Parker moved in with them after his parents died a year ago. Peter is only 6 years old now, but Xanth knows he will probably become Spider-Man in the future! Not wanting to lose in strength to his new 'brother' In the future, gives him another reason to grow stronger.
May sighed, clearly still trying to process the fact that her house now contained two boys one of whom apparently wanted to start throwing punches for fun.
"Alright, alright. Martial arts classes it is. But you're doing your homework first, mister."
"Yes ma'am!"
That weekend, Ben drove him to the only dojo within a reasonable distance a small, unassuming karate studio above a laundromat, run by a stern old man named Sensei Ishida who had a habit of correcting stances by smacking students' elbows with a wooden ruler.
Xanth loved it immediately.
Not because it was flashy, it wasn't.
Ishida ran things the old-fashioned way, hundreds of repetitions of the same basic strike until it was burned into muscle memory, hours of stances held until legs shook.
But that was exactly what Xanth needed.
His body was already getting stronger and faster than it had any right to be for an eight-year-old and what he definitely didn't have was control.
Ishida's discipline gave him a framework to actually understand his own limbs again, rather than just muscling through everything on raw instinct.
He learned fast.
Too fast, if he wasn't careful.
More than once he caught himself about to snap a strike faster than a normal child's reflexes should allow, and had to consciously dial it back mid-motion.
It became its own kind of training, not just learning to hit harder, but learning to hide how hard he could actually hit.
At home, more training happened after Ben and May went to sleep.
He started small.
Push-ups, sit-ups, laps around the backyard in the dead of night when no one was around to see an eight-year-old training like his life depended on it.
Every few months he'd notice the numbers creeping up, more reps, faster times, heavier objects he could move around the yard without straining.
By age ten, he'd taken to shadowboxing against the old oak tree in the corner of the backyard, its bark slowly gaining more and more scuff marks over the months.
By eleven, he'd started thinking seriously about something else entirely: ki.
He remembered it clearly from his past life, energy blasts, flight, all of it from a show he used to watch on a couch in another world entirely.
But this wasn't that world.
This was a blend of two, and he had no guarantee the rules were the same.
Maybe ki didn't exist here at all.
Maybe this world ran on something else, mutant genetics, magic, whatever cocktail of nonsense Marvel usually ran on.
There was only one way to find out.
He thought back to the show, to how Goku had first learned, fumbling around under Master Roshi's guidance, learning to gather and feel his own energy before ever throwing a single blast.
Xanth had no Roshi, just memories of a cartoon.
He sat cross-legged in the grass and tried to just feel something. Anything.
Months of it.
Cupped hands, gritted teeth, absolutely nothing happening except him feeling ridiculous.
Then one night, a faint, warm tingle, not in his hands, but just under his skin, like something stirring that had always been there and simply never been noticed.
It was so subtle he almost dismissed it as his imagination.
But it came back the next night. And the night after that.
Ki sense came first, and it came painfully slowly, the ability to feel a faint, almost imperceptible "presence" to living things nearby, nothing like the clean readouts scouters gave in the show.
He couldn't even sense much beyond the house at first. It took well over a month of quiet, patient effort before he could reliably feel Ben and May's energy from separate rooms, or pick out Peter's from across the yard.
Producing his own energy outward took even longer.
Small, unstable pinpricks of light in his palm that fizzled out after a second or two, more frustrating than encouraging.
It wasn't until he was thirteen that he finally managed to hold a small, stable ball of ki steady in his hand.
He decided, one night, to see what it could actually do.
He aimed at the old oak tree, the same one he'd been throwing punches at for years, and let the energy loose.
The blast was small, barely bigger than a golf ball, and nowhere near as powerful as anything he remembered from the show.
But it still tore clean into the trunk, splintering bark and gouging a fist-sized hole straight through part of it, the tree groaning audibly in the quiet night air.
Xanth stared at the damage, heart pounding not from the power of it, which was honestly underwhelming, but from what it represented.
Even a "weak" blast like that could do real, visible damage.
Damage that Ben or May would absolutely notice the next morning.
Damage that couldn't be explained away as "kids being rough" the way scuffed bark could.
He spent a frantic ten minutes afterward yanking loose bark and dirt over the hole, doing his best amateur landscaping in the dark to make it look like storm damage or rot.
It wasn't perfect, but it would have to do.
That was the moment he decided: energy blasts were off the table for now. Not because he couldn't do it but because a suburban backyard was not the place to practice something that could put holes in trees, and he didn't have anywhere more private to go.
Not without risking Ben or May finding out, or worse, some nosy neighbor spotting a flash of light from an eight-year-old's backyard at night.
Ki sensing, though, that he kept at.
Nobody could catch him refining a skill that left no evidence behind.
So that became the focus for the next several years: sharpening his ability to feel the energy of things and people around him, expanding the range bit by bit, learning to pick out subtle differences between one person's presence and another's.
Energy blasts could wait until he had a place to actually use them without burning down the neighborhood.
Dojo life continued in parallel, and he never completely stopped his physical training.
At home, Peter grew alongside him in a different way than him, sharper, funnier, endlessly curious about why Xanth was always so tired in the mornings, why he disappeared some nights, etc.
Xanth brushed it off every time with a joke or a shrug.
He hated lying to him, even by omission, but some secrets weren't his to give away carelessly, not yet.
By sixteen, Xanth was no longer the scrawny kid from the dojo's early days.
He'd filled out lean, coiled muscle built from years of secret training rather than any growth spurt alone.
He even had a six pack now!
His ki sense had grown sharp enough that he could feel the general presence of everyone in the house without even trying, and pick out familiar signatures from down the street if he focused. Energy blasts remained untouched since that night with the oak tree, a skill on pause, waiting for the day he'd finally have somewhere safe to pick it back up.
At one point during ki training he had learned flight, but he didn't train it too much only hovering around the backyard at night after making sure no one was around. He didn't want to fly off and attract the government's attention.
By seventeen he was even more refined, but that was it.
Somewhere along the way he discovered a huge problem, he hadn't had any actual battles his whole life, how the heck was he supposed to actually grow 'stronger' combat wise or anything like that. A saiyan gets stronger after each battle, after each beating they get from an enemy. But he hasn't had any enemies or battles yet.
At midnight of his 18th birthday something stirred deep within his soul.
[age requirement met, reincarnation benefits package being provided based on current circumstances… it includes:a hyperbolic time chamber knob, this knob can be placed on any surface and it will become a door to your personal hyperbolic time chamber, within which you can make the outside door disappear. Time difference is one year equals one day. You do not age within the time chamber. You can summon mock enemies of any kind with just a thought, however you must have extensive knowledge of said enemy. Nobody is able to use the knob unless you give them verbal permission.]
[This is all that was deemed sufficient to grant to you, have a good life ;) ]
As all this information hit Xanth while he was excersizing at the stroke of midnight, he grinned.
"This is just what I needed, and with my knowledge of the characters from marvel and dragon ball in my past life, I can summon plenty of mock enemies to fight!"
And he can train his Ki blasts however he wants in there!
He doesn't waste time and immediately as soon as the knob appears before him he places it on the fence of his backyard, opens the door, and walks in. The door in reality dissolves into nothing after he closes it behind him.
A vast white space extends before him past the open bedroom he is standing in which has only one wall, just enough for the door to the real world to be on. In the bedroom there is a king sized bed.
He ignores the bed for now and heads out to the white expanse and speaks out loud.
"Let's see… I want to fight… Iron man!"
He summons iron man in one of his earliest suits.
"Oh this is gonna be fun!"
Half a day later in the real world…
It is now mid morning.
The door reappears in the same spot he entered from and after he exited the knob falls to the ground.
During his half a year in the chamber, he had fought a variety of enemies just to become combat ready, he had also grown significantly stronger as each time he was beaten in there, it counted as a real loss on his body and thus he got stronger due to his saiyan blood.
He had lost a few times on purpose too just to condition himself.
Seeing that it was morning he got ready to start his day.
——————
Author here, I would like to point out that the world is largely marvel and less dragon ball, only some dragon ball elements are in meanwhile a lot of marvel elements are prominent.
I'm not going to spoil too much but some major characters from dragon ball exist, some don't.
Sorry about the info dump of a chapter, I promise that future chapters won't be like this one.
If you have any suggestions, advice, or criticisms, feel free to leave a review of the fanfic or comment and I will respond thanking you.
Chapters will be released on Saturdays only, until I can get in a good writing rhythm and am able to pump them out faster