## Act I: The Endless Road
Goku ran.
That was pretty much the only thing left to do when the floorboards underneath your feet were made of solid gold tile, the sky above your head didn’t have a single bird to look at, and the silence inside the air lines was entirely too big for a normal brain to process.
He just kept his boots moving.
Snake Way stretched out in front of his chest in an endless series of winding, glittering yellow loops, twisting through the upper layers of the afterlife like some giant dragon had taken a mountain trail, caked it in a stubborn attitude, and told it to never reach a terminal point.
Endless fields of soft white vapor rolled lazily millions of parsecs beneath the granite edge.
There wasn’t a single drop of mountain wind to cool his neck.
No trees.
No dirt paths.
No water holes.
Just the track.
And Goku.
The weirdest parameter about the whole layout was that his lungs didn’t start burning or screaming for oxygen the way they would have if he were still active down on the Earth’s crust.
It made a basic kind of sense, and then at the exact same time, it didn’t make a single drop of sense at all.
He was officially dead.
He carried a solid white glowing halo hovering right above his black hair spikes.
He had stood inside the main ledger station to speak with King Yemma—who turned out to be absolutely colossal, incredibly busy, and remarkably well-vetted when it came to filling out customs paperwork.
The giant king had told his ears that a warrior named King Kai was waiting at the end of the line, and that he was the only master manager who could teach his knuckles how to handle the superior Saiyans before the pods touched down in the grass.
So he ran.
During the first three or four thousand parsecs, the whole exercise had felt pretty exciting.
He got to test his high-speed sliding dash across the gold brickwork, leap over the big curves, and see how fast his feet could clear a cloud bank.
Then the shift had turned incredibly boring.
Then it had become exciting all over again the second his brain cells started calculating how much denser his muscle mass was going to be once he cleared the final checkpoint.
Then it dropped straight back down into a boring routine.
Right now, after three months of continuous movement, the experience was sitting somewhere completely between those two markers, with a massive side portion of pure biological hunger added to his balance sheet.
Goku dropped his right palm flat over his orange gi sash, his mouth twisting into a thoughtful frown as he looked down at his boots.
“Man…
I wonder if a guy’s stomach cells can actually experience a total system starvation pass after he’s already cleared the funeral transport.
It feels like my rice reserves are running flat empty down here.”
Absolutely nobody cleared their throat to deliver an answer across the sky lines.
He just grinned and kicked his feet into a faster sprint.
Every now and then, while his pace was locked into a steady mechanical rhythm, his mind would drift backward to map the image of Raditz.
His brother.
The specific word still tasted remarkably strange behind his teeth.
Raditz had been an incredibly cruel, loud, and thoroughly unrefined piece of work.
He was strong, sure, but his combat spirit had been caked in a greasy, small-minded meanness that Goku had only fully resolved once he felt the absolute terror flaring through Gohan’s small frame down at the island house.
But at the end of the day, the long-haired soldier had still been real family by bloodline, and that parameter made the whole layout feel pretty weird when he looked back at the grave.
Goku had spent his entire life operating under the simple assumption that he was just…
Goku.
Grandpa Gohan’s boy from the woods.
Chi-Chi’s stubborn brawler husband.
The kid Gohan’s dad.
Bulma’s very first road partner.
Krillin’s best brother from the old temple days.
A regular martial artist who liked a hot plate of meat, a clean brawler match, and a fresh road that let his knuckles grow a bit harder.
Now his registration file had been updated with the name Kakarot.
An alien asset.
A biological member of a predatory space race that apparently made a regular habit of launching infant capsules at peaceful target worlds, and currently carried a pair of superior executioners toward the Earth’s atmosphere simply because Raditz had let his transmitter run hot before his heart stopped beating.
Goku’s facial muscles tightened up into a rare, serious line of focus, his fists clenching tight against his ribs.
Then there was the other one.
Kallard.
The secondary Saiyan who had dropped his black ship out of the clouds right after the drill beam had cleared the canyon.
Goku had only managed to track his energy signature for a single microsecond before Kami caught his arm to drag his soul to the check-in station, but his internal sensing needle remembered the exact weight of the stranger’s current.
It was heavy.
Dense.
It felt exactly like an immense, white-hot furnace that had been locked behind a thick wall of granite stone.
He wasn’t an evil pirate grunt.
Goku was entirely, professionally certain about that specific parameter.
He had spent his whole life reading the baseline spirit of fighters across a sparring mat, and he knew how to map the layout.
Raditz’s power had thrown off a sharp, greasy, and thoroughly ugly frequency—it felt exactly like a coward waving a rusty knife through a crowd while baring his teeth.
Kallard’s current carried a massive, dangerous amount of raw physical potential, sure, but the trajectory wasn’t caked in cruelty.
It felt a hell of a lot more like Piccolo’s style when you got right down to the marrow.
It was the presence of a real worker who carried a substantial amount of darkness behind his eyes, but had consciously chosen exactly where to point the blade to keep the floorboards safe.
Goku split his pale face into a wide, cheerful grin under the golden starlight, his pace accelerating until the gold bricks turned into a yellow blur beneath his toes.
“Man, I deep-seatedly hope that bandana guy is pushing Krillin and the rest of the boys through some real good training rotations down there on the grass.
They’re going to need every tool he’s got.”
He threw his torso forward into a high-speed sprint, his shadow lengthening across the sky lanes.
Because if an independent space hunter like Kallard was actively managing the defense logs on Earth, Goku flatly couldn’t afford to let his own discipline turn lazy while he was clearing the afterlife.
Dead or alive, he had a whole new collection of rivals to catch up with before next year.
And to his brawler heart…
that specific configuration sounded like an immense amount of fun.
## Act II: The Starter Mode Betrayal
Down on the crust of the planet Earth, “fun” was absolutely, profoundly not the specific category of vocabulary anyone else inside the hangar dome would have selected for the logbook.
The primary Mark Three gravity chamber hummed with a deep, bone-shattering electrical vibration that sounded exactly like a localized mountain thunderstorm had been trapped inside a thick steel container box.
Krillin stood right in the dead center of the silver floorboards, his small knees bent into a low defensive horse stance, his arms shaking violently against his chest, a steady stream of thick sweat pouring down his pale cheeks to drip onto his orange gi fabric.
The digital control dial on the outside panel was manual-locked at a clean **three times Earth’s normal gravity baseline**, a parameter that Bulma Briefs had cheerfully described to the team as “simple starter mode,” and which Krillin had currently registered inside his mind as a “complete structural betrayal caked in advanced corporate math.”
Kallard stood motionless behind the reinforced three-inch observation glass window alongside Bulma, Brakka, and Master Roshi, his dark pupils steady behind his green visor lens.
Inside the silver room, Krillin attempted to slide his right boot forward by a fraction of an inch to clear a footwork line.
His thigh muscles let out an immediate, visible tremor under the three-G displacement load, his leather sole catching the metal with a sharp, dry screech.
He managed to lock the heel down.
Then he dragged his left ankle forward to match the vector.
He let let out a ragged, wheezing gasp of air cells, forcing his small hands out in front of his chest to slowly gather a marble-sized sphere of blue ki energy between his palms.
The fire flickered and rippled erratically, its frequency fighting hard against the gravity.
Bulma track the green indicator needles flaring across her monitoring screen, her pencil clicking against her thumb.
“The internal power level output is holding stable at forty-five units, Greenbean.
The core isn’t showing a leak.”
Brakka let let out a short, gravelly grunt through his nose clips, his lower eyes checking his own maintenance slate.
“His breathing coordination is completely caked in rust, lady.
His lungs are extracting oxygen like an old fuel pump that’s running on a split line.”
Master Roshi nodded his head slowly, his old hands leaning heavy across his wooden staff.
“The young man’s center of gravity is resting entirely too high over his hips, Kallard.
He’s forcing his skeleton to carry the weight instead of letting his lower dan-tien distribute the current.”
Kallard reached out his white-gloved hand, pressing the manual intercom button with a sharp click.
“Drop your center of mass two inches lower through the slot, Krillin.
Your stance is leaking structural balance.”
Krillin lifted his head toward the glass pane with an extreme amount of effort, his teeth bared as a thick bead of sweat ran straight into his eye socket.
“I…
I am currently attempting my absolute best to prevent my entire rib cage from turning into a permanent piece of silver floor decoration for your laboratory, space teacher!” he wheezed out loudly through the speaker mesh.
“The lead plating is completely out of bounds!”
“Drop your center anyway,” Kallard said flatly, his voice devoid of any soft phrasing.
“The machine doesn’t care about your complaints.”
Krillin delivered a short, highly descriptive human curse word into the microphone, but his martial arts discipline took the steering column anyway.
He sank his hips deeper into the horse stance, widened his boot placement by two inches, and compressed his internal ki well behind a clean wall of focus.
The violent shaking caked into his thighs instantly dropped down by half, his skeletal framework locking into a much more stable, resilient geometry against the silver floor.
Master Roshi split his wrinkled face into a small line of an open smile behind his dark lenses.
“There.
Track the line now.
A hell of a lot cleaner on the turf.”
Krillin focused his mind back onto his palms, the blue sphere of ki energy stabilizing into a perfectly round, calm blue jewel that didn’t throw off a single drop of static gray noise.
Bulma’s digital terminal let out a quiet electronic beep of verification.
“The active energy current is completely controlled, brawler.
No indicators of an emotional spike on the display.”
Kallard nodded his head once behind the pane.
“Good extraction, Krillin.
Now launch the sphere straight toward the rear target plate without allowing your baseline power level number to flare up a single unit.”
Krillin stared straight through the green tint of the glass window, his jaw faltering wide open.
“You…
you want my hands to do what, Ronin?
Talk plain to my ears.”
“Throw the blast without opening your primary valves,” Kallard said plainly.
“Keep the iron cage closed while the kinetic mass clears your knuckles.”
“That specific category of a movement pass sounds mathematically impossible under three-G, scrapper!”
“It’s entirely possible, Krillin.
It simply feels unfamiliar to your human habits.
There’s a massive technical distinction between the two.”
The small bald hero let let out a long, tired gasp through his nose, his facial muscles resetting into an iron mask as he locked his dark pupils straight onto the heavy tungsten target block forty feet across the room.
He didn’t run a standard high-pressure charge pass, and he didn’t allow his active aura to explode out into the local atmosphere lines.
He simply compressed his well, aligned his elbow joints with a fast micro-inch precision, and unleashed the blue sphere with a sharp, forward snap of his wrists.
The kinetic blast traveled across the silver room at half its usual tournament speed, but its internal structural density was remarkably clean, cutting through the dense air lines without dropping a single digit of its potential current.
It struck the center of the tungsten block with a heavy *THUD*, detonating into a controlled, tight flash of blue fire that didn’t leave a single scrap of residual smoke caked along the rails.
Bulma grinned broadly through her ponytail strands, her finger hitting the terminal check mark.
“Nice delivery, shorty!
Flawless arithmetic on the trajectory!”
Krillin instantly let out a huge, triumphant laugh across the silver dome floorboards, his chest puffing out proudly as he pointed his thumb toward his chin.
“Ha!
Did you track that line, space teacher?
The bald school just cleared the high-grade asset list—”
*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-SCREECH.*
Before the final syllable could even clear his mouth, the acoustic failure buzzer on the outer wall exploded into an immediate, ear-shattering industrial grinding shriek that caked the entire hangar in white noise.
Krillin jumped three feet into the air from pure startle factor, his balance loop completely breaking apart under the three-G weight as he hit the silver tiles flat on his backside with a loud, hollow *oof*.
“Oh, come on!
Why the hell did the monster buzzer scream at my head now?
My hands were completely empty!”
Kallard quickly covered his mouth with his gloved hand to hide the immediate line of a smile breaking through his beard trim, his shoulders shaking.
Master Roshi chuckled slowly into his hand, his old beard moving against his staff.
Bulma leaned her face straight into the primary microphone terminal, a bright, beautifully sarcastic grin clearing her cheek marks.
“Your active power level rating just experienced a sudden, ninety-unit emotional spike because your silly brawler pride got too greedy for a basic victory pass, Krillin!
The software maps a pride loop the exact same way it tracks a battlefield panic flare!
The execution was clean, but your five minutes of benched penalty time are officially open on the ledger!
Go sit your boots down in the grass!”
Krillin pointed his finger straight through the reinforced three-inch pane, his voice a high-pitched wheeze of pure domestic outrage.
“I…
I was experiencing a valid moment of professional brotherly pride, Bulma!
Is having a regular human spirit officially classified as an illegal asset management choice inside your father’s factories?”
Brakka manual-engaged the secondary speaker switch with a sharp click of his titanium knuckles, all four of his eyes wide with an absolute professional joy.
“For the specific maintenance purposes of this defensive preparation year, bald boy…
yes, your human spirit is flatly considered an out-of-bounds piece of equipment leakage!
Move your framework off the grates before the next shift turns hot!”
Krillin let let out a long, dramatic groan of pure physical exhaustion, turning his body flat onto his back beneath the heavy three-G air lines as he stared blankly up at the ceiling lights.
Kallard shook his head slowly, his eyes tracking the baseline data logs on the side terminal.
“The small man is systematically optimization his internal pathways with every single rotation shift, master.
His cell structures are turning dense.”
Roshi’s old eyes softened with an immense, quiet pride behind his dark red lenses as he watched his oldest student reach out to grab a towel from the floorboards.
“He…
he always possessed a remarkably fine capacity for listening to a technical instruction, Kallard.
Even during the old childhood days when his mouth spent twenty minutes pretending his ears hadn’t mapped the roadmap.”
## Act III: The Blade of Patience
Across the far northern end of the polished hangar dome clearing, Yamcha and Tien were currently locked into a full-speed physical coordination sparring match on top of a massive, reinforced canvas mat, while the small white-skinned child Chiaotzu hovered three feet motionless above their perimeter lines, his dark pupils tracking their energy displacements using a small digital Capsule Corp scanning sensor strapped around his small wrist loop.
Yamcha’s movement velocity was remarkably, incredibly faster than it had been three months ago when the *Wayfarer* first cleared the clouds.
The transformation pass was visible not just in his raw kinetic speed, but in his structural recovery metrics.
He no longer allowed his brawler ego to run an overextended attack sequence every single time his eyes track what appeared to be an open guard lane across the clearing.
He was monitoring his steering handles.
Mostly.
Tien, meanwhile, had transformed his entire style into something remarkably sharp, hard, and thoroughly caked in an absolute line of clinical efficiency.
He moved his boots through the grass with a quiet, terrifying intensity that reminded Kallard’s internal mind less of a standard martial arts athlete competing for a gold medal, and a hell of a lot more like a cold tactical blade learning the absolute parameters of patience inside a ditch.
Yamcha executed a fast high-speed blind feint toward the crane student’s upper eye line, dropped his mass low to the sod with a beautiful axial pivot, and unleashed a sweeping leg kick caked in three hundred units of compressed current.
Tien leaped three feet vertically into the air lines before the foot could clear his slot, twisted his torso forty-five degrees mid-flight, and descended with a fast, heavy palm strike aimed straight for the wolf’s right shoulder guard.
Yamcha shifted his body mass by a single micro-inch on the fly, allowing the palm strike to glance harmlessly off his green shoulder fabric before he manual-engaged his left hand to release a short-range, seventy-unit concussive ki burst point-blank against the student’s ribs.
Tien managed a tight, high-speed forearm cross block to absorb the blast, but the sudden kinetic impact of the explosion pushed his heavy boots back half a step across the canvas mat.
Yamcha split his face into a wide, triumphant brawler grin, his fist locking into the air.
“Ha!
Got you tracking the border lane that time, Tien!
The wolf school just—”
*BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.*
Before the sentence could even clear his teeth, the small scanning monitor strapped around Chiaotzu’s wrist loop let out a sharp, high-pitched electronic warning buzz.
Yamcha’s brawler grin vanished straight down into his shirt collar, his shoulders dropping flat.
The small white-skinned child looked down at his screen, his voice small and down-to-earth through the quiet dome.
“Your active energy pool just experienced a sudden twenty-unit leak during your presentation pass, Yamcha.
Emotional spike registered on the logs.”
Yamcha threw both of his hands up toward the rafters in absolute, un-vetted frustration.
“Oh, come on, kid!
You’ve got to be kidding my receivers!
I can’t even celebrate a clean tactical block anymore without the company computers filing an invoice against my health logs?”
Tien slowly lowered his forearm guard, his breathing remaining perfectly smooth, deep, and entirely controlled behind his ribs as he reset his boots into the crane stance.
“A celebration pass is nothing more than a piece of wasted, non-profit physical movement inside a ditch, Yamcha.
It leaks your focus current.”
The wolf brawler stared at his three-eyed teammate for three long seconds, his mouth flat.
“You…
you are completely, biologically allergic to the concept of a regular human joy, aren’t you, brother?
Your system was manufactured inside a meat freezer.”
Tien considered the statement with an absolute, unblinking gravity for a single breath of the wind.
“No.
My hardware operates perfectly fine.
I simply prefer my handles stable.”
Chiaotzu managed a very small, quiet line of a childhood smile from his floating slot.
“Maybe a tiny bit caked in the freezer specs, Yamcha.
Just along the edges.”
Kallard watched their bickering voices clear the mat, a deep, quiet satisfaction settling behind his chest plates.
He knew the absolute numbers caked into the wider galactic tracking charts—he knew that even with this flawless piece of technical conditioning, every single human martial artist standing on this grass lawn was still completely outclassed by the raw biological mass of the incoming vanguard.
No amount of fine-line training rotations would ever make Yamcha’s cell structures inherently stronger than Nappa’s veteran military frame inside a twelve-month cycle.
No amount of mental discipline would ever allow Krillin’s baseline output to match the eighteenth-thousand peak caked into the prince’s bloodline.
This preparation year flatly wasn’t about attempting to make a group of ordinary humans magically catch up to the genetic cheat codes of a Saiyan warrior.
It was entirely about the math of pure survival logistics.
It was about ensuring that when the shooting cleared the gates, every single microsecond of active coordination on the field was utilized to buy their friends another breath of oxygen.
A weaker fighter who knew exactly when to shift his boots, when to lock his valves to hide inside a shadow, when to deliver a compressed strike, and when to execute a clean tactical retreat…
was a fighter who lived long enough to alter the margins of a war ledger.
Kallard had constructed his entire ten-cycle biography out in the deep lanes on that single, absolute piece of business logic.
## Act IV: The Blue-Haired Propaganda
Bulma Briefs cut her brilliant blue eyes sideways to track the kid’s bearded profile through the light lines, her pencil tapping a slow rhythm against her clipboard edge.
“You’ve got that exceptionally serious, high-pressure brawler face caked onto your jaw clips again, Greenbean.”
Kallard blinked his dark pupils twice, his tail lashing a slow circle through the loose gravel near her desk.
“I don’t remember entering a single ‘serious face’ specification onto my personal registry logbook today, Bulma.”
“You possess at least six separate configurations for that face shield, brawler boy,” she jeered back softly, her blue eyes wrinkling up with that familiar, beautiful warmth that didn’t have a single drop of corporate armor left.
“This specific version is what our department classifies as the ‘I am currently calculating a massive amount of terrible cosmic odds behind my teeth but trying my absolute best to look like a calm, cool space hunter for the crew’ face template.
It’s a very common layout for your character.”
Brakka let let out a short, cackling grunt from his iron fuel crate, his multi-jointed fingers using a grease rag to clean his goggle lenses.
“An absolutely flawless piece of technical data resolution, capsule lady!
Your scanning droids have mapped the kid’s internal programming with a ninety-nine percent accuracy rating!
He runs that exact script every time his ledger turns red!”
Kallard looked between the old gray-blue alien and the brilliant human girl, his fingers hooking into his utility loops with a dry rasp.
“I’m starting to experience a substantial amount of professional regret regarding how incredibly well you two master builders are beginning to coordinate your database lines on my deck.
It’s a systemic hazard to my authority.”
Bulma tapped her pen flat against her schematic blueprints, her blue eyes wide with an absolute scientific arrogance.
“You flatly should be running a budget adjustment pass, bounty boy.
Senior mechanic Brakka and I have spent our morning hours locked into an exceptionally productive engineering conversation regarding your ship’s lower structural layout.” This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
The old alien technician’s face instantly flared a bright shade of pink through his white hair mane, his four arms locking into a rigid cross brace as he sat up sharply on his box.
“We…
we have explicitly, profoundly spent our morning hours locked into a white-hot professional *argument* against writing a single digit of your crazy, illegal capsule modifications onto my cutter’s ledger lines, lady!
Let’s maintain the boundaries on the text sheet!”
“It is mathematically considered a highly productive conversation if my pen keeps drawing the upgrades and your throat keeps screaming ‘no’ until the technical data clears the logic gate, gray-blue!” she yelled back through her ponytail strands, a bright grin breaking across her lips.
“It is flatly, structurally not considered productive if my mouth delivers an absolute corporate veto forty consecutive times and your fingers simply continue to sketch out a massive mountain of forbidden, non-profit space non-sense inside my bilge!” the mechanic growled back, his mane bristling.
Bulma completely ignored his roaring pass, sliding her digital tablet across the workbench wood to place the flashing blue line schematics straight under Kallard’s visor lens.
The technical drawings showed a comprehensive, backward-engineered overhaul of the *Wayfarer’s* lower cargo storage deck, the entire square footage caked into a modified, fold-out modular gravity training floorboard caked in heavy high-pressure hydraulic dampeners, layered energy shielding rails, and a highly precise, low-gravity automated recovery tank system designed explicitly to repair a fighter’s bone marrow after a terminal brawler match.
Kallard studied the complex architectural line loops, his dark pupils tracking the clean integration of Capsule Corp software with Brakka’s old pre-imperial hardware rails.
It was an absolute masterpiece of a custom tactical layout.
Brakka stared straight into the side of the kid’s face shields, all four of his eyes wide with an absolute, desperate paternal panic.
“Do not go putting on that specific impressed, value-seeking brawler look for her screen, Ronin!
Turn your face away from the propaganda!”
“I didn’t deliver a single syllable of an approval text to her receivers yet, old man,” Kallard said smoothly, his tail lashing a soft circle.
“You didn’t have to clear your throat, boy!
Your left ear ridge just twitched by three micro-inches!
That parameter means your internal brawler brain cells are already calculating how many training hours we can squeeze out of the cargo bay while we’re navigating a hyperspace jump lane!”
“The engineering layout is an exceptionally fine piece of functional asset optimization, Brakka,” Kallard said flatly, his dark eyes cutting back up to meet the girl’s gaze.
“The integration loops are pristine.”
Brakka violently threw the grease-covered maintenance towel caked in his hand straight at the center of Kallard’s face shield with a loud *thwack*, his four arms shaking with pure dramatic outrage.
Bulma broke out into a sudden, bright, and thoroughly beautiful laugh that caked the entire laboratory clearing in light, her fork tapping her tablet with a triumphant click.
“Thank you for the data validation, Greenbean!
The contract is officially signed for the workshop floor!”
Kallard pulled the dirty maintenance towel off his visor with a dry smirk breaking through his beard trim, cutting his eyes down to glare at his crusty old mentor.
The old technician pointed his thick titanium knuckle straight toward the kid’s nose clip, his gray ears dropping low.
“You…
you are currently sitting within two inches of being permanently scrubbed off my primary kinship ledger and replaced by a significantly quieter, less susceptible brawler asset from the next trade hub, boy!
You’ve been completely brainwashed by her high-pressure blue-haired engineering propaganda loops!
It’s an absolute tragedy for the firm!”
Bulma lifted her brow clips up toward her hair line, her smirk wide.
“Blue-haired engineering propaganda?
That…
that is easily the finest piece of commercial market branding my ears have ever collected, mechanic!
I’m putting that title straight onto my next set of corporate business cards!”
Kallard let let out a genuine, low laugh through his chest plates, his eyes tracking her beautiful face lines.
The preparation year was moving down the track at a remarkably fast, uncontrollable velocity—the daily training shifts blurring together into a single, continuous stream of hot sand, grease smudges, and hard punches.
Capsule Corp’s pristine white domes had slowly, remarkably transformed into a familiar household clearing for his boots.
The tiny pink house sitting alone in the blue surf lanes felt like a normal weekend rest stop for his crew.
Even Chi-Chi’s sharp, terrifying maternal execution threats had started to become a regular, comforting piece of music caked into his daily rhythm parameters.
And Bulma—
The brilliant, fiery heiress of the capsule empire was becoming familiar to his human soul in a way that scared his internal focus a hell of a lot more than any high-caliber brawler match with Turles ever could.
Not because her character parameters carried a dangerous threat to his skin—though her short temper and her megaphone were certainly a substantial systemic hazard to his sanity—but because the real, living, and thoroughly un-scripted reality of knowing her across a wooden workbench was slowly, systematically erasing every single cold, dead text line he carried inside his memories regarding her role in the old chronicles.
The Bulma caked into his old human brain cells from his past world had been nothing more than an artistic collection of ink lines drawn on a page—brilliant, loud, funny, vain, brave, selfish sometimes, and entirely generous when the script required a savior.
But this Bulma sitting flat on his hangar floorboards was a hell of a lot more than a dry biography sheet.
She got remarkably quiet and still for three heavy minutes when she thought nobody on the grass was tracking her eyes, her blue pupils watching the sky lanes while she silently worried about Goku’s soul clearing the next world.
She systematically kept three extra storage containers of hot meat cells prepared inside her dome kitchen every single afternoon the boy Gohan cleared the mountain perimeters, but she proudly lofted her chin up to pretend to the crew that the catering was “nothing more than some basic leftover scrap material that was taking up space in my refrigerator modules.” She called Krillin a short, irritating little brawler to his face clips, and then immediately spent two hours of her evening manual-adjusting the rubber straps on his biometric backpack to ensure the sensors would stop chafing his skin during a high-gravity drill pass.
She argued with Brakka like a ruthless spaceport rival, learned the old-spec logic boards from his titanium fingers like a dedicated student, and corrected his engineering errors with the absolute authority of a master builder who held a permanent tenure in his biography.
She worked her fingers until her cell structures were completely caked in pure physical exhaustion, and then turned fiercely red with a massive temper loop if a single person in the bay had the nerve to notice her fatigue.
She spoke three times faster when her mind resolved an impossible circuit puzzle.
She bit the wooden end of her pencil when her brain cells were tracking an optimization loop.
She laughed with the absolute totality of her face lines when a piece of regular human humor caught her guard completely off-balance.
She had started utilizing that ridiculous nickname *Greenbean* on almost every single shift that cleared the clock.
And his own brawler mouth had officially started answering to the frequency without a single drop of hesitation line.
That specific configuration was precisely how a substantial amount of trouble initiated its execution phase inside a hunter’s container.
## Act V: The Step of the Kid
Piccolo and the boy Gohan cleared the southern atmospheric dome perimeters right at the hour of sunset.
They descended straight out of the upper gold cloud deck with a silent, heavy precision, Piccolo’s massive white cape trailing through the breeze as Gohan floated smoothly down alongside his boot guards.
The small four-year-old boy had grown exponentially denser than he had been three months ago—not just in his raw biological power level metrics, though his output numbers had stabilized into a remarkably clean baseline tier, but in his absolute physical posture across the grass lanes.
He was still a shy, intensely gentle childhood asset who preferred books to a blaster, but there was a new, solid line of a quiet steadiness anchoring his red boots against the soil.
He was still a child under his hair crown.
Kallard intended to keep his framework locked inside that protective zone for as many rotations as the ledger could afford to buy.
Gohan broke out into a full-speed childhood sprint toward the hangar entrance doors the second his yellow pupils resolved the orange uniforms standing near the workbench.
“Krillin!
Look at my boots!”
Krillin, who had just been manual-released from his three-G gravity chamber suffering and was currently lying flat on his back in the grass like a discarded towel, lifted his hand into the air with a weak shake.
“Hey…
Gohan…
listen to my throat clips, kid: if that crazy space teacher ever walks up to your blanket and utilizes the syllables ‘Starter Mode Mode’ to describe a training room…
you turn your speeders on and run straight back to Mount Paozu without looking at the dials.
The math is an absolute trap for our race.”
Gohan stopped his boots near the bald hero’s head, his face twisting into a thoroughly confused childhood frown.
Bulma crouched down smoothly near her terminal table, extending a small, bright blue capsule cooler container toward his small hands.
“Your primary command manager sent a fresh batch of her custom rice balls and sweet berry jelly packs along with the morning speeder mail, Gohan.
The nutrition parameters are fully optimized for your shift.”
The small boy’s eyes instantly flared into wide circles of pure childhood delight, his chest puffing out.
“Genuinely, Bulma?
Mommy sent the sweet berry packs?”
Piccolo let out a short, aggressive demonic grunt from his shadow position near the rafter pillar, his claws curving back into his purple sash loop.
“The brat has already processed three full pounds of clean mountain mountain venison cells before our flight plan cleared the ridge, researcher.
His storage bins are completely full for the afternoon.”
Bulma cut her blue eyes sideways to glare straight through the Namekian’s purple cape fabric with a sharp line of her corporate defiance.
“I didn’t request a single line of an infrastructure audit from your eggplant receivers today, demon lord.
Keep your database behind the fence.”
Piccolo turned his tall green face away toward the metropolitan horizon with a low sneer.
Gohan leaned his head closer to Bulma’s sleeve, his voice dropping into an absolute down-to-earth whisper.
“I…
I possess an immense amount of biological space left inside my stomach cells to process the berry packs anyway, Bulma.
My Saiyan wells are running fine.”
Kallard stepped his boots over to meet their line, a quiet smirk clearing his beard trim as he looked down at the kid.
“That specific category of a metabolic statement is an absolute piece of un-deniable Saiyan lineage evidence, kid.
Your cell structures know exactly how to manage the inventory.”
Piccolo muttered low under his breath, his yellow eyes narrowing.
“An entirely unfortunate, resource-heavy piece of genetic design for a combat unit.”
Gohan grinned brightly through his mountain dust smudges, his small boots scrambling off toward the benches to open up his blue capsule cooler with a fast velocity.
Kallard came to a vertical halt three paces from the demon lord’s shoulder guard, his dark pupils steady behind his visor.
“Talk plain about the metrics, Piccolo.
How exactly is the boy’s container handling the long-range scheduling layout out in the stone ridges?”
Piccolo crossed his long green arms tightly over his heavy white chest piece, his face flat as an iron anvil.
“The…
the brat’s performance parameters are turning out a hell of a lot better than my primary logs predicted three months ago, Kallard.
Let’s enter the data line plainly.”
“Specific notation keys, demon king,” Kallard said.
“My receivers require the numbers.”
“He runs a tactical panic loop seventy percent less often when the automated target drones engage his blind flank,” Piccolo growled low, his ears dropping.
“His coordination stays stable inside the slot.”
“That is an exceptionally fine piece of structural maintenance labor, Piccolo.
The valves are sealing.”
“But he still maintains a terminal habit of running a movement hesitation pass every single time my claws force him to execute a high-velocity killing strike against a living target block, hybrid,” the demon lord spat out, his teeth bared.
“His spirit is caked in too much domestic fluff.”
Kallard held the Namekian lord’s cold gaze through his green tint, his voice dropping into a low primal rumble that caked the grass lane in iron.
“He is four standard cycles old, Piccolo.
Let’s maintain a grounded perspective on the spreadsheet.
He isn’t supposed to possess a veteran executioner’s mindset before his primary teeth have even cleared his gums.”
“The two elite space conquerors currently moving along our sky lanes aren’t going to be recruiting a group of small children to play a game of grammar tag when their pods clear the cloud deck, Kallard!” Piccolo hissed out, his face turning dark.
“They’re going to use their bare knuckles to turn this whole continent into an open grave!”
“No, demon king, they flatly won’t show a drop of mercy,” Kallard said softly, his hand dropping down to rest flat against the iron terrace railing.
“But if your training methods systematically erase every single drop of soft human warmth, childhood joy, and family memory out of his small framework to turn him into a cold weapon…
you won’t build a reliable guardian who can save this world, Piccolo.
You’ll simply destroy the exact internal soul parameters that make his ancestral power level worth protecting in the first place.
You’ll leave behind a broken piece of scrap iron that has zero purpose left to anchor his feet when the real storm hits the dirt.”
## Act VI: The Face under the Hood
Piccolo’s green jaw line flexed with an intense, silent pressure beneath his purple turban fabric, his yellow eyes wide as the raw mass of the kid’s argument cleared his guard lane without a single piece of resistance.
They had versions of this tactical conversation on almost every single rotation shift that cleared the calendar—sometimes delivered through a short string of down-to-earth words, sometimes exchanged through a sharp line of their eye lenses across a campfire clearing, and sometimes executed point-blank through a heavy sparring match that left both of their armor plates scuffed with red grease marks.
But today…
to Kallard’s quiet satisfaction…
the demon lord didn’t launch into an immediate, aggressive verbal defense of his old-school warrior manuals.
His yellow eyes drifted slowly across the lawn clearing to track the child Gohan, who was currently sitting flat in the grass right beside Krillin’s shoulder, happily stuffing three sweet berry jelly packs straight into his jaw line while the bald hero used his hands to recount an incredibly exaggerated, cartoonish story regarding an old childhood brawler match Goku had cleared years ago during a tournament circuit.
“The…
the brat spends a substantial amount of his evening rest hours delivering a string of questions to my ears regarding his father’s old history lines, Kallard,” Piccolo said quietly, his voice dropping into a lower register that didn’t carry across the turf.
Kallard’s expression softened beneath his bandana, his tail resting still.
“What specific entry does your throat write into his logbook when he asks about Kakarot’s style?”
Piccolo frowned deeply, his claws clenching his cloak.
“I tell his ears…
that his father was an exceptionally, profoundly strong martial arts asset across the board.”
Kallard waited in the slot, leaving the air lines empty.
The demon lord looked thoroughly, structurally irritated by the continued absence of a sarcastic remark from the hybrid, his green lips curling.
“And I tell his receivers…
that the man was a complete, short-tempered tactical fool who didn’t possess a single digit of common business caution inside his brawler brain cells.”
Kallard managed a tiny, real nod of respect through his visor tint.
“An entirely accurate, down-to-earth data rating, Piccolo.
The ledger can verify that specification sheet without an error pass.”
“And…
and I tell the kid…
that his father was a remarkably, incredibly brave piece of work when the shooting turned mean inside a ditch,” Piccolo muttered out, the final syllable clearing his throat in a quiet, rough cadence that barely cleared the wind gale.
Kallard turned his face slowly around to track the demon king’s profile.
Piccolo’s facial muscles instantly hardened back into an absolute wall of freezing demonic pride, his boots sliding back an inch into the grass blades as he pointed a claw straight at the kid’s chest.
“Don’t you dare go putting on that specific sentimental brawler look for my turban line, Kallard!
The conversation is completely closed!”
“I don’t remember delivering a single syllable of an emotional text to your ears today, Piccolo,” Kallard said with a dry smirk breaking through his beard trim.
“My face shield is perfectly flat.”
“You were structurally, deep-seatedly on the verge of writing a sarcastic commentary onto my slate, hybrid!
I can read the frequency!”
“I was flatly not running that program, old timer.”
“You possess a terminal habit of running that program with your mouth clips, scrapper!
Everyone on this lawn knows your template!”
Kallard let out a long, tired sigh through his nose, his hand rubbing his neck hair mane.
“Man…
everyone on this beautiful blue planet seems to have spent their afternoon cycles developing a master certification in reading the micro-inch movements of my jaw lines today.
It’s an absolute multi-faction conspiracy.”
Piccolo split his green mouth into a very small, remarkably faint line of a mocking smirk behind his collar fabric—it was barely a single digit on the display screen, and it dissolved back into his scowl in less than a millisecond—but it was flatly, undeniably there.
It was an immense piece of progress for the demon lord’s internal processor logs.
“Clear your knuckles and step out onto the canvas mat with my forms, space traveler,” Piccolo hissed out low, his white cape flying wild as he stepped his boots across the lawn.
Kallard raised an eyebrow clip beneath his visor, his tail lashing out a clean circle through the dew.
“Right now, demon lord?
The sun is already dipping behind the city towers.”
“The vanguard doesn’t check the municipal lighting schedule before they launch an artillery strike, Kallard!
You just spent half your daylight shift monitoring a group of weak human brutes inside a metal box!
Your cell structures are perfectly warm for a high-velocity physical coordination pass!
Secure your handles!”
Kallard managed a real, wide grin through his lips, his boots popping their heels against the concrete grates as he unslung his gray cloaking fabric.
“Looking forward to clearing the invoice with your style, old timer.
Let’s go turn the current hot.”
## Act VII: The Cracking of the Air
They moved their broad frames straight out into the furthest, widest end of the outdoor testing lawn clearing, maintaining a clean twenty yards of open turf space between their combat boots as the rest of the camp detail gathered along the bench line to track the presentation.
Even the child Gohan completely stopped his chewing motion, his small hands holding his half-eaten rice ball container flat against his knee sash as his yellow eyes locked onto the mat.
Bulma Briefs pushed her clipboard terminal to the side of her desk desk, her blue eyes wide behind her hair strands.
Senior mechanic Brakka let out a slow, tired sigh through his gray nose clips, adjusting his goggle straps with his titanium thumb.
“There…
there goes the primary landscape architecture budget for the entire northern courtyard quadrant again, boys.
Go get the heavy rakes out of the bilge.”
Master Roshi sat forward on his camp stool with an immense, quiet martial arts interest clearing his old lenses.
Kallard and Piccolo faced each other across the green lawn blades, their physical frameworks perfectly locked into their respective high-tier combat brackets.
No opening of the green ancestral *Primal Instinct* wells was permitted to clear the grid, no high-caliber killing strikes were allowed to fracture a bone marrow, and absolutely zero wide-area energy blasts were permitted to scorch the compound walls.
Those were the strict, unyielding regulatory boundaries written into their training manual.
Piccolo initiated the transaction first with a blinding, predatory burst of speed that completely defied his massive seven-foot frame weight.
He vanished from the turf lines in an instantaneous purple flash of ki current, materializing directly in the air lines ten feet above Kallard’s hair crown, his heavy white boot driving straight downward like a massive stone axe head clearing a ridge.
Kallard executed a fast, thirty-degree diagonal slide to allow the trajectory to clear his guard slot, but Piccolo’s multi-jointed leg extended its length mid-kick by an extra three yards all at once, his heel bending at a sharp, unnatural geometric vector to chase the hybrid’s jaw line.
Kallard shot both of his white-gloved hands out with a lightning-fast reflex, his fingers locking tightly around the Namekian’s green ankle guard to anchor his mass.
Piccolo’s long green arm violently stretched forward straight toward his visor lens a fraction of a millisecond later, his claws curved into an aggressive strike brace.
Kallard ducked his torso low beneath the claw trajectory, executed a clean low-gravity axial pivot on his heel, and utilized the Namekian’s own descending momentum to hurl his tall seven-foot frame completely over his shoulder guards with a heavy structural throw.
Piccolo executed a clean mid-air flip before his back could hit the sod, his fingers releasing two sharp, marble-sized orange ki shots straight downward point-blank against the hybrid’s chest armor.
Kallard crossed his tattered forearms over his chest plates in a high-speed defensive brace.
*BOOM-BOOM.*
The two close-range energy impacts detonated with a sharp mechanical crackle of sound, the concussive pressure wave driving Kallard’s heavy boots fifteen feet backward through the dirt grass, his soles caking two long trenches into the lawn turf before he brought his framework back to a dead halt.
Piccolo landed flat on his boots twenty paces away, his body instantly launching forward into a high-speed sliding dash to close the slot.
Their fists met right in the center of the dust cloud with a loud, bone-clicking *CLANG* that rattled the dome rafters.
The initial three-strike exchange was remarkably controlled, tight, and caked in an absolute line of clinical physical fundamentals.
The secondary combination pass accelerated into an unprecedented tier of brawler velocity, their limbs turning into a complete blurred network of green-and-purple afterimages across the mat.
By the turn of the third continuous exchange…
the very local air lines clearing the courtyard began to let out a sharp, audible snapping crack around their shoulders like a series of small blaster discharges, the sheer raw kinetic displacement of their movements launching clouds of loose grass blades twenty feet into the sky.
Kallard fought with a completely separate category of a structural layout now than he had utilized during his long nights of running the outer rim ports.
The dirt of this planet Earth was systematically altering the geometry of his style behind his teeth.
Kakarot wasn’t standing in the slot yet, but Kakarot’s childhood brothers and teachers were actively filling his receivers with data.
Master Roshi’s ancient lessons in low-gravity footwork balance, Piccolo’s completely unconventional, multi-jointed defensive angles, Tien’s rigid clinical willpower discipline, Krillin’s high-velocity evasive efficiency—Kallard’s human soul was actively, systematically absorbing small pieces of their character specifications into his own muscle groups without ever meaning to write the code beforehand.
He was still Ronin at the end of the day.
Still direct.
Still direct to the centerline space.
Still direct and brutal when the contract required a swift conclusion.
But his framework was flatly no longer just a self-taught space port outlaw running from a shadow.
He was building an integrated art.
Piccolo caught the shift inside his guard lane mid-strike, his yellow eyes wide.
“Your…
your boots are moving across a completely separate set of coordinate lines than your style displayed three rotations ago, Kallard!” the demon king growled out between hits, his arm parrying a knee block.
“Your balance loop has cleaned up its static!”
Kallard blocked a heavy left elbow strike with his wrist, countering with a short, mechanical right hook that clipped the Namekian’s turban fabric.
“Your own valves are running a hell of a lot tighter than the factory specs allowed down in the canyon clearing, Piccolo!
The layout is mutual optimization!”
The demon lord’s green mouth twisted into a sharp, brawler grin.
*FLASH.*
All at once, Piccolo’s physical frame completely split apart into two identical green and purple entities across the canvas mat, their dark pupils unblinking as they executed a double-flank lunge.
Kallard’s dark eyes sharpened behind his visor.
*The Multi-Form Technique.
The old crane school code pass.*
The secondary Piccolo entity cleared his left blind spot at terminal speed, a massive green fist driving with a force explicitly calculated to cave his green rib guards straight into his lungs.
Kallard dropped his entire body mass flat to the turf grates, executed a sweeping double leg kick that violently broke the first Piccolo’s balance loop down in the grass, and simultaneously raised his right index fingers to fire a short, marble-sized *Static Buster* pellet point-blank straight against the secondary clone’s descending wrist joint.
The high-frequency kinetic disruption pulse hit the arm rail with a sharp electrical crackle, short-circuiting the clone’s psychic energy structure just enough to cause its purple silhouette to flicker and ripple like a broken hologram screen.
Piccolo’s real biological body utilized that exact microsecond of electrical gray noise to system-bypass Kallard’s remaining arm block, his heavy purple boot plate slamming straight into the center of the kid’s black chest armor with a massive concussive *THUD*.
Kallard flew forty feet horizontally across the outdoor testing field, his back hitting the grass sod with a heavy roll before he manual-popped his feet straight back onto his boots, his face caked in dirt as a genuine, loud roar of pure down-to-earth laughter cleared his throat.
Piccolo narrowed his yellow eyes into two cold slits of light from his slot, his chest heaving to extract oxygen.
“You…
you spend entirely too many hours of your shift letting out a loud laugh when your guard lane gets caked in a heavy blow, hybrid traveler!
It’s an absolute violation of standard warrior discipline!”
“You adapt your structural angles too damn fast for a primitive local planet manager, Piccolo!” Kallard laughed out, wiping a fresh line of red blood cells from his beard trim with his glove. New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
“The data is an absolute treat to read!”
“That specific line of vocabulary sounds remarkably like a brawler insult clearing your teeth, scrapper!”
“It’s a high-grade professional compliment for your logbook, demon king!
Enter the line!”
“That parameter makes the transaction a hell of a lot worse for my pride, Kallard!”
## Act VIII: The Inventory of the Night
Kallard launched his broad body straight back into the lane using a fast, low-power *Flash Trigger* pulse, his boots leaving a green trail across the lawn blades.
He appeared inside the absolute center of Piccolo’s blind guard lane in less than a breath, bringing his heavy right fist to a dead, sudden halt exactly **one single inch** away from the green skin of the demon lord’s chest plates.
Piccolo’s clawed hand was simultaneously locked motionless exactly **one single inch** away from the black leather fabric of Kallard’s throat guard.
Both veteran brawlers held their vertical postures completely frozen in the slot, their chest cages rising and falling in perfect synchronization as the hot wind from their speed wave settled the grass dust around their boots.
Gohan let let out a massive, ecstatic childhood cheer from the bench line, his small hands clapping wild against his orange gi.
Krillin whistled loudly through his teeth, his towel waving in the air.
Yamcha grinned broadly, leaning his shoulders back against the tool cart.
Bulma Briefs lifted her megaphone clip from her desk, her blue eyes wide as she shouted across the lawn clearing.
“Try your absolute best to prevent your brawler knuckles from breaking any more of my father’s expensive landscape architecture tiles this week, boys!
The company budget is running tight!”
Brakka manual-engaged his transponder box with a gear-toothed cackle.
“Try your absolute best to completely ignore her definition of an expensive piece of grass tissue, demon king!
Her father’s checkbook doesn’t possess a terminal limit!
Keep the hammers turning!”
Piccolo slowly dropped his green claw back down to his belt loop, his yellow eyes tracking the kid’s bare face with a quiet, unyielding calculation before he took a slow step backward through the clover.
“We…
we execute the secondary simulation pass on the turn of the tomorrow morning shift, Kallard.
Keep your valves greased.”
Kallard lowered his fist smoothly, his tail wrapping back around his waist guard with a clean click of his buckle.
“I’ll have my primary crew prepare the data lines before the dawn clears the city, Piccolo.
Looking forward to the work sheet.”
The demon lord turned his tall green frame around to march back toward Gohan’s bench, but right before his boots cleared the edge of the canvas mat, he stopped his weight for a single frozen second, his cold voice clearing his throat in a quiet down-to-earth whisper.
“You…
you operate as an exceptionally useful piece of defensive machinery for this planet’s ledger lines, hybrid.
Let’s enter that digit into the logbook.”
Kallard blinked his dark pupils twice, his jaw faltering slightly.
From the mouth clips of a cold-blooded demon lord like Piccolo…
that specific line of down-to-earth vocabulary was mathematically equivalent to a full-scale romantic love letter caked in poetry.
“Thanks, old timer,” he said softly.
“The entry is signed.”
Piccolo let out a short grunt through his nose clips and vanished into the shadows of the northern ridges with the boy.
That exact same night shift, Chi-Chi arrived at the Capsule Corp hangar perimeter gates riding inside a massive corporate delivery speeder piloted by the Ox-King, her hands manual-carrying enough boiling iron hot-pots and deep ceramic food containers to make the Brief family kitchen look like a full-scale military supply depot.
She proudly declared to every droid on the walkway that her journey had been executed explicitly because her son Gohan required a proper plate of domestic human nutrition to survive the week.
But every single martial artist sitting around the workbench knew a hell of a lot better—she had cooked enough slow-roasted mountain beef cells and sweet rice cakes to pack the stomach wells of every single fighter standing inside the trench.
Kallard spent his evening shift helping her carry the heavy iron containers inside the dome kitchen, his broad arms lifting three massive platters simultaneously without a single drop of an effort line.
Chi-Chi watched the absolute stability of his shoulder joints through her round spectacles, her face setting into a sharp, clinical line of maternal evaluation.
“You’re…
you’re systematically packing a proper allocation of those meat cells down your own throat loops every single day of the week too, aren’t you, brawler boy?”
Kallard blinked his dark eyes twice, his visor flashing under the kitchen halogen bulbs.
“I…
I can easily clear a plate if the inventory allows for the fuel current, ma’am.”
“That was flatly, structurally not the specific category of an answer my question was extracting from your receivers, kid!” she snapped back instantly, her hands planted firmly against her blue apron fabric.
“I asked your mouth if you’re eating proper food!”
He stared straight into her spectacles.
She stared straight back through her long black hair bangs without a single millimeter of a hesitation line.
Kallard’s internal mind fully resolved right then and there exactly why a planet-shattering hero like Kakarot spent his entire life fearing the absolute baseline authority of this regular human housewife a hell of a lot more than any cosmic warlord or mechanical laboratory monster operating across the galaxy lanes.
“Yes, ma’am,” Kallard said flatly and honestly, dropping his chin down into a low warrior bow.
“My account processes the meat cells every single rotation.
The layout is optimized.”
Bulma Briefs walked past his left shoulder guard carrying a stack of clean silver plates, a bright beautiful grin clearing her ponytail strands as she whispered out low near his ear ridge.
“An exceptionally smart, well-vetted piece of public relations vocabulary, Greenbean.
You’re learning how to monitor the steering handles.”
Kallard cut his dark pupils sideways to deliver a dry, non-profit look straight toward her cheek smudges.
Chi-Chi’s sharp eyes narrowed into two tight points of white light behind her lenses, her focus tracking the exchange.
“Greenbean?
What specific calling card designation is that supposed to mean for his file, daughter?”
Bulma smiled completely innocently, her fork clicking against her porcelain plate.
“Just a small corporate nickname our department developed for his armor layout, Chi-Chi.
It tracks his baseline color metrics perfectly.”
The academic housewife looked the giant, scarred Saiyan scrapper slowly up and down from his black hair spikes straight down to his tattered leather combat boots, before she nodded her head once with an absolute gravity.
“Yeah.
Track the line cleanly.
The vocabulary fits his structural character template perfectly fine.
I approve of the entry.”
Kallard closed his large eyes under his bandana line, his shoulders dropping flat.
“Oh, man…
not you too, ma’am.
The conspiracy is officially running at a hundred percent saturation tier.”
The small boy Gohan let out a loud, high-pitched childhood giggle from his stool near the rice pot, his mouth caked in sauce.
Kallard looked down at the kid’s bright face, his chest plates relaxing completely as a quiet line of warmth flooded his human soul.
He decided behind his teeth that a little bit of a public relations humiliation across the kitchen was a hell of a lot lower than the price required to keep that childhood laugh caked into the living timeline.
The transaction was completely worth the liability.
## Act IX: The Small Green World
The late-night kitchen feast was significantly louder, funnier, and more down-to-earth than the previous month’s layout had been.
It wasn’t an easy shift to clear—Goku’s absolute biological absence from the primary head chair still brushed against every single laugh that cleared the table, and every Gohan smile carried a small line of a purple shadow hidden beneath its edges.
But the dome room flatly did not feel like an open funeral transport service anymore.
It felt exactly like a collection of real, hard-working people who had made a terminal choice to keep living, laughing, and building their walls while their knuckles prepared for a cosmic war.
That was a specific category of a design template that Kallard’s human soul understood all the way down to his bone marrow.
After the dinner plates had cleared the spreadsheet, he tracked Bulma Briefs down into one of the smaller high-energy development laboratories caked into the second layer of the compound buildings.
She was sitting flat on her stool behind her workbench, her blue hair tied up messily with a rubber band, a fresh layer of dark graphite engine grease caked across her left cheek bone as her thin fingers used a soldering iron to adjust a logic wire rail inside Raditz’s dismantled scouter module.
Brakka’s handwritten technical notes were spread wide across the wood face beside her elbow.
Kallard leaned his broad shoulders comfortable against the steel doorway frame, his tail lashing a slow circle through the dark hallway lines.
“You…
you systematically missed the final dessert allocation pass inside the kitchen quarter, Bulma.
The sweet sugar cakes were caked in prime metrics tonight.”
She didn’t bother to lift her blue eyes up from her magnifying lens for a single millisecond of the clock, her soldering iron releasing a tiny puff of gray zinc smoke.
“I processed exactly three bites of a sourdough roll while my fingers were recalibrating the signal receiver loops on this logic plate, Greenbean.
My time limits are running hot.”
“Does that specific category of an inventory entry actually count as a valid dinner shift on your spreadsheet, researcher?”
“It does if your mouth clips maintain a strict data boundary and refuse to deliver the numbers to my mother’s megaphones, brawler boy,” she jeered back softly, her fingers clicking a copper capacitor pin into place along the western rail rail.
He stepped his heavy boots slowly through the doorway clearing, his dark pupils tracking the alien electronic components spread open across her bench wood.
The scouter’s primary high-frequency transmitter main line had been completely separated from the plastic ear casing and hard-wired straight into a massive Capsule Corp digital signal analyzer screen, where rows of flashing alien imperial symbols were scrolling right alongside columns of clean human mathematical equations.
She had already translated more than half of the code database using nothing but her own brain cells.
“You’re…
you’re not just running a diagnostic repair pass on that spaceport junk pile anymore, Bulma,” Kallard said softly, his voice dropping into a quiet down-to-earth register.
“You’re systematically optimizing the absolute architecture of the receiver grid.”
“I’m developing a complete structural understanding of its arithmetic flaws first, scrapper,” she said, her blue eyes finally lifting up to lock straight into his bare face through the yellow halogen desk glare, her smile sudden, bright, and completely un-shielded by corporate armor.
“Then I’m going to use my father’s tools to build a superior baseline filter that will make this imperial hardware look like a piece of primitive trash.
There’s a massive technical distinction between the two design passes.”
“An exceptionally huge distinction for our survival logs, ma’am,” Kallard managed a small line of a real smile.
Senior mechanic Brakka wasn’t active inside the laboratory dome clearing tonight—which mathematically indicated to the kid’s ledger that the old four-armed grease demon was either fast asleep inside his lower cabin bunk, or currently hiding inside a storage vault taking apart an anti-gravity capsule engine Dr.
Brief had shown his eyes during the afternoon shift.
Kallard sat his broad frame down heavily onto an empty wooden stool directly across the workbench table from her slot, his long brown tail wrapping securely around the base bolts.
Bulma dropped her soldering tool flat onto its holder, her blue eyes studying the deep white branching scars caked across his bare forearm skin with a quiet, unyielding softness that had zero corporate sarcasm left.
“You…
you look completely, profoundly caked in pure physical weariness tonight, Kallard.”
“So do your face clips, Bulma,” he whispered out low into the quiet room.
“Your ponytail is completely crooked.”
“I asked your receivers first, space traveler,” she sniffed.
“No, you didn’t.
The data lines were empty.”
“I implied the question explicitly through my eyebrow posture, Greenbean.
Let’s maintain accuracy on the text sheet.”
He split his bearded jaw into a tiny, genuine line of an open smile, his dark pupils steady.
The brilliant blue-haired girl lowered her chin onto her open palm, her blue eyes fixed straight on his pupils through the yellow light lines.
“You’re pushing your biological container entirely too hard across these training fields, Kallard.
Everyone on the grass can felt the heat wave.”
“Every single martial artist standing in that trench is grinding their bone marrow down to the zero mark to survive the year, Bulma,” he said flatly, his hand tracing a line in the workbench wood.
“My workload matches the unit’s timeline.”
“Not like your forms do, scrapper boy,” she whispered out softly, her voice serious.
“When you’re running those kicks inside the ten-G chamber…
or when your knuckles are trading blows with Piccolo out on the turf…
it looks like your spirit isn’t just practicing a basic martial arts lesson for a tournament circuit.
It looks exactly like your mind is locked into a furious, white-hot physical argument with a massive collection of dark ghosts that only your own eyes have the database to see across the field.”
Kallard’s fingers went perfectly rigid and still against the wood face, his internal sensing needle flaring with a sudden white-hot memory line.
The red sky of Vegeta catching fire.
Morga’s cold hands dropping into the ash.
The *Galaxy Breaker’s* terminal limit-break four-times current caving his own bone marrow inward inside the Veyruna clearing.
The face of Turles grinning through the smoke of a burning forest.
The dark imperial shadow of Frieza’s flagship destroyer hanging above the horizon.
The future chronicles of a world that had been turned to glass because the defenders weren’t caked in enough discipline to hold the lane.
“I…
I guess my account is running that specific argument line behind my teeth most days, Bulma,” he whispered out small into the dark space.
“Does…
does the darkness ever deliver a single line of a helpful answer to your receivers when the drill turns cold, Greenbean?” she asked, her blue eyes wide through her eyelashes.
“Sometimes it delivers a warning sheet, Bulma,” Kallard said flatly.
“Sometimes it simply reminds my knuckles exactly what a slaughter looks like when the defenders let their discipline drop for a single shift.”
The blue-haired heiress sat perfectly still on her stool for three heavy seconds of the night breeze, her thin hand slowly and thoroughly reaching out across the copper wires caked onto her workbench to place her bare fingers gently flat against one of the thick white branching scars crossing his right forearm skin.
Kallard went completely, structurally vertical and motionless in his slot, his breath freezing deep inside his throat cage as the light, warm touch of her skin cleared the rime from his bone marrow in less than a millisecond.
“Does the score mark still throw off a line of physical pain cells to your system, Kallard?” she asked softly, her thumb tracing the crooked edge of the skin with a quiet, unyielding curiosity.
“Sometimes…
when the gravity dial turns hot…
the tissue registers the load, Bulma,” he whispered out low.
“Does the mark hurt your chest right now?
In this room?”
“No, ma’am,” the young Saiyan warhound growled out softly, his dark green pupils locking straight into her blue eyes through the yellow halogen glare.
“The current inside my arm is completely stable tonight.
The transaction is clean.”
Bulma Briefs looked straight back into his face clips for a single, long, and thoroughly un-scripted breath of the winter wind, her thin fingers slowly retracting back into her coat pocket loop as she realized the absolute raw depth of the connection clearing their matrix, a deep beautiful line of a pink blush flaring bright across her soot-stained cheeks.
“Sorry about the measurement pass, Greenbean.
My engineering mind got a bit too curious regarding your specification sheet.”
“The…
the inventory check was completely approved for your department, Bulma,” Kallard said, his throat feeling caked in dry spaceport sand as his heart executed another ridiculous, high-velocity thudding pass against his ribs.
“Don’t go filing an error report.”
## Act X: The Gravity of a Joke
The blue-haired girl cleared her throat with a quick, professional click of her tongue, her fingers grabbing her digital tablet notebook to hide her face lines as she manual-reset her display screens.
“Right!
Well!
Moving the layout forward for tomorrow’s checklist: we’re officially threw the primary power switches on the Mark Three gravity chamber prototype at the dawn shift, scrapper boy!
Get your boots ready!”
Kallard managed a tiny, dry line of a smirk breaking through his beard trim, his tail lashing a slow circle near the stool legs.
“Are…
are your fingers systematically skipping the entire engineering phase for a Mark Two gravity room on my spreadsheet, Bulma?
I don’t remember reading those logs.”
“The Mark Two gravity experiment was the specific system loop that caught an immediate line of superheated chemical fire along the primary capacitor rails last Friday morning, brawler boy!” she yelled back through her ponytail strands, her old corporate sarcasm returning to her lips with a beautiful bright line of an open smile.
“Our department has officially made a terminal management decision to never speak of her biography codes again across this table!”
“Her biography codes?” Kallard laughed out quietly, leaning his arms back against the wood.
“The old transformer unit carried a feminine gender specification on your spreadsheet?”
“She died with a massive amount of technical bravery to deliver those baseline field orientation metrics to my droids, Kallard!
Her sacrifice was pristine!”
“Senior staff technician Brakka is going to deep-seatedly, absolutely hate every single line of that un-scientific vocabulary when his ear clips collect the text sheet tomorrow morning, Bulma.
He prefers his machinery caked in dry numbers.”
“The old four-armed grease demon already cakes his entire toolbox in pure dramatic hatred every single time my pen enters a room, Greenbean!
It’s an approved baseline metric for his character file!
Now clear your boots off my workbench and go find your blanket!
Your system requires the sleep cells!”
Kallard stood up to his full broad-shouldered height smoothly, his tattered gray cloaking fabric falling back down over his green-trimmed chest armor plates as he adjusted his utility loops.
“Your own receivers require a full allocation of rest hours to clear the carbon soot from your lenses too, researcher.
Don’t go running a fraudulent maintenance report regarding your own health logs.”
“I am an emotionally advanced, biologically superior scientific asset who runs on pure high-octane engineering greed, bounty boy!” she jeered back proudly, pointing her screwdriver straight toward his visor casing.
“I’ll go to my blankets when my logic gate is optimized!
Goodnight, Space Batman!”
Kallard managed a real, quiet, and thoroughly down-to-earth roar of a laugh that filled the quiet laboratory dome rafters, his white-gloved hand giving her a low warrior salute.
“Goodnight, Bulma.
Keep your handles steady.”
He marched his heavy combat boots out through the automatic laboratory companionway doors, the small silver nickname *Greenbean* following his steps down the dark concrete walkways like an absolute mountain of glorious, beautiful trouble that his human soul didn’t have a single drop of an interest in clearing from his ledger lines tonight.
The next morning shift, far away within the frozen unmapped void of the afterlife sky lanes, an orange martial arts warrior named Goku finally cleared the final golden brick curve of the endless mountain trail, his tattered boots coming to a dead, sudden halt as his dark eyes track the terminal checkpoint of his three-month sprint.
A tiny, perfectly round green planetary marble was hanging motionless directly above the soft white vapor clouds like a small jewel floating inside a void.
It was remarkably, incredibly smaller than his human memories had prepared his brain cells to see—possessing nothing more than a single grassy lawn clearing, three miniature palm trees, a small automated capsule speeder car parked near a fence, and a tiny square residential house caked in a clean coat of yellow paint.
Goku split his pale face into a wide, ecstatic brawler grin under his halo light, his fists locking into his belt sash as his legs prepared a final leap.
“Ha!
Finally track the end of the road lane!
The master king’s kitchen is officially open for my knuckles!”
He launched his vertical frame straight across the empty sky lanes, his body executing a clean high-speed diving descent toward the small green lawn grates below.
The very fraction of a millisecond his leather soles cleared the atmosphere boundaries of the tiny planet…
an immense, unprecedented, and thoroughly terrifying column of solid raw gravity current violently slammed straight down onto his head with a force that caked his entire skeleton in a ten-G displacement load.
His balance loop completely broke apart down the center rail, his bare face hitting the green grass sod with a massive, concussive *PLOP* that left his limbs tangled up in his sash fabric.
A small, brown furry monkey asset sitting near a palm tree trunk—Bubbles—turned his face around slowly to track the sudden intrusion, staring at the fallen brawler with a pair of wide unblinking eye sets.
Goku lifted his right white-gloved hand into the air lines with an exceptionally weak, trembling tremor of his fingers, a small line of a dry smirk breaking through his jaw grates as he gasped for air cells.
“Hi there…
little monkey boy…
the lead plating inside this yard is currently running a hell of a lot heavier than the local tournament circuits allowed for my boots…
the math is completely out of bounds…”
A slow, friendly brawler voice called out from the side of the small yellow residential house porch steps, the sound caked in a cheerful down-to-earth humor.
“Well, track the entry cleanly!
The orange hero has officially cleared his customs pass through my perimeter fence line, hasn’t he, Bubbles!”
Goku managed to painfully turn his head bone around by two micro-inches through the heavy grass blades, his dark pupils tracking a short, portly blue-skinned master warrior wearing a high-class formal imperial robe, a pair of dark sunglasses caked over his lenses, and a set of long twitching antennae ridges clearing his forehead.
He was standing vertical right alongside his tiny speeder car, a wide open smile splitting his cheeks.
“I am the primary certified senior management director of this entire sector terminal, young fighter!” the blue man chuckled out brightly through the wind loop.
“The local population call my ledger King Kai!
Welcome to the training course, Goku!”
Goku blinked his dark pupils once through the dirt smudges, a massive wave of pure inspired warrior excitement instantly clearing the static from his tired cells as his knuckles clenched the grass turf.
“You’re…
you’re a hell of a lot smaller than my brain cells predicted your volume would look like on the spreadsheet, old timer,” he wheezed out happily through his teeth.
“Let’s go turn the brawling hot.”
King Kai stood frozen near his bumper for a single heavy second of the wind pass, all his data loops running an absolute system error pass, before he violently broke out into a massive, thunderous roar of pure un-adulterated laughter that shook his antennae rails with a pristine velocity.
“An absolutely flawless piece of natural comedy on the very first exchange, kid!
Your character specifications are completely approved for my kitchen!
Let’s go open up the balance sheets!”
Back down on the crust of the planet Earth, inside the pristine white dome of the Capsule Corp compound clearing, the young Saiyan scrapper Kallard stood vertical in the center of his silver Mark Three gravity training chamber, the digital dial panel manual-locked at the maximum ten-G multiplier.
His broad chest was caked in sweat, his scarred forearms raised into a clean, balanced crane style brace, his dark green pupils flaring wide behind his lens line as Bulma’s diagnostic droids track his vital indicators through the glass pane.
The preparation year wasn’t over yet.
The two elite executioners were still moving along the tracking lanes toward their home world.
The sky was still marked for a total liquidation pass by the cold machines of the empire.
But the board was flatly no longer running on the old pre-programmed script lines.
The blue planet Earth was changing its music with every single hour that cleared the clock.
And the lonely brawler Ronin was finally building a wall that could break the prince’s teeth.