The letter found them in a town called Mishiro, six weeks after the Paozu regional tournament, delivered to the inn they were staying at by a courier who had been following their general direction along the southern circuit for three days.
It was written on the back of a tournament program — the West Capital Open, held the previous month — in handwriting that was large and slightly impatient, the handwriting of someone who had more to say than they wanted to take the time to write down properly.
Heard you’re doing the circuit.
Heard you beat Krillin.
Heard you left the Crane School.
All three of those things are interesting.
I’m in Mishiro for two more days before I head east.
If you want to train with someone who isn’t going to be a waste of your time, the address on the front of this is where I’m staying.
—Y
Tien read it twice.
Then he handed it to Chiaotzu.
Chiaotzu read it and said: “Yamcha.”
“Yes.”
“He’s very confident for someone who lost to Kami at the 23rd.”
“He’s confident in general,” Tien said.
“It’s not entirely without basis.”
This was true.
Yamcha was — in the original timeline, in the series, in the body’s memories of having competed against him — a genuine fighter.
Not in the top tier, not someone who had ever been central to the big conflicts, but someone who had trained seriously and continuously and who had a specific quality of doggedness that Tien respected more than raw talent.
He’d been humiliated at the 23rd.
He’d come back for the 25th, older and harder.
He’d kept training through the period between tournaments in the way that people train when they have a genuine need to, rather than a schedule.
He was also, in this period, unaffiliated.
Like Tien, he had been training under a master and had reached the point where the master’s system had given him what it had to give.
He was somewhere in the two hundred fifty to three hundred range, in terms of power level.
He had speed — real speed, the kind that required genuine ki control to produce — and the Wolf Fang Fist, which was a legitimately powerful technique when applied by someone at his level.
He had the Spirit Ball, which was interesting for similar reasons to the Tri-Beam: a small, dense, controlled ki construct that operated at higher effective density than his base output level.
He had a ceiling that, in the original, he never pushed high enough.
Not because he lacked the capability.
Because circumstances had never aligned to force him to it.
He could be useful, Tien thought.
And training with him would be useful.
Genuinely.
He’s better than me in specific areas and I’m better than him in others and that kind of complementary sparring is exactly what I need.
The tactical consideration was real.
But there was also something else — something less strategic and more simply human.
Yamcha, in the original story, had been a peripheral figure.
A punchline, eventually, to the story’s own relentless power inflation.
He had been treated by the narrative with a carelessness that his actual qualities didn’t deserve.
He had been a person who tried hard, cared about the right things, and had simply been on the wrong side of a story that didn’t know what to do with him.
He deserves better than what he got, Tien thought.
And then he thought: And I’m in a position to give him some of it, if I handle this right.
“Let’s go find him,” he said.
The address on the program’s front was a training hall in Mishiro’s north district — not a public facility but a private one, the kind that serious independent fighters sometimes rented by the week in towns they were passing through.
The hall was small and bare, the floor sprung hardwood, the walls hung with nothing, the space used and currently empty except for the man doing one-arm handstand push-ups in the far corner.
Yamcha heard them come in — Tien was certain of this, certain that his ki signature had registered the moment they entered the building, whatever it looked like — and finished his set before standing.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, with the kind of build that came from years of developing speed and power simultaneously rather than prioritizing one at the expense of the other.
Dark hair, pulled back.
A scar on his cheek that Tien recognized from the body’s memories as coming from the 21st World Tournament — an early fight that had gone badly for a moment before going well.
His eyes were dark and direct and assessed Tien with the complete frankness of someone who has spent their whole life in arenas where clear-eyed assessment was survival.
“Tien Shinhan,” he said.
Not a greeting.
A confirmation.
“Yamcha,” Tien said.
Yamcha looked at Chiaotzu.
“Chiaotzu.”
“Yamcha,” Chiaotzu said pleasantly.
A moment.
Then Yamcha crossed his arms, not defensively but in the manner of someone organizing their thoughts.
“I heard from Krillin,” he said.
“He said you seemed different.”
“I am different.”
“Different how?”
Tien considered the question and the best form of the answer.
“I left the Crane School’s approach behind,” he said.
“Not just the affiliation — the methodology.
The way I train, what I’m trying to build, what I think fighting is for.
“I’m not trying to win tournaments.
I’m trying to get as strong as I can, as fast as I can, for reasons that I think will become clear in time.”
Yamcha looked at him steadily.
“Reasons you’re not going to explain right now.”
“Not fully.
No.”
Another moment.
“But they’re real reasons,” Yamcha said.
“Yes.”
He seemed to weigh this — the not-explaining versus the quality of what he could feel, which was a ki signature that had clearly grown since the 23rd Tournament, that carried the warmth of serious recent training rather than the complacency of someone coasting on existing ability.
“Krillin also said you were interested in being connected to Goku,” Yamcha said.
“Eventually.
Not urgently.”
“Why eventually and not now?”
“Because right now I need to train.
I’m not at the level I need to be at, and spending time on social connectivity when I should be working doesn’t serve anyone.” He looked at Yamcha directly.
“Including Goku.”
Yamcha was quiet for a moment.
Then something in his posture shifted — not relaxed, exactly, because Yamcha didn’t fully relax in this context, but settled.
Arrived at something.
“You wrote that letter because you think training together would be useful,” Tien said.
Not a question.
“Yes,” Yamcha said.
“You’re better than me in some things.
I’m better than you in others.
That’s the most valuable kind of training partner you can have when you’re past the level where most people around you are less than you.”
“I know,” Tien said.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“So.” Yamcha unfolded his arms.
“You want to see if this works.”
“Yes.”
“Conditions?”
Tien appreciated the directness.
“Full contact when we spar.
Honest assessment — not diplomacy, not ego management.
If one of us sees something the other is doing wrong, we say it.” He paused.
“And it’s temporary.
I have a schedule and a direction and I’m not altering it.
But for as long as we’re going the same way, this is useful.”
Yamcha looked at him for one more moment.
Then he said: “First match starts whenever you’re warmed up.”
They trained together for nineteen days.
It was the most productive nineteen days Tien had experienced since the transmigration — not because it was pleasant, which it frequently wasn’t, but because Yamcha was exactly what he’d assessed: a fighter with genuine strengths in areas where Tien had real gaps, willing to be honest about what he saw with a directness that had nothing to do with cruelty and everything to do with a shared investment in the work.
What Yamcha was better at: footwork.
The positioning, the angling, the management of three-dimensional space in a fight.
He moved around the ring in a way that was almost geometric, always in relation to his opponent’s center of mass, always creating angles that didn’t exist until suddenly they did.
The Wolf Fang Fist was built on this — it wasn’t primarily a power technique, it was a positioning technique, a way of using high-speed movement to create a moment of absolute structural advantage and then applying power into that moment.
The power was secondary to the geometry.
Tien watched this and understood, for the first time, a specific gap in his own fighting: he was powerful and technically skilled, but he fought primarily on a linear axis.
Forward pressure, the superiority of his output overwhelming opposition.
Against Yamcha, that forward pressure ran into angles it wasn’t designed to handle, and he found himself repeatedly in positions he’d trained himself out of ever being in.
It was instructive in the way that being shown your blind spot is instructive — uncomfortable, precise, impossible to ignore once seen.
What he was better at: power output, ki control, and the sustained pressure of a long fight.
Yamcha’s speed was expensive; it burned ki at a rate that wasn’t sustainable over a long exchange.
In the first three days of sparring, Yamcha won the early exchanges of almost every session and then ran out of pace around the four-minute mark, the speed dropping, the footwork becoming slightly less pristine, the geometry slightly less perfect.
Tien, who had trained his endurance with as much focus as his power, began winning from the five-minute mark onward.
Consistently.
“You run hot,” Tien said, after the third day’s evening session, while they were sitting against the wall of whatever training space they’d found, drinking water and coming down.
“I know,” Yamcha said.
He didn’t sound defensive.
He sounded like a person cataloging a problem they’d been aware of for a while.
“The Wolf Fang Fist is built for early finish.
If it doesn’t end quickly, it costs too much to maintain.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Tien said.
“The footwork doesn’t have to be expensive,” Tien said.
“You’re spending ki on the movement itself — actively powering it.
If you could move that way without the ki expenditure — if the geometry became instinctive enough that you weren’t consciously constructing each angle—”
“It would cost less,” Yamcha said.
“Significantly less.” Tien paused.
“The movements you’re making are already efficient.
They’re not efficient because they’re cheap — they’re efficient because they’re precise.
But precision and cheapness aren’t the same thing.
Right now you’re buying the precision.
You need to inherit it.”
Yamcha was quiet for a moment, looking at the middle distance.
“How long would that take?”
“Months.
A year, maybe more.
It’s a quality of training below the conscious level — you need to do it until you stop doing it and it just happens.”
Yamcha was quiet for another moment.
Then: “What would I need to change about how I train?”
“Stop fighting at full speed,” Tien said.
“For a while.
Slow everything down to half-speed and work the geometry at that pace until every angle is so familiar you don’t choose it, you just find yourself there.
Then gradually increase.
Don’t race to full speed.
Let it come up as the familiarity deepens.”
Yamcha looked at him with an expression that was slightly skeptical and considerably interested.
“You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m working on my own version of the same problem,” Tien said.
“Different technique, same principle.”
“The compression thing Korin mentioned.”
Tien looked at him sharply.
Yamcha held up a hand.
“He didn’t tell me the details.
I visited the tower — not the top, I couldn’t make the full climb, I ran out of time — but I talked to people in Natarl who’d spoken with him, and he mentioned you specifically.
Said you were working on something interesting.” He shrugged.
“Korin apparently gossips.
I don’t think he considers it gossip.”
“He considers it propagating useful information,” Tien said.
“Sure.” Yamcha looked at the ceiling.
“What’s the compression thing?”
Tien thought about how much to share.
He looked at Yamcha — at the genuine curiosity in the question, at the serious face of a person who was not asking out of competition but out of the same instinct that had driven him to write the letter on the tournament program.
Yamcha was a person who wanted to be better.
That was his best quality and it was sufficient.
“I’m trying to develop a way to temporarily increase effective output without drawing on life force,” Tien said.
“By changing the state of the ki before it enters the output pathways.
Compressing it to higher density.”
Yamcha absorbed this.
“Like — more punch per unit.”
“Exactly like that.”
“Does it work?”
“Sometimes.
For very brief periods.” He paused.
“I need to make it reliable.
That’s the project.” He looked at Yamcha.
“The footwork geometry thing I described — the principle is exactly the same.
Making something that currently requires conscious effort so instinctive that the consciousness can be elsewhere.”
Yamcha was quiet for a long moment.
Then: “So we’re both working on the same fundamental problem from different directions.”
“Yes.”
“That’s—” He almost smiled.
It was a slightly rueful almost-smile, the expression of someone finding unexpected common ground with a person they’d previously understood as simply an opponent.
“That’s actually very annoying.
I wanted to not like this.”
“You can still not like it,” Tien said.
“I know,” Yamcha said.
“I don’t think it’s going to stick.”