[Month Thirty-Two — Kami’s Lookout]
He gathered them on a Sunday, in late winter, when the sky above the Lookout was pale and clean and the wind had the particular knife-quality of high-altitude winter without the brutality of storm.
He had given each of them a week’s notice — not much, but enough, and the specificity of the invitation (come to the Lookout, it matters) had been sufficient to produce compliance in all of them without requiring explanation he wasn’t ready to give by messenger.
They arrived across the morning.
Krillin first, because Krillin was always early, ascending the cloud road with the slightly awestruck expression of someone encountering the Lookout for only the second time and finding it still remarkable.
Yamcha second, arriving in a capsule aircraft he’d borrowed from someone in the circuit, landing on the eastern face with a precision that suggested he’d been practicing.
Bulma third, in her own aircraft, with a tablet and two thermoses and the brisk manner of a person who already knew the agenda and was ready to work.
Goku was last.
He arrived the way Goku arrived places — flying, simply, the orange gi a bright point against the winter sky, descending to the Lookout’s surface without ceremony and looking around at the assembled group with the open curiosity of someone arriving at a party they weren’t sure they’d been invited to but were glad to find themselves at.
“Everyone’s here,” he said, with the tone of someone finding this pleasing.
“Yes,” Tien said.
“Come sit down.”
They arranged themselves on the Lookout’s surface — Tien standing, the others seated in a rough circle, Chiaotzu at Tien’s left with the stillness of someone who already knew the full picture and had prepared himself to watch others receive it.
Kami stood at a slight distance, present but not central.
Mr.
Popo had brought tea, which everyone had taken except Bulma who had her thermos, and the winter light fell flat and clear across the Lookout’s pale stone.
Tien looked at the circle of faces.
Krillin: attentive, sitting forward slightly, the posture of someone who knows something important is coming and has been waiting for it.
He had gotten stronger in the past months — approximately seven hundred now, the independent training producing visible results — and his face had the quality of a person who had quietly been preparing even without the full picture.
Yamcha: leaning back, arms across his chest, outwardly casual in the way he presented when he was actually being most careful.
He already knew more than the others — the Mishiro conversations had given him the shape of the thing — and what showed in his face now was not anticipation but a kind of readiness, the face of a person waiting for confirmation of what they’d already decided.
Bulma: tablet in her lap, stylus in her hand, making notes that she’d apparently been making since she sat down.
She had the focused manner of a person who had already reorganized their priorities and was now in execution mode.
Goku: sitting cross-legged with the relaxed completeness of someone who was comfortable in their body regardless of context, watching Tien with those clear eyes that were already slightly narrowed in the way they narrowed when he was sensing something and wanted to understand it better.
Tien breathed.
He thought, briefly, about his previous life — the apartment, the shelf of manga volumes, the late nights reading these characters from the outside — and let the thought pass through without catching on it.
“I’m going to tell you everything I know,” he said.
“All of it.
And then we’re going to talk about what we do with it.”
He told them.
He started at the beginning — not his beginning, the transmigration, which was a conversation for a different time and different circumstances, but the threat’s beginning: what was approaching, what it was, and why it was approaching this planet specifically.
He told them about Raditz, the Saiyan who would arrive first — alone, powerful, carrying a scouter and an agenda that was personal to Goku in a way that would be both complicated and devastating.
He told them about Nappa and Vegeta, who would follow, who were more powerful still, who would arrive with the specific intent to find the Dragon Balls and with a casual willingness to destroy everything in their path as they did it.
He gave them power levels.
Raditz at twelve hundred.
Nappa at four thousand.
Vegeta at eighteen thousand.
He watched their faces as the numbers landed.
Krillin’s expression moved from attention to a very controlled form of alarm — the alarm of someone calculating rapidly against numbers they’d just been given and finding the calculation unpleasant.
He said nothing.
Yamcha’s casual posture did not change.
His eyes did.
Something in them became very still, the way eyes become still when they’re processing information that requires a full stop.
Bulma was writing.
Goku—
Goku was the one Tien watched most carefully, because Goku’s response to this information mattered more than anyone else’s in the room, and because he’d had the most uncertainty about what that response would look like.
What it looked like was this: Goku listened to the power levels and the timeline and the nature of the threat with the expression of someone who has been told the mountain they’re planning to climb is significantly larger than they thought, and who has responded to this news not with fear or hesitation but with the specific brightening of someone who has just discovered that the challenge is actually adequate to their interest.
That was Goku.
That was the thing that made him both extraordinary and, in the most genuine sense, occasionally alarming.
“Eighteen thousand,” Goku said, when Tien had finished.
“Vegeta.”
“Approximately,” Tien said.
“What are you at now?” Goku asked.
“Twenty-three hundred base.
Effective output with my techniques active is closer to five thousand.” He paused.
“I’m planning to reach thirty-two hundred base by the time they arrive.
Effective output somewhere around six and a half thousand.”
Goku absorbed this.
He looked at the sky for a moment.
Then: “I need to train harder.”
This was what Tien had hoped for and had not been certain of.
Goku training at his natural motivated pace was not Goku training with real urgency.
Real urgency was a different gear.
“Yes,” Tien said.
“All of us do.”
“Chi-Chi would — ” He paused.
“She wouldn’t be happy.”
“I know,” Tien said.
“But we can find times.
And there’s something else—” He looked at Bulma.
“Tell him.”
Bulma looked up from her tablet with the slightly annoyed expression of someone interrupted mid-note.
Then she understood what he was referring to and the annoyance shifted.
“I’m building a portable gravity modifier,” she said.
“Wearable.
If it works — and it will work, I just need three more months on it — you could train in high gravity anywhere.
No room required.”
Goku’s expression was now fully engaged.
“How high?”
“Starting at two times.
The portable model won’t do more than four without a power source upgrade I haven’t figured out yet.
But two to four times gravity consistently, wherever you are, for as long as you want—” She shrugged.
“It adds up.”
“It adds up enormously,” Tien said.
Krillin had been quiet since the power levels.
Now he said: “What’s our actual role in this?
When they arrive.
Realistically.” He said it with the quality of someone who needed the real answer, not the encouraging one.
“Raditz at twelve hundred — I’m at seven hundred.
I can’t fight that.”
“No,” Tien said honestly.
“You can’t fight it at current levels.
You can in seventeen months if you push.” He looked at Krillin directly.
“By the time they arrive, I need you at twelve hundred.
That’s the target.”
Krillin blinked.
“You think I can reach twelve hundred in seventeen months?”
“Yes.
If you use the gravity room here three days a week, senzu-supported training cycles, and the wearable device when Bulma has it ready.” He paused.
“You’re already at seven hundred.
You need to nearly double.
The same trajectory you’ve been on, accelerated, gets you there.”
Krillin was quiet for a moment.
Then he nodded — once, cleanly, the nod of someone accepting an assignment.
“Yamcha,” Tien said.
“Twelve hundred,” Yamcha said, before Tien could speak.
“Same target.”
“I was going to say ten,” Tien said.
“Twelve,” Yamcha said, firmly.
“I have seventeen months and I’ve been training harder than I ever have.
I’m not settling for ten.” He paused.
“I’m at six hundred now.
I can do twelve.”
Tien looked at him.
The same directness, the same refusal to accept a ceiling someone else had estimated for him.
“Twelve,” he agreed.
He turned to Goku.
Goku was looking at the sky.
He had been looking at the sky for the past several minutes, in the way that Goku looked at things when he was thinking — not checked out, not absent, but somewhere inside himself where the processing happened.
Now he came back and met Tien’s eyes.
“Vegeta,” Goku said.
“Eighteen thousand.
You said that’s where he arrives.”
“Approximately.”
“So I need to be at eighteen thousand.”
“At minimum,” Tien said.
“More, if possible.”
The number hung in the air.
Eighteen thousand.
Against a current of — Tien felt Goku’s ki signature through the third eye, measured it as accurately as he could.
Perhaps five hundred, in the resting state, which was a resting state that bore no relationship to his actual capacity, which Tien estimated at significantly more. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
But even factoring in the gap between Goku’s rest state and his genuine ceiling—
Eighteen thousand was a very large number.
“King Kai,” Goku said.
Tien stopped.
Goku looked at him steadily.
“You know about King Kai.”
It was not quite a question.
The way he said it suggested that the foreknowledge Tien had admitted to weeks ago on the plain had been in Goku’s mind since then, turning over, and this was where it had arrived.
“Yes,” Tien said carefully.
“He can teach things that nobody here can teach,” Goku said.
“Techniques that could get me where I need to be.”
“Yes.”
“But the only way to get to him is through the Other Side.” Goku paused.
“Which means dying.”
A silence on the Lookout.
The winter wind moved across the pale stone.
“That’s a fixed point,” Tien said, very carefully.
“There is a sequence of events — Raditz’s arrival, what happens during that fight — that leads to circumstances where the path to King Kai becomes available to you.
I cannot tell you more than that without risking changing things that need to happen the way they happen.” He looked at Goku with the full weight of what he was saying.
“I’m asking you to trust that.
To trust that the path exists and that it finds you, and to focus right now on getting as strong as possible so that when the path opens, you’re ready for what King Kai can build on.”
Goku looked at him for a long time.
“Okay,” he said.
The same word Chiaotzu used.
The same complete, uncomplicated acceptance.
But from Goku it carried a different specific weight — not the trust of a friend in a friend, but the trust of a fighter in another fighter who has shown their seriousness.
“I trust you.”
Tien felt the words in his chest like a weight that was also a gift.
“Thank you,” he said.
Bulma cleared her throat.
“Are we done with the emotional part?” she said.
“Because I have seventeen months of engineering to do and I’d like to talk about resource allocation.”
Krillin made a sound that was almost a laugh.
Yamcha’s mouth moved.
Goku turned to Bulma with the uncomplicated delight of someone who had never once found her manner anything other than refreshing.
“Sorry, Bulma,” Tien said.
“Don’t apologize, just be organized,” she said, and opened a new page on her tablet.
“Now.
Gravity room scheduling.
Senzu supply projections.
Scouter development timeline.
Wearable gravity prototype.
Let’s be specific.”
And they were.
For three hours, in the clear winter light on the world’s highest platform, they were specific and practical and detailed and real, and when they were finished they had a plan — not the perfect plan, no plan was perfect, but an honest one, built from what was actually true about each of them and aimed at what actually needed to happen.
As they were leaving — the aircraft warming up, Krillin beginning his descent of the cloud road, Goku having said an uncomplicated goodbye and launched himself into the sky — Yamcha stopped beside Tien at the Lookout’s edge.
“Seventeen months,” he said.
“Seventeen months,” Tien confirmed.
Yamcha looked at the sky.
“Are we going to make it?”
Tien thought about Kami’s caution: hold it loosely enough that when it doesn’t go exactly as you’ve planned, you can adapt without being destroyed by the deviation.
He thought about what he’d built and what it would face.
He thought about Goku’s face when he’d heard the power levels and had chosen, immediately and without apparent distress, to treat it as an adequate challenge.
“Some of us will have hard moments,” he said.
“Some things won’t go the way we want.
But yes.
In the ways that matter — we’re going to make it.”
Yamcha nodded.
He picked up his bag.
“Good enough,” he said.
He walked to his aircraft.
The engine turned over.
The Lookout, enormous and patient and indifferent to timelines, remained.
Tien stood at its edge for a long time after everyone was gone, in the winter quiet, looking at the sky.
Seventeen months.
He went back to the gravity room.