[Month 46 — Two Months Out]
He felt it at three in the morning.
The third eye, which maintained a passive background monitoring even in sleep — a development that had arrived without announcement sometime around month thirty-eight, the integration deep enough that the sense continued operating at low priority while the rest of the mind rested — registered something at the edge of its range.
Not the distant disturbance Kami had sensed at month thirty.
Not the formless pressure of something large moving through space at astronomical distance.
Something specific.
A ki signature, faint and far, but with the qualities that made a ki signature identifiable rather than merely detectable.
He came awake immediately, without transition, sitting up in the dark of the Lookout’s sleeping room with the particular clarity of someone whose training had made their sleep-to-waking transition as clean as a switch being thrown.
He extended the third eye to its maximum range.
There.
Northeast, if spatial orientation applied at this range, which it only approximately did.
Far — very far, not a ground-level distance but something that implied the scale of the thing he was sensing was not moving along the ground at all.
It was moving through the upper atmosphere, or beyond it, decelerating toward the surface in a trajectory that was diagonal and steep.
He held the signature in the third eye and examined it the way you examine something dangerous that you’ve been expecting and are now holding carefully.
The ki signature of a Saiyan was specific.
He had known this theoretically but had not known it with the body until now.
There was a quality to it — a sharpness, a cutting edge to the energy that human ki didn’t have, something that corresponded to the biological difference between an engineered warrior species and the fighter cultures of Earth.
It was not simply stronger.
It was differently constituted.
Like the difference between a cultivated field and a wildfire — both real, both powerful, but operating on different principles.
And this particular signature was—
He sat with it for a long moment.
Twelve hundred.
Approximately.
Maybe slightly more — the range made precision difficult, and the signature was moving, which added a Doppler-like complication to the reading.
But the scale was consistent with what he’d been expecting. Read this novel at novelping.com for the best experience.
Raditz, he thought.
That’s Raditz.
He got up and went to find Kami.
Kami was already awake.
Of course he was.
Whatever the Guardian of Earth’s mechanism for perceiving threats to the planet was, it was not the third eye and it was considerably more sensitive than any ki sense.
He was standing at the Lookout’s northern railing in the dark, looking at the sky with an expression that was the composed equivalent of alarm — all the internal reaction contained, only the quality of attention broadcasting it.
“You feel it,” Tien said.
“Since an hour ago,” Kami said.
“I was about to wake you.”
“I felt it myself.” Tien stood beside him at the railing.
The sky above them was clear, the stars densely packed, the atmosphere utterly unremarkable.
Somewhere in or above it, moving downward: a Saiyan in a pod.
“One,” Kami said.
“One,” Tien confirmed.
“I know whose it is.
I know what he’s coming for.” He paused.
“This is the beginning of the sequence I told you about.
The one I said Goku needs to confront on his own terms.”
“Yes,” Kami said.
“I remember.”
“The people I’ve told — they need to know tonight.
Now.
The landing will be in—” He thought about the original timeline, the pod’s trajectory, the short preparation window.
“Within forty-eight hours.
Maybe less.”
Kami was quiet for a moment. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
“You have been preparing for this for three and a half years,” he said.
“And now it’s here.”
“Yes.”
“Are you afraid?”
Tien thought about the question honestly.
He turned it over, looking at its honest face.
“Yes,” he said.
“Not of the fight.
Of the things I can’t control.
The fixed points.” He paused.
“There are things that have to happen that are going to be hard to stand next to and not change.”
Kami looked at him with the deep, long-seeing eyes that had watched everything for centuries.
“Then let them be hard,” he said.
“And stand next to them anyway.
That is what you have been building yourself to do.”
Tien breathed.
The pre-dawn air was cold and specific and real against his face, the same real air that had been there on the first morning at the Crane compound when he’d woken up in a borrowed body and understood what world he was in.
“Yes,” he said.
“That’s what I’ve been building myself to do.”
He turned from the railing.
“I’m going to wake Chiaotzu,” he said.
“And then I need to reach everyone.
Tonight.”
He went inside.