[Month 46 — Day of Arrival]
The pod came down in the eastern farmlands at 6:14 in the morning.
Tien felt it through the third eye before he heard it — the ki signature that had been an approaching abstraction for thirty-six hours suddenly resolving into immediate, concrete, close-range specificity, the way a distant sound becomes a voice when the speaker enters the room.
The signature was large.
Larger than the estimate he’d been working with.
He had said twelve hundred.
The scouter on his wrist, active since midnight, updated as the pod entered the lower atmosphere:
1,340.
He was already moving.
The impact itself arrived as a sound a few seconds later — not an explosion, exactly, but the deep, resonant concussion of something massive meeting earth at velocity, a sound that traveled through the ground as much as through the air and that produced, in the birds of the eastern farmlands, a silence followed by a chaos of startled flight that Tien could perceive through the third eye as a ripple of small, frightened ki signatures scattering in every direction from a central point.
He was running east along the Lookout’s cloud road, Chiaotzu beside him.
The others were converging from their various positions — he could feel them through the third eye, the familiar signatures moving toward the same point with the purposeful quality of people who had been told where to go and when.
Krillin from the south, moving fast.
Yamcha from the west, faster than Krillin — he had been closer.
Goku—
Goku’s signature was already at the impact site.
Of course it was.
Paozu Province was forty kilometers from the impact crater.
Goku had been awake and wearing the device and trained to respond to exactly this kind of ki signature since the coordination meeting.
He had arrived before anyone else.
He was standing at the crater’s edge, and his ki was doing what Tien had never felt it do before in the waking world — it was absolutely still.
Not the stillness of inactivity.
The stillness of complete focus, of a person meeting something that requires everything they have and giving it everything, no fraction held back.
The signature at the crater’s center was the one the scouter read at 1,340.
It was looking at Goku.
Don’t rush this, Tien thought, pushing ki into his flight and covering distance fast.
This is Goku’s moment first.
Let him have it.
The crater was forty meters across and two deep, the earth thrown up in a ring around its edge in the specific geometry of a high-velocity vertical impact.
The farmland around it was flattened in concentric rings of decreasing destruction — closest to the impact, the soil was glass-smooth from the heat; further out, stalks of whatever crop had been growing here were bent flat, pointing away from the center like compass needles all magnetized to the same pole.
At the crater’s center, the pod: a smooth ovoid of dark metal, perhaps three meters long, its surface still radiating heat in visible waves.
The impact had split it along one seam and the figure that had emerged from it was standing at the crater’s near edge, and Tien, arriving at the crater’s rim with Chiaotzu, got his first real-world look at a Saiyan.
Raditz was large.
Not the cartoonish largeness of exaggeration but the genuine physical presence of someone for whom size was a byproduct of function — broad through the shoulders, legs that suggested a person who had stood on many different worlds under many different gravity conditions and had the muscle architecture to prove it.
The armor was real in a way that the series had implied but that actually seeing it confirmed: not costume armor, not decorative, but functional combat plating over a bodysuit that moved with him rather than restricting him, the shoulder guards and chest plate bearing the small scratches and impacts of actual use.
The scouter over his left eye was active, its green lens scanning.
The long black hair, ridiculous and characteristic and entirely real, fell to his lower back.
He was looking at Goku with an expression that was the specific expression of someone who has arrived at a destination and found the destination inadequate in a way that is both professionally frustrating and personally complicated.
Goku was looking at him with an expression that Tien had not seen on Goku’s face before.
It was not fear.
It was not combative readiness.
It was something stranger — a look of recognition without memory, the disorientation of sensing something familiar in something entirely unknown.
The scouter on Raditz’s face was active.
Tien watched Raditz’s expression change as the scouter read Goku.
In the original timeline, Goku’s power level at this moment had been approximately 330.
Raditz’s scouter had read it, confirmed what he’d expected — a native-level fighter, barely worth his attention — and the dynamic of the subsequent confrontation had been shaped entirely by Raditz’s confidence in his overwhelming superiority.
The scouter read Goku now.
Something happened to Raditz’s face.
The scouter read 8,200, and Raditz’s expression went through three stages in approximately one second: the initial casual scan of someone confirming an expected low number, the double-take of someone whose instrument has returned an impossible result, and then — the recalibration.
The settling.
The face of a professional fighter recognizing that the situation is materially different from what he was briefed. Get faster updates on g.com.
His eyes moved from Goku and swept the crater’s rim.
The scouter swept with them.
Tien watched the green lens track across the assembled group — Krillin had arrived, Yamcha was landing at the crater’s east edge — and watched Raditz process what he was reading.
Not 300.
Not 200.
Not the negligible power levels of a subjugated planet’s native population.
1,190 from Krillin.
1,210 from Yamcha.
And from the figure standing at the crater’s north rim—
Raditz’s scouter found Tien.
3,800.
The lens cracked.
Not dramatically — not the explosive failure that scouters were famous for in the series when they tried to measure ki beyond their calibration ceiling.
A crack from the lens’s upper corner, propagating to its center, the display fragmenting.
Raditz reached up and touched it with two fingers, looked at the broken readout, looked at Tien.
His expression was no longer the expression of a person who has arrived at a subjugated planet and is collecting an asset.
It was the expression of a person reassessing.
“Kakarot,” Raditz said.
His voice was the unhurried baritone of someone who had learned to operate from a position of assumed superiority and was working out, in real time, what operating from a different position felt like.
He was talking to Goku but he was looking at Tien.
“Your scouter — you have a scouter.”
It was directed at Tien.
Not a question.
Noting a fact.
“Yes,” Tien said.
“It’s not Saiyan manufacture.”
“No.”
A pause.
Raditz processed this.
A human fighter at nearly four thousand power level, with locally manufactured ki measurement technology, standing at the rim of his landing crater with the composed readiness of someone who had been expecting this arrival.
“Who are you?” Raditz said.
“My name is Tien Shinhan,” Tien said.
“I’m a fighter from this planet.
And I’ve been waiting for you.”
Goku said: “Raditz.”
It came out quietly.
Not a greeting.
Not a challenge.
The name of something he was still assembling into meaning, still converting from the abstract — brother, Saiyan, origin — into the concrete: this person, here, now, in his world.
Raditz’s attention shifted back to Goku with the automatic reflex of someone who has been interrupted in the middle of a threat assessment by the primary subject of their mission.
His scouter was broken, but he had felt the 8,200 before it cracked.
That number had not left his attention.
“You know my name,” he said.
“Then you know why I’m here.”
“I know some of it,” Goku said.
His voice was even.
“I know you say we’re related.”
“Not say.” Raditz’s tone was something between contempt and frustration.
“We are.
We are Saiyan.
We are from Planet Vegeta, which no longer exists, and you were sent to this world as an infant on a mission that you have clearly failed.” He paused, and the pause had an edge in it that was not quite anger but was in the neighborhood.
“You were supposed to clear this planet.
And now you’re standing here with a power level that should not be possible for someone who has spent his development on a world with this gravity and with these—” He gestured at the assembled group with the specific contempt of someone categorizing a problem.
“—people around you.”
“They’re my friends,” Goku said.
“I can see that,” Raditz said.
And for a moment his expression was something that was not quite readable — complicated, the face of someone whose professional framework is being made complicated by something personal that he hadn’t been prepared for.
Tien watched this carefully.
In the original timeline, the conversation between Goku and Raditz had been shaped by the absolute power differential — Raditz in control, Goku outmatched, the exchange driven by Raditz’s contempt and Goku’s dawning horror at his own origin.
This was not that dynamic.
The power gap still existed — 8,200 against 1,340 — but it ran the other way, and Raditz knew it, and the knowledge was changing the quality of everything he said.
He’s working out what his play is, Tien thought.
He came here expecting to find a low-level warrior he could easily compel.
He’s found something different.
He needs time to recalculate.
Which meant they needed to not give him that time.
“Raditz,” Tien said.
Raditz looked at him.
“I’m going to be direct with you,” Tien said.
“You came here to retrieve your brother for a mission.
Your brother doesn’t want to go.
And you’re currently significantly outmatched by the people standing on the rim of your landing crater.” He paused.
“I’m not telling you this to threaten you.
I’m telling you because I’d like to have a different conversation than the one that starts with you attacking us.”
Raditz stared at him.
“A different conversation,” he said.
“Yes.”
“About what?”
“About what you want,” Tien said.
“Not what Vegeta sent you to retrieve.
What you, specifically, want from this situation.”
The silence that followed was different from the silence before it.
Charged in a different way — less like the tension before a fight and more like the tension before something that could go in several directions and all parties were calculating which direction it would go.
Raditz said: “You know about Vegeta.”
“Yes.”
“You know about the mission.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“The same way I knew you were coming,” Tien said.
“Thirty-six hours before your pod entered the atmosphere.”
Raditz was quiet.
His broken scouter hung at his eye, useless, the cracked lens giving him nothing.
He was operating on raw ki sense now — and by his expression, the raw ki sense was telling him approximately what the scouter had before it broke.
“What is your name again,” he said.
Not a question.
Committing it to memory.
“Tien Shinhan.”
Raditz looked at him for a long moment.
Then he looked at Goku.
Then he looked at the broken scouter, the way a person looks at an instrument that has failed them, and for just a moment his face had the expression of someone much younger than his armor and his posture suggested — someone who had arrived somewhere expecting one thing and found something so far outside the expected parameters that the mission briefing was now not just incomplete but actively misleading.
“What happened to this planet,” Raditz said slowly, “while I wasn’t looking.”
“We prepared,” Tien said simply.