[Twenty-Two Hours Later]
They camped at the crater’s rim.
Not formally — there was no fire, no organized watch rotation, just the practical decision of people who understood that leaving the site was less sensible than staying near it.
Krillin and Yamcha had taken turns sleeping in short intervals against the crater’s edge, the practiced rest of fighters who had trained themselves to recover efficiently.
Chiaotzu had settled into a meditation that served as both rest and monitoring, his ki sense extending over the pod in a continuous, quiet attention.
Tien did not sleep.
He sat at the crater’s north rim with the third eye open through the night and monitored two things: the pod, where Raditz’s ki signature was present and wakeful, and the sky, where nothing else was coming — not yet, not now, Vegeta’s arrival still months away on the original timeline and not moved by events here.
He thought.
He thought about the conversation at the crater’s edge and whether it had been right or wrong to have it, whether inserting a possibility into Raditz’s calculation that hadn’t been there in the original was a deviation that would produce consequences he couldn’t see.
He 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 the fixed points.
King Kai.
The Kaio-ken.
Goku’s path.
These things were downstream of Raditz’s arrival — they required something to happen here that opened the path.
In the original, the path opened because Goku died with Raditz in the field, the mutual hold, Piccolo’s canon, the end.
If Raditz didn’t attack.
If Goku didn’t die.
The path didn’t open.
Does the path require Goku to die here, specifically?
he thought.
Or does it require Goku to reach King Kai’s planet, which happened to be through death in the original?
Are those the same fixed point or two different ones?
He turned this over carefully, because the answer mattered enormously.
In the series, King Kai’s planet was accessible from the Other Side — from the dead.
The only living person known to have visited it was through Instantaneous Movement, which didn’t exist yet in this world.
The path, as the original story had structured it, was: Goku dies, Goku runs Snake Way, Goku reaches King Kai, Goku learns the Kaio-ken.
But the series had also established, in later arcs, that the afterlife realm was complex and that the rules around it were not perfectly fixed.
Kami had access to the divine telephone.
King Kai communicated with the living world.
Could Kami facilitate communication with King Kai without Goku dying?
He didn’t know.
He made a decision: this was a question for Kami, and it needed to be asked soon.
Because if the answer was no — if Goku dying was genuinely necessary for him to access King Kai and the Kaio-ken — then everything Tien had done to potentially prevent Raditz’s attack was working against the larger goal.
The night was long and very clear and full of stars.
At 4 a.m., the pod opened.
Raditz stood at the pod’s split seam and looked at the night sky for a long time before he looked at the people at the crater’s rim.
In the dark, his ki signature was readable through the third eye in detail — not the professional flatness of someone managing their output for a fight, but something more complex, the signature of someone who has been awake for twenty-two hours doing the kind of thinking that has consequences.
He looked at Tien.
“I sent the report,” he said.
“What did it say?” he said carefully.
“That the mission was a failure,” Raditz said.
“That the retrieval target’s power level exceeded operational parameters.
That I was—” He paused.
“—missing in action.”
The silence that followed had a very specific quality.
“Missing in action,” Tien said.
“Yes.” Raditz’s voice was level.
Professional.
The tone of someone who has made a decision through their professional framework and is presenting the technical outcome of that decision, because presenting the personal one is not yet something they are equipped to do.
“The report says the target neutralized my scouter and my position tracking device, and that my status is unknown.
Vegeta will receive the report but not be able to verify it with a follow-up contact.” He paused.
“The tracking device—” He reached into the pod and produced a small component, held it up, and closed his fist.
When he opened his fist again, the component was debris.
Goku had come down from the rim sometime in the past hour, silently, and was standing twenty meters from Raditz.
He said nothing.
“Why?” Tien asked.
Raditz looked at him.
“Because you were right,” he said, and the flatness in his voice was the flatness of someone stating something that cost them something to state.
“About what Vegeta would do here.
About what he does to everything.” He paused.
“I have been in Vegeta’s service for my entire adult life.
I know exactly what he does to planets that have something he wants.
And I know what he does to the people on those planets.” He looked at Goku.
“I came here to bring you to that.
To be part of what delivers you to that.”
“And now?” Goku said.
Raditz looked at the fragment of tracking device in his palm.
He let the pieces fall into the crater.
“Now I am missing in action,” he said.
“On a backwater planet with a low-class warrior brother who has apparently spent his developmental years building something I don’t fully understand yet.” He looked at Tien.
“With people who knew I was coming.”
He climbed out of the pod and stood on the flattened farmland and looked at the crater and the sky and the assembled group, and his bearing had something in it that was different from twenty-two hours ago — still the professional posture, still the Saiyan warrior’s quality of readiness, but underneath it something that was less armored than before.
“What happens now?” he said.
Tien looked at him.
He thought about what Raditz was, in the original story, and what he might be in this one.
He thought about a Saiyan warrior with a power level of thirteen hundred and forty, trained in the combat methods of a culture that had survived longer than Earth civilization, carrying knowledge of the galactic situation that nobody on this planet had.
He thought about the wearable gravity device on his wrist and the senzu beans in Korin’s tower and the thirteen months remaining before Nappa and Vegeta arrived.
“Now,” Tien said, “we see if you’re willing to train.”
Raditz looked at him.
“Thirteen months,” Tien said.
“That’s how long we have before Vegeta stops waiting for your status report and decides to come here himself. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Thirteen months to be as strong as we can possibly be when he does.” He held Raditz’s eyes.
“A Saiyan who trains seriously can do things in thirteen months that take humans years.
With the resources we have access to—”
“What resources,” Raditz said.
“Senzu beans,” Tien said.
“Gravity training facilities.
And—” He paused.
“A technique I’ve been developing that might be adaptable to Saiyan biology.”
Raditz was very still.
The ki compression technique, applied to a Saiyan’s ki — with the zenkai recovery mechanism and the naturally higher ki ceiling of Saiyan biology — was a variable Tien had not allowed himself to calculate because Raditz coming over to their side had been too speculative to plan around.
But standing here now, with the tracking device in fragments at the crater’s bottom—
If the compression technique works on Saiyan ki, Tien thought, Raditz at thirteen hundred with three months of gravity training and compression work and two or three zenkai cycles could approach Nappa’s level.
We’d have a Saiyan on our side at Nappa’s power level.
“Tell me about the technique,” Raditz said.
“Later,” Tien said.
“First — and I need you to understand this is not a condition I’m negotiating, it’s a reality of the situation — you need to talk to your brother.”
Raditz looked at Goku.
Goku was still standing twenty meters away, in the early pre-dawn dark, and his expression was the expression that Tien had been watching since the pod landed — the careful, layered thing that was Goku trying to reconcile what he’d been told with what he felt.
For most people this reconciliation took days or weeks or never fully resolved.
For Goku it had apparently taken twenty-two hours, because what his face showed now was simpler than it had been when the pod first opened.
“I don’t know you,” Goku said to Raditz.
“But you’re my brother.
And you just — ” He paused, and the pause had in it something that was characteristically Goku: the complete inability to be indirect about the thing he actually felt.
“You gave up a lot.
In that pod.
For something you don’t know yet.”
Raditz said nothing.
“I’d like to know you,” Goku said.
“If you want that.”
The morning was coming up over the eastern farmlands — the same slow arrival it had made every morning of human history on this planet, indifferent to craters and broken scouters and the specific impossible moment of two Saiyan brothers standing in a field on a world that one of them had been sent to clear and had chosen instead to stay on.
Raditz looked at his brother for a long time.
“I don’t know how to do that,” he said.
And it was the most unguarded thing he had said in the entire twenty-two hours, and it landed in the morning air with the specific weight of something true.
“Neither do I,” Goku said.
“We’ll figure it out.”
Tien stood at the crater’s rim and watched them, the two Saiyans standing in the flattened farmland, and felt something that was not quite what he’d planned and was also exactly what he’d hoped for, which was not the same thing and never was.
Adapt, he thought.
Hold it loosely.
This is better than the plan.
The sun came up.