Age 761, April
Desperate, Garlic Jr. opened the Dead Zone to conquer the united Goku, Kami, and Piccolo in one fell swoop. He quickly learned his mistake in not accounting for Goku's little son, Gohan, as the boy's raw power pushed him into the ungodly maw of the portal, shattering it with the ghoul sealed inside.
Forgetful of what he just accomplished, the promising Gohan goes home with his dad, leaving the Demon King, Piccolo, alone among the ruins...
Chapter 1: Dead Reckoning
A gentle breeze washed over the green man's shoulder, an affirmation that the conflict was over, for now.
"Coward," he scoffed. "Turning tail before we could fight again." He winced in pain; the culprit being a sharp sensation in his upper right abdomen. With two fingers, he could feel sticky red blood clotting over a jagged scrape.
Frustrated, Piccolo thrust his arm at the last remaining arched structure in the distance, a transparent, white ray of his ki arcing towards it before they collided. It crumbled into nothing but stone shrapnel, utterly no match for the might of the Demon King.
"Look at that, Garlic. You're gone without a trace."
He turned around in a confident stride, ready to put the nausea of partnering with Goku behind him, when something made him uneasy. It wasn't another injury, but something out there, something he saw. And, perhaps most troubling, the tiny scent of ki he could feel around the same area. It was nothing like Garlic's forces, or, really, anything he'd ever seen in either of his two lifetimes.
For a moment, Piccolo just stared at his point of interest, waiting on the smoke to clear so he could see just what it was that caught so much of his attention. Then, with a quick hop, he broke into a flight toward it. The smoke wisped away into plain air at his presence.
As his feet touched the ground, what he sensed became clear. The shape of it seemed alien; vaguely like the architecture of Garlic's palace, dark and angular.
"There's no way this was here before." Piccolo felt the ground in his right palm, then dusted away a few piles of sand clotting around the structure. "Garlic probably unearthed it when he opened the vortex. But how long was it here before then?"
His outstretched hand was met with a sudden hiss as he tapped the front of the structure, a green glow revealing many runic symbols adorning it. Limpness then washed over his legs; with a startled shout, Piccolo was dropping down a pitch black tunnel.
THUD. Luckily for his pride, the Demon King landed clean on his feet, huffing to regain his composure.
He brought up his hand, forming a sort of lantern by collecting a blaze of ki in his palm. Through the dust, he spotted all kinds of crude, junky technology and more alien structures around, unlike anything to be found on Earth.
His clomping footsteps kicked up dust clouds and occasional frightened bugs. Minutes of walking and feeling around failed to lead to any discoveries, yet he felt he was getting closer to whatever that was he sensed.
Just after passing a strange symbol scratched in the floor reminding him of a letter "X," Piccolo spotted a heavy shutter door, fastened by an iron chain linked to the floor. Rubbing his hands together, he grasped the shutter, melting a suitable walkway through it with the hot glowing ki collected in his hands.
"Eh, nice try," he joked with a smirk. A purple light blinked faintly at the end of this new room. The ki he picked up was right there, calling to him.
As Piccolo stridently walked through the room, exalted by yet more sparks, glowing lights, and noises of heavy machinery. The demon's eyes finally picked up their prize: a capsule. The stainless steel tube would have seemed measly to most, but the undeniable power within made it priceless to Piccolo.
He held it in his hands. Further examination revealed the same X symbol he spotted before, white and immortalized into the front of the tube.
"What are you."
A twist and a pop released an icy mist. He turned it over, rolling out the contents into his palm: a fruit. The demon did a double-take and moved in for a closer look. Suddenly, a migraine shot through his head, his vision grew fuzzy, and a powerful hallucination overtook Piccolo's mind.
It played like a horrific movie, he was not a part of it, only watching. It was all blood red, scratchy, grainy as a damaged old film.
He saw so much: a repeat of his humiliation twice at the hands of Goku, his ultimate new technique failing in the future, himself discarding the fruit as his own body became dust and went the way of the wind, Goku doing battle not with him, but another slug-like demon, and finally, a man just like Goku with dark eyes, smirking, before he finally came to.
Piccolo shook in terror, as he simply glared at what he had found. Raising his other hand to wipe the sweat off his brow, all he could do was stop and contemplate everything he had born witness to.
Time passed. No new visions came, but Piccolo continued to grasp the spiky orange fruit, silent.
Yet more time passed; now he sat in his usual meditation stance, perhaps to hide his uneasiness from nobody.
Soon, Piccolo stood again, raising first one, then the other fist, weighing each of his paths, all in a far slower and more methodical way than the usual person would have the patience to do.
Above ground, the gold of a sunset finally gave way to dusk. Great silver boulders trembled, crumbled, fell into the trenches being torn by an unspeakable force beneath the crust.
The concurrent explosion would have sliced the eardrums of any one person standing anywhere in the void of its half-mile radius; the surrounding animals were all already dead by the white-hot smog, massive shrapnel, or the impact itself. From the deathly cloud emerged one figure, shroud in a black, sparking aura.
He smirked and cackled wildly, for reasons only he could ever be sure of. With a loud whoosh Piccolo darted over the horizon. His true bounty was at hand.
Nearly frothy at the mouth, Piccolo could not focus on anything but what was ahead, bypassing endless miles of scenery. Quickly, the scene became still again. Piccolo dropped to the grass of a quiet plateau, glaring dead-eyed at the man in orange struggling to shove his little son behind his back to keep him safe.
The Demon King cracked a fanged smile. "I'm surprised. I'd have thought you'd be more prepared for this. Either way, you know how this ends, Goku. Let's enjoy it while you last."
