AN: Power levels were designed as a system for villains to underestimate heroes with. On a meta level they were purposefully made useless so the outcome of matches wouldn't be determined from the outset, and in an in-universe level they are only useful in the most vague and basic forms at best, and almost always entirely useless against humanoids. (Most species in the galaxy can't power up without literally transforming into a new body) Even when they are used, they measure the ki a body gives off and that alone, not fighting ability.

Power levels are, as a rule, completely useless. Which is why the lower power level wins quite often in the story.

I've said this many times, and I will continue to - this is not a vs fic. There are many vs fics to read. This is not one. It is not remotely relevant which one is more powerful.

The Next Dimension Over

Chapter Forty-three

If they were going to build a tower this big, they could have at least made a few resting points along the way. "...I can't believe they're still going up. Don't they ever take breaks? I mean...they could slip a little bit! Or...turn around."

Or try to summon Goku's golden cloud until it actually listened and rescued all of them from their own stupidity. His included.

"I should have brought that airplane capsule." Bulma groaned in frustration. "My arms are gonna fall off."

He...decided not to respond to that. Her arms might have felt like they were going to fall off by holding her own weight around his neck, but his were supporting himself, hers, and most recently a sleeping Pu'ar's weight. And also doing all of the climbing.

Not that he could expect anything else of her, though. The damn tower went off into the abyss for as far as he could tell, and for what adventuring she'd done in her life, she was still chiefly a scientist. A climb like this wouldn't be reasonable for her to make.

It wasn't really reasonable for him to make. He just...wasn't ready to try to climb down without falling to his death while he had two passengers messing up his balance. And also liable to die if he fell. Maybe it wasn't that great of a plan for the long term, as the distance between himself and the ground increased with every hour, but for the short term it was great.

Or, at least good. Great would have been finding a way to stop climbing entirely without falling to his aforementioned death.

Actually, he would have preferred the airplane capsule. If his ears weren't so vulnerable to potential assault, Pu'ar weren't asleep, and Bulma might not risk falling off just to wave her arms around or use said arms as a deadly weapon against him...he'd point out this more than made up for the submarine thing. After all, it was explicitly her role this time to make sure they had everything they needed, given he'd failed so spectacularly last time.

For a given value of...whatever.

His arms hurt, his head hurt, his shoulders and neck hurt, and his two craziest companions were still climbing a weird monument pole for no reason other than boredom. He'd started to feel a bit irritable.

He blamed it on himself for following after them, mostly. He blamed it on them for doing it in the first place.

He didn't really see a need to choose between the two in a hurry, given he wasn't apparently anywhere close to catching them yet.

"Damn it, I can't even see them yet."

At least if he could convince them to knock it off and come back down already, he'd feel less bad about not finishing it, too. And then they could all go back and maybe use the magic flying cloud to go up and figure out where the tower went up to.

Or suffocate and die if the damn thing went off into space and never ended. At least they wouldn't be still. climbing.

"When I catch up to them..." He grit his teeth, pulling himself up to the next hand hold. "First...I'm gonna kill them."

"And then I'm going to."

What he'd do with himself, once he caught up to the two troublemakers and exacted his revenge...he was still just gonna keep putting that decision off until he ran out of time.

(*)

With the right application and rationing of chakra, a shinobi didn't really need to sleep for...well, she'd heard that Gaara spent most of his life not sleeping. But, his sanity had suffered quite strongly from the lack of rest, so it could hardly be said that a shinobi didn't need to sleep for years (provided they had the chakra), so much as that they might be able to go without it.

It still wasn't generally something she liked to do. Burning up chakra she could be saving instead wasn't often worth the trade of going a night without sleep. There wasn't actually any opportunity to sleep while climbing the tree, however, so it was climb without rest or give up on determining just what the tree was for.

Mostly, she was concerned about Goku. As a shinobi, she'd learned how to manage her chakra and keep herself energized and alert for as long as she needed to. Goku also had been climbing the tree without rest for more than a day. Without such training.

"...We can turn around if you want to, you know."

She couldn't really see him, as they still climbed on the opposite sides of the tree, but what little she saw of him was enough to surmise he shook his head. "Nah, now that I've gotten this far I wanna see what's up top!"

By now, she was almost certain it was more than twice the height of the tree that towered over the battlefield. Which meant she was only all the more interested in seeing what it was at the top. The tree shouldn't be in the world anymore. But...what if somehow it had regrown, and over the years grown up more to this height somehow?

She shook her head quickly and dispelled that line of thought.

Stuck in the future...that couldn't be. She absolutely couldn't be. Because...there wouldn't be any way to go 'back' to her world if she were still in it. There wouldn't be any way to reverse time and go back to when she belonged. So. This tree couldn't be the same one.

And that was why she'd climb it. Just to prove it was something else.

(*)

He completely lost track of time. At some point, he'd tied what used to be his sling around Bulma's wrists just to keep her grip tight when he noticed she was drifting off over his shoulder. At some point, Pu'ar woke up again. At some point, he was sure the sun got up into the sky again, but that couldn't be, because the world was still dark from when it was before, right?

Who the hell knew.

He was in some kind of hell. He'd fallen asleep and fallen off the tower hours before, and this was his forever hell for being such a gullible idiot.

Maybe that was it.

For some reason he kept climbing anyway. If this was his after life, then he probably didn't have a choice but to climb. Who knew what was below him now? Was there anything below? Was there anything above?

He didn't know any of that stuff. He did know one thing, though: he was so damn tired he'd actually started to go crazy. He hadn't figured out just yet whether the madness had set in before or after he'd made the stupid decision to start climbing the giant stick in the ground, though.

(*)

Just under two days.

She'd nearly called an end to it at a day and a half when Goku's hand slipped, but he recovered before she could reach him, and determined with all the stubbornness she'd ever seen in him to keep climbing. The determination was probably rooted in exhaustion...but fighting him while he had the energy to keep powering up the tree would be dangerous. If he wasn't thinking straight, he could knock himself off, and at this height there weren't many things even she could do to help either of them falling.

They climbed the tree without any substantial break for just under two days.

She wasn't quite sure how to calculate that distance, but finally making it to the top put those thoughts on hold. The top of the tree wasn't a gigantic flower, furled or unfurled. It wasn't simply a pole, branches, or a flat surface as the world's highest and most useless look out tower.

In fact, the top of the tree was an even more elaborately designed...dome. Or something. She didn't immediately see the top of it, as from the position of scaling the trunk, it took some acrobatics just to climb and jump up to...a set of stairs.

The interior of the tree...was stranger than the tree itself. Clearly it had been carved out when the tree was smaller, but nothing seemed to be trying to grow back inside it. For being so high up, there didn't appear to be any kind of accumulation of dust or debris, and...the few furnishings inside the building looked...not ancient.

So high, there was only the sound of wind outside. She didn't feel any slight vibrations or hear any sounds of movement from whoever might have been occupying the tree (somehow). And...there was no malice. No hostility. Probably the resident of the tree house would have had some hostility to unannounced visitors if their presence was known.

"We made it..." Goku mumbled, looking a little bit dazed. Whether it was out of surprise that they did, confusion at what they found, or exhaustion...well, it was probably exhaustion.

Which settled it. Before any further exploration happened, he would sleep.

"Goku, lay down and rest."

"Huh...?" He blinked up at her, frowning. "But I just got here."

She shook her head slightly, and moved to sit down at one of the interior walls. "We've been climbing for days. If you want to replenish your energy, you'll have to sleep. Once we're done exploring here, we won't be able to make the trip back down without rest."

"...Oh..." He mumbled, voice thick with sleep. "I guess..."

He wandered over to her on heavy steps, and dropped to the ground next to her lap. It was a sign of how tired he really was that, not only did he make no attempt to delay rest until they'd at least explored the area first...but he didn't think of simply using the Nimbus cloud to return back down.

But in fairness, she hadn't really thought about it when she was climbing, either. She'd been too focused on going up to think much about going down, and...too focused on climbing to think about alternatives.

It only took a few moments for his breathing to slow down and deepen slightly, as he drifted off to sleep. She curled up slightly where she sat, and scanned the room in silence, moving no more than that. Perhaps it would do her well to sleep, too. It would help replenish some of the chakra reserves she'd used climbing the tree, after all.

It would also leave the both of them in a mysterious and uncertain situation without sufficient energy to fully defend themselves, in the middle of a dark structure miles in the sky, without a single guard.

Sleep, perhaps, would do her well.

She could wait another few days to rest, if she needed to.

AN: It's a short chapter because there's literally only so much you can write about climbing up a tower that has nothing remarkable on it. It's just a flippin' HUGE tower. There to be climbed. And climbed. And climbed.

Seriously, the absurdity of Goku spending 72 hours climbing a tower without rest is

madness.

It could have at least been one day, Toryama. That would have been reasonable in some small way. On the bright side, the next chapter will be much more interesting if only because it's not about climbing. a. tower.