Disclaimer: I don't own Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT, Dragon Ball Super, or anything else related to the Dragon Ball universe, or any of its characters. They are all owned by Akira Toriyama.
Lying spread-eagled in a crater, broken and bleeding, there was really nothing more he could do.
There were no last second miracle solutions to get away, and nobody was going to step in and save him. He was completely, utterly helpless.
Again.
It was as simple as that.
He could do nothing except pay witness to his own death.
It would be painful, he knew. Excruciating even. Orders of magnitude greater than the pain he was already going through from the fall just moments ago, but after a time, it would end.
It would all be over.
He just needed to hold out through the pain, until then.
'It should only take a few more seconds.'
…
Seconds that were going to drag out agonizingly slowly if the insane maneuvers his brain was pulling off in the background were anything to go by. His perception of time was nearly stationary now, so it would be a long few seconds.
Every time he thought he had gotten used to what his brain could do, it always came back and did something like this, blowing his previous expectations out of the water. It was like it had no limit to how fast it could process information.
It was something that he had never found a reason to complain about before now. He was usually grateful for it in fact, and even took advantage of it as often as possible, but there was a time and a place for it.
And it wasn't here.
He couldn't do anything injured as he was, so any plan he could come up with would be pointless. His brain was just wasting energy and dragging out what was supposed to be a few moments of pain followed by a quick death, into an eternity. He really didn't want to have to see the next few seconds play out moment by moment, frame by frame, all because his mind couldn't just stop for once. It was already going to be brutal enough as it was.
He just wanted this to be over as soon as possible.
Maybe it was the head injury talking, but sometimes, it felt like his mind was a completely separate entity. Even long after he had given up on the situation, his mind just kept on whirling. Conjuring up a multitude of hypothetical solutions, only to discard each one as impossible an instant later.
It was basically fact checking him. Going over the whole situation he was in again, in unnecessary levels of detail, just to make sure that it was impossible to solve after all.
Honestly, what could it possibly come up with that he hadn't seen yet, that could miraculously get him out of this mess? He couldn't even move, and it hurt to breathe.
It was irritating.
He was tired, in pain, and now that he was really paying attention to his feelings, absolutely livid with the whole situation in general. All of the 'could have beens', how he could have easily avoided this entire situation, the way he handled everything, his mind forcing him to watch his death play out in super slow motion with extreme detail, how emotionally unstable and cowardly he was as a person, and especially how stupid this thing was.
This T-Rex…
He knew it was an irrational hatred, but…
He had only been a few steps away from a new level in his training, he had felt it. He wasn't anywhere near his father's level yet, not by a long shot, but for the first time ever, he had seen some of the potential that he contained.
He might have actually been able to help when the saiyan's arrived. He may have even been a key factor. Not necessarily due to having enormous power by then, that would be greatly overestimating his capabilities, but due to the fact that the combined might of his dad, his dad's friends, and Piccolo, may in fact equal the might of the saiyans.
Adding himself to the equation, having even just a little bit of power by then, when they arrived, could tip the balance in their favour. Just being there at all, could win them the fight, and save the Earth.
But now this thing, in its infinite wisdom, decided that this particular meal was more important than any of that.
It didn't know about the saiyans. It couldn't. It didn't know about anything. Its whole world probably consisted of this patch of land and the forest surrounding it.
This thing didn't just not recognize, or care, about the potential consequences of its own actions, but it also didn't understand or comprehend just how stupid it really was.
It was just a mindless dinosaur acting on instinct that just happened to stumble into a situation where it had the potential to inadvertently engineer the total wipe out of all life on earth.
In fact, it probably thought that eating him here was a good thing. Satisfy its hunger for a few hours, then meander on off to its next meal. The fact it had just lowered the odds of the planet existing in the same condition as it does now, in a years' time would go way over its head.
And the saiyans would never know. If they defeated his dad in a year, they'd never know that perhaps the only reason why, was because this particular dinosaur had gotten a little hungry one day, and happened upon a situation, totally by chance, that basically paved the way for their victory long before they even got there.
They'd never know just how ludicrously unlucky the people of Earth had been.
He hated this thing. It was so stupid that it lacked the comprehension of its own stupidity.
And it was going to kill him.
For some reason, the fact that it was a mindless dinosaur that would end him, got to him almost as much as the fact that he was going to die at all.
The fact that it wasn't a saiyan or any other form of intelligent life that killed him, but a stupid dinosaur...
Slowly, his death, the thing's wide open jaws continued to inch forward. They were buried in the ground at this point, scooping up so much dirt and rock that he was admittedly curious as to what happened to it all after it was swallowed. Something like that just had to wreak absolute havoc on its digestive system, right?
Was there some reason for it?
Or was it back to the stupidity of the thing again?
Slow motion didn't even begin to describe what he was seeing. His mind had gone completely off the rails, grinding faster than it ever had before.
Everything else aside, it was honestly incredible, even by his standards.
An instant later, relative to him, he was able to pinpoint the exact moment that his mind finally gave up.
It finally stopped frantically scanning through the environment around him to throw together a last second plan to survive, and started going through his memories.
His life began unfolding before him once again. An occurrence that he was really starting to get used to, considering all of the times it had flashed before him recently. It had happened multiple times just today in fact…
He saw his home and his family. He saw how happy they all were back then. Back when his life was simple. Back when he wasn't constantly surrounded by things that wanted to kill him, or when he wasn't being constantly plagued by unsolvable mysteries…
He saw his room and… how had he not seen it earlier, the literal mountain of books that he had stashed throughout the house…
He smiled.
They were both the cause of, and the solution to, all of the problems he had in his life back then…
He saw his dad- daddy?
... Then promptly began to wonder when exactly that term had become so awkward to say, or even think. Daddy just seemed so… so weird now…
Which was itself weird. That was what he had called his dad every day his whole life…
When had that changed?
Then he saw the day his life flipped upside down. When he was kidnapped by Raditz… then kidnapped again, but by Piccolo…
Twice in one day. Within hours of each other. There had to be some sort of record for that…
He remembered being woken up, quite rudely now that he thought back on it objectively, by being tossed into a pond…
Then there was his conversation with Piccolo…
His dad… the Dragon Balls… the Saiyans… training… surviving on his own till then…
The whole conversation flashed through his mind in the tiniest fraction of a second.
In that moment, while his mind was doing its own thing in the background, he took note of two things.
His mind was accelerating, rather than slowing down…
…and he was beginning to experience the first signs of a very familiar sensation.
He placed it immediately.
In the past, back before he had ever been out here by himself, there were occasions where he would be unable to fall asleep, no matter what he did. Whether it was a thought that wouldn't leave him alone, or something else entirely, on those particular occasions, he would just lie in bed and essentially wait.
Sometimes when he did that, eventually, he would begin to essentially, hallucinate. Whether it was seeing weird lights on the back of his eyelids, or hearing various sounds in his head…
Or…
Sometimes, and the very reason he was even recalling these particular experiences, he would feel what he could only describe as, the feeling of falling into himself, somehow.
Falling through his mattress and into his mind. It happened when he remained perfectly still for a significant period of time while trying to fall asleep, despite his mind still wandering as it always did.
The feeling had been so weird to him back then that he had started to read up on it, to see if it happened to other people. He was lead into the world of lucid dreaming, and the various ways to induce them soon after…
It turned out that it was possible to manipulate these feelings in a few different ways to sort of fall asleep without really falling asleep.
To remain conscious as his dreams began, and to freely manipulate them as a result.
His overall experience with these controllable dreams, had been what allowed him to write off some of the impossible occurrences that had happened to him recently as just dreams in the first place. He had had some crazy ones long before ever living out here…
But that was hardly the point.
Now however, he was experiencing that very same sensation that so often precluded an incredibly vivid dream.
He was hardly in a quiet environment ideal for sleep however. So it didn't make much sense why that would be the case.
Sure enough, the feeling intensified, and he felt himself begin to fall.
His surroundings blurred and faded, and he felt himself get pulled downwards.
He started falling, spinning rapidly the whole time, through some sort of black void.
He couldn't see or feel anything other than the pressure on the back of his eyes and the inside of his skull from the rapid spinning his body was apparently experiencing.
Hallucinations brought on by head trauma, was the most probable explanation he could come up with.
In other words, his brain had probably just fried due to everything that he just went through.
Because just falling asleep, was a bit of a stretch. Perhaps he had simply lost consciousness…
At least the pain in the rest of his body was beginning to fade…
So… silver lining.
If it stayed like this, then maybe his imminent death wouldn't be as painful as he had originally thought.
He could just sit back and relax as his body and mind slowly shut down.
He was finished.
He felt himself exhale.
With it, he felt himself let go of all of his concerns, worries, and attachments, and he accepted his fate. He didn't like it, but he could accept it.
He was ready.
…
A feeling that could only be described as his face slamming into concrete immediately crushed that thought before it could really take hold.
No.
It was happening again wasn't it?
Another one of those dreams.
That impact had hurt.
A dream so vivid that he could even experience pain in it.
Just like that one he had about the saiyans in the forest, and the one about Piccolo too…
He had had vivid dreams all his life, but ones that actually hurt had only started after those two.
When he opened his eyes, there was a wooden table in front of him.
The 'room' he was in, for lack of a better word, was still black, he wasn't spinning anymore, and he knew immediately that this was a dream of some sort. It just had that dream feel to it.
The dead silence was another giveaway. It was that special kind of silence that wasn't really silent. He could hear that same low pitched vibration that was always present no matter how quiet the environment, and his ears were ringing.
He had actually fallen asleep. Or passed out, or something of that nature. A pretty unbelievable feat if he said so himself, given the situation he had just been in.
On the table there were various puzzle pieces linked together forming an incomplete picture. And there were quite a few pieces missing. Some were even on the floor around him.
He was seated in a simple wooden chair.
Other than the chair and table, the room was empty.
His head was still swimming, but the weirdest part about whatever this was, was the fact that he could actually feel his memories inside of these puzzle pieces. His entire life was here, scattered about on the table and now out of order.
His head had apparently struck the table with a good deal of force and knocked around some of the pieces. That's what that impact had been.
And he knew the pieces were out of order because they were his memories. For some reason he just knew what the picture was supposed to look like.
It didn't make a whole lot of sense logically, but he had enough experience with completely random dreams like this one to know that they hardly ever did.
In a daze, he just looked at the broken picture of his life in front of him for a few moments, trying to make sense of everything.
Everything looked backwards, and he could actually feel how weirdly his memories were clashing with each other at the moment. It was as if moving these pieces around had actually scrambled his memories. Was he supposed to put them back in order?
Because this picture made no sense at all.
He reached for a random piece in front of him, picked it up, and froze when he looked back at the broken picture once again.
…
How?
He was baffled.
How had he missed that much?
He had always seen himself as a skeptical person, but there were huge problems with the universe as he understood it. Fundamental contradictions that were now screaming at him. And this was the first time he had ever heard them. There were a whole slew of very basic questions that he didn't have the answers for. And for some reason, he had never even thought to ask any of them before now.
For the first time ever, it felt like he could truly look back on his life objectively. Without bias, and with a clear mind.
There were so many things about his life that just made no sense. And they were all things that he took for granted and never questioned.
Heck, they were all things that nobody seemed to talk about. Even his dad had never really seemed to care about them.
The stories his dad had mentioned, and the truths that science had uncovered, were not at all compatible.
Yet somehow, they both seemed to be true.
The dead coming back to life, the fact that the Dragon Balls even existed, the fact that they could even exist, magic, Ki, talking animals…
All topics science had yet to explain. Mostly because humans as a whole weren't aware that most of those things could even happen. These were truths that were basically only known to his dad's group of friends and a few others who for some reason, kept it to themselves.
The methodology of science, was unquestionably the best way to uncover the truth on any topic. He knew this. He knew to question everything, but for some reason, all of those stories his dad had told, all of the strange events he had seen, experienced… he just accepted them all at face value.
He only applied his skepticism to the things that humans did. And never to the things that his dad did.
And he knew why.
Frankly, he was disappointed in himself for falling for it too.
It was basically a logical fallacy. He accepted everything his dad did, and everything he said without question because it was his dad. If some powerless human had said or done any of the things that his dad had, he'd probably think them crazy, or pulling some sort of magic trick.
There was a divide in his mind.
On one side, he perceived the universe according to the laws of quantum mechanics, relativity, and all manner of other mathematical and scientific models, that when brought together, made testable predictions, had tremendous explanatory power, and showcased just how elegant the universe actually was.
And on the other, he viewed the world as a magical place, where people could fly, supernatural events happened all the time, and magic was very real. Every time he had a question about something on this side, someone would do some hand waving, throw around the term 'magic' or 'Ki' and then the conversation would be over. Worse yet, he'd be satisfied with those answers.
He hadn't even noticed until this moment.
All of the questions he had were on the supernatural side of the divide. Literally all. On the scientific, the human side, all of his questions were either answered, he knew could be answered given enough time, or he knew to be unknowable. The limits were very clearly defined there.
Because the methods of science were unquestionably, the best pathway to the truth.
He wanted that clarity on the other side of the divide.
So he needed to knock it down.
There were so many implications hidden in the broken picture in front of him that he'd probably have to spend weeks puzzling them all out.
There were so many that he didn't even know how or where to start.
It was actually pretty overwhelming.
This had never happened before. Having so many truths in front of him that he was actually afraid of learning them. He knew that one would lead to another, and another, and he didn't know if it would ever end.
He was actually afraid.
But… he really wanted to know.
He just needed to take the first step.
He would take them on, one at a time, and see where they lead.
He let out a breath, then he looked at the piece still in his hand…
He'd start here…
…
He relived the memory. Then, once it finished, he smiled.
At that exact moment, he understood what his mind had been up to all this time. It hadn't given up after all.
In the past, some of his greatest sources of inspiration came from remembered conversations. He would either talk to his dad about something, or he'd read a book one day, then abruptly, out of the blue months after the fact, he'd remember that conversation and come up with brand new, completely out of the box ideas about it that he hadn't even considered before.
In some cases those ideas had been monumental… at least in his opinion…
It just happened again.
This had been one of those moments.
Only this time it was huge.
That memory had been his first step in bridging the gap between the two sides of the divide, and it had shattered his fundamental understanding of the universe.
Again.
He was really beginning to see how little he actually knew.
Even if his subconscious mind wasn't some separate entity actively looking out for him, he wanted to think that this whole situation was planned by it somehow. He certainly hadn't been the one to orchestrate this.
No, his mind planned this. It was scanning through his memories to try and find just such an event after failing to find anything useful in the surrounding environment.
It was trying to inspire him, so that he would take drastic measures.
And it succeeded.
The puzzle piece… it had been a single sentence that Piccolo had mentioned, in passing. He probably hadn't meant anything by it at the time, but the implications hidden within it, nearly floored him.
He had had all of the pieces before now, but he just hadn't put them together.
'Your dad will be back in a years' time after he gets wished back to life with the Dragon Balls.'
That was what he had said.
After he had remembered that statement, he had, what could only be described as a moment of clarity with the universe where everything seemed to make sense.
He understood the rules of the Dragon Balls. The basics anyways. You gather up all seven and you get one wish, then you have to wait a year until you can make another one. They turn into stone in the meantime.
Easy enough, but now that he was thinking back on everything that had happened after Raditz had arrived, there were some questions that he hadn't asked or even thought about. Really basic questions that he definitely should have.
The first one was simple.
Why was everyone waiting?
The Dragon Balls had been active at the time, and still were since no wish had been made recently. Some of them were still scattered around the world at the moment, or at least they were back then, but with the strength of his dad's friends', and Bulma's dragon radar there was no way it would take a full year for them to gather them all up.
Why not immediately wish his dad back to life the instant they were all gathered?
Why specifically wait one year?
For a moment he had considered that maybe Piccolo had just meant that his dad would be wished back to life as soon as possible and that he would only get to see his dad in a years' time when the saiyan's arrived…
But he had dismissed the idea because if his dad was around, there would be no reason for Piccolo to train him at all. His dad would eventually show up one day to take him back if he was alive.
Yet Piccolo had said that he was going to train him after six whole months had passed. He had even implied that the training would continue until the moment that the saiyan's arrived.
It wouldn't take that long for the Dragon Balls to be gathered if they were really serious about gathering them.
His dad wouldn't allow Piccolo to train him either if he could stop it. They were enemies after all. Not to mention, there would be no need for Piccolo to go through the effort if his dad was alive at the time.
If it was truly necessary for him to be trained, then his dad would do it himself if he could.
But he won't.
Because he won't be alive at the time.
His dad's group of friends were specifically waiting until just before the saiyan's arrive to wish him back to life.
Which means that they have a reason for it.
It didn't even matter what that reason was. The fact that there was a reason at all, was the truly mind blowing part.
The fact that they were deliberately waiting to make the wish was the first thing that his mind had honed in on.
His dad's friends' wouldn't let his dad suffer unnecessarily, which means, quite simply, that his dad still existed in some form despite being dead, and he was doing something extremely important.
He had some task at the moment that required him to stay dead.
It's the only conclusion he could come up with.
He himself, had no way of knowing what that was, but if he were to take a guess it would probably involve some sort of training. It would have to.
Otherwise his dad would need to be brought back to life as soon as possible so that he could continue his training here. As strong as he was now, he wasn't strong enough to stand up to Raditz, and the incoming saiyan's were supposed to be even stronger.
But in any case, what his dad was doing at the moment wasn't the part that flipped his entire world upside down.
The part that did, was the fact that his dad wasn't really dead, and the implications that followed.
At least, his dad wasn't dead according to his previous understanding of what death was.
He had heard stories and various mentions of the other world from his dad in the past, but honestly, it hadn't made a lot of sense. As a result, he had just assumed that his dad was talking about such a place metaphorically, instead of literally. An almost religious way of referring to the place people went to when they died.
But no, apparently, that was not the case at all. In fact, if his revelation was correct, not only was the other world a real place, but he could think of it as a separate universe almost.
He could also deduce, that the universe he currently resided in was subservient to it in a similar manner that an animal enclosure was at a zoo. There were some differences obviously, but the analogy wasn't too far off.
Additionally, it was possible to travel between these two universes under certain circumstances.
Death didn't even exist at all. If it did, the Dragon Balls wouldn't be able to restore someone to life.
There were basically two possibilities to explain what happened when someone was wished back to life with the Dragon Balls.
The first one was that the dragon recreates the person from scratch. This would create a perfect clone of the original person with all the same memories and traits as the person who had died. But it wouldn't actually be them. Just an indistinguishable fake. The person that had actually died would still be dead.
This possibility he was able to dismiss because his dad's friends were waiting to make this exact wish on his dad. If there wasn't an important reason for his dad to stay dead, then they would need to wish him back as soon as possible so that he can spend as much time as possible training and preparing for the saiyans.
The second possibility was the one that was far more likely. The soul of someone who died was actually moved somewhere at the moment of death, and stored. The other world was actually a real place here.
The act of dying was actually nothing more than being moved from one location to another. And wishing someone back to life with the Dragon Balls did nothing more than move them back again.
When people die they leave their body behind. Which means that the soul has to exist in some manner as well. Some part of them has to go to the other world, and it clearly isn't the body…
Upon making the wish in this scenario, the dragon would simply grab the person's soul from the other world, recreate their body from scratch, and then stuff the soul back inside it.
Which means that, technically speaking, he wasn't a half saiyan- half human hybrid at all.
He was a soul that had been essentially stuffed into the body of a half saiyan- half human hybrid at the moment of his birth.
All sorts of implications followed that fact alone. From family bonds not being nearly as close as he originally thought that they were, especially if some sort of reincarnation cycle existed, as is suggested in many religions, to the fact that there was a being out there somewhere that was powerful enough to create life, but that also continues to let a significant number of their creations suffer unnecessarily. A god basically, that was either not all powerful, or not all good.
Someone had to create the living world, and someone has to oversee it…
But in any case, while interesting to think about, once again, those particular ideas weren't the main focus here.
They were merely stepping stones to the true conclusion he had reached.
He would come back and think about those ideas later.
The part that did matter, was the part that directly applied to his current situation.
At the core of his character there was nothing but fear. That's what he had concluded only a second or two before all of this new information had revealed itself.
He had been wrong.
There was a fundamental contradiction he had overlooked.
The soul exists.
That's what he is. A soul trapped in a body.
But, science has revealed that emotions, thoughts, memories, even personality, can all be changed by purely physical and chemical means.
You can induce fear through drugs, or by altering the levels of various neurotransmitters in the brain.
But he was a soul.
How did physical changes to the body change the way his soul worked if his soul can exist without his body?
It didn't, he realized. It was an illusion.
When someone died they didn't just become emotionless rocks in the otherworld. If they did, his dad wouldn't be training to fight the saiyans. He wouldn't care to.
People kept their personalities after they died.
A person's true character was stored in their soul, not in the physical makeup of their body, or the synapses in the brain.
As always, he could explain it through the use of an analogy.
Everything that he was, was stored in his soul. All of his thoughts, memories, and personality was there.
His body was a prison that he was locked in. A prison that he was absolutely at the mercy of. When his body was affected by something, the corresponding response would be beamed into his soul somehow.
It was like an IV drip of poison. One that he couldn't disconnect.
When his body decided to experience something, or when the chemical makeup of it was altered, he had no choice but to experience it himself. All of those chemical imbalances directly influenced his emotional state against his will.
And that was why he was so afraid all the time.
He wasn't a coward at all. He possessed a body with a high affinity for fear. A body that was highly sensitive to changes. The body of a child. In particular, the chemicals that generated the fear response were abundant in his body. It wasn't actually a character defect. He had just been unlucky enough to be born with a body that did that.
His body wasn't him.
It all made sense.
He had his own set of emotions, and his body had its own. And they clashed. His body was filled completely with fear, and his soul was calm and calculating. He felt the effects of both, but since his soul did not need his body to survive, and could exist in the other world freely, the emotions that his body forced him to experience were not real.
So he shouldn't care about them.
The fear he was feeling now, was not real.
Even now, as the black room around him shattered, its purpose fulfilled, and he was once again faced with his death, he could see the proof for himself.
His body, locked up in uncontrollable fear and pain, in a state so pitiful he would never have a chance of moving it properly…
And then there was him. The prisoner stuck inside. Calm, calculating, and with absolute freedom of thought. It was the one thing his body couldn't take away from him through fear alone.
He could think about cats if he wanted to. Or any topic just as arbitrary.
No matter how debilitating the signal his body was beaming into him was, he could think about whatever he wanted to.
He could see the situation for what it was now.
Just as he was at the mercy of his body's chemical and physical changes, so too was his body at the mercy of his decisions.
It went where he took it, and he felt what it sent him. No matter how unnecessarily over-exaggerated the signal it sent him was, he felt it.
But now that he understood what was going on, he wouldn't be fooled by it anymore.
He felt his eyes close.
Then he took what he could only describe as a mental step back.
He wasn't in a life threatening situation, about to be eaten by a dinosaur.
He was playing a game.
A game of strategy.
One with a very simple premise.
A game that involved maneuvering a puppet out of danger. He had very limited control over what it could do, and sometimes it would do things that he didn't want it to.
He had to maneuver it out of danger and essentially buy time until he found an opportunity to get it to safety, all while under what he could only describe as a fear illusion for an added layer of difficulty.
And if he lost, he would be moved to an unknown location in the other world to see what happened next. All of the fake feelings of pain and fear that he was swamped with would disappear at that point.
They would disappear if he lost the game.
To be honest, it didn't even sound that bad apart from one thing.
When he was in the living world, at any time he could make the decision to move to the other world. Suicide essentially. It wasn't nearly as dark a topic now that he understood it entirely, and it could be undone with the Dragon Balls.
But, when in the other world, he couldn't make the decision to go back again by some sort of anti-suicide, it was all out of his hands when he got there.
Maybe someone would wish him back to life with the Dragon Balls eventually, but maybe not.
That was the reason why he wanted to win the game. To have his life in his own hands for as long as possible.
He only had that control when he was alive.
In the other world, his fate was in the hands of whatever powers oversee it.
So he would win.
There were no limitations on what he could do in this game, apart from the physical capabilities of the puppet he was stuck in.
With the change in mindset, potential solutions that would be deemed so reckless and insane that nobody else would ever even consider them as options suddenly opened up.
There was actually only one that he could see.
But that was one more than there had been previously…
Since his body's muscles were locked up from the crippling levels of fear and pain it was flooded with, he needed to get creative with how he was going to move it around.
He couldn't move his muscles naturally. That was out of the question. The fear and pain had made it impossible.
But his body wasn't special by any means. At the atomic level it was made out of the same stuff as rocks. It was just infinitely more complex and intricate. But it was ultimately just atoms.
As it just so happens, he had just invented a technique that allowed him to enhance his body's normal movement capabilities. He had been using it pretty one dimension-ally though. Just sticking to things.
But, he had proven that it was possible to contract a ball of energy to the point where its density essentially flash froze it to whatever he had pumped it into.
Since his body was a regular, if highly intricate object, he would use it as the thing he would stick his energy to.
His Ki was controlled by his mind, which was perfectly clear and focused, unlike his body. So he could still use his energy. However he had so little of it remaining that he couldn't hope to actually defend against an attack, let alone fight off a dinosaur, so he had to use it sparingly.
He also had complete mental control over his energy, even when compressed. It was what allowed him to stick to things in the first place.
The process was simple.
Flood his body with energy, compress said energy until it stuck to his body, then move the energy.
His body would then be dragged along for the ride.
Movement without muscles.
But he had to be careful with it.
There were inhibitors in his body's nervous system that prevented unnatural muscle movement.
For example, when moving his body normally using his muscles, he could only extend his elbow so far. It stopped at about a hundred and eighty degrees. His muscles were not designed to move it any further than that.
If he used his energy though instead of his muscles, while also ignoring all of the pain that his body was sending him, he would not experience these limitations, and he could very easily hyper extend his limbs and break them.
He needed to be aware of that.
Focusing on his energy, he pumped it into his body.
He felt it follow along the contours of his body, and when he was ready, he compressed it until he felt it lock in place, and then he pulled.
He left the ground.
In that instant, two mysteries on his list were solved. He figured out both how to fly, and how martial artists like his dad were able to survive rapid, near instantaneous accelerations that the atomic bonds within their bodies could not otherwise withstand.
Flight was so deceptively simple. He had been overthinking it all this time.
During his training and experimentation, he had figured that he needed a ton of energy continuously being fired out of his feet like a rocket to create the thrust needed. He needed a counter force to gravity after all. His plan had originally been to achieve flight via conservation of momentum. A method that he had nowhere near enough energy to pull off.
Another idea he had entertained for a few moments but immediately dismissed even earlier on, was actually the right answer apparently. He just needed his energy attached to him, then he just had to lift his energy. Will it upwards harder than gravity pulls him downwards.
The reason he had dismissed it earlier, was because he had thought that doing something so simple was exactly like sitting down on a chair, and trying to achieve flight by pulling up on the armrests. If you could lift your own weight plus the weight of the chair, than surely you could lift off from the ground…
Only you couldn't, because pulling the chair up, pulled you down with just as much force.
He hadn't realized the difference.
Here, when willing his energy upwards, there was no opposing force pulling him down like with the chair. He only had gravity to overcome.
And that wasn't very strong.
As weak as it was however, he just didn't have enough energy left to just fly away.
Because flying did cost energy.
It wasn't much, just enough to essentially maintain a ball of Ki the size of his own body, but he was already running dangerously low.
Immediately after feeling his back leave the ground, he spun, and pulled to the left, executing a roll that positioned him just outside the danger zone…
Almost.
He felt something rough scrape along his cheek, which strangely enough, burned him.
It took him only a moment to figure out that he had just received rug-burn via dinosaur skin.
An odd injury to be sure.
Completing the roll, he used his energy to create a brace for his right leg, compacting it as much as possible to prevent any movement upon his landing. He knew it was injured, but he didn't know how badly. But either way, a sudden spike in pain, fake as it was, might break his concentration.
He landed on air, after seamlessly, and instinctually initiating his air walking technique.
There was no sudden pain.
He had managed to dissipate the impact perfectly to prevent it.
He hadn't used his muscles at all, either.
That was how they did it. People like his dad and Piccolo.
They weren't super strong fighters at all. Not due to their muscles at least. They were doing the same thing that he was.
Their bodies were made out of matter. And matter, no matter how dense had finite tensile strength. Their muscles, despite being strong, had a theoretical limit to how strong they could become.
Because they were made out of matter.
It was a biological barrier that no amount of strength training would ever overcome.
Yet they just seemed to keep increasing in power over the years despite this limit.
This was what his dad had meant when he said that Ki was used to surpass the body's biological limits.
It was because they weren't using their muscles at all. They were manipulating their energy, sticking it to their bodies, and flinging themselves around like puppets. Then when they impact with something at high speed, they protect their bodies with the same method that he had used earlier with that stick. An energy barrier that dissipated the impact that extended just above their skin.
The barrier did a lot of things. It protected the body from any external impacts much like a cushion, but it also prevented all of the atoms and molecules within the body from being ripped apart.
If you threw a punch at a thousand miles an hour for example, no amount of external 'cushioning' would stop your body from ripping itself apart due to the sudden deceleration at the end of the punch.
When your fist stops at the end of this hypothetical punch, inertia kicks in and the atoms in your arm will want to tear themselves apart and keep going despite any energy barrier applied on the outside.
The atomic bonds between various molecules in the body would not handle the strain of such an exertion, and when taken to the extreme, the actual nuclei of these atoms could fission or be otherwise torn apart.
An external cushion would keep all of the atoms within its confines, but they would be scrambled. Liquefied even.
No amount of external protection would stop this.
A fact that lead to his next insight.
Ki was non-primitive.
Meaning, it was not a simple energy that he had perfect control over. It could act independently of his own will, to an extent.
To prevent the complete destruction of the body from throwing a punch at such an extreme speed, two things had to happen.
First, the relative distances between every single atom or molecule in the body, and its neighbour, could not change significantly. They had to remain within specific tolerances to allow natural body movements and nothing more. If they didn't stay in this range, the body would begin to tear itself apart.
And second, there has to be a force that compacts all of the various atoms, molecules, and subatomic particles together, forcing them to maintain their shape. This would counteract the extreme forces that these particles would otherwise experience by their own inertia under such conditions.
If these two things happened, the body could not be damaged at all, no matter how rapid the acceleration.
And since his dad fought at such speeds all the time, without consequence, this had to be the case.
Compacting objects together like this was very easy to do on a large scale. He did it all the time in his Ki experiments. The problem arose when it came to smaller objects.
Even if he could find a way to compact something so ludicrously small, such as a handful of atoms, together, there was no way he would be able to do the same on the countless billions of atoms that make up his body, in such a way that all of them maintain their proper shape and structure, at once. There were just far too many. And all of them required different magnitudes of forces, and in different directions.
This was where his sponge-in-water analogy that he had been using to explain using that stick as an effective weapon earlier, broke down.
It sort of worked, but it didn't show everything.
This time, his body was the sponge, instead of the stick from earlier. The sponge being submerged represents what his body was like when he stuck his energy to it.
But that was the extent of his control over his energy.
He told it where to go. Told it to defend this limb, or that one, or to move this body part in that direction, and then his energy handled all of the internal inertia negation and force cancelling. The details too complex for any one person to calculate themselves.
His energy would automatically contour to all of the various atoms and molecules in his body, and provide all of these various internal forces to hold everything together.
That way, as long as he had energy left to use, his body wouldn't break down due to the rapid accelerations it experienced.
His energy did this totally independently without his input.
There was so much going on behind the scenes in each movement. But as long as he had enough Ki, and was skilled enough in energy manipulation to keep all of these variables in check, there was literally no conceivable limit to how fast he could move.
None of that mattered yet though. He was nowhere near fast enough to destroy his own body with his movements.
That would come later.
Standing perfectly still, he tilted his head to the left. Just enough to see the dinosaur's behind him.
His energy was low. He wouldn't be able to take out even one of these dinosaurs, let alone the other seven that were now closing in on him.
But he didn't need to.
He highly doubted that there were many people who would have seen the solution to this situation, if they had been in it.
It was actually pretty brilliant, if he said so himself.
Running was not an option, and neither was fighting.
He needed to position himself in such a way that no dinosaur could kill him. Buying time, essentially.
After all of his revelations he had just went through, he had realized that the dinosaurs themselves, weren't intrinsically dangerous. The emotional response his body was sending him was wrong, or rather, it was short-sighted.
Only two parts of each dinosaur were actually dangerous.
The teeth, and the stomach. He could just dodge the other limbs…
It just so happened that there was a location, between those two dangerous places that was perfectly safe.
A razor's edge.
He heard a roar, and in his peripherals, another T-Rex lunged towards him with its jaws wide open.
So he enacted his plan, and jumped inside.
After passing between its teeth, he was encased in shadow. He bounced off something slimy, and wet, before he began flooding his right arm with energy. He made it past the tongue, and punched the wall at the back of its throat as hard as he could manage.
As expected the wall of cartilage gave way, and he found himself buried shoulder deep in the wall of its esophagus.
He felt himself get drenched in some sort of warm liquid- blood in all likelihood, and he immediately manipulated the energy in his arms and legs, to stick to the wall.
He had anticipated the sudden bout of violent thrashing that immediately ensued by the victim of his surprise attack, and he was prepared for it.
It began throwing its weight around as hard as it could, trying to dislodge him, but he wouldn't budge. He refused to.
He didn't really care about this thing. In fact, that was an understatement. Once he bought enough time and recovered, he had every intention of breaking out, and in an ironic twist of fate, making this thing his dinner.
They had the audacity to ruin his day, set him back in his training, and try and eat him. He was going to hunt them down and kill them all.
He wouldn't have to worry about food for a while then.
He could still feel the pain in his leg from that fall.
It pissed him off.
Lashing out with his left arm, he punched through the wall, and buried it inside, alongside his right.
Then he started digging.
He needed a place to rest, so he was going to carve a hole in the wall large enough for him to fit inside safely.
Then he'd wait.
It was his turn now.
A/N: Still no beta reader as of yet.
- LeviTamm