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.
A/N: Thanks to TheRangerBoy, for being a beta for this chapter.
Moments Earlier
"Krillin, is that Goku's little boy?" Tien asked, as he pointedly glanced at Gohan, who was standing a few dozen meters away next to Piccolo.
Gohan's focus was entirely on Yamcha's fight, so he couldn't hear Tien when he spoke.
"Huh? Oh, yeah. His name's Gohan," Krillin answered.
"Gohan, huh?" Tien tested out the name.
"Yeah. Piccolo's been training him."
"I can tell. Just look at the two of them."
"I know what you mean. They kind of give off the same vibe now, don't they?"
"Yeah. They do."
"Is that a bad thing?" Chiaotzu chimed in.
"Not necessarily Chiaotzu," Tien replied before admitting, "but it is a little concerning, I won't lie. I'm just a little worried about the boy is all. Who knows what Piccolo has been showing him?"
Yamcha's battle continued to unfold in front of them, and with his concerns aired, Tien, Krillin, and Chiaotzu once again focused on the conflict without another word.
"Yamcha look out!" Krillin shouted as the Saibamen attempted to take his friend by surprise.
...He barely sensed the surge of energy in time to cover his eyes from the flash of light that came next.
Boom!
The explosion rocked the ground, causing a miniature earthquake, and Krillin could feel shards of dirt and rock, bounce off his clothing and off of his arms and legs.
The flash had been bright enough to see through his own eyelids.
…
He took a few moments to recover before finally opening his eyes.
...He wasn't entirely prepared for what he saw.
Neither were his friends.
Yamcha had been blasted backwards a few dozen meters by being so close to the blast, but he was still alive thankfully, and after tracing the direction of the blast back to its source, he was able to quickly determine that of all people, Gohan had been the source of it.
The revelation had floored him.
"G-Gohan?" He stuttered out, confused and uncertain.
The boy glanced in his direction for a few moments, but never answered.
Gohan quickly turned towards the saiyans and started talking to them.
Krillin shook himself out of his surprise and ran towards his friend.
"Yamcha! Are you alright?" He called as he arrived next to him.
"I'm fine Krillin." Yamcha responded. He was sitting on the ground still after being thrown backwards.
Krillin sighed in relief.
"Now what did you go and do that for you dummy? That thing almost killed you! How many times did Mr. Popo beat it into your head to never turn your back on your opponent!"
"Krillin that's enough…" Tien cut in, as he landed next to the two. "Are you sure you're alright Yamcha?"
Yamcha hesitated for a few moments, still seemingly in shock.
"That kid… that's Gohan right?" He eventually asked.
"Yeah he is, and he just saved your life," Krillin answered.
"He did, didn't he?" Yamcha whispered, seemingly to himself.
He laughed dryly, drawing his friends' attention.
"Yamcha?" Tien questioned, concerned at the sight.
"I'm such an idiot," Yamcha said. "Just like that it was all over. I saw it all flash before my eyes."
"Join the club," Krillin stated, knowing exactly what Yamcha was talking about. He had died once before himself, and knew exactly what it was like to see your entire life flash before your eyes in your final moments.
"...I know exactly what that's like," Krillin confirmed.
"Just be thankful that Gohan was here and had your back, and get up. We have a battle to finish don't we?" Tien pointed out.
"Yeah. Yeah I guess we do," Yamcha affirmed. "I can't believe how strong he is," He continued after a moment of silence.
"Right? It sure is something," Krillin remarked. "What the heck kind of training did Piccolo put him through?" Krillin asked rhetorically, and with some sarcasm.
"That power…" Yamcha began.
"You sense it too, right?" Tien asked, already on the same page as his friend. "That power surge from earlier…"
"Hm. You're right. That was him after all, not Piccolo," Krillin explained.
"He's just a kid, it's amazing," Yamcha said.
Their attention was drawn towards the conversation taking place when they heard Gohan speak up.
...
"And talk about brave!" Yamcha exclaimed. "He just insulted them to their faces!"
"Get ready," Tien warned. "If something happens we're going to need to back him up."
"Right," Yamcha replied as he slowly stood up again, and settled into another stance.
"Watch his back Yamcha. Who knows? You might even get the chance to return the favour," Krillin said, settling into a fighting stance of his own.
"Saibamen! Kill that runt!" They all heard the bald saiyan order.
Before anyone could do anything, the attacking Saibamen fell over and died.
"What the? What happened?" They all heard Nappa ask, clearly confused.
No one else had any answers either.
"What do you think happened? He lost," Gohan explained.
"What did you do?"
"I took my turn. Someone else can go next."
Gohan had killed two Saibamen in just a few moments. Whatever he had done, Krillin, Yamcha, Tien and Chiaotzu could all agree that they were happy that the boy was on their side.
...
"No, I think that's enough," Vegeta replied after a while.
"The rest of you," Vegeta began, referring to the rest of the Saibamen in front of him. "Attack him all at once," He ordered.
It had all started with a clock.
Months ago, after truly realizing the implications of his ability to slow down time, Gohan realized that there was a need for him to formalize the concept more thoroughly so that he could truly begin to measure the effects of what he was doing.
So, during his training with Piccolo one day, after another typically brutal session, Gohan had picked up a clock that he had asked Piccolo to materialize for him, and stared at it for a while.
...It had ticked and tocked, and counted down the seconds just like any other would have.
And Gohan had listened to the sound, as it did.
He listened to the clock for a long time that day, and counted down the seconds alongside it.
...And after awhile of listening, he had the rhythm of the clock memorized. He eventually reached the point where he intuitively understood how long a second was, and he found that he could cover his ears to block out the ticking, close his eyes and count the seconds in his head, and when he opened his eyes again, the clock would be exactly where he had predicted it to be.
He had learned how to count out ten seconds without a timer to guide him simply by referencing his memory of that sound. Those ticks of the second hand on that clock.
And that, simple as it seemed, was the beginning of something amazing.
...
Because he had looked at that clock again that day, and then he had entered the slow motion world.
...And the clock had slowed immediately to a standstill. It had just stopped ticking entirely.
He had been so used to fighting Piccolo, that when he actually put in effort to slow down time, he could watch as projectiles as fast as bullets passed by lazily in front of him. So he had been able to tell immediately that it was unlikely that he would be seeing the second hand move from that new perspective.
If he could see bullets travelling through the air, then waiting for a second to tick by would take an eternity.
So he had had to dial it back a bit.
...And he had had to practice that.
But when he had figured it out eventually, he had discovered that he could vary the rate at which he experienced time. He could slow it down, or speed it up as he wished.
That had posed a bit of a problem though. What he had really wanted was a way to be able to measure exactly how fast he was accelerating things.
He had had questions that he needed answers for.
How much was he slowing down time, and how much energy did it take to do it?
He had needed to develop a system.
He had left the slow motion world after making that revelation that day, and had counted to ten without acceleration.
...Then he had declared that ten second interval to be equal to one subjective interval of time, or one SIT, since he knew it so well and wanted a convenient acronym for it.
Ten seconds. The whole system, he had decided, would be based on intervals of ten seconds.
...That would be a SIT.
The next step had taken him a few days, but he had been determined.
More training days had passed, and in his offtime, when he had been too tired to do anything else, he had continued his work on that new idea.
He had eventually decided to create a tiered system.
Tier zero SIT, he had declared, was ten seconds of real time.
Higher tiers would then correspond to shorter time intervals.
Tier one SIT had been the next level that he had needed to master. It involved accelerating time to the point where exactly ten seconds would go by from his perspective, for the clock in front of him to tick once.
He'd slow time, count to ten by following the clocks rhythm that he had memorized, and then finely tune the rate at which he was slowing it down until one second for him, equaled a tenth of a second to the outside world.
The plan had been to measure exactly how hard he needed to focus to reach that rate of subjective time exactly.
...But the clock had made things difficult. The only way he had known of to actually practice doing that, was to look at the clock face. But it didn't count out tenths of a second at all, and he had quickly needed something far more precise for his purposes.
But he had figured out a solution to that eventually...
He had had to bug Piccolo for a little while to get him to let him into his capsule house to grab his computer, but his mentor had eventually caved and gave in.
He had just been grabbing something really quick, it wasn't like he was going to live in there after all. Piccolo had still been against that idea…
Gohan had grabbed his computer, which had access to satellite internet, and found a digital timer online that had a very high resolution.
...Which had made everything much simpler.
Tier zero SIT was the default ten seconds in the real world, and tier one, was ten times faster.
After some practice, he had eventually figured it out. How to get that exact rate of acceleration. Which had meant that he had been ready to move up to the next tier.
Each new tier in his SIT system, was exactly ten times faster than the previous.
Tier two counted out hundredths of a second, and was ten times faster than tier one as a result.
...That one had actually been difficult to work out. The screen on his computer had actually been slower than the timer itself.
His screen ran at about 60 Hz, which meant that even though the online timer was counting out in hundredths of a second, his screen hadn't been observing every number due to the refresh rate, which had made things a little harder to time out.
...But it hadn't been impossible. Just difficult.
He just couldn't count out every hundredth of a second individually. He had had to instead, time out a standard interval of time, ten seconds, at that speed, and make sure that the start and end points of the time interval had lined up with the timer.
...And when he had that down, he was able to learn a couple of things.
He had taken note of how much effort it took to experience time at tier one, and then compared it to the amount of effort it took to experience time at tier two.
...And then he had started meditating.
Piccolo had shown him how to do so properly a while back, and Gohan often used it as a way to observe his energy.
His mind worked best in images, which meant that he commonly used images in a lot of his measurements since they worked for him so well.
Back when he had been measuring his Ki, he had taken to associating images with feelings. If he felt that his Ki container was half full, he would imagine a glass of water that was half full, and associate the two together. So that the next time he was at half full, that image would appear in his mind.
With all of his new ways of measuring Ki due to his triple tank theory, and the perfect energy conversion idea that his fundamental energy transforms supplied, where x joules of Ki equals x joules of another form of energy, without loss, that system of associating images became incredibly refined.
He knew exactly what 8% of his total Ki felt like, for example, because he knew how much energy he needed to expend to get rid of 92% of his reserves from his calculations. He had blown up a chunk of land and compared it to known TNT yields and he had done the math. With the total amount of Ki inside him known from earlier experiments, he could then subtract the amount he had expended to figure that out, and then he could remember that feeling. The feeling of 8% of his reserves.
He had done enough of those measurements to get a very good handle on how much energy he had at any one time.
...And this same idea applied to his new system of Tiered SITs.
This time, he had taken to imagining a ping pong ball, floating on top of a pool of water.
At Tier Zero, there was no water, and the ball was on the ground.
When he went to Tier one, he imagined the water level raising by some amount as he focused. He didn't really know how much it rose precisely in terms of joules or anything, but he could see the change for himself.
It was a little wishy washy and informal, but it had been his only real option at the time.
By continuing in that same fashion, he could concentrate harder, making it to Tier two, and when he did, he had noticed that the water level was at twice that of where it had been at Tier one.
It took twice as much effort to get to tier two, as it did to get to tier one. He had been able to feel it.
Which narrowed it down to two main possibilities. Was the relationship linear, or exponential?
It had all depended on that third tier. The third data point.
So he had taken the measurement as best as he had been able to, and had realized that tier three took three times the effort of tier one.
...Which made it linear, after all.
Tier three, he had calculated, was about the rate he needed to be at to visualize bullets moving at about a half meter per second, since he was translating thousandths of a second at that tier, into what he perceived as normal seconds.
This linearity property of accelerated subjective time hadn't been the only thing he discovered with these measurements either.
It had been his first major insight into what magic was, and how it worked.
He had immediately asked himself that, if the magic required to slow down time was linear, then what would happen if he expended all of it at once doing so?
How far could he push things?
What was the highest tier he could make it to if he went all out?
…
That question had led him to another revelation.
He could visualize how much Ki he had at any one time. The amount he had sitting idly in his Ki container, but he hadn't been able to do the same thing with his magic.
Magic would just abruptly run out at some point, without any warning.
But he could feel it's rate of change.
More precisely, he could feel it decrease as he used it.
If he was doing something that required him to use x amount of magic every second, he would feel some amount of mental strain that corresponded with that rate.
It was all in his head. Literally.
When he concentrated on something to do with his energy, that was literally the feeling of how fast his magic energy was being lost in the process.
So when he used twice the amount of magic energy every second, he would feel twice the strain.
It was unlike Ki in that aspect.
With Ki, it was possible to entirely empty out his reserves in one gigantic ball of energy. Because there was no physical strain he experienced when doing so. Well, there was a little, but the strain didn't increase if he wanted to empty his reserves faster. He would only feel strain if he was trying to do something useful with that Ki, like make a ball with it or something. But he wouldn't feel much at all if he was just emptying his reserves and firing the energy in all directions wherever it wanted to go.
But with magic, if he increased the rate at which he was using it, he would hit a bottleneck.
It was like physical muscles in that respect.
You could not flex your arm one time so hard that it exactly expends all of its energy in that one go. If you waited a couple of minutes, no matter how hard you had flexed, unless you ripped your muscle apart, you would find yourself able to flex it again.
Magic was like that. He could flex his concentration to slow down time, but could not expend his entire magic container at once in one massive burst to basically stop time for a brief instant.
Because of the rate, not the amount.
He was limited by how hard he could flex, not by how much energy he had in total.
Which meant that his tiered system of SITs, while linear in their effort distribution, was actually capped at the end. At some point, he simply couldn't exert any more effort and wouldn't be able to slow down time any further, despite the fact that he may have had the energy to do it in his reserves.
He couldn't 'flex' as hard as he wished, and was limited by something.
...And with practice, he had discovered that just like muscles, he could learn how to flex harder.
Time was incredibly important in this fight with these saiyans.
It was a resource.
If he was not in the slow motion world at the right time, they could blitz him while he was unguarded.
It took a fraction of a second to slow down time, and as a result, no matter how hard you trained to accelerate time, it was always possible to be caught off guard if you weren't ready to make that jump.
Gohan had been greatly worried about that for the fight, so he had taken preparations to cover that weakness.
He could split himself into a total of five clones with the use of the multiform. Three of those clones were required to fight on the front line, control his Ki battery, and manage the energy from that battery.
...This left him with two extra clones to work with.
And clone number four was being used to cover this exact weakness of his.
He never wanted to be caught off guard, so he allocated a clone to do nothing more than observe the battlefield in the slow motion world for the entire duration of the fight.
It was just sitting in the background a good distance away, using its bubble sensing technique to observe the fight from afar.
...During his training, Gohan had figured out that he could radically increase the versatility of that technique by moving the bubble while it was active.
He didn't have to be at the center of it at all when he had it up. Since it was just a super thin ball of energy, he could move it around like any other, which gave him the ability to have 360 degree vision in a location that he wasn't even at himself, as long as it was within range .
Coupling that technique with the multiform, where each clone could potentially use their own bubble, and share information with each other telepathically, he had come up with a strategy to prevent himself from ever being caught off guard.
...But it came at a cost.
Because how many techniques did he have active in the background now?
He had an orbital Ki network, he had five clones, he was shuttling energy around all the time, he had a backup clone permanently in the slow motion world with its bubble sensing technique up, and focused in on a place far away from that clone…
It all used a lot of magic.
…
He had had to make a pretty difficult decision while he was preparing for this battle.
He had listed out all of his weaknesses, and all of his plans, and had tried to tally up what it would all cost him in terms of energy.
He didn't have the Ki to do it all… so he had needed the orbital Ki battery.
...Which had added to his already lengthy list of magically intensive techniques that were constantly running in the background, and draining his reserves.
The cost of covering up all of his weaknesses was a massive hit to his magic energy container.
He had estimated that probably about 80% of his reserves were unusable to him, before the fight had even started.
...But he had made that choice anyway.
Because the returns on that investment were just too huge to pass up.
Sacrifice 80% of his magic container, in exchange for something like a 6,000% increase in his Ki reserves? Probably more than that, in fact… Plus the peace of mind to know that he couldn't be blitzed by anyone unless their speed was truly terrifying in magnitude…
That was a no-brainer.
He could compensate for that magic loss anyway with some of his other trump cards.
He would not be able to use any intricate techniques at all, unless it was necessary. No lasers, or special attacks, or anything other than small scale manipulations of his energy.
Even that little trick of his with the Saibamen was pushing it. He had taken the chance however, as there had been a miniscule probability at the time, that he could have turned the tide of the entire fight with it.
If nobody knew what he had done when one of the saiyan's comrades had just abruptly died, and he had acted nonchalant about it, as if he could kill anything with no effort at all… there was a tiny probability there that he could generate a good amount of fear in these saiyans.
They could hesitate, and rethink their idea of trying to kill everyone there.
It was a really small chance, but it wasn't zero. So he had taken it, and had fried that creatures brain.
That stunt of his had sacrificed a small portion of his dwindling magic reserves, sure.
...But he had further preparations to make up for that.
Plans upon plans.
His orbital Ki network wasn't the only preparation he had made after all. He had a lot of trump cards ready for this battle.
A lot.
One of which would actually make up for his inability to concentrate energy with his currently low magic reserves…
But that was for the future. For if the trump cards he intended to use before then, didn't work.
...
Clone number four was almost always concentrating, even if the clone Gohan was piloting himself on the frontline wasn't. And if something happened that Gohan didn't see in time, clone number four would telepathically communicate it to him immediately.
And knowing that that clone was in place helped Gohan relax a great deal. Especially when the clone was silent as it was now.
Three Saibamen were about to attack him all at once now, and clone number four was silent about it, even though Gohan knew that it was still observing because he could sense that it hadn't been destroyed. Which meant that there were no surprise attacks in the works, and he could take them all out without any repercussions.
...Just as he was about to do so however, he was interrupted.
"Wolf fang fist!" The man in orange shouted abruptly, as he attacked the Saibamen on their way.
Gohan observed carefully as the man struck all three Saibamen hard, using a speed that he hadn't used in his previous fight.
...It was actually moderately impressive, in Gohan's opinion. The man was much stronger than his previous fight had let on.
Three strikes.
Yamcha had hit all three Saibamen, and then threw the three of them into the air.
"Spirit Ball!" The man then shouted, rapidly forming a ball of energy in his hand and hurling it at the airborne Saibamen.
Just as the three Saibamen struck each other in the air, bouncing off of each other, the energy ball struck, and incinerated all three targets.
There was nothing left of them when the dust settled.
…
It was a shame, Gohan thought to himself. If only he had been a little bit more subtle earlier when he had saved this man's life, then he could have used those remaining Saibamen as a way to drag the fight out longer.
...But he had tipped his hand a little too much instead, and now things were like this. He had been deemed enough of a threat for the saiyans to decide that the remaining Saibamen should all team up on him at once, and as a result, all of their fates were sealed in an instant.
If Yamcha hadn't taken them out, then Gohan would have done so himself.
...
Gohan smiled.
He hadn't needed the help, but it was nice to see that they were willing to kill after all. His teammates that is...
It was also a relief to know that he wouldn't have to tip his hand again, as Yamcha had taken out the Saibamen instead of him having to.
All that the saiyans knew about him now, was that he could make pretty decently sized energy blasts, and could kill things seemingly with a simple thought.
...His next plan still had a shot of working, then.
"Way to go, Yamcha!" Krillin cheered.
"Yeah! Awesome!" Tien joined in.
Gohan frowned however, when he noticed Yamcha panting due to the exertion.
'Don't tell me that one attack exhausted him…' Gohan thought to himself.
Yamcha laughed.
"Thanks," he replied to the compliments directed at him.
"You! You...!" Nappa shouted in rage. "Im gonna kill you!"
They could all feel the bald saiyans rage almost wafting in the air.
...It made Gohan's skin crawl.
"You're only alive because that runt stepped in!"
He began charging up his energy dangerously.
"I'm gonna kill you! All of you!"
He was stopped by the shorter saiyan.
Vegeta had grabbed Nappa's arm, and gave him a look.
"Nappa calm down. Those Saibamen were expendable and you know it. There's no reason to fly off the handle just because they did what they were supposed to."
"But…"
"You know as well as I that we can handle anything that these fighters can dish out."
Vegeta released Nappa's arm.
"They are of no consequence to us."
There was a moment of silence as both sides stared at each other.
A gust of wind blew through the clearing.
…
Gohan took a deep breath and sighed.
It was time.
...Time for his next plan.
"Do you really believe that?" Gohan abruptly questioned, breaking the silence.
Everyone's attention was immediately drawn to him again.
He could feel their eyes…
...But he continued.
"Why are you two even here?" Gohan asked.
"What?" Nappa replied, almost baffled by the question.
"I asked you why you were here."
"...Runt, you're really starting to get on my nerves."
"We're here for the Dragon Balls," Vegeta interrupted. "As I said before. Are you going to tell us where they are now?"
"There's no way…" Gohan mumbled to himself.
"What? Speak up kid!"
"There's no way you can be that stupid. I refuse to believe it."
"What!?"
"Oh, shut up already! Nobody wants to hear your damn temper tantrums anymore! That got old half an hour ago," Gohan replied.
...This was a pretty risky card to play, in Gohan's opinion, but there was a chance that it would work. And if it didn't, when Nappa flew off the handle as Vegeta had said he would, and attacked him, the saiyan would be too blinded by rage to notice the trap that Gohan had set up to kill him.
Nappa's eyes widened at his response, and he simply looked baffled. As if he simply had never expected anyone to have the audacity to say something like that to him, especially not a kid.
...In contrast, Vegeta grinned in amusement. Clearly finding the unexpected remark from his enemy, entertaining.
"And you... Vegeta is it? You're here for the Dragon Balls? Why?"
"Isn't it obvious? We're here to make a wish," Vegeta replied.
"What wish? And what makes you think the Dragon balls can grant it?"
Before responding, Vegeta had to quickly silence Nappa with a glare, as he had anticipated his partner's inevitable outburst, and didn't want to deal with it at the moment. He silenced the other saiyan before he even got a chance to say anything or respond at all to Gohan's previous insult.
"There are legends of the Dragon Balls of Namek," Vegeta began. "Seven in all, gather them all together to make any one wish… And now here we are on Earth, and here we find a Namekian. There's no point in denying it, we know it's true."
"I had no intentions of denying it. I just think that you need to seriously rethink your entire strategy for trying to get them."
Gohan intended to point out how ridiculous their plan actually was, and lead them down a path step by step, using their own reasoning skills against them, to get to a conclusion that not only wasn't true, but seemed as if it should be.
A falsehood that just seemed to have to be true, because it would be absurd if it wasn't. A conclusion that rendered their entire plan pointless.
"Your entire plan up until now has been to come here, grab the Dragon Balls, make your wish, and then kill us all."
After confirming that everyone was listening, he started pulling the rug out from under the saiyans, explaining the things that he had wanted to from the very beginning.
"Well, sorry. Things don't work like that at all."
There was a chance that this would end the conflict. A small one, but he had a lot of strategies that were like that. Simple things that he could do at any time that had tiny odds of ending the fight immediately.
By having so many of these tiny probabilities, he was hoping that at least one of them would finally come to fruition. If they didn't… then he would have to get serious.
"The reason why I asked at all is because you aren't making any sense," Gohan continued. "And here's why."
He began walking and talking, using hand gestures to emphasize his speech.
"Your scouters work as communicators. You said that yourself earlier. You heard Raditz's final words one year ago, didn't you?"
The question was rhetorical, as he already knew the answer. He let it linger in the air for a moment before Gohan laid out his first main point.
"You knew, back then, that we knew you were coming."
"What's your point?" Vegeta asked.
"Think about that for a moment. We knew you were coming a full year before today."
This strategy of his worked best when they came to their own conclusions instead of him having to overtly lay it all out on the table himself, so he was trying to get them to answer their own questions.
"Suppose you were us. Suppose you were in our position, and that it was your job to defend this planet from two super strong fighters from another world. Fighters who are way stronger than you are."
...He noted the barely concealed rage on Nappa's face in the corner of his eye. Likely, from his insult to the man earlier.
Gohan made a quick mental note to keep an eye on him, in case he snapped.
"But…" Gohan continued, "you know that they are coming a full year in advance, and you happen to have these all-powerful wish granting Dragon Balls on your side."
Gohan made eye contact with Vegeta, and asked his next question.
"What is the first thing that you would do in that situation?"
...
Vegeta's eyes promptly widened at the realization.
'Good,' Gohan thought to himself. Things seemed to be going well at the moment.
"Now do you see my point? Your entire plan makes no sense at all."
Gohan stopped walking. He was now in the middle of the two groups. His allies behind him, and the saiyans in front.
...Even that walk of his, during his monologue up until that point, had been calculated. He had strategically positioned himself for his next strategy. The one that he would implement should his current one fail.
...He needed to be in front of his teammates for it.
"The fact that you made it here at all," he said, "tells you everything you need to know about the Dragon Balls. That's all the information you need, to understand how they work."
Gohan took a subtle glance around the battlefield and saw the looks of confusion on the faces of everyone there, even his allies. Everyone there except for Piccolo, anyway. He and Piccolo had already talked about how the fight would go down and were on the same page.
..But seeing how some of them hadn't grasped that last point of his, he restated it clearly.
"The very first thing we would have done with them, is wish for the Dragon to destroy you outright."
Nappa's eyes widened in realization next. Even he, in his blind rage was able to see where this was going.
"But you're here now. Why is that?" Gohan asked.
Gohan continued before anyone could interrupt, answering his own question.
"Clearly the Dragon can't do that. If he could have, then one day during your trip over, you would have fallen over dead in your spaceship."
"So what if the Dragon can't kill us directly?!" Nappa interjected. "He probably hasn't ever faced anyone as strong as us before!"
"You're right," Gohan confirmed. "He hasn't. But consider what you just said again. You just admitted to yourself that the Dragon isn't all powerful with that concession."
...And this was the part where he dragged everyone down the rabbit hole.
"There are some things that it can't do. I wonder… what other things might it not be able to do?"
There was a contemplative silence that he let drag on for a few moments.
...And then he continued on. He took a deep breath, looked up to the sky, and began shouting.
"Dragon! I wish for you to kill the saiyans on their way here now!"
There was another silence as everyone continued to watch him. It almost felt like he were an actor on a stage at the moment. As if he were performing.
...But it was necessary to truly get across what he needed to say.
"...Clearly," he continued, "that doesn't work or it would have happened."
...This was the part that Gohan wasn't actually too sure about, despite the facade of confidence that he was putting up. He didn't know if the dragon could actually do that or not because he hadn't been there when the most recent wish had been made to try. It was also possible that his dad's friends simply lacked the audacity... the boldness required to make such a wish.
...But he was banking on the fact that the saiyans wouldn't make that assumption. It was a terrible idea, when trying to invade someone, to assume beforehand that they were all morons who wouldn't try absolutely everything in the face of potential annihilation.
He continued on. Shouting to the sky as if he were actually making a wish to Shenron.
"How about instead… 'Dragon! I wish for you to destroy their spaceship before they get here, while they are are travelling inside it!' ...That would do the trick I bet."
"Can you survive in the hard vacuum of interstellar space?" Gohan asked the saiyans. "Is the dragon not powerful enough to defeat a spaceship?"
He continued on, before either of them could reply.
...Which was another facet of this strategy. Overload them with so many possibilities that they couldn't possibly respond to all of them.
"Clearly the dragon can't destroy objects then, or it would have happened. That's two things now that the dragon can't do."
These were things that they should have realized before coming, too. If Gohan had been in Vegeta's place as the one planning this operation, as soon as Raditz had opened his mouth declaring that they were on their way and would be there in a year... he would have realized that it was impossible to actually make it to the Earth for those exact reasons he just mentioned. He'd get killed by the very Dragon Balls he wanted to collect.
"...And there's more."
Gohan faced the sky again, and made another wish to the invisible dragon.
"Dragon! I wish for you to teleport the spaceship that they are inside, a hundred light years to the left, leaving them behind!"
He faced the saiyans once again, looking Vegeta right in the eye as he stated another limitation that should have been realized from the get go.
"...The dragon can't teleport things from one location to another."
Gohan repeated the process again.
"Dragon! Introduce a biological pathogen on the inside lining of their spaceship that is both lethal and incurable to the saiyans!"
...And again.
"Dragon! Redirect their spaceship into a star!"
...And again.
"Create a black hole exactly in front of their spaceship!"
"Mess up their ship's navigation system so that they never reach the Earth!"
"Make the saiyans conveniently bump their head and forget all about the Earth and the Dragon Balls!"
"Strip them of their power!"
"Radically accelerate the speed at which they age!"
"Fuse all of the hydrogen in their water supply into helium! Creating the same conditions inside their spaceship as the core of a star!"
Judging that to be enough for now, he let another silence descend on the battlefield.
...And again, after letting it drag for a few more moments to make sure everyone was following along, he continued on.
He still had more that he wanted to say.
"...Then you have the opposite effects," Gohan spoke calmly, looking directly at the saiyans once more. "Ones that don't hinder you in any way from getting here, but that instead, help us to defeat you when you arrive."
He made another wish to the invisible dragon above him.
"I wish for ultimate strength so that when the saiyan's get here, I'll be ready!"
...And he made another immediately afterwards, in the same vein as he had earlier. He intended to make repeated wishes rapid fire to truly emphasize how limited the dragon's power would have to be for the saiyans to even make it to the Earth at all.
"Make me, and all of us immortal!"
Understanding the reluctance that some people might have upon making such a wish, he quickly added a caveat.
"...Or if that bothers anyone, add the condition 'for this fight only!' If the dragon can make someone immortal then surely, he can do it temporarily."
He took a deep breath after all the shouting, and judged that that was enough for now. He had gotten his point across and he was ready to wrap up his extended monologue.
...This one anyway. He may need to go on another one again, later.
"The point is, we could have killed either one of you in any number of a thousand ways if the Dragon Balls could do any of the things that you seem to think they can."
There was just one last point he wanted to get across...
"...But none of those things happened," Gohan said. "You made it here."
"Why?" He asked.
In light of everything he had just said to them, they really shouldn't have made it there at all. And they should have known how unlikely it would have been, beforehand.
…
But in any case, no matter the reason… it was time for the last hypothetical. The very bottom of the rabbit hole.
"...Or did you?"
It was time to make them question everything.
"Maybe you didn't make it here after all…"
He turned up towards the sky, facing the invisible dragon once more…
But this time he was calm. He didn't shout. He spoke to the dragon calmly... softly. And his voice was just loud enough to be heard by everyone in the area.
"Dragon... Direct their spaceship away from all planets with any form of life on them. Then I want you to force their minds into an illusion from which they will never wake, that is so powerful that it is indistinguishable from the reality they want to experience. Have it be the dream world in which they succeed in all of their plans and finally get their wish."
...Gohan was actually really curious as to whether Shenron could grant a wish like that. It likely hadn't been tried before, but the saiyans didn't know that.
If he ever had the opportunity to make a wish himself… he'd be having a lengthy discussion with Shenron about what the true limitations were. He had a lot of questions for such a time…
Gohan wanted the saiyans to believe that the people of Earth would make a wish like that if they could, when in reality, nobody else had probably ever thought of it.
"Let their bodies wither and die out in the void of space while they play out their delusions of grandeur deep inside their own thoughts and dreams where they can't hurt anybody else anymore," he said, finishing the wish.
"Or better yet," Gohan amended, "Dragon, in this illusion, make them come close. Have them nearly succeed in all of their goals and then rip it all away from them at the last moment. Then... put them through hell. Rip away everything they have ever cared about one layer at a time, and leave them with nothing in the end."
…
Everyone was speechless.
...At least, that was the impression Gohan was getting. He really had no idea what was going through everyone else's heads.
"Raditz made a mistake when he told us you were coming I think," Gohan continued. "We've had a year to prepare a good wish for the dragon."
Gohan was actually pretty surprised that nobody had tried to interrupt him yet. Not that he was complaining or anything...
"And that's a long time," he continued in the silence. "And while you may be stronger than we are individually, you lack something that I don't."
...And it really summed up the entire situation.
"You lack imagination."
And not just them.
...Everybody else here did too. His dad's friends for not being more creative with the Dragon Balls, the saiyans, for not thinking through their plan in advance, and even Piccolo to a degree.
It had become quite clear during his training sessions with Piccolo that all of Gohan's ideas would be ignored completely because of the fact that he was a kid, not because there was any fault in anything that he had to say, but because of what he looked like.
His strategies to optimize his training, and his plans to beat the saiyans without having to fight them conventionally had all been dismissed immediately… at least, until Gohan had finally gotten strong enough to actually win a spar against his mentor.
Then all of sudden, he had had room to make demands and take control over his own training, but only then.
...And if he were being honest, part of him would probably always resent Piccolo a little for that. Gohan had figured out how to use his training time much more efficiently months ago, and Piccolo had refused to go along with it because it appeared to an outsider who didn't know any better like slacking off.
How much stronger could he have gotten if he had been able to take advantage of his own biology sooner, right from the get go, instead of being dragged into, essentially, a beating every single day for months? He had noticed a long time ago that it was actually more efficient to train less often, as counterintuitive as that seemed.
If he made a graph, where on the x-axis was 'hours spent training per day', and on the y-axis was 'power level increase for that day', he would end up with a graph that looked alot like a bell curve.
Barely training at all gave you marginal returns for the day as you might expect. A really low rate of power level increase. And then there would be this sweet spot where his time would be perfectly optimized right at the center of the bump in the graph where the slope was zero.
...But the crucial insight that he had discovered was that if he trained even longer than that, his returns for the day would actually go down.
Training for five minutes in a day increased his power level by about the same amount as training for 20 hours did. There was a such thing as over training.
In order to truly optimize his training schedule then, it should be obvious that putting in the exact amount of time to give him the most power increase to be the best option. But unfortunately, that sweet spot only existed at around the two hour mark.
Which seemed ridiculous at first glance. Only two hours? That's not enough time to even fully drain his own Ki reserve after all. It didn't even put him below 50%, in fact. Didn't it make more sense to fully drain himself every session instead? To train longer?
You would think so. He had thought so too, but his calculations told him otherwise, and he had meticulously checked and rechecked the results. And sure enough, barely training at all every day was the best thing that he could do for himself if he wanted to truly get stronger as quickly as possible.
Training the way Piccolo had made him was just so inefficient. He had probably lost a month of time from that alone.
...But by the end of it all, he was pretty sure that they had finally come to understand each other.
After getting strong enough on Piccolo's inefficient regime to defeat him, Gohan had taken full control of his own training to finally prove once and for all that his ideas were right.
He had trained for just two hours every day, spending most of his off time either making preparations for the saiyans, experimenting, or watching Piccolo continue training by himself.
...And Piccolo had been surprised by it. Despite 'wasting time' as Piccolo had initially assumed, Gohan could still continue to fight him on equal terms during their spars.
And during those weeks was where Gohan had truly begun to understand where Piccolo was coming from.
Because Piccolo's body didn't work like that. Piccolo couldn't barely train at all and still have high returns. There was something different about their respective biology. Either something unique about Namekians that makes their 'Power level increase per day' vs 'hours spent training in that day' graph, linear, or… and more likely, something unique about saiyan biology that made Gohan's graph a weirdly shaped, left-skewed bell curve.
Piccolo hadn't known, in other words. He wasn't being stubborn for the sake of it. He had been truly doing what he had thought was right all along.
...It just seemed so backwards that training much less often gave him so much more power.
But it was true… and he had finally demonstrated it to Piccolo after his power level had gone off the charts in those following weeks. Advancing at a rate that was completely unlike anything Piccolo had ever seen before. And Gohan was pretty sure that that had been the moment where their relationship had truly changed from mentor and student, to rivals as well.
But still… that rigid mindset that he had had…
Gohan just would never understand. How was it that the things that were just common sense to him were so difficult for others to understand?
An idea's merit does not depend on the age of the person who gave it, or even the species.
You have to be ready, at all times, to admit that you're wrong when the proper evidence shows itself. The only things that are absolutely certain are the logical absolutes and mathematics. Literally everything else, including all beliefs no matter how firmly entrenched, should be subject to revision at all times.
And there was nothing wrong with saying 'I don't know', when you didn't have the answer.
Piccolo had done none of those things, and had stunted Gohan's growth essentially because of it. If he had only listened to him from the start…
He had stood firm in his belief that Gohan had no idea what he was talking about because he was a kid.
He had never even entertained the idea he may have been the one who was wrong.
He had been sure that he was right, and when Gohan had asked why, he would never get a straight answer.
That rigid mindset of Piccolo's had blocked all of the truly creative ideas he may have had, from showing themselves.
They all lacked imagination, not just the saiyans.
Gohan couldn't depend on anyone.
"So what the hell makes you think you're even here at all now, Vegeta?" he continued.
"There are two options," Gohan summarized. "Either you never made it here and we've trapped your minds in an illusion on the way over and you haven't realized it yet, or the Dragon Balls aren't nearly as powerful as you think they are. There is no third option. In either case, you aren't going to get what you want."
Gohan markedly left out the option that the people of Earth, or at the very least, the people who were in charge of making the wish to the Dragon really weren't smart enough to try anything else other than wishing his dad back to life, and for some reason, wishing him back to life in such a way that didn't let him immediately arrive on the planet.
Getting the saiyans to assume that the people of Earth were like Gohan, people who would do anything to win, whether the action was considered dishonourable or not, was the true point to all of this.
"It's all been a gigantic waste of time, and you should have known that the instant that you landed here. Well done."
A/N: Hope you enjoyed.
- LeviTamm