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.
"This is nuts!" Krillin said what they were all thinking. "What is he even trying to do?" he asked.
"You've got that right. They're just talking. This is just so surreal," Tien replied.
"Gohan has changed so much. I can't believe that this is the same shy kid that I met on Roshi's island just one year ago. What happened?"
"He's not at all like Goku," Tien said. "I would have thought that he would have taken after him. He certainly is bold, though. I'll give him that."
"Goku will sure be in for a surprise when he meets his son again," Yamcha pointed out.
"You're telling me," Krillin replied. "I can't even imagine how that meeting will go. I don't think anyone anticipated that Gohan would turn out like this."
"But seriously guys," Yamcha began. "What is the point of telling the Saiyans all of this? What is he trying to do? 'Hey, you guys are morons, now go away.' That's basically what he just told them. Does that seem like a really good idea to anyone else here?"
"I will admit though," Yamcha continued, "that those were some good points, I can't believe he put that much thought into the Dragon Balls. Can they really do any of those things?"
"I don't know," Krillin said. "Nobody has really tried to do anything like that yet, as far as I know."
"Because that would seriously make our lives so much easier if we could," Yamcha said. "Temporary immortality? I hadn't even thought of that before. Being unable to die just until the Saiyans are defeated? I think I could get behind something like that."
"Are you serious?" Tien asked.
"Just think about it. Remember Drum?" Yamcha asked, referring to a fight that happened years ago. "He kept getting in your way Tien. Preventing you from using the Evil Containment Wave on King Piccolo. How much easier would that fight have been if you couldn't die until after you had used that technique and sealed him?"
"We didn't have access to the Dragon Balls at the time though," Tien pointed out. "King Piccolo had already used them. That wasn't an option."
"It doesn't matter. I only brought that up as a point of comparison. If you did have access to the balls back then, and thought to make a wish like that, King Piccolo could have been defeated so much sooner."
"It was for the best though," Tien replied. "King Piccolo isn't sealed anymore. Goku killed him. There isn't any chance that he'll come back now."
"But just think of the possibilities. Doesn't the Evil Containment Wave normally cost the user their life?"
Tien's eyes widened in realization.
"Your right! If that wish had actually been made, then Master Roshi wouldn't have died back then! He would have gotten around that cost!"
"True immortality can't be good for anyone," Tien continued. "But if it was just temporary like that…"
"It had been an option now, right?" Yamcha asked.
"What do you mean?"
"A wish was just made to the dragon," Yamcha explained. "We had access to them this time. Nevermind that we couldn't have changed anything before. If we had actually gone there this time, to where Bulma summoned the dragon, we could have changed the wish."
"But what about Goku?" Chiaotzu asked.
"We could have simply waited for another year. He wouldn't have minded at all. If a clever wish could have been made to save the Earth, and it just meant that he had to stay dead for a little while longer, I can't see him actually caring all that much," Yamcha explained.
"Ha," Krillin laughed. "Knowing him, I'm sure he would have been disappointed on some level though. He's probably itching to fight these guys," Krillin joked.
"We could have done things differently," Yamcha summarized. "Goku's got one smart kid."
They continued to listen in as Gohan continued his conversation with the Saiyans.
"...Trapping them in an illusion?" Krillin balked at the suggestion. "What is he even…"
"That's…"
None of them could even comprehend just how far Gohan was willing to go with the Dragon Balls. That an idea like that could even be considered.
"Piccolo, what did you teach him? Why is he saying all of these things?" Tien asked in astonishment.
Piccolo frowned.
"I didn't tell him to do anything."
"You didn't?" Tien asked. "Then what…?"
"Is Gohan actually being serious?" Yamcha pressed.
"I didn't tell him to do anything," Piccolo reiterated. "This speech of his was all his idea. Believe it or not, it's actually a strategy to help us defeat them. One that I happen to agree with. So make sure you don't interfere with it."
Seeing the expressions on their faces, Piccolo decided to elaborate.
"I'll just tell you what he told me," he continued. "We have two options. We can either fight the Saiyans, or we can roll a die first. We don't know how many sides the die has, but if we roll a one, the fight ends immediately and we win. Long before any serious fighting starts."
"Right now, he's rolling the die," Piccolo explained. "This conversation he's having with them is it. There is a chance that everyone will walk away today without any more fighting. And to understand why, just imagine what they must be thinking right now. Try and understand how things look from the perspectives of these Saiyans."
"They know nothing about the Dragon Balls," he continued. "They don't know how they work, who created them, or how powerful they are. Which must be terrifying. How would you go about attacking someone that might have the power to wish you away in an instant?"
He paused for a moment to let that sink in.
"This plan is probably not going to work," Piccolo explained. "Gohan even said that to me himself. But why not take the chance? We would just waste the opportunity if we didn't."
"The Saiyans don't actually know how the Dragon Balls work," he summarized. "And Gohan is taking advantage of that. He doesn't actually have to use the Dragon Balls to take advantage of them. Simply describing what could have been done with them is enough to seriously mess with their heads."
"But he didn't use them, right?" Yamcha asked. "Or did you guys actually go to where the Dragon was summoned to change the wish?"
"Goku isn't here yet after all, and I can't sense him," Yamcha continued. "You guys didn't really do that, did you?"
Piccolo didn't answer.
The battlefield was silent for a few moments after that speech of his, as everyone came to terms with what Gohan had just said.
Gohan looked over his shoulder during the intermission, back at his temporary allies and noticed that even they were exchanging glances, clearly thinking over everything that he had just finished explaining.
It made him wonder just how many problems they had faced in the past that could have been solved with a simple creative wish with the dragon balls.
His dad had told him the stories of everything that they had gone through. From Oolong's wish for a pair of underwear, right up to his dad's final battle with Piccolo at the world martial arts tournament.
Gohan didn't know all of the details, but he did have the general timeline understood for the most part.
So much could have been avoided. Some people hadn't needed to die.
At every opportunity that the Dragon was summoned, the wish had barely been thought out at all.
A pair of underwear. Wishing for a single person to be revived. Wishing everyone killed by Piccolo back to life. Even King Piccolo's wish to regain his youth was limited in scale.
These wishes were meant to solve a single problem, and to be fair they sort of did. But not in any kind of permanent way.
It all just seemed so inefficient.
Why not plan them out properly in advance?
Why not gather everyone together for a sit-down one day during a time of peace and say: 'you know what? There isn't a world-shattering threat at the moment, but let's gather up the dragon balls anyway and make a pre-emptive wish for when the next one shows up to give the people of Earth a phenomenal advantage.'
Another threat always seemed to show up, and it just annoyed him hearing about all of these crazy situations that his dad had had to go through in the past, because nobody actually fixed anything in the end.
The Earth was just as vulnerable to threats after his dad finished defeating the most recent one, as it was when whatever it happened to be first revealed itself. The cause of all of these threats had never been addressed at all, leaving open the possibility of another one showing up at any time.
It would just take one wish to finally put an end to them all for good.
And there were all kinds of possibilities on that front, that hadn't been explored before.
Had anyone tried wishing for more wishes?
...
'Shenron! I wish for two more wishes!'
...There would probably be problems for wishing for an infinite number of them, as Shenron would literally never leave for the rest of time, as he would always be waiting for the next wish to grant, and some random guy could eventually stumble onto the scene and make a wish of his own which could cause all kinds of problems. But two or three extra wishes would be nice.
And even if Shenron couldn't do that, it didn't really matter. The knowledge that he couldn't was itself valuable.
Then Gohan wouldn't have to waste brain power wondering what could have been every time someone wasted a wish, or even worse, if Gohan himself were ever placed into a situation where he had to make a wish fast, and time was running out, if he did not have this type of knowledge on hand, he would have to waste time asking the dragon about it.
Gohan had to know the rules, and all of the edge cases in order to play this type of game, and questions like these needed to be asked. Even if they seemed ridiculous at first glance.
How about perfect future knowledge? The ability to know when all future threats would show up?
Could Shenron grant that?
Or if that was too much power for any one person to have, Gohan could imagine a limited version of that ability, where his dad would get a letter in the mail from an unknown person exactly one year before a serious threat to the Earth would reveal itself, giving a basic outline of what the threat was and where he needed to be to stop it. Even mentioning how strong the threat was.
Why not wish for that type of situation to become true?
...And there were more.
There were other interesting solutions like this that he really wanted to explore at some point in the future. Hypothetical wishes that he would have to ask Shenron about if he were ever in the position to do so in the future.
And some of them... really got him thinking about time travel. Could the Dragon Balls be used for that?
That would certainly serve as a good backup plan if one day his dad made a mistake when dealing with a threat. It always seemed that he ended up ultimately winning in the end, but everyone had off days. What would happen if his dad just messed up at a critical moment and he couldn't win anymore as a result?
He wasn't perfect by any means, no matter what his track record said. And it disturbed him that everyone seemed absolutely dependent on his efforts all the time.
Could you flat out wish, in one of these types of situations where his dad failed: 'Shenron! Send me back in time x number of days?'
...Just as a sort of reset button.
He didn't like the fact that everyone depended on his dad for everything. One day, he would fail if everything kept being placed in front of him. It was a simple matter of probability.
If on any given day his dad had a 99% chance of defeating whatever enemy he was dealing with... then that meant there was a 1% chance that he would fail.
Which was 1 out of 100 times.
Gohan didn't like betting against his dad like that, but the point was that the defense of Earth should not depend on the sole efforts of any one person for exactly that reason. Their options needed to be far more robust, than that.
Was the Earth even worth protecting if it couldn't defend itself? Without depending on an alien to do it for them?
Gohan simply wanted more options. Back-up plans to increase their chances in the future.
And time travel was a good candidate for that. It didn't even have to be a last-ditch effort either.
It could even be used for simple visits as well. He could go back in time to learn from some of the martial artists that were around hundreds of years ago. And he could remain in the past for potentially years at a time. Decades even.
He could even include in the wish: '...also, give me a magic button that when pressed, brings me back to this moment in time,' as a way to get back to the present time.
...Or, since a button was a physical object and therefore could be destroyed, he could say instead, to bring him back to the present whenever he stated some kind of password aloud.
And that was just one possible use for that type of plan.
There were still all of the possibilities involved in meeting his past self and such. How was that dealt with by the universe? What were the rules that governed it?
Could Gohan stand up and say one day: 'at this moment, this date, future me is going to return and talk to me. He will explain all of the important information from the future to prevent some of the threats from ever getting off the ground.'
Could he do that? ...And then could he write down that exact date, live out the next few years of his life, gather the Dragon Balls and make the wish to the past?
There was no reason that he could think of as to why this should be impossible unless the Dragon Balls themselves were unable to manage it.
There was no logical inconsistency there. He'd meet his future self as a kid, learn about the future, prevent a bunch of stuff from happening over the next few years as a direct result of that information, then gather the Dragon Balls when he was the exact age and appearance of the person he had met, and then finally make that journey himself to complete the cycle repeating the exact words he had been told as a kid to his past self, verbatim, to prevent any paradoxes.
...
It would come as no surprise to someone like him either.
Because 'Past Gohan' was probably the only person on Earth who would believe someone that told him that they were a future copy of him in an instant, and without hesitation or any form of surprise at all.
This should have happened already, in fact.
Because Gohan had gone through this thought experiment before, and nobody had shown up. He had had these types of thoughts for as long as he could remember.
He had even made a password about a year and a half ago, long before his life had been flipped upside down that, if ever spoken aloud by someone else in his presence, would allow him to be almost certain that the person who said it was either him from the future, or someone that knew his future self.
He had invented it mostly because he was a little bit of a nerd and liked to think about these sorts of philosophical thought experiments, but the fact that the Dragon Balls were real rendered a lot of that theorizing as potentially practical.
Ever since he had heard about the Dragon Balls for the first time years ago, he had been able to see these sorts of weird paradoxes with them and as a result, he had made his password just in case. And that password was a word that he had never said aloud or even written down anywhere, so there was no way anyone could glean it from him unless they were a mind reader or something of the sort.
When he had thought of it for the first time he had said nothing to anyone about it either.
If anyone had been watching him when he had been sitting under that tree that day with Icarus, thinking through all of this, they wouldn't have been able to tell that anything strange was going on.
They certainly wouldn't have noticed that he was preparing for a possible confrontation with his future self.
...And the point of this password was simple. If ever, someone walked up to him on the street and told him it, he could be sure of one of four things.
Option one was that the person was him from the future. As a future copy of himself would not reveal that sort of information to anyone under any circumstances... unless possibly as a dying breath.
Option two was that it was a person capable of reading minds, or someone who knows someone that can. And in that situation, he'd be glad to hear someone say his password to him, as he could then have a lengthy 'conversation' with that person about how they had come by that information.
Option three was that someone had used the Dragon Balls or an artifact like them to somehow mess up the timeline and had gleaned the information of his password from a different timeline.
And Option four, the most unlikely of them all, was it was some insane guy who had just decided to randomly walk up to him and spew out a random conglomerate of syllables that just so happened to be his exact password.
But the odds of that were so small that he referred to them as negligible. Genuine time travel was more likely than that by far.
If someone said that word to him, he could be sure that one of those options had happened. And he was almost positive that he had covered all of the options there. He was pretty sure there were just the four possibilities, and that any others would be so close to one of them that they would be almost identical.
It was a very obscure, arbitrary, and random password that he couldn't imagine anybody ever saying, unless they were from the future or had otherwise read his mind somehow.
But the point of all of this was that Gohan should be able to make a decision right now, that he will gather the Dragon Balls in a few years time, and wish to visit his past self and explain everything that will happen.
If that were physically possible, it should have either happened already, or he should be meeting a future version of himself at some point in the future.
And it was unlikely that it had already happened, he was pretty sure. As he had no memory of such a meeting taking place as far as he could tell. Though he couldn't be absolutely sure on this front as a future copy of himself would be capable of unbelievable subtlety as they would have a complete knowledge of how he would think and react to any given situation.
But these were the types of thought experiments that his dad and his dad's friends needed to sit down one day and talk about.
Because you never knew when a wish like that would need to be made, and having all of the edge cases planned out in advance would make everything much easier if the time ever came.
But even if time travel couldn't be done there were still potential ways around it to achieve similar results.
Had anyone tried making the wish: 'I wish that everything that has happened in the past few weeks to be nothing more than a bad dream, and that I will wake up with the knowledge of everything that has happened!'
That one was treading on some dangerous ground that was for sure, but it would be more helpful than simply wishing everyone back to life after a catastrophe. You'd have to deal with the threat again, but you wouldn't be surprised by anything the next time and…
'Okay…' Gohan's mind went on a random tangent.
That could actually be a way to get infinite wishes right there, whether or not Shenron had the power to grant more than one at a time.
Wish for the threat to be a dream, wake up a couple of days in the past, and immediately notice the fact that in the new timeline the Dragon Balls haven't been used yet, and he still would have all of that future knowledge.
He would have effectively made a wish to the Dragon without causing the year-long time delay by doing that. And then if he failed to solve the threat on the next run through... make the same wish again.
You could repeatedly face the threat over and over again until you had perfect knowledge of how it will all go down.
You could even cut out all the extra steps involved there by making the wish: 'I wish to have been inside a dream for the past x days until now, in which I am experiencing a time loop. Where the dream continues only if I have failed to defeat the threat. The instant I haven't failed, is the instant I know I am in reality.'
...
No… there were some problems with that.
There had to a better way to verbalize it. To make a logically consistent wish in which he was dreaming of being inside a time loop up until the instant the wish is made. That way Shenron wouldn't actually be creating a real time loop, or really even manipulating time at all, and only one wish would actually be granted by Shenron. The last wish, and the one that brings him out of the illusion.
There had to be a better way to say that. But he'd probably need to sit down for a few minutes to actually hash it out.
But if a wish like that could be made, then pretty much all threats could be defeated no matter how tough they were. It would basically create reset points where you would respawn at any time if you ever failed, so that you could try again.
...And why stop with just one threat? He could extend this wish so far out into the future, that a threat that showed up 30 years from now to destroy the planet would still send him back to the moment the wish was made. He'd rather re-live out 30 years of his life with perfect knowledge of everything that will happen in that time than lose the entire Earth and everyone on it.
...Perhaps that should be his life's purpose, in fact. He could take that responsibility on his shoulders. To be the person that anchors the timeline like that.
If something bad happened... no problem. The bad thing didn't actually happen and all events leading up to it were simply dreamed up by him.
...He really needed to talk to Shenron.
Because there were concerns that he had now.
Gohan knew the way that he would think. He knew exactly what a future version of himself would do if he were ever given the opportunity to make a wish to the dragon.
He would freely mess with the timeline if it saved lives. People would probably call it playing god, but he wouldn't care at all, and he would do it anyways.
He would do it, and it should have happened before these two Saiyans even showed up.
A future version of him would know things that would be very useful about the fight that was about to take place, and there would be no reason not to share them with him.
Of course... that assumed he would make it through the day.
In order to meet his future self, there had to be a future version of himself, and that meant that he had to win the fight in the first place.
But there were just so many options with the Dragon Balls, and after glancing at the faces of the people in the area, he could tell that very few of them have actually put any real thought into how to use them more effectively.
Gohan had completely blown their minds from what he could tell, and he had barely even scratched the surface with the possibilities he had come up with, in his thought experiments.
…
He needed to make sure that he was the one to make the next wish to the dragon. He clearly couldn't trust anyone else to do something like that anymore.
Maybe when this was all over, if he was still around, he'd search for them himself.
He'd be able to do so much with them.
Maybe he'd even be able to undo the fact that he had killed all those people back then, too...
Gohan could almost hear the sound of Nappa's teeth grinding together, such was his rage.
He was a hair away from going on a rampage.
Gohan's thumb rubbed against his back pocket, in anticipation.
...The pocket that contained some of his surprises for the battle. If Nappa came at him pent up with that much rage, there was a very good chance that Gohan would be able to kill the Saiyan with one of them. Probably 50-50 in fact, depending on the saiyan's reaction speed. Solely because of the fact that Gohan was both being severely underestimated, and because of the fact that Nappa probably couldn't even see straight at the moment.
The Saiyan would just need a few more nudges to tip his rage over the breaking point if it wasn't there already.
Gohan might need to jab him a little more.
"Nappa," Vegeta began, breaking the intense silence. "I'm only going to say this once. If you attack before I give you the order, I'll kill you myself."
The threat was delivered with a surprising level of calmness, and it was clear that Vegeta had been unphased by most of what Gohan had said earlier.
...Which came as a bit of an annoyance. Things would be so much easier if Vegeta were as hot-headed as his partner. Manipulation would be much, much harder on someone with Vegeta's temperament.
"What?" Nappa reeled back in shock.
"You heard me. The kid was exactly right. You need to calm down, right now."
"But Vegeta!"
"I won't repeat myself again. So I suggest that you consider your next actions very carefully. I happen to be in the middle of a conversation with the kid, and I would be quite upset if you interrupted me again."
There was a new angle here, Gohan realized as Vegeta glanced in his direction.
If he could pit these two against each other by either making Nappa disobey the orders he was just given, or maybe…
His thoughts were cut off, as Vegeta began speaking
"So it was all a waste, was it?" he asked.
Then he laughed.
"You know, I've met people like you before, kid. Politicians with a silver tongue that think they can talk their way out of anything."
"But, I'll admit," he continued, "a lot of what you said was interesting."
Vegeta cleared his throat, and settled in for a lengthy speech.
"I'll play along."
...There was a lot he needed to respond to.
"I never expected that the dragon was all-powerful. In fact, I've known that he wasn't ever since I first heard those legends. It's obvious. If he was, then the Saiyan's, and all the other violent races across the galaxy would have been wiped out a long time ago. All it would have taken was a simple wish from an idealist to 'remove all suffering in the universe' or something of the like."
"So while everything you just said about destroying us on our way over is true, as you could have done those things, you also could have solved all of this universe's problems ages ago."
"The fate of my people would have been different, then."
"We wouldn't have been wiped out. As it wasn't just warriors that were killed. Our women… and our children were destroyed just like all the rest. People who weren't fighters by any means. They weren't a threat to anyone."
"You can hate us as much as you want, and want to wish us away but if you really didn't lack imagination, as you said, and were truly interested in saving as many innocent lives as you could, you would have. All it would have taken was a simple wish. And since that didn't happen, it's clear that the Dragon balls have limits."
"Everything you said about destroying us on our way over can be disregarded by doing nothing more than assuming that one of the dragon's conditions for fulfilling the wish is related to distance."
"You didn't do any of those things, not because the dragon couldn't, but because we were too far away."
'I see…" Gohan thought. He had successfully mislead Vegeta by warping the facts the way he had. But Vegeta, despite being mislead, had managed to turn Gohan's efforts on their head by reaching a different conclusion than intended.
Vegeta had reached the wrong wrong conclusion. But it was still wrong. It was just benign.
There was no distance restriction as far as he was aware, but given the information that Vegeta had had at the time, that was actually a decent argument.
It was actually pretty clever. Gohan hadn't anticipated that angle.
"And as for making yourselves all-powerful with a wish," Vegeta continued, "you could have given yourselves god-like powers and prevented the destruction of my people with a snap of your fingers by granting that wish yourself, and it can be dismissed just as easily as simply destroying us can."
"As for making yourselves immortal, we'll just have to test that won't we?"
"Death isn't the worst thing someone can experience. Tell me kid, have you ever been tortured before?"
"You may have been smart enough to make yourself immortal, but were you smart enough to remove your sense of pain when you did?"
"None of you are strong enough to take me on in direct combat, I can defeat any of you with ease, immortal or not. I just may not be able to kill you. Because immortality says nothing about how strong you are. You won't be able to keep up, I'll capture you, pin you down, and force you through the greatest hell that you can possibly imagine until you tell me where those Dragon Balls are."
"And how are you going to do that?" Gohan interjected. "You think you can pin all of us down? What if we are all immortal? We outnumber you. Pin down one of us, and the other's will intervene whether or not they are strong enough to defeat you themselves."
Vegeta smiled.
"You're right. I won't pin down all of you. Just you, kid."
'I see,' Gohan thought. 'I suppose that's to be expected from taking the lead role in this conflict. Of course, it would draw their attention and paint me as their primary target.'
He did, however, find it a little annoying how he still felt that tiny nagging sense of fear inside him as a result of those words. His mind was confident in all of his preparations as his options were truly vast, but he had never been able to totally shut down his body's emotions.
He'd just have to ignore them like always. Ignore them, and don't react in any visible way to them.
"Oh wow," Gohan replied. "Well then. I'm flattered. This should be an interesting battle then, I suppose."
If he screwed up too badly, he could end up getting tortured.
...He wasn't really sure how he felt about that.
"What specific wish are you after, if you don't mind me asking?" Gohan questioned. "I would imagine that it would be immortality, but what if the dragon can't grant that?"
"I'm well aware of the fact that immortality may not be achievable," Vegeta replied. "You didn't wish for that after all, did you? You wished Kakarot back to life, right? I heard the Namekian say that one year ago."
Vegeta held his hand out, causing the scouter he had dropped earlier to fly into it.
After pressing a couple of buttons on the side, an audio recording started to play.
'He'll be up and running again in a few weeks at the most.'
The first voice was obviously Piccolo's. Gohan hadn't actually been able to hear that conversation as he had been inside that spaceship at the time. But he knew exactly what this event was.
This was where Piccolo mentioned the Dragon Balls.
...The recording continued.
'What? Tell. Me. How…'
...That voice, Gohan recognized as Raditz's.
'Gladly. On this planet we have something called Dragon Balls. If you gather all seven of them together you can get any one wish granted. Goku's friends will have him wished back in no time.'
…
Vegeta pressed another button and the recording halted, creating another moment of silence across the battlefield.
Everyone had been able to hear it clearly.
…But seriously, that scouter made no sense at all to Gohan. Information wasn't supposed to be capable of travelling faster than light, so Gohan had absolutely no idea how a real-time conversation could take place across however many hundreds of light years distance, that was.
It didn't agree at all with relativity. But to be fair, Gohan's clones seemed to be capable of instant communication like that as well. They may even be using the same physical principle as that scouter to do so.
He had a clone in orbit at the moment, and at any time, he could choose to see through its eyes. It was like he was holding a door open with his back foot, and he needed to only reach behind him and swing it open to see the Earth in it's incredible glory sprawled out before him from that clones perspective.
He had even done that a few times over the past hour as a way to quickly check in to make sure everything was still going okay.
Well… for that, and because he could never get sick of that view, no matter how many times he saw it.
...That analogy also broke down a little as it wasn't just one door that he was holding open with his back foot. There were four different doors, all leading to a different clone. A different environment.
And he had been periodically checking in on them all to make sure all of his plans were still in motion.
Vegeta finished his speech after letting the silence drag on for just a few more moments.
"If wishing back the dead is possible, then I have another wish to make."
"You do?" Nappa asked in surprise.
'Interesting…' Gohan thought, after seeing the bald saiyan's reaction to that. Vegeta hasn't shared everything with his underling.
Vegeta had plans that Nappa didn't know about. Vegeta didn't trust him.
...Gohan could make use of that later. The two of them weren't on the same page at all...
Vegeta grinned but didn't elaborate on his cryptic remark.
"Wishing your friend back to life are you?" Gohan asked.
It was a simple probe for information. He hoped that that was what they would wish for if given the chance, but he wasn't sure. It would definitely be convenient if that was all that they wanted.
"How generous," Gohan continued. "I'm curious as to why you didn't just ask nicely then."
"What?" Vegeta asked, eyes widening slightly in surprise.
...His surprise made sense though. Vegeta probably hadn't even considered the possibility that he could just ask to use them and be on his way. And if all he wanted was to bring Raditz back to life, then Gohan was more than happy to let them make that wish. That is, after the balls recharged anyway.
But they had spent a full year travelling there, what was another year to them? They could wait one more for the balls to recharge.
"I mean really. Why bother destroying that city earlier?" Gohan asked. "It was totally unnecessary. If you had asked nicely, maybe we would have let you use them. Raditz isn't really a threat to anyone here any longer, we're all much stronger than he is."
Vegeta frowned after hearing that, but said nothing further.
He didn't give anything away.
…
After another moment or two of silence, Gohan decided that it was time for his next move. He didn't want the fight to start just yet, so he had to make sure that there weren't any long drawn out silences that could invite the saiyans to attack.
It was time for the next manipulation attempt.
"But anyways," Gohan abruptly began, "a lot of that was pretty interesting. I didn't think you had thought through the consequences of the Dragon Balls so thoroughly. But there is another thing that you failed to realize."
"Oh?" Vegeta asked, seemingly amused at the way the back and forth was going. "And what is that?"
"You're not the first," Gohan replied. "You are not the first people to come after the Dragon Balls. There have been attempts before."
"There's been so many of them," Gohan continued. "A whole line of people with ambitions as fantastic as yours have vied for the Dragon Balls in the past, and you know what? We've gotten real tired of it all."
"So many people tried to take them by force that we finally decided to just make them unstealable."
Vegeta narrowed his eyes. "Oh? And how did you manage that?"
"By giving each one to a guardian," Gohan replied. "It turns out that we don't actually have to be stronger than you to prevent you from taking the Dragon Balls. We just have to make some rules that you can't get around."
"So why don't you consider this for a moment?" Gohan asked, preparing to give another monologue.
"There are seven Dragon Balls in all," he said, "and each of them is assigned to a guardian. To prevent any hostage situations or anything like that, we made it so that each of the seven dragon balls become unusable when their guardian is killed."
"The Guardian has to not only be alive to give up the Dragon Ball," he continued, "but has to also grant it to you willingly. And finally, the person seeking the Dragon Balls has to have a pure heart. That final condition was introduced to prevent anyone from torturing a Guardian until they released their Dragon Ball, as you suggested you would do earlier."
"If you haven't met all three of those conditions," he explained, "you can't get your hands on one Dragon Ball, let alone all seven."
"What if some of those Guardians were in that city you destroyed earlier? Or better yet, what if some of those Guardians are behind me right now?"
This whole strategy basically put a shield made of doubt, around him and his allies. If the saiyans bought any of what he just said, then they probably wouldn't want to risk killing anyone.
"That puts you into an unwinnable situation as far as I'm concerned. Kill one of us, and a Dragon Ball becomes useless," Gohan said.
Of course, the strategy probably wouldn't work, but it was worth a shot...
"I suppose it would wouldn't it?" Vegeta replied. "That is, if any of that were actually true. It seems to me that the people behind you aren't helping you out very much. They sure look confused for people that understand the rules of the Dragon Balls. Almost as if they actually know how they work and don't understand why you are trying to lie about them."
...That was annoying, Gohan thought. But to be fair, Gohan hadn't had the time to actually explain his plans to his temporary teammates, so he could hardly expect them to just go along with them. Some of his plans were probably completely alien to them.
Information manipulation? Why should they care about that? They were martial artists.
It was like expecting his dad to help him with his calculus homework. His dad may be a brilliant fighter, but there was pretty much zero chance that Gohan could get his dad to understand the concept of a derivative, let alone the slightly more advanced topics like divergence and curl.
And the same applied to these people behind him with his ideas on how to use information itself as a weapon.
...And so they let their facial expressions undermine his plans without even knowing.
"They clearly don't understand that your attempts to mislead us are the closest that any of you can get to actually defeating us, and have no idea how to play along with it, or even why they should," Vegeta continued.
"It hasn't even crossed their minds," Vegeta said, "that by not playing along, they are undermining all of your strategies, and guaranteeing our victory."
"And maybe," Vegeta switched gears, "you don't understand how the Dragon Balls work either. They could be ancient artifacts that are no longer understood by anyone currently alive."
"That Namekian," Vegeta pointed at Piccolo, "might just be a descendant of whoever made the first set. He may not know how they work at all. But it's clear that you know where they are, or at the very least, you know how to find them. And you know how to use them."
Vegeta narrowed his eyes into a glare, and emphasized his next point.
"I'm not leaving until I see the balls for myself. If any of what you just said was actually true, you could show these things to us firsthand and we'd leave, with the knowledge that we couldn't have done anything differently."
"But you're putting up resistance," he pointed out. "You don't want us to get our hands on them. You would have told us all of this immediately, otherwise. That way you never would have needed to fight those Saibamen at all."
"Why would you be worried about us getting our hands on the balls if they were protected behind a barrier of needing permission to use them?" Vegeta asked.
Gohan sighed in disappointment. He knew that most of these plans wouldn't work, but it was still annoying to see them all get shot down right in front of him.
"I guess things are just going to have to get messy then, won't they?" Gohan replied.
"It's the way things are, kid," Vegeta explained. "Just tell us where they are, and you won't be harmed."
'Do they seriously think that we believe them when they say that?' Gohan thought to himself. 'They must think that they were so naive.'
"I think you misunderstand the situation here," Gohan claimed. "You aren't in nearly as good a position as you seem to think you are. We won't be harmed? I'm not convinced you can do that even if you tried."
It was time for his last attempt. Gohan only had this last attempt at information manipulation left in his arsenal. It would all be improvised if he were to ever try again in the future.
...It was also the boldest, if he did say so himself.
"Oh? I thought that that was obvious," Vegeta replied.
He seemed to be giving off the impression that he was just humouring Gohan for the sake of it.
"It isn't," Gohan replied. "And the reason why, is because you came to us."
"And what do you mean by that?" Vegeta asked.
"I mean that we lured you here."
Vegeta frowned, but then his eyes widened slightly when he caught on to what he was saying.
He could read between the lines.
"I haven't moved from this spot essentially since before you guys landed in that city. On this planet." Gohan explained. "But more than that, we have had essentially an entire year of prep time, as a result."
"We planned," he continued, "one year ago, since we knew about your scouter's ability to detect power levels, to make you come to us instead of the other way around. So naturally, we, as the defenders, chose the battlefield that we would fight on, and knew where it would be a full year in advance."
All that preparation time was dangerous when combined with the possible wishes from the Dragon Balls. Vegeta had been able to get around most of Gohan's earlier arguments by referring to a possible distance issue or the fact that the people of Earth hadn't asked for immortality for one reason or another.
But this strategy would get around that.
"All we had to do next was get someone to power up, and then you would come running to the exact spot that we have laid down all of our preparations," Gohan said.
...Meaning that a trap was still possible, even in the face of Vegeta's false assertion about distance.
The saiyans certainly weren't too far away to be unaffected by a wish now...
"Everything, right up to the exact position of my two feet at this instant, has all been preordained," Gohan summarized.
This strategy of his was meant to be implemented if he were ever in the position where his hand had been tipped too early.
...Exactly as it had been.
The point was to basically do the exact same thing that the boy did in the classic fable of the boy who cried wolf.
He'd claim to have all of these strategies and preparations, none of which would actually come to light, and then when they caught on to the fact that he's been lying through his teeth this whole time, they will lose their sense of caution, and naturally, immediately fall into Gohan's actual traps.
Because he had revealed a little bit about himself too early and lost a little bit of his surprise factor, he needed to manipulate his own reputation to make himself look like a fraud to gain it back. But he needed to do it in a very subtle and underhanded way.
"What makes you think that this area isn't full of traps?" Gohan asked.
"Traps? Are you serious kid? What trap could you possibly use against us? I can assure you that we're strong enough to handle it, whatever it is," Vegeta replied.
"Do you breathe air?"
"What?"
Gohan's question seemed to throw them for a loop. It seemed that the saiyans weren't used to fighting people willing to kill them by any means necessary.
"If I removed all of the oxygen in the area, would you suffocate and die?"
As far as the saiyans were aware, that was possible to do with the Dragon Balls.
"By trap, I assume you thought I meant some kind of small explosive device or some other petty contraption," Gohan continued. "Something that I could use during a fight that would benefit me somehow, but that you're obviously way too strong to be slowed down by. Or maybe a weapon of some kind. But I think you're missing the point entirely."
"I'm not like you guys," Gohan said. "My dad is a Saiyan like you, and he sure loves to fight. It was like it was just in his blood. He did it all the time, every day, whenever he had the chance."
"I'm not like that," he reiterated. "I actually don't like fighting very much at all. I don't get that thrill that every other Saiyan just seems to. I know your friend Raditz seemed to be like that as well…"
"But I don't," Gohan continued. "I actually hate fighting. I know how to, but it isn't something that I intend to do very often at all."
"Which means that here," he said "in this fight that we're about to start, I have no intentions of dragging anything out. None at all. I may be a Saiyan, but I'm a human first. So while you're there trying to enjoy yourself and drag everything out for your own entertainment like a moron, the instant you lower your guard or turn your back, I'm going to kill you. Both of you."
This actually was true. But Gohan figured that they probably wouldn't take it very seriously as a threat yet. So he could get away with telling them all about it and they'd still be surprised when he actually took his own advice later.
"And I don't care how I do it, either. Are you immune to poisons? I'll kill you with one if you aren't. If I shut down your metabolism with a toxin, can you still fight?"
Here, he was vastly overstating his capabilities. He did actually have a poison that he was going to try to use for the fight, but it wasn't one of those military grade super poisons that practically guaranteed instant death on contact. He would have used one of those if the information for synthesizing them was freely available on the internet, but unfortunately, such knowledge was classified for obvious reasons.
With capsule printers so widespread, certain knowledge had to be restricted to prevent anyone from creating a biological superbug or any kind of chemical weapons with them. So he had had to make due with a lower grade poison that was easy to make, and that may not even work on a Saiyan. There was no data yet about how Earth poisons affected aliens.
He was going to test it out either way if the fight progressed to that phase of his strategy, though. And who knows? He might just get lucky with it.
"You think I'm going to fight you at all fairly in some kind of honourable combat?" Gohan asked. "I'm going to throw everything I can at you two until either you die, or I do."
It was time to introduce his last hypothetical scenario. It should also be the most likely, in their minds. Which made it the most dangerous.
"If I spent months and months, long before you got here, doing nothing more than stockpiling vast quantities of explosives, and then lured you to the exact spot that they were buried at, and then set them off, would you survive that?" Gohan asked. "How big of an explosion would it need to be to kill you? You may be strong but there has to still be some kind of threshold, a magnitude of explosion too strong for even you to handle. You couldn't, I assume, walk across the surface of a star under your own power for example, right?"
They would have to be unbelievably durable to withstand those kinds of conditions.
"What if I had a bomb like that? Just under your feet right now? Powerful enough to take out a continent? To shake the entire planet?"
"Would that be enough?" he asked. "I've had a year after all. That's a long time. And you don't necessarily need anything special to make an explosion that big either. You just need a lot of it."
"And who even needs to collect anything themselves?" Gohan asked.
Gohan glanced into the sky and repeated his actions from earlier. Shouting at an invisible Shenron.
"Dragon! Bring my dad back to life!"
...Then he continued after a moment with a much softer voice, amending the wish as if it were an afterthought. "...And also give me 50,000 megatons of high explosives, burying them at this exact location."
And this was the main point he was trying to make.
"The dragon can do two things in one wish can't he?" Gohan asked. "It sure would suck if he couldn't after all. Considering there are two of you and you both seem to want immortality."
If they denied that the dragon could grant two wishes at once, which they probably would, then he could pit these two against each other.
"I wonder where that would put poor Nappa though? Clearly the weaker of the two of you," he continued. "What would happen if the dragon said 'sorry, only one thing can be wished for at a time.'"
"What if only one of you could get what you came here for?" Gohan asked. "If that were the case, out of the two of you, I think that the person who ends up getting immortality in the end would have very little to do with how much you each want it, but instead who is willing and able to kill the other to prevent them from getting it first."
"Even if the two of you kill us all and get the Dragon Balls, I think your greatest roadblocks are each other," Gohan explained. "Who is your real enemy here I wonder?"
Gohan then pointed at Nappa. "You are in a dangerous spot Nappa. Your boss is going to kill you even if you make it all the way to the end of this alive. Do you really think he'll let you become immortal?"
"Kid, shut up," Nappa replied. "Just shut up! I've heard enough out of you!"
"Just look at what you guys did to Raditz," Gohan continued, despite Nappa's warning. "Sent him here all alone without scouting out the area first, and think of how low your opinions are of him. He means nothing to you because he's so weak."
"But… " Gohan continued, "and I don't know if you've realized it yet... relatively speaking, you're as weak to Vegeta as Raditz was to you, Nappa. So why do you think you're any different? If Raditz was still alive, would Vegeta have let him become immortal?"
"Would you have?" Gohan pressed.
"I said shut up!" Nappa shouted.
"Interesting," Gohan said. "You keep saying that, but you aren't doing anything to stop me from speaking. I think on some level that you know it's true."
Gohan held out both of his hands in front of him to emphasize the two options he was about to present the saiyans.
"Either the dragon can't grant you both what you want," he explained while raising his left hand to emphasize the choice, "or you're about to be blown to pieces with the largest man-made explosion this world has ever seen because I wished for the two things that I wanted," he finished, emphasizing the choice with his right hand.
"Don't fall for it, Nappa," Vegeta said, in slight irritation at what Gohan was trying to do.
"I won't!" Nappa replied.
Vegeta frowned a moment later however, after he noticed Nappa taking subtle glances in his direction.
Gohan noticed this as well. On some level, this strategy of his was actually working.
...Vegeta decided to do some slight damage control, as a result. Nappa was suspicious of him, now.
"It's clear that the balls can be used multiple times, even if for some reason, they can't be used repeatedly in succession," Vegeta explained. "There's some sort of time delay in place between wishes, but that isn't a problem. We can make our first wish and wait for them to charge up again. Then we'll make another."
It was actually a little impressive in Gohan's opinion, that Vegeta had been able to deduce that with so little information at his disposal.
"Interesting plan. Who goes first then?" Gohan asked. "Because there will be pretty much nothing to stop the first guy who gets immortality from doing what Vegeta did to that Saibamen, to them."
"Here's what I think," he continued. "Vegeta brought Nappa here as cannon fodder. As a dog to be unchained against us. As a measuring stick basically. How strong are these Earth guys? Who knows? Let's throw Nappa at them to find out."
"I said shut up!" Nappa shouted again, in rage.
"...And if Nappa dies," Gohan continued, "... well then it sure is convenient that there's no one left to contest Vegeta's claim to the wish."
"Kid, I swear I'm going to kill you!" Nappa threatened.
"Will you?" Gohan asked, skepticism clear in his voice.
"Vegeta! Give me the order to kill this… this freak already!"
'Freak, huh?' Gohan thought. That's a new one.
"Yes Vegeta," Gohan replied in a monotone, unimpressed voice. "Give the order already. Make a decision. Because this is probably your last chance to walk away from this."
It was time, Gohan decided.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a remote control. A detonator.
It wasn't a real detonator because the whole situation he had set up was fake, but it probably looked like one. And he was going to pretend that it was one.
He didn't really care if they called his bluff either. It's not like his life depended on this strategy working after all. He'd just start using his real strategies instead if it failed.
Gohan narrowed his eyes and glared at the two Saiyans.
...Mostly as an attempt to make himself look as genuine, crazy… and as much as a freak, actually, as possible.
"Let's get one thing straight right now," he said. "No, you're not going to kill me, and no, you are no longer in control of this situation."
"I think that the stuff I buried underneath you will kill you long before you ever get the chance to try to kill me," he claimed.
Something about Gohan's act seemed to resonate with Vegeta, as Gohan was able to notice the slight widening of his eyes, not quite into alarm, but he was certainly paying more attention to him now.
"You were being serious?" Vegeta asked carefully."… You would commit suicide and kill all of your friends just for a single chance to take us both out?"
"Yes," Gohan replied with conviction. "I thought that that was clear. Who the hell do you think you're talking to?"
Everyone else on the battlefield besides Piccolo was stunned by the admission..
Gohan was glaring at Vegeta straight in the eyes. With his bubble sensing technique, however, he was able to notice the reactions of his own temporary teammates.
They were clearly being fooled just as much as these Saiyans were.
"Uh… Piccolo? You guys didn't really change the wish like that did you? Are we seriously standing on a bomb right now?" Yamcha asked, worried, verbalizing all of his friend's thoughts.
They hadn't actually been there for the wish, so what Gohan had said actually could have happened.
Piccolo decided not to answer.
"Piccolo?"
Piccolo remained silent.
"Seriously? Why are any of you even surprised?" Gohan asked, directing his question at everyone, including his own allies.
"Ye of little faith," Gohan mumbled to himself.
Then he shouted to the invisible dragon again.
"Dragon! I want you to do two things. Bring my dad back to life, and bury 50,000 megatons of high explosives at this location. Those explosives are special, however. It needs to be the case that they can only be set off when I press this detonator, and when they are set off, everyone but the two Saiyans attacking the Earth are to be teleported to a safe distance from the blast to ensure that we all survive it."
"Then when the two of you get killed," Gohan continued, suddenly pointing at the saiyans, "we'll simply repair the damage to the planet with another wish to the dragon."
"The Dragon Balls can revive the dead," he explained. "Any living thing caught in the blast will be wished back later. A wish needs to be made to the dragon anyways to resurrect everyone that has already been killed by these two. We'll change that wish to also include repairing the damage from the blast."
That should set everyone's mind at ease, more or less.
Before anyone could respond however, he continued.
"Nothing has happened yet that is irreversible," Gohan pointed out. "Everyone you killed in that city can be brought back. Everything can still be undone. But this is the final step for which that is true. Everything will go to hell if you press your attack any further."
"How the rest of your life will play out, Vegeta, is entirely dependent on the actions you take in the next few seconds," Gohan asserted. "Are you going to leave? Or stay?"
"Vegeta! He's bluffing! Just let me kill this kid already!" Nappa exclaimed.
Vegeta's eyes never left Gohan's.
"Fine," Vegeta gave the go-ahead.
"What?" Nappa asked, not believing his ears.
"I said fine," Vegeta reiterated, eyes still locked onto Gohan's. "Go kill him, Nappa."
Nappa grinned viciously, and wasted no time in powering up and charging. Intending to make a beeline towards Gohan.
The ground exploded from the abrupt surge of power, and Nappa took off, rapidly closing the distance.
He had made no attempt to power up fully, and instead prioritized closing the distance as fast as possible, instead of ensuring that he was at full power upon arrival.
…
Gohan and Vegeta however, were having a stare down.
"You people think you can kill me?" Gohan asked.
Gohan laughs, and disregards the incoming Nappa, as he won't arrive in time.
"Fucking die in fire you bastards." Gohan flipped the controller and tries to press the trigger.
While his finger closed the distance to the trigger, Gohan quickly entered the slow motion world.
...
From the new perspective, and since he was in no rush and wasn't attempting to accelerate his finger with any energy manipulation, his thumb slowed to a crawl as he continued to observe Vegeta.
He had slowed time almost as much as he possibly could.
...Well past the 3rd Tier SIT threshold.
He needed to be sure that whatever Vegeta intended to do next wouldn't catch him off guard.
Nappa, since he wasn't at maximum power, was actually only moving at a casual pace when compared to some of the spars he had had with Piccolo during training.
It was Vegeta that was the real threat. At any time, Vegeta could power up and easily cover the distance between them almost instantaneously. Gohan was fully aware of that. He could sense the power that Vegeta held inside him.
Nappa didn't even register to him as a threat in this slowed time frame, and so Gohan mostly ignored him for the moment.
Would Vegeta call his bluff, or not?
They were continuing to stare into each other's eyes.
But there was this weird aspect of this type of combat that was hard to get used to. It was impossible to tell if a Ki was observing you in an accelerated time frame or not. Vegeta could easily be watching him in that moment, at a subjective rate of time a hundred times faster than Gohan was observing him with himself, and he would never know. There was just no way to tell.
...And that was why he had slowed down time as much as he had in the first place.
He was ready at a moments notice to transition into ultra high speed movement if Vegeta tried anything.
And if Vegeta ended up doing nothing, then Gohan would hit the trigger. Nothing would happen, and then he would try to kill Nappa when he arrived.
And so he continued to observe.
…
It took about 15 more seconds relative to him, for Nappa to reach the halfway point between them. He had moved about 20 meters in total.
...That's when Vegeta moved.
Even to Gohan's accelerated time, it was a blur. Vegeta moved, catching up to Nappa almost instantly, and he grabbed Nappa by the arm, and threw him into the sky.
It all happened soundlessly in this shared world of theirs, and Gohan could even see the ripples of the air, as Vegeta's movements created a shockwave that slowly started to spread out in all directions, soundlessly.
Then Vegeta started rapidly gathering energy for something big.
Deciding that he was too close to the saiyan, Gohan decided to move himself, and so he launched himself backwards and into the air, noticing immediately that Piccolo had joined him.
Piccolo had clearly also been watching the saiyans carefully and had been ready to move before Vegeta finished gathering energy.
Still in the slow motion world, Gohan quickly glanced at his temporary comrades on the ground below and found them instead covering their faces and gathering their own energy to shield themselves from the attack that was about to come.
They were either too slow to dodge, had been caught off guard, or had simply decided to withstand the attack with their own energy. The latter of which was a pretty stupid move in his opinion, as dodging took much less energy overall and was far more efficient, but he had also prioritized increasing his own speed as much as possible during his training with Piccolo.
It was possible that the two of them were simply on another level now when it came to speed in comparison with his dad's friends.
Gohan quickly shifted his gaze back towards Vegeta.
He had strategically chosen that exact moment to dodge.
Blinking in the slow motion world was a pain to have to deal with. When time was slowed down this much, when you closed your eyes to blink, it took an eternity for them to open again. This was another reason why his bubble sensing technique was so useful. Piccolo could get around this problem with his own refined senses, and so could his dad, but he and Piccolo had theorized that the saiyans, since they had to use machines to detect energy signatures, had no way to overcome this aside from their own ability to instinctively know how their opponent was going to react to any situation.
Vegeta, probably without even knowing what he was doing, had seen Gohan, Piccolo and their comrades a distance away and determined that distance to be too great to be blitzed in the time it took for him to blink, and so he had allowed himself to.
Vegeta had blinked. And that was the instant that Gohan and Piccolo had chosen to launch themselves into the air a safe distance from the blast.
This preserved their element of surprise.
Vegeta hadn't directly seen their move, and so the knowledge about how fast they actually were remained preserved.
The next thing Gohan observed was Vegeta's mouth moving. It was in a different position now then it had been a moment ago.
Vegeta was talking.
...And that was another thing that was messed up in this world.
There was no sound, and it was almost impossible to lip read what someone was saying as people spoke so unbelievably slowly.
But the saiyan's mouth was moving. And since Gohan was a safe distance away, he allowed himself to drop his concentration and re-enter the normal world.
...
Abruptly the sound returned.
"Nappa! Get out of the way, now!" Vegeta shouted, as he launched Nappa into the air.
An instant later, a dome of energy incinerated the entire battlefield as Vegeta unleashed his attack, and directed it into the ground.
…
Gohan grinned at the sight.
It had worked after all.
Well... it was the lesser of the two good outcomes of his last plan, but it was still good.
Gohan had been prepared to run with his hidden bomb strategy right up until the moment Nappa was too close to continue with it, in which case he would have switched over to his first real strategy to try and take him out.
But instead, Vegeta had decided to interfere.
He had probably caught that detail that Gohan had slipped into his explanation earlier about the explosives not going off until he specifically triggered the detonator. With that, he had probably figured that he could beat Gohan to the punch. Destroying the explosives outright before the trigger was pressed. And since they apparently couldn't go off by any other means, the explosives wouldn't detonate.
And to be fair, Vegeta had actually beat him. The energy attack had destroyed the ground before Gohan managed to press the trigger, so if that had actually been his strategy, it would have been effectively countered.
But since it wasn't, it didn't matter.
Ideally, he had wanted the saiyans to leave the planet. But instead the second best thing had happened.
Vegeta had fallen for the trick and had demonstrated a portion of his power to them. He and Piccolo, and all of his temporary comrades now had some insight on just how strong Vegeta was. And how fast, and how one of his attacks worked. And by observing how he would react after expending that energy, they may even get some insight on how deep his energy reserves were.
Would that exertion tire him out at all? It probably wouldn't. But it would be interesting to see, either way.
It had been like a game of chicken, what he and Vegeta had just done, and Vegeta had blinked first.
Gohan had won that first little match of theirs, and he hadn't had to do much of anything at all.
...Just warp the truth a little, and pretend to be a crazy pyromaniac.
It had been a while since Vegeta had fought someone that could twist words the way that this kid could.
This kid was dangerous, he decided, after observing the kid trying to trigger the device in his hand.
He knew exactly how to make someone doubt themselves.
Vegeta was at war with himself now, as he watched everything unfold in his own accelerated reference frame.
The kid was probably bluffing, but he couldn't be sure. His friends in the background had all looked incredibly nervous when they had heard about the bomb. Which lent credence to the fact that it was actually there.
It hadn't been an act. Their fear had been genuine. And that same fear had vanished after the kid had explained how he had also amended the wish to prevent any of them from dying. Which meant that at the very least, those people had believed it to be true. Or at least possible, anyways.
But the kid had also mentioned it. Why wouldn't he just set it off the moment they had arrived? Why explain that the bomb existed at all?
The kid had claimed that it was to avoid bloodshed and to give them a chance to leave in peace, but it still didn't make any sense to him. They couldn't truly be naive enough to think they'd just leave the planet after promising to do so, could they?
They could have simply accepted the kid's offer to leave, and simply decided to move to a new location of their own choosing, one that wouldn't have any sort of preparations laying in wait, or they could have taken another city full of people hostage.
...But then they could have just waited where they were, he realized. These people... Even if he had ordered Nappa to come with him to eliminate all life on this pathetic rock, the kid could have simply watched it all happen, knowing that they were the only ones who knew where the Dragon Balls were, and knowing that the saiyans would always have to come back to get that information and then they'd be back at square one.
Standing on a battlefield that may or may not be full of traps.
It wouldn't matter to them if everyone else died, as they could just wish them all back to life later.
He had taken to observing the kid's eyes in the meantime to try and figure out if the kid was being serious or not... and they never wavered.
...He couldn't be sure one way or the other. And that was the part that Vegeta hated the most about all of this. The kid had trapped him.
If the explosives weren't real then maybe some other trap was. He couldn't be confident about anything on this battlefield unless he leveled it himself. Ensuring that any would-be traps were destroyed in the blast.
And… interfering with Nappa's charge would also have the added benefit of making it look like he actually cared about the fool enough to try and save his life. Which would directly undermine the kid's earlier attempts to pit them against each other.
He had to do it. The kid had tied his hands. It was well played.
…
But if it was a bluff, he was going to kill that kid for it.
...And so he stepped in.
A/N: Hope you enjoyed.
- LeviTamm