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.
A/N: Sorry for the wait everyone. Real life got in the way and all that. Part of the reason for the delay is also because I am writing multiple stories simultaneously, including some stuff that I haven't published yet, and even an original story or two that may never reach the light of day.
I also decided to wait so that I could update all of my stories simultaneously.
Anyway, I'm trying something a little new with my stories. Anything that I have to say will be posted on my most recent chapters. And all of my previous AN's will be deleted. This is because there were almost 10 thousand words of AN's throughout this story that buffed the word count. Which felt a bit grimy to me.
I also went through literally every single chapter in this story, and fixed a ton of errors. From misspelled character times, to excessive use of italics, to many other things. I've been meaning to do that for a while, and I finally managed it. So my old chapters are a little less bad than they used to be now.
-LeviTamm
Gohan was not one to let a potential advantage pass him by.
He had killed a bunch of people in that forest over six months ago. Giants, dinosaur people, even humans.
They had been people who had possessed some pretty advanced equipment and had had a base set up in the middle of nowhere under mysterious circumstances.
He had killed those people and had then ended up training with Piccolo.
But what they had all been up to back then, had always been a question in the back of his mind.
It had even made his list, after all.
But a lot of time had passed since then. And the humans had started an investigation after he had tipped off that cop when he had taken that day trip into the city to try and save that girl's life.
Sure enough, they had found the massacre he had left behind and had thought that the whole situation had been worth investigating.
Whatever it was that they had found, had been pretty serious.
The army had been called in. A military base had been set up, along with a perimeter around the area.
It had all been quickly classified as well.
The media firestorm had been suppressed, and everyone had been left in the dark.
Including him.
And Gohan had not liked that one bit.
Sure it was great that it wouldn't ever be tied back to him, and he could go on with his life without ever being labeled as a mass murderer, but he had been there, and even he didn't know what that group had been doing.
He was a curious kid.
So one day, during some off time in his training with Piccolo, he had gone back to that place to see if he could find anything interesting.
That had been when he had found out about the military presence in the area, and the perimeter that had been set up.
He had observed them working for a while that day. None of the personnel in the area had ever thought to look up. So he had been able to get away with sneaking around the area pretty easily.
And even in the off-chance that they could have spotted him, his ability to rapidly move around in the slow-motion world would have blurred any of his features to ensure that he wouldn't have been recognized.
...But he had found out a few things that day.
He never did figure out what the giants had been doing with the excavator, but he had seen some of the military equipment that they had been packing, as it was being loaded into trucks and sent away somewhere.
Guns, explosives, various chemicals, vehicles, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
It had been a goldmine.
Of course, Gohan had understood that he couldn't just walk in through the perimeter and take any of it, even with his superpowers, as it had all been placed under intense supervision by the guards in the area.
If he were being honest, technically he could have done so, but he would have had to kill everyone in the area, and he didn't want to get his hands any bloodier than they had already been at the time. Especially when they were all innocent, and were just doing their jobs.
And he was just a kid. There had been no way he could have carried it all. There had just been so much.
But he had been able to see inside one of those government trucks as it had passed by his hiding spot. And when he had seen inside, he had known immediately that he needed to step in.
So he had followed that truck.
Surely the guards in the area wouldn't miss one little truck full of equipment amongst hundreds of others, he had thought at the time.
And that had been his thought process as he lifted said truck up into the air when nobody had been looking after the driver had left to take a smoke break around a corner outside.
Then he had carried it off into the distance.
Piccolo had sure been confused when he had flown back with the thing, but at that point, his mentor had pretty much gotten used to all the crazy things he got up to using human technology, and he hadn't interfered.
…
There were some crazy plants out there in the world.
One, in particular, could be ground up and refined to produce a compound called YLW-3. It was an abbreviation based on its chemical compound, but by coincidence, the chemical name happened to look like the word yellow. Since the gas itself was also yellow in colour, people tended to just call it that for short. Yellow Number 3 for those who wanted to get specific.
YLW-3 was used commonly in hospitals as an anesthetic. But the cool thing about it, at least in his opinion, was that it had to be severely diluted to be made safe for humans.
In other words, it was stored like many other chemicals were. At stupidly concentrated levels, and in steel canisters at high pressures.
Then, what would normally happen in hospitals, when an anesthesiologist was prepping a patient for surgery, is they would dilute this chemical into a useable form, before administering the proper dose.
And then, like many of the lesser anesthetics out there, the patient would then be knocked out.
YLW-3 was some powerful stuff, especially at high concentrations.
While not typically lethal, if you inhaled too much of it, you'd be knocked out fast. Even in smaller doses, this was typically the case.
And it was due to this quality that all the criminal organizations and gangs all around the world would carry it around whenever they needed some sort of knockout gas.
It was the go-to.
It had become a very common compound after it had been discovered. But it wasn't something that you could just go to a store and buy. Especially for someone like him. Even with a capsule printer.
No… he had needed to get lucky to get his hands on the stuff. He had needed to meet a criminal organization and raid their stores.
If he hadn't have seen that label on that passing truck that day, he never would have managed to create trump card number two. Which was, in his opinion, the best shot that he had at ending this fight without any further escalation.
If you ramped up the dose of this compound… nobody was safe from it.
Not even him.
He had taken into account the differences in Saiyan and human biology. And had anticipated the possibility that the knockout gas wouldn't work on aliens. He had anticipated this months ago. And so, naturally, he had tested it on himself.
Being only half Saiyan, he wasn't exactly a perfect test subject, but at the very least, after successfully knocking himself out with the chemical, he had been able to deduce that simply being part Saiyan wasn't enough to have immunity.
He had needed to give himself a pretty high dose of the stuff, relatively speaking, but he had still diluted it. A lot, in fact.
His plan had been to start out at a very low dose, and just work his way up until he was unconscious. And he'd take note of when that happened.
The dose that had knocked him out had been a solution that had been diluted to about 5% by mass.
Hospitals typically had it diluted to less than 1% for humans, so his Saiyan biology did seem to give him some resistance to it, but not an extreme amount.
But if he were being completely honest, he still couldn't be 100% sure if the chemical would work on a pure-blooded Saiyan. It may have just been the human in him that it had been effective against.
But he had figured that it was worth a try anyway.
So he had ramped up the dose in the preparation of trump card 2.
Eight industrial canisters in their 100% purified form, had all been arranged inside his capsule house.
They were industrial grade, not-even-slightly-diluted canisters, inside an enclosed room, all of which he had set up to a series of tripwires and small explosives.
He had done the tests himself, and knew with near 100% certainty, that if any of the tripwires in his house were tripped, whoever tripped them would either be dead from the stupidly concentrated chemical or knocked out, in mere seconds.
These Saiyans would need to have a very powerful immunity to resist its effects.
Maybe they had one. But there was only one real way of finding out.
So he had this trap set up. It had been among the last of his preparations before coming here with Piccolo.
He had been setting it up just as Piccolo had walked into his house to tell him that the Saiyans had arrived.
But by itself, this trap left one final problem. A pretty important one at that.
How would he get the Saiyans to trigger the trap?
He couldn't just invite them into his house. That'd be weird. And there were a whole bunch of other problems involved with trying to get them to walk into a tripwire inside. He'd also be caught up in the trap himself unless he did something a bit more creative.
He needed them to trigger the tripwires. Preferably both of the Saiyans at once.
But he had had months to solve this problem. And that was a long time.
The solution he came up with was pretty straight forward if a little inelegant.
Relativity.
The tripwire didn't care whether someone walked into it, or if the whole building it was inside ran into someone. From the tripwire's perspective, these were equivalent situations.
Of course, he'd had to modify the building first. If he just threw his capsule house, his target would slam into the exterior wall. And since the tripwires were inside, nothing would happen.
So he had needed to make a hole in the wall first so his target could slip through it.
And of course, he'd had to mark and properly prime the capsule much like he had with his laser from earlier to ensure that the strategically placed hole in the wall would actually be where it needed to be as the capsule house materialized mid-flight.
And then the house would spend about a tenth of a second in the air, before the perfectly positioned hole swallowed up the two Saiyans, as at the moment, they were right next to each other.
They would suddenly find themselves inside a house, and wouldn't see the tripwire slam into them until it was too late.
Gohan had carefully mapped out the interior of that room.
He had spent months thinking about the geometry, and how to ensure that there was no way that his targets could fall into the trap and somehow miss all the wires.
He had set up a tripwire grid. Complete with dozens of triggers, all of which, would set the whole thing off.
And it was all so delicate, that he had put off actually setting these triggers until the day of the battle, too afraid that it'd be triggered by accident if he left them set up for longer than that.
A gust of wind blowing the wrong direction through the open door could probably set it all off.
He had thought about all of these things and more and had even considered which wall the hole needed to be placed on to ensure that the amount of YLW-3 that escaped the room from it, would be minimized.
He had even briefly considered rigging up some flashbang grenades to go off at the same time for even more of a surprise, a few extra things that he had also liberated from that base in the woods, but after some thought, he had decided against it for a pretty counterintuitive reason.
The Saiyans were powerful. And if they were suddenly blinded, or if their senses were compromised, they would probably lash out in all directions with a powerful energy attack to destroy anything trying to use that opportunity to sneak up on them.
This was likely something that the Saiyans had had to learn because of their reliance on scouters to detect ki signatures. They couldn't sense other people without one, which was an obvious weakness. Throughout their rampage across the stars, Gohan had imagined that they had to have come across somebody at some point that would have tried to take advantage of this, which would have caused the Saiyans to compensate somehow.
Taking away their vision left them blind. Gohan knew this. And the Saiyans had to know that he knew this. So he had to be careful in the design of this trap. He wanted it to only contain the minimum number of parts necessary to do the job. And flashbangs weren't necessary. He'd make use of the ones he liberated in a different way, later.
But the point was, he didn't want the airborne compound to ignite or break down from one of the Saiyan's lashing out like this before it made it into their lungs.
And it would all come down to about one second.
A little less than that, actually.
It would take just under one second for his primed capsule house to materialize as he threw it at them, until the moment of no return, where they inhaled too much of the compound to remain conscious.
Assuming that the Saiyans had no special, cheaty immunity to the gas, and if it took longer than one second for them to react, there was a very good chance that it would all be over with this.
Gohan looked on, as his house capsule crawled through the air. Some part of him lamenting at the fact that it was about to be destroyed.
Trump card number 2 had been played. There was no going back. And it was quite possible that the entire future of Earth would be determined during the next second.
...
Piccolo had tried to break this habit out of him.
It required a lot of effort to slow down time like this. And if you did it for long durations you would rapidly wear yourself out.
But Gohan just couldn't help himself.
He was supposed to use the ability only when he was fighting so he could keep up with whoever he was fighting with.
But he used it regularly.
He used it to watch birds fly around, to watch shockwaves shoot around the area in slow motion due to his own movements, and all kinds of other things.
There was this delicate balance that martial artists like his dad and his mentor would always try to achieve.
If you weren't in the slow-motion world when you needed to be, you could easily be caught off guard when your enemy moved, as it would look like your opponent was teleporting around. But conversely, if you were in it too much, then you would be mentally exhausted before the fight ever truly began.
And one day, Gohan wanted to try to achieve that balance. But he just didn't have the mental discipline yet to refrain from processing the world at these ridiculous speeds.
One day, he'd figure it out.
But until then…
He wanted to watch the next second play out.
The house materialized.
His aim had been perfect.
The red dot on the capsule had been facing him. Indicating that it was oriented correctly.
He and his clone had timed out the safety timer perfectly.
...
Then the house traveled thirty meters unimpeded.
Vegeta was at Nappa's side. Almost ideally placed for this attack.
...
It was almost poetic.
The sum total of humanities knowledge was at play here.
The absolutely brilliant engineers from Capsule Corp, who figured out fundamental matter manipulation. The chemists who figured out how to refine YLW-3, and make it as potent as possible. The martial artists and Ki users of the world, to teach him how to move fast enough to make an effective weapon out of all of this. And all the other scientists, physicists, mathematicians and technologists who invented computers, the internet, timers, satellites, and all the other tools that developed over decades, to bring forth this one idea.
He had simply been the one to bring all of these pieces together. The credit was hardly his alone.
A moment later, his view of Vegeta and Nappa was obstructed by the house that slammed into them.
Or more accurately, the house that scooped them up, as the perfectly placed hole was indeed perfectly placed.
Seeing this, Gohan left the slow-motion world. Allowing the sounds in the area to once again be hearable.
Gohan had to fight to maintain a straight face as he heard the storm of tripwires and explosions a moment later.
Moments earlier
Vegeta was crouched down at Nappa's side, ensuring that the idiot was still alive, when he saw his own attack vanish into thin air.
He had just finished deflecting the surprisingly large energy blast that the Namekian and the kid had worked together to produce.
And then the kid had somehow absorbed them both.
Never before had he seen something like it. And it took him a few moments to get over the shock.
Then he watched as the kid's doppelganger, threw a small item at the original that he had been speaking to all this time.
And that had been another surprise. The kid either had a twin or had found a way to clone himself somehow. And for whatever reason, that clone had been hidden from view all this time. Waiting for the right moment.
He had no idea what was going on.
The original version of the kid caught the thrown item and threw a different object that had been concealed in his other hand, straight towards him.
With no idea what was going on, and still trying to keep up with everything that had happened over the past few moments, Vegeta hesitated. He was simply unsure of what to do.
He lowered his body in preparation however, not wanting to fall into whatever trap the kid had unleashed on Nappa a moment ago.
There was an explosion of smoke, and a large object was suddenly hurtling straight at him.
...
Vegeta couldn't believe his eyes.
A building had suddenly appeared out of thin air and would hit him long before he'd be able to get out of the way.
If he had been at full power, he could have easily dodged.
But he hadn't ever intended to take these Earthlings seriously enough to do that. Having anticipated an easy victory here.
Aside from the kid's mind games, everything had been under control until just a few moments ago. So he hadn't seen it as necessary to get serious.
At that moment, as he watched the building rapidly approach him, Vegeta decided that he would not make that mistake again. Once he got out of whatever trap this was, he was going to power up, and finish everyone off himself.
He'd leave the Namekian alive so that he could get the Dragonballs, and he'd kill the rest.
...But before that, he had to counter this ridiculous trap that had been sprung on him.
A moment later, he noticed the hole in the wall of the building. It had been perfectly positioned so that the building wouldn't actually hit him. He'd fit through the hole, and so would Nappa, and they'd find themselves inside.
He glared into the darkness of the room inside, just beyond the hole, as he watched it crawl towards him.
Since he knew that he couldn't dodge it in time, he figured that he would simply allow the building to swallow him up.
He'd prepare an energy attack, and destroy the back wall of the room as it approached him.
He wasn't going to allow a building to slow him down.
He'd blow through the back wall, power up, and take a page out of that brat's book and attack them all before they were ready.
He grinned viciously, as the darkness of the building enveloped him, imagining all of their faces as the trap they had so meticulously prepared fizzled out, to no effect.
...
It was a bit like jumping onto a moving ship from a stationary platform.
Vegeta stepped onto the floor of the rapidly moving building and felt the sudden change in his velocity.
Then he grabbed Nappa and jumped off the floor in preparation for his counter-attack.
He found himself in mid-air inside the darkened room with Nappa in his right hand.
They were inside the building now, and he prepared his energy attack.
The room was shrouded in darkness so he couldn't see a thing at first.
However, light returned to the room as he reached his left arm up in preparation to blow through the back wall with an energy blast.
He prepared his punch, timing it out so that the back wall would reach him just as he swung his arm forward.
It was in that moment that he realized that he had made another mistake.
He saw his surroundings for the first time due to the light he had produced from his energy. It was the only source of light in the room.
With it, he could see everything.
Since he had deliberately waited for the back wall of the room to reach him before attacking, he had been floating idly in the air as the entire building continued traveling along its trajectory around him.
And as a result of that brief period of time he had hesitated, he had not noticed the true nature of the trap that was now upon him.
In the next thousandth of a second, the room's surroundings all imprinted themselves in his head, and he knew exactly what was about to unfold.
He had just enough time to understand what his current situation was, and not enough to actually do anything to stop it.
By waiting for the back wall to reach him, he had thrown away his last chance to avoid the actual trap that was contained within this building.
He saw the tripwires, the explosives, and several grey canisters of some sort of chemical. He didn't know what it was, but the fact that this kid had been the one to prepare it, made him equal parts furious, and apprehensive.
When he made it out of this, he wouldn't let that kid take another breath. The kid was without a doubt the most dangerous among all the gathered Earthling trash.
He saw one final glint out of the corner of his eye.
Focusing on it, he received the final shock before the trap sprung.
There was a grid of barely noticeable, unbelievably thin wires everywhere.
In fact, he felt one of them make contact with his neck in that instant.
The level of planning of this trap truly struck him at that moment.
The windows had been boarded up in advance. To ensure that he would be unable to see these wires until it was too late to dodge them.
There would be no escape.
The wire around his neck snapped, and he felt himself run into a dozen other wires, just as he heard the explosives go off all around him.
They almost all went off at once.
...But it was okay.
He had experienced blasts of far greater magnitude than this one, before.
Then he smelled something in the air.
His eyes widened in shock.
'...Do you breathe air?' He heard the voice of that kid echo throughout his mind.
Vegeta couldn't believe it.
It wasn't possible. Did that kid seriously…?
Immediately he noticed his concentration begin to slip, and his perception of time began accelerating against his will.
Everything was speeding up as whatever gas he had inhaled prevented him from focusing properly.
He couldn't keep up with the world around him any longer. And he felt himself begin to slip from that enlightened state of mind that he and all other battle-hardened Saiyans could reach that allowed them to see movements that are ordinarily way too fast to be visible. To slow the world itself down to a manageable speed.
His grasp on this mindset slipped through his fingers, and his perception of time returned to normal speed.
Now he saw the world the same way as any other powerless weakling did.
Then the back wall of the room, the one which he had initially intended to smash through, slammed into him and he felt himself lose control of the situation.
The wall didn't break upon his impact with it, which forced him and Nappa to start tumbling around inside the darkened room.
Due to the way the dome-shaped building had been thrown, it struck the ground on its leading edge, causing it to dig into the ground and then start flipping end over end.
He felt his energy attack fade, and everything was plunged into shadow.
Then he found himself smashing against all of the walls and furniture in the tumbling room.
He completely lost his sense of orientation in the blackness.
...He was the Prince of Saiyans, however. So simply smashing into all of the walls and appliances was not enough to actually do any damage to him.
It was more annoying than painful.
The part he was truly concerned about was the pungent aroma in the air that made his eyes water.
Whatever this stuff was, it was strong.
But he couldn't discern the true effects yet. Was it a poisonous gas? An irritant?
He didn't know yet. And wouldn't know until the symptoms of it started to present themselves.
All he knew was that it was strong enough to completely overpower all of his senses, and prevent him from concentrating.
It burned his eyes, his sinuses, and his lungs. But he could tell that this was more due to how concentrated the gas actually was, instead of an actual effect of it.
He needed to get out.
…That was when his eyes start to droop.
...
The pieces clicked into place.
Knockout gas.
…
The kid had used knockout gas on him.
For the first time in years, Vegeta was at a loss for what to do.
This wasn't a situation that he could just fight his way out of. He had been attacked in a completely different way than what he had been expecting from the Earthlings.
...And that shook him to his core.
His mind scrambled as it started trying to find a way out of this mess.
It was a rolling explosion of chaos and noise. The house had been traveling at literal supersonic speeds.
It was easy to forget, when he watched these things play out in slow-mo, just how fast everything was actually moving.
That house was like a bullet. And after it scooped up those Saiyans, it collided with the ground, bounced, and chaotically flew out of control. Flipping end over end as it broke apart.
The house was not meant to remain intact for long. All it had to do was keep the chemical contained in an enclosed space for long enough to be inhaled.
It worked fast enough to not really matter how long a person was exposed to it. If you smell that gas, it's too late.
Every additional millisecond of exposure just amplified the effects even further.
Gohan had never seen a sight as beautiful as this.
'Take that you Saiyan bastards.'
He had not taken the time to remove the furniture from inside his house.
Which meant that the inside of the thing, as it rolled around, was probably very much like the interior of a fully stocked refrigerator that had just been shoved off the side of a mountain, and was now uncontrollably tumbling down the side.
Everything inside would be smashing against the walls, all as the explosives were being set off and the compound being violently released.
Knowing… sensing, the two Saiyans inside that place just brought a form of joy to him that he hadn't experienced in a long time.
It was the feeling of finally executing on a set of ideas that he had been carefully developing for months, and seeing it all go off without a hitch. Exactly as he had planned.
He had been correct after all.
Too much had happened in the last ten or so seconds for the Saiyans to have seen this all coming.
Heck, he had been talking about the imaginary explosives that he may or may not have buried in the ground only about sixty seconds ago. And pretending that his TV remote was some sort of detonator.
The Saiyans had not been prepared for this sudden assault. For his and Piccolo's combined energy attack. For his ability to redirect energy attacks with capsules.
Or to throw entire buildings at them at a moment's notice.
Not after spending all that time just standing around and talking.
A/N: For those skeptical of the effectiveness of knockout gas on saiyans, I invite you to watch Dragon Ball episode 11: Penalty is Pinball. And notice that in particular Goku is knocked out by sleeping gas. Therefore Vegeta is not immune.