Young Trunks launched himself at his father head-first while maintaining his Super Saiyan form. While Vegeta kept his arms crossed and his body turned in an antagonistic stance toward his son, his face relayed a mild interest in such a straightforward attack. Just as he was about to close the distance, the young Super Saiyan vaulted back and took it to the ceiling of the spaceship. His sudden stoppage left a pop of a golden halo meant to blind and confuse the opponent while Trunks pushed off of the ceiling and plunged straight down with a double foot stomp.
Bemused, Vegeta smacked Trunks aside with a backhand in his base form. Unrelenting and showing a proud bruise on his right cheek, Trunks regained his senses in mid-air and burst with the full luster of Super Saiyan Ki to rush right back at his father, this time madly throwing fists forward only for Vegeta to keep his space and carefully disarm each of the boy's blows with a misdirection. Trunks changed his tactic, realizing that his swift flurry wasn't working, and began focusing some more power behind his strikes while significantly slowing them down.
This backfired differently–instead of merely redirecting the blow and returning to defense, Vegeta defused it and returned a half-assed jab that reached its intended purpose because of Trunks' wholehearted devotion to offense. Having had enough beating for one exchange, Trunks let out a resounding battle cry and reeled his right arm back, encasing his fist in a glowing mass of energy before throwing it forward only for Vegeta to catch it by the wrist, open the boy up by moving his arm and delivering a knockout blow to the gut that curled Trunks up.
After the boy collapsed on the ground and the Super Saiyan luster sparkled away from his hair, Vegeta crossed his arms and looked down at his child with a strict glare.
"That is fine, that will be enough," he declared. "You did well, changing strategies on the fly, but you have no foresight. You switch between plans without scoping ahead if they are indeed what you need and if that exact strategy will indeed work. Needless to say, you're still too much focused on offensive power, which blows up in your face when your opponent is simply stronger than you."
"C-Can't move…!" Trunks cried out with static crystals of tears lingering in the corners of his eyes as the boy struggled to peel his body off the ground with the gravity machine humming in full force, restricting the two with 350X Earth's gravity. "Turn off the gravity machine, dad!"
"No," Vegeta turned around. "The entire point of this training is that we learn to deal with oppressive gravity even when we are not training. We train in increased gravity, we eat in increased gravity, we rest in increased gravity. You wouldn't stop whining about wanting to go on this trip and I planned this trip to be a fine opportunity to crank it up with my training so that Kakarot doesn't foster ridiculous ideas about catching up to me. Proving that Super Saiyan 2 has nothing to do with royal genetics will do that to low-class hicks like him. If you're going to cry and complain, I'd rather drop you off at home and see that your mother oversees your training."
"No!" Trunks yelled out. "I'll stand up! Just… Give me a breather."
"That's what I said earlier, we'll rest," Vegeta repeated his earlier command and walked off to the kitchen. "If you want to eat, you'll have to walk on your own two feet. You're too old for your mother and father to be feeding you, and I won't have my kid eating off the floor like an animal."
"Y-Yes!" Trunks coughed out, still struggling against the pressures of increased gravity. Despite his tough predicament, he couldn't help but chuckle to himself. After everything, father took Trunks with him. Not only that, father explicitly stated that this trip wasn't about training him, because King Vegeta the IVth was no martial arts instructor. He was a warrior. That meant that they were not only going on this trip to collect the Ultimate Dragon Balls as father and son but also as equal training partners. Maybe not equal in strength, but equals in terms of their standing.
Vegeta wouldn't demand anything from Trunks that he wouldn't demand from himself. That was why, despite being put through most imaginable ways of committing child abuse, Trunks couldn't stop smiling.
"ULTIMATE DRAGON BALL DETECTED, ULTIMATE DRAGON BALL DETECTED!" the gravity machine went off automatically to prepare the systems for landing. It was a safety feature that Bulma installed into all of her spaceships. The manual artificial gravity settings went out as a vessel approached a planet for landing because landing had plenty of unruly gravitational hiccups to itself, so it was better to be safe and let the system handle it from a default 1G point rather than applying the amp from the point of a custom setting.
"Tsk, saved by your mother's softness, as usual," Vegeta snickered when Trunks began gasping for air to catch up to all the oxygen he was missing because only being able to draw half-hearted breaths and feeling like his body was being crushed and drilled into the floor by the absurd gravity. "Want to make it fun? The one to find the Ultimate Dragon Ball gets the last dinosaur thigh."
"Th-The last one?" Trunks picked himself up and sat on his rear end, brushing his hair and caressing his head. The boy still spoke funny since his jaw nearly got dislocated because of the force pulling at it into the floor and denting his entire head. "Did we eat all the rations already?"
"Don't whine, if the planet we're going to has wildlife, we can replenish them. Besides, we can always barter and buy some more from nearby space stations," Vegeta shrugged. "Eating what you're willing to kill is part of survival training. It builds character and devouring your opponent is immensely satisfying."
"I… I guess…" Trunks scratched his head, still reluctant to kill and eat something that he would meet for the first time soon enough.
"If you're so hesitant, why don't you simply beat your old man to the Ultimate Dragon Ball and get to finish your mother's precious food?" Vegeta teased Trunks before approaching the porthole to look at the soft almond hues of the shrouds enveloping the planet they'd soon land on. The planet's atmosphere seemed to have the pleasant color of peanut butter while murky green clouds spun around it, similar to how Earth's cottony clouds shrouded it.
A few hours later, Trunks was bobbing around on his rear end, seated on the spaceship floor with a dinosaur thigh larger than his entire body waving over his head. Knowing that this was the last bit of food that his mother packed for them and his father prepared for him, par for their deal, Trunks savored every bite before he licked the bone clean of any last trace of strips of muscle or spices. This was the first time that Trunks was the first to find the Ultimate Dragon Ball as opposed to his father.
"Dad…" Trunks bent his arm, letting the half-eaten dinosaur thigh hang over his back like a club and showing the boy's filthy with grease and spices face. "What happened out there? You didn't, by any chance, let me win, did you?"
"Hmph, don't be ridiculous. If you think I would do such a thing, I must not have been hard enough on you during your training," Vegeta scoffed and looked away. He was sipping on some beer from a can, though he had plenty of slaughtered slimeballs, which were the local fauna of Planet Manora. These gelatinous, utterly unintelligent aliens made of animal grease entirely and hovering through the gas clouds just above the thicker layers of Planet Manora's atmosphere didn't look appealing to Trunks at all, but Vegeta wouldn't have gathered them and dragged them all the way back if he didn't intend to eat them.
"My training? I thought we were training together to make each other stronger," Trunks became concerned all of a sudden. Afraid of being patronized and catered to like a child. His father must have already thought that he was spoiled. "And how come you've gathered all those dead blobs? When did you have the time to do that? You weren't looking for the Ultimate Dragon Ball at all, you were gathering food, weren't you?"
"Tsk, you're too smart for your own good and you've got the mean mouth of your mother," Vegeta grumbled after crushing the can in his hand and walking off to see what he could make of these dead aliens. At the very least, they would have to last them until they reached another station.
"That is enough!" Tenshinhan barked out, overseeing his students sparring with each other in free-form styles. After seeing the martial arts practice cease, Tenshinhan's strict disposition ceased and gave way to a softer look as he nodded in approval of his students' efforts. "Excellent work, everyone."
"Does that mean we pass this mysterious test of yours, master?" Maiyo, one of the students, inquired as all the curious, budding martial artists turned to their master who still had his right arm in a cast and had most of his body in bandage wraps while a few of the unharmed and exposed to the elements patches of skin had band-aids stuck on the bruises that Tenshinhan suffered fighting Baby.
"Indeed, I believe that all of you might be ready to move on to the next level of your training. In fact, it will be the final stage of your training under me as your master. You may have noticed that I haven't accepted any new students ever since I've gathered all of you. There is a reason behind that. It was always my intention to teach you the basics of martial arts and then let you out into the wild, let you experience the world, and study at your own pace and at your own time. This final test will be like a graduation year for you. It will be the ultimate test of a martial artist's skills," Tenshinhan explained patiently while his students shifted through different emotions, depending on the part of the explanation their minds shut themselves off to.
"The final stage? N-No way!" a student from the back exclaimed.
"Master, what's going on? Are you closing up the gym?" another one expressed his worries. "If we're short on money, we can always take up jobs to keep the gym open. Besides, as you've said, you can always just accept new paying students!"
"Not at all," Tenshinhan made sure to swiftly defuse these false implications. "I bought this patch of land, got this building built, and kept this gym open with the inheritance from Tsuru Sennin that I've come to receive as his student, with a little help from Bulma through the years. That's why so much of the gym equipment has the Capsule Corps logo. I do not intend to close the gym either, I will merely assemble a new class from fresh faces and start teaching anew."
"Master! We thought that you simply needed help to do maintenance around the gym in your condition. We were ready to all pitch in with the cleaning and cooking, just like we used to do during the early days!" Catsup, one of Tenshinhan's favorite students, stepped out from the front row. "Please, let us help you with whatever struggles made you make this decision!" he bowed the upper half of his body with a nigh constipated expression.
"And take away the day job from these devoted young women that came here to tend to our needs and take care of the gym with their personal touch? I wouldn't dare…" Tenshinhan's glare softened even more as he looked off to the left wing of the dojo where all the villager women coming to apply for the dojo for various reasons, ranging from love proclamations to Tenshinhan or one or more of the students to failed dojo applications and stayed while working to help keep the dojo open and well maintained and the master, students, and attendees well fed. "Honestly, I'm incredibly proud of all of you and your journey. However, just like a parent must show a strict hand in seeing their child off to take control of their own lives when they think they're ready, I too must let you go and continue training at the beat of your own drums. Do not think that you have achieved the peak of martial arts after this final stage is complete. You merely no longer need my hand guiding you every step of the way. Needless to say, both my gym and my experience will always be here for you and you will be welcome to drop by and see me or train here whenever you like. However, you will no longer be students of this dojo, you will be martial artists of your own school. It is for that reason that I've had Sesami prepare these for you…"
Tenshinhan limped his way to the dojo wall and slid a case open, only to reveal a chest inside it. Carefully and gently, the martial arts master picked the chest up with one hand and placed it on the mat in front of him while sitting down before it. Bowing their heads in respect, the students all followed Tenshinhan's example and sat with their legs crossed before their master's gift to them all.
Respectfully to his students and the contents of the chest, Tenshinhan opened it up to reveal pairs of patches with each of his student's names on them. One smaller one to sew onto the front right side of their gi, and a much larger one to sew onto the back of their gi. The students stared at these decorations with awe, even though it took them a few seconds to realize what they were.
"You wish for us to sew this onto our uniforms instead of the Ten-Shin-Ryu logo!" a student exclaimed, cluing in those who still hadn't figured it out.
"That's right. However, I will only hand these out after you complete the final stage of our training. You shall only have become the masters of your own personal styles when you graduate from my training and prove to me that my lessons have not been lost on you. These logos are not something to be taken for granted or to be seen as a disgrace against Ten-Shin-Ryu. In fact, I won't mind if you never wear them and continue to wear the Ten-Shin-Ryu uniform out of respect for this dojo. As I've said, after completing our training, you will become your own men and train under your own tutelage, meaning that I will issue you advice, however, I will be in no position to impose my training methods onto you as your master," Tenshinhan explained before closing the chest, standing up and placing the sealed logos back in the sliding wooden case in the wall.
"And what is this final stage of our training, master?" Catsup looked Tenshinhan in the eyes and asked boldly. "We are ready!"
"So it seems," Tenshinhan nodded in agreement. "The final stage of your training will be to assist me in collecting the Ultimate Dragon Balls. We will journey above the heavens themselves, far off into space, and weather the perils of the universe. If nothing in this universe can budge you, break you, or stray you from the path of a martial artist, I will feel confident in handing you out mastery over forging your own paths as martial artists and there cannot be a way in making me any prouder in graduating you than that."
While the students argued and rustled with unease, Tenshinhan limped his way forward. As their master stepped down, the students parted ways and let him pass. After realizing that Tenshinhan was going somewhere, the students followed him into a grassy opening surrounded by mountains and creeks on the outer side.
The moment that the students cleared the rocky mountain peak obscuring the grassy clearing they expected to see, they couldn't help but stop and gasp. There was a spaceship that spanned the entire grassland parked in between the mountainside, just narrowly obscured and covered by it. It was like man had built another mountain that shuffled itself into the fold. Needless to say, the spaceship had a Capsule Corps logo on it.
"This is the spaceship that will take us above the clouds and to the wildest edges of the universe. Our quest will be to collect as many Ultimate Dragon Balls as we can, in order to collect all seven and return them to Earth," Tenshinhan explained while stepping off to the side so that his gobsmacked students could absorb the sight and take in the implications. "This exam of ours is time-sensitive. We have less than a year left to complete it."
"I'm not sure how, but… My mind seems to have knowledge about the Dragon Balls, yet not about the Ultimate Dragon Balls," Maiyo grabbed his forehead, wincing in pain. Remnants of Baby's merged hive mind consciousness must have still lingered in him from the time that Tenshinhan and his students became infected with Baby's flesh and fought as his mindless thralls. One unexpected side-effect was that Tenshinhan often needed to do a lot less explaining about certain martial arts subjects or mysteries surrounding the Earth that the Dragon Team was well aware of yet the rest of the world may not have been, such as the Dragon Balls.
"They are a lot like the ordinary Dragon Balls, except a lot more powerful. All Dragon Balls expel a grand amount of negative energy when used because the very idea of wish fulfillment via magical means is innately selfish and naïve. Because of how powerful they are, the Ultimate Dragon Balls expel enough negative energy to destroy the planet they were used on within a year. In order to cleanse and stabilize that negative energy, they must be restored at the opposite ends of the universe, as opposed merely to the random locations around the world. That is why whenever they are used, they must be assembled together once their negative energy has been purged so that they can prevent the destruction of the planet they've been used on," Tenshinhan explained.
"So our graduation exam is to… Save the world?" Catsup said out loud with a horrified look on his face and sweat pouring down his forehead.
"Correct," Tenshinhan nodded. "Even though, after the death of a dear friend of mine, I have abandoned fighting for the sake of the world and I nowadays mostly fight to teach the new generation of martial artists, I cannot deny that sometimes being a skilled martial artist means that you have to use this gift and these skills for the benefit of those without them. This final graduation exam will put not only your martial arts skills to the test, as you will face incredible opponents and threats in the forms of different alien species and inhospitable conditions of outer space, but it will also test your willpower and what kind of martial artists you will be in the future. Will you use your fists to protect the innocent, or to oppress them and impose your will upon them? As someone who has walked both sides of that path, I will not impose my will upon any of you and you will graduate regardless of the type of martial artists you will become. This test of your spirit and will is more meant to serve as a mirror to each of your souls, providing each of you with the chance to judge your own actions yourselves."
"Master!" the budding martial artists chanted out in unison, their backs stiff and straight and their faces beaming with the solemnity and willpower of a honed martial artist.
"I will admit that grief has kept me somewhat alienated from the truth that being a martial artist means that sometimes you have to fight for what you believe in and forge the future you wish to see with your own hands. Protect the innocent," Tenshinhan closed his eyes with the phantom pain of his admitted blindness weighing on his soul. "This is a living testament that even your master is nowhere near done learning and growing as a martial artist and that your personal growth will never truly be complete. Merely believing that there is no further space for you to grow might stunt your growth, but that in itself does not make this falsehood into the truth. This will be my last lesson to you all, one that all of us can learn together, as it is one that needs to be taught to all of us, your master included."
Bowing and following their master thereafter, the students boarded the spaceship and prepared for takeoff. Clouds of dust burst onward from the engine of the spacecraft as an intense drive of the vapor and thick gases hovered the mountain-sized vessel above the ground, all the way where it could have expelled the blaze of burning spaceship fuel without obliterating the natural beauty surrounding the Ten-Shin-Ryu dojo. Then, in a blink, the tremendous spaceship became just a glittering star far off in the sky as it blitzed away toward the ends of the universe on a quest to save the Earth from the backlash of the means that saved it.