Gohan vanished, appearing in front of Piccolo's face with a jumping thrust kick aimed right at Piccolo's chin. The Super Namekian leaned back, avoiding the upper kick that would have opened him up for a follow-up attack. Gohan proceeded with the follow-up regardless, freezing up at Piccolo's eye level in mid-flight and throwing a barrage of chain punches at him which Piccolo absorbed with his palms with little difficulty. His childlike sparring partner vanished, bursting with a scarlet aura for just one blink as a rapid hurricane kick caught Piccolo in the jaw and sent him flying back.
The child Saiyan advanced on his opponent with stout attacks, Piccolo could see Chi-Chi's technicality and elegance in Gohan's form and even though he found his partner's attacks rather predictable compared to his explosive innovation earlier, he allowed Gohan's advance by stepping back and avoiding Gohan's attacks. There it was again. The Saiyan brat blinked up with the King Kai's Fist aura and appeared right in front of Piccolo with a kick to his chin that sent Piccolo soaring all the way to the ceiling.
Piccolo felt the integrity of his neck and demonic endurance being put to the test as Gohan activated his flight technique and backflipped once more, swatting his much heavier and more powerful opponent into the air. Dashing after him in pursuit, Gohan smashed his elbow into Piccolo's forehead, whipped a stiff kick at his ribs, and then pushed his other leg into the core of Piccolo's chest. He flat out copied an attack from his father's childhood by expanding his arms and legs and spinning like a whirligig, pummeling Piccolo with relentless and wide but lukewarm attacks.
Gohan stopped with a kick to the side of Piccolo's neck and then a double ax handle slam to the top of Piccolo's head, sending the Super Namekian down on the ground. Piccolo landed on both feet and caught Gohan by his heel as the cheeky bastard tried dashing in from the side with a diving kick. Piccolo flipped Gohan up, swinging in mid-air to throw him off-guard and to fumble his sense of balance.
A crushing elbow strike made Gohan whine out in pain and wince. Just like that, all of his defenses were done for. Piccolo thrust a step-in elbow slam, whiting Gohan's eyes out and sending blood and slobber to leak out of his mouth. Without mercy, the Super Namekian swatted his hand with a backhand slam and knocked the kid into the spaceship ceiling, socking off of them like a ball of rags before Piccolo collided with Gohan again in his aerial pursuit. A chop at Gohan's throat, a rapid barrage of stomping kicks aimed at the kid's pressure points, and an overhead kick sent little Gohan down for the count.
Much to Piccolo's surprise, the kid's wobbly and bruised hands pushed him off the ground, struggling against 350X Earth's gravity and the sum of his injuries. He was his father's kid alright. Piccolo had assumed that, with him being trained by his father and mother his whole life, Gohan would be a pampered and soft combatant, but this kid was tougher than he looked. Whether or not it was because Goku intended it, but seeing his father in battle has also taught Gohan just how tough he truly was as well and how far his willpower could take him in a fight.
Piccolo had no doubt that if he fought the kid seriously, he might land more than a few solid blows and give Piccolo an actually intense workout. It was something he truly never expected from a child that wasn't even able to become a Super Saiyan. Piccolo smirked, rearing his fangs, recalling his own foolishness when he dreaded the idea of killing Frieza because that'd have left the universe barren and boring for him as a martial artist. It seems he had underestimated the resolve and natural abilities of Saiyans.
"Enough!" Piccolo hissed, swatting his hand aside. Gohan had been training with the Super Namekian enough to learn more discipline than he had in the beginning. When informed that their training was over, Gohan froze in place and returned to a proper, straight-back stance, and bowed to his sparring partner before collapsing on his bottom.
"Gohan-san!" Dende whined out, running up to his friend and nurturing him back to full health. Piccolo stared at an unused stash of Senzu just lying on the table. Taking some of those was short-sighted. They were already in an extremely short supply, and this breed of magical seed was about to become extinct.
"Thanks, Dende," Gohan chuckled, cheering through the battery he had suffered.
"Your form is solid. That's your mother's work, no doubt. Though you're way too easy to read. The Androids will have a field day with you. You've no ace moves that aren't your father's and they've specifically taught themselves to kill him. You'll be just a warm-up. A punier version of your father. Something to murder, to whip him up into a frenzy, and to drive all semblance of cool thought out of his head. You might just end up getting him killed in the end too," Piccolo scolded Gohan while he sat on the ground and Dende helped his recovery.
"Piccolo-san…" Dende looked up to the Super Namekian, pleading with him to be kinder to his partner without saying a word of it to distress Gohan.
"If all you can do is copy your father's moves that he invented on the fly in the heat of other battles, you're better off sitting this fight out," Piccolo summed it up before turning his back to the young Gohan and Dende.
"B-But my father is the strongest warrior, isn't he? He beat Frieza and became a Super Saiyan. He beat you every time you two fought," Gohan winced in pain before standing back up on both feet. Dende would have gone pale if his anatomy had allowed for such expression of terror on his face. He'd have never expected his kind-hearted friend to flat-out taunt the most powerful Namekian warrior in the universe like that right after being knocked flat by him.
Piccolo turned around, though, much to Dende's surprise, his face had been calm. The Super Namekian kept his arms crossed and his eyes closed and there wasn't a single sign of wrath on his face. Neither the ridges over his eyes nor his cheekbones twitched once.
"That is true. However, your father won those fights because he's been fighting his entire life. He won those fights through experience, seeing through his opponents' weaknesses and fighting styles and adapting to them. You can't just take moves he's improvised in the past and use them against different opponents. Even if you use them against the same opponent, the enemies your father fights are better martial artists than to be caught by those moves twice. You're dead in the water just copying your father. You can't copy your way into becoming a Super Saiyan, no matter how strong you are physically," Piccolo found a way to bite Gohan back just as hard.
Whereas Piccolo reacted calmly to the callout, Gohan clenched his fists and began shaking. A shimmering, white aura spreading shiny particles off of it in its radiance lit up around the child Saiyan as the entire spacecraft that the trio had been training in began shaking. Piccolo took his eyes off the kid for a moment to observe the condition of the ship. For a second there, he felt worried that Gohan's Ki might have torn the ship apart, whereas it withstood their most intense previous training.
"This… You're wrong!" Gohan cried out. "My dad's the strongest martial artist alive. Learning his moves and fighting like him is the logical solution! All the Androids are afraid of him, that's why they're so desperate to kill him. If I can become as strong as my dad, together we can beat them!"
The intense pressure of energy stimulated Gohan's long hair, spiking them up but as more and more time passed, Gohan's wrath dwindled out and the energy he had spent just powering up to his limits, trying to break beyond them, left him all tuckered out so the kid collapsed on his knees. Sweat dripped down on the floor tiles below as Gohan panted heavily.
"Ultimate Dragon Ball detected, Ultimate Dragon Ball detected!" the ship's AI blasted out through the speakers. It had switched off the gravity machine as opposed to just keeping the gravity back to 1X as it escalated like a heavenly arrow toward the nearby planet where the Ultimate Dragon Ball rested.
"Good, it's en route to the restored Planet Namek," Piccolo nodded calmly. "We can pick it up without skipping a beat of our journey."
"Um… Excuse me, Piccolo-san, but… Why are we traveling to Planet Namek again? Shouldn't we just collect the Ultimate Dragon Balls and hurry to save Planet Earth?" Dende wondered.
"Do you even want to rescue Earth?" Gohan called Piccolo out again. "Your predecessor tried to take it over and was a scary Demon King, wasn't he? Half of you also tried to take over the Earth once! Don't tell me you're okay with the Earth being destroyed and letting the Androids die with it…"
Piccolo vanished, appearing in front of Gohan. Dende cried out to stop the Super Namekian but Piccolo kicked Gohan in the gut to shoot him upward and then grabbed the brat by his collar, pulling him in closer to his eye level so that Gohan could look into the Super Namekian's eyes and the two would understand each other perfectly.
"You've grown impudent in your early teen years, brat. If you have this much energy to rebel, I must have been doing a poor job at whipping you into shape. I'll just have to train you extra hard from now on!" Piccolo smacked Gohan on the top of the boy's head with his elbow so hard that the young teen bounced off the floor and fell flat on his back, panting heavily and needing more of Dende's aid again.
"Piccolo-san!" Dende stepped out in between the Super Namekian and Gohan.
"The reason we're going to Planet Namek is quite simple–the way Planet Namek is right now, it's just a broken shell of its former self. A pathetic ball of misery for the trash of the universe to abuse and bully. Turles, Frieza Army, the Androids… Namekians have been the pushovers to this universe's bullying for too long. As part of Planet Namek's ultimate warrior, it's my role to finish all that while protecting both humanity and Namekians at the same time. If you have a problem with that, you'll have to speak with your fists, kid. Now hurry and heal that whiny brat so we can pick up that Dragon Ball!" Piccolo replied before lashing out at Dende, who loomed over his collapsed friend to help his recovery.
"So this is Planet Hath…" Gohan looked around at the young trees and dirty plains as far as his eye could see. While the spaceship browsed for the optimal location to bring them as close to the Ultimate Dragon Ball as possible, the young Saiyan recalled seeing patches of chocolate-colored swamps and biomes of red clouds, too.
Piccolo glanced back at the kid. The Super Namekian's mouth opened up to scold him for not paying attention to the task they came here for but seeing the wonder in the kid's eyes and him splitting off from the group to explore more and more of the planet's surface, Piccolo shut his mouth and took over extracting the Ultimate Dragon Ball himself. The shiny, wish-granting artifact laid nearby a handful of eggs inside of a bird's nest. Piccolo expanded his limb to extract the treasured orb without alerting the owners of the nest, be their alien birds of pterodactyls, that were undoubtedly somewhere nearby to their presence.
"There are buildings here but no people…" Gohan scanned the surface of the location on Planet Hath they were in. "I wonder where is everyone?"
"Who knows, maybe Hathians wiped themselves out through warfare or they died because of some freak atmospheric phenomenon. Maybe they've just traveled to the stars to look for better worlds to inhabit and left their home be? If you don't want Earth to end up the same way, we better collect this and bring it home," Piccolo handed the Ultimate Dragon Ball to Gohan, knowing full-well the inquisitive reaction that it'd invite in the young teen.
"Wow!" Gohan rolled the wish-granting ball around in his hands. "I've never seen one up this close. The Ultimate Dragon Balls have black stars, not red ones, like the normal ones. I wonder why that is…?"
"It's because they possess an incredible amount of negative energy," Piccolo felt a little glad to feed the boy's curiosity. Unlike earlier, when he was pressuring the kid and trying to whip him into shape the same way that Shura's gang had been whipping him and how humans have treated his predecessor, all he got from Gohan was resentment and spite. By feeding the boy's inquisitive nature, it felt like Piccolo could really connect with him.
"Negative energy? That wasn't in any of my books…" Gohan wondered, examining the shiny ball and trying to peer right through it to get as good of a look of the black star as he could.
"That's right. All Dragon Balls are inherently a little evil. All of them generate negative energy because the idea of fulfilling desires through wishing them to be brought to life is inherently selfish and selfishness is inherently a negative thing," Piccolo pointed out.
"But dad and his friends have used the Dragon Balls to help people…" Gohan brought his point up by looking up to Piccolo with a confused look. "Now you're telling me they're actually evil?"
"You can use negative energy in positive ways. Dark sorcery, which humans have called "demonic", has always been a part of the Namekian culture. Even the purest of us have always had a speck of evil in them because light and darkness must be in perfect harmony to preserve true balance. If everyone strives to be good all the time, evil will rear its head in equal strength to match the overwhelming goodness. But if everyone who strives to be good understands and practices negative things in moderation, true evil won't get a chance to manifest," Piccolo explained.
"I don't think I get it…" Gohan blew his cheeks out with pouty lips and handed the Ultimate Dragon Ball back to his master.
"You might if you take the Dragon Balls as an example. A society of perfect virtue and goodness would never allow the Dragon Balls to exist because they are inherently selfish. By being all-good, and all-virtuous, they'd never use the Dragon Balls to bring their loved ones back to life and feed their selfishness. Without that, grief to match their virtue would manifest and rot them from the inside. Without feeding their selfishness a bit, absolute evil could take hold of that which was once absolute good," Piccolo explained while taking off to the spaceship only for young Gohan to follow him shortly.
"I see," Gohan said. "So, if we strived to be good in everything we did, we'd have never used a tool so dark like these Ultimate Dragon Balls. We'd have never cured the Heart Virus and lost many more people. That pain I felt when I lost grandma so soon after meeting her, the entire world would have felt that a hundred times over."
"That's a way you can look at things, sure. Though you can't toot your own horn too much. The negative energy from all that grief would have never threatened to destroy the Earth. The Ultimate Dragon Balls are a tool so selfish and so full of negative energy that it would absolutely do that. By always thinking you're just doing a bit of evil for the right reasons, you can just as easily become like Android 21 yourself. As far as she's concerned, she's converting humanity into machines to save them from the Heart Virus, after all," Piccolo replied.
The two entered the spaceship and Gohan slipped out from his spacesuit, rushing up to his master to continue their conversation. Dende stared at the two with wide, unblinking eyes, wondering just what the heck happened down on Planet Hath to eliminate all that resentment in Gohan's eyes and frustration in Piccolo's.
"Yeah… I think… Having lost grandma to the Heart Virus and almost having lost dad too… I think I can kind of understand Android 21 better," Gohan nodded a couple of times.
"Oh? So you're planning to become her ally then?" Piccolo raised the ridge over his eyes with a sarcastic smirk.
"No, I think she's still wrong. She's using her need to assist humanity as a scientist to shroud her own selfish need to have her revenge for whatever it was Chayote-san and dad did to her. She's in the wrong, for sure. It's just… All this you've taught me about the Ultimate Dragon Balls and the balance between the negative and the positive energy… It doesn't really answer much, it just raises way more questions," Gohan became sullen and fell on his butt. This was the beginning of what would be a pondering process on things that often took people their entire lifetime to figure out.
"What are you doing just sitting on your ass, punk?" Piccolo hissed. "On your feet, didn't you hear what I told you earlier? Our training isn't done yet!"
"Yes, Piccolo-san!" Gohan jumped up from the jolt running down his back and took a hasty fighting stance. The young Saiyan rolled in mid-air to tackle Piccolo as a living cannonball, but the Super Namekian swiped his hand, nearly cracking his pupil's spine into two with a thunderous chop that stunned and flinched Gohan, opening him up.
Piccolo skid across the floor, tripping the young Saiyan up before launching an electric wave of Ki from his antennae that lit up the entire place and supercharged the ship's systems to the point of nearly shortening them out all the while shocking the young Saiyan and leaving him covered with burns and bruises. Piccolo vanished, dashing in from behind with an elbow strike to Gohan's back that whited the kid out and left the kid slumping down on the ground almost completely lifeless.
"P-Piccolo-san, you've broken his back!" Dende cried out, smacking his cheeks in terror.
"Heal him. He's a Saiyan, he'll come back stronger from this," Piccolo muttered while cracking and rolling his knuckles to prepare for the second round. As expected, Gohan couldn't take the Super Namekian's full power intending to kill him, but that was just a matter of time until he'd work through that. Gohan wasn't a bad kid like his future version. Of that, Piccolo was sure. Now that he was certain that Gohan wouldn't let grief drive him down a dark path as it did with his grandfather, he could begin pressing down on the kid with all he had.
Even if he laid down with his spine broken right now, Piccolo had never been more certain of anything in his life than he was in his belief that Gohan could not only survive his best attempts at breaking him figuratively but also come out shining.
"Tough it out, Gohan," Piccolo whispered to himself while Dende hurried to bring Gohan back to a fighting shape. "Only through hardship you'll figure out the genuine answer, become true to yourself, and awaken your Super Saiyan transformation."