NSFW Creative Writing[NSFW] Zenkai By Death Thread starterZackman2k12 Start dateToday at 4:06 AM Tagsalternate universe dragon ball au dragon ball z return by death zenkaiCreatedToday at 4:06 AMStatusIncompleteWatchers25Recent readers303Threadmarks5Death by meteor was bad. Death by a meteor with a truck bolted to it was just insulting. But the real nightmare started in the afterlife, where a bored clerk handed Daichi Sakamoto his reincarnation package: Return by Death, Zenkai Boost, and a one-way ticket to the Dragon Ball universe. With curses that make every enemy stronger than him.
He's going to die. A lot.ThreadmarksStatistics (5 threadmarks, 12k words)ThreadmarksReader mode RSS CHAPTER 1 ZENKAI BY DEATH!Words 4.1kToday at 4:06 AMCHAPTER TWO: FIRST CONTACT[Words 1.9kToday at 4:32 AMChapter 3 CHECKPOINT!Words 2.4k51 minutes agoCHAPTER FOUR: GETTING FURTHER; RESOLVEWords 1.6k36 minutes agoCHAPTER FIVE: THE CYCLEWords 2.1k16 minutes agoIgnoreWatchThread ToolsThreadmarksView contentThreadmarks CHAPTER 1 ZENKAI BY DEATH! View contentZackman2k12The one and only Keikaku Doori MotherfuckerToday at 4:06 AMAdd bookmark#1ZENKAI BY DEATH
The insulated DoorDash bag strapped to my rear rack was threatening to slide off again. I reached back with one hand to nudge it into place while keeping the other on the handlebars, sweat dripping from my chin onto the crossbar. Thursday evening, Shibuya ward, and I was already thirteen minutes behind schedule because some guy on the twenty-third floor of a locked apartment building couldn't be bothered to come down and meet me.
Thirteen minutes.
The ramen in the bag had long since gone from "piping hot" to "lukewarm apology."
I know, I know. Not exactly the stuff of epic tales. But I'm not telling you about the ramen. I'm telling you what I was thinking about right before I died the first time.
The intersection was one of those wide-open ones near Yoyogi, six lanes across with a pedestrian scramble in the middle. My light was green. My pedaling was steady. I was maybe a hundred meters from the apartment complex where my customer was probably refreshing the app with increasing irritation, and I was mentally rehearsing the bow-and-apology combo I'd deploy when I handed over the soggy noodles.
I never got to use it.
The truck came from the left.
Not "ran the red light." No, that would imply someone was behind the wheel making a terrible decision. What I saw, in the half-second before my brain caught up with my eyes, was a ten-ton Isuzu box truck barreling through the intersection at full speed with an empty cab. Windshield glinting. Steering wheel motionless. Driver's seat occupied by nothing but shadow.
My body moved before my thoughts did. I yanked the handlebars right, then immediately counter-steered hard left, throwing the bike into a rear-wheel skid that sent the back tire screeching across the asphalt in a perfect crescent arc. The truck's grille passed close enough to my left calf that I felt the heat of the engine wash over my leg. The wind of its passage yanked the DoorDash bag clean off the rack and sent it tumbling down the road behind me. There went my four-point-eight star rating.
I planted both feet on the ground, chest heaving, staring at the truck as it continued its driverless rampage down the street and crumpled into a Lawson's storefront two blocks away.
"Okay," I said out loud. "Okay, what the hell."
That was when I heard the second set of engines.
I turned. The next intersection, maybe fifty meters ahead, now had two trucks rolling into view from opposite directions. Same thing. Empty cabs. Synchronized. They angled toward me like a pair of jaws closing.
I don't know how to explain what I did next except to say that fear is a hell of an engineer. I popped the front wheel up, a clumsy manual I'd never been able to pull off in my twenty-two years of casual cycling, and pedaled backward. The chain caught in some mechanically improbable way that should have snapped it clean in half. It didn't. The bike reversed three meters, then four, then I dropped the front wheel and cut a diagonal across the sidewalk, hopping the curb with a bone-jarring crunch. The two trucks kissed each other's bumpers with a shriek of twisted metal exactly where I'd been standing a second before.
My lungs were on fire. My legs were trembling. The bike frame was making a noise like a wounded animal.
I looked up.
Four trucks. One at each corner of the intersection ahead. And above them, I swear on everything I am about to tell you, I swear this is true, a meteor.
Not a metaphorical one. A chunk of burning space rock the size of a minivan, screaming through the atmosphere, glowing white-hot and shedding sparks, and bolted to its front surface was a fifth truck. The truck was fused to the meteor's face like some kind of cosmic hood ornament, its headlights still on, its empty cab flickering orange in the fire of atmospheric entry.
The four trucks boxed me in from all sides. I had nowhere left to swerve. No physics-defying trick left to pull.
The meteor descended.
I remember thinking, absurdly, that this was going to destroy my bike.
Then white.
Then nothing.
Then fluorescent lights.
The kind that hum at exactly the frequency of existential dread. Long tubes of buzzing, washed-out white set into a ceiling made of those cheap fiberboard tiles with the little irregular holes punched in them. The air smelled like toner ink and floor wax and something else I couldn't place until much later. Despair. The air smelled faintly of despair.
I was standing.
I didn't remember getting to my feet. I didn't remember having feet. But there they were, in the same scuffed sneakers I'd been wearing, planted on a floor of polished linoleum the color of old oatmeal. My body was intact. No burns. No broken bones. My heart was beating, which seemed like a questionable design choice given what had just happened to me.
I was in a hallway. A very long hallway.
The walls were beige. Of course they were beige. They stretched forward into a vanishing point so distant I couldn't make out the end, lined on both sides with those fabric-covered cubicle partitions you see in government offices. Every few meters, a potted plant sat dying in slow motion. There were no windows.
And there was a line.
Hundreds of people. Thousands, maybe. Stretching ahead of me in a sluggish serpent of shuffling bodies, all facing the same direction, all wearing the expressions of people who had been waiting long enough to forget what they were waiting for. Some were in modern clothes like mine. Others wore garments that suggested they'd been here for a very, very long time.
A hand reached out from my left and shoved something into my palm.
I looked down. A slip of paper with a number printed on it.
734,821.
I looked up. The hand belonged to a man in a gray uniform seated behind a small desk. He had the face of someone who had been doing the exact same job since before the invention of fire and had made peace with that fact a long time ago.
"Take a number," he said, already looking past me to whoever was next. "Wait in line. When your number is called, proceed to the indicated window. Do not lose your ticket. Do not attempt to skip the line. Do not attempt to die again before your case is processed."
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I was hit by a meteor," I said. "There was a truck bolted to the front of it."
The man did not look at me.
"Next."
"Wait. Please. Just tell me what this place is. What happens now?"
He sighed. It was a sigh with geological layers. A sigh that contained multitudes.
"Sir, you are deceased. You are in the queue for processing. Given the circumstances of your arrival, I would prepare for a significant wait. Now please move along."
I stared at him. He stared through me.
The person behind me in line, a middle-aged woman in a hospital gown who looked equally confused, nudged my shoulder.
"Just take the number," she whispered. "I've been here three hours already. The faster you move, the faster we all move."
I looked at the slip of paper in my hand. 734,821. The number felt impossibly large and impossibly small at the same time. I looked down the endless beige hallway at the thousands of people shuffling forward inch by inch toward whatever waited at the end.
Somewhere in the distance, a tinny speaker crackled and announced a number I couldn't quite make out.
The line shuffled forward six inches.
I shuffled with it.
The line moved six inches at a time.
That was the rhythm. Six inches forward. Wait. Six inches forward. Wait. The fluorescent lights never flickered, never dimmed, never acknowledged that time was a concept that existed in this place. My sneakers made soft squeaking sounds on the linoleum. The potted plants remained exactly as dead as they had been when I first noticed them. I could not tell you how long I stood in that line because there was no way to measure it. My phone was gone. My bike was gone. The DoorDash bag was somewhere in a Shibuya intersection getting run over by driverless trucks.
Six inches forward.
The woman in the hospital gown behind me had started talking somewhere around what might have been hour two. She had been hit by a bus while crossing the street to visit her mother in the hospital. The irony was not lost on her. She told me about her cat, about her job at a publishing company, about a trip to Okinawa she had been planning for the summer. Then she stopped talking. Then she started again. Then she stopped.
I do not know when she stopped for good because the line kept moving six inches at a time and eventually I could not hear her voice anymore.
The beige walls did not change. The fiberboard ceiling did not change. The man in the gray uniform at the desk behind me became a distant memory. New people joined the line. Old people vanished from it. I learned to stop looking at the slip of paper in my hand because the number never changed. I learned to stop looking at anything at all.
Six inches forward.
The tinny speaker crackled. Numbers were announced. None of them were mine.
What felt like years later, I reached the front.
I knew it was the front because the line stopped existing in front of me. There was just a window. A counter. A pane of frosted glass with a semicircle cut out at the bottom, the kind you see at bank tellers or old post offices. A man sat on the other side with his back to me, typing at a keyboard that made sounds like a drawer full of silverware being dropped down a flight of stairs.
I stood there. I was not sure if I was supposed to announce myself or wait to be acknowledged. The years in line had worn away my instincts for human interaction.
The man swiveled around.
He was younger than the guy at the intake desk. Sharper. His gray uniform was pressed and clean and he wore a pair of reading glasses perched halfway down his nose. He looked at me the way a man looks at a receipt he is about to throw away.
"Number."
I held up the slip of paper. He squinted at it, then at a screen to his left, then back at me.
"734,821. Sakamoto Daichi. Male. Twenty-two. Cause of death..." He stopped. He leaned closer to the screen. He leaned back. He removed his glasses and cleaned them with a cloth from his breast pocket and put them back on and looked again.
"Meteor," he said flatly. "With a truck bolted to it."
"That is correct."
He stared at me for a long moment. Then he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and continued reading.
"Okay. Okay. Let me pull up your file. Karma assessment, past lives, allocation of merits and demerits." The keyboard clattered. The screen flickered. He made a small humming sound in the back of his throat. "Hmm. All right. Not great. Not terrible. You recycled a lot. Held doors for people. Helped an old woman carry groceries up three flights of stairs last month. But you also stole a pack of gum from a convenience store when you were fourteen and you never apologized to your mother for that thing you said on her birthday six years ago. You know the thing."
My stomach tightened. I knew the thing.
"So here is how this works," he said, spinning a pen between his fingers. "Your karma indicates you get two boons. Two curses. And a spin of the reincarnation wheel. Simple enough. Let me pull up what the system generated for you."
He squinted at the screen again. His expression shifted. The corner of his mouth twitched upward.
"First boon." He paused. "Return by death."
My blood went cold.
"Wait," I said. "Return by death. Like... like Return by Death?"
The clerk raised an eyebrow. "You are familiar with the concept."
Familiar. Familiar. I had watched Subaru Natsuki scream and sob and claw his way through death after death on my laptop screen in my cramped apartment, eating convenience store onigiri at two in the morning. I had watched him die to the same assassin over and over. I had watched him watch the people he loved forget him. I had stayed up until sunrise binging the second season, telling myself I would stop after one more episode, unable to look away from the slow-motion train wreck of a power that broke its user in ways that had nothing to do with physical pain.
Familiar was not the word.
"That is not a boon," I said, my voice coming out higher than I intended. "That is not a boon. That is a curse. That is the worst curse. That is a living nightmare. Do you understand what you just said to me?"
"It is what the system assigned." He shrugged. "You watch too much anime, kid. Anyway, you do not get to pick. Moving on."
"Moving on? You cannot just move on. I have to go through what Subaru went through? I have to die, and die, and die, and the people I care about will never remember, and I will just have to carry all of it alone forever?"
"Second boon." He talked over me like I had not spoken. "Oh. Oh, hey. Zenkai boost. You know what that is?"
I stopped breathing.
"Every time you nearly die, you get stronger. Significant physical enhancement. Recovery from injury grants proportional power increase. Classic Saiyan physiology perk." He nodded appreciatively. "Not bad. Not bad at all."
I knew exactly what a zenkai boost was. I had grown up on Dragon Ball. I had drawn Goku's hair so many times in the margins of my school notebooks that my teachers had stopped confiscating them out of sheer exhaustion. I knew about Saiyans getting stronger after near-death. I knew about Vegeta manipulating it on Namek. I knew about Cell coming back from a single nucleus with power that dwarfed everything that came before.
And now I was looking at a combination.
Return by death. Zenkai boost.
Death. Power. Death. Power. Death. Power.
I was not getting the near-death version. I was getting the full-death version.
"Oh no," I whispered.
"Huh. That is weird."
"What is weird?"
"They are merging." He tapped the screen with his pen. "The two boons. They are combining into one. The system does that sometimes when there is thematic overlap. Return by death plus zenkai boost equals..." He waited. The screen made a processing sound. "Zenkai by death. Huh. You die, you come back, you come back stronger each time. The zenkai trigger is the death itself rather than just a near-death experience."
I gripped the edge of the counter. My knuckles went white.
"So I have to die," I said. "I have to actually die. And then I come back. And then I am stronger. And then I have to die again. To get stronger again."
"Looks that way." He scratched his chin. "Well. At least it is not entirely worthless. A functional combination. Good for you."
"Good for me?" My voice cracked. "I have to die repeatedly. I have to experience death again and again. I have to feel it happen. And then I have to keep going. Subaru's power already broke him and he did not even get a stat boost out of it. I have to go through that but with a reward system that incentivizes me to actually seek out death. That is not a boon. That is a psychological torture device designed by someone who hates me specifically."
The clerk looked unimpressed. "Are you done?"
"No, I am not done. This is insane. This is completely insane."
"Your other option is oblivion. No reincarnation. No nothing. You want me to file for that instead?"
I shut my mouth.
"Did not think so." He swiveled slightly toward the wall. "Now for the wheel."
He gestured to a screen mounted on the wall to my right. A colorful wheel appeared, divided into segments with names I both recognized and did not. Some were familiar from my years of reading and watching everything I could get my hands on. Midgard. Azeroth. The Lands Between. Earthland. Others were strange and unknown and somehow more frightening than the ones I recognized.
"Spin it," he said.
There was a button on the counter. Large. Red. Looked like it had been pressed a billion times by a billion trembling hands.
My hand hovered over it.
"Wait," I said. "Wait. What about the curses? You said there were curses."
"After the wheel." He waved a dismissive hand. "Curses can adapt based on where you end up. No point reading them until we know the destination. Spin."
I did not like that. I did not like the word "adapt." I did not like anything about any of this.
But my hand was already moving. My finger pressed the red button.
The wheel spun.
Colors blurred. The segments merged into a single whirring smear of light and text. The wheel made a clicking sound as it turned, a mechanical tick-tick-tick that seemed to go on for much longer than it should have. Midgard slid past. Azeroth. The Cosmere. Earth-616. Names I knew and names I did not. The black unlabeled segment near the bottom flickered past like a blink. The ticks grew further apart. The needle hovered.
It landed.
"Dragon Ball."
The clerk said the words with a finality that settled into the air like a funeral bell.
"Dragon Ball," he repeated. "Huh."
"No," I breathed. "No, no, no, no, no."
I slammed my palms against the counter. The frosted glass rattled in its frame.
"You are screwing me. You are screwing me completely. Do you have any idea what Dragon Ball is? I know Dragon Ball. I have watched every episode. Every movie. I have played the games. I know what the power levels are in Dragon Ball. Master Roshi blew up the moon in the second tournament arc. The moon. And he was not even close to the top. Vegeta could destroy planets by the Saiyan Saga. Frieza destroyed Planet Vegeta with one finger while sipping wine. Cell was going to destroy the solar system. Buu turned a city into candy. Beerus tapped a table and destroyed half a planet. And you are sending me there with a power that requires me to die."
"I am not sending you anywhere. The wheel sends you. I just process the paperwork."
"Please. Please, I am begging you. Is there anything I can do? Any appeal? I will take anything else. I will take the black segment. I will take oblivion. Just not Dragon Ball. Please."
The clerk looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked back at his screen.
"Now for the curses."
"Did you hear anything I just said?"
"No." He scrolled. "First curse. Stronger opponents wherever you go."
The words hit me like a brick.
"No," I whispered. "No, please. Not with Dragon Ball. You cannot."
"That is rough," the clerk said, ignoring me entirely. "That is really rough. You walk into a tavern and the local bandit turns out to be a retired war god. Wait, hold on."
He leaned closer to the screen. The keyboard clattered.
"Oh. Oh, that is interesting. The curse is transforming. Adapting to the world assignment. Stronger opponents is converting to higher power levels. Makes sense. In a universe where everyone runs on ki and power scaling, that is how the curse manifests. Everyone you fight will simply be at a higher tier than you are. Mechanically cleaner. More elegant, really."
I felt my legs go weak. "Higher power levels. In Dragon Ball. Where power levels start in the thousands and go up to numbers that do not have names."
"Second curse." He clicked his tongue. "Live in interesting times."
He actually laughed. A short, sharp laugh that echoed off the fiberboard ceiling.
"Oh, that is bad." He was grinning now. "Live in interesting times. The old Chinese curse. May you live in interesting times. And combined with the stronger opponents curse?" He shook his head slowly, almost admiring. "Too bad. Really. That is genuinely awful for you."
"Please tell me it does not transform. Please tell me it stays the same."
He typed. The screen flickered. He made a thoughtful noise.
"It is transforming. Live in interesting times is converting to more encounters. So you do not just get strong enemies. You get a lot of enemies. And they are all strong."
He spread his hands as if presenting a birthday cake.
"Synergy."
I wanted to scream. I wanted to flip the counter. I wanted to go back in time and tell myself to call in sick for that DoorDash shift. I wanted to reach through the frosted glass and grab this smug bastard by his pressed gray collar and shake him until he understood what he was doing to me.
"So let me make sure I understand this," I said, my voice trembling. "I am being sent to Dragon Ball. A universe where people blow up planets with their fingers. I have to die to get stronger. Everyone I fight will have a higher power level than me. Trouble will find me constantly. I will have more encounters than I can handle. Every single fight will be against someone who outclasses me. And the only way to close the gap is to die against them. Repeatedly."
"That is the gist."
"I am going to die to Raditz," I said, my voice rising. "I am going to die to Nappa. I am going to die to Vegeta before he even turns into a good guy. I am going to die to the Ginyu Force. I am going to get my body stolen by Captain Ginyu. I am going to die to Frieza in every single one of his forms. I am going to die to the androids. I am going to die to Cell who has the cells of every fighter who ever existed and will know every technique I could possibly use. I am going to die to Buu who will turn me into a chocolate bar and eat me. I am going to die to Beerus. I am going to die to Golden Frieza. I am going to die to Jiren. I am going to die to Moro. I am going to die to Granolah. I am going to die to Black Frieza who one-shot Ultra Instinct and Ultra Ego at the same time. I am going to die forever. Do you understand? Do you understand what you are doing to me?"
The clerk stood up from his chair. He stretched his arms above his head. He looked at me with something that might have been pity or might have been boredom or might have been the satisfaction of a man who has seen this exact breakdown a thousand times and has long since stopped caring.
"Enjoy your new life."
He turned away.
"Sucks for you."
The frosted glass slid shut. The fluorescent lights flickered once. The tinny speaker crackled and announced the next number.
"No," I said. "No, wait. Wait. Please."
I felt the floor dissolve beneath my feet.
The beige hallway tilted sideways. The dying potted plants blurred into streaks of brown and green. The hum of the fluorescent lights stretched into a long, low drone.
Nothing again.
Nothing, and somewhere in the dark, the distant roar of an engine.
A pod. A space pod. Round and white and screaming through atmosphere.
I knew that sound.
I had heard it in episode one. Like ReplyReport Reactions:FryGuy, anirocks, gaouw and 4 othersZackman2k12Today at 4:06 AMAdd bookmarkView discussionThreadmarks CHAPTER TWO: FIRST CONTACT[ View contentZackman2k12The one and only Keikaku Doori MotherfuckerToday at 4:32 AMAdd bookmark#3CHAPTER TWO: FIRST CONTACT
I woke up screaming.
The pod was tiny. Claustrophobic. A white metal egg with a single round window and control panels that meant nothing to me. Warning lights flashed. Something beeped with increasing urgency. Through the window, a blue-green planet swelled to fill the entire view, and I was plummeting toward it at a speed my brain refused to calculate.
No tail. I had checked. Twice. I was human. Just a guy. A normal guy hurtling toward the Dragon Ball universe in a Saiyan space pod for reasons that probably made sense to someone, somewhere.
The atmosphere hit. The pod shuddered and screamed. Orange fire swallowed the window.
"I am going to die," I said. "Instantly. The moment I land."
The ground came into view. Mountains. Forests. A tiny house with a curved orange roof.
Mount Paozu. Home of Son Goku.
The pod impacted.
First Death
The hatch blew. I crawled out coughing, hands raised, mouth already forming the words I come in peace—
Something small and blue and impossibly fast slammed into my chest.
Ribs cracked. Spine folded. Blackness.
Second Death
I woke up screaming. The pod. The beeping. The planet.
"Okay," I gasped. "He tackled me. Child. Happy. Tackle. Death."
I was stronger. I could feel it. The Zenkai by Death had kicked in. My limbs were tighter, denser.
The pod crashed. I kicked the hatch open and rolled out, already shouting.
"FRIENDLY. I AM FRIENDLY. PLEASE DO NOT—"
A fist buried itself in my stomach. The boy stood there, fist extended, head tilted, eyes wide with curiosity. "Oh. You broke."
Darkness.
Third Death
I woke up screaming. Again. "He punched me as a greeting. A friendly hello punch."
Two deaths. Two boosts. My body hummed with unnatural strength.
The pod crashed. I stepped out. Hands up.
"I AM VERY FRAGILE. PLEASE DO NOT HIT ME. I WILL BREAK."
The boy skidded to a stop. Head tilt. "You talk weird."
Before I could respond, he pulled the red pole from his back. "You wanna see my power pole? Power pole, extend!"
The pole shot out and hit me directly in the forehead.
Blackness.
Fourth Death
I woke up screaming. "I hate the power pole. I hate it so much."
Three deaths. Three boosts. The restraints creaked when I moved. The metal bent. I was getting stronger. Significantly stronger.
The pod crashed. I stepped out. The boy was already there, eyes shining, tail wagging.
"Hi! You came out of the sky—"
I caught his fist.
I did not plan it. I did not think about it. He threw the same friendly stomach-punch he had thrown before, and my hand moved on its own and caught his knuckles in my palm. The impact stung. It rattled my wrist. But I caught it.
The boy's eyes went impossibly wide.
"You caught it," he breathed. "You caught my punch! Nobody catches my punch! Are you super strong? You are super strong, right? Do you want to fight? I really want to fight!"
He yanked his hand back and dropped into a stance, tail lashing.
"No," I said. "I do not want to fight. I want to—"
"Power pole, extend!"
I caught that too. My free hand snapped up and grabbed the tip of the red pole. The boy was grinning now, a wild grin, the grin of a child who had just found the best toy in the world.
"You are so cool! How are you so cool? Are you an alien? I bet you are an alien. You feel like an alien. Not that I know what aliens feel like. But if I did, you would feel like one."
"I am an alien," I said, still gripping his fist in one hand and the power pole in the other. "I am an alien and I am friendly and I do not want to fight. Please."
"But you are strong!"
"I am not strong. I just... okay. Listen." I released his fist. I released the pole. I crouched down to his eye level. "I died three times to get this strong. Every time I die, I come back, and I come back stronger. That is why I caught your punch. That is why I caught your pole. I learned. I adapted. I—"
Something cold wrapped around my heart.
I stopped talking.
The boy was looking at me. Waiting. His head was tilted. But I could not speak. I could not breathe. There was a pressure in my chest, a terrible squeezing pressure, like invisible fingers curling around the muscle of my heart and tightening.
No.
I looked down. There was nothing there. No hand. No shadow. No visible force. But I felt it. I felt it as clearly as I had felt the boy's fist in my stomach. Fingers. Long and thin and cold. Wrapped around my heart. Squeezing.
No, no, no—
I had forgotten. In the chaos of dying and coming back and dying again, I had forgotten the rule. The most important rule. The rule Subaru had learned the hard way.
Do not tell anyone.
The Witch of Envy did not exist in this universe. She should not exist in this universe. But Return by Death was her power, her curse, her brand upon the soul, and apparently she had followed it here. Or the system had replicated her enforcement. Or something. It did not matter. What mattered was the hand around my heart.
The boy was saying something. His mouth was moving. I could not hear him over the roar of blood in my ears.
The fingers tightened.
I opened my mouth to scream and no sound came out.
The world went white, then red, then black.
Fifth Death
I woke up screaming. Loudly. Longer. My hands flew to my chest and clutched at my shirt. My heart was beating. It was there. It was whole. The phantom fingers were gone.
"The witch," I gasped. "The witch is here. She is here. Or the enforcement is here. Whatever it is, it is here. I cannot tell anyone. I cannot explain. I cannot say the words."
Four deaths now. Four boosts. I could feel the power thrumming in my veins, denser and hotter than before. My second death by heart-crushing had given me another zenkai on top of the three I had already earned. My body felt like a weapon.
But none of that would matter if I said the wrong thing and the witch grabbed my heart again.
"Okay. New rules. Do not talk about the deaths. Do not explain the power. Just... survive."
The pod crashed.
Fifth Attempt
I stepped out of the pod and Goku was already running toward me, a blue-and-orange blur of childlike enthusiasm.
"Hi! You came out of—"
I sidestepped. His tackle missed. He stumbled, caught himself, and spun around with his eyes even wider than before.
"You dodged! That was so cool! Nobody dodges me!"
"Lucky guess," I said. "My name is Daichi. I am an alien. I come from space." I paused. Chose my words carefully. "I am not here to fight. I just... arrived."
"An alien!" He was bouncing now. "From space! That is amazing! Am I an alien? Grandpa said he found me in the woods. Maybe I am an alien too!"
"Maybe," I said. "You do have a tail."
He looked at his tail like he was seeing it for the first time. "Oh yeah! Do aliens have tails?"
"Some do." I kept my voice steady. My heart was still pounding from the memory of the witch's hand. "Some do not. I do not."
"You do not have a tail," he confirmed, circling me. "That is okay. Tails are not everything. Hey, do you want to fight? You feel really strong. Like, really really strong. Stronger than the bear I fought last week. Stronger than the tiger. Stronger than—"
"No fighting," I said. "Not yet. I just got here. I am hungry. Do you have food?"
His entire face lit up.
"Food! I love food! I have a fish! It is longer than my whole arm! Come on, I will show you!"
He grabbed my wrist and started dragging me toward the little orange house. His grip was still too strong. His enthusiasm was still lethal. But I was stronger now too. Strong enough to keep my feet. Strong enough that his grip, while firm, did not threaten to snap my bones.
"The fish is really good," he was saying. "I caught it this morning. It took me a whole hour. It kept trying to eat me but I was faster. Are you fast? You look fast. We should race after we eat. Do you like racing? I love racing. I race the dinosaurs sometimes but they get mad when I win."
He talked the entire way to the house. I let him. I nodded in the right places. I made sounds of agreement. All the while, my mind was racing.
Four deaths. Four zenkai boosts. I was stronger than any human had a right to be. But I was still in the Dragon Ball universe. I was still standing next to a child who would grow up to fight gods. And I could not explain anything. Not the deaths. Not the power. Not the future. Every time I tried, the witch would crush my heart and send me back to the pod.
I was alone in this. Completely alone.
Goku threw open the door of his tiny house and dragged me inside. It was small and cluttered and smelled like fish. A single bed. A table. A fireplace. The fish in question was hanging from the ceiling, wrapped in rope, and it was indeed longer than his entire arm.
"See? Big!"
"Very big," I agreed.
"We can share it. I was going to eat the whole thing but you are my guest and Grandpa said you have to share with guests. Are you my guest? I have never had a guest before. You are my first guest. That makes you special."
He said it so simply. So earnestly. This boy who had killed me four times without ever knowing it. This boy who had shared his fish with a stranger who fell from the sky.
"Thank you," I said. "I am honored to be your first guest."
He beamed.
We cooked the fish over an open fire. Goku talked the entire time. About the bear he fought. About the turtle hermit he had heard about from a traveler. About his grandpa and the four-star dragon ball he kept on a little shrine. I listened. I ate. I did not die.
When the fish was gone and the fire was low and the sun was setting over Mount Paozu, Goku looked at me with those wide, earnest eyes and said, "Hey, Daichi? Are you going to stay?"
I thought about the pod. I thought about the world outside this little forest. I thought about Raditz and Vegeta and Frieza and Cell and Buu and everything that was coming. I thought about the witch's hand around my heart and the curse of stronger opponents and the endless, endless dying ahead of me.
"For a little while," I said. "If that is okay."
"Okay!" He grinned. "But tomorrow we fight. Promise?"
I looked at the small boy with the tail and the power pole and the heart too big for his tiny chest.
"Tomorrow," I said. "Maybe."
It was not a promise. But it was enough. Like ReplyReport Reactions:anirocks, gaouw and BagratZackman2k12Today at 4:32 AMAdd bookmarkView discussionThreadmarks Chapter 3 CHECKPOINT! View contentZackman2k12The one and only Keikaku Doori Motherfucker51 minutes agoAdd bookmark#4CHAPTER THREE: CHECKPOINTThe fire had burned down to embers.
Goku had offered me his bed, a lumpy straw mattress in the corner of the tiny house, with the kind of aggressive hospitality only a child who has never had a guest can muster. I had refused. Repeatedly. Eventually we compromised by dragging the mattress outside and sleeping under the stars, which Goku declared was "way better anyway because now we can see the sky."
He was asleep in seconds. Curled up on his side, tail wrapped around himself like a blanket, snoring with the peaceful abandon of someone who had never stayed up late worrying about anything in his life. I envied him. I envied him so much it ached.
I lay on my back and stared at the stars. They were different from Earth's stars. Or maybe they were the same. Maybe this was Earth. Maybe every planet with a moon and a sun and a blue sky called itself Earth because that was what people named the ground under their feet. I did not know. What I knew was that somewhere up there, in the darkness between those unfamiliar constellations, a Saiyan pod was hurtling through space with a baby inside it. A baby who would grow up to be Raditz. And behind him, Nappa. And behind them, Vegeta. And behind them, Frieza.
I closed my eyes. The witch's hand was a memory in my chest. A warning. I could not speak the truth. I could not warn anyone. I could only die, and come back, and die again.
Sleep took me eventually. It was not restful.
I woke to the smell of cooking meat and the sound of humming.
Goku had already caught breakfast. Two enormous fish, each one nearly as long as he was tall, roasting over a fire he had built while I slept. He was humming a tune I did not recognize, something cheerful and off-key, and when he saw me stirring he broke into a grin.
"Morning! You slept forever. I already caught breakfast and did fifty laps around the mountain and punched a boulder into gravel. You missed it."
"Sorry," I mumbled, sitting up. My body felt strong. Four deaths' worth of zenkai hummed in my veins. "I was tired."
"That is okay. Here, eat. Then we can do stuff."
We ate. The fish was good. Goku talked. I listened. The sun climbed higher over Mount Paozu and the forest came alive with the sounds of things that wanted to eat us.
I needed to be careful. I needed to ask questions without revealing what I already knew. I needed to play the part of the confused alien who had just arrived on a strange new world.
"So," I said, keeping my voice casual, "what is this planet called?"
"Earth," Goku said through a mouthful of fish.
I made a show of looking surprised. "That is neat. My planet was also called Earth."
Goku's eyes went wide. "Really? There are two Earths?"
"There were." I stared into the fire. "Before mine was destroyed. By a giant meteor."
I had meant it as cover story. A way to explain where I came from without explaining anything at all. But the words came out heavier than I intended. Maybe because a meteor had killed me too. A meteor with a truck bolted to it. The universe had a sense of humor and it was terrible.
"That is cool!" Goku said. Then his face scrunched up. "Not the meteor part. The meteor part is sad. But the two Earths part is cool. I am sorry your Earth got destroyed."
"Thank you."
"Were there strong people on your Earth? Did you fight them?"
"No. I was not... I was not a fighter. Where I came from."
"Oh." He seemed genuinely confused by this concept. "What did you do?"
"Delivered food. On a bicycle."
"Food delivery!" He bounced up. "That is important! Food is the most important thing. You were like a hero. Bringing food to people who were hungry."
I laughed. I could not help it. It was the most generous interpretation of DoorDash I had ever heard, and it came from a child who punched boulders into gravel for fun.
"Something like that."
Goku finished his fish and tossed the bones into the woods. He stood up and stretched, his tail uncurling behind him.
"Okay! Let us train!"
I blinked. "Train?"
"Yeah! You said you were not a fighter before. But now you are here. And you feel strong. So we should train. Training makes you stronger. Grandpa said so."
I thought about it. Training with Goku. The boy who would become the strongest fighter in the universe. The boy who had killed me four times without meaning to. Training with him would not trigger the zenkai- no death, no boost. It would be pointless for me. But for him...
For him, training with someone who could actually keep up might mean something. Might push him further. Might prepare him for what was coming.
"Okay," I said. "Let us train."
The training was, as predicted, pointless.
For me, anyway.
Goku ran me through his routine. Push-ups. Sit-ups. Squats. Laps around the mountain. Punching the big oak tree until our knuckles bled. He did everything at full speed, full power, and I kept up because four zenkai boosts had pushed me into a realm of physical ability I still did not fully understand. But I was not learning anything. There was no technique here. No ki control. No martial arts philosophy. Just a feral child's idea of exercise, passed down from a grandfather who had learned from a master but had clearly simplified everything for a toddler.
"Do fifty laps around the mountain!" Goku shouted, already running.
I ran. The mountain was large. Fifty laps was insane. I did them anyway.
"Now climb the cliff without using your hands!"
I climbed. I fell twice. I did not die, so no zenkai. Just bruises.
"Now punch the tree until it falls over!"
We punched the tree. It took four hours. My knuckles were raw. Goku's knuckles were fine. The tree eventually fell, and Goku cheered like we had won a war.
"This is the best day," he declared. "I never had anyone to train with before. Grandpa used to train with me but then the monster stepped on him. Training alone is boring. You get bored?"
"Sometimes," I said, which was the understatement of my entire existence.
"Me too. But not today! Today is fun!" He dropped into a fighting stance, tail lashing. "Let us fight now!"
"I thought we were fighting the tree."
"The tree is dead. We won. Now we fight each other."
I looked at his eager face. His shining eyes. His tail wagging like a dog who had just been offered a walk. Four deaths I had suffered to this child. Four deaths, and here he was asking for a fifth.
"Fine," I said.
We squared off in the clearing. The wreckage of the pod glinted in the morning sun behind me. The fallen tree lay defeated to our left. Goku dropped into a low stance, fists raised, tail curling and uncurling with anticipation. His grin was so wide it threatened to split his face.
"You ready?" he asked.
No. I was not ready. I was never ready. But I had died four times to get here, and my body remembered every single one. My muscles knew his speed. My bones knew his strength. I was not the same man who had crawled out of that pod.
"Ready," I said.
He moved.
He was fast. Blindingly fast. A blue-and-orange blur that crossed the distance between us in the space between heartbeats. But I was fast now too. I sidestepped his opening punch and felt the wind of it pass my cheek. My body flowed around his follow-up kick without conscious thought. Four deaths had burned his attack patterns into my nervous system.
"Wow!" He was laughing. "You really are fast!"
I threw a punch. He blocked it. The impact cracked the air between us. He slid backward two feet, his heels digging trenches in the dirt, and his eyes went even wider.
"And strong! You are strong too! This is amazing!"
He came at me again. A flurry of punches and kicks, wild and instinctive, no formal style but devastating in their speed and power. I blocked. I dodged. I countered. My fists found his ribs and he grunted. His foot caught my shoulder and I spun. We separated and clashed again, again, again, the clearing echoing with the sound of impact.
For the first time since arriving in this world, I felt something other than fear.
I felt alive.
He was better than me. Of course he was. He had been fighting since he could walk. But the gap was not insurmountable. Four zenkai boosts had closed it to a razor's edge. I could see his movements now. I could react. I could fight back. We were evenly matched.
Goku ducked under my hook and drove his fist toward my stomach. I twisted. His knuckles grazed my ribs instead of caving them in. I brought my elbow down on his shoulder and he dropped to one knee.
"Good one!" He was laughing. Still laughing. Fighting was joy to him. Pure, unfiltered joy.
He exploded upward. His head caught me under the chin. My teeth clacked together. I staggered backward and he was on me, a blur of strikes, and I was blocking, blocking, blocking...
His hand shot forward.
It was not a punch. It was not a kick. It was just... a strike. A simple, open-palm thrust aimed at my chest. Fast. Faster than his other attacks. A lucky shot, the kind of strike that happened when instinct took over and the body moved before the mind could catch up.
I should have blocked it. I should have dodged. But I was off-balance, still reeling from the headbutt, and his palm caught me in the throat.
The crack was louder than the pod crash.
I felt my windpipe collapse. Felt the cartilage fold inward like a crushed straw. My hands flew to my neck. No air. No air. I tried to breathe and heard a wet whistling sound from the ruin of my throat.
Goku froze. His hand was still extended. His grin melted away, replaced by confusion, then horror.
"Daichi?"
I dropped to my knees. The world was going gray at the edges. My lungs screamed. My chest heaved. But nothing moved. The pipe was crushed. The passage was closed.
"Daichi! What is wrong? Why are you making that face?"
He did not know. He did not understand. He had never broken something he could not fix. The fish stopped moving when you squeezed too hard, but people were different. People came back. That was what he had learned from me, except he had not learned it, because those deaths had never happened.
I pitched forward. My face hit the dirt. I could see his feet. His small, bare feet, shuffling closer.
"Hey. Hey, Daichi. Get up. You have to get up. You said you would fight me. You promised. Daichi?"
His voice was getting smaller. More frightened.
"Please get up. Please. I did not mean to. I do not know what I did. Please."
I wanted to tell him it was okay. That it was not his fault. That I would come back. But I could not speak. I could not breathe. I could only lie there with my face in the dirt while a child begged me to stop dying.
The gray ate the world. His voice faded.
The last thing I felt was his hand on my back, shaking me.
I woke up gasping.
My hands flew to my throat. Whole. Intact. Air flooded my lungs and it was the sweetest thing I had ever tasted. I lay there, chest heaving, staring at the sky.
The morning sky. Pale blue. Streaked with pink. The stars were gone and the sun was rising over the mountains.
I was not in the pod.
I sat up so fast my head spun. The camp. I was at the camp. The fire pit from last night. The straw mattress under my back. Goku's little orange-roofed house a few yards away. The pod was visible through the trees, still smoking, still tilted.
The checkpoint had moved.
The pod was no longer my reset point. The camp was. Which meant the pod crash was permanent now. Which meant time was moving forward. Which meant my deaths had consequences I could not undo.
Five deaths. Five zenkai boosts. My body thrummed with power. I felt like I could punch through a mountain. I felt like I could run to the horizon and back before breakfast. But all I could think about was the look on Goku's face. The confusion. The horror. The small, lost voice begging me to get up.
He did not remember. He would never remember. But I would.
The door of the house banged open.
"Morning!"
Goku bounced out, fully dressed, power pole on his back, tail wagging. His eyes were bright and clear and held no memory of the boy who had accidentally crushed a stranger's windpipe.
"You are awake! I already caught breakfast. Two fish. Really big ones. Do you want to eat? Then we can do stuff! I was thinking we could train. I never had anyone to train with before. It will be so fun!"
I stared at him. Five deaths. Five returns. And every single time, this was who he was. A child. A good-hearted, impossibly strong, accidentally lethal child who just wanted a friend.
"Yeah," I said, my voice steady despite everything. "Let us eat. Then we can do stuff."
"Awesome!"
He ran back inside for the fish. I sat on the straw mattress and watched the sunrise and felt the phantom ache of a crushed windpipe in my throat.
The checkpoint had moved. I was making progress. But the witch's hand was still waiting in my chest, and Goku's friendly punches were still lethal, and somewhere out there in the wide world of Dragon Ball, things were going to get so much worse.
I stood up. My legs were steady. My hands were still. Five deaths had taught me something.
I was getting harder to kill.Last edited: 48 minutes ago Like ReplyReport Reactions:anirocks and BagratZackman2k1251 minutes agoAdd bookmarkView discussionThreadmarks CHAPTER FOUR: GETTING FURTHER; RESOLVE View contentZackman2k12The one and only Keikaku Doori Motherfucker36 minutes agoAdd bookmark#5CHAPTER FOUR: GETTING FURTHER; RESOLVEThey sparred again that afternoon.
Five deaths had reshaped me. My body was a library of every mistake I had made, every killing blow I had absorbed, every fraction of a second I had failed to react. When Goku came at me with his wild, joyful flurry, I saw every opening. Every gap. Every moment where his instinct outpaced his form.
I did not beat him gently.
I could not afford to. The curse demanded stronger opponents. Every death had to mean something. Every fight had to push me further. Holding back was not kindness — it was suicide with extra steps.
My fist caught him in the ribs. He folded. My kick swept his legs. He hit the ground. My palm drove into his chest and launched him backward through the stump of the tree we had spent four hours punching down.
He lay in the dirt, gasping, eyes wide with something that was not quite pain and not quite shock. Wonder, maybe. The look of a child who had just discovered the mountain was taller than he thought.
"You... you won," he managed. "You really won. I could not even touch you."
I stood over him, breathing hard. My knuckles throbbed. My heart pounded. But I had done it. I had beaten Son Goku in a fair fight.
"That was amazing!" He scrambled to his feet, wobbling, clutching his side. "You are so strong, Daichi! Way stronger than this morning! How did you get so strong so fast?"
I could not tell him. The witch was always listening. "I am a fast learner."
"We have to fight again tomorrow! I am going to get stronger too. You will see!"
He limped back to the house, still grinning, still talking, still utterly undefeated in spirit. I watched him go and felt the first cold trickle of dread.
He was going to get stronger. That was what Saiyans did. They fought, they lost, they healed, and they came back stronger. Zenkai by Death was their birthright, woven into their biology, as natural as breathing.
The difference was that Goku did not need to die to get it.
The next morning, Goku kicked down the door of his own house.
He did not open it. He kicked it. The door flew off its hinges, sailed across the clearing, and embedded itself in a boulder. He strode out with his tail lashing and his eyes blazing and a grin that belonged on a predator, not a child.
"I feel amazing!" he shouted. "I feel like I could fight a whole army! Did you get stronger too? You feel stronger. But I feel way stronger. Let us fight!"
We fought.
He was faster. Sharper. His punches carried weight they had not carried yesterday. The zenkai from his beating had pushed him into a new tier of power, and I felt every ounce of it. His fist grazed my cheek. His kick clipped my shoulder. For the first minute, I was on the back foot, retreating, dodging, barely keeping up.
But I had five deaths in my veins. Five zenkai boosts, earned the hard way, stacked one on top of another. His one night of healing was not enough to close the gap.
I caught his kick. I twisted his ankle. He yelped and I threw him into the ground hard enough to make a crater.
The fight lasted ten minutes. He landed three hits. I landed thirty. When he finally dropped to his knees, panting and bruised and still grinning, I knew what was coming.
"That was so cool," he gasped. "Tomorrow. Tomorrow I am going to win. I promise."
I helped him up. My hands were steady. My heart was not.
He was catching up. One sparring defeat had given him a zenkai that nearly matched three of mine. If he kept growing at this rate, while I stayed stagnant...
I could not stay stagnant. But the only way I grew was through death. Actual death. The witch's hand, the darkness, the screaming, the return. Goku could grow from a beating. I had to die.
The third morning, he beat me.
It was not close. He came out of the house before sunrise, fully dressed, power pole in hand, tail already twitching with anticipation. The zenkai from yesterday's defeat had pushed him further. Much further. His movements were crisper. His instincts sharper. He had absorbed everything I had thrown at him and rebuilt himself around it.
"Morning, Daichi! Let us fight!"
I barely had time to stand up before he was on me.
His fist hit my guard and my arms went numb. His kick caught my ribs and I felt something crack. I swung at him and he was not there. He was behind me. He was above me. He was everywhere, a whirlwind of blue and orange, and I could not keep up.
The fight lasted three minutes. I landed one hit. A glancing blow to his shoulder that he did not even seem to feel. He landed twelve. The last one was a punch to my solar plexus that folded me in half and left me wheezing in the dirt.
"I won!" He was bouncing. Literally bouncing. "I finally won! That was so fun! You are still really strong, Daichi. But I am stronger now. Let us fight again later!"
He ran off to catch breakfast, still celebrating, completely oblivious to the ice spreading through my chest.
I lay in the dirt and stared at the sky and did the math.
Goku: zero deaths. Three zenkai boosts from sparring defeats. Growing exponentially.
Me: five deaths. Five zenkai boosts. Growing only when I died.
He was going to leave me behind. Tomorrow he would beat me faster. The day after, I would not touch him at all. And when Raditz came, when Vegeta came, when Frieza came — I would be dead weight. A footnote. A corpse waiting to happen.
Unless.
Unless I used the one thing I had that he did not.
I sat up. My ribs ached. My arms were still numb. Goku was by the stream, wrestling a fish three times his size. His laughter echoed through the trees.
"Goku," I called. "Come here. I need to tell you something."
He dropped the fish immediately. It flopped back into the water and escaped. He did not seem to care. He ran over, dripping wet, eyes curious.
"What is it? Are we going to fight again already?"
"No." I took a breath. The words were already forming in my throat, and I could feel the faintest pressure in my chest. The witch. Waiting. "I need to tell you a secret. Something I should have told you before."
"A secret?" He sat down cross-legged in front of me. "I like secrets. What is it?"
My heart was pounding. The pressure in my chest was growing. She knew what I was about to do. She was already reaching for me.
"I can return by death," I said.
Goku tilted his head. "What does that mean?"
The fingers closed around my heart.
"It means every time I die, I come back. I come back to a fixed point. And I come back stronger." The pressure was crushing now. I could barely breathe. "I have died five times since I met you. You do not remember any of them. But I do. I remember all of them."
Goku's face went pale. "You... died? I killed you?"
"You did not mean to. You never mean to. But it happened." The witch's grip was absolute. My vision was going dark. "And I need to die again. Right now. Because if I do not, you will surpass me and leave me behind. And I cannot fall behind. I cannot. So I am telling you this knowing what will happen. Knowing she will take me. Because I need the death. I need the boost."
"Daichi, your chest—"
"I will come back," I gasped. "I always come back. And when I do, I will be stronger. Do not worry. I will see you in a few minutes."
The witch's hand clenched.
My heart stopped.
I pitched forward into the dirt, and the last thing I saw was Goku's horrified face, his hands reaching for me, his mouth open in a scream I could no longer hear.
I woke up gasping.
The morning sky. Pale blue. Streaked with pink. The campfire cold. Goku's house quiet. The straw mattress under my back.
Six deaths. Six zenkai boosts.
My body was a furnace. Power roared through my veins like a river after a dam break. I felt like I could punch the sun out of the sky. I felt like I could run to the edge of the world and kick the horizon until it moved.
And I had done it. I had weaponized the witch. I had used her own enforcement against her, turning her punishment into a power-up. She could crush my heart as many times as she wanted. Every time she did, I came back stronger.
The door banged open.
"Morning! You are awake! I already caught breakfast. Three fish this time. Really big ones. Do you want to eat? Then we can fight. I feel really strong today. I think I might win this time."
Goku bounced out, eyes bright, tail wagging, completely unaware that he had just watched me die.
I stood up. My legs were steady. My hands were still. Six deaths hummed in my blood.
"Yeah," I said. "Let us eat. Then we fight."
He beamed.
This time, I was going to win. Like ReplyReport Reactions:Bulledar and anirocksZackman2k1236 minutes agoAdd bookmarkView discussionThreadmarks CHAPTER FIVE: THE CYCLE View contentZackman2k12The one and only Keikaku Doori Motherfucker16 minutes agoAdd bookmark#6CHAPTER FIVE: THE CYCLE
Day 23. Morning.
I woke before Goku for once. The sky was still dark, the stars fading, the first pale edge of dawn bleeding over the mountains. My body felt like a coiled spring. Thirteen deaths. Thirteen zenkai boosts. I had stopped counting my power level in numbers because I had no frame of reference. What I knew was that I could run up the mountain in seventeen seconds. I could punch a boulder into dust. I could catch Goku's fastest punch without looking.
And it still was not enough.
He was a Saiyan. Every beating I gave him came back to me doubled. Every defeat sharpened him. Every sparring session closed the gap. I was dying to keep pace with a child who got stronger by having a bad afternoon.
The door banged open.
"Morning! You are already awake! That is weird. Are you okay?"
Goku stood in the doorway, rubbing sleep from his eyes, tail drooping. His hair was even messier than usual. He yawned, revealing a mouth full of teeth that could probably bite through steel.
"I am fine," I said. "Just thinking."
"Thinking is boring. Let us eat! I caught fish last night and I saved one. It is cold but cold fish is still good."
We ate. He talked. I listened. The sun climbed higher. Another day in the cycle.
"Hey," Goku said, licking fish grease from his fingers. "I have been thinking."
"That is dangerous."
"What does dangerous mean?"
"It means keep going."
"Oh. Okay. I have been thinking that we should go find the turtle hermit. You know, the one I told you about? The one who can shoot beams? I bet he could teach us both. Then we would get even stronger. We could shoot beams together. Would not that be cool?"
I opened my mouth to respond.
The sound of an engine cut me off.
It was distant at first. A low rumble. Then louder. Closer. The crunch of tires on dirt. The whine of a motor pushing through underbrush. Something was coming through the forest, something mechanical, something that did not belong in the wilderness of Mount Paozu.
Goku shot to his feet. His tail went rigid. His eyes sharpened.
"Something is coming," he said. "Something big."
We moved together, falling into a formation we had developed over three weeks of sparring. Side by side. Shoulders aligned. Fists ready. Whatever came through those trees was going to find two fighters, not one.
The car burst into the clearing.
It was small and round and blue, a capsule corp vehicle covered in dust and scratches. It skidded to a halt ten feet from the house, engine sputtering, smoke rising from the hood. The door flew open.
"Eight days!" a voice shrieked. "Eight days driving through this stupid wilderness! No roads! No signs! No bathrooms! If this stupid dragon ball is not out here I am going to..."
She stepped out and saw us.
She was young. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Turquoise hair tied back in a ponytail. A pink dress that was wildly impractical for forest travel. A holster on her hip with a pistol that would not have scratched either of us. And in her hand, a small handheld device with a glowing screen and a blinking dot.
Bulma Briefs. Genius inventor. Heiress to the Capsule Corporation fortune. The first friend Goku ever made in the original timeline.
Her eyes swept over the clearing. The tilted space pod. The fallen trees. The craters from our sparring sessions. And finally, the two of us. A feral child with a tail and a power pole. And a teenage boy with no tail and eyes that had seen death thirteen times.
"Uh," she said. "Hi. I am looking for a dragon ball. Have either of you seen a little orange ball with stars in it? About this big?"
Goku tilted his head. "You mean my grandpa?"
"Your... what? No. I mean a dragon ball. A..." She paused, squinting at him. "Wait. You have a tail. Why do you have a tail? Is that a costume? Are you wearing a costume?"
"No," Goku said. "It is my tail. It is real. Do you want to touch it?"
"Ew! No! Why would I want to..." She stopped, steadied herself, and took a breath. "Okay. I am Bulma. I am a genius inventor and I am on a quest to find the seven dragon balls. My radar says one is right here. Right in this clearing. So if you could just..."
"The four-star ball," I said. "It is inside. On a shrine."
Bulma turned to me. Her eyes narrowed. "How did you know that?"
Because I had watched this scene play out on a CRT television in a living room that no longer existed in a world I would never see again. Because I knew her name and her quest and her future and her eventual husband and her brilliant, doomed son. Because I knew everything that was coming and I could not say a single word of it.
"I have been staying here," I said. "I have seen it."
"You have been staying here?" She looked at Goku. "With him? In this tiny house in the middle of nowhere? Who are you people? And how old are you, anyway?"
"I am twelve!" Goku declared, puffing out his chest. "Probably. Grandpa was not sure."
Bulma's gaze slid to me. Her eyes narrowed, scanning my face, my build, the way I stood. "And you? Actually, wait. You definitely cannot be older than me. What are you, fifteen?"
I had been older. Much older. Another life, another world, an apartment, a bicycle, a stack of bills on the counter. None of that showed on my face anymore. The reincarnation had peeled the years away.
"Fifteen," I said. It was close enough.
"Fifteen," she repeated flatly. "And you are living in the woods with a twelve year old who has a tail."
"I am not a child," Goku protested. "I am twelve. That is basically grown up."
"This is Daichi," Goku continued, undeterred. "He is an alien from space. His Earth got destroyed by a meteor. We are training partners. Do you want to fight?"
Bulma stared at him. Then at me. Then back at him.
"An alien," she said.
"Yes."
"From space."
"Yes."
"Whose planet got destroyed by a meteor."
"Also yes," I said. "It is a long story."
Bulma pressed her palm to her forehead and dragged it slowly down her face. "Eight days. Eight days in the car. And I find a tail boy and a teen alien. This is fine. This is completely fine. I am going to find the dragon ball and I am going to leave and I am going to pretend this never happened."
She marched toward the house. Goku looked at me.
"Is she a friend?" he asked.
I thought about the question. Was Bulma a friend? In the story I knew, she was the catalyst. The first domino. Without her, there was no journey. No training with Roshi. No tournaments. No dragon balls. No adventures. She was the beginning of everything.
But she was also seventeen, arrogant, selfish in the way that teenagers are, and about to discover that the world was much, much bigger than she thought.
"Not yet," I said. "But she might be."
Goku nodded like this made perfect sense. Then he ran after her, shouting, "Wait! You cannot just go in! You have to knock! Grandpa said knocking is polite!"
I stayed in the clearing, watching the capsule corp car tick and smoke. The sun was fully up now. The sky was blue. Somewhere in the distance, a dinosaur roared.
Three weeks I had been here. Thirteen deaths. And now the story was beginning.
Bulma screamed from inside the house.
Goku shouted, "Monster! There is a monster!"
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
Here we go.
I walked inside.
The house was a disaster. Bulma had knocked over the little table. Goku was standing in front of the shrine, power pole extended, tail bristling, ready to defend his grandpa's ball from the weird screaming lady. Bulma was backed against the wall, pointing her pistol at him with a shaking hand.
"It tried to eat me!" she shrieked.
"I did not try to eat you!" Goku shouted back. "You tried to steal my grandpa!"
"It is a dragon ball! It is not your grandpa!"
"Grandpa is inside the ball! He told me so!"
"People do not live inside balls!"
I stepped between them. Thirteen deaths had given me the kind of presence that made people stop and look. Bulma's eyes snapped to me. Goku lowered his pole half an inch.
"Everyone calm down," I said. "Bulma. The dragon ball belonged to Goku's grandfather. It is very important to him. Goku. She is not trying to steal it. She just wants to look at it."
"I do want to steal it," Bulma muttered.
"Not helping," I said.
Goku's tail flicked. "Why does she want it?"
"I am collecting them!" Bulma threw her hands up. "All seven! When you gather all seven dragon balls, the Eternal Dragon appears and grants you a wish! Any wish! I am going to wish for a perfect boyfriend!"
There was a long silence.
Goku looked at me. "What is a boyfriend?"
"It is complicated," I said.
"What is a wish?"
"It is when you ask for something and it happens."
"Oh." Goku considered this. "So if I wished for a feast, a feast would appear?"
"Yes," Bulma said. "But I am not wasting the wish on food. I am going to get a boyfriend. A perfect one. Anyway, I need that ball. So hand it over."
"No," Goku said.
"I will pay you!"
"What is pay?"
"Money! Cash! You can buy things with it!"
"What are things?"
Bulma's mouth opened and closed several times. She looked at me with an expression of desperate appeal. "Is he for real?"
"He has lived alone in the woods his entire life," I said. "He does not know what money is. He does not know what a city is. He has never met another human before me."
"He has a tail!"
"So do monkeys. He is not a monkey."
"I am not a monkey," Goku confirmed. "I am Son Goku. And you cannot have my grandpa. But..." He paused. His brow furrowed in deep thought. "You said there are seven balls. And you are looking for all of them. Are you going on an adventure?"
"Yes," Bulma said warily.
"Then I will come with you!" Goku retracted his power pole and slung it across his back. "I can protect you from monsters. I am very strong. And Daichi will come too. We can train on the way."
"I never agreed to this," I said.
"You are agreeing now. It will be fun!"
Bulma looked at me again. Her expression shifted into something calculating. She saw two strong fighters. Two free bodyguards. A genius inventor traveling alone through monster infested wilderness. The math was not hard to do.
"Fine," she said. "You can come. Both of you. But the ball comes with us."
"My grandpa comes with us," Goku corrected.
"Whatever. Just... just let me get the ball and we can leave before something else weird happens."
She pushed past us toward the shrine. Goku watched her like a hawk, tail twitching, ready to intervene if she did anything disrespectful. She picked up the four-star ball, examined it briefly, and stuffed it into a pouch on her belt.
"One down," she muttered. "Six to go. This is going to take forever."
She marched back outside to her car. Goku followed, bouncing with excitement.
"Daichi! We are going on an adventure! This is the best day!"
I stood in the doorway of the tiny orange roofed house and watched them. The blue haired genius inventor and the tailed Saiyan child. The beginning of a story that would take them across the world and beyond the stars.
And me. A fifteen year old boy with thirteen deaths in my body and a witch's hand in my heart. A character who was not supposed to exist.
"Coming, Daichi?" Goku called from the car.
I stepped out into the sun.
"Yeah," I said. "I am coming." Like ReplyReportZackman2k1216 minutes agoAdd bookmarkView discussionThreadmarksView content
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