"Thank you for agreeing to train me, sir. I really appreciate this." Kakarot said, gently setting Chichi down on the front lawn of the mansion, as Tater, Cynder, and Cynthia touched the ground beside him. His tuxedo had lost its sleeves and jacket, and the rest looked rather tattered, but the only one who really cared was Chichi.
"Wait, you're training him!? But not me!?" Cynder cried out, also wearing a tuxedo of his own. "Come on, I was stronger than this guy at birth!"
"And far more dangerous… not to your enemies, to boot, Cyn." Tater replied, ruffling his annoyed two-year-old son's hair. "Besides, I never said I'd train you. I'm not training anybody. I just said that, in exchange for room and board, you can train here at mine. I only offered because you'd be a better punching bag than Tommy. When I want to spar with a real fighter, while Tarble's off in wedded bliss, you'll be here. If you pick something up along the way, that's fine, but I won't be teaching you." Tater explained, walking toward the house, barely even sparing Kakarot a glance. Then, as an afterthought, he paused, "And don't teach Cyn how to fight. That's the only rule. He's just not ready for it."
"Daddy!" Cynder protested, but he was ignored.
"Got it." Kakarot agreed with a nod.
"Come on, Kakarot. Let's get you changed out of that thing." Chichi put her hand on his shoulder, guiding the twelve-year-old into the mansion in front of them.
…
It'd all started after the old lady treated the duo to a meal back at her village. Concerned that Tien and Chiaotzu wouldn't give up their plans to pressure the village into paying for their 'services', the two decided to spend a few days there.
That evening, though, they'd met Novem, who'd invited them to Tarble's wedding in three days' time.
Kakarot had wanted to go because he wanted to find someone from that village to train him. Chichi was just a romantic at heart.
She spent the next three days with a tailor from the village, sewing a dress for her and a tuxedo for Kakarot.
As for the wedding itself, it was rather nice.
It was the afterparty where everything'd gone all… Kakarot.
What happens when you throw a party and invite seven Saiyans?
You get 'friendly sparring'.
The groom, brides, and the two-year-old were barred from combat. Tarble had actually been the one to decide that rule. No combat on the day of a Saiyan's wedding.
With the ones capable of putting up a good fight against him out of the picture, Tater bowed out, too. That left Tommy, Zeck, and Kakarot.
Tommy offered to spar with Zeck. That'd probably be a pretty good fight. Zeck agreed to do it, but he didn't seem particularly enthused by the idea. Unlike usual, though, Tommy seemed like he was actually looking forward to a fight, if nothing else just to mark the occasion.
In the end, Kakarot stepped in and ended up sparring with Tommy.
Actually, it was less of a spar and more of Kakarot just barely managing to hold on, despite the vast gap in overall power. The fight lasted three hours before Tommy finally managed to win.
This was despite the fact that Tommy was, technically, more than ten times more powerful than Kakarot, just based on numbers alone.
The skill gap was real. Kakarot was skilled. Just not strong.
Even if Tater's relationship with Zeck wasn't almost like that of strangers, ever since they'd both moved out of the Celatian village, the chances Tater had to spar with the guy were few and far between. Tommy's own instincts preferred to process violence through artistic mediums, rather than through actual combat, so, while he didn't dislike real fighting, he considered fighting to be a waste of his time, something that pulled him away from his art.
So, he decided to extend an offer to Kakarot.
Tater knew how Tarble felt about Kakarot learning the Saiyan way of fighting. How he genuinely seemed to believe that the boy should grow up as an 'earthling', and develop his own style completely and fundamentally distinct from their own, but from his point of view, a bit of light sparring wouldn't be an issue, so long as he didn't disclose all of the training methods and combat methodologies that Tarble had developed for them over the years.
While you could learn quite a bit from fighting, you couldn't learn the methods that Tarble had designed for power cultivation just by crossing fists a few times. Kakarot couldn't learn them from humans, either. Only a Saiyan body, a Saiyan mind, could handle that kind of extreme. It went beyond the physical aspects, too. Tommy couldn't even do it, anymore. Zeck had stalled, too.
Celatians, physically, were just barely better suited to physical training than humans were, and he'd hit a wall in his ki training, due to the difficulty of progressing based on ki alone. Apparently, he was working on something, but whatever it was, he hadn't figured it out quite yet.
Tater had already been doing his personal training back in the Celatian village anyways, to keep those methods a secret from Cynder. Letting Kakarot train in his yard, or the woods right outside his mansion wasn't a big deal in that sense.
There was no way that the boy didn't have the sense to realize that Cynder, at not even three years old, wasn't ready to learn how to utilize his extraordinary power yet, and the mansion was built with a large number of family and guests in mind, so there wouldn't be any space issues, either.
Practically a free twelve-year-old Saiyan punching bag.