"Goku!"
The shouts broke across the battlefield from six different directions. Krillin was already moving.
He didn't need to.
In the smoke and scattered debris of Vegeta's point-blank energy discharge, something twitched. An eyelid, then both. Then Goku's hand shot up and seized Vegeta's forearm with the grip of a man who has stopped thinking and started doing.
He pulled.
Vegeta's face came toward him at speed.
Here we go again.
The headbutt connected. Vegeta's gathered energy detonated prematurely, the charge releasing in all directions instead of one, the shockwave pushing both of them apart in opposite arcs. They separated into the air—both momentarily seeing double, both fighting through it with the stubborn focus of people who have decided not to be done yet.
"Damn it." Vegeta pressed the back of his wrist to his face. Blood. Again. He stared at it with an expression that had cycled past rage into something colder and more calculated. Kakarot keeps resorting to the same primitive tactic and it keeps working because I keep walking into range to finish him.
Figure it out.
He wiped the blood off on his glove, locked his gaze on the figure across the sky, and released his full aura in a single controlled burst.
Then he accelerated.
His fist came in wrapped in blue-white flame—every reserve committed, the finishing blow—
It went through nothing. Goku's silhouette shattered on contact, dispersing like smoke. Vegeta's burning knuckles passed through empty air and kept going.
Afterimage.
He stopped himself from reacting immediately and swept the space around him with his senses instead. Movement in every direction—speed-impressions, sonic traces, the barely-detectable displacement of air that marked where a body had recently been. Goku was circling, searching for the blind spot.
Fine.
Vegeta raised both hands and let the energy go everywhere.
"Spread Bomb Barrage!"
The attack didn't have a single target. It didn't need one. Hundreds of energy projectiles launched in every direction simultaneously—not aimed, just saturating, filling the available space between them with detonating light, the ground below becoming a moonscape of overlapping craters in the span of two seconds.
One of the blasts caught Goku mid-approach, blasting him out of his afterimage cluster and into the open. Two more found him as he tumbled, forcing him defensive, eating up the momentum his flanking approach had built.
The barrage rolled outward and reached the spectators.
A hemispherical barrier snapped up around the group before anyone could move—light blue, translucent, the surface shimmering slightly as dozens of energy projectiles struck it, each one absorbed without ceremony, the ripples fading like stones dropped in still water.
Krillin sat down hard. Not from impact—from the sudden and complete relief of a man who had braced for something that didn't arrive. "I'm—" He looked at the barrier, then at Jordan, who had one hand extended in the direction of the blast zone. "We're alive."
"Snack?" Jordan had already redirected his attention to Gohan, who had gone very wide-eyed at the surrounding detonations. He produced something from his coat pocket and offered it over. "We're fine. Watch the fight."
Gohan accepted the snack with the mechanical reflex of a child whose brain was currently occupied with the spectacle overhead. He ate it without tasting it.
In the air, Vegeta pressed the advantage his barrage had bought.
He came in with a flying kick, the whole force of his body concentrated into the leading heel, flames trailing—
Goku's shoulder was still numb from the explosion. He saw the kick coming, turned to give it the narrow angle, and almost made it.
The impact caught him square on the left shoulder instead of a glancing blow. The sound it made was not a good sound.
Goku's face went the color of chalk. His left arm dropped and stayed down, the shoulder doing something it should not be doing. He held the expression for exactly one beat before his jaw set and his right arm came up.
The muscles in his forearm bunched. His waist torqued. The hook that came out of it wasn't technically sophisticated—it was just everything he had, delivered to the first available surface—
His knuckles connected with Vegeta's nose.
The prince's head snapped sideways. He stopped moving forward.
They separated again, both landing in the air twenty meters apart, both breathing. Vegeta's face was a map of recent decisions. His nose was bleeding freely, the left side of his face carrying a bruise that was rapidly becoming architectural. He looked at his blood-covered glove.
Across from him, Goku's left arm hung loose at his side. His gi was shredded across most of its surface. He was grinning.
"That's what fighting is," Goku said, not unkindly. "Either you win or I win. That's the whole thing." He shifted his weight onto his back foot. "We're not done."
Vegeta's thoughts moved fast and ugly.
He's stronger than me. He's faster. Fighting like this, trading hit for hit—he outlasts me. The calculation was simple and he ran it twice to make sure. Change the variable.
His hand opened. Energy gathered in his palm—not the concentrated charge of an attack, but something different in quality: cool where his other techniques ran hot, self-sustaining, with an internal gravity that seemed to pull at the air around it. A ball of light, coherent and growing, emitting a glow that was—
Wrong.
Something about it was wrong in a way Goku couldn't immediately quantify. He reached for the sensation and couldn't name it. There was no destructive intent in the energy—no killing charge he could identify—but there was something in it that made the hair on his arms stand up, that tugged at something deep in his biology with a familiarity he couldn't source.
At the barrier's edge, Raditz went still.
It started in his tail—a vibration, almost a sound, rising up through his spine and into his chest before he'd consciously registered the light. His pupils contracted to points. His hands, which had been loose at his sides, curled slowly into fists.
Beside Jordan, Gohan stopped chewing.
His eyes were on Vegeta's hand. His expression had gone blank in the particular way of someone whose conscious mind has stepped aside because something older has taken over. The snack fell, forgotten.
"Even if you already knew my plan," Vegeta said, the arrogance restored, bright with the relief of a man who's found his way back to solid ground, "it's too late to stop it." He raised the ball. "Energy and oxygen, synthesized into an artificial moon—one point seven billion Zenos of Blutz Waves. With my tail, I transform. My power multiplies tenfold." His smile was the smile of someone who has been behind all fight and has just remembered that he's been holding the trump card the whole time. "Today is your last day, Kakarot!"
"That thing Jordan warned me about—"
Goku's blast left his hands before the thought finished.
"Too late!"
Vegeta hurled the sphere upward. It caught the air, expanded, the absorption rapid—growing from a hand-sized ball to a mass that eclipsed the sun as it climbed, hanging above the desert like a second noon had arrived, its light blanketing the entire battlefield in pale blue-white.
The light reached the three Saiyans below.
It hit Raditz first. His knees buckled. The fur came through the fabric of his Turtle Hermit uniform in patches—black, coarse—his teeth elongating behind lips that were pulling back not in a snarl but in something involuntary, the body following its own instructions. His frame was already broadening, the seams of the uniform giving up.
Gohan made a small, lost sound, his hands going to his head. The same transformation was taking him from the feet up.
"Their tails!" Piccolo's voice cut through everything. He was already pointing. "Gohan and Raditz are transforming—someone cut their tails, now!"
Jordan stood up.
He dusted the sunflower seed shells off his coat with two unhurried swipes, straightening his collar. His expression had the quality of a man putting down a book that was getting to a good part because something needs handling.
"A domestic dispute, and now this," he said to no one in particular.
His eyes opened fully. The gold light that lived in them—usually ambient, background, the trace warmth of a fire that hasn't been stoked—flared to something brighter, something sun-adjacent. It filled the whites completely and kept going, two points of concentrated brilliance in an otherwise unremarkable face.
Two beams, thin as lasers and precisely the temperature of enough, reached across the distance between them.
One large tail and one small tail fell into the desert dust, severed so cleanly there was barely a pause in the transformation's momentum
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