Preparing for Battle

By the time Ji Ming returned to Earth, autumn had already deepened on Mount Paozu.

The spaceship landed at dusk. The trees around the landing pad had been splashed gold by the setting sun. When the hatch opened, the first person Ji Ming saw was not Chi-Chi, but Vegeta standing at the front—his arms folded, his face expressionless, though his battle suit was visibly smeared with grease he had not yet had time to wipe off.

"The Gravity Chamber didn't blow up," Vegeta said first, with a faint trace of pride in his voice.

"Then why are your hands covered in grease?"

"...I was fixing Nappa's training machine."

Vegeta stepped aside, revealing a large group behind him. Piccolo, Krillin, Tien Shinhan, Chiaotzu, and Nappa were all there. Master Roshi stood beside Krillin with his cane, his sunglasses reflecting the sunset. Son Gohan was tightly held by Chi-Chi, peeking half his face over her shoulder as he waved at Ji Ming. Bulma leaned against the shell of the Gravity Chamber with a cup of coffee in hand. The exhaustion in her eyes was heavier than before they had left, but she still smiled when she saw the spaceship land.

After letting go of Son Gohan, Chi-Chi inspected Ji Ming from head to toe several times. Only after confirming he had no new injuries did she pluck a loose thread from his collar and take a step back. She no longer cried so easily, yet her eyes were still red.

"How long has it been since you had a proper meal?"

"I didn't miss a single one of Mom's meals." Ji Ming patted his backpack.

Chi-Chi froze for a moment, then laughed through her tears and lightly punched him on the shoulder.

That night, Ji Ming briefed all the core fighters at Kami's Lookout on the crucial intelligence from Planet Sadala. At the same time, Bulma mobilized every geological scanning array available in North City, expanding the possible range of Dr. Gero's underground base from the northern mountain range described in the original setting to the vicinity of old military tunnels in the southwest—the threat of the Androids was closer than she had imagined.

The Saiyan assembly zone had finally begun to show results as well. King Vegeta sat in command, reorganizing the first batch of Saiyans to arrive on Earth according to their combat strength and potential. They were divided into reconnaissance, mobile, and main-force teams. By the day Ji Ming returned, the mobile team could already complete more than five rounds of coordinated sparring inside the energy simulation chambers provided by Bulma.

Starting the next day, preparations for war officially accelerated.

Bulma posted the Gravity Chamber schedule on its door in a chart. At five in the morning, Vegeta was the first to push his way inside, setting the gravity directly to its limit before lowering it again, then increasing it by one level every half hour—he was testing whether he could find the threshold where his strength would rise rather than diminish through repeated periods of extreme exhaustion. Son Goku took the afternoon slot. Ji Ming, Piccolo, and Nail held rotating sparring sessions in the evening. Krillin, Tien Shinhan, and Chiaotzu trained during the middle of the day. Occasionally, Nappa squeezed in to get a turn as well, bringing along the ki-blast coordination technique he had recently developed.

Ever since the intelligence from Planet Sadala had come back, Vegeta had been pondering one thing—the embryonic form of "Ultra Instinct" Ji Ming had mentioned, which had briefly appeared during the trial. He did not ask for details. Instead, he repeatedly practiced unconscious blocking and evasion in the Gravity Chamber. On the evening of the seventh day, when Ji Ming drove him into a corner with an ordinary straight punch and he could not retaliate with brute force, Vegeta was finally forced to "switch off" his mind. In that instant, his body dodged on its own—the movement was no more than half a step, but that half-step caused every one of Ji Ming's follow-up attacks to miss.

After knocking him down, Ji Ming did not press the attack. He merely reached out and pulled him back up. "The energy expenditure from this sparring session was thirty percent lower than before."

Vegeta panted heavily before forcing out a question. "What do you call this?"

"It doesn't have a name yet. But it can reduce your energy consumption by an order of magnitude while in Super Saiyan form."

Son Goku's training direction was completely different. He remained in Super Saiyan form, but did not pursue evasion. He had Krillin and Chiaotzu fire ki blasts at him from two directions at once, taking every blast head-on and using his body to memorize that fleeting instant of "heavy pressure" within each impact. Bulma watched with her heart in her throat from the monitoring room, but even she could understand the curves on the data recorder—his muscles' impact resistance density was climbing at a visible rate. The last time they had recorded the same level of muscle density was with Ji Ming on Namek.

Piccolo locked himself in an inner chamber at Kami's Lookout for three full days. When he emerged, Nail discovered that Piccolo's Special Beam Cannon was no longer a spiral structure, but had been compressed into an extremely thin, almost silent linear wave. After he fired it once, a whole mass of rock in the mountain behind Kami's Lookout silently lost a circular section, its cross-section as smooth as a mirror. The wave frequency had vanished completely from sound—Frieza could evade an ordinary Special Beam Cannon, but he would never evade this shot.

Piccolo lowered his two fingers and walked back toward Kami's Lookout. He said only one thing to Nail. "This one is for Gero."

A month passed in the blink of an eye.

That evening, Bulma's satellite monitoring system finally detected an abnormal energy fluctuation. The source was two hundred meters beneath the Far Northern Mountain Range outside North City. Its frequency band was a ninety-seven percent match for the "Dr. Gero laboratory energy signal" Ji Ming had previously provided. At the same time, the Saiyan Mobile Corps assigned to external reconnaissance intercepted two humanoid energy signatures on both sides of the far northern wasteland—they were moving extremely quickly, but showed no signs of life. Before the corps could arrive, they had already retreated toward another entrance in the mountains.

Ji Ming was sparring with Vegeta in the Gravity Chamber when he received the news. Both men stopped at once, their golden auras abruptly retracting beneath sixty times gravity. Vegeta did not ask any questions. He merely took off the tattered gloves of his battle suit and put on a new pair.

"They're finally here."

Early the next morning, Earth's battle plan was finalized at Kami's Lookout. The Saiyan main force was split into three battle groups—Vegeta would lead the mobile corps in sealing off the perimeter, ensuring that no other artificial beings could escape the Far Northern Mountain Range; Son Goku would command the central force and confront any high-level enemy that broke out from the underground base; Ji Ming himself would lead Piccolo and Nail directly into the core of the underground base.

Before Kami's Lookout, Chi-Chi unusually did not try to stop him. She merely tightened the loosened bandages in Ji Ming's cloth bag, tucked in a small packet of freshly steamed bean buns, patted his arm, and stepped back. "Go early and come back early. Don't get hurt."

Bulma projected the latest scan data onto a holographic screen. "The entrance is deep inside an old mine shaft on the northern slope of the Far Northern Mountain Range. A real-time 3D map of the deep structure has been generated. There's one navigation wristband for each of you. The underground base has strong electromagnetic interference, so normal communications will be disrupted. At short range, you can communicate through ki. For long range, use my specially encrypted signal."

Ji Ming took a navigation wristband and fastened it around his wrist, his tone calm. "Move out."

Purple flames flashed beneath Vegeta's feet as he rose into the air first, with the Saiyan Mobile Corps close behind. Son Goku raised a fist toward his son before streaking away in a flash of red light. As Piccolo departed Kami's Lookout with Nail, Dende, and the last two Planet Namek warriors, their capes stretched into straight white lines beneath the morning sun.

No shadow from Frieza's spaceship fell across the sky that day. Only Earth's own warriors converged on the battlefield. The Androids waited underground.