I'm Late

The Afterlife.

A yellow road that seemed to stretch on forever ran beneath a boundless sea of purple clouds, while countless translucent souls with vacant expressions drifted through the air around it.

Goku was sprinting at full speed along Snake Way with heavy strides. A faintly glowing angel's halo now hovered above his head, while the charred wound in his chest where the Special Beam Cannon had pierced him had already vanished.

"Hah... huff... hah..."

Goku's feet pounded against the rough stone slabs of Snake Way, producing dull thuds.

Raditz's blood-smeared, savage grin before his death was still replaying in Goku's mind. "It's useless... Kakarot... In one year, my two companions will come here... Their strength will be a disaster beyond anything you lowly Earth monkeys can imagine! Hahahaha..."

300,000 battle power.

Raditz alone had nearly sunk the Earth. Even Chen He had suffered injuries worse than ever before, while Goku himself had lost his life. What kind of terrifying monsters would companions many times stronger than Raditz be?

"I can't stop... I absolutely can't."

Goku gritted his teeth, and an unprecedented anxiety flashed through his clear eyes. Ever since starting a family, he had Chi-Chi's nagging and Gohan's cries resting on his shoulders. Those tangible attachments had become a crushing responsibility. If he failed to protect the Earth a year from now, everything he cherished would turn to dust among the stars.

Driven by an obsession bordering on madness, Goku finally crossed Snake Way and met the short, round King Kai. On King Kai's Planet, where gravity was only ten times that of Earth, he pushed every shred of his potential to the limit day and night.

"This move is called... Kaio-ken! Goku, if your body can't withstand its strain, every blood vessel in your body will burst!" King Kai's warning still rang in his ears.

"Come on!!"

Goku roared across the grasslands of King Kai's Planet, and a blinding dark-red aura instantly erupted around his body.

Meanwhile, on Earth, in an unknown wilderness of barren mountains and stone pillars.

BOOM—

A boulder as tall as several stories shattered with a thunderous crash. Amid the billowing dust, five-year-old Son Gohan crawled miserably out of the rubble. His clothes had long since been torn into strips, and his fair little face was covered in dirt and dried blood.

"What are you crying for? Get up."

Piccolo stood coldly atop a towering stone pillar with his arms crossed, his enormous white cape snapping in the gale. There was not the slightest trace of pity in his dark green eyes.

"Wah... Dad..." Gohan dropped onto the ground, tears washing two pale streaks through the grime on his face. He was only five years old. Just a few days ago, he had been studying in his mother's arms, yet now these two cold uncles had thrown him into these wild mountains crawling with beasts.

"Your father is already dead."

A low, somewhat hoarse voice came from the shadows.

Chen He walked over, his boots crunching over sand and stones. The gravity vest on his body had been replaced by some specially made alloy that gleamed with a dark golden luster, and every step he took left a clear footprint in the ground. After the battle with Raditz, Chen He understood that the collapse of the plot had rendered conventional methods meaningless.

Chen He stopped before Gohan and looked down coldly at the young child who had inherited Saiyan blood.

"If you want to survive, if you want to see your mother again, then clench your fists." Chen He crouched down, his rough, heavily callused palm pressing firmly against Gohan's violently trembling shoulder. "For this year, Piccolo and I won't treat you like a child. There's no place for tears here."

Gohan stared into Chen He's abyss-black eyes, which did not waver in the slightest, and his sobs abruptly caught in his throat. Under extreme terror and pressure, the ferocity belonging to a Saiyan deep within the child's bloodline was finally awakened by these two monstrous seniors.

One year passed in a frenzy amid three utterly different yet equally insane currents of ki.

Inside the Hyperbolic Time Chamber after the system rebooted, Chen He repeatedly drove his body to the brink of complete collapse.

"Since the flow of time can be altered... there must be certain nodes in the flow of ki within this space as well."

[Time Stop Flash] also became a technique he created himself during that time.

There were no dazzling visual effects. Centered on him, everything within a five-kilometer radius—floating dust, flowing time, even the vibrations of the air—was forcibly frozen for one second in that instant.

One year later.

The wilderness outside East City.

At that moment, the sky seemed to be cleaved apart by an invisible colossal blade. Two massive spherical spaceships, trailing long, blinding tails of flame, crashed through the earth's crust.

Two immense auras, so powerful that the entire Earth began to groan in anguish, shot up from the craters.

"Oh? There are actually a few monkeys with decent battle power waiting for us on this planet, Vegeta."

The towering, heavily muscled Nappa walked onto the ruins with a sneer. The tangible white aura around his body nearly baked the surrounding air into warped distortion—350,000 battle power.

Standing before him was a short man with his arms folded, elegantly and coldly adjusting the scouter by his ear. Vegeta's indifferent eyes were filled with the pride of a superior predator, and the terrifying pressure radiating from him weighed down on the land like an invisible mountain range—790,000 battle power!

"Don't waste time, Nappa. Clear out this trash," Vegeta ordered coolly.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

Four figures tore through the air almost simultaneously and landed amid the ruins opposite the Saiyans.

Piccolo yanked off his weighted cape in one motion. Purple lightning flickered faintly between his two fingers as it accumulated wildly—after a year of grueling training, his Special Beam Cannon had reached full power, and his battle power had soared to 180,000.

At his side, six-year-old Son Gohan wore a child-sized Demon Clan martial arts uniform. Though his face was still somewhat pale, his eyes had gained a new steadiness, and a faint golden aura rose from his body—under the inhuman torment of the two monsters, his battle power had reached an astonishing 55,000.

Chen He, meanwhile, still stood with both hands in his pockets, his black training uniform snapping in the gale. His pitch-black eyes were fixed on Vegeta in the distance, while the ki within him surged like a rushing river—380,000 battle power.

"Everyone... sorry, I'm late!"

Accompanied by a sharp whistle through the air, an orange-red streak descended from the sky. Goku wore his faded, repeatedly washed martial arts uniform, the halo above his head now gone, while every muscle on his body gleamed with a bronze luster. Having returned from the afterlife, his battle power had already surged to the terrifying threshold of 280,000.

"Kakarot... so you really didn't die." A cruel, excited smile slowly curled across Vegeta's lips. "Three hundred eighty thousand, two hundred eighty thousand, one hundred eighty thousand... I never expected this lowly planet to produce a few slightly stronger ants like you."

"But before the absolute power of the Saiyan Prince, none of that means anything!"

BOOM—!!!

Without any warning, the soil across the entire wasteland was blasted into the air by the collision of four terrifying energies, soaring hundreds of meters high in an instant.

Goku's eyes turned an eerie dark red in a flash. "Kaio-ken—Triple! Haaaah!!"

His power level of 280,000 surged to nearly 840,000 under the boost of the triple Kaio-ken. He transformed into a streak of red lightning and collided head-on with the arrogant Vegeta. Meanwhile, Piccolo took Gohan and became a sky full of afterimages, tightly pinning Nappa down on the other side of the ruins.

Chen He abruptly vanished from the center of the storm.

The next second, Vegeta, who was wildly exchanging punches with Goku, had his pupils suddenly shrink to pinpoints.

In his senses, Chen He had still been dozens of meters away one second ago, yet the next, he had appeared without warning in Vegeta's blind spot to the left. There was no sound of breaking wind, no movement of ki.

BOOM!!

Chen He's charged punch slammed solidly into Vegeta's crossed right arm.

The crisp crack of shattering bone rang out clearly amid the raging energy storm.

"What?!"

The proud Saiyan prince was smashed into the ground like a meteor by the force of that punch.