"I figured you'd get here before me, Tater. I flew back pretty slowly." I noted as Tater landed softly on the summit of the mountain.
"So does Tater, so it balances out." Pepper said, laying on a rock, with her head on my lap and her feet on Lynn's, who didn't seem as enthused about the arrangement as I was. On the ground beside Lynn was a large metal box.
"You're getting meaner." Lynn observed.
"Not really." Tater responded, getting a glare from Pepper in turn, "She's always been like that."
"I haven't punched anyone real in the face in weeks." Pepper told Lynn with an eye roll.
Tater scoffed, rolling his eyes. "Anyways, I was late because I had to deal with the spaceship you told me about, then I had to fly across the country, because apparently, Bulma gave most of the dragon balls back to their owners. I also had to promise that I wouldn't let you make the wish until-"
"HEY! HEEEY!"
"Until she gets here?" I finished for him, as Bulma's jet-car started to land, "Give me the dragon balls." I gestured.
Tater tossed me a box that he'd been holding under his arm. Checking, I counted six dragon balls inside, each with a different number of stars. Even though mine was still in a shielded safe, the six were already glowing.
I plucked them out of the box and set them on the ground one at a time, as Bulma walked out of the jet, followed by Roshi, who was apparently in the passenger's seat.
"Do you think that the wish will actually bring my Zeck back, Tarble?" Bulma asked. I opened my mouth to answer, but she beat me to it. "You hesitated! Why are you hesitating? Will it bring my Zeck back or not? Tell me!" She grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me.
I pushed her back, grabbing her back to steady her. "Don't worry, Bulma. I promise, Zeck will come back to life. Even if I have to personally break the laws of mortality to do it, I'll bring him back… Even if the wish doesn't work."
"What are the chances that it doesn't work, Tarble?" She asked me.
Instead of responding, I turned to Pepper and Lynn, who were still sitting on the rock. They understood my meaning.
Lynn bent down to open the safe and get the dragon ball out of it, but Pepper beat her to it, reaching into the box and extracting the orange orb from within… without actually opening it.
"Oh, come-" I muttered, staring at the ruined remnants of the safe that I'd spent several weeks designing and synthesizing the materials for, before shaking my head.
Basic lead wasn't dense enough to shield the special wavelength of energy emitted by the orange orbs, so I'd needed to synthesize a material that specifically responded to the energy wavelength in question. The theoretical work behind it was easy, but actually synthesizing the materials took weeks of effort that I'd now, apparently, need to put in again.
Oh, well. I wouldn't need that box for another year, anyways. "Thanks, Pep." She tossed me the orb.
"Everyone ready?" I asked, turning around to meet everyone's gazes. "This'll be the first time Earth's Shenron will have been summoned in decades."
Roshi, who had apparently been holding onto one of the Dragon Balls, nodded, solemn rather than his usual joking self. Everyone else, for the most part, looked anticipatory.
Good enough for me.
"Alright. Shenron, we have a request. Come forth."
…
"GAAH!" Zeck appeared suddenly, fifteen feet in the air, and tumbled to the ground before he could catch his bearings, landing awkwardly at an angle that would've shattered the legs of any normal human in at least four separate places.
With him, it just made him feel like a goof. Standing up, Zeck patted himself off while dusting off the dirt. "...I'm alive. Tarble must have done it." The thought felt like it needed to be articulated.
Zeck didn't remember dying, but he remembered facing his own death, that final moment when he'd realized without a shadow of a doubt that he was about to die… then his memory simply cut off, and he was falling out of the sky, perfectly whole once more.
Even his clothes were perfectly whole, the places where they'd been ripped and torn from the battle completely fixed, as if his personal timeline had been perfectly rewound to right before the fight began.
But, as he did an internal check to make sure that nothing was off, the Celatian realized that somethingwas off.
Exerting his ki, Zeck pinpointed the problem instantly. His body had been reconstructed. Nothing else. The glitching communication implant at the base of his neck was gone, as was the internal Infinite Energy Converter implant that supplied the vast majority of the Celatian's ki reserves.
Without that, all the Celatian had access to was his natural ki reserve.
To be clear, Zeck's natural ki reserve had partially adapted to the Infinite Energy Converter's output over the short time that it'd been inside him. He hadn't suddenly dropped back down to the point he'd been at before, barely a threat to even Tommy. The pressure from the massive amount of ki energy had pulled out all of his body's latent potential, bringing his power level up to somewhere just past five hundred thousand or so, even without the Converter. A full level behind what he'd slowly become used to… but at least he was alive.
As Zeck internally shrugged over the loss of his enhancement technology, he heard the distant crack of lightning. Shortly after, dark clouds rolled in, blotting out the sun in moments, the area once again finding itself coated in an eerie darkness.
…
"Ugh… anyone get the number on those buses? Because there was definitely more than one." Krillin muttered, rubbing his head. Everything hurt, but at the same time, nothing did. Phantom pains were slowly dying down all over his body.
Putting his hands to the ground, the bald teen attempted to push himself to his feet. Instead, a casual push sent Krillin flying into the air, and he slammed the back of his head against a tree, which strained for a moment before launching him back into the ground, where a dozen leaves made their way into his open mouth. "GUH! Nngghhh…" grumbling under his breath, Krillin tried bringing himself to a sitting position once more, but far more carefully this time around.
Succeeding this time, he looked around. He was in the middle of a small forest clearing, alone save for a large, purple egg that stuck out like a sore thumb.
Krillin tried to push himself to his feet, only to accidentally do a graceful backflip instead, landing on a tree branch behind him. "...What's going on? Why am I so strong?" The Turtle student wondered aloud, staring at his hands in shock. If one were to put a number to the amount of raw power contained in Krillin's small hands at that moment, it'd be over 10,000, a far cry from his former power level, and so powerful that he didn't fully understand what to do with it.
While he stared in wonder, shocked to speechlessness by his new level of strength, the sky above the bald teen rapidly grew dark.