Today was the day.
Because I knew exactly where the Saiyans would arrive, I told Krillin—and he passed the word to everyone else. No panic, no dramatics. Just instructions. Everyone trusted him enough not to ask why.
I arrived first.
Raditz was already nearby, his ki completely suppressed. Even now, with everything that had changed, he understood how dangerous this moment was.
Standing here again felt… strange.
Meeting Vegeta for the first time had always been terrifying, but now it was something else too—nostalgic, in a way that made my chest tighten. My son had told me about Vegeta from the future timeline he came from. A Vegeta who broke down after Cell nearly killed him. A Vegeta who watched Goku die saving the world—just like in my original timeline.
That future survived Cell.
Barely.
Then Majin Buu came.
And after that… everything became a blur.
Trunks hadn't returned to that future until much later—until a man who looked like Goku appeared. That man killed me.
I knew, deep down, that he wasn't Goku.
But the fact that he wore Goku's face still unsettled me in a way I couldn't fully explain.
My memories weren't perfect. They never were. Emotion warped them, twisted details, blurred the spaces between events. I trusted what I experienced, but not always the order, not always the exact shape of things.
That was why I kept records.
Journals. Data logs. Schematics. Every improvement I made—from my armor to the mechanical heart Raditz now depended on—was written down, measured, verified.
Memory could lie.
Data couldn't.
Everyone was here now.
Piccolo.
Tien.
Chiaotzu.
Krillin.
And finally… Yamcha.
Seeing them all alive hurt more than I expected.
I had watched every one of them die once.
Even Yamcha.
I used to think we had a future together. Looking at him now, it was hard to reconcile that thought with the man he'd become—a confident flirt, fearless around women in a way that made no sense compared to the boy I remembered.
People changed.
Timelines changed.
What they didn't know—what none of them knew—was my real power level.
I kept it suppressed at two hundred.
Not a guess. Not an estimate.
An exact number.
I knew because I'd rebuilt Raditz's scouter design from memory, improved it, calibrated it myself. Vegeta and Nappa's ki were already detectable, closing in fast.
Any moment now, I would see them.
This was the moment everything either broke… or proved that the future could be rewritten.
I found my gaze drifting back to Yamcha.
In my original timeline, he died because of a single mistake. A moment of overconfidence. A second too late.
I wanted to stop that from happening.
Not just to save him.
But to prove—to myself—that death wasn't inevitable. That knowing the future meant something. That it could be changed.
I took a slow breath and steadied myself.
Today, I thought, we find out if that's true.