Son Goku stood at the edge of the gargantuan crater left by his final clash with Coola. The airless silence was profound. He bent down and picked up a piece of ore, roughly the size of a washbasin. It was a deep, crystalline blue, glittering with an inner light. He squeezed it in his hand. "Incredibly hard. No idea what it is… but it's beautiful. The girls will love this."
With a casual wave, he stored the shimmering blue crystal and all the other scattered, exotic ores around him into his World Ring. But that wasn't enough. The fight had driven home a crucial lesson: against certain types of opponents, a weapon wasn't just useful—it was essential.
He closed his eyes, focused, and a moment later, hundreds of thousands of Shadow Clones erupted into existence around him, a silent, golden-haired army under the alien stars.
"Fan out. Find anything unusual, anything hard, anything that feels… special. Bring it all back."
As the saying goes, many hands make light work. The clones shot off in every direction, some scanning, some using brute force to dig. In what felt like no time at all, they began to return, depositing piles of strange minerals at Goku's feet: some were impossibly hard and metallic, others glowed with a soft inner luminescence, a few were brittle and crystalline, and one batch was even soft and fibrous, like stone wool. Goku, no geologist, couldn't tell good from bad. Into the World Ring it all went.
Half a day passed. The once pristine, rugged rock planet, under the ministrations of the King of Destruction and his legion of clones, was transformed into a pockmarked, ravaged wasteland, its crust almost completely turned over. His haul, however, was immense. A small mountain of rare and exotic stones now occupied a corner of his pocket dimension.
The greatest prize came last. Dug from the very heart of the planet, his clones brought him a spherical ore nearly ten meters in diameter. For lack of a better name, Goku dubbed it the Planetary Core Stone. Its color was a pure, light-absorbing black. Its hardness was such that even a full-power punch from Goku in his Super Saiyan 3 state failed to make so much as a dent. Its resilience was absolute.
To be fair, the rock planet wasn't huge—perhaps a little over twice the size of King Kai's tiny world. After Goku's enthusiastic "mining operation," it was, for all intents and purposes, a spent husk.
Seeing nothing left of value, Goku placed two fingers to his forehead. Shunkan Idō.
---
He reappeared on Earth, amidst the crowd near the now-concluded World Martial Arts Tournament. The once-grand arena was a scene of mild chaos. The fighting platform was in ruins.
Brute was in the process of accepting a gold medal and a stack of prize money from a referee who was trembling violently. The ref, who had once looked cool in his sunglasses, now sported a spectacularly bruised and swollen face.
"Consider yourself lucky, punk!" Brute said, clapping the terrified man on the shoulder with enough force to make him stagger. "Daring to disqualify my boss? Like the boss would say—you were asking for it!"
"Y-yes, sir… It won't happen again…" the referee stammered.
Nearby, Krillin, Tenshinhan, and the others maintained a respectful distance from the rampaging Minotaur. When Brute had returned to find both his and Goku's qualifications revoked, he hadn't bothered with arguments. He'd simply leaped onto the stage, kicked Krillin and Tenshinhan—who were in the middle of their own final match—clean out of the ring, given the head referee a thorough "talking-to" with his fists, and then stamped a hoof. The resulting shockwave had finished demolishing what was left of the ring. Only the timely intervention of Bulma and the other women had prevented him from leveling the entire stadium.
Intimidated by Brute's raw power, and with Krillin and Tenshinhan themselves conceding that the championship felt hollow without Goku, the officials had no choice. They handed the winner's prize to Brute.
Goku materialized among the women with a soft pop. Seeing him appear safe and sound, the heavy anxiety lifted from their hearts. They immediately swarmed him, a chorus of relieved voices and questions.
"Goku's back! That means… that Coola guy is finished," Krillin said, watching the reunion with a mix of relief and profound melancholy. "I wonder just how strong he is now… He's reached a level where we don't even have the right to spectate his battles anymore."
Spotting Goku, Brute immediately scurried over, the gold medal and prize money held out like an offering. "Boss! You're back! I knew you'd wipe the floor with him! Look! I got your championship back! Those idiots dared to disqualify you, so I taught 'em a lesson and took what's rightfully yours!"
"Well done, Brute," Goku said, a satisfied smile on his face. He didn't care about the title, but the principle mattered. "I go off to risk my life saving the planet, and they dare to write me off? They were definitely asking for it." He waved a hand at the money. "I don't need that. You and the Strategist split it."
Brute's eyes lit up with pure joy. "YES, BOSS!" He whooped and dashed off to find his skinny companion and divvy up the spoils.
"Since everything here is settled, let's head back," Goku said. After exchanging farewells with Krillin and the others, Goku, Bulma, and the women piled into a sleek Capsule Corp limousine and drove off.
---
Far away, nine kilometers southwest of South City, in the southern sea, lay a large, privately-owned island. On it stood a sizable, modern city. Deep within a nondescript building, in a sub-basement level, a sophisticated scientific laboratory hummed with activity.
An old man with a stern face, carrying a plain plastic bag, keyed open a heavy door and entered a peculiar room. Had Son Goku been present, he would have been shocked on two counts. First, the room's dimensions felt wrong—larger on the inside, reminiscent of the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. Second, the old man was none other than Dr. Gero, the creator of Androids 17, 18, and Cell.
The lab was a forest of machinery, monitors, and bubbling glass tubes. Dominating the center was a large, transparent incubation chamber holding an egg-shaped object the size of a washbasin, covered in sensors and wires.
Along the walls were six upright medical pods. Through their observation windows, the silhouettes of humanoid forms could be seen suspended in fluid. Their faces were obscured by breathing apparatuses and sensor arrays. Two of them had even undergone cranial surgery, their skulls replaced with transparent domes through which their artificially augmented brains pulsed with faint light.
"Dr. Rocco, what is the status of the experiment?" Dr. Gero asked, placing the plastic bag on a nearby steel table.
From the shadowy corner of the table, a short, grotesquely wrinkled alien creature uncurled itself. This was Dr. Rocco. He shuffled over, opened the bag, and pulled out a half-cooked leg of lamb. He took a savage bite, blood dripping down his chin.
"It… progresses… well," Rocco rasped, his command of Earth's language halting and guttural. "Progress… is… very smooth. I believe… we can… initiate the awakening… of Androids 11… and 12… to observe… field performance."
Who was Dr. Rocco? When had this hideous alien appeared at Dr. Gero's side? If Son Goku had witnessed this scene, a chill would have run down his spine. It was clear: the timeline, the very storyline of Dragon Ball, was bending and twisting into unknown shapes, all because of the ripples caused by his existence.
---
Goku won! Heck Yea!!!
d(´∀｀)b