Deadman's Arctic was not meant to sustain life.
It was a jagged, unforgiving expanse of frozen tundra and howling winds at the edge of the world, where the sun seemed to offer light but absolutely no warmth. It was a place of isolation, a barren wasteland that the rest of the planet had rightfully decided to stay away from.
For Piccolo, the reincarnation of the great Demon King, it was the only place quiet enough to hear himself think.
Right now, however, he wasn't thinking. He was bleeding.
Thwack. Thwack. CRACK.
Piccolo's fists moved as a blur of dark green, slamming rhythmically into the side of a massive, glacier-hardened cliff face. He wasn't using his Ki to shield his knuckles. He was using raw, unprotected physical force, deliberately tearing the skin and fracturing the bones in his hands, only to force his Namekian biology to regenerate the tissue denser and stronger than it was a second before.
Purple blood stained the white frost of the cliff.
He threw a devastating roundhouse kick, his heavily weighted boot shattering the bedrock and sending a localized tremor through the ice field. He followed it with a flurry of elbows, driving deeper and deeper into the mountain until the structural integrity of the stone gave way, collapsing the entire face of the cliff in an avalanche of ice and boulders.
Piccolo stood amidst the settling dust, his chest heaving, his breath pluming in the freezing air like exhaust from a dying engine.
He wore his turban and his weighted cape, garments woven from a density-altering material that currently pressed down on his frame with the weight of a small commercial aircraft. Every step was an agony of gravity. Every strike was a war against his own muscles.
It wasn't enough. It wasn't even close to enough.
"Gah!" Piccolo roared, a sound of pure, unadulterated frustration. He swept his arm out, firing an erratic, uncharged blast of yellow Ki that detonated against a distant ridge, vaporizing a million tons of ice in a blinding flash.
The ensuing shockwave whipped his white cape around him, but the display of power brought him no satisfaction.
He looked down at his trembling, purple-stained hands. He was stronger than he had been at the World Martial Arts Tournament. Much stronger. He could feel the dense, coiled power resting in his core. If he fought the Goku of five years ago today, he would tear the Saiyan apart in minutes.
But the Goku of five years ago was dead. In his place was a monster.
The memory of the beach crashed over Piccolo's mind, a suffocating wave of humiliation that made his fangs grind together. He remembered the alien, Raditz. He remembered the metallic device on the invader's face, the frantic beeping, the numbers.
Five thousand, two hundred. The human woman.
Five thousand, four hundred. The screaming infant.
Five thousand, seven hundred. His sworn enemy.
Six thousand, two hundred. The toddler.
Piccolo closed his eyes, his fists clenching so tightly his newly healed knuckles split open again.
He was a Demon King. He had been birthed from the dying breath of his father with a singular, cosmic mandate: to conquer this world and bathe it in darkness. He was supposed to be the apex predator of Earth.
Instead, he was a rounding error.
The gap wasn't just large; it was mathematically insulting. The weakest member of the Son family—the screeching, overbearing housewife who had once been little more than an annoyance at the tournament—possessed more than double his maximum output. If Chi-Chi had wanted to, she could have swatted him out of the sky on that beach like a bothersome insect.
And the girl. Yuzu.
Piccolo shuddered, a cold sweat breaking out over his brow that had nothing to do with the freezing tundra. When the girl had dropped her suppression, her Ki hadn't felt like Goku's. Goku's energy was a roaring, wild fire. The girl's energy was like a scalpel—cold, infinitely dense, and terrifyingly deliberate.
With a frustrated snarl, Piccolo dropped into a cross-legged position on the frozen earth. He closed his eyes, forcing his erratic breathing to slow. Physical exertion wasn't going to bridge a gap of four thousand units. He needed to focus. He needed to expand his senses and understand the scale of the mountain he was trying to climb.
He pushed his awareness outward, casting his mind across the globe.
See without seeing, he commanded himself.
The dark void of his mind's eye began to populate with flickers of light. He felt the weak, ambient life forces of the planet. A herd of caribou miles away. A pod of whales in the northern ocean. The distant, buzzing static of human cities to the south—millions of tiny, insignificant sparks.
He pushed his consciousness further, sweeping eastward across the continents, searching for the singular coordinates that haunted his waking hours. Mount Paozu.
He found them instantly. You couldn't miss them if you tried.
From halfway across the planet, the Ki signatures of the Son family did not look like sparks. They looked like four localized suns burning a hole through the fabric of the Earth's atmosphere.
Piccolo's breath hitched in his throat. Even from this distance, the sheer gravitational weight of their dormant energy pressed against his mind, threatening to suffocate his psychic projection.
They weren't even fighting. They were just... existing.
But as Piccolo watched, the dynamic of the energy shifted. Two of the massive suns—Goku and the girl, Yuzu—suddenly flared, their edges sharpening as their power spiked.
They're sparring, Piccolo realized, his stomach twisting into a cold knot.
He focused all his psychic discipline on the engagement, trying to glean some tactical data from their movements. It was a mistake.
The speed at which their energies clashed was incomprehensible. Piccolo's mind struggled to track the kinetic transfers. He felt Goku's roaring, explosive strikes being met and perfectly redirected by the girl's crystalline, suffocating pressure. Every time their auras collided, Piccolo felt a phantom shockwave rattle his own teeth.
Then, the girl's energy did something impossible.
Piccolo couldn't say why. Why it was impossible, he could just tell it was. Because of a sudden explosion of power erupted, from a kinetic explosion that felt odd to his refined Ki Sense.
'What was that?' Piccolo thought, his concentration wavering. He couldn't even tell what the girl had done.
Before he could process, or attempt a guess he felt Goku's energy roar in response, swelling into a blinding mass to counter a massive beam attack. The two energies cancelled each other out, and the sparring session ended, the auras dimming back to their terrifying, dormant baselines.
Piccolo snapped his eyes open, gasping for air as if he had been held underwater.
He slumped forward, his hands pressing into the frozen dirt. His heart was hammering against his ribs.
"Monsters," Piccolo hissed, his voice raspy and broken. "They are absolute monsters."
The despair threatened to swallow him whole. What was the point? Why endure this freezing wasteland? Why shatter his bones and bleed into the ice?
Even if he trained every single second of every single day for the next ten years, how could he possibly catch up to a four-year-old who was fundamentally rewriting the laws of Ki manipulation just to spar with her father?
His dream of revenge felt childish now. A hollow joke. He had spent his life preparing to kill a martial artist, only to discover he was sharing a planet with gods.
I am irrelevant, the dark thought whispered in the back of his mind. The Demon King is a relic. You are already obsolete.
Piccolo's hands dug into the dirt, his long claws carving deep grooves into the permafrost. His pride, the core of his very existence, writhed in agony. To be defeated was one thing. To be left behind—to be ignored as a non-threat by a family of freaks—was a fate worse than death.
Even his newest technique—the Makankosappo—was but a pipe dream to use. It took far too long to charge and could be dodged by people who were as fast as those monsters. And he would be sensed if he tried to fight any other way.
He raised two trembling fingers to his forehead.
A volatile spark of crimson and yellow electricity crackled at his fingertips, the signature prelude to his ultimate trump card. He had spent months engineering this technique—the Makankosappo. It was designed to be a piercing drill of hyper-concentrated Ki, an attack meant to punch through targets vastly stronger than himself by trading time for lethality.
But sitting here in the freezing dark, the harsh reality settled over him like a suffocating shroud.
The technique was a mechanical failure against this new paradigm. To gather enough force to even threaten a power level over five thousand, he needed minutes of absolute, uninterrupted concentration. He had to stand perfectly still, gathering his reserves into a single point while a secondary spiral woven around the core stabilized the piercing trajectory.
Minutes. In a real battle against the current Son family, a single minute was an eternity. Chi-Chi had dismantled an interstellar conqueror in less than thirty seconds. If he tried to charge the Makankosappo against her, she would have closed the distance, shattered his jaw, and scattered his remains across the horizon before the first spark could even clear his fingertips.
The realization was a bitter pill to swallow. His greatest masterwork was functionally useless.
Piccolo lowered his hand, the sparks fizzling out into the frozen air. He let out a low, venomous growl that vibrated through the very bedrock of the arctic gale.
"Am I truly just a relic?" he whispered, his voice catching in his throat.
The wind howled louder, mocking his silence. He was the heir to the Demon Clan, a name that had once reduced the nations of the world to trembling, groveling cattle. Now, he was a spectator, forced to watch a family of anomalies play god from a distance.
But as the freezing frost began to cake onto his weighted cape, the paralyzing despair in his chest began to warp. It didn't vanish; it transmuted. It curdled into something sharper, uglier, and far more familiar: pure, unadulterated spite.
If his current methods were obsolete, then he would discard them. If the Makankosappo was too slow, he would re-engineer its mechanical sequence. He would force his body to handle the compression simultaneously while in mid-motion. And he would do it just to end them all.
He will kill them all for he was Demon King: Piccolo Junior, and that title symbolised his inevitable victory.
It was a shame, that for all of his talent and potential, he had missed what having a true sparring partner was capable of doing to a person's growth, or having someone to protect did. Piccolo, he had none of that.
And so as the months passed by, the gap would only widen.