Here is the 37th chapter. Hope you like it, well I told you to read my other Fan-fic and you did, so thank you, here's the promised next chapter. I don't know if I'll fully come back with this fic yet though.
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My eyes stayed open even when the air hit them.
Free fall. Fun.
When the ground got close I took control and dashed toward Roshi. His signature was easy to find, as always.
Months without moving, and now this. I wasn't even pushing it and the speed was absurd, I crossed most of the distance in under a minute, skimming low over the ocean. The water pulled into a ring around me and tore open in a trail behind.
The little house came into view and I stopped dead. The wave I'd dragged in kept going without me and swallowed Master Roshi whole, where he lay on his deck chair, probably reading his so called treasures.
A second later he surfaced, sputtering.
"Sorry for the interruption, Master." I said, laughing a little to smooth it over.
"Cress, you ungrateful brat. Is this how you greet your master after vanishing for months?" He waded out and crouched over the soaked magazines, blowing on the pages like he could save them. "Look at what you've done to my babies."
"I really am sorry. I didn't know I'd gotten that fast."
"Hmph. You owe me magazines, boy." He turned his head away.
'Since when did Master Roshi get this dramatic?' I chuckled internally.
—
Roshi, still pretending to sulk, cast a glance at the boy without turning his head.
'He's changed. Stronger, sure. But more than that...he's calm. Unbelievably so.'
—
"Well then, Master, I'll take my leave." I bowed, just enough to be sincere about it.
"What a heartless student. You come, you ruin my treasures, you drench me, and then you disappear right after?" Master Roshi wrung out the front of his shirt. "Kids these days."
"I'll bring the magazines next time. Double."
"Double." He considered that. The sulk lost some of its conviction. "Make it triple and I'll forget the water."
"Triple."
"Then we have no quarrel." He settled back onto the deck chair, which was still dripping, and waved a hand at me like he was dismissing a servant.
I pushed off the sand and went.
—
—
I dropped out of the sky over West City and came down outside Capsule Corp.
I headed for the building. I still remembered the way, even if it had been long enough that the details had gone a little fuzzy.
A security bot rolled up, scanned me, beeped, and let me through. Still in the system, apparently.
I raised my hand to knock. The door swung open before I could.
"Oh my god, you're back. I thought you died." Tights stood there, face scrunched up, then it loosened all at once, relief breaking through before she could stop it. "How could you go months without showing up? We had a deal!"
"First of all, I'm sorry. I didn't know it would take that long." I held up a hand before she could load the next complaint. "I'll explain, I promise. But I need to see your dad first. There's a ship with my name on it."
"No, you're not going anywhere till you explain." She stepped into my path.
She didn't know I could be past her before she finished the sentence. I wasn't going to, move that fast this close and the wind alone would put her through a wall. So I stayed put.
"Short version." I picked the words carefully. "I wanted to learn something new. My master put me in a coma to do it, and I had to climb out on my own."
The truth was I wanted to see that ship. The gravity chamber inside it, specifically. My Fanboy heart needed to see it, and I couldn't wait much longer.
Tights gave up on the interrogation eventually, mostly because her father appeared in the hallway behind her and she lost the high ground.
"Ah. You're back." Dr. Brief had a cigarette in one corner of his mouth and a small cat asleep on his shoulder, which was either the same cat from last time or a different one running the same shift. He looked at me the way he looked at most things, like I was a problem he'd already half-solved and was mildly pleased to see again. "I was beginning to think you'd abandoned the project."
"Something came up."
"Things tend to." He turned and walked back the way he'd come, which I understood to be an invitation. "Come on, then. She's finished. Has been for a while."
I followed him through the labs.
He pushed open a set of double doors at the back and there it was.
The ship sat in the center of the bay, white and round and gleaming under the lights. The hull seams were clean. The landing gear sat flush. It looked less like something that had been assembled and more like something that had been grown into exactly this shape.
'I would believe it more if he told me he rebuilt it from scratch.' I thought impressed.
"The plating runs to three hundred times standard gravity," Brief said, walking a slow circle around it with pride.
"I wouldn't recommend that on the first day, but the field generators will hold it. Self-contained life support. Water reclamation. The drive's integrated into the new chassis, your old schematics got you the principle, I handled the execution." He tapped ash onto the floor.
"Three-month crossing instead of four. You're welcome."
"Three months." I ran my hand along the hull. It hummed faintly under my palm, the gravity core, idling, waiting. "How did you cut a month off?"
"Reworked the subspace fold calculation." He said it the way other people said I made tea. "There were three things in your original engine that should not have worked. I left them exactly as they were. I'm not in the habit of breaking what I don't understand."
That was the most honest thing an engineer could say, and I respected it more than any compliment.
I rubbed my hands together. I'd been waiting for this since before the hibernation.
"Now for the fun part. Time to test that gravity chamber."
"Go ahead. Just don't push it." Brief lit a fresh cigarette off the old one. "I'd rather not explain to Tights why her first friend who vanished for months turned himself into paste on day one."
The ship opened with a hiss and I climbed inside.
The main room was round, wrapping all the way around a single thick pillar in the center, the control panel, judging by the readouts glowing along its surface. The walls curved smooth overhead. Bright, clean, bigger on the inside than it looked from the bay.
"Okay. Not bad."
I found the trapdoor set into the floor near the wall. It lifted easily, a short ladder dropping down to the lower level, a cramped little corridor with doors off it. Toilet. A bedroom. A kitchen with actual counter space, which I hadn't expected.
I climbed back up. There was a TV mounted on the curve of the wall, speakers tucked into the panels on either side.
"I guess I can start to be a bum, I just need the El cinco." I chuckled at that.
The old man had thought of everything.
I walked back to the pillar in the center and ran my finger down the panel until I found the gravity controls.
"Right. Let's see what you can do."
I set it to ten.
The weight came down and I barely felt it. Home gravity. I'd been born in this. "Ten. Sure."
Twenty. A little more. My shoulders settled under it. Still easy.
"Thirty."
That one had some teeth. Not much. I rolled my neck and felt it pull.
"Forty."
Now it was working. The air felt thick, every movement asking something of me. I threw a few slow punches just to feel the drag.
"Okay. Fifty."
It dropped onto me all at once and I planted my feet.
"...Yeah. There it is."
Everything got heavy. My knees wanted to fold, my breathing shifted on its own, the floor seemed to press up through the bottom of my feet. I held the stance and let my body adjust to it, breath by breath.
Huh. Fifty.
I'd figured I could take more than that. A hundred, maybe. But there was a difference between hitting hard and holding yourself up under weight coming from every direction at once, and I'd spent years doing the first thing and almost none doing the second.
"That'll change," I said out loud, mostly to myself. "Give it a week."
I settled into my stance and started to move.
Then a little screen on the central panel lit up.
"Hey. You just got back and the first thing you do is train? At least come eat something." Tights. She sounded disappointed in me, and she wasn't wrong to be.
"Okay, okay. I'm coming."
I cut the gravity and climbed off the ship.
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"Lord Frieza. I have a report." Zarbon knelt.
"What is it, Zarbon. I hope it's good news." Frieza didn't sound particularly bothered either way.
"It concerns the Saiyan squad we deployed to Planet Frieza 117."
"What? It's been a few hours, at most." A pause. "Are they all dead?"
"No, my lord. The opposite. They completed the mission." Zarbon's voice wavered. "In record time."
Frieza said nothing. The silence stretched out long enough to become its own kind of answer.
"Hoho." When he finally spoke, he didn't sound angry. Not yet. "I sent them there to teach that clever little monkey a lesson. And he cleared it like it was nothing."
He rose from his chair. A flick of telekinetic force, and the chair folded in on itself with a shriek of bending metal.
Zarbon did not move. Did not breathe, if he could help it.
"Cress. That was his name, yes?"
"Yes, my lord."
Frieza looked out at the stars.
'A race of monkeys is one thing. A monkey that thinks is another.' The thought settled cold and clear. 'Leave one like that among them long enough, and the whole pack starts getting ideas.'
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The squad got back from Planet Frieza 117 two days ago. The mission was clean. No casualties.
I was in the training hall, alone.
I held my hand out toward the far wall and pushed. Not with Ki, not exactly. I was trying to feel the space between my hand and the wall the way Whis had shown me.
Is the space resisting me, or am I creating the resistance.
That was the question he'd left me with. Space had a texture. It yielded to some kinds of pressure and pushed back against others. Every technique I threw, every step I took, I was shoving against it instead of moving through it.
I pushed again.
It felt like a wall. It felt like exactly what it was, empty air and a stone wall behind it, both of them perfectly ordinary, neither of them yielding to anything.
I dropped my hand.
Two months of this. I could feel the edge of the thing, the place where the answer was supposed to be. I couldn't cross it. Whis had told me not to expect to feel it clearly for a while, and I was beginning to understand that his "a while" and mine were different lengths.
I reset my stance and tried again.
Nothing.
Fine. It would come or it wouldn't. I'd put in the hours either way.
I was about to start over when the datapad on the bench chirped.
I walked over and picked it up.
New deployment order. Direct from Force Command.
I read it twice.
We'd been back two days. Two days. You didn't redeploy a squad this fast unless something was burning, and nothing in the briefing said anything was burning. Just another mission. Outer rim. Manageable parameters.
The timing was wrong.
I stood there with the pad in my hand and turned it over. Frieza keeping me busy. Frieza keeping me where he could see me. That was the read. He'd made me Squad Leader so he could watch me, and watching me meant working me.
I filed it and went back to the wall. The mission could wait until I briefed the others. The technique couldn't, because the technique didn't care whether I worked on it or not, and the only thing standing between me and it was hours.
I held my hand out again.
'Is the space resisting me, or am I creating the resistance.'
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Captain Ginyu landed in the docking bay and stepped off his pod with the satisfaction of a job done well.
Zarbon was waiting.
"Captain. Good hunting?"
"Flawless." Ginyu rolled his shoulder. "The garrison didn't last an hour. Barely worth the trip." He looked around the bay. "What did I miss? You've got the face you get when there's news."
"Some." Zarbon fell into step beside him as they walked. "Lord Frieza is in a mood. The Saiyans."
"The monkeys are always a problem."
"The squad on the frontier. The one with the Low-Class running it." Zarbon paused. "You were there, Captain. Beluria. The orbital intercept."
"The talking one." Ginyu remembered. The little Saiyan who'd opened a comms channel mid-vacuum and argued Lord Frieza out of a kill, of all things. Fifteen thousand, suppressed posture, far too composed for his level. "Cress, or something. What about him?"
"He's still clearing missions he was meant to die on. Lord Frieza assigned them a planet designed to break them. They walked off it without a scratch. He thinks the creature is clever."
"Clever." Ginyu said it like it tasted strange. "Clever doesn't survive a Captain. Frieza's losing sleep over a fifteen-thousand pet?" He shook his head. "Send me. I'll have the squad sorted by—"
"The child is still with them."
Ginyu stopped walking.
He remembered that, too. He hadn't seen the boy, just the pod, and the numbers the scouters scraped off it before they overloaded and went dark. He'd been curious at the time. Curious and busy, and it had gone out of his head the moment the engagement ended.
It came back now.
"The mutant," he said.
"Yes. Still on the squad. Still growing." Zarbon kept his voice low. "The technicians can't put a ceiling on him. That's what worries them. They don't know where the number stops."
Ginyu turned to face him fully.
A body that hadn't finished growing. A ceiling no one could find. Wasted on a child who couldn't hold it, sitting in a Saiyan squad on the frontier, attached to a problem Lord Frieza already wanted gone.
He'd filed the boy away once. He took the file back out.
He smiled.
"Zarbon," he said. "I think it's time I paid that squad a visit."
"Which one do you want? The leader or the child?"
"Both." Ginyu started walking again, and his stride had changed. "It would be rude to make the trip and only greet one of them."
Zarbon watched him go.
He had served Frieza long enough to know the difference between a Captain doing his duty and a Captain wanting something.
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Author's note:Did you like it? The first person to write ai is going to go to hell, I did not use ai this chapter, like at all. The next chapters are still going to be written with the help of ai though, I just had a lot of time for this return chapter. Leave your thoughts, and the power stones, if I reach 1000, I'll drop a bonus chapter.