Nobody could see the fight.
That was the maddening thing. Piccolo had dropped off the Lookout like a falling judgment, and somewhere down in the ruins of the world, a battle was happening, and the only way Liam could participate was to stand on the edge of the Lookout and squint at a sky that told him nothing.
He had no ki sensing. That was simply not a skill available to him in this world, any more than he could have performed surgery without knowing anatomy. The locals could feel power levels the way you felt weather coming. Liam felt nothing. His En extended thirty meters and then hit the edge of his range and reported back that the immediate vicinity contained stone, wind, and several people.
"Can he win?" Liam asked.
"He will win," Gohan said, with the certainty of someone who had watched Piccolo train.
Trunks was less settled. "The Androids don't have energy signatures. We've never been able to measure their real power. How do we know Piccolo is stronger?"
"Uncle Piccolo will win," Gohan said again.
He pressed the button on his new watch.
The screen lit up: a three-dimensional model of his own body, rotating slowly on the small display. A golden distribution spread across the chest and back, densest at a point between the shoulder blades, radiating outward through the torso to the limbs. The coverage reached up to the jaw, out to the elbows, down to the hips.
Two readouts on the right side: S-Cell Content: 41% Anger Value: 0
Gohan exhaled slowly and let his focus narrow. His thick eyebrows pulled together. The gold bloomed upward from his skin like a sunrise in fast-forward, hair standing and brightening, eyes shifting to vivid green. The aura came with it, and on the watch display, the anger value spiked and climbed in real time.
It hit 120 and the single digits kept going.
Gohan watched the number, and Liam watched Gohan, and there was something instructive happening: a man learning to read his own internal state from the outside, seeing the physical reality of something he'd only ever felt before. Gohan eased back deliberately, pulling the emotional intensity down like adjusting a dial, and the anger value dropped.
It settled around 20 and held.
The transformation held with it, stable and clean, the gold burning at a steady low flame. Full power, minimum volatility.
"That's the Full Power concept," Liam said, mostly to himself. "Saturate the cells to near the breakthrough threshold, then control the trigger down to minimum maintenance. The transformation becomes resting state instead of emergency response."
He was fairly certain this was what Goku and Gohan had worked out in the Time Chamber, in the original version of events that no longer entirely applied here. The principle was elegant once you saw the mechanism: the threshold for anger kept rising as the cells multiplied, the emotional trigger that had once moved mountains eventually became a quiet hum.
Gohan released the transformation. The numbers dropped.
"Let me see mine," Trunks said.
Bulma produced a second watch from the trailer, already calibrated. Trunks got it on his wrist, activated it, and studied his own body map.
S-Cell Content: 24% Anger Value: 0
"Why only twenty-four," he said, with the tone of someone personally offended by their own biology.
He breathed in, summoned every frustration available to him, which was considerable given his life, and the anger value climbed: 10, 23, 59, 88.
His hair got slightly fluffy.
That was all.
Trunks stared at his watch, then at Gohan, who had the grace not to comment.
"Threshold is probably around thirty to thirty-three percent," Bulma said, cigarette going, one eye still on the monitors in the trailer. "To transform, you need enough cells to respond to the trigger. Below that, the trigger fires and nothing catches. You're not stuck, Trunks. You're just not ready yet." She looked at her son. "And the way to get there is not more anger. The cells proliferate under calm."
Trunks processed this. "So to become a Super Saiyan, I have to stop being angry. But the transformation requires anger. Saiyans are insane."
"You need calm to build, and anger to detonate," Liam said. "Separate phases. You're trying to do both at once and wondering why nothing works."
Bulma tapped ash off her cigarette. "Liam. The cell distribution starts at the posterior heart position."
"I noticed that."
"First thing I checked, when the scan came back." She exhaled. "Inner peace for proliferation, extreme anger for activation. Both routed through the heart. S-Cells might be a cardiac muscle mutation. Saiyan-specific."
Gohan went very still. "Dad's heart virus."
The question hung there without needing to be completed. Goku had eaten almost everything as a child on Paozu Mountain. He'd drunk the Ultra Divine Water in Korin Tower, which was medically comparable to a very determined attempt at self-poisoning. He'd trained under King Kai using techniques that were described as extremely taxing. He'd pushed Super Saiyan to its limits repeatedly, run the transformation like a furnace at full output.
And eventually, his heart had given out.
"I worked out a treatment," Bulma said. Her voice was level. "Too late. The illness came fast and the deterioration was faster. I've had years to be angry about it." She flicked the cigarette. "Now I'm just finished being angry about it."
The silence that followed was the specific silence of people sitting with something unfixable and having made, or not yet made, their peace with it.
Gohan looked at the sky. "If S-Cells can reach ninety percent, ninety-nine percent. Is there a level past Super Saiyan Two?"
Liam thought: yes, and it involves a tail and a full moon and a degree of structural commitment that made Super Saiyan Two look like a mild caffeine response. He said nothing.
"Speculation," Bulma said. "All of this is still theoretical. It would be useful to have a baseline from someone who's already past his apparent limits." She looked at the general direction of the sky. "A shame Goku isn't available for a blood sample."
From somewhere that was everyone's inner ear simultaneously, Goku's voice arrived, warm and entirely unconcerned about interrupting.
"I've been sparring with someone interesting up here. He's from an ancient school, one of Earth's old guardian figures apparently. Incredibly strong. But every time I try to get a proper match going, he's in the middle of putting together some kind of model kit." A pause, the sound of genuine bafflement. "Who builds models in the Other World? He's been on the same one for years."
Master Roshi shook his head slowly, the expression of a man who had spent decades being embarrassed by his most famous student's conversational choices.
"Stinky boy," he said, with great affection.