Five minutes.
Liam had been tracking the time from the moment Gohan stepped off the Lookout to the moment he stepped back on. Five minutes, give or take, to locate two targets in a hidden underground laboratory, travel to them, and finish the matter so completely that he'd returned empty-handed. No debris. No prisoners. No evidence that anything had required sustained effort.
Liam had fought hard for a long time to reach the level where he could handle most things competently. He had opinions about the gap between competently and this.
"Next we wait for the new Dragon," Piccolo said, with a smile that was still getting used to being on his face. "Then we restore everything."
Gohan looked down at the world below the Lookout, at the familiar ruin of it, at fifteen years of damage laid out across the landscape like a geological record of something that should never have happened. "It's been a long time," he said quietly.
"Actually." Dende emerged from the temple gate carrying a model under one arm, a carefully constructed replica of a dragon coiled inside a glass case. Mr. Popo looked at it, then at Dende, then at the timeline they'd all agreed on.
"You said a month," Mr. Popo said.
"The original dragon's foundation was much stronger than I expected," Dende said. He looked at Piccolo with something adjacent to reverence. "And before the assimilation, the other Piccolo-san spent time advising me. The depth of understanding he had for Dragon architecture, it was extraordinary. One of the few truly all-round genius Namekians."
Piccolo received this without visible reaction. The all-round genius in question had chosen to dissolve most of that architectural knowledge into combat power, which Dende clearly found professionally regrettable and Piccolo found entirely sensible.
"Three wishes?" Liam asked.
"Three wishes," Dende confirmed. "Same as Porunga."
He set the model on the stone, removed the glass cover, and said clearly: "Come out, Shenron."
The model pulsed once. Then it became light, and the light became something else entirely, golden lightning pulling itself upward from the Lookout into a sky that responded by turning dark, the daylight replaced with a pressing, close night that had nothing to do with the sun's position. The lightning organized itself into an immense coiled shape in the darkness above, an infinity symbol written in living gold, and a head descended from it with the sound of something that predated architecture.
"The one who gathered the seven Dragon Balls," the Dragon said, and the voice came from everywhere simultaneously, "speak your wishes. I will grant three."
Dende stepped back and gestured toward Gohan.
Gohan stood at the center of the Lookout with the weight of fifteen years and one impossible morning on his shoulders, and looked at Liam.
"Without you," he said, "none of us would be standing here."
Roshi stroked his beard. "Give him a wish. That seems appropriate."
Liam opened his mouth, ran a quick inventory of his actual desires, and found nothing the Dragon Balls were specifically equipped to address. His Memento Mori panel was still absent. His Nen still worked. He was in a dimension his student's Hatsu had punched open, and the exit was operational.
"I'm fine," he said. "I don't have anything."
He looked at Akane.
"Hunter License?" she said, from his shoulder.
"You can take the exam next year."
She thought about it with genuine effort. "Then I can't think of anything either."
The lack of demand seemed to create a mild social awkwardness on the Lookout. Bulma was turning something over in her mind, watching the two of them, thinking about whether Dragon Ball wishes applied to people who had arrived from somewhere the Dragon Balls had never heard of.
Gohan turned back to the Dragon. "First wish. Revive everyone who died because of the Androids."
The Dragon's eyes moved. A pause, longer than pure processing time, the consideration of an intelligent entity working through scope.
"The time span is long," it said. "Some of those who died have already completed reincarnation. They cannot be returned."
Gohan absorbed this. "Then revive everyone who can be revived."
"This wish is simple."
The Dragon's eyes went red.
It was not simple in any ordinary sense. The Lookout's plaza filled with light, and the light organized itself into people. Krillin. Tien. Chiaotzu. Yamcha. One after another, familiar shapes became solid, standing on pale stone under a dark sky, blinking, looking at hands that worked, at a world that had continued without them.
Trunks scanned the crowd with specific urgency, the way you search a crowd when there is one particular face you need to find.
He found it. The man with the sharp eyes and the aggressive posture and the hair that went straight up in a way that was genetically inevitable. Standing among the revived with the expression of someone who had died one way and woken up another, taking stock.
Vegeta looked at the Lookout. Looked at the people on it. Looked at Son Gohan, standing in a white god's robe with golden hair and the calm of someone who had finished the thing that needed finishing.
His eyes narrowed. Then his aura spiked, a full-body spike of something that was partly fury and partly something more complicated that he had no intention of examining in front of witnesses.
He flew off the Lookout without a word, straight out over the sea of clouds, and became a point in the distance, and then was gone.
Trunks watched the empty sky.
He had spent his whole life wondering what his father was like. He had a data now.
He took a careful step behind Bulma and continued observing from there.
Bulma was looking at the space where her parents had not appeared. She exhaled smoke. They'd been ordinary people, and the years were long, and reincarnation ran on its own schedule.
"Your father had merits," the Dragon said, unprompted, apparently deciding that clarification was appropriate. "His inventions benefited many. He was entitled to heaven. But your mother's path led to reincarnation, and he would not go to heaven without her. He chose to wait and reincarnate together. King Yama arranged for them to be reborn."
Bulma looked up at the coiled form in the dark sky for a long moment.
"When I die," she said, "I'll thank King Yama personally."
There were other absences. Gohan stood near the edge of the Lookout and was still for a while, looking at the faces that had come back and the specific gaps among them. Piccolo put a hand on his shoulder and kept it there until Gohan let out a slow breath and straightened up.
Liam watched this and then looked away. Some things didn't need observers.
He walked over to Gohan when the moment had passed.
"One more thought," he said. "About your father."
Gohan looked at him.
"The Dragon can't revive someone whose death was natural causes. But it can create a body. If the Dragon builds Goku's body, heart disease and all, modern medicine can treat the heart disease. It's been fifteen years and Bulma has already developed the treatment. Once the body is healthy, you ask King Yama for the soul and reunite them." He shrugged. "Two steps instead of one. It might work."
Gohan stared at him.
The possibility rearranged itself across his face slowly, like a city's lights coming on at dusk, one block at a time.
Liam turned away.
Bulma was waiting for him at the plaza's edge, cigarette at the end of its life, looking at him with the expression of someone who had already said their actual thanks privately and was now handling the formal version.
"Liam," she said. She had used the other name throughout. It felt right that she kept it. "Thank you."
"You have other work ahead," Liam said. "Don't only remember this part."
Her expression said she knew exactly what he meant. The ancient egg, sealed somewhere on Earth since before recorded history. The pink catastrophe waiting inside it, patient as geology. The chapter that would follow this one if nobody did anything about it.
She gave him a thumbs up, cigarette between two fingers, forty-six years old and currently the most capable person in this dimension.
"I remember," she said. "There won't be another doomsday."
Liam nodded once.
Akane straightened on his shoulder. The glow started at her edges, pale and building, the Butterfly Hatsu activating with the same quality it had on the first day: visible but not quite explainable, a Specialization ability doing things that defied the description Akane herself would give of it. She spun. The spin generated something like a current, aura and intent and whatever the Hatsu used as its actual medium creating a pocket of pull, a small gravity of return.
The vortex drew him in.
The Lookout, the dark sky, the gold Dragon, Bulma with her thumb up and a cigarette in her other hand, Gohan standing with old grief and new purpose, Trunks watching his father's empty skyline with complicated feelings he'd be untangling for years, Piccolo meditating at the edge of a world that had just exhaled for the first time in fifteen years.
The center of the vortex.
Then nothing, and then not nothing, and then somewhere else entirely.