Two people walked out of the temple gate into the morning light, and the Lookout went quiet.
Son Gohan's hair was gold. Standing straight up, the way Super Saiyan hair stood when the transformation was active, every strand catching the light. His eyes were green. And his face was exactly the same as it always was: steady, unhurried, the expression of someone who had just come inside from a walk rather than someone channeling enough energy to level a city block.
He looked like he'd simply changed his hair color.
Next to him, Trunks stood with matching gold hair and the same impossible calm, a smaller echo of Gohan beside him. Yesterday, Trunks had maxed his anger at eighty-eight and made his hair fluffy. Today, standing in full Super Saiyan transformation, he looked like he was thinking about breakfast.
Bulma reached her son in four steps. She looked him up and down, then put her hands on his shoulders.
"You're taller," she said.
"A year inside," Trunks said. He was smiling. "Of course I'm taller."
Piccolo looked at Gohan the way a teacher looks at a student who has answered a question the teacher wasn't sure had an answer. "Is that you, Gohan."
"You've changed too, Uncle Piccolo," Gohan said.
Liam walked over and looked at Gohan's wrist.
S-Cell Content: 91% Anger Value: 0
He read it twice to confirm the numbers hadn't rearranged themselves when he wasn't looking.
"Super Two?" he asked.
"Yeah," Gohan said, with the mild tone of someone confirming a lunch order.
Liam exhaled. In the original timeline, Gohan had achieved Super Saiyan Two at eleven years old, under the specific pressure of watching his friends die one by one, rage breaking a seal that training alone hadn't reached. This Gohan was older, had spent over a decade grinding against a losing war, had just spent a subjective year in a white void with a twelve-year-old to train and an urgent problem to solve. The conditions were different. The result was somehow still Gohan.
"Full power?" Liam asked.
"Not quite," Gohan said, with the hint of a smile, "but I can feel where the ceiling is from here."
Liam stared at him.
Full Power Super Saiyan Two in a single subjective year, after a decade of fighting without proper instruction, after speaking to his dead father through a cosmic telephone relay. The Androids in this timeline were already the reduced edition, the versions that had never had Cell's interference to push them to their upper limits. And Son Gohan had rolled up past everything that should have been sufficient to handle them, in one extended training session, and come out looking like he'd slept well.
"Brother Gohan is very strong now," Trunks announced to everyone, with the complete and unself-conscious confidence of someone who had experienced it firsthand. "No Android is going to give him any trouble."
Roshi settled back in his seat with the deep satisfaction of a teacher watching a lineage prove itself. "Now that Gohan has a god's awareness of the territory, finding No. 17 should be straightforward. The sooner we finish this, the better."
Piccolo's expression didn't lighten. "No. 18 is dead. No. 17 ran before I could corner him. After seeing what I could do, he went to ground. I searched all night."
Gohan was quiet for a moment. The new awareness that came with being Earth's god was still sorting itself into something he could navigate. Thoughts, emotions, events in the lower world, deaths, they arrived in his consciousness the way information arrived on a screen, not intrusive but present, available when he reached for them.
He scratched his cheek. "No. 17 went back after you left, Uncle Piccolo. He took No. 18's body."
Piccolo's face went a specific shade of green that was distinct from its normal shade.
Roshi stroked his beard. "Siblings, even transformed ones. They wanted her to rest somewhere."
"I'm concerned about something worse," Bulma said. She looked at Liam.
Liam nodded once. They'd discussed Dr. Gero's backup project at length two nights ago on the Lookout's edge. The secret laboratory in the north, the one that only became relevant in the original timeline because Cell arrived from the future to use it. The lab that had been running independently, tended by micro-robots, refining a project that nobody in this timeline had any reason to know existed.
Except that Android 17 had just gone looking for somewhere to take his sister's body, and the micro-robots apparently had navigational opinions.
Gohan was already looking north, eyes focused on something the rest of them couldn't perceive.
"Dr. Gero's hidden laboratory," he said. "Underground facility. The micro-robots led No. 17 to it. There's another Android there, a different kind. One designed to absorb the others."
Piccolo went very still. "Absorb them?"
"No. 18's body is already inside it."
The sequence clicked into place: Cell, or this world's equivalent of Cell, incomplete, running on whatever base state Dr. Gero had left it in before his timeline ended. Absorbing No. 18's body immediately. Turning toward No. 17.
"He'll absorb No. 17 next," Liam said.
"He already has No. 18," Gohan said. He turned back to the group, and the mild expression hadn't changed. "I'll handle it. I'll be back shortly."
He stepped off the edge of the Lookout and was simply not there. No dramatic departure. No displacement of air. The kind of movement that was less like travel and more like the universe agreeing to relocate him on request.
Piccolo stared at the space Gohan had occupied.
Roshi picked up his tea.
Liam counted silently.
Some time later, at a significant distance to the north, something happened. Even at this altitude, even with no ki sensing and no way to interpret the event in any technical terms, Liam felt the distant assertion of something large and final resolving. It was brief. It was not a fight that had gone on long.
Then it was over.
Gohan stepped back onto the Lookout.
Electricity still crawled along his forearms and shoulders, the residual signature of Super Saiyan Two not quite finished with the air around him. There was something on his clothes that suggested he'd been in proximity to a biological event. He made a small gesture, said something under his breath, and his clothes were clean.
Piccolo, who could feel aura at distance and had therefore perceived in rough terms what had just occurred in the north of the world, was looking at Gohan with an expression he was visibly not sure how to wear.
Roshi made the same satisfied sound as before, but quieter.
Trunks was grinning. He spread his hands at the group as if this settled everything.
"I said so," he announced. "I said no Android was going to give him any trouble."