The world felt remarkably fragile.
That was the observation I made when the wooden pencil I was currently holding had snapped perfectly in two between my thumb and forefinger. I stared at the broken graphite bleeding onto my notebook paper.
With a sigh, I brushed it off the paper and threw the pencil into the bin with a perfect shot that'll make basketballers jealous. With ease, I lowered my Ki down again.
"Control your micro-movements, Yuzu," Mom said without looking up from her own reading at the kitchen table. "If you break another pencil, you're doing the rest of your Maths with a pen."
"Right," I muttered, gently plucking a fresh pencil from the cup.
It wasn't that it was hard, far from it actually. Multiplication and division weren't complicated for someone who was used to far worse.
Today, it was Tuesday. And on the weekdays, mom had us both study. It had been exactly three days since we had our potential unlocked by Korin.
Adjusting to my newfound power was about getting used to the world. Everything felt like it was made of wet tissue paper. Doorknobs crumpled if I didn't consciously throttle my grip strength. The floorboards groaned in protest if I didn't distribute my weight perfectly.
Across the table, Gohan was chewing on his bottom lip, staring intensely at a sheet of basic division. His pencil was completely encased in a faint, blue aura. He wasn't breaking it, but he was inadvertently exhausting himself to keep the lead from snapping under his grip.
"Finished," I said, sliding my workbook forward.
Mom glanced over the pages, her dark eyes scanning the equations with practiced speed. She nodded once, a proud smile touching her lips. "Perfect, as always. Gohan?"
"Almost done, Mom!" he squeaked, furiously scribbling down the answer.
The moment his pencil lifted from the paper, a massive shadow fell over the kitchen window. Dad's face pressed against the glass, his nose squished flat, grinning like a maniac.
"Are they done yet, Chi-Chi? The sun's wasting away!" his muffled voice vibrated through the pane.
Mom sighed, though the fondness in her eyes betrayed her exasperation. She closed her book and stood up, smoothing down her apron. "Alright. Recess. Go stretch your legs. But remember the agenda today, Goku! We aren't just brawling in the dirt."
"I know, I know!" Dad cheered, vanishing from the window.
I stood up, rolling my shoulders. The domestic peace was nice, but my mind had been itching for the last two hours. It was time for the checklist.
The clearing behind the house had been expanded considerably, mostly because Dad's "farming" had leveled a small forest. The midday sun beat down on us, but the mountain air kept the temperature comfortable.
"Alright," Dad said, hovering a few feet off the ground, sitting cross-legged in thin air. "Flight is easy once you get the hang of it. It's just pushing your Ki out of your feet and back, like... like standing on a geyser!"
Mom crossed her arms, staring at him. "Goku, that is the worst explanation of aerodynamics I have ever heard."
"He's not wrong, but his analogy is," I interjected, stepping up beside her. I pushed my Ki downward and lifted myself until I was eye-level with Dad.
Flight in this world wasn't antigravity, you can still be pulled to the ground whilst you hover or fly. Piccolo's flight technique was vastly superior to the method the Crane used. And Piccolo's method was the one I used. It was more about using Ki like a helicopter than the other option which was using it like a rocket thruster. Both had their advantages but I personally used the former as it was more aerodynamic.
Dad probably was aware of that himself which is why he chose to learn the more aerodynamic version after realising how different our flight was.
"It's better to think of it like a helicopter, Mom." I explained, flying higher into the sky, now about 20 metres off the ground.
Dad floated up next to me, crossing his arms with a thoughtful nod. "Right! Yuzu's got the science part, but let me give you the martial arts side. If you just blast Ki out of your feet, you're acting like a rocket. Rockets are fast, but they can't turn well, and they burn up all their fuel."
He demonstrated by holding his hand flat. "Instead of pushing away from the ground, imagine you're making a floor of Ki right under your boots. You're not blasting; you're standing on your own energy. Once you're standing on it, you just move the floor."
Mom closed her eyes. She took a deep breath, dropping into a relaxed horse stance on the grass. Since drinking the Ultra Divine Water, her Ki was a roaring hearth, but unlike me, she didn't know Ki Suppression like me and dad did.
A soft, white aura outlined her body. The grass beneath her boots flattened, not from a violent gust of wind, but from a sudden, heavy pressure. Slowly, smoothly, her boots left the dirt. One inch. Two inches. A foot.
She opened her eyes, looking down at the empty space beneath her, then back up to us. A triumphant grin spread across her face. "I'm doing it. Goku, I'm actually doing it!"
"Now try moving!" Dad cheered, doing a backflip in mid-air.
Mom leaned forward slightly. She wobbled, her center of gravity shifting awkwardly, but her martial arts fundamentals kicked in. She adjusted her core, treating the empty air like a slippery training mat, and glided forward. Within five minutes, she was doing laps around the clearing, her flight path stabilizing with every pass.
"My turn! My turn!" Gohan yelled from below.
He didn't wait for instructions. He just squeezed his eyes shut and pushed. With his oceanic reserves of Ki, the result was instantaneous and disastrous.
BOOM!
A crater exploded beneath Gohan's feet as he launched himself upward like a cannonball, screaming at the top of his lungs. He overshot Dad and me in a fraction of a second, hurtling toward the cloud layer.
"Gotcha!" Dad blurred out of existence, reappearing directly above Gohan and catching him smoothly by the collar of his gi. He floated back down, holding the dizzy four-year-old by the scruff. "Too much rocket, Gohan. Not enough floor."
"Start smaller," I advised, drifting down until I was hovering beside them. "Don't push the Ki out of your feet. Spread it over your skin, like a blanket. Let the blanket lift you."
Gohan nodded, taking a shaky breath. He closed his eyes again. This time, there was no explosion. A dense, heavy blue light enveloped him. He lifted off the ground, a bit jagged and jerky, but he was floating. He opened his eyes, letting out a squeak of delight as he paddled his arms in the air as if treading water.
"Alright, back on the ground!" Dad clapped his hands, descending gracefully. "Flying is great, but it drains your stamina if you aren't used to it. Now that you have the feel for moving your Ki outside your body, we need to talk about control."
We formed a semi-circle around him.
"When most people fire a Ki blast, they just throw their energy out," Dad explained, holding out his palm. A standard yellow energy sphere materialized. "But if you control the edges of it, you can make it do whatever you want."
He tossed the sphere toward the forest. Halfway there, it hooked sharply to the right, weaving around a massive oak tree before detonating against a boulder.
"The Bending Kamehameha," Dad said proudly. "I used it against King Piccolo when we fought. If you can bend your Ki, you can hit someone who thinks they've already dodged. If you can change the direction your Ki goes mid-flight you can do this pretty easily."
"I might as well go first."
I cupped my hands.
"Kamehameha." I chanted it quickly, then I thrusted my hands forwards a continuous beam of blue energy fired from my palms. While it was in flight, I focused on the beam and shifted my head to the side I wanted. The beam snapped at a perfect ninety-degree angle, striking the exact center of a target Dad had painted on a distant tree.
"Show-off," Mom teased, though she was already cupping her hands at her side.
"Ka-me-ha-me-ha!" Mom chanted, thrusting her palms forward. A respectable, bright blue wave erupted from her hands. She didn't snap her neck like I did; instead, she swept her arms slightly to the left.
The beam responded, banking in a smooth, elegant arc. It lacked the jagged, unpredictable right-angle snap of mine, but it successfully carved a crescent trench into the dirt before dissipating.
"Like guiding a horse," Mom noted, inspecting her palms. "It's all about directing the momentum."
"Exactly!" Dad beamed, turning to Gohan. "Give it a shot, buddy. Just focus on where you want it to go, not where you're pointing."
Gohan planted his little boots into the dirt. He squeezed his eyes shut, his face scrunching up in intense concentration. "Kame... hame..."
The air around him hummed. Even without trying, his latent power leaked into the technique.
"HA!"
A massive, roaring column of blue energy blasted from his hands, nearly twice the size of Mom's. The sheer recoil pushed him backward a few inches. Remembering the lesson, Gohan jerked his arms violently to the right, trying to force the beam to bend.
Instead of a smooth curve or a sharp snap, the beam spiraled. It whipped around like an untethered firehose, blasting a crater into the ground, violently whipping upward to singe the top of Dad's hair, and finally rocketing off into the stratosphere where it detonated inside a passing cloud.
Dad patted out the small embers in his hair, laughing nervously. "Okay! A little too much horsepower, but we'll work on the steering."
Once the smoke cleared, Dad clapped his hands together, shifting the lesson. "Alright, next up. No more eyes."
Gohan blinked. "Are we taking a nap?"
"No, we're going to see without seeing," Dad explained, tapping his temple. "Mr. Popo taught me this on the Lookout. Everything that's alive has an energy signature. If you quiet your own mind, you can feel them. It's like feeling the warmth of a fire without looking at the flames."
"Dad, whilst you teach them this, can I go off and do my own training?" I asked. He knew I had this skill already. Plus, my Ki Control surpassed his by a wide margin.
"Sure, Yuzu, just stay within eyesight."
I nodded to Dad and walked to the far edge of the expanded clearing, leaving my family behind to practice their Ki Sense training. I could hear Dad patiently talking Gohan and Mom through the meditation process, his voice a low, calming murmur against the rustle of the wind.
It was time to get to work.
"Kikō Yōyō," I said, and twin disks of silver energy formed in my palm, each about the size of a small coin between them stretched a thin strand of Ki. The strand connected the disks through a small knot-like loop, completing the shape.
I flicked my wrist downward. The silver disks shot toward the ground, stopping exactly two inches above the grass as the Ki string pulled taut. They spun at thousands of revolutions per minute, the sheer rotational friction emitting a whine.
I swung my arm in a wide arc. The Yo-Yo snapped sideways, the string extending to twenty meters in a fraction of a second. The silver disks slammed into a massive, jagged boulder shearing through the solid stone like a diamond saw through warm butter, leaving a perfectly smooth, glowing red cut.
With a sharp tug of my middle finger, the Yo-Yo snapped back to my palm.
Next, binding and retrieval. I spotted a dead, fallen tree trunk resting at the bottom of the incline easily weighing at least a ton. I fired the Yo-Yo again, but this time, instead of allowing the disks to act as a blade, I manipulated the string. The silver thread whipped around the trunk three times, the disks latching onto the wood to anchor the grip.
I anchored my feet and yanked my arm back.
The massive log launched up the incline, ripping through the underbrush and hurtling directly toward my face. I didn't flinch. Just as it entered my immediate striking range, I pivoted on my heel, and delivered a devastating roundhouse kick to its center mass. The wood exploded into a shower of splinters that rained down around me.
'Heh, that's perfect.' I expressed my honest thoughts to myself in my head.
The shower of splinters rained down around me, clattering harmlessly against my silver aura. I brushed a stray piece of wood from my shoulder and let the aura fade.
"Let's try this," murmuring, I manifested a second Kikō Yōyō in my other palm. The now pair of silver Yo-Yo's hummed as I felt my lips twitch. Good, this would work.
I whipped both arms forward. The Yo-Yos shot out in opposite directions, whistling as they cut through the air. The right one wrapped its string around the high branch of a towering pine, while the left latched onto a heavy boulder embedded in the dirt fifty feet away.
With a sharp exertion I retracted the strings simultaneously. The opposing forces didn't tear me apart as my own body was used as the fulcrum thus I was violently launched into the air, slingshotting between the two anchor points. Mid-flight, I dispelled the left Yo-Yo, letting the right one carry my momentum in a sweeping arc around the pine tree.
As I swung, I rapidly fired and dispelled the second Yo-Yo from my free hand, using it like a grappling hook to strike specific leaves as I passed them. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Precision targeting while under extreme kinetic stress.
I released the main string and dropped into a silent crouch in the center of the clearing. I looked back at the pine tree. A dozen leaves drifted slowly to the dirt, each perfectly bisected.
I dismissed the constructs, shaking out my hands. Good.
I closed my eyes thinking about something.
You know in the fanfiction on Dragon Ball I read in my past life, I've never seen someone actually do this before. Granted, I didn't read fanfiction much but this idea was almost entirely original.
And it came from a flaw I realised that happens in the fandom. It's simple; bigger beam = stronger beam. It doesn't help that a lot of the attacks in the series were big and flashy but that was wrong. Techniques that fired large volumes of Ki in a wide area were often stronger than normal blasts, yes, but a large portion of that energy was wasted on the environment around them.
The opposite was truer, the smaller or more concentrated a beam was, the stronger it was. For proof, look at the Makankōsappō (Special Beam Canon). So what if you took the Super Kamehameha and condensed the Ki to the size of a regular Kamehameha?
The physics were elementary: Pressure = Force ÷ Area. If I kept the total Ki output or the force exactly the same, but drastically reduced the area the piercing power would increase exponentially.
A Concentrated Kamehameha in other words.
I widened my stance, planting my boots firmly in the dirt. I brought my hands to my right hip, cupping them together.
"Ka... me..."
The energy rushed into my palms. It was blindingly bright, the sheer volume of it physically pushing my hands apart as the bulbous sphere formed. The air around me crackled, the grass flattening in a perfect circle from the atmospheric displacement.
"...ha... me..."
Now, the alteration. I grit my teeth and pulled my hands back together, actively fighting the outward pressure of my own Super Kamehameha and focused on condensing the Ki. I imagined a vice grip closing around the sphere, forcing the erratic, expanding Ki inward.
The sphere shrank from the size of a beach ball to the size of an apple yet my arms were shaking violently. Sweat beaded on my forehead.
"HA!"
I thrust my hands forward.
A blindingly thin, intensely blue laser erupted from my palms. It didn't roar like a tidal wave; it shrieked like a high-frequency drill. The beam crossed the distance to a towering, jagged cliff-face a mile away and punched through solid stone without a single rock shattering.
No explosion. No wasted kinetic transfer. Just a perfectly smooth, cauterized tunnel bored straight through the mountain.
I let my arms drop, my breathing heavy.
It was strong. Devastatingly strong. It would pierce a Saiyan's armor and their torso without a single issue.
But it was a failure.
I mentally reviewed the timeline of the technique. A standard Super Kamehameha took exactly 5 seconds to charge to maximum output. My Concentrated Kamehameha had just taken 10 seconds.
In a live-combat scenario an extra second delay wasn't just a minor flaw; it was a death sentence.
I crouched in the dirt, analyzing the error.
The problem wasn't the capacity; it was the sequence. I was treating the technique like a two-step process. Step one: Generate the Super Kamehameha. Step two: Compress the accumulated mass. By allowing the Ki to expand to its natural size first, I was forcing myself to fight the outward pressure I had just created which was only as quick as 5 seconds because of my Ki Control being as good as it was.
I dropped into the horse stance once more, pulling my hands to my hip. This time, I didn't just cup my hands; I locked my wrists, creating a rigid, unyielding physical and mental boundary.
As soon as the words "Ka... me..." left my lips, I began to mentally clock the time it took to charge this version.
The Ki sparked to life between my palms. But the moment it tried to expand into the bulbous sphere of a Super Kamehameha, I clamped down on it forcing the condensation to happen simultaneously with the generation. Pulling the energy tightly together at the exact same rate I was drawing it out of my reserves.
"...ha... me..."
The sphere didn't grow larger than a tennis ball, but the resistance… It felt like I was trying to hold a dying star between my bare hands.
I pushed through it.
"HA!"
I thrust my hands forward as a beam no thicker than a dinner plate erupted from the white-blue hot sphere. The kickback was violent. My boots carved trenches into the dirt, standing my ground with ease.
The beam shot across the clearing, slicing the air with a deafening crack of displaced oxygen. It hit the same cliff-face, striking a few feet to the left of my first attempt.
Once again, there was no massive blast radius. The Concentrated Kamehameha drilled through the rock face.
I cut the Ki feed, letting the beam dissipate.
The charge time was exactly the same as a standard Super Kamehameha, but the piercing power was exponentially higher.
I thought about it for a second, then smirked.
"Whoa..."
I turned around. Dad, Mom, and Gohan were standing at the edge of the clearing, their Ki Sense training clearly interrupted. Dad was staring at the glowing, slag-dripping hole in the distant mountain, his jaw slightly slack.
"I did it!" I exclaimed with excitement. I felt the rush of my blood within me, felt the pulsing energy within my palms and was even grinning.
Dad was the first to speak.
"That was amazing, Yuzu!" he said, eyes wide with the kind of delight only he could manage after seeing a cliff get drilled like it had offended the laws of nature. "It was like your beam just ignored the mountain!"
"Because it did," I said, still grinning. My hands were trembling a little, but in a good way. "I compressed the output instead of letting it spread. Less area, same force. Higher penetration."
Gohan's mouth hung open. "You made a tiny Kamehameha?"
"Not tiny," I corrected immediately, lifting a finger. "Concentrated."
Mom folded her arms, looking from the hole in the mountain to me, then back again. "And how long did that take you to figure out?"
I hesitated for half a second. "Two attempts."
Her eyelid twitched. "Of course it was."
Dad laughed so hard he had to lean forward with his hands on his knees. "That's my girl! You already started making your own moves!"
"I'm not making them up," I said, trying and failing to sound humble. "I'm improving the delivery system."
"You say that like it is a machine," Mom muttered, though there was no real complaint in her voice.
"There is a machine," I said, glancing at my palms. "It's just made of Ki."
Gohan finally found his voice. "Can you teach me that one?"
I looked at him, then at the mountain, then back at his eager face. "Eventually. First you need enough control to not turn your beam into a weather event."
Dad nodded seriously. "She's right. That one's for later. But Yuzu…" He straightened, his grin turning proud in that infuriatingly warm way of his. "That was awesome."
I let out a breath and dropped my arms, the last of the tension leaving my shoulders.
"Yeah," I said, smiling up at them. "I know."
Mom shook her head, but she was smiling too. "All right, genius. Show-off time is over. Dinner's in an hour."
I turned back to the smoking hole in the cliff and smirked.
"Worth it."