"Unnn…" My head felt like it was on fire, and my arm felt even worse. Trying to move the arm that didn't feel like it contained fire instead of blood sent a sharp pain shooting through my right side, eliciting another groan from me. Still, I managed to sit up against the metal bedframe behind me, taking a deep breath to clear away the pounding in my head.
It helped a bit, but not much. Still, I got a sense of what was going on.
Wherever I was, the rest of my team was nearby, including Pepper. But we weren't on Celatus. The distinct lack of ambient ki signatures was the clue there. Being on a planet felt like being surrounded by life. It was invigorating, in a way. But here, it felt more like being surrounded by life… which was concentrated into two boxes. Tater and I were on one, while Pepper, Tommy, and Lynn were on the other.
We were in the spaceships that Doctor Hyperion had made. He must have finished it while I was unconscious, which meant that I'd been unconscious for days at least.
Luckily for me, I'd made sure to give the good doctor the coordinates to Namek a while ago. As much as I wanted to talk to him, to make sure that we were going in the right direction, and everything was going according to plan, but as soon as my leg left the bed, I could tell that I wasn't up for walking.
Or staying awake for long.
After a few minutes, my headache lulled me back to sleep.
…
The trip to Namek should have taken two weeks using the spaceship specs that Doctor Hyperion gave me. However, I only woke twice over the course of the trip. The second time, I made it a few steps, and talked to Tater for a while. He cleared things up for me, and made me feel a lot better.
Apparently, I'd managed to somehow tap into the Great Ape's power for a second, when Dodoria was winding up to kill Pepper and I. The energy bomb that I'd hit him with in response to his attack had completely destroyed him… and drained me nearly dry. Even for a Saiyan, with our resilient constitution, it'd been touch and go for weeks whether or not I'd actually survive.
Pepper'd been better off. She'd had a few broken ribs, and a stupid number of scrapes and bruises, but she'd been perfectly healed before the launch had even happened, and her power level had shot up even higher than mine had been, afterward.
By the time I'd talked to Tater, most of my physical injuries had healed, except for the thing from the Dodoria Cutter. I was just dealing with the exhaustion that came with the strain.
After Tater finished explaining everything to me, I managed to tell him where we were going, Planet Namek, before my headache got the best of me and I fell back asleep.
…
The fourth time I woke up, something felt different. It took me a moment to realize exactly why that was.
Then, I realized the two reasons behind it.
The first reason that things felt different for me was because my strength boost had finally kicked in from my Saiyan physique finishing its healing. Suddenly, I was crazy strong. Even though I wasn't good at comparing my own energy to others, I could tell that, now, I was a lot stronger than my father. My power level had jumped from somewhere definitely above two thousand to something definitely above fifteen thousand. Perhaps even over twenty thousand. Maybe, I wasn't entirely sure.
I couldn't help but smile as I felt it. All of my injuries, all of the headaches and the weakness, it'd mostly vanished, dialed all the way down to a gentle thrumming in my right arm, where the larger portion of my new scar was apparently still settling, even though it'd finished healing, been unbandaged, and was now just a long white stripe that went from my inner elbow all the way down to my wrist.
As I pulled off the plain white Celatus shirt that I'd been wearing, which smelled rather funny after me wearing it for the past three weeks or so apparently, and replaced it with a new shirt from the closet in my recovery room, I considered the second reason things felt different.
We had definitely landed on Namek. I could sense the children outside the spaceship, playing, as foreign energy signatures watched us from a distance.
Obviously, the Namekians were being cautious around us. For some reason, I couldn't imagine many extraterrestrial visitors coming to this out-of-the-way planet with almost zero in the way of useful resources, so it made sense to me.
I was rather glad that the others hadn't yet taken the initiative to make contact with the Namekians of their own accord.