"Ooh, look at all of the food! What's that! It looks so fluffy… I wanna eat it!" It'd been just under four years since the last time any of us saw Tater, now. I was almost twelve, and with my mastered Super Saiyan Primal form, looked just a year or two younger than I actually was.
Today was the day of the 20th World Martial Arts tournament, and something in my gut told me that there was zero chance of Tater missing it.
So, all of us fighters from the village had decided to take a trip to Papaya island together.
That meant me, Lynn (who was in the middle of her final growth spurt and looked like she was coming up on her mid-teens), Pepper, and the now 16 year old Zeck.
Unfortunately, though, we couldn't all sign up for the tournament. Even casual sparring between people as strong as my team was horrifyingly destructive, usually resulting in the destruction of a small island or similar-sized landmass.
After all, Pepper's power level was actually comparable to mine, now that I'd begun hitting my first real bottleneck, while she'd managed to shatter hers over the last few years of continued effort. And Lynn's own power level, even, had broken 100,000, too.
As such, given that Tater would probably be participating, likely seeing the tournament as free money with his overwhelming power in comparison to the Earthlings, Pepper was barred from participating.
I even put Lynn on Pepperwatch to ensure that the thirteen-year-old girl didn't try to sign up behind my back, meaning that Lynn was barred from entering the tournament, too.
As such, only Zeck and I were going to compete in the tournament. Zeck knew that he wasn't going to win, not with Tater and I competing, but he wanted to see just how far his own strength would get him against normal humans.
I figured that he'd be fine, so long as he didn't run into Tater or I in the preliminaries. He wasn't some Saiyan powerhouse, with the various overwhelming advantages that my team had, but he'd tried really hard to get stronger and stronger over the last five years, and that effort had put him in a bracket above where anyone apart from my own teammates should reasonably be right now.
"Pep, that's called cotton candy. As good as it may taste, don't spend all of your allowance on it." I warned as Pepper bought five cones of the stuff and began stuffing her face.
I couldn't help but wince. Even us Saiyans weren't immune to the downsides of eating too much sugar… eventually. If Pepper liked cotton candy as much as I did, this was going to be a loong day.
"Grandpa, can I have this, and this, and this, and what's this? It looks so tasty! But, Master Roshi, it's just ten hot dogs! I'm still really hungry!"
"Kakarot, you can eat after you get signed in for the tournament! At this rate, we're gonna be late."
"...What…?" I locked eyes with Roshi across the street, and we blinked at each other for a moment, as he pulled along a little kid with very distinctive black hair, an old man with a large mustache following behind, chuckling like he'd just heard a great joke.
My mind blanked.
Why were Roshi and Gohan both with the seven-year-old Kakarot?
Why was that very same seven-year-old Kakarot signing up for the World Martial Arts tournament, when he should be on Mt. Paoz, isolated and probably only a few years away from accidentally killing his grandfather (which I knew I'd prevented, but still… Goku wasn't supposed to leave Mt. Paoz for another four and a half years or so)?
And the most important question that crossed my mind.
WHY WERE THEY BOTH SO DAMN STRONG?
Twelve year old Kakarot was supposed to start with a power level of ten. It got somewhere around 150 around the 21st tournament, which was supposedly around Roshi's natural maximum before he started retraining himself.
At least, that was how it was supposed to go.
In reality, seven-year-old Goku's power level… I'd peg it at somewhere near Zeck's… 500 or so, judging from my senses. That was higher than his Raditz Saga power level was supposed to be, twenty years in the future.
Then, there was Roshi. Somehow, the old man was even stronger than that.
Not by much, from my guesstimate, but still, his power level, somewhere around 200 or so five years ago, was now somewhere over 400.
I wasn't fooled by that, though. Roshi basically had three forms that I knew of, basically like Frost Demon transformations to conserve energy. Currently, he was in his weakest form.
Last time I'd seen him in his fighting form, it'd been around a 30% increase from his weaker 'old man' form.
Making his full power… stronger than Goku? Without counting his true full power, naturally, which was actually incomparable to that.
Why the heck was Master Roshi's full power level probably over a thousand!?
Maybe this would be an interesting tournament after all.
I felt sorry for all of those normal humans training for five years just for a chance to compete in this tournament, though.