"Remember. Be observant, careful, and fast. The Stealth Box isn't perfect. If Gero's got a sophisticated enough detection algorithm, his cameras'll catch the unnatural shifts in the light. This search is pointless if the old man gets away." I explained through telepathy.
"Do you think he can already detect ki fluctuations?" Zeck wondered.
"Unlikely, but if we try to search by ground, this'll take way too long. He'll notice us for sure." I replied with a shrug, "Let's just get this done as fast as possible and hope that he doesn't have enough time to escape, if he does notice." I replied. Honestly, that was a prayer. As sure as I was that the paranoid old geezer definitely had some sort of escape plan ready, there was exactly zero chance that he'd want to leave without his work.
I was betting that, since it'd been less than two years since the incident, according to Tater, and the Saiyan had spent that entire time randomly wandering the Earth, making him almost impossible to track down, Gero's research likely hadn't gotten too far.
There was a fair chance that he'd figured out how to detect ki, but even that was an extremely difficult thing to figure out from scratch. Of all of the civilizations in the universe, only a handful, not including Celatus, had ever managed to figure that technology out by themselves, even though ki was a fairly common phenomena. Ki was simply too volatile to accurately detect or measure.
We searched from the skies, in a grid pattern. Each of us took a specific sector, and we made sure to keep close enough to each other that Lynn could contact me via telepathy, and Zeck could do the same with Tater, in an emergency. Telepathic range depended heavily on how strong or skilled someone was, and none of us were particularly skilled in telepathy, so the weaker of us didn't quite have the range to connect to someone across the entire mountain range.
In fact, the fact that Zeck could use telepathy at all was rather impressive. I kind-of wondered if it was a talent native to Celatians or something, not that it mattered much to me.
We scaled the search sectors based on speed. How fast we could fly without straining ourselves. As such, I ended up with twice as much area to cover as Tater did. It was only fair, since I was nearly a hundred times stronger than him, since I was using my SSJP and he couldn't do so for more than a few seconds at a time, according to him.
Probably because it was outside of combat. By now, I could use SSJP almost as easily as my base form. Switching between the two felt like breathing, and the power felt like a part of me, rather than something extra, but getting it to this point had taken me almost five years of constant effort, thanks to my focus on control rather than power during training.
Though I honestly wasn't sure that I could've broken through to much of a higher level than where I was right now without the pressure of some impending disaster.
After all, when we'd arrived on Earth originally, my power level had been around where Tater's was right now. My control, honestly, hadn't been much better, either. A nearly ten times increase in effective power level in that time was rather impressive, from an outside point of view.
The only person who'd grown notably more than that was Tater, who'd gotten a massive Zenkai boost from his fight with me four years ago, and not even managed to double his power level since that, after four years of constant effort with a specific, observable goal in mind.
In other words, around 60% of his growth was from that one battle with me. Had he not fought with me that day, he likely wouldn't have even broken 100,000, which would've left him a lot weaker than the current Lynn.
From that perspective, my growth was pretty incredible.
I just wished that I could've figured out the real Super Saiyan, too, over the last five years. If I'd have managed that, my growth would've spiked even more.
I'd do that someday, Frieza pressure or not, but for today, my ten million class SSJP power level was more than enough to make me the strongest person on this planet by an order of magnitude.
Until Pepper figured SSJP out for herself. Then, it'd be about half an order of magnitude, and she'd probably master the form in two months just because I'd already done it and she had her crazy Goku-level Pepper instincts to help her, closing the gap just a little bit further.
While I thought about the difference in power levels between us Saiyans, we searched a quarter of the mountain range. As far as the eye (or ki sense) could see, nothing but rocks, shrubs, trees, and grass. Apparently, Lynn managed to find a cave, but it was filled with animal feces, not Dr. Gero.
Not that, in all honesty, there was that big of a difference between the two. Anyone who experimented on human beings like rats was clearly very similar to a pile of feces.
He needed to be eliminated. It wasn't just a preventative measure… I just couldn't bring myself to allow somebody to waste completely random, innocent lives just because they hated my friend.
At least Frieza didn't discriminate like that. You could almost call the Frost Demon a force of nature, because anything that caught his attention in any way, shape, or form would be subjected to whatever his whim at the time was, regardless of who or what they were.