Tater's body flashed past me, the wind ripping at my shirt as he passed. Then, I dodged slightly backward as it happened again. This time, behind me.
And again.
And again.
Every time, he missed by mere inches, his light, almost-blonde green SSJP hair fluttering in the wind as I casually dodged with almost computerlike precision. This happened hundreds of times per second, give or take. I'd lost track twenty-six hours ago.
Just two days ago, Tater had managed to convince me that his son, Cynder, at two-and-a-half, was ready for martial arts training.
To be fair, with a power level of 50,000 and the ability to use it pretty well, the kid really was precocious. And he absolutely loved the idea of learning to fight like his daddy. The boy hadn't stopped flying over to pester me about it since he learned to speak in complete sentences.
Did I actually want to teach the kid quite yet? No. He may have been precocious, but as a toddler, he didn't really understand the idea of mortality.
Martial artists had the ability to cause extreme damage. I wasn't going to train anyone who didn't understand what it was like to actually be in danger. As a toddler, I honestly didn't really think that Cynder was up for it.
But Tater said that the boy was ready for it. Even Cynthia agreed, and the kid himself had a focused gleam in his eyes that you didn't normally see in toddlers, when I talked to him about how hard what I was going to have him do would be on him.
Plus, the boy was a Saiyan. Half-Saiyan, but his Saiyan blood was incredibly strong. He may have looked a lot like his mother, but he had his father's Saiyan blood.
Saiyans tended to spend the first three years of their lives in incubation pods, but after that, they were immediately pulled out and spent the entire rest of their lives 'working'.
If Cynthia and Cynder himself were both willing to take the risk of starting him too soon, then I was willing to be a little flexible.
So, I'd told him that I'd start training him if he finished my test.
A week surviving, alone, in Yanzubit Heights. The most cold, lifeless, inhospitable environment on Earth.
Food there was scarce.
The terrain was horrible, and Cynder knew that he'd be monitored 24/7. Flight was restricted once he touched down.
The wind was biting cold and so strong that it'd regularly cause massive avalanches.
Water left out in the open would freeze in place in minutes.
And nothing lived there. Not a single living plant or animal. Just a few small patches of grass, that was it. The only accessible food supply were the fish living in the biting cold waters of the surrounding ocean.
Which was constantly ravaged by powerful tropical storms, even hurricanes.
And no, Cynder had not been taught how to swim yet. Though, if he chose to fly underwater in order to find food, we wouldn't really hold it against him.
Not that we told him that, so he'd probably never even think of it. The boy's Saiyan Pride (inherited from his father) probably wouldn't even allow him to think of cheating like that.
So he'd basically been sent to hell on Earth for a week. A normal island, like the one Piccolo had left Gohan on in the original timeline, would simply feel like a vacation to a child as massively powerful as Cynder.
I needed him to truly feel the pressure of hard work, sweat, and pain. There weren't many places capable of pressuring a Saiyan as strong as Cynder, but as long as he wasn't able to fly away, Yanzubit Heights would do it.
But that meant that Tater had a full week without his child.
And he was ecstatic. He'd immediately flown over to the Celatian camp and asked me for a training session.
That had been ongoing for 26 hours straight so far.
Normally this wasn't something I did, training for such a long period of time without breaks, but it was a good exercise in stamina.
So far, neither of us had begun flagging, but at this rate, we both knew that it was only a matter of time until Tater's strength gave out first.
Which, while mildly annoying from my perspective, was the best possible option from Tater's. The big guy would get a workout, and I would at least be forced to focus on my immediate surroundings continually for a much longer period of time than I'd ever needed to before.
It was working so well that my brain had begun multitasking. Doing stupid little things while a small portion of the back of my mind stayed dedicated to keeping track of the larger SSJP.
Things like watching Pepper snack on something when she wandered over to watch the training, counting exactly how many bites she's taken while standing there on the shoreline, or reading the fluctuations of Kakarot's power level as he wandered through the planet with Bulma, gathering the Dragon Balls.
So, when a small speedboat carrying the boy, along with two girls, rolled ashore on our island, while I was preoccupied, I wasn't particularly surprised.
Part of me had always known that this day would come. Kakarot and Bulma were finally searching… no, they'd clearly already found every single Dragon Ball.
They only needed the one inside my safe in my apartment, and they could make their wish. All they needed was my permission.