Xeno Trunks

This scroll shouldn't exist, at least not like it was…

I'd walked the shelves of the Time Vault long enough to know them by memory at this point. So my surprise was understandable when a whole new history, clean and bright, echoing with events that—by every record we keep—have never happened, appeared out of nowhere.

I'd been standing in front of the scroll for the better part of an hour, trying to understand how or why this would happen, when the door to the Nest banged open.

"—swear if I have to eat one more slab of raw whatever-that-was I'm going to—" The voice stopped dead. "Oh, come ON."

I turned around.

Lady Chronoa stood in the doorway wearing what I can only describe as a… poorly designed Saiyan costume. A set of armor that was two sizes too big. A tail that was very obviously stitched on and hanging at an angle that looked… off, spiky black hair listing sideways off her head like a wig in a stiff breeze, where you could still see her real hair below and a scouter that was perched over one eye, upside down.

"You're not supposed to be in here," she said after a brief moment of awkward silence.

"I work here."

"You work out there." She jabbed a finger vaguely at the rest of the Nest, her whole small face going red. "This is—I was undercover, this is a professional disguise—stop looking at me!"

"The tail's on backwards."

"IT IS NOT—" She grabbed the tail, checked, and found that it was. In a furious flash of light the whole getup vanished, armor and wig and crooked tail, and there she was again, pink-red hair, Potara earrings, arms crossed, refusing to meet my eye. "You didn't see any of that."

"I saw all of it." And I was going to tell the others as soon as I had the chance.

"You saw a highly trained operative returning from a delicate reconnaissance—"

"They caught you, didn't they?"

"They did not catch me, they thought I was a very short soldier… that was a bit weird, but they did not catch me!" she snapped, then deflated. "One of them asked if I'd fallen out of the pod on my head... But that's not the point." She walked past me, still pink to the ears from embarrassment, and stopped in front of the shelf, in front of the scroll. And just like that the embarrassment drained out of her, and something quieter took its place.

"You found it," she said.

"I did." I let the teasing go. "It's a new scroll. No parent thread, no divergence point that I know of, and I've checked it against everything and it doesn't come from anywhere." 

"It’s a naturally occurring timeline, a new branch in time so to speak."

"Is that possible?"

“It is, but it's super rare…”

“Really?”

"I was standing in it a week ago eating raw meat, Trunks, so trust me, it's possible." She reached up and touched the scroll, gently. "Brand new. First one I've seen in a few million years."

I asked the question I'd been holding since day one.

"Towa," I said. "Or Mira. Any of the Time Breakers."

"No." Lady Chronoa shook her head, "That's why I went down myself instead of sending you—I wanted to get a closer look, and I know for certain that there's nothing on it. No dark magic, no demon energy, none of Towa's grubby little fingerprints, it's clean."

That’s good.

“I might recruit him when he’s older… he looks promising, annoying and infuriating, but promising.”

Wait, what?

Escarot

Transform. Hold it. Drop it. Rest.

I'd lost count of how many times I'd run the cycle so far, the field was one big scorch mark now, and my body had that hollowed-out feeling you only get from doing the same hard thing a few hundred times in a row. Going gold, holding gold, letting it go. Rinse and Repeat.

I'd found a rhythm to it by now though, and the good thing about rhythm is that it frees up your head for other things. My body ran the drill on its own while my mind drifted somewhere more interesting.

It drifted, like it always does, to what comes after this, what’s the next step. I couldn’t let myself feel comfortable with the power I had now, that would only result in my death down the line, Frieza was but a small fish in a big terrifying pond. Besides I knew that base Super Saiyan wasn’t the top of the ladder, not even close.

I had seen the steps the Z-Fighters had taken, and based on that I knew what came next.

Super Saiyan, Grade 2.

I went gold again and held it, letting the power hum through me, and I turned the idea over while I did.

The first real improvement over Super Saiyan in the anime. Vegeta debutted this form against Cell— it was bulkier, meaner, and packed way more of a punch than normal Super Saiyan, he cooked it up in the Time Chamber, took him about two months to reach that state, if I remember it right.

Two months. Huh. That seems like a rather reasonable timeframe for such a big boost in power, and… realistically, Vegeta and I are on the same boat, after all, by the time he first entered the Time Chamber, it hadn’t been long since he first became a Super Saiyan.

Meaning… it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibilities for me to do the same.

I dropped the form. Wiped sweat off my jaw. Went gold again.

That said, it was easier said than done.. And I chewed on the how of it, because I had no idea how. The anime as always never really explains it, it just shows the muscles and the power and moves on. All I knew about the Super Saiyan Grades was that they are not new forms per se, but improvements. Basically, you take the Super Saiyan and you crank it, how? Well, maybe by locking down every nerve, ramming ki through the whole body at once, forcing the output past where it naturally sits…

I stopped mid-motion, gold flickering around me, because that sounded oddly familiar, “That almost sounds like Surge…”

It couldn’t be that simple right?

It would be stupid if it was, but… then again… no, it can’t be that fucking simple, but… I suppose it is worth a try, I mean, I lose nothing trying after all.

So, like a good Saiyan… I tried it.

I planted my feet and as if using Surge, I began to force more power through every muscle, every nerve, every fiber of my being all at once, taking the power already roaring through me as a Super Saiyan and forcing it outward, driving it through every channel at the same time, while refusing to let it settle where it wanted to.

For about half a second, nothing happened.

Then my power exploded.

It slammed outward against the inside of my skin like something trying to escape from within, and my body answered the only way it could—my muscles swelled, hard and fast, tendons standing out like cables, the gold aura around me doubling and turning more jagged, I felt myself get slightly heavier, denser, and above all unmistakably stronger, a raw spike of output well past anything I would’ve ever expected.

It was exhilarating!

And then I discovered the problem with it.

I couldn't hold it. For one, I was already drained from hours of training, and two... Every second I held the form I had to actively wrestle it back down, clamp harder, force it to keep the shape I wanted, and the effort of that was its own separate drain layered over the normal drain of Super Saiyan.

The edges of my vision started going white, and the last thing I registered was the ground coming up to meet me personally, which was strange, because I didn't remember falling.

Huh, I thought, somewhere very far away.

Worked, though…. Kind of

Well that hurt...

I woke up looking at the ceiling.

My ceiling, specifically, my own room. King Vegeta’s former room, which meant someone had carried me here, which meant someone had found me facedown in a scorched field, which meant I was never going to hear the end of this if Okara heard about this.

"Oh good, you're not dead."

Okara, of course. She was sitting in the corner with her feet up on a table, arms crossed, grinning at me like a fucking chesire cat.

"How long," I sighed, my whole body ached in a deep, wrung-out way, like every muscle had been used as a rope in a tug-of-war.

"Couple hours, give it or take, one of the soldiers found you eating dirt and screamed the castle down. I carried you back." She tilted her head. "You wanna tell me why the almighty king of the Saiyans passed out alone in a field like an idiot, or should I just assume you did something stupid?"

"I did something stupid."

Might as well admit it.

"Knew it."

"It worked, though," I said, and even wrung out and aching and flat on my back, I felt the grin start to form. Because it had, sure it only worked for half a second, before it dropped me on my ass, but fuck that, it worked!

That said… It would take me a while to reach a point where using that state would be anywhere near viable. For a moment there I thought my body was about to explode, but hey… at least now I know it's possible, and what's the path I have to take to achieve it.

Okara looked at me for a second, then rolled her eyes. "You're insane."

"Probably."

"Teach me whatever it was the second you can stand, I wanna do it."

I was about to say she couldn’t because she had yet to reach Super Saiyan, but then I remembered… I could probably teach her Surge, if anything to prepare her for this stage of her training, now that I think about it… she would probably have an easier time mastering this step, after all, her energy control is better than mine after her training in Yadrat.

“Sure.”

Power Level Section

Escarot (Base): 6,000,000

Escarot (Super Saiyan): 300,000,000

Escarot (Super Saiyan Faulty Grade 2): 361,000,000