Ch. 46: Namek Bound! (3)

After we broke free of the earth's atmosphere and the ship's artificial gravity kicked in, we immediately went to check on Krillin, since he'd fallen right off of the ladder when Bulma had started the launch. Luckily, everything on the ship was reinforced by ki, so he hadn't bent any of the rungs on the ladder out of shape. That would have seriously annoyed me for the rest of the trip, since I'd never be able to fix it with the other four around.

As for Krillin, he was tougher than that. He'd hit his head a couple of times, but he'd been hit far harder than that before. He was complaining a lot, but he was fine.

...

"Uck! This sucks! I can barely move!" Krillin complained. We'd just begun our training. After a lot of complaining, Bulma agreed to spend her time on the second floor of the ship, while we trained in the gravity chamber on the first floor. To start, we'd set the gravity to X10, the same gravity as King Kai's world. 

Piccolo and I could deal with X10 gravity fairly well. After all, we were both in an entirely separate league from Krillin and Gohan, especially me. 

Unfortunately, Krillin and Gohan weren't as lucky as the two of us. They were both able to move about a little bit, but it would take them quite a while to be able to move freely like Piccolo and I, so we sparred a bit in one-on-one matches. 

Piccolo had gotten quite a bit stronger since the last time we fought. According to Nappa's scouter, he'd had a base of 1800 two months or so ago when the Saiyans had arrived. Now, I'd put his base at about 2500 or so. He completely overpowered me in raw power unless I used the Kaio-Ken or Silver modes. Unfortunately for Piccolo, I had roughly 50 years of intensive battle training at an incomparably higher level than this. My skills were vastly superior to his. 

"Special Beam Cannon!" He hastily shot his special move at me. Despite the fact that he hadn't been able to charge it up as high as he could, it was still enough to seriously injure the current me if I were to take it head on.

"Ooh... HA!" I decided to return Piccolo's favor by shooting off my own preferred energy wave. It was a special technique I'd created based on the Kamehameha. I called it the supreme wave. A bit of a boring name, but it was a terrifyingly powerful technique. The idea was to minimize the amount of energy used in moving your body to force the wave, which meant that all I had to do was put my hands in a resting position, build up energy, then push it out with an incredible force. 

Despite the nearly 1,000 difference in our battle state power levels, the strength of our energy waves were evenly matched... So, I put a little something extra into mine to make up the gap.

"Grey Mode!" I shouted. This was a nerfed version of Silver mode that only equaled Kaio-Ken times four or so. Still, each successive Kaio-ken was a 1.5 times multiplier compared to the previous version. That meant that Grey mode by itself multiplied my base power by five. I'd never showed it off before, but I was planning on eventually disseminating Silver Mode anyways, so now felt like a pretty good time to reveal it.

Naturally, I couldn't use my full Silver mode with as many restrictions as I'd put on myself, but Grey mode was still perfectly useable. It made my hair a bit lighter than it was in the base state, but just like Silver mode, there weren't any other changes to my appearance. 

My Supreme Wave absolutely decimated Piccolo's Special Beam Cannon once I added my Grey mode to its power, causing small burns all over Piccolo's body as a result. Luckily, I'd toned it down to the point where it didn't cause any more damage than that, but Piccolo had still lost the battle.

The moment that my wave stopped, my Grey mode ended as well.

"Whoa!" 

"What was that?!" Krillin shouted, his battle with Gohan completely forgotten when he felt the sheer power that I'd pushed out. That was natural. My resting power level was 2,000, but when I got serious, it jumped all the way up to 3,000. With my Grey Mode's five times multiplier, it broke 15,000, twice Nappa's resting power level, if only for the instant that I had used it. That was enough power to destroy a planet.

I scratched my head, trying to figure out how to explain this in a way that didn't break canon apart. I couldn't let Gohan, Krillin, and Piccolo learn Kaio-Ken yet. Maybe them using it during the Frieza fight would be okay, since Frieza's so powerful, but I expected their power levels to be at around 5,000 each by the time we got to Namek.

Once Guru unlocked their potentials, Gohan's power was going to come close to 50,000 by my estimate. Roughly five times stronger than he was in the canon at that time. I wasn't worried about Zarbon or Dodoria's effect on the timeline, but if they used Grey Mode during the fight with the Ginyu Force with that level of strength, they'd all easily destroy Captain Ginyu before he could turn himself into a frog. 

"It's basically the Kaio-ken that my dad used when he fought Vegeta. I just upgraded it a bit. The effect that it has on my body isn't as bad now." I explained.

"Right. The technique that you yelled at Pigero for using." Krillin realized. 

"Yeah, basically. It's just polished." I agreed.

"Could you teach that to us?" Gohan asked. I shook my head,

"It's not possible to use the technique without perfectly understanding the fundamentals behind it. Even my dad would need a few months to learn it." I told them. This was the truth. Using the Kaio-ken itself wasn't too hard. You just needed to curb the Limit Break to the point where it wouldn't instantly kill you. Using Grey Mode required an intimate understanding of how the technique interacted with your physical body, to curb the damage while maximizing the power as much as possible. I wasn't going to teach it to the others any time soon.