Raditz had erased Zamasu with a casual wave of his hand, as effortlessly as brushing away smoke. Even the fallen Kai's immortal body—granted by the Super Dragon Balls themselves—offered no protection against the overwhelming might of Universal Law. In the void where Zamasu had stood moments before, only emptiness remained. One figure stood alone beneath the clearing sky.
Silence stretched across the Time Plaza for several heartbeats.
Then someone shouted, their voice cracking with emotion. "We're saved! We're actually saved!"
The dam broke. Tears streamed down faces that had been etched with despair moments before. Excited warriors embraced one another—strangers and friends alike, united in the overwhelming relief of survival. Even Chronoa and Trunks found themselves locked in a fierce hug, both of them trembling with the release of tension they'd carried for two impossible days.
They weren't just saved. Everyone across all the universes would be saved now. Raditz had done the impossible.
Raditz crossed the plaza to where Trunks still knelt, his body battered from Zamasu's casual brutality. The Saiyan warrior reached down and gently stroked his hand across the young man's injuries. Instantly, broken ribs mended, internal bleeding ceased, and torn muscles knit themselves back together. Trunks gasped as vitality flooded back into his body.
"He can even heal injuries completely..." Chronoa whispered in awe, watching the display of power that transcended anything she'd witnessed in countless eons.
"I spent a very long time communing with the universe's will," Raditz explained, his tone matter-of-fact despite the cosmic significance of his words. "I came to understand both the power of creation and the power of destruction in their purest forms. Healing and restoration are merely small applications of those fundamental forces."
He raised his palm slightly, fingers spread. Magical power—not ki, but something far more primal—swept across the entire Time Realm like a gentle wave.
Everyone stared in wonder as the destroyed plaza transformed before their eyes. Shattered stone reassembled itself. Scorched earth bloomed green again. The broken fountains reformed, water already flowing from their peaks in crystalline arcs. Ancient walkways repaired their cracks. Toppled statues rose and settled back onto their pedestals. Within seconds, the plaza looked exactly as it had before Zamasu's attack—as if the destruction had been nothing more than a bad dream.
"You now possess power equal to Lord Zeno himself!" Chronoa's voice carried hope that had seemed lost forever. "You can stop the dark forces! You can push back the negative world!"
"I'm not certain yet," Raditz admitted, a slight pause in his words. Then his expression sharpened, eyes focusing on something invisible to the others. "However, there's one matter that requires immediate attention." He looked toward the sky, to the exact spot where Zamasu had materialized. "Why don't you come out voluntarily? I'm talking to you, Number Twenty-One."
Number Twenty-One?
Trunks's fighting spirit reignited instantly, his body tensing despite his freshly healed injuries. The villain who had appeared alongside Zamasu—the secondary threat that had been easy to overlook in the fallen Kai's overwhelming shadow.
Zamasu had been the public face of evil, but Number Twenty-One provided crucial support from behind the scenes. Don't let her deceptively weak appearance fool you—the white lab coat, the black skirt and stockings, the high heels that clicked on stone. Once she lost control, she transformed into something as terrifying as Majin Buu himself, perhaps even more dangerous.
Trunks had personally fought in that battle. He would never forget Number Twenty-One's horror for the rest of his life.
A vortex suddenly tore open in the air above them, creating a wound in the Time Realm's fabric. From within that dimensional tear, Number Twenty-One emerged—but not with confidence or menace.
"I don't know anything! I swear I don't know anything!" she shrieked, panic saturating every syllable. Her hands waved frantically, her normally neat brown hair disheveled and wild. She looked half-insane, eyes darting in every direction. "It wasn't me! None of this was me!"
"She's... different," Trunks murmured, lowering his guard slightly. The energy signature he sensed now felt fundamentally altered from their previous encounter.
The gathered Time Patrollers frowned, studying Number Twenty-One with newfound wariness and confusion.
"Ahhh... so hungry! I'm so hungry!"
Her voice changed pitch and tone mid-sentence, becoming savage and feral.
"I can't stand it anymore! Let me— No! No, it's not my fault!"
Then weak again, almost pitiful.
"I want to eat! I need to eat everything!"
Number Twenty-One thrashed in midair, her behavior oscillating violently. One moment she roared with bestial fury, the next she clutched her head and whimpered in pain. Her body language shifted so drastically that it became impossible to predict what she might do next.
"Has she gone mad?" Chronoa asked carefully, prepared to defend the Time Nest if necessary.
"No," Raditz said, his cosmic perception revealing layers of truth invisible to others. "There are two distinct personalities inhabiting her body—one fundamentally kind, the other irredeemably evil. With Zamasu's destruction, the restraints on the evil personality have weakened. The good personality is finally able to surface, but they're fighting for control." He took a step forward. "Let me help her."
Before anyone could react or protest, Raditz materialized beside Number Twenty-One. Space instantly sealed around them both, cutting off any possibility of escape. A tide of magical power—that same fundamental force he'd used to reshape the plaza—rushed toward the struggling android.
The half-demon Number Twenty-One's pupils were completely bloodshot, veins standing out on her neck and temples. She lunged at Raditz with inhuman speed and ferocity, fingers curved into claws—but her movements were sluggish, fighting against themselves. Deep within, some part of her still resisted the urge to attack, to consume, to destroy.
Raditz's power enveloped her like a cocoon of pure light. Slowly, carefully, it began its work.
As if peeling away layers of diseased tissue, the evil thoughts embedded in her psyche started to dissolve under Raditz's influence. The demonic genes that Gero had spliced into her genetic code gradually weakened, their aggressive influence fading like poison drawn from a wound. Number Twenty-One's ragged breathing began to steady. The agony twisting her features eased fraction by fraction.
"Ah... ah... ah..." Number Twenty-One panted heavily, sweat soaking through her lab coat and plastering her hair to her forehead. She looked as if she'd just completed some exhausting physical ordeal, finally released from invisible chains.
Her disheveled appearance—hair wild, coat hanging open, cheeks flushed—would have suggested something entirely inappropriate if not for the audience of witnesses. Several Time Patrollers coughed awkwardly and looked away.
"Raditz... you're Raditz," Number Twenty-One gasped, her consciousness clearing as the fog of madness lifted. Recognition sparked in her eyes.
"That's right. And you're Number Twenty-One, correct?"
"None of this is my fault!" The words tumbled out desperately. "I'm just a scientist! That evil version of me—that's not who I really am! That was never the real me!"
"I know," Raditz said gently. "I won't kill you."
His cosmic perception had revealed the truth of her situation. Number Twenty-One had been dominated by an evil personality for far too long, suppressed and trapped within her own body. The core of her being wasn't malicious. As she'd claimed, she truly was just a scientist—brilliant, curious, and now deeply traumatized.
With Raditz's promise of safety, Number Twenty-One looked down at the gathered warriors below. Her gaze landed on Trunks, and she flinched, shrinking back. She still remembered their fierce battle, the terror of losing control, the guilt of what her evil personality had forced her body to do.
Raditz guided Number Twenty-One down to stand before the assembled Time Patrollers. He explained his promise—that she wouldn't be harmed—but in exchange, she needed to tell them everything she knew about the conspiracy, the fallen angels, and the forces threatening the multiverse.
"No problem! I'll tell you everything—absolutely everything!" Number Twenty-One's survival instincts kicked in immediately. Words spilled from her mouth in a rushed confession. "I'm truly just a scientist. I never wanted any of this. One day, an angel who called himself Mirto appeared in my laboratory. He brought me to a place called 'the Ancient Ruins.' There, he completely liberated my evil personality from the restraints Dr. Gero had built into my psyche. The demon side has dominated my actions ever since."
She took a shaky breath, organizing her thoughts.
"Mirto forced me to help them research loopholes in space-time. I was ordered to create a wave interference device capable of opening a channel to another world—a different reality entirely."
"What world?" Raditz asked, though cold dread was already forming in his gut.
"Your world," Number Twenty-One said, looking at Raditz with confusion evident in her expression. "There's a true mastermind behind the fallen angels—someone even Mirto answers to. He mentioned it once, almost carelessly, that they intended to travel to the world Raditz originally came from." She paused, remembering. "He gave me something precious for my research—a Seed of Civilization, born at the universe's very beginning. He allowed me to use it in my experiments."
The revelation hit Raditz like a physical blow.
Behind the angels existed another layer to this conspiracy—a mastermind who not only knew about Raditz but understood where he came from. The being knew Raditz wasn't native to this reality, that he'd somehow crossed dimensional boundaries. And now they wanted to follow that path, to breach the barrier between worlds.
Could they be trying to break through the dimensional wall entirely? To reach the third dimension—my original world?
The implications made Raditz's mind reel. Was he just a node, a connection point meant to bridge two realities? Had his entire journey been orchestrated somehow?
A chill ran down his spine despite his cosmic power.
But wait—if he could make a wish through the Dragon Balls and enter the Dragon Ball world, why couldn't someone from the Dragon Ball universe reverse that process? Perhaps it only felt impossible because he didn't fully understand the mechanics. Maybe the mastermind had already seen through everything, comprehended truths that Raditz was only beginning to grasp.
So what did it mean that he'd been allowed to travel here in the first place? Had it all been arranged? Was he following someone else's plan?
Raditz had penetrated the will of the universe itself, achieving power rivaling the Omni-King. Yet in this moment, he felt profoundly confused about his own existence, his own purpose.
He forced himself to calm down, to focus on what could be learned now. "What can the Seed of Civilization do? What were you researching?"
"At the moment it detonates," Number Twenty-One explained, her scientist's mind engaging despite her fear, "it can theoretically stop anything. And I mean anything—any phenomenon you can describe with words, and even phenomena beyond description or language. It operates on a conceptual level." She shook her head regretfully. "But actually making it explode proved nearly impossible. I tried countless methods, ran thousands of simulations. Nothing worked. Eventually, I had to repurpose it into a jamming device to assist Zamasu in capturing you."
Raditz remembered now—back in the Ancient Ruins, Number Twenty-One had used some strange fluctuation that dramatically slowed his movements, making him vulnerable. So that had been the Seed of Civilization, weaponized in its incomplete state. And during that encounter, Zamasu had kept insisting that someone important wanted to meet Raditz.
It sounded disturbingly like he was meant to be a sacrifice. A piece moved across a cosmic game board.
"That's everything I know," Number Twenty-One said quietly, pulling her lab coat tighter around herself. The gesture made her look small, vulnerable—a frightened woman who'd been caught up in forces far beyond her control. "I swear that's the complete truth."
"Thank you for your honesty," Raditz said. "You've been through an ordeal. You can stand with us now—you're under my protection."