Synopsis: Three days pass, and Roshi awakens at 4:30 in the morning next to a tired Kuririn who complains about the early day. Roshi makes his way upstairs next, scoffing himself at not being able to sleep with Lunch due to the violent disposition of her other half. Only Goku is able to sleep with her due to his indifference towards the opposite sex. When Roshi gets upstairs, he plans to check out a sleeping Lunch before waking up Goku, but is terrified to discover she transformed at some point in the night. Roshi tries to quietly wake up only Goku by prodding him with a broomstick, but the waking boy speaks too loudly and she's woken up as well. Lunch fires her gun at Goku for trying to cozy up to her, but he knocks her out with a swift kick to the face. Roshi is surprised to see that Goku doesn't hold back even against girls. He tries to use the situation to his advantage to cop a feel of the sleeping Lunch, but is reminded by Goku of his original task. It's time to train! Before they can really get started, Roshi lays out a few ground rules for his new students. He says that pursuing the martial arts shouldn't be about looking cool or impressing girls, but rather to improve oneself and to stay healthy. At the same time however, if they ever come across someone who's misusing their power, then it's their duty to use their own power to stop them and protect others. They then begin their training with some light jogging, which leads Kuririn to think that maybe this training won't be as hard as he'd heard. Eventually however, they come to a milkman's house just as he's preparing to make his deliveries. Roshi had spoken with him over the phone the day before and arranged for he and his students to make the deliveries themselves. Instead of using the milkman's helicopter to cover the large delivery area however, they'll be doing it on foot. As if that wasn't difficult enough of a task, Roshi has them skip the entire way to the first house. Once that delivery is done, he has them zig-zag back and forth between trees along the path to the next house. Once there, he has them take a long mountain path's stairway. At the top, Roshi takes a break and waits for his students to catch up, as even Goku is beginning to tire from all that they're doing. When Goku asks why he can't deliver the milk with kinto'un, Roshi chastises him and says it wouldn't be training if he took the easy way out. Besides, his grandpa and Gyu-mao used to do this kind of training all the time. Hearing that, Goku is rejuvenated, and once Kuririn finally catches up, they deliver the milk to a house on top of the mountain. A monk comes out to thank them and talks with Roshi, the pair apparently having known each other for a long time. The monk asks how his new students' training is coming along, and Roshi says that while they've only just started, he thinks they have great potential within them. Goku and Kuririn are thrilled to hear this, but Roshi tops this by saying that if they keep it up, they should be able to enter the tournament 8 months from now. Kuririn recognizes the tournament as the Tenkaichi Budokai, or 'Strongest Under the Heavens', a tournament that martial artists from all over the world gather to compete in to decide who's the strongest of them all. Roshi cautions them that if they do enter, their goal isn't to win, only to test their skills, but he does see benefit in them having a goal to reach towards even this early in their training. With the thought of entering the tournament to help them continue on, Roshi takes the boys onward with more milk to deliver, leading them across a fallen tree, through a desert and a river, and even being chased by a hungry dinosaur. By the time the milk delivery is done, Goku and Kuririn are both exhausted, but Roshi says they'll be doing this same routine every day for the next 8 months. That's only for their early morning training too, now it's time to start their morning training! Review: At long last, the true story of this particular arc starts to take form. The Tenkaichi Budokai (or World Martial Arts Tournament in the English dub of the anime) is one of the most easily recognizable locations in the entire franchise, right up there with the likes of Roshi's house, Kami's lookout, and even Planet Namek. The stories told and fights shown off during the tournaments are some of the best the franchise has to offer to boot. Needless to say, it's an event that completely lives up to it's premise, even if at this point in the story it's being treated more as a means to an end. Before we get to the tournament itself though, there's still training to do, or in our case, training to talk about. I mentioned before that the Kame style is less an actual style and more of just a strength building regiment, and while that is true for the physicality side of things, it does have it's own code to live by. And live by it Goku does, despite him seeming not to get it at first. I mean, training to improve yourself, just living a good life, but always striving to protect people if you see someone misusing their power? That pretty much sums up the character of Goku to a T right there. There'll be plenty of times where that 'protecting' thing gets a little hazy, but we'll cover those instances as we come to them. The idea of doing something like milk delivery as training for martial arts seems pretty silly at first glance, but that's exactly what it's intended to do. It IS silly, but assuming someone was able to deliver it by foot in a fast enough manner across multiple different types of terrain, such as what we're shown here? It's still silly, but it's also just impressive enough to buy as something that would build up a person's strength, if they were strong enough in the first place to do it and keep doing it, of course. That said, I'm pretty sure at least some of those people at the end of the delivery probably got pretty spoiled milk. I still won't be able to touch fully on it until a certain other pair of characters make their appearance, but it's worth noticing that once their training proper starts, Kuririn acts much less antagonistically towards Goku. Rather, he's shown to be rather fretful when they're doing dangerous things, and to respond to good news jubilantly alongside his fellow pupil. It's almost like Goku beating him started to change him or something. Weird. Probably not something we'll ever see again either, I'm sure. Until next time! Favorite Panel:
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About the AuthorAspiring author and big anime/manga fan, just trying to do my best in the world. For more details, go to About Me. Archives
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