Epilogue:

Yamucha struggled slowly out of the fog. It clouded his brain with pain, and he sensed that he had been out for hours, maybe days. But the pain he felt now was lessening, and rapidly. His head was clearing.

He opened his eyes.

Bulma was leaning over him, her eyes wide with distress, hair blown in wild directions by the wind that was whipping over the landscape. In her hand was a small leather bag, and Yamucha had seen those enough times to know what it contained; a senzu bean, and she had just given him one.

The pain was gone, except for stiffness and the most complete lack of energy Yamucha had ever felt in his life. How badly, he wondered, had he been hurt to begin with if the senzu beans still left him feeling like crap?

"Bulma." He said. "How did you get here?" he sat up, leaning on one elbow first and then gradually leaning upright.

She cocked one eyebrow. "Hello, I'm a genius, remember? I have a capsule plane with me at all times."

He grinned. Then abruptly the grin vanished. "android 21!" he said abruptly. "Is it dead?"

"Android 21?" Bulma looked puzzled. "I don't have any idea what you're talking about. I gave you a senzu bean the second I got here; I haven't seen a thing."

Yamucha struggled to his feet. The area around them was a giant crater, so big that he could only barely make out the edge on the horizon. There was no doubt about it; that blast hadn't just been huge, it had been apocalyptic. Probably even Tien hadn't known it would be that big. And who could blame him? It wasn't the sort of attack you could practice for.

He looked at Bulma. "Where are the others?"

She rolled her eyes. "I told you, I saw you first thing and gave you a bean. I haven't seen anything else."

Yamucha began to walk, looking for anything that stood out of the general rubble around him. Everything was so destroyed, however, that it was most likely that his friends were buried.

Suddenly something caught his eye. A change in color; amidst the dirty grays and browns of the torn up earth, a gleam of silver, far off to the right.

He floated off the ground, oblivious for the moment to Bulma's yelled protests from below. As he got closer, he saw what it was, and his breath caught in his throat.

He landed next to it.

It was cast in a rock that was obviously just that; rock. But it was the purest silver color imaginable. A statue, so perfect it could have been made by the finest sculptor ever to be born.

It was Tien.

He stood in the stance he had died in, when the last of the energy, even the powerful, most potent life force that kept his heart beating and his cells living, had left his body. His legs braced slightly apart, muscles clenched, hands in position in front of his face.

But it was his face that was the most startling. It was clenched in pain, as much pain as there must be when one forces oneself to die. But the mouth was different.

The mouth was smiling.

The End.