Piccolo Junior's History
After his defeat at the hands of Goku, Piccolo vowed to continue his quest to avenge his father and kill Goku and flies off into the sky. Five years pass and Piccolo has since continued to train in order to reach his goal, but one day he has a brief confrontation with the Saiyan Raditz, who found Piccolo due to his scouter when he was trying to locate his brother Kakarot (Goku). In complete awe over the sudden arrival of this stranger, Piccolo demands to know Raditz's origins and intentions. Raditz smirks at Piccolo's demands, to which Piccolo retaliates with a Destructive Wave. Raditz shrugs off Piccolo's most powerful technique without a single dent, with Piccolo trembling in fear. Before Raditz can murder Piccolo, his scouter locates another strong power level. This makes Raditz ultimately ignore Piccolo in favor of his true target (whose power reading he had initially mistaken Piccolo's for due to their similar levels of progress), his younger brother Kakarot, who turned out to be Goku. Piccolo follows Raditz to Kame House, where Goku and his child Gohan went to meet up with old friends, Piccolo learns of Raditz's plan to destroy humanity by hiding behind the house and listening in to the conversation with his strong hearing abilities. When Raditz easily subdues Goku and kidnaps Gohan, Piccolo offers to Goku a temporary truce in the face of this new threat, intending to resume his ongoing struggle with Goku afterward. Goku agrees, despite the pleas of his friends against the idea, and the two make their way to defeat Raditz.
Once Goku and Piccolo locate Raditz, Goku makes a feeble effort to rescue his son through discussion rather than action, but this fails, resulting in a battle. Raditz easily tackles both Piccolo and Goku, managing to sneak attack and surprise them every chance he gets, with Piccolo and Goku not even being able to land a single hit. When the battle takes to the air, Raditz fires two energy waves downwards at Goku and Piccolo. Goku luckily dodges, but Piccolo is less fortunate, with his left arm being lost by disintegration. With the battle seemingly hopeless, Piccolo asks Goku if he has developed any new techniques to assist in these kinds of battles. Goku answers he has not, with Piccolo scoffing at Goku's lack of planning or preparation. Piccolo reveals he has developed a technique to pierce even the strongest of bodies, naming it the Special Beam Cannon. Piccolo demands for Goku to buy him extra time to charge the technique but states the wait will be worth it. As Goku begins to get pummeled, Piccolo finishes charging the attack, but is now in even more woe, as he fears Raditz will be fast enough to evade. Piccolo's prediction comes true, as he fires the blast, Raditz manages to side-step the attack, taking off only a small fragment of his Battle Armor.
Raditz discovers his earlier assumptions on Goku, and Piccolo's power levels were wrong, as he now knows Goku and Piccolo both have the ability to raise their power levels over 1,000, something Raditz was unaware of at first. When all hopes seem lost, as Raditz starts to pummel Goku into submission by breaking his ribs, Goku's young son Gohan intervenes after destroying the pod he was contained in and charges towards Raditz, damaging Raditz's armor and hurting him greatly by smashing into his chest. Now due to Raditz being much weaker from the assault, Piccolo manages to mortally wound Raditz with the Special Beam Cannon, although Goku sacrifices his life in the process to restrain Raditz, and Piccolo thus avenges his father at a bit of an unexpected moment. Before dying, however, Raditz tricked Piccolo into telling him about the Dragon Balls, and reveals that two other, more powerful Saiyans, Nappa and Vegeta, will be arriving on Earth in one year. In anger, Piccolo finishes Raditz off with one final blow rather than making him suffer, an action noticed by Kami who suspects that Piccolo is changing. When Goku dies shortly afterwards his body mysteriously vanishes, with Piccolo confirming Kami's intervention.
Anyone killed by Piccolo before he turned good would be sent to limbo, with their spirit wandering in agony. Since Goku and Raditz did not suffer this fate after Piccolo killed them, Kami cited this as an indication that Piccolo was becoming less evil.
With the news of even more powerful opponents soon to arrive, Piccolo takes Gohan to Break Wasteland in order to train the boy and raise his survival skills, so Piccolo can use Gohan's massive potential to help defend the Earth from the Saiyans, and originally, to help Piccolo take over the world afterwards. Though his treatment to Gohan is initially harsh, leaving him alone in the Wasteland for six months to raise his survival techniques, then brutally training the boy for the next six months, he begins to warm up to Gohan, and the two form an unbreakable bond. While the training occurred, Piccolo shows a little affection for Gohan in the first night of his six-month survival training by giving him three apples, as Gohan had not eaten anything in days. Piccolo does become annoyed when Gohan complains about the apples' bitter taste, remarking Gohan will need to let go of his time with his parents who pampered and spoiled him. Suddenly, Gohan transforms into a Great Ape and proceeds to destroy the wasteland around him, much to Piccolo's shock and slight fear. Piccolo (seemingly[2]) destroys the moon to turn Gohan back to normal, knowing the two invading Saiyans could use this technique to their advantage also. Piccolo then proceeds to remove Gohan's tail and makes him new training clothes and a sword.
When Vegeta and Nappa arrive on Earth, they are met by Gohan, Goku's friends Krillin, Chiaotzu, Tien Shinhan, and Yamcha, and Piccolo. Goku had been wished back to life but would take several hours to arrive. Piccolo soon learns from the Saiyans that he is a Namekian rather than a demon as he previously believed. The Saiyans then start the fight off by growing six Saibamen, small, humanoid plant-like aliens grown from the ground who all have power levels equal to Raditz's 1200, which they instruct to fight in a mock tournament against the Earth's defenders. The Saibamen are all destroyed, though Yamcha is killed in battle when one of them manages to grip him and self-destruct, killing them both. Piccolo destroys the last remaining Saibaman, after it attacks Gohan, with a punch in the stomach, followed by a mouth blast, disintegrating it.
With the Saibamen gone, Nappa, the larger Saiyan, decides to enter combat. In the ensuing fight, Chiaotzu and Tien perish, and the defenders of the Earth are heavily beaten. When Chiaotzu prepares to self destruct while holding Nappa, Piccolo orders Gohan to watch Chiaotzu's sacrifice, and then proceeds to compliment Chiaotzu by saying Chiaotzu has won his respect for his sacrifice to take down a powerful enemy. Despite Piccolo landing some decent hits, and planning team attacks with Krillin and Gohan, Nappa seems invincible. During one of the team attacks, when Gohan gives into his fear and runs away from Nappa instead of blasting him as Piccolo ordered, Piccolo deems Gohan a failure, and when the three-hour break occurs, suggests Gohan should go home, and not be a distraction in this fight. Remembering that during his fight with Raditz, Goku pulled and squeezed his tail tightly and had caused him unbearable pain, Piccolo attempted the same feat and got a hold of Nappa's tail (discussed with Krillin and Gohan after having a three-hour break) but the monstrous Saiyan revealed he and Vegeta were immune to that handicap and knocked the Namekian unconscious for a short while. Later in the battle, when Nappa attempts to finish off Krillin with a final blast, Piccolo saves him just in time with a small hand blast launched at Nappa's back.
When the smaller but more powerful Saiyan named Vegeta detects that Goku is arriving, and that he is more powerful than anticipated (being read at 5,000 without powering up, already), he orders Nappa to quickly kill the remaining defenders, as their working with Goku might result in a challenge. Goku's resurrection proves that the Dragon Balls are legitimate, so they can use the ones on Namek and do not need the ones located on Earth. Nappa first aims for Gohan with an extremely powerful attack, but Piccolo jumps in the way of it, sacrificing himself to save Gohan. His body ruined, Piccolo falls to the ground. With tears in his eyes, Piccolo bids farewell to Gohan, whom he admits made him soft and is the only person to ever call him friend. Piccolo's death also results in Kami's passing, as they were once a single being, and therefore if one dies then so would the other.
After the Saiyans are beaten by Goku and the remaining fighters, and Vegeta retreats, Gohan, Krillin and the brilliant inventor Bulma head to Namek and to locate the Dragon Balls so that they can wish Kami, Piccolo, Yamcha, Tien, and Chiaotzu back to life and restore the Dragon Balls of Earth.
