Future Trunks Arc

The Future Trunks arc is the Dragon Ball Super manga’s darkest story: chapters 14 to 26, collected across Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4 and Volume 5. Future Trunks escapes to the past one step ahead of a killer who wears Goku’s face, and the search for that killer’s identity pulls the heroes into a conspiracy involving a rogue apprentice Kai, stolen time rings and a god’s plan to erase every mortal in existence.

The setup: a SOS from a ruined future

In Trunks’s timeline, a being the survivors call Goku Black has spent a year reducing humanity to a handful of holdouts. Trunks barely escapes him — his partner Mai apparently killed covering his retreat — and reaches the past in a one-way trip, his time machine’s fuel spent. Black follows him through a rift in time, and the two revelations that follow drive the arc. First, Black is wearing Goku’s body but is not Goku. Second, the investigation in the present points to Universe 10, where the apprentice Supreme Kai Zamasu has been quietly concluding that mortals are a blight the gods should remove. Beerus handles the present-day Zamasu himself — one Hakai, and that thread is cut. The future’s Zamasu, and the one inside Goku’s stolen body, remain.

The story in order

The arc unfolds as a mystery told in expeditions. Goku, Vegeta and Trunks travel to the future, fight Black and the immortal future Zamasu, and are driven back; they return with new knowledge and new techniques and are driven back again. The truth assembles piece by piece: Black is Zamasu, who in his own timeline used the Super Dragon Balls to swap bodies with Goku, murdered him and his family, then recruited his future counterpart — who wished for immortality. Together they executed the other gods and began the Zero Mortal Project unopposed.

The investigation phase is worth pausing on, because the manga builds its villain out of a sparring match. Visiting Universe 10, Goku asks to test the apprentice Kai he has heard about — and beats Zamasu soundly. The defeat festers. A god who already believed mortals were violent and unworthy has now been humbled by one in front of his master, and his philosophy curdles into a project. Meanwhile Trunks turns out to have grown in ways the present-day cast has not: his years as an attendant to his timeline’s Supreme Kai left him with a healer’s ability, which he uses on Goku in the field — a quiet manga-only detail that underlines how much of a veteran this young man has become.

Each return trip changes the tools on the table. Goku learns the Evil Containment Wave, the Mafuba, from Master Roshi — and when the moment comes, the seal fails because the charm needed to complete it is the wrong one, a mistake played for comedy with lethal stakes. Vegeta, refusing to be outpaced, develops a rapid switching technique between Super Saiyan God and Blue that lets him batter Black without Blue’s stamina drain. Goku goes further and perfects Super Saiyan Blue itself, sealing the form’s overflowing aura inside his body to use its full power continuously. When Black and Zamasu use the Potara to fuse into a single god of overwhelming strength, the heroes answer in kind: Vegito returns. But the fusion burns out early, Trunks’s desperate strike splits the merged Zamasu back into two — and the two immortal halves begin multiplying instead of dying. The chapter-by-chapter sequence is in the chapter index.

Major fights and new forms

This arc is a technique showcase. Perfected Super Saiyan Blue is Goku’s headline achievement — not a new colour but a mastery of an existing one. Vegeta’s God-to-Blue switching is its counterpart, built on control rather than output. On the villains’ side, Goku Black’s Super Saiyan Rosé mirrors Blue as the divine form of a real god in a Saiyan body, and Fused Zamasu combines that power with true immortality, which is precisely why he cannot simply be beaten: every conventional win condition is removed, one by one, until the arc’s bleak ending is the only door left.

It is also worth naming what the arc does to Trunks himself. He arrives as a soldier and is repeatedly, gently, outclassed — by Black, by the fused Zamasu, by the sheer divine scale of the problem. His sword strike that splits Zamasu is the last great deed of a mortal in this story, and even it only reveals that the enemy has stopped obeying the rules of death altogether. The manga lets its most desperate hero do everything right and still lose his world, which is why this arc, alone in the series, ends in elegy rather than celebration.

How the arc ends (spoilers)

There is no victory in the ring. With Zamasu multiplying across the future Earth, Goku uses the button the Omni-King gave him and summons the future’s Zeno — who looks at the corrupted timeline and erases all of it: Zamasu, the Earth, the universe, everything. Trunks’s world is not saved; it is ended, cleanly. Whis arranges the one mercy available — Trunks and Mai travel to a different future timeline, one branched before Zamasu’s attack, where another Trunks and Mai already live. The arc closes on that strange, sad compromise: the survivors survive, but home is gone.

Chapters in this arc

Where this arc sits in the reading order

It follows the Universe 6 arc — the time ring Black wears and the gods’ politics both grow out of that tournament — and precedes the Universe Survival arc, which opens with the summons this arc’s ending makes inevitable. Read it officially from the VIZ chapter index, and see the status tracker for where the manga stands today.