Super Hero Arc

The Super Hero arc is the Dragon Ball Super manga’s current final arc, running from chapter 88 to chapter 104 across Volume 20 to Volume 24. It steps away from Goku and Vegeta to put Gohan and Piccolo back at the centre of the story, as the Red Ribbon Army rises again under new management and a genius named Dr. Hedo. The arc adapts and expands the Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero film — and then keeps going, ending with a prequel one-shot in chapter 104 before the series paused.

The setup: heroes in peacetime, villains in a boardroom

The arc opens with its lightest material: Goten and Trunks, now teenagers, moonlight as the costumed heroes Saiyaman X-1 and X-2, foiling small-time crime while keeping their identities secret from school. Their trail crosses that of Dr. Hedo — grandson of Dr. Gero, superhero obsessive, and freshly released prisoner — whose zombie-like Alpha androids and a stolen data disk pull the boys into something bigger. These opening chapters (88 to 90) are a prequel, deliberately low-stakes, and they plant the arc’s pieces: Hedo’s genius, his Gamma androids in development, and the ambitions of Magenta, president of Red Pharmaceutical Front — the Red Ribbon Army wearing a corporate mask.

Magenta’s plan is a full revival: recruit Hedo, rebuild an army, and recreate the Army’s ultimate weapon. Standing in the way is an Earth whose first line of defence has gone soft — Goku and Vegeta are off training on Beerus’s planet, and Gohan has buried himself in research, letting his fighting edge dull to almost nothing.

The story in order

The main story ignites when Hedo’s completed androids, Gamma 1 and Gamma 2, enter service — superheroes in their creator’s image, convinced by their programming and their employer that Capsule Corporation’s allies are the villains. Piccolo, investigating alone, is beaten by Gamma 2, recognises the Red Ribbon insignia, and infiltrates the base in disguise. What he does next defines the arc: he asks Shenron to unlock his latent potential, and then he engineers a crisis — staging Pan’s kidnapping with her cheerful cooperation — to force Gohan back into battle on the largest possible stage.

A thread from the prequel pays off here: the data disk Hedo fought to recover in the opening chapters carries Dr. Gero’s research — including the foundations of Cell. Magenta’s scientists turn that inheritance into Cell Max, a kaiju-scale recreation built for power rather than the original’s cold perfection, and Hedo, who never signed up for a monster he could not admire, finds his life’s work aimed at the world he wanted to protect. The Gammas’ gradual realisation that they have been cast as villains in someone else’s story is the arc’s quiet engine: these are superheroes, earnestly made, in an army that is anything but.

It works almost too well. The rescue assault on the Red Ribbon base draws in the whole Earth cast, and when Magenta panics and releases his trump card early, the fight escalates past anyone’s plan: Cell Max, a giant, unfinished recreation of the original Cell, rampages without reason or control. Gamma 2 gives his life in a self-destructing charge that still cannot finish the monster. And in the wreckage, seeing Piccolo beaten down in front of him, Gohan finally snaps — past rust, past doubt — into the form this arc exists to deliver. The post-battle chapters slow down for the consequences: Hedo is recruited to Capsule Corporation rather than arrested, Carmine tries one last scheme, and the strongest fighters in the universe gather on Beerus’s planet to test the new pecking order — Gohan included. The sequence in full is in the chapter index.

Major fights and new forms

Two transformations headline the arc. Orange Piccolo is the visible result of Shenron’s potential unlock combined with Piccolo’s own awakening — a bulked, transformed state that finally returns him to the front rank after years as the team’s tactician. Gohan Beast is bigger still: a wild, white-haired explosion of everything Gohan has suppressed since childhood, triggered by rage at Piccolo’s apparent fall and strong enough to end Cell Max with a single inherited technique — Piccolo’s own Special Beam Cannon. The arc’s epilogue sparring adds the measuring stick: Gohan Beast against Goku’s Ultra Instinct, and Broly making real progress in controlling his legendary power rather than merely surviving it.

How the arc ends (spoilers)

Cell Max is destroyed by Gohan Beast; Gamma 2 does not survive his sacrifice, while Gamma 1 and Hedo find a home at Capsule Corporation. On Beerus’s planet, the test fights end in good humour — Goku and Gohan’s bout is interrupted, Vegeta finally takes a sparring win over Goku in their base forms, and nobody’s pride is permanently damaged. Back on Earth, the arc closes on a small, perfect scene: Gohan, late as usual, collecting Pan from school, and intercepting Carmine’s lingering plot without breaking stride. Then chapter 104, “The Birth of Saiyaman X,” steps backwards: a one-shot prequel showing how Trunks and Goten first became Saiyaman X, before any of this began. It is, for now, the final chapter of the manga — no chapter 105 has been announced, and the status tracker follows the situation as it develops.

Chapters in this arc

Where this arc sits in the reading order

It follows the Granolah the Survivor arc and is the latest completed arc in the series — there is no next arc yet. Start it from Volume 20 onward, read it officially through the VIZ chapter index, and use the manga status page for the confirmed position on what comes after chapter 104.