The world he'd died in let him go.
And this one waited.
Air scoured his lungs—thin, metallic, charged like the moment before a storm breaks. Heat rode every breath, not the greasy heat of fire, but something cleaner, meaner, as if the atmosphere itself had teeth. Above him, a red sky stretched like wounded glass. A moon hung too low and too large, its craters glowing dull, and pillars of smoke climbed from a shattered city until they frayed into that bloody vault.
He lifted a hand on instinct and froze.
A glove he didn't own. Knuckles banded in white, fingers precise, strong enough that the simple act of curling them felt like cocking a weapon. He flexed; the tendons under the skin sang with power that wasn't human.
Something brushed his thigh.
A tail—furred, brown, restless—coiled on reflex and cinched itself around his waist.
For a heartbeat he had two hearts: the mercenary's steady engine and the prince's arrogant thrum, both beating inside one ribcage. It should have torn him apart. Instead, the rhythms found one another and locked, a brutal duet.
Not Ethan Cole anymore, he thought, tasting the truth the way you taste blood after a hard punch. I'm—
The ground shook with laughter.
It rolled across the blasted plain, big and stupid and joyous. Ethan—Vegeta—turned toward it.
A mountain of a man stood on the ridge, bald skull gleaming wet, mustache thick, tail lashing. He hurled violet blasts into the huddled shapes below, and each blast tore streets into trenches and bodies into smoke.
Nappa. He knew the name the way you know your own once you've heard it in someone else's mouth too many times. In this life, Nappa smelled like scorched meat and old victories.
"Dinner's still moving!" the brute crowed, voice booming. "Makes it fresh, Prince!"
Vegeta pushed himself to his feet. The move was alarming and easy—no ache, no wobble, just force waiting to be spent. He was heavier, denser, balanced around the coil of his tail and the hungry furnace in his core. When he rolled his neck, vertebrae popped like distant gunshots.
A delicate chirp at his left ear. He reached up and his fingertips tapped a cool lens that curved over his eye. The device purred, a green glyph flickering across its display.
The scouter.
A battle cry knifed the air across the field—high, desperate. An alien in cracked armor charged, blade raised. Vegeta didn't think, not with words; his body answered with contempt. He vanished from the patch of ground he'd occupied—no, not vanished: moved—a blur of speed that made the air whine. He reappeared in the alien's path, palm up, two fingers together.
He pushed.
Ki—raw, hot, honest—leapt from his hand and bored a neat, mean hole through the alien's breastplate. The body folded around the absence and fell, smoking.
Vegeta looked down at his hand. A smile—half Ethan's, all Vegeta's—cut across his face.
Well, he thought, that's new in all the best ways.
The scouter ticked, searched, settled.
PL 310.PL 430.PL 180… dropping… zero.
Numbers. He didn't need them to know the truth here—these enemies were ants. But the numbers soothed a part of him that loved math almost as much as violence.
Another chirp—not the scouter. Colder. Tidier.
A pane of light slid into being, not in the air but in his head, crisp as a HUD and impossible to ignore.
[System Online] Host: Vegeta Current Power Level: 18,000 Saiyan Bloodline: 100% Pure Progress toward Super Saiyan: 30%
The words burned with the authority of a trigger pull. Vegeta blinked slow.
So it wasn't a hallucination in the fire, he thought. I didn't imagine that voice just to make dying feel like a negotiation. He felt Ethan's soldier-calm take a seat beside Vegeta's royal fury. The arrangement was indecent and perfect.
Another line unfolded, precise as a knife:
[Context Sync] Timeline: Saiyan Saga (Pre-Earth Invasion) Known Variables in Range: • Nappa (PL ~4,000) • Vegeta (You) • Raditz — Signal Lost
As if summoned, the scouter crackled. Static like sand through a wire, then a voice—thin, desperate.
"—Dragon Balls… grant any wish. Even—resurrection…"
Raditz. The scouter carried his dying words across space like a moth bringing fire to a dry field. The transmission guttered and went black.
Nappa hurled a blast at a broken tower, reducing it to a sigh of ash. He turned to Vegeta with a grin that belonged on a kid who'd just found out fireworks existed. "Hear that? The idiot's dead. Saving us the trouble."
Vegeta's tongue found a new mouth and liked the shape of contempt. "If he wanted mercy, he could've asked for it before being born weak."
Nappa barked a laugh that shook dust loose from the stones. He chewed on a charred limb, offered the rest. "Snack?"
Vegeta took it, bit, chewed, and spat bone. Flavorless. Unworthy. He turned his face up to the red.
Dragon Balls, Ethan whispered inside him, remembering nights with anime on cheap TVs in bad apartments between worse jobs. Any wish. He didn't need immortality—what an insult to real strength. But there were other wishes. And sometimes the right lie opens more doors than the truth.
The System obliged the thought.
[New Objective] Investigate: Dragon Balls (Planet: Earth) Optional Rewards: • Super Saiyan Progress +10% • Unique Skill Unlock (Conditional) Note: Canonical Threats Approaching: — Son Goku (Rapid Growth) — Frieza Forces (Remote Oversight)
He rolled the name Frieza across his mind like a round in a breech. The scouter didn't have a number for that monster here. Ethan's memory did. 530,000 in first form. The number fell through him like a stone through water, and the Saiyan in him bared his teeth.
Ethan's tactical brain set pieces on a mental board: gravity training; Zenkai spikes near death; controlled fights just shy of suicidal; Ki discipline beyond the sloppy brawling these apes around him called war. He could feel the path writing itself, a staircase built of broken limits.
Nappa flicked ash from his fingers and stomped the last moving shape under his boot. "So? We finish the cleanup, then Earth? Heard the backwater breeds decent cuisine. And if their wish-orbs are real—" He grinned with too many teeth. "—immortality, heh!"
Vegeta let the word hang just long enough to make Nappa believe he was thinking about it for the first time. "We'll go," he said. "But we don't ask for toys we can steal with our hands. We take what we want because we want it."
Nappa blinked, confused, then satisfied, because the sentence ended with something he understood: want and take.
A cannonball of alien cavalry crested a ruined street, shrieking and firing wildly. Nappa swatted them from the sky with the back of one hand, delighted. Vegeta didn't move. The Ki coiled in him wanted an excuse to burn. The soldier in him warned against wasting ammunition to celebrate a mood.
Discipline before spectacle, Ethan thought.
Spectacle as discipline, Vegeta corrected, amused.
He lifted a finger. A needle of light leapt and perforated the lead rider's engine. The machine sneezed itself into shrapnel. Two more shots, two more elegant failures of alien engineering. The rest broke formation, instantly learning that fear is a teacher that doesn't need a lesson plan.
The scouter pinged a presence swooping in high and fast—one of the planet's defenders with more nerve than sense. Vegeta let it close. At the last instant, he moved, leaving an afterimage where he'd stood. He appeared above the pilot, upside down, staring into the alien's eyes through a cockpit spidered in cracks.
"Boo."
He tapped the canopy with two knuckles. The knock blew the ship apart. He dropped through the fresh hole and landed as metal rained around him, unbothered by the furnace wind.
Nappa held a hand to his ear, scouter fuzzing. "Picking up chatter. Something about evacuation tunnels."
Vegeta closed his eyes and felt the map of the city without successfully pretending he believed in sensing Ki. He didn't need mysticism; the ground told the story—a faint rumble under rubble where the desperate chewed holes through their own home to get to a slower death.
He didn't care which tunnel led where. He cared that control was not yet a total word here.
"Collapse them," he said.
Nappa punched the ground. Streets buckled, and a seam line of caves caved like a zipper closing. The screams that followed were brief. Mercy by architecture.
The System purred approval in a way that made disapproval sound possible later.
[Micro-Objective Complete] Suppress Planetary Resistance • +3% Battle Instincts (Applied) • Combat U.I. Calibration: Improved [Calibration Preview Enabled] → Threat cones overlay available at user discretion.
For a second, faint vectors ghosted the edge of his vision—angles where attacks were most probable, trajectories drawn as if by an invisible mathematician. He grinned. Useful. He tucked it away; the world didn't need to tilt like a training sim all the time. Part of strength was the joy of reading chaos without subtitles.
He rose into the air without thinking about how. Flight wasn't a switch; it was an agreement with gravity that he would pay later and in a currency the universe didn't have the words for. The wind tore at his hair; rain slashed sideways. The city spread beneath him in a geometry of ruin.
"Prince!" Nappa bellowed, delighted to be ordered again. "Pods are ready once we're done burning the last of—well, whatever these were."
Vegeta drifted down until they were side by side. He looked at the brute who, in another life, would earn his contempt and, in this one, had to survive his utility.
"We won't waste weeks," Vegeta said. "Earth first. Then training you can't survive, but you'll try anyway. Then Namek—" The word arrived unbidden, a pearl shaken out of a canon he hadn't yet slid down. He tasted it. Namek meant more Dragon Balls, bigger wishes, deeper consequences. Ethan's memory catalogued the arc like a dossier: Gohan, Krillin, the Ginyu Force, Frieza peeling off his shapes like a snake proud of its skins. "—If we need it."
Nappa scratched his chin, leaving a streak of ash. "What's a Namek?"
"An answer to a question I haven't asked yet."
Nappa nodded sagely, which is to say he didn't understand anything and liked the sound of it.
A survivor, braver than clever, sprang from a pile of masonry and fired a cannon that might have killed a tank back on Ethan's Earth. The shell pinged off Vegeta's chest and tumbled away, convinced of its own irrelevance. The alien gaped.
Vegeta walked to him. Not flew—walked. Each step an insult. The alien jabbed the muzzle again, as if repetition could rewrite physics. Vegeta plucked the weapon from his hands, bent it into a knot, and dropped it.
"You had a chance," he said, calm. "You used it to make noise."
He placed two fingers against the alien's forehead. The beam was small and final.
Nappa clapped. "Ha! You're in a good mood."
"I'm in a mood," Vegeta said.
The System intruded with the grace of a final draft:
[Primary Directive Updated] Path to Ascension Detected Milestones: • Gravity Mastery: 100x native gravity (Reward: +20% Super Saiyan Progress) • Zenkai Optimization: Controlled brink-state recoveries (Reward: +10% Base Stat Efficiency) • Battle: Earth Campaign (Reward: Skill Node — Royal Instinct) • Optional: Dragon Ball Acquisition (1–7) (Variable Rewards)
The soldier in him wanted to nod. The prince in him refused to acknowledge the urge in public. He compromised by pretending amusement.
You and I are going to get along, he told the invisible interface. As long as we both remember who gives orders.
He opened his palms. Ki collected there like obedient lightning. He shaped it into a bright, elegant sphere no larger than a man's heart. The planet beneath his boots watched him without eyes and counted its breaths.
"I'm done with this world," he said. It wasn't cruelty. It was punctuation.
He lofted the ball lightly and snapped his fingers. The orb accelerated, burrowing into the city's broken core. For three seconds nothing happened. For the fourth, the ground bulged. For the fifth, a column of light bored up through stone and metal and memory, and the city sighed itself flat. The shockwave threw rain outward in a ring that rattled windows already dust.
When the glow faded, the ruin was quiet.
Nappa looked satisfied in the way only a man with no imagination can. "Pods?"
"Pods," Vegeta said.
They crossed the ruin together. Vegeta's scouter warbled occasionally as it found and lost dying embers of power. He didn't bother to tamp them out. If anything learned from this, it would lie about it and the lie would not matter.
The landing site lay just beyond the city's broken teeth—two attack pods hissing, their hulls pocked by old scars and new rain. Nappa slapped the side of one like it was a beloved animal. Vegeta brushed a finger along the other's edge and felt the hum in his bones.
He paused.
The red sky leered overhead. Somewhere beyond it, Frieza existed like a problem arrogant enough to call itself a solution. Somewhere spinward, Goku—Kakarot—lived on a blue world too generous for its own good, training like a starving man at a banquet.
He saw the board and all its false fairness. He felt the fuse of his own pride burning toward the powder of his potential. He smelled—lightly, almost humorously—the last ghost of cinnamon gum that belonged to a dead man who had never believed in gods.
You're not gone, he told Ethan's shadow. You are me when I'm clever. I am you when I'm cruel. We will be king when this ends.
The System ticked like a satisfied metronome.
[Travel Itinerary Proposed] Destination: Earth ETA (Saiyan Attack Pod): 1 year Recommendations en route: • 30x–60x Gravity Drills (Requires: Gravity Chamber) • Combat Simulations (Available: Limited — Nappa) • Nutrient Capsule Optimization (Unlockable via Capsule Corp contact)
Capsule Corp. A different smile this time, brief and private. Bulma. A useful nuisance. A nuisance worth keeping.
He stepped toward the pod and then stopped again, that soldier's superstition catching his sleeve. He looked up one last time at the red, at the moon that hung too close and at the smoke that pretended to be weather.
"Nappa," he said.
"Yeah, Prince?"
"If anyone ever asks what happened to this world—"
"They won't," Nappa said cheerfully.
"—tell them it was unlucky enough to be in my way on a day I decided to be efficient."
Nappa scratched his ear thoughtfully. "That's a lotta words."
"Then tell them nothing," Vegeta said, and slid into the pod.
The hatch sealed with a hiss, the interior cocooning him in a comfort that belonged to machines that didn't mind murder. The harness hugged his shoulders like a conspiracy. The scouter dimmed, then brightened as the pod linked to it with a friendly chime.
He laid his head back and closed his eyes—not to rest, but to remember. Raditz's failing voice about the Dragon Balls. Frieza's number like a cliff face. Kakarot's idiot luck distilled into destiny. Gravity that could be paid like a debt. Pain that could be used like a tool.
The pod thrummed. The ground fell away. The red sky dwindled from wound to memory.
Somewhere between breath and burn, the System rose one last time in his mind's eye, as clean as scripture and far more honest.
[Ascension Path Locked] Starting Point: 18,000 Next Threshold: 30,000 Penalty for Failure: None (for now) Warning: — Fate resists edits; apply force.
Vegeta smirked, the expression a blade.
I don't edit fate, he thought. I make it write better.
The pod kicked. Stars stretched. A new horizon leaned in, and the man who had died on a slab of wet concrete and the prince who had been born under a different kind of cruelty agreed on something important.
They were done being second.
Earth waited. So did war. And in the space between, the path to Super Saiyan narrowed into a road only a monster or a god could walk.
He intended to be both.