The stars stretched thin and snapped back into needles. The pod's couch cradled him the way only a machine designed by enemies of comfort can. Harness crossed his chest, humming with a low, contented menace. Vibration moved through the hull in fine, steady lines, the thrum of a predator with its nose locked on a distant pulse.
He didn't sleep.
He catalogued.
Breath in—thin, metallic, charged. Breath out—slow, precise, counting heartbeats until the count itself obeyed.
The System waited until his body and the pod agreed on a shared silence, then wrote its calm across his vision.
[En Route: Planet Earth]ETA: ~1 year (subjective)Pod Capabilities: Stasis | Nutrient Gel | Tactical CommsLimitations: No gravity modulation | No external training apparatusCompensations Available:• Isometric / Breath-Load Routines• Combat Visualization Suite (System-Assisted)• Ki Discipline Protocols (Beginner → Advanced)
"Beginner," he said, smiling at the insult purely because it had the decency to be accurate.
The pod dimmed, the way a room dims when a teacher closes the blinds. A cursor waited.
[Tutorial: Ki Under Constraint]Goal: Shape, store, and release Ki with zero collateral.Exercise 1: Breath-Lock (1:1:1)— Inhale to four counts, hold four, exhale four, hold four.— Maintain steady output of 1% Ki in palm during the entire cycle.Penalty For Failure: Nerve micro-tear (minor), Lesson Repeat.
He raised his hand. The glove made a quiet note against the pod's interior, like a ring against a rail.
A bead of light formed in his palm—no bigger than the head of a pin. It wanted to grow, to be admired, to become spectacle. Discipline before spectacle. The soldier in him sharpened the prince's smile into purpose.
He breathed to four. Held to four. Exhaled to four. Held to four. The light stayed small, obedient. The pod's metal skin did not complain. The System's bar barely moved.
"Again," he said, and the word became an hour.
When the hour ended, the bead hadn't wavered once. Sweat ticked down his temple and into his hairline, useless to a man who didn't need to lose water to prove he'd earned anything.
[Exercise 1: Complete]+1% Ki Efficiency (Sustained)New Exercise Unlocked:— 1:2:1:2 Breath-Lock (Intermediate)
He closed his eyes and let the pod darken until the red afterimage of the last world stopped staining the inside of his lids. Memory unspooled—not like a dream, but like film someone had spliced with impatience and knives.
A boy with royal blood and a scouter too big for his face. Soldiers kneeling for him and then glancing at the shadow looming behind—Frieza's shape at the edge of every room, a smile like a polished blade. King Vegeta's hand on a tiny shoulder, heavy with pride that had nowhere safe to sit. An order barked and obeyed, obeyed, obeyed until obedience became a language that only sounded like strength.
And from an older, uglier world, Ethan's memories wove through those like wire through garrote: boots on wet streets; rain turned to tin; Rule One whispered at the exact moment when gods were the most persuasive.
The two sets of lives fitted together indecently well.
He drifted two knuckles along the pod's armrest, feeling for seams, counting bolts, mapping how many seconds a hand would need to find leverage if the entire universe decided to rotate ninety degrees without warning. The old reflex made the new body feel at home.
"Prince," Nappa's voice rumbled through the comm—tinny, too pleased, like laughter in a tin can. "You awake, or did you decide to nap your way across the void?"
"Try the words I await orders, Nappa," Vegeta said, not bothering to hide the amusement.
A pause while the brute configured humility. "I await orders."
"You're going to do something that will make you hate me less and love me not at all. Isometric holds. Breath-loads. Minimum three hours on, one off. Repeat until your legs stop asking the question why and start telling you yes."
"Isometrics," Nappa repeated, skeptical. "That a new kind of punching?"
"It's the kind that makes the punching worth watching."
Nappa grunted. "Can't spar in these pods."
"You can learn not to be a hostage to oxygen."
Another pause. "This because of that… System you mentioned?"
Vegeta considered lying and realized there was no point; Nappa wouldn't remember the lie long enough for it to be useful. "Because I say so," he said, and let the channel cut.
He went back to breath and beads of light.
Hours became days, became a measure that didn't ask for names. He slept when the pod forced him to and dreamed in two languages, with neither offering a place to land: Frieza on a throne made of someone else's air; an alley glittering with rain and spent brass; a child kneeling in front of a tyrant with his pride held perfectly still because anything that moved could be taken.
When he woke, he invited pain in as a guest he did not intend to let stay.
[Protocol: Zenkai Optimization]Warning: Zenkai triggers require brink-state trauma.Recommendation (En Route): Controlled micro-strain only.— Tendon/load cycling at 90–95% max output— Breath deprivation intervals (max 2 minutes)— Nutrient Gel dosing after each session (Pod capacity: Adequate)Projected Gain (En Route): +2,000 → +4,000 PL
"Stingy," he muttered, and the System did not disagree.
He ran holds until his forearms trembled, until the veins in his wrists wrote maps the pod hadn't paid for. He pulled against his harness until the carbon fiber complained and then apologized. He drove micro-currents of Ki through each finger, teaching them to think like knives even when they wore gloves.
Once, he let the bead grow too large. The pod's wall dented with a shy, ugly clank. A warning flared.
[Collateral Detected]Penalty: -0.5% Ki Efficiency (Temporary)Lesson: Strength is a story told to a container. Tell the right story.
He breathed until the dent was just a shape that metal had decided to keep and the System's disapproval sank into something like respect.
The Combat Visualization Suite unlocked without fanfare. The pod's interior blurred, then smoothed, then unfolded into a room he knew and had never seen. Red carpet. Gold curtains. A view full of cold stars. Frieza's voice behind him, that purr that turned orders into seductions.
He didn't turn to face it.
"End simulation," he said, and the room obeyed. He wasn't interested in the heroism of killing a shadow. Not yet. He wanted something that bled when it was supposed to.
"Give me Nappa," he said instead.
The suite obliged. Nappa, confused and delighted, with a club he didn't need. Vegeta stalked him through terrain that changed obediently with his mood: blasted plains; narrow corridors; a gym too clean to be real.
They fought for hours that didn't exist. Vegeta taught, which is to say he hit Nappa the instant the big man thought knowing the next move was the same as making it. He interrupted habits mid-birth and shoved them back inside.
"You're thinking finish," Vegeta said, standing over him with a heel to the brute's sternum after the tenth simulated throw. "Think break. Not their bone—their plan. Their breath. Their willingness."
"That's… a lot to think at once," Nappa admitted, breathless in a simulation that still stole air.
"It is. Do it anyway."
The suite bled away at his command. The pod returned. The safety of harness and hum pressed in around him, which meant it could be ignored again.
He let himself touch the edge of Frieza on purpose then—not the memory, but the number. Five hundred thirty thousand. A cliff face with no handholds, a physics lesson taught in terror, a joke the universe told with its mouth full.
Ethan's soldier-mind lined up answers like bullets: You don't fight cliffs. You put anchors in them. You don't jump—you make stairs. You don't beg for immortality; you build a body that tells time to wait its turn. Breath-load. Isometric. Micro-strain. Real fights on arrival. Gravity later, engineered sooner than canon intended. A Capsule Corp scientist who would love a problem the way gods love attention.
Bulma's name lived under the plan like a watermark he refused to read aloud. Not yet. Not while the pod hissed and space pretended to be empty.
He ate when the gel insisted. Slept when he had to. When he woke, he made the universe smaller with repetition until the only thing left was what he chose to notice. The pod set a metronome; he snapped it in half and kept the beat anyway.
Time hated him for refusing to count it. It retaliated by passing.
The System tracked what his pride wouldn't announce.
[En Route Gains]Base PL: 18,000 → 22,400Ki Efficiency: +6%Breath-Load Endurance: +180 seconds (sustained)New Skill: Micro-Vectoring (Fine Ki Control in fingertips)
He rolled the new number in his mouth and did not smile. Satisfaction was a trap that liked to wear his face.
"Prince," Nappa said, crackling through the pod again, thoroughly alive and annoyed. "My legs feel like they're writing letters to my ancestors."
"Good," Vegeta said. "Tell them to spell your name correctly."
Silence, and then a chuckle too big for the speaker. "You ever going to explain what you meant about Earth? About the Dragon Balls?"
Vegeta considered giving him the story, then remembered that stories in the hands of men like Nappa become hammers when what you need is a key. "We're going to take what we need," he said. "And break what tries to keep it."
"That's the part I like."
"It's the only part you heard."
The pod shuddered—subtle, then less so. Instruments brightened.
The System arrived before the view.
[Approach Vector Achieved]Destination: EarthAtmospheric Entry: T-00:04:21Threat Scan (Passive):• Multiple PL spikes (range: 1,500 → 3,500) — clustered• One rising signature (unknown) — outside cluster• Ambient Ki density: High (adaptation beneficial)Recommendation:— Land separate from Nappa by 200–300 km to split response.— Engage in controlled brink fights (Zenkai Optimization).— Avoid Kakarot (initial encounter) until Base ≥ 30,000.
The scouter pinged in sympathy, as if jealous of the System's competence. He flicked it with a fingertip and it behaved.
"Pods will split," he said onto the shared channel.
"Wha—Prince?" Nappa's disappointment was a child's. "We don't three-legged race this one?"
"We divide the board," Vegeta said. "You break small things loudly. I break important things precisely. We meet when the planet has learned our names at the appropriate volume."
"What if the locals get a lucky shot in?"
"Then don't be local."
He killed the channel and let the pod show him the planet.
Blue, stupidly beautiful. Cloud swirls like cream stirred just once. Continents drifted under veils of weather and millions of lives who'd told themselves a story called tomorrow without earning it.
Somewhere down there: Kakarot, training with the single-minded cheerfulness of a man born to be a problem. Piccolo, a cunning, cruel teacher forced to act like a guardian and liking it less than he admitted. Bulma, an engineer who had never seen a prince but would recognize an impossible problem the moment it stalked into her lab and smirked at her tools.
Vegeta felt the arc of all that possibility and reached out to grab only the parts that served him.
He closed his eyes as the pods sang their descent songs—plasma licking hulls, atmosphere turning hands to claws and then to feathers as the math balanced out. The harness tightened. The g's pressed him into his seat, tried to teach him humility; he reminded them who graded the exam.
Heat skated along the hull. The black outside became red, then orange, then bright as the inside of a forge.
The System cut through with one last clean line.
[Ascension Reminder]Next Threshold: 30,000Milestone Unlocks at Threshold:— Royal Instinct (Reactive Prediction)— Gravity Tolerance +20x (Base)Warning:— Fate resists edits; apply force.
He laughed, short and satisfied. Not because it was funny. Because the warning tasted like permission.
The pod punched through cloud. Land rushed up—green broken by gray broken by lines that meant civilization as soft animals defined it. The pod chose a desert with the good manners to be empty. He didn't need an audience for the first set of murders.
He braced without tensing, which is what separates professionals from the exhausted. The pod hit earth, bounced, dug a crater, and came still with the innocent chirp of a machine proud to have not failed in public.
The hatch hissed open on a heat shimmer and the smell of dust. He unbuckled, rose, and stepped into sunlight that wasn't red.
The air was thick with life. The ground wanted to be farmed. The horizon wanted to be chased. He stood at the lip of his impact crater and breathed all of that in like it was an insult.
Far away, a handful of power signatures brightened—the cluster the System had predicted—coming his way with intent.
Nappa's pod fell somewhere beyond the curve of desert. A distant whump and a ribbon of dust announced the big man's arrival like the preamble to a bad joke.
Vegeta rolled his shoulders. Every muscle answered like a subordinate glad to be asked.
He lifted two fingers to his scouter, then thought better of it and lowered them. He didn't need devices to know this planet had built some men who would try—honestly, foolishly—to stop him. He found he almost respected that.
Almost.
He looked up, not because the sky had anything left to say, but because habit demanded he memorize the weather before he drowned this world in a better one.
"Earth," he said, tasting the word as if it might have poison in it and be improved by that. "I'm in a generous mood. You get first swing."
He smiled, sharp and private.
Then he moved.