The second plume on the horizon thickened into a column as Nappa's pod tore the sky and buried itself in sand. The ground shuddered, then exhaled, heat shimmering over the crater's lip. A bald head rose from the dust cloud first, then a grin too pleased to belong to a professional.
"Prince!" Nappa boomed, stamping up the slope with the enthusiasm of a parade. "Tell me you left some for me."
"I left you a lesson," Vegeta said. "Plant it."
Nappa blinked, then crowed as memory caught up. He slapped a compartment on his armor—hollow clicks—and produced a small capsule of green seeds that looked like wicked little teeth. He knelt on the sand and pressed them into the earth with an almost tender care that had nothing to do with mercy. His palm hovered, Ki bled from his hand into the ground, and the desert answered with a low tremor.
The sand boiled.
Six wet, sharp shapes bloomed, clawing their way free—Saibamen, squat and sinewy, eyes like knife points under a skull that never learned kindness. They shrieked in pitches designed to offend the living.
The System slid its voice across Vegeta's vision like silk.
[Summoned Units: Saibamen x6]Average PL: 1,200 (volatile)Traits: Acidic Secretion | Bio-Suicide ProtocolUse Case: Calibration | AttritionNote: Unstable loyalties; respond best to immediate dominance.
Vegeta's tail flicked. "Make them bow."
Nappa ground a heel on the nearest Saibaman's head, forcing it face-first into the sand. It squirmed, then went still, the others following—chittering, shouldering one another to kneel where kneeling was a new language.
Across the ridge, the Z-Fighters stared. Piccolo wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. Krillin dragged himself from a half-collapsed gouge in the rock, chest heaving, face gray. Tien crawled out of his crater with the slowness of a man arguing with his own tendons. Yamcha cradled a useless wrist and tried to make the pose look like a choice. Chiaotzu hovered shakily at shoulder height, eyes wide.
A sixth signature touched the edge of Vegeta's sense—small, bright, earnest, late.
The System obliged the realization.
[Secondary Signature Detected]Designation: Son GohanPL (fluctuating): 1,100 → 2,800 (spike potential)Position: 0.9 km NW, behind ridge; approaching—hesitant.
Piccolo hid the boy, Vegeta thought, faintly amused. Good instincts, wrong war.
He lifted his chin. "Rules," he said to Nappa, voice mild. "We test the stock before we butcher it. One of them against one of yours. Then we calibrate."
Yamcha stepped forward before anyone reasonable could stop him. Pride made a shape under his bruises. "I'll go first," he said, and tried to put steel into it.
Krillin glanced sideways, half warning, half prayer. Tien said nothing, but his jaw tightened.
"Which toy?" Nappa sang.
"Any," Vegeta said.
A Saibaman bounded merrily into the arena of sand below, arms out, claws flexing, skull plate glistening wet as if freshly lacquered in cruelty. It cackled and paced, leaving small punch-holes in the ground.
Yamcha shook out his shoulders. Pain chased across his face, then hid. He dropped into stance, drew a long breath, and launched.
He was fast—by human measures. His first flurry made the Saibaman backpedal in jerks, claws up, shriek hitching. Yamcha pivoted, low sweep, a hook that would have broken a human's neck. The Saibaman took it on the skull plate and spun, came up giggling, spit a fan of acid that hissed through the top layers of Yamcha's gi.
Yamcha swore, rolled left, and slammed his palm under the creature's chin with a crack that rattled teeth in watchers who weren't wearing armor. The Saibaman cartwheeled, stuck its claws in the earth, and screamed into another charge.
"Footwork," Vegeta observed, almost to himself. "Hands good. Head wrong."
The fight turned tight. Yamcha harried the Saibaman, corralled it toward a boulder, feinted left, leapt high—Wolf Fang Fist carving the air in arcs. The Saibaman met him halfway, caught a forearm, bit, stuck. Yamcha yelled. They tumbled. He reversed, threw the thing off, drove a heel down on its chest and felt something give.
It lay still long enough for hope to grow reckless in Krillin's mouth.
"Yamcha!" he shouted, voice already climbing the pitch of victory. "You got—"
Vegeta saw it before anyone else did: the Saibaman's fingers lacing behind Yamcha's neck, knuckles whitening as if the bio-weapon had decided to pray. The skull plate opened along a seam and revealed wet inner light. Yamcha's eyes widened, the moment a window—Understanding is an excellent but late companion.
"Down!" Piccolo roared.
Vegeta did not warn him. Discipline before spectacle. The world must teach with the tools it owns.
The Saibaman detonated.
White-green light punched outward in a radius tight enough to be intimate. Sound followed like a jealous lover. Sand atomized, then reassembled itself as glass in a ring where Yamcha had been.
Where Yamcha had been, there was a hollow. At its center, a body that had the shape of a man and the weight of an answer he hadn't meant to give.
Krillin ran. He slid to his knees at the crater's edge, hands going useless over and over, as if the problem were a puzzle he could solve by bleeding on it. No breath. No flicker. A hero's haircut in the wrong economy.
The System spoke without apology.
[Fatality Logged — Target: Yamcha]Cause: Saibaman Bio-SuicideTechnique Acquired (Observation): Bio-Suicide Countermeasure — 0% (Requires lab testing / Ki sheath timing)Morale Impact: High (Allies)
Vegeta folded his arms and let silence wreck the ground more thoroughly than the blast had.
Krillin's shoulders shook. His head lowered, then rose, rage peeling up from the base of his spine like flame. He stood—small, broken, incandescent.
"Move," he told Tien and Piccolo, voice gone sharp. "Now."
He lifted both hands. Ki gathered at each fingertip, launched as ten lances that blossomed into a scatter storm mid-flight. It wasn't pretty. It didn't need to be. The desert became a grid of impact points stitched together by violence, each little sun seeking a Saibaman skull like a hound.
Four Saibamen vanished in shrieks that cut off too quickly to be satisfying. A fifth leapt, took the edge of a blast, and landed on one knee, one arm charred to charcoal.
The sixth… wasn't there. It had burrowed, clever ugly thing, and came up beneath Krillin's blind side, mouth open like a promise.
Vegeta did not move.
Tien did—too late. Piccolo did—late but hard. He rammed shoulder-first into the Saibaman's leap. They skidded. Claws scored Piccolo's chest; acid sizzled.
Piccolo's hand closed over the creature's skull like a man palming a ball. He squeezed. The Saibaman went still, then limp, green-black ooze leaking from the seams of its face.
Piccolo dropped it at Krillin's feet and stood heaving, bleeding from three new lines.
"You're thinking in circles," Piccolo rasped at him, and to Vegeta's silent amusement, the Namek's eyes flicked toward the prince as if to confirm he was tutoring under duress. "Make them squares."
Krillin swallowed rage back down where it came from, and it sat there, hot and heavy, as if waiting for a proper issue date.
Nappa laughed at all of it, clapping like a delighted child. "They pop nice, don't they? Like peppers!"
"Amusements," Vegeta said. "Now the test."
Nappa denied the chance to misinterpret. He crashed into their line like a blade with legs. Tien moved first, the only one with a stance that looked like discipline instead of hope. Three eyes narrowed. Hands locked. The shape of his Tri-Beam turned the desert into a target and the air into a constraint.
Vegeta tilted his head, aware enough to admire the geometry a little.
"Prince," Nappa sneered mid-charge, "watch me unpaint the lines."
Tien roared and fired.
The Tri-Beam smashed into Nappa's chest and the world told itself a different story for a second: the brute's feet moved backward. Sand arced. Nappa's grin slipped.
The beam burned out. Tien dropped to a knee, breathing through teeth, blood dripping from his nose. Nappa stopped moving backward, then smiled like a man remembering he paid the rent. He lifted his hand and closed it around nothing just to make the air feel owned.
"Cute," he said, and disappeared.
He appeared at Tien's side and punched.
Bone cracked—arm gone, severed at the shoulder in a geyser of red that the desert drank with morbid efficiency. Tien's scream had a shape old soldiers recognized and decent gods pretended they didn't.
Krillin moved without permission from his fear. Piccolo moved because he refused to be asked again. Chiaotzu's hands trembled, light building at their tips like the beginning of a storm.
Nappa swept a leg through Krillin's midsection and launched him end over end into his own broken ridge. Piccolo met Nappa head-on and paid for the honesty with a knee to the gut that would have folded a man with fewer bones to break. Nappa backhanded the Namek into a boulder; the boulder decided to retire.
Tien staggered to his feet. One arm hung as a memory. He planted his feet again anyway.
"Tien!" Krillin coughed. "Don't—"
Tien didn't look his way. He set his jaw as if setting a bone. "Chiaotzu," he said quietly. "No."
Chiaotzu hovered, tiny face wet with the wrong things. He stared at Tien and then at the brute, then at Vegeta, as if the prince might be a judge who would hide mercy under the bench.
Vegeta offered nothing. Discipline before spectacle. Let the world teach.
Chiaotzu moved—the wrong way in a good direction. He surged, a streak of white, latched onto Nappa's back like a desperate second spine, and screamed one word that didn't need a language.
"Tien!"
Nappa flailed, furious. "Get—off—me—"
Chiaotzu grinned through tears and detonated.
The blast knocked sand into the air like a thousand fists. Smoke boiled.
The System recorded with a pitiless pen.
[Self-Sacrifice Logged — Target: Chiaotzu]Effect on Nappa: Surface damage only (armor integrity: 74%)Ally Morale: Fractured / SteelingProjected Zenkai Gains (Vegeta, if brink achieved): Pending.
When the smoke cleared, Nappa was on one knee, armor scorched, mustache singed. Rage blew off him in visible heat. He rose shaking with the outrage of interrupted amusement.
Tien's mouth formed a shape that might have been a name or a vow. He gathered himself as if the world owed him one more working muscle and then launched, Tri-Beam again, a triangle of stubborn in a circle of futility.
Vegeta raised a hand—not to stop the attack. To watch the math.
Tien's beam carved another piece off the brute's arrogance and another piece off Tien's life. The second piece was bigger. Blood burst from his mouth. His knees locked. His eyes found Nappa and told him something that would keep no one warm.
The beam failed. The desert, contemptuous, took back the heat it had loaned.
Nappa laughed and didn't bother to be impressive about it. He walked forward and stomped. The heel came down where Tien's chest had been.
Krillin's scream died before it learned how to be born.
Tien did not rise.
Piccolo went silent. Krillin shook. The ridge around them rang with the quietest sound a battlefield makes: hope leaving by the door instead of the window.
Vegeta exhaled through his nose—half irritation, half calculation. Two dead. The board was drawing itself back into canon, more or less. But this time, he owned the chalk.
The System slid another line into place with clerical calm.
[Board State Update]Allies Remaining (Earth): Piccolo (wounded), Krillin (brink), Son Gohan (nearby), Unknown Spike (rising, distant)Enemy Assets: Nappa (combat-ready), Vegeta (dominant)Recommendation:— Force Gohan's entry (fear-to-rage conversion drills).— Instruct Nappa to target Namek; preserve the child's near-death stimulus for maximum Saiyan data.Optional Reward: Super Saiyan Progress +2% (Emotional Catalyst Research)
Vegeta considered the elegance of cruelty and found it wanting; not because it was cruel, but because Frieza had used it first. He valued originality, even in sin.
He gazed across the sand to where the small power flickered behind a ridge, the boy's fear pulsing like a frightened bird against its own ribs. Piccolo felt it too; Vegeta saw the Namek's eyes angle without moving his head.
"Nappa," Vegeta said, boredom coiled in cruelty, "stop playing. The Namek bores me. Break him."
Krillin staggered into the middle before thought could veto courage. "No!" He hurled a Destructo Disc, his control crisp even while his hands shook.
Nappa bent at the waist with surprising grace. The disc missed his throat by two inches and carved a canyon into the ridge behind him large enough to be a sermon. Nappa grinned and lunged.
He didn't reach Krillin.
A small shape streaked out of hiding with a cry that bent at the end and tried very hard to be a roar. Gohan slammed into Nappa's side with the honest violence of a frightened child who had decided fear had become boring. The impact moved the brute. Sand fountained.
Nappa looked surprised, then delighted, then very, very angry.
Vegeta's lips curved. "There you are."
[Emotional Catalyst Achieved — Son Gohan]Spike: 2,800 → 3,200 (transient)Correlation: Protective RageNote: High potential asset/obstacle. Observe.
Gohan tumbled, rolled, bounced to his feet more by luck than training. Piccolo grabbed him by the shoulder and threw him behind, eyes never leaving Nappa. The move was genuine care disguised as tactical necessity.
Nappa wiped blood from the corner of his mouth and tasted it with theatrical relish. "That all you got, brat?"
"Careful," Vegeta said softly. "You bruise the fruit before it's ripe, and the wine is terrible."
Nappa snarled, a beast lectured by a vintner, and charged Piccolo instead. Fists like meteorites. Piccolo met him with palms and knees, technique singing and screaming at the same time. He lasted five exchanges. On the sixth, Nappa slipped a hammer through the Namek's guard and shattered ribs like sugar glass.
Piccolo's eyes widened. He looked—not at Vegeta, not at Nappa—but at Gohan. Something that had never had a name in him before found one.
Nappa cupped a blast between his hands. It bloomed cruel and bright. He aimed at the boy because cruelty makes cowards good at math.
Piccolo moved.
He stepped between boy and blast with a calm he hadn't earned until now and threw his arms wide like a man welcoming weather. The blast took him clean in the chest. The world threw him backward into the ground and then tried to pretend it hadn't.
Silence.
Krillin's knees buckled. Gohan made a sound that would never be a word again.
Piccolo wheezed. He reached, dragging Gohan close by the collar. His mouth worked around the weight of last things. "Gohan… listen…"
Vegeta watched without blinking. In canon, this is the first time he says it out loud, he reminded himself. That the boy made him better by the insult of existing. He felt Ethan's quiet respect lean forward inside his head.
Piccolo's fingers tightened. "Tell your… father… finish this."
His eyes found Vegeta's for the first and last time and did not ask for mercy or forgiveness. They did something rarer: they recognized what stood there.
Piccolo smiled, small and mean and private. "You'll die later," he said to Vegeta, as if scheduling.
Then he let the breath go.
The System recorded, indifferent to poetry.
[Fatality Logged — Target: Piccolo]Dragon Balls (Earth): Inert (Kami link severed)Planetary Defense: Severely degradedRipple: Gohan Rage Potential +++
Gohan's aura broke. It surged up through him like a fault line erupting into air. He screamed and the scream had a direction: Nappa.
He charged with speed that would have written pride into a lesser man's face. Nappa laughed, prepared to turn courage into a cautionary tale. Gohan's little fist hit his jaw with a crack loud enough to deserve applause. Nappa pinwheeled and spat a tooth.
Vegeta's eyebrows rose, honest surprise softened by satisfaction. "Yes," he murmured. "Like that. Like that."
Nappa recovered in the way mountains do—slow, then all at once. Rage ate theater. He grabbed the boy by the ankle and flung him toward the horizon like a stone skipped wrong. Gohan hit sand, tore a trench with his body, and lay stunned, alive out of spite.
Krillin threw himself between Nappa and the boy, more courage than strategy. Nappa raised a hand.
The System cut in, voice suddenly cool with a different kind of precision.
[Approach Vector: Kakarot]ETA: 00:00:53PL (suppressed?): 5,000 → rising (unknown ceiling)Recommendation:— Stall Nappa; do not allow fatal blows on key assets (Krillin/Gohan) before Kakarot engages.— Prepare to sever liability (Nappa) post-demonstration.Optional Reward: Ascension Path Synergy +1 (Rivalry Node engaged)
Vegeta's smile sharpened into something that would leave a cut if you touched it.
"Nappa," he said, not raising his voice and somehow filling the desert with it, "enough. Hold."
Nappa rounded on him, drunk on momentum. "I'm winning!"
"You're wasting," Vegeta said. "There's a difference."
For a second, it looked like Nappa would charge the wrong enemy. Then the chain of command, old and mean and comfortable, slipped back over his neck. He snarled and took a pacing step backward, tail lashing.
Vegeta turned his head and looked toward the empty blue—and then not empty. A speck grew into a comet, into a man on a cloud that had decided it liked him. The air around him trembled with a promise that had survived far too many kindly choices.
"Kakarot," Vegeta said, tasting the name as if it might be poison and finding it a spice. "Finally."
Krillin sagged with relief he hadn't earned but desperately needed. Gohan pushed himself to his knees, eyes swimming and bright, staring at the man descending like a new rule.
Nappa laughed again, ready to be offended by hope.
Vegeta raised one hand to hush the planet and let the moment become a stage.
"Welcome home," he said to the speck that had become a man, and the smile on his mouth was a blade and a blessing both.