The sky bled. Not metaphor—an iron-red moon hung over the shattered plain, and the smoke picked up the color like it wanted to drink. Vegeta came to with his back against a slab of rock, grit in his teeth, tail twitching on instinct.
Nappa's boot crunched nearby. "Prince, campfire's up. Raditz—don't touch that, idiot—you'll blow your own hair off."
A limp alien body landed a pace from Vegeta's boots. Nappa flicked a torch, fussed with scrap for kindling. Raditz's voice yapped somewhere beyond the smoke—loud, unimportant, easy to tune out.
A thin chime lanced his head.
[SYSTEM ONLINE: Host: Vegeta. Power Level: 18,000. Pure Saiyan Blood: 100%. Target: Super Saiyan (Phase 1) — 30% Activated.]
Of course there would be a system. Wear the crown, wear the cheat. The surprise rose and he strangled it before it touched his face. He tasted copper, dust, and the old pride this body carried like a scent.
"Done chatting, Raditz?" Vegeta's voice came crisp, unamused. "Or do you need the moon to come down here and explain itself to you?"
Raditz shut up with a nervous chuckle. Nappa glanced over, reading Vegeta's mood like weather. "We're clean. Orders say return once the beacon's planted."
"Then we're done." Vegeta pushed off the rock, rolled his shoulder until the joint popped, and let his tail coil high, a quiet flag of superiority. The red moon glared back—like a warning, like a promise.
Nappa toed the corpse away from the fire. "You took a hit, Prince?"
Vegeta's eyes slid to him. "I took a nap."
Nappa grinned despite himself. "Heh."
Eighteen thousand. Thirty percent. The numbers sat in his skull like weights. A leash if I treat them like endpoints. A fuse if I don't.
He didn't bother to explain anything. He didn't have to. His stride drew the others along the blasted ridge to the clearing where three pods squatted like eggshells in the ash. The scouters on the perimeter chittered their acknowledgement; the pods hissed open.
"Try not to talk all the way home," Vegeta said without looking back. "You'll tire yourself."
Nappa's chuckle followed him into the pod. Raditz muttered something that might've been agreement. Inside, the seat molded under Vegeta's armor. He let the glass iris seal his view of the red-drenched world. Then the stars took over.
The pod spun to the jump vector; the sky pinholed and then went—a clean yank, a patience-eating hum, the familiar pressure pressed to the bones. Vegeta closed his eyes and counted a breath in five, out five, making space around the System's line of text that wouldn't fade.
[SYSTEM: Baseline established. Training recommendation available upon request.]
Later. He forced the prompt to the edge of his awareness. I know what I need: gravity. Pressure. A voice that isn't mine telling me I can't.
Planet Vegeta swelled out of the dark like a bruise—orange-brown, scarred, honest. Reentry carved a glare along the pod's skin. The comm crackled.
"Unregistered approach vector," a bored voice drawled. "Identify, or we—oh. It's the Prince and Nappa. Figures. No signal, no clearance." A second voice, lower: "Shut it and bring the guard detail. If he wants to hit something today, let it be the pad."
Vegeta's mouth tipped. Let them whine. The pods punched atmosphere; heat sang—then the landing field rose, a chequer of concrete and shadowed towers. His pod kissed down hard enough to make the suspension complain. He liked that.
Hatches irised open. Nappa stepped out first, rolling his neck, eyes up for trouble. Vegeta followed, not glancing at the line of soldiers who had sprinted into parade formation late. Their captain swallowed hard, stood straighter.
"Welcome back, Your Highness," he managed. "Do you—shall we—escort—"
"Research wing," Vegeta said. "The chief engineer."
The captain blinked, wrong-footed. Nappa jogged to catch up with Vegeta's long stride. "Ship trouble? We can requisition a new one. No need to bother the eggheads."
Vegeta ignored the guard detail entirely and cut across the pad, tail swaying with unspoken warning. The air carried salt and metal and the hot breath of engines. A gull-analog screeched overhead as if it had an opinion worth hearing.
"Not a ship," he said. "A chamber."
"A what now?"
"Gravity training." He gave Nappa a side-eye that said Think. "You can follow, or you can waste your energy asking."
Nappa followed.
The research institute threw pale light across the corridor floors, cold and clean. Techs flattened to the walls as Vegeta passed. A clerk sprinted ahead, babbling "Prince, Prince—she's in her lab—this way—"
She looked up when the door slid open, a stylus held between her teeth, hair an uncommitted bristle. She took the stylus out, set it down without looking, and bowed enough to acknowledge rank without fawning.
"Prince Vegeta," she said. "We weren't told to expect—"
"I require a gravity training chamber."
She repeated it like she needed the sound to build blueprints around. "A gravity… training… chamber." She blinked. "Scaling?"
"As high as you can push without liquefying a Saiyan," Vegeta said. "Switchable bands. I want a dial, not a monument."
Nappa tossed his hands. "Since when do we—"
"Since now," Vegeta said.
The engineer's eyes had already gone elsewhere, grabbing pieces of the future from the air and stacking them. "Chassis we can adapt from the hyper-resistance rig. Shell from the old centrifuge drums. Field drivers… hm. The seal isn't the problem; bleed is. You'll want a dead man's cutoff and a biometrics lock." She looked back, calculating the man more than the request. "One week."
Vegeta nodded once. "I'll be back in six days."
She smiled like a woman who loved audacity on someone else's time. "Then I'll pretend you meant that."
Vegeta had already turned. The clerk fumbled for a form; Vegeta didn't slow down to sign it. Protocol could chase him if it had the legs.
Nappa matched him in the corridor. "You going to tell me what you plan to do with this… room?"
"Stand in it," Vegeta said. "Until standing isn't the right verb."
Nappa tried not to grin. "Right."
They stepped back into the thinning light of the day—if it could be called that; Planet Vegeta wore day like a blade. The wind off the water tasted like a dare. The landing field sprawled to their right; to their left, the cliffs ran down to a roiling, dark-blue sea.
The guard captain pretended not to stare. Vegeta weighed him with a killed glance anyway, then lifted two fingers to flick Nappa away. "You don't need to shadow me."
Nappa hesitated. "Orders are—"
"My orders are you don't." Vegeta's tone made the air colder. "Go eat. Or break something that deserves it."
Nappa's grin this time was honest. "Yes, Prince." He thumped his chest with a fist—loyalty, relief—and peeled off toward the barracks.
Vegeta walked alone.
The cliff path didn't bother to be safe. He liked that. He moved until the concrete gave up and the rock took over, until the engines' breath settled into a low growl behind him and the sea took the rest. Down the cliff face, the waves hit in disciplined ranks, white-sheathed, never bored.
Eighteen thousand. He let the number sit, then let it burn. Thirty percent. Another ember. He thought of the leash. Thought of the hand. He didn't need to say the name. It was in the tilt of his head, the set of his shoulders, the way his tail traced slow, precise arcs like a blade tasting the air.
[SYSTEM: Training recommendation available. Display?]
He stared at the line where sea knifed into sky and answered nothing. The wind did not mind the arrogance.
He imagined the chamber—a small, merciless planet inside a room. He imagined turning the dial and finding the first setting insulting. He imagined the second setting cracking something old and proud across his back until pride stood up again. He imagined Frieza as nothing more than a distant pressure, a trivial weather system, a past-tense.
Footsteps clattered behind him—quick, hesitant. Not Nappa. A private with more fear than sense—uniform half-straight, breath high.
"Your Highness," the private blurted, stopping two paces back like he'd run into an invisible wall. "Message traffic from orbit flagged your pod code—directive from Command requests confirmation of your readiness for redeployment—"
Vegeta didn't turn fully—just enough for the private to feel the focus like heat. The wind ripped the words to tatters between them and still carried the meaning.
"Tell Command," Vegeta said softly, "that the Prince heard them."
A swallow. "And… your answer, Your Highness?"
Vegeta let the sea fill the pause. One week. He saw the dial again, imagined his bones re-learning honesty under pressure. He let the System's prompt sit unaccepted, because the only recommendation that mattered had already been made.
He stepped closer to the edge, boots grinding rock. The spray hit, bright and cold.
"My answer," he said, and the tailline cut the air, "is that when they ask again, they'd better have something worth my time."
The private tried not to look relieved and failed. "Yes, Prince."
Vegeta watched the horizon a breath longer, then finally blinked the prompt.
[SYSTEM: Training recommendation suppressed. Standing by.]
He smiled without kindness. One week is long if you waste it. I don't.
He turned from the cliff and started back, the decision set like a blade in his hand.