He turned from the cliff and started back, the decision set like a blade in his hand.
The wind shoved at his shoulders as if it owned the path. It didn't. Vegeta took the slope two strides at a time, boots grinding the rock into powder, tail a live metronome behind him. The pad's heat bled into the air; engines coughed; soldiers pretended not to watch.
Nappa fell in beside him, chewing on a question he couldn't help but spit. "Prince—Dragon Balls. You want 'em? We could hit Earth, scoop the set, bring Raditz back. Make Command shut up for a week."
Vegeta didn't slow. "Say it again and listen to how it sounds."
Nappa scratched the back of his head. "Like… logistics?"
"Like charity," Vegeta said. "Weak things die. If they come back, it should be because they clawed their way out, not because I held their hand from orbit."
Nappa huffed, part laugh, part test. "Even if it's our own? Raditz—"
"Raditz was noise," Vegeta said, not unkind and not kind. "You know it. He knew it."
They cut across the pad. The guard captain clocked their vector and decided he had somewhere else to be. Buildings rose—block, glass, steel bones—throwing clean lines on the ground like borders that thought they mattered.
"Dragon Balls can do anything," Nappa tried again, because he was loyal enough to be annoying. "Any wish. I've heard stories."
"So have I." Vegeta's mouth twitched like it wanted to be a smile and got lost. "Wish for strength and you get a ceiling. Wish for immortality and you get bored. Wish for time and you lose your edge. The only answer the universe respects is weight."
They hit the research wing's doors. The glass retreated fast, embarrassed to be in the way. The hall smelled like solvent and ions. Techs pressed themselves flat to the walls. Vegeta's steps set a beat that the building learned or broke against.
Eighteen thousand. He let the number sit in his skull like a stone. He didn't hate it. He hated what it meant. A soldier with a pretty title. The other number came without permission and he didn't send it away. Five hundred and thirty thousand. Not rumor—experience, secondhand and unwelcome, but true. The distance between them wasn't a line; it was a cliff he intended to climb without rope.
Nappa watched his face and chose the wrong thought to say out loud. "It's a big gap."
"It's a measurement," Vegeta said. "Gaps are for people who stop."
They took the corner. A clerk in a slate uniform hustled out of an office, already talking. "Your Highness—if you need the design bureau, I can—there are forms—"
"There are doors," Vegeta said, and didn't break stride.
The clerk pinwheeled a nod and scurried ahead to hit panels they didn't need help hitting. Doors whispered open. Lab light hit them—cold, white, unsentimental. Tanks glowed with nutrient gel the color of old jade. A rig hummed in a corner like something attempting to be patient.
Nappa's voice softened despite himself. "So… gravity chamber. That's the plan."
"That's the plan," Vegeta said. He let the words do the work of a vow.
The memory hit him from an angle he allowed: a body under training it had no right to survive; a dead planet's gravity faking itself in a ship's belly; a man who screamed at the void and taught it to listen. The math lined up whether he liked it or not. From a few thousand to a million, to tens of millions, to a hundred and fifty—numbers like claws up a mountain face. You didn't ask a dragon for that. You turned the dial until your bones learned a new language and then you spoke it fluently.
A technician noticed them, went pale in the useful way, and pointed with her whole arm. "Chief's in Bay Three."
Bay Three was half-lit, because the tank at its center didn't care if the light was nice. A tall woman in a white coat stood with a stylus tucked between two fingers, reading data off a spine display like a priest decoding omens. She didn't jump at the intrusion. She just looked up, measured the noise, and filed it.
"Prince Vegeta," she said, professional calm. "We weren't told to—"
"You are now," Vegeta said. He stepped closer, enough that the tank's glow painted his armor in trickster shades. "I want a gravity training room."
She repeated it to taste the engineering underneath. "Gravity training." Her eyes flicked once in a rectangle around the space, seeing it empty so she could fill it. "Scaling?"
"As high as you can push without turning a Saiyan into soup," Vegeta said. "Switchable bands. External power. Redundant cutoffs. Biometric lock keyed to me."
Nappa planted his fists on his hips, looking around like the chamber might grow out of the floor on command. "You'll put this here?"
"Here and elsewhere," Vegeta said. "I also want it on a ship."
The chief engineer's stylus stilled. "A dedicated gravity room aboard a cruiser?"
"A small ship," Vegeta said. "Single-berth if you have to. A planet I can carry. We go where the weight goes."
Nappa blew a low whistle. "That'll make Command happy."
Vegeta didn't look at him. "Command can file a report."
Footsteps scuffed at the threshold. The clerk arrived with a flimsy stack of authorizations that thought they mattered and set them on a tray as if the paper might explode if angled wrong.
"The design bureau will need—" the clerk began.
"What it needs is my answer," Vegeta said, and turned the full focus of his presence back on the engineer. "How long?"
The room learned stillness.
Gel bubbled in the tank with the patience of a slow heart. Somewhere down the hall a centrifuge argued with its bearings. The engineer didn't fill the silence with flattery or panic. She did the math. You could see it. She divided the problem into sections, killed the frivolous ones, stacked the rest until the shape held.
Vegeta waited, because pressure without patience was noise.
Nappa shifted once and stopped when Vegeta didn't move.
"How long," Vegeta said again, not louder—closer.