Chapter 25

Vegeta had been so close to dying for so long that a control worker had to hold him up while he met with Freeza. Freeza waited, surprisingly patient, while Vegeta struggled to give a decent report. It took a lot of stopping and starting, but he managed to explain Gavel's powers and the threat he had been.

"I see," Freeza said, snapping his fingers at a passing janitor. Other than Kiwi, there were no soldiers left on 65. "But Mr. Robe, the leader, is still alive? This isn't over until I have his head."

"Don't... worry..." Vegeta slurred. It was getting cold again but Freeza wouldn't let him go. Didn't he have nice warm fur a few minutes ago? He missed it. "Robe... just a politician... weak..." He laughed painfully. His lungs hurt. "Funny... Robe wants t' be like you... heh heh... All'a the rebels think he's angry when... just wants y'r spot..."

"They don't know? Interesting." Just as the janitor returned with a glass of water for Vegeta, Freeza's comm went off.

"Lord Freeza, please forgive our absence! We were—"

"Mr. Vegeta has already told me everything, Mr. Zarbon. Since all of my men have done such a good job stifling this insurgence I'm willing to allow all the survivors to return here. There's a little more dusting to be done, but any threat to us has been neutralized." Freeza gave a knowing look to Vegeta. "For now, I would like to know how you escaped."

"We didn't do anything!" This time it was Dodoria's harsh voice coming in through the speaker. "After being stuck here for weeks, everything just sunk back under my skin."

Knew it, Vegeta thought weakly. Whatever magical ability Gavel used was dispelled after his death. "Guys... Ronji's in... house somewhere... last I saw, alive... should find him..."

There were some faint crashes in the background and the comm buzzed as it was wrestled from one set of hands to another. "Is Vegeta there? Hey! Vegeta!"

"N... Nappa?" Vegeta strained against the darkness that was creeping up on him once more.

"I can't believe you beat that guy! I've never been so glad to be alive."

"You... okay?"

"Aaah... half starved and weaker than Ronji, but I'll live. Raditz is here, too."

"I'm glad..." were Vegeta's last words before he fell asleep.

Freeza done with him, Vegeta was rushed to the treatment center and thrown into the last working tank. Ronji didn't have time to fix any of the healing tanks that had been destroyed when the rebels invaded 65, a year ago. He hadn't even taught the other scientists more than basic maintenance. Needless to say, there was a party thrown when news of Ronji's survival came a day later. Vegeta had to spend a solid twenty four hours in the tank, and even after that he didn't wake up. His pulse was healthy, he just needed some natural recovery time.

Freeza smugly watched the rebel forces fall apart. Someone had caught wind that Robe's motives weren't as pure as advertised, and the entire army was either going on a witch hunt for their ex-leader (on the run) or returning to their home planets to pray Freeza wouldn't notice them. He noticed them. He noticed them all. As the five survivors of Kekken returned home, Freeza was already dispatching what remained of his weak left over forces to start the cleanup. And one other thing... "Look everywhere. Ask everyone you find. Killing all of them isn't enough, you have to bring him here. It's a fact that he's been helping the rebels. He's teasing me. His was the power level that set the limit for the original scouters, you know. I'm sick of chasing him. When you find him, tell him that he has a skilled but captainless taskforce waiting for him. Tell him it's time to come home."

Ronji lay on the floor of the spaceship near Nappa and Raditz's feet. Even though it would be three weeks before they reached 65, knowing that he would get to eat mint and chocolate again was all he needed. He owed Vegeta his life. And from what he heard, so did Zarbon, Dodoria, and the two other Saiyans. Either way, he never wanted to be on the front lines again.

A curious cafeteria worker found out that Vegeta would eat whatever food was held up to his mouth without waking up. Just about every resident of 65 brought their leftovers to him at some point. Entertainment at its finest. Vegeta slept for fifteen days. The first day was peaceful. He didn't dream of anything. Then a distant hum penetrated the calm nothingness. Vegeta frowned in his sleep, rolled onto his stomach, and tried to open his eyes.

In the dream, they opened to Freeza. Freeza, inches away, staring right through him. Something wrapped around Vegeta's neck. It was Freeza's white tail, thick and disgustingly muscular instead of soft and furry like a tail should be. Pointy black fingernails scratched his face. And he was getting cold again.

His breaths were shallow. He struggled to sit up, but Freeza's three-toed foot was pressing down on his chest. He couldn't breath. Something was in the back of his throat. He coughed it up. It was a piece of his lungs. His mouth tasted bloody and raw.

After days, he finally propped himself up on an elbow. Blood was dripping from his mouth but he couldn't feel a thing. Freeza was gone. Off in the darkness, a tiny point of light appeared. Vegeta wanted to scramble away from it but his body wouldn't do what he told it to. He could only lie there and watch it get closer and closer.

The moment the light skewered Vegeta's heart was the moment he woke up.

He was caught in bed, gasping for air, winded not by the dream but by his power level shooting up so fast it left his breath behind. Oh, that was good. After more than a month of working with his injuries he was finally healed. He had missed the novelty of lying motionless with no pain. His blanket was warm. His stomach was full. Soon he would unwrap the present that was discovering the new limits of his new power. And he had pulled off the most dangerous mission of his whole career, something maybe even Freeza couldn't have done.

The only thing missing was his tail.

"!" Vegeta fell out of bed and hit the ground face-first. He didn't have time to marvel at how falling hadn't hurt, his tail was gone. He knew it without looking, but just in case... no, nothing. Now he was the same species as Marone.

Vegeta got up shakily. He felt incomplete. What in the world had happened to it? Had he lost it in the confusion? No, without it he wouldn't have been able to become a Great Ape. Unless...

He ran blindly until he found Freeza. "Did you cut off my tail?" Vegeta demanded. Somehow he knew what Freeza was about to say.

"Transforming on my planet is not allowed, Mr. Vegeta," Freeza said coolly.

You know I can control it. I would have just sat on the landing pad until sunrise.

You mutilated me.

Am I even a Saiyan anymore? I can't transform now, which would have been bad news for you a little while ago.

"You couldn't have waited five hours for it to wear off?" was all Vegeta ended up saying, through clenched teeth. Even omitting everything else, he had never spoken so boldly to Freeza. He had also never hated him so much.

"I should have killed you for breaking that rule." Freeza fixed Vegeta with a look that made a chill run down his spine. He was too close to him. "I understand the context for your disobedience—" disobedience? "—so I made a compromise. Would you rather have your tail or your life, Mr. Vegeta? I can made it neither. Three points for your work with the rebellion, but minus one for not realizing how often I spare others. And minus another for what happened on Kekken."

Vegeta blinked heavily to keep the background from fading into black. He didn't want to go back to that dream. "W—what happened?"

One of Freeza's eyes widened, and the other narrowed. "Your orders were to get information on Gavel then relay it to me. You did the former, but got captured first. And you took it upon yourself to not inform me even once you had escaped."

"I think it was better this way," Vegeta muttered. He really shouldn't keep talking, but he couldn't stop himself. "Now you know that I can handle things on my own. If I was unable to receive instructions on an important planet, you could trust me to act in your best interests."

"Good point," Freeza said, smiling in a way that only made Vegeta more tense. "But that doesn't concern me as much as whether or not you can follow orders does. Let's call this little chat of ours 'unofficial', so what business do you have with me?"

Vegeta understood. He needed a less controversial reason for seeking an audience with Lord Freeza. "... I want to leave for a while. Take some time off to visit a planet or two peacefully."

"A vacation for a birthday present? Anything else and you'll be spoiled rotten." Freeza ruffled Vegeta's hair while the Saiyan tried not to recoil. "Happy 15th, by the way. All right. Since you slept through your own birthday, I'll think about it. Get back to me once you've picked a specific place." And that was that.

Vegeta didn't know why he asked for time off. He hadn't planned to, he was just trying to think of something to say and that was what came out. Surely taking a break from missions was more of a punishment to a frenetic Saiyan like Vegeta, right? But now that he could finally settle down and start picking apart everything that happened on Kekken, one idea someone else gave him stuck out again and again. IGRIS. That was how Vegeta found himself meeting for the first time with the Director of IGRIS Relations, Freddo. And that was how he found out about it...

The Galajūichi Budōkai.

When Vegeta heard what it was, a smile grew on his face. When he heard where it was, his heart nearly lurched up his throat. He grabbed a fistful of glossy informational pamphlets and seemed to dissolve away into the very air before Freddo's eyes.

He was ready to go within a day. Everything was in order. He had toothdrops and a few cloth training suits, but no armor. He had notebooks and pens and pod-friendly food—this time, he wasn't going to waste time travelling there in sleep. Freeza had given him enough money to pay the registration fee. He had measured his current power level as instructed: 10,700. (He had gained a phenomenal 500 points from Kekken, the most strength he had earned yet from a single mission.) Nappa and everyone returned in less than a week, but he set off long before that.

His destination? The galaxy-wide martial arts tournament!

*⁂*⁂*

A group of about fifty people, including Freeza and Kiwi, were waiting on the landing pad as the ship touched down. Zarbon opened the door to thunderous applause. Raditz had barely set foot on 65 when Marone pushed through the crowd and jumped into his arms, hugging him as tightly as she could. Nappa and Ronji ignored them and kept walking, but five more steps and Ronji had thrown himself at Freeza's feet, weeping with relief and withdrawal. Freeza said something Nappa couldn't hear over the crowd and flicked his tail for Ronji to get up. Ronji thrashed forwards, trying to stand, run, and bow at the same time, and fell flat on his face. He picked himself up again and made a break for the nearest building with blood streaming from his nose. As Freeza turned to Zarbon and Dodoria, Nappa walked past them by himself.

First he visited the obviously abandoned training centers. They were too clean; the air didn't smell like moving bodies anymore and all the scuffs on the floor had been janitored away. He realized that his training partner, Yapez, was dead. So was Raditz's, a perpetually-scowling terrycloth alien whose name Nappa didn't know.

He wandered around for hours. Of course Vegeta was nowhere to be found. At dinner, the big cafeteria looked empty with only fifty people in it.

"Yeah, there's a few others on duty but this is pretty much all that's left of 65 now," Marone said with a sigh. "Freeza sent every single soldier on the planet to go fight."

"What do you do again?" Nappa asked, bored and pushing around the mush on his plate.

"I'm a strategist... is what I used to say," Marone said, her dark eyes looking down at her plate sadly, "but now that just feels like a lie. Lord Freeza wouldn't let any of us advise him on this rebellion 'cause it was too 'important.' But things have sucked ever since I came here... there were next to no planets left, and now even those have been taken care of."

"What are you talking about?" Raditz spoke up. "You mean planets to be processed? I've been going on missions this whole time and I haven't heard anything like that."

"Have you ever read the archives? It used to take weeks, even days, to travel to most planets. Now it's normal to take months. Months. I can't imagine living the way you do. How many years have you burned in sleep? Especially someone like Vegeta. He must have spent more than half his life unconscious."

"The experience makes up for it," Nappa said. "We live twice as much on missions, so long travel times are fine."

"Also, the aging process of our physical bodies slows down a lot while our minds are in sleep," Raditz said. "Speaking of which, if there aren't any good planets to do missions on, where did Vegeta go?"

"Oh, just to some martial arts tournament," Marone said carelessly.

"What?!" Nappa yelled. "Why the hell didn't he wait for us? Not even me!"

"He got special permission from Lord Freeza. I think you guys have to go hunt down the rest of the rebels."

"That doesn't sound too bad," Nappa mumbled.

"If the rebels are just the surviving native races and Lord Freeza wants them all gone—I'm sure he does—then it's like doing all the missions at once!" Raditz was amazed at such a concept. "We'll make a clean sweep."

"Yeah..." Nappa was getting more unhappy as each minute passed. "... But I can't see the future anymore. Once the rebels are gone, there's nothing left. And 65 was supposed to be the elite Freeza Planet... now it's just a bunch of janitors. Who knows how many of the weaker soldiers will die on this last mission? At the end, Lord Freeza will be left with a few crumbs for an army and nothing worth seizing. I don't understand."

"I see what you mean," said Raditz, frowning. "What's even weirder is how calm he is. Does he not see what's coming?"

Marone rolled her eyes. "Probably. Anyone who ignores my strategy doesn't have any of their own, true fact."

Everyone on 65 was growing anxious with the way Freeza was acting. He spent too much time out of his offices nowadays, smiling at whoever he came across and looking out at his half-destroyed planet. He even came to see the two interns, Shun and Ree, off on their errand.

"Don't worry if you don't find anything," Freeza told them cheerfully. "I'll hold Mr. Ronji accountable. Just travel quickly and report back as soon as you can... this is not something you two can take your time on, understand?"

Shun and Ree gulped, nodded, and jumped in their spaceships. Receiving orders unrelated to planet processing was uncomfortable and confusing for all, but they didn't need to be on the same page as Freeza in order to serve him.

Of course, Freeza didn't think it was necessary to explain that he was just in a good mood because the rebel cleanup was off to a smooth start... and so were his plans for the future. He remembered an especially pleasing conversation that had taken place that morning and had to resist the urge to do a dance of joy.

Mr. Ginyu had been located and was on his way.

*⁂*⁂*

Vegeta had barely begun analyzing his first day on Kekken when he sensed something. He turned around halfway and stared at the curved wall inches from his nose. He had spent years floating in space, usually alone. He could feel when someone was with him.

He went back to his notes, ignoring the far-off presence. He would find out who was following him when he reached his destination.

It took Vegeta's pod one month to speed to the closest edge of the galaxy. One more day of travel after that and he reached the billboard. It was about ten feet by fifteen feet, equipped with a computer and six small rockets. The computer's GPS (Galactic Positioning System) worked with the rockets to keep the sign fixed at the exact same coordinates listed in Vegeta's pamphlet. Vegeta tilted his head to read the sideways display on the drifting board.

OFFICIAL GALAJŪICHI BUDŌKAI BOARDING AREA #29734

00d 01h 17m 57s

A countdown. Vegeta thanked fate for getting him there on time. He had reached his limit of being stuck in that inhumanely cramped spaceship last week. He wouldn't be able to handle waiting around another ten days for the countdown if he had missed it.

That hour passed in a silence that was almost painful without movement to soften it. Vegeta didn't break his eyes away from the glowing red numbers the entire time. His books were full and his analysis was complete. For now, he had done all the technical study he could ever want. It was time to do, not think.

Vegeta's ship was programmed according to the pamphlet's instructions. On his signal, it would shoot straight down the y-axis at a steady speed of 1.5 mkm/s for ten seconds. His finger hovered over the button.

0d 0h 0m 6s / 5s / 4s...

Seeing the two spaceships float in front of Vegeta's window almost made him miss 0s. His finger jammed painfully against the button just in time.

The ships were so good at what they did that, save for some gentle tremors, the billboard disappearing was the only sign that they were moving. The two other travellers—obviously fellow soldiers, given their fighter pods and armor—each eyed Vegeta then shared a nod and a thumbs-up between themselves.

Inside his own ship, Vegeta was shaking with anger—stark contrast to the cerebral peace of the past month. Freeza. He sent two dogs after me! Does he think I'll run away again? After—

Vegeta's thoughts were interrupted when his ship collided with the fastest moving planet of all time, Sazz. It sunk into the spongy surface until it was completely submerged and out of harm's way.

Vegeta didn't look at the underground parkade outside his window, or the many exotic ships from all corners of the galaxy that surrounded him. He was too busy thinking of Freeza. This is disgusting. I'm not seven years old anymore! After all I've done for him, he still doesn't trust me? What does it take?! He couldn't believe that—

Paff paff paff. A powdery white doughnut was trying to knock on his window. Vegeta snapped out of his anger long enough to gather up his things and tip the valet to roll his ship out of the way. He received a ticket to the lower levels of parking that he tucked into his duffel bag for safekeeping.

This wasn't the place for spending thoughts on Freeza. After growing up around standardized round ships, seeing all the different shapes, textures, and smells that a spaceship could have was mind-boggling to Vegeta. Many of the ships had the same insignia that was on the billboard from earlier—six foamy waves crashing down on a beach of black sand sprinkled with white starfish. It was familiar somehow... after a good twenty seconds of digging, Vegeta remembered that it was the IGRIS symbol. He almost hadn't recognized it.

Without even leaving the parking lot, Vegeta was already discovering how little he knew. He would have to be satisfied with just roughing his pursuers up a bit and getting them to tell Freeza he could handle himself.

Except they were nowhere to be found. Vegeta thought he saw one of their ships being moved around a corner, but he wasn't sure. Oh, well. He didn't have anything to hide. If he saw them again, he'd give them a message for Freeza, but he wasn't going to waste time seeking them out.

He had a whole planet full of fighters to meet.