The planet shook with a sickening quake. Streets buckled and tore, towers fell into emerging chasms, and roots spread over every city on the globe.
Turles awoke from the rumbling with a mouth full of blood and blood rushing to his head. His eyelids felt like they weighed a ton each, but he knew that his mission was not over, so with every ounce of strength in his body he opened his eyes, hacked out the blood in his mouth, and watched as it fell into the endless abyss
How had he gotten stuck over a pit?
His memories trickled in slowly, he had been fighting Kakarot, but he had lost somehow. Oh, he knew for certain he had lost, he could feel it from the dozens of holes in his body. Hot enough to cauterize the wounds as he was hit, and painful enough to make him wish for death.
But death was only a fleeting thought for him and an embarrassing one at that, Kakarot had already explicitly given him a much better thing to wish for. Revenge, best served via that monkey's corpse at his feet and a promotion to a new rank.
He tucked his head down and saw what had saved his life, the only thing stopping him from falling into the planet's depths, complete luck. The gap in the front boot had been made by a split pipe, and was holding him in place upside down. With each drop of blood that trickled past his upper lip and traveled across his face, he had to wonder how he could be so lucky.
Kakarot had tried to give him a second chance, but he'd only succeeded in sealing his own squad's death.
Turles heard the unmistakable shredding sound of polyleather ripping and saw that his luck had decided it gave him all the time it could. He needed to summon his ki, fly upwards, and make his next move.
He tried to gather his ki from within him and felt his vision blur and his head go light. His body needed more rest, he didn't even have enough ki to hold him steady. He was desperate enough that he would've used his tail to try and hold onto the pipe, but Kakarot had taken that from him too.
Sccrrrrp! his boot screamed as its sole nearly split completely in half.
Turles gasped as he tried to swing his arms, but even that was strenuous on the battered saiyan.
For an instant, he thought they were right. He could hear Salza and the rest of Cooler's Armored Squadron ook-ook and aak-eek'ing at him, tossing banana peels and other fruit at his face. Maybe he was just a pathetic monkey, destined to die as pointlessly as his species had lived.
But in his moment of doubt, Cooler's voice came to him like a second wind.
"Rise," Cooler said, "You are an Elite Warrior of the Cooler Army. Your people were a nuisance to the galaxy and you've excelled past whatever they could hope to be. Now rise to the dignity of your station, Turles. Be the warrior I need you to be."
Turles boot snapped from his weight and the saiyan fell down into the abyss. Until he stabbed his hands into the wall of soil and dragged down from the momentum, creating a rain of dirt that fell into the planet's abyss. It was too dark to see anything, but he felt the dirt hit his face, he knew they could not share the same fate. He dug a second hand in and stopped his fall.
I will not, Turles felt strain even from thinking as he climbed, make an embarrassment … of Lord Cooler.
The pain was irrelevant, what his body wanted him to do couldn't matter less, he had a mission to complete, and he intended to succeed at it.
With each fistful of soil he took, his determination grew. He climbed past the ruined infrastructure of the planet one arm's length at a time until he had found his way from sure death.
Now he looked at a far more nebulous situation, the one he had helped to create.
The Tree of Might stood on the horizon, but in a form he'd never seen before. He'd used it once before and gotten to eat its fruit, but when he tried to use it on Roug, he had to flee after he had captured Jerem and detected Nappa and the others approaching. Using it on a planet with weak nutrients in the soil and less lifeforms to siphon energy from was what they had intended to find out on Roug, but were forced to discover on Throhbaq, but this? This didn't make sense at all.
The Tree of Might was blooming. Its branches stretched further than the heavens and were coated with thick leaves of neon green and cerulean blues. The tree wasn't the rancid black color he'd grown accustomed to, but a healthy brown with leaves that were the size of entire neighborhoods.
It was an odd sight that gave him goosebumps, but he knew enough to know that with a strong tree came strong fruit.
Turles trudged towards the Tree of Might, one step after another. Each step closer to his destiny, each step closer on his mission to destroy the saiyans.
Vegeta and Nappa flew through the subway tunnels at blistering speeds to catch Mireau. To The Prince's surprise, Nappa was almost leaving him in his dust.
He'd never seen his bodyguard this determined before. Nappa was a hothead, but what that had always meant to him was that he was quicker to scream his problems to death than to think through them.
But then again, they'd never had a problem like this before.
Broly was kidnapped and possibly already dead. The Coward and The Clown were missing, and Nappa had already lost an eye. Unsurprisingly, all of his subordinates were lagging behind him. As the Prince of All Saiyans, it was only natural that he would have to be the one to set them in line.
While they were all obsessed about some "Nobody dying" foolishness, he knew what actually needed to be accomplished. Defeating their enemies.
He'd spent enough time sitting and watching his underlings fight weaklings and barely eke out a win. They were on a timer, they needed to get this mission finished before the Ginyu Force came down to investigate, or else it would mean each of their immediate deaths.
Yet, here they were, chasing some lanky elderly through a tunnel.
"Nappa!" Vegeta said, "Are we gaining on him or not?"
"There's two of them."
"What the hell do you mean there's two of them?!" If Vegeta didn't learn how to "sense" ki soon, it was going to drive him to madness.
"He split himself up somehow. I can tell that they're all the same guy, but there's two of 'em now and they're racing right next to each other."
"I asked if we were gaining on him, not how many of him there are. We don't have time for you to struggle with counting."
"Barely. The bastard is fast but we'll get him eventually."
"Unless he goes two different ways. There are two of him now and we're running in a series of tunnels. How are we going to make sure that he doesn't give us the slip?"
As they flew through the tunnels, large walls of metallic chrome descended from the ceiling, cutting them off from where they had come. Vegeta thought they might've been motion sensors, but it would make a lot more sense that somebody somewhere was watching them and closing off their path manually.
In the far distance ahead of them, Vegeta could hear a rumbling begin.
"They won't give us the slip," Nappa said, "We're going to catch him before he does that."
"How exactly do you think that's going to happen? There's two of us and two of him. This is his environment, not ours. He's obviously going to break off at some point and then these damn walls falling from the ceiling are going to come into play, so what's your plan before th-"
"We'll kill him before then!" Nappa cut him off. It was the first time he'd ever done so.
"We'll kill him?" Vegeta said. "This is your fight but if you need my help so desperately I can give it to you. If you were able to think for two seconds then we would only be trailing behind this freak, not chasing after him like mutts with a ball. Once he gets to where he's going, we each attack the place and destroy it, then check if the others are still alive and leave this planet. Or is that plan too complex for you?"
"What do you mean we'll destroy it? If Broly's still alive then he'd be with them."
Vegeta grimaced at the tone that Nappa was taking with him. Hesitant, confused, angry, he must've been forgetting his place. All he needed to do was say "Understood" and they would be on their way, but he had to play stupid.
They went past a hole in the ceiling and Vegeta took note that Nappa weaved around the opening and its slivers of light as if they were toxic. The hole had roots coming out of, but nothing else.
"What," Vegeta said, "are you afraid you're going to trip on a tree root again? You're becoming just as soft as Broly." Just as the words came out of his mouth, he heard a loud snap and the sound of crackling behind him. The roots were now following them, not gaining on them, but stalking them at an even pace.
Nappa accelerated even faster, but Vegeta slowed down as he turned to face the new glorified shrubbery.
"Time to show you how it's done!" Vegeta said as he hurled a blast of ki at the roots.
The roots exploded into a storm of chips and splinters, but just as soon as they were destroyed they were replaced with newer, faster, and thicker roots.
"Die!" Vegeta kept firing off more ki at the roots, but they were unrelenting. He wasn't about to be overpowered by some stupid plant. If someone as stupid and pathetic as Kakarot was able to find a way to beat the roots, then he would be the one to find out how to destroy them.
As Vegeta slowed down even further to prepare his Galick Gun and obliterate the entire tunnel system behind them, he felt Nappa's large hand grab him by the collar of his armor and yank him away. With his form ruined, he couldn't launch his attack, and watched as they got further and further away from the roots.
"You think a prince would act like this?" Nappa said as he looked back at Vegeta and pushed his flying faster than he ever had before.
"Like what, exactly? Efficiently? I almost had it." Vegeta slapped Nappa's hand off of him and flew beside him. "Your judgment is getting clouded, Nappa."
"My judgment is better than it's ever been!" Nappa screamed as he pointed to the makeshift eye patch that Vegeta had made for him. "You're being reckless, paranoid, bitter. Kakarot didn't want to go oozaru, he's always hated it and we all know that, we work better as a team in our normal forms, but you made him do it to spite him for challenging you. You and Broly could've worked together, but you were so busy being jealous of him that you almost got both of you killed! Raditz was outnumbered and against somebody more powerful than him, but you let him fight alone. Why? Because you think that he still hasn't proven himself to you, to your standards, after all the years he's been with us.
"You're just scared to fail, you always have been! You think that if you don't prove that you're the strongest person here then you're nothing, but that's a load of shit! I can count four people in this galaxy who would care about you no matter what, no matter how strong you are, and guess what? they're all right here on this planet fighting for you!"
"You don't know wh-"
"I was there when you were born gods damnit!"
The rumbling was getting closer to them and Vegeta saw the train tracks begin to vibrate. Each moment they got closer and louder, the whispers of metal on metal turned to screams as a horn blew in the distance.
The horn was so loud that it made Vegeta wince, but Nappa's screams overpowered it. "I wanted all of you to grow up to be strong and prideful saiyans, and I failed you! The things I saw when I was attacked by those roots, the things I had to relive. You know what kept me fighting? You. The four of you. You four taught me that my way wasn't the only way of being a saiyan. None of you needed to be just like me.
"Every second I was trapped was a never ending nightmare of every mistake I've ever made, everything I ever pushed away. But I kept pushing forward because I knew I needed to get back to you. I need to be here for you and your brothers. If it meant saving all of you, I would go through whatever the hell that thing put me through a million times, and I'll be damned if I'm going to sit back and see any of you go through it at all, or watch you die because I wasn't quick enough."
"You're willing to die for the clown and the two cowards?"
The pair was bathed in fluorescent light as a metal behemoth appeared in front of them. The train only had one car attached to it, but both were bulkier than any Vegeta had ever seen, and thick with the same chrome like metal of the dividers that had come down behind them.
On the front of the train there was a chrome lined porthole and through its thick tint, Vegeta saw movement. Inside of the train were dozens of warriors sitting in the train seats and standing while holding onto the train's railing.
Nappa charged a white aura of ki around his body and without hesitation slammed his shoulder into the oncoming train. On hundreds of planets before, this would be a minor distraction, but instead the planet of Throhbaq gave them yet another surprise.
The train didn't explode, it didn't crumple into a wad of scrap, it rippled. The train survived the impact with severe damage, but it survived nonetheless. It stayed on its rails, it didn't get pushed back, and Nappa looked back at The Prince while he tightly held onto his shoulder.
While Nappa cursed in agony, they both knew the new situation, the people in the car would be perfectly fine and ready to fight.
The sound of metal came from the ceiling again, and Vegeta watched as the divider came down behind them. When it fell it did not cut through the roots that were chasing behind them, but instead landed on top of it as the roots multiplied underneath, becoming a mass that crawled along the train tracks towards them.
In front of them another divider began falling down, and Vegeta knew what needed to be done.
The Prince grabbed his bodyguard by the collar of his armor and spun with him in his grasp, gaining all the momentum that he could as he threw him past the divider before it closed.
"Vegeta!" Nappa shouted as the divider descended.
"You're the only one who can track them," Vegeta said. "If you waste time fighting these pieces of trash then you'll lose the trail. You have a job for yourself to do and you picked it. Now get out of my way. "
Nappa reached out to him. He was probably going to tell him to come with him or that he was doomed and needed to run, but he didn't care and never heard it. Before Nappa could speak, the divider slammed down and did the final step of cutting them off from one another.
If Nappa truly thought that proving his strength didn't matter, then he truly had gone mad on Roug. To be a saiyan meant using his strength to prove what was right, to have the galaxy form to his will. He had spent so long under Frieza's control that he had almost forgotten his purpose, forced to be another's slave when he should've been making a name for himself as the next ruler of the galaxy. Today was the first day of his ascension to his rightful place, and it was time he started acting like it.
Vegeta felt a steady rumble under his feet as the tunnel and tracks shook again, but thought nothing of it. Everything he needed to worry about was right in front of him.
Capitalizing on the damage that Nappa had already done, Vegeta grabbed onto the porthole of the conductor's car for the train and ripped it open wider so he could climb through it. Once inside, he pressed the rectangular button on the wall to access the next train car, and took in the scene as the door opened.
There they were, the horn headed warriors of the planet Throhbaq, the only bit of intel they had received that was accurate on this mission. They were all dressed in white suits and while some had specks of red on them from the injuries they took during the collision, none of them looked bothered by it. Scratches and scrapes were nothing for them, but in a moment he knew he'd have them wishing they had died in the crash.
The doors of the train were broken ajar in the crash, and a dull voice repeated throughout the train's intercom, "Please stand clear of the closing … please stand clear of the closing …"
"Well well well," Vegeta said as he crossed his arms in front of him, "it seems you've all taken a one way trip to your graves. Any last requests?"
The dozens of fighters looked at him with condescension; laughing, smiling, their grins ear to ear. But one in the back stood out the most, he sat in the back with a posse surrounding him and shook his head as he put a pair of goggles over his face.
"Buddy, you really don't know what you just got into, do you?" The purple skinned Throhbaqian said. "No clue on how to sense power levels for The Little Prince, huh?"
The people on the train moved towards Vegeta, cracking their knuckles, rolling their necks, and pulling out metal sticks of varying lengths from their coat pockets.
Vegeta didn't move.
"Little hint for the little man," they continued,"I've got the goods. I got the boost, baby. Dosed up, my power levels are hitting records. My DNA is a top shelf liquor and yours is a three credit can of yellow water I wouldn't even waste my time pouring down the drain."
"... Are you going to keep having some sort of psychotic break or whatever this is, or are you going to send your fools to die before I twist your head off of your shoulders?" Vegeta said.
"Hm. I guess I'll let my employees beat you up before you get introduced to the power of Vurn, the future of what it means to be a saiyan. Get him!"
Vegeta stood with his back pressed against the wall and watched as a man twice his size lunged towards him. He kept that smug look on his face even after Vegeta delivered an open hand slap to his face hard enough that his head unscrewed from his neck.
Vegeta caught the head by its horn, and held it as the torso leaked onto the train's floor.
"Future of saiyans?" Vegeta said as the employees clicked their metal rods.
Streams of ki emerged out from the metal and took sharpened and blunted shapes. Switchblades, cleavers, nightsticks, and more, the train was now full of people holding an entire armory.
"And Tuffle Tech. See ya in the highlight reel!" Vurn said as he pushed a button on his goggles, and somewhere, deep within the planet's tunnels, three Tuffles watched the fight with bated breath.