"It's too bad that Vegeta has to leave before we had one more fight…" Goku rustled the back of his spiky hair as he looked at the Saiyan king ascending the mechanical escalator rolling up to the spaceship. One amongst dozens that Bulma offered the Saiyans for their successful and comfortable return to their home planet.
The king turned and looked down, but he didn't gift his last icy stare to his rival, who expressed his grievances but instead he glared down at Bulma. Chayote turned to her mentor with confusion, wondering what that may have been about. That Bulma waved her hand farewell with a cheerful smile bogged Chayote's mind almost as much as the object of Vegeta's focus before his departure from Planet Earth.
"It was nice of Bulma-san to give the Saiyans all these spaceships just so they could get back home…" Gohan looked up at the marvelous and dirt-cheap product of Bulma's engineering that would soon enough put Capsule Corps back on the map in terms of influence and income in the industry.
"Of course she would do that. Wouldn't you want to get rid of them as fast as possible?" Krillin nudged Gohan with his elbow while squinting his eyes. Even though little Gohan widened his smile a tad, he didn't reply to that with either an expression of relief that the brutish Saiyans were leaving Planet Earth alone at last or a scolding that Krillin would be such a poor host.
"Well, I disassembled the vessels they came here with for both parts and blueprints for future productions. It only felt suitable. Plus, I didn't want Vegeta to throw a fit…" Bulma replied, looking far more upbeat than normal. She didn't express gripes with her memories of Vegeta prancing about the Capsule Corps complex demanding favors and items as if Bulma and her family owed them to him or bossing her around like she was his maid. That would have been Bulma's usual reaction. Chayote had long become used to that and thought she knew this characterization to be immovably true and yet…
An ear-raking shriek slashed through the membranes of everyone's eardrums. When Vegeta's cocky voice filled the yard as the Saiyan king spoke through the speaker, some visitors seeing the Saiyans off settled on the fact that they actually preferred this cacophonous, shrieking static to Vegeta's orderly yet vexing demeanor.
"I'll expect you to make good on your promise to fix my planet. Also, do not meddle with Saiyan affairs anymore. As long as you stay in your own corner of the universe and don't get in my way, we'll leave you alone too." Vegeta didn't speak for too long, nor did he become sentimental when saying his farewells. The royal spaceship that he boarded, one in no way different from the handful of others hosting the rest of the revived Saiyan race, kicked off the ground with bouncy and thin mechanical legs as jets of pushing thrusters propelled them upward.
"Jeez, didn't even say goodbye, that jerk…" Bulma chuckled to herself, pouting her lips and crossing her arms, though Chayote hadn't seen the woman do it so playfully rather as a sign of actual grievance.
"Good riddance," Piccolo concluded, closing his eyes. "Now the Earth can return to peace. How it was before this entire Saiyan mess kicked off."
"You mean with you gunning out to kill Goku and take over the world?" Krillin jested, leaning in on Piccolo's side.
"You idiot! That was Piccolo, not me!" the Super Namekian clenched his fist with a furious hiss. "I only respond to the name of Piccolo not to make too big of a mess of things!"
"I guess some things will be different…" Goku showed his teeth in a smirk while relaxing to the autumnal breeze in the air. "Oh well, it just can't be helped. Piccolo, you're crazy strong again after coming back to life, right? Let's fight again some time for fun."
"Fine. I'll have no problem with toughening up Earth's line of defense in case Frieza ever shows up again. Just because someone didn't bother taking out the trash properly the first time." Piccolo turned his bitter eyes away from Goku in discontent.
"Bulma, I'll have a request to make. I'll need to borrow one of your spaceships too. I need to reach Planet Namek to use their Dragon Balls to resurrect Chiaotzu." Tenshinhan approached Bulma from behind, making the woman jump up as her friend addressing her out of the blue snapped her out of her daydreaming while the Saiyan ships became just glistening stars off in space.
"Sure thing. I'm not running a charity here, though. I can either rent you out one, give you a first-class ticket on one flight that I'm planning to offer to the public, or sell it to you for a premium, the lowest it's ever going to get price." Bulma replied nonchalantly.
"You… You literally just gave away dozens of ships to Vegeta…" Krillin deflated in disappointment at his friend's shrewdness.
"I didn't give them away for free, you know…" Bulma crossed her arms in defense of her reputation. "Vegeta let my spaceships sometimes pass through his corner of the universe, something that doesn't apply to anyone else out there. Do you think aliens would line up to use my space-tourism services too once they hear about it?" the woman rubbed her hands together.
"Well… I don't really have a job, per se. I've done some farm work before, so maybe I can help Capsule Corps with some gardening in exchange?" Tenshinhan blushed, looking down as he hadn't expected to encounter such an obstacle.
"Right…" Bulma snickered. "You'd repay me the depth in maybe four years that way… Don't worry, I was just kidding. I'll write one spaceship off as a test flight so the board won't have any questions. You can hop into it and adventure away."
"I see… Thank you, Bulma…" Tenshinhan nodded, being as dense with humor as ever.
"King Vegeta, we've noticed that your ship has taken off-course. What is going on?" a screen hanging on the spaceship wall activated while the king of all Saiyans bounced around in 300X Earth's gravity, toying around with the gravity and conditions settings of his spaceship, which was why he traveled alone. The rest of the Saiyans got heaps stronger training with Kami Upa, but they would have still not been anywhere near being able to handle Vegeta's level of training.
"That's because I've changed course, Parel. With Planet Vegeta still a desolate hellhole, we're not in a particular rush to get back home." Vegeta forced out of him through strenuous physical effort while still performing one-handed push-ups. A swarm of drones released on his instructions and began firing rapid barrages of laser bolts toward the warrior, but Vegeta performed a push-up so explosive that it sent him rolling through the air like a cannonball toward the mechanical pests.
Swift punches and kicks dealt with them with only minor issue while Vegeta turned around and dispatched of yet another drone with a Ki blast, then raised his arms over his head and expelled a vicious Kiai wave that shook the entire vessel he traveled on. With the training partners disposed of, Vegeta approached the screen, picking up a tower off of an exercising machine and wiping his forehead. The king chose not to disable the stupendous gravitational field active around the spaceship and learned to cope with it as if it was normal. He had seen Goku and Piccolo do a similar thing with weighted clothing. If he wanted to catch up to them and surpass them so that the next time he visits hell they no longer bother him. He needed to train hundreds of times more intense.
"What are your orders, King Vegeta?" Parel the Saiyan stiffened and saluted his king while Vegeta stepped on a fallen and still sparking drone, using it as a step-up stone for a leaning pose.
"Think about it, we're going to rule the entire universe in Frieza's stead. We will go wherever we please and take over any worlds we see fit. If we are to live in liberty and abide by the old Saiyan ways, we need to make sure that bastard's entire clan is eliminated. I'm going after his old man–Cold. Then–his brother. Only when the Saiyans are the only empire around will I be content with ruling and bringing a new Saiyan Golden Age." Vegeta smirked while crushing the drone underneath his boot in a burst of nuts, bolts, and chocolate-colored, thick machine oil. "I'm not too fond of the deal we made with the Earthlings, but this junkyard of a cluster of systems is irrelevant. Plus, whatever deals I make won't matter to my descendants so it's not like Earth is entirely off-limits to us."
"B-But… King Vegeta… The last time you faced Frieza you… Don't we need the might of a Super Saiyan to win? King Cold, he's… Just as strong as Frieza…" Parel knew he was treading on very thin ice and he must have felt thankful that Vegeta didn't possess psychokinetic powers like Frieza's capable of killing him off over the transmission. Still, the king became riled up with a growl and grinding of his teeth while his face twisted in wrath.
"What was that…!?" Vegeta seethed.
"N-Nothing, my King… It's just… If you get killed… Our empire is over before we even establish it…" Parel bowed repeatedly, wondering if a handful more bows will spare his life when his king at long last meets his face-to-face. "Just… Let us all come with you, King Vegeta, please…"
"Piss off. I don't need low-class trash like you dragging me down. You've all become a great deal stronger on Earth, somehow. Still, you'll be no match for King Cold or his elite soldiers. I can't throw any more of my soldiers away. Your job will be to colonize the universe, not to fight my own wars for me. If I cannot slay the old emperor, I'm not fit to be the king of all Saiyans anyway!" Vegeta crossed his arms and turned away from the screen, admitting his care for his people in his own unique way before he became emotional once more and slammed his fist down on the transmitter, cutting the communications short as he rolled his palm across the control panel, sending his vessel speeding toward the northernmost edges of the universe where Frieza Clan members who did not rule lived.
All the while, Vegeta continued to push his body far beyond any limits he thought that his body had held previously. He had long since stopped rationalizing his escalating power. After hearing about the fall of Frieza at the hands of a Super Saiyan and finding out that Super Saiyan was just a state of being and not a singular warrior chosen by fate, Vegeta stopped seeing any line as a definitive limiter of his power. Surpassing Frieza's own power felt like a given at this point, not as an impossible goal. Still, it felt like he was just a schoolboy racing to learn the subject before the inevitable exam soon enough.
"Arrived at our destination–North Galaxy Sector ½-0!" the speaker on Vegeta's spaceship called out, prompting Vegeta to gaze up in shock as he propelled his body in a mid-air roll and landed gracefully on both feet before rushing up to the control panel to see if what the system proclaimed was the truth.
"Already? Amusing. Bulma has made some truly remarkable heaps of junk. Then again, she built it based on our technology…" Vegeta smirked to himself, observing an orange world floating before him, surrounded with maya blue shrouds all over. Planet Cold-8 was that planet that King Cold spent his retirement on. It was a planet that stuck out like a sore thumb from the rest of the dark, desolate planets in this place, solely because King Cold had yanked it all the way to this part of the galaxy with his psychokinesis after his army had conquered a world that Cold had taken a liking to. Instead of leaving his favored lonely and inhospitable corner of the universe, the universal overlord had dragged his corner of retirement paradise to that corner and made a home in it.
"Bulma must have installed some scouter functions in you. She has a nasty habit of stuffing everything she makes with every function she knows how to work. Is there anyone on Planet Cold-8 with a battle power of a million and above?" Vegeta wondered.
"Negative. The planet's highest estimated battle power is 12 218 with the average battle power being 8432." The spaceship's AI replied.
"What nonsense! Where did that retired asshole go off to?" Vegeta sneered at the screen, pounding the control panel before exhaling and settling down. "I guess it'll be easier dealing with Frieza's brother rather than chasing his old man across the universe wherever he had gone off to. Still, I'm feeling a bit of a burn after all the neck-breaking training. I think we should land and say hello…"
As the ship took a dash toward the atmosphere of Planet Cold-8, Vegeta stared through the porthole without dropping a sly grin on his face. Even though he'd have liked to vanquish Frieza himself, now that the tyrant's chokehold on the universe was gone, Vegeta felt a lot more like an honorable warrior hunting the enemy down rather than a terrified rat trying to gather enough resources to craft a trap for the bothersome cat that haunted the warehouse with the goods the rat craved.
"Run!" a petrified alien in Frieza Army gear shrieked out before a kick snapped his back in two and left him powerless to avoid a blue energy wave rising to where Vegeta had punted him off to. Once the energy wave swallowed the fleeing, paralyzed soldier, he disintegrated near-instantly.
"It's Vegeta…!" another fish-faced soldier warned the other survivors before a vicious chop separated his head from his body and sent it rolling. Vegeta was quick to crush it as the sight of this blobby head and its awkwardly positioned, post-mortem eyes made this entire resort of the space emperor's father feel like an unsanitary junkyard.
"We must warn King Cold of this!" another soldier with tiger-colored mutton chops and spiky little horns at the corners of his forehead bellowed before Vegeta's punch dug into his back and pumped him full of Ki, overwhelmingly so, enough to detonate it all at once and reducing the terrified soldier to specks of cinder that settled in neat, little piles of ash.
The idyllic serenity of Planet Cold-8 became tainted with agonizing screams for a little while. Vegeta wrapped up plowing through the entire planet in mere twenty minutes before returning to the rooted spaceship-palace in the heavenly resort made of silicon powder beaches and ruby-colored water, foaming milky-white as it washed against the shoreline.
"This place has medical pods. Good. I can rest my body up nice and proper before picking up a skull to decorate my throne. It's too bad, just Cooler's skull will make it look rather asymmetrical… Oh well. There'll be nothing but time." Vegeta basked in his own newly gained power posing atop of a decimated pile of Cold's reserve forces he left behind to attend to his precious planet.
Vegeta slept inside of the medical pod for the next two days, having plugged his spaceship into the medical pod and set a warning that would turn it off upon the signal of a spaceship entering the atmosphere of Planet Cold-8. Once the medical door opened and the medication suppressing Vegeta's consciousness and keeping him in a state of dreamy haze stopped pumping into his body and numbing his burning muscles, the Saiyan king stumbled out of the medical pod prepared for a clash.
Yet a limited inspection of the surroundings relayed to him that the medical pod had opened because his recovery process was complete and not because the spaceship's AI was warning him. The king cleaned himself of the minty green goop and put on some of Cold's own spare armor that looked aptly regal for the one who had ascended to the rank of king. The armor seemed vastly too large at first. Yet, as with all the Frieza Army gear, it shrunk down to fit the body of the wearer as it would have expanded for the same purpose all the same if it had to do so.
Feeling like he had all the time in the world, Vegeta ran through the records in King Cold's communications tower, looking for the records that King Cold had on his sons. With what had happened to Frieza and rumors spreading quickly across the universe, especially when they concerned the emperor himself, King Cold would have kept a tight watch over both his sons. It was because of that reason that Vegeta didn't have to look too hard to find Cooler's signal on a quaint little planetoid just 4 light-years away–Planet Mink.
"Hmm… What's this? An unnamed record?" Vegeta mumbled to himself as he opened up a curiosity before him, located plainly in the archives with no particular storage space for it. Such a thing could have only been possible if a mystery agent contacted King Cold from a planet that was not in the tyrant's records. That alone intrigued the Saiyan king enough for a watch of the record.
A video link, static and too dark to make out too many details from, lit up before the king after he opened it. The shape looked vaguely feminine and definitely belonged to something humanoid. She must have had long and spiky hair and something to make her eyes gleam azure in the limited lighting that whichever corner of the universe she spoke from offered while transmitting to this location.
"Hello, have I reached whichever corner of the universe Frieza has retreated off to?" the woman asked with a sly tone. One that was unfamiliar to the king of Saiyans, however. The woman seemed confident when addressing the now-fallen emperor and the inheritors of his leftovers. She laid relaxed in a large chair with her leg crossed over the other. The details weren't one-hundred percent clear, but judging from the curious slurping noise, she had been nibbling on her fingernail and the soft end of her index finger while talking.
"Ah? King… Cold? I don't believe I have data on you, though I'm glad to hear that Frieza wasn't left to rot wherever Son Goku had dumped him after he was through with him." Vegeta would have liked to hear King Cold's responses, but it wasn't like the communications recorded that sort of thing, just the incoming transmission.
"Settle down, King Cold. I am reaching out to you from Planet Earth."
"Earth!?" Vegeta's eyes shot open as he dropped over the communication device, almost smacking his face to the monitor to make out any details about the woman contacting Frieza's father.
"Yes, I am aware that is the planet where Son Goku, the Super Saiyan that defeated your son, comes from. I'm sure that savage made your precious boy promise him many things, like that he shouldn't hurt anyone ever again or that if he shows his face around Planet Earth–he's dead, right?"
"Be that as it may, King Cold, I'm afraid that if you attack Planet Earth blindly, you'll lose, no matter how many of your spawns you drag across the universe with you. Son Goku has already bested you, meaning that in the time it will take for all of you to come here, he'll have continued training and growing more and more powerful. You'll be just light exercise to him soon enough."
"I have contacted you to let you know that Son Goku has enemies on Planet Earth that he is not aware of and that he does not speak for the planet itself. In fact, he's just an invasive alien parasite to our fragile ecosystem. I've been building something resembling of a grand plan for the better part of the last decade: how to get rid of him and his fellow Saiyan friend. In fact, she started out as my primary target before a few… Complications… With killing Chayote became known to me."
"Now that I've got your attention, King Cold, I propose you go to Planet Namek. I'll have sent you something interesting there that will make our meeting on Earth possible. It would make matters a lot easier if you wiped out the Namekians while you're at it as well, but don't destroy the planet unless you wish to ruin our only chance at revenge."
"I've expected you to say something like that. However, as stuck-up as you may be, King Cold, you cannot kill Son Goku without me and, as much as it pains me to admit it, without your participation, my plan might take the better part of the decade too. That is why I propose we work together to resolve this matter."
"Yes, yes… You can go back to ruling the universe afterward and keeping your empire afloat. I don't much care about what you do after our deal comes through, frankly."
"Oh, I have a hunch that you will cause no harm to Planet Earth. I'm sure that you will realize just how productive our co-existence and partnership will be in time, King Cold."
"If you rush to Earth now to meet me, Son Goku and his friends will sense your Ki and will intercept you the instant you breach the atmosphere. You will have only wasted both our time and earned your place by your son's side in a wheelchair of your own. I am aware of your son's condition, King Cold, and I promise you I can not only fix him back to how he was, but I can also make him better. I can make it so that Son Goku can no longer see you coming, in fact. That is what I intend to do on Planet Namek."
"It must be Planet Namek because it is one of few planets the exact coordinates of which are well-known to me. Our planet isn't as well-traveled as those inside of your esteemed empire. I know you consider such a meeting place beneath you but… You will meet my assistants on Planet Namek if you wish to have your revenge and get your broken son back on the emperor's throne. That is all. I hope you're as intelligent as I make someone who once ruled over most of the universe out to be."
"That bitch!" Vegeta slammed his fists down. "Who was she!? What does she want with King Cold!? Dammit!" the king of Saiyans seethed to himself as he turned around and sat by the panel, processing the information he just found out and figuring out his alternative plan of action.