"Lord Regent!" a Saiyan soldier with a banged up and partly chipped off armor leaned down closer to the pile of rubble where his barely functioning scouter picked up the life signature of Paragus. After multiple attempts to reach the commander, the surviving Saiyan soldiers stumbled back as beams of white light burst forth from the openings in the pile of rubble. A powerful blast of energy tossed the rubble aside, liberating Paragus from his prison.
"Report…" Paragus huffed with a husky tone while leaning forward and panting with a body he could barely hold up straight. The weight of the entire palace had landed on top of him after Chayote knocked him out and the Saiyan wasn't conscious enough to bolster his body and prepare for the crushing weight, resulting in far worse injuries than he'd have normally suffered from a sky-scraping building crumbling on top of him.
"Lord Regent… It's a crushing defeat. They leveled the palace to the ground. The whole of Planet Vegeta turned into a wasteland, with most Shamoians wiped out in the cataclysm. We don't have even remotely enough to restore the ecosystem of Planet Vegeta anymore. Broly-sama is nowhere to be seen. We've combed the entire wasteland. There were a few reports of a weak signature of his vitals coming from a cracked fissure, but we found nothing but scorching heatwaves and showers of magma down below…" the Saiyan soldier reported.
"You picked up some vitals… That's good. As long as we've got life signs, we can work with that," Paragus huffed before gathering enough strength to straighten his back and stretch until a painful crack resonated through his body and a few of his sprained joints popped back into place. "Find Broly's remains at all costs. He's our only way forward."
"B-But… Lord Regent…" another Saiyan soldier muttered with a puny voice. "Our empire… Our King… All is lost."
"You have three choices right now: run away and return to your life as an exile, a throwaway piece of runt garbage, head to Planet Earth and join that deceitful traitorous snake King Vegeta and his Earthling Saiyan drivel, or you can find Broly and take back our empire. Find Broly's remains. NOW!" Paragus raised his voice, which was a rare enough occurrence for the soldiers with broken bodies, battered armor, and crushed spirit to shape up and salute their Lord Regent. "I want everyone with a pair of free hands looking for Broly. He is our key to bringing this back and reversing this crushing defeat into total victory!"
A small platoon of surviving soldiers saluted their Lord Regent and ran off to their banged-up speeders to take off and start examining the depths of the cracked planet's surface to retrieve whatever remained of Broly. Paragus turned around and began limping toward the sight of a crumbled mountain that was pretty much the only source of elevation in the vicinity.
"Has our underground pod storage survived the catastrophe?" Paragus turned to the handful of soldiers that formed his de facto personal guard and paced behind their Regent.
"All of our underground warehouses survived. Our escape pods and all the outdated spaceships, the spaceships that our recruits used to arrive here that were stored for parts or emergency use, have made it with minimal damage. It appears that Planet Vegeta is in no danger of blowing up as we initially feared, however, its surface is wiped clean of most traces of life. The battle must have gotten wild…" a Saiyan soldier reported.
"Of course! Even against the full might of Queen Chayote and her Earthling guests, Broly gave a valiant fight. Still… It's difficult to believe that Broly could have been defeated. If only I knew how they kept him down, maybe I could use that same method to better handle that boy's wild spirit…" Paragus sighed and rubbed his tired eyes. "We're heading to the underground warehouse. We're heading out in our supply of civilian ships."
"Where are we heading to, Lord Regent?" the soldier stopped and looked at the back of his Regent in confusion. With the current state of the revived Saiyan empire, the soldiers had no hope of a return to form. "We must know. Knowing that we still have hope will help the soldiers do their best. Right now, they're feeling crushed and afraid. King Broly had the fear of death instilled in them and now we saw an enemy even scarier than him utterly crush all of our military and level all of our empire to the ground. Everything we've built… It's all gone. Please, Lord Regent… Let us in on your plan and how can we take it all back so that we can tell the soldiers and reinvigorate their spirits!"
Paragus turned around and looked the beaten-up soldier straight in the single eye peeking out through the chipped-away part of the helmet. The soldier stiffened up and staggered back, afraid that he may have crossed a line even with the usually civil Lord Regent who somehow kept his monstrous son in line. "Tell them…" Paragus muttered. "Tell them we will fix Broly back to shape, see him rise from the brink of death stronger than ever before, like only we Saiyans can. Tell them we will commandeer the nearest fastest military cruiser we can find and spearhead our remaining troops straight to Planet Earth, skipping through every wormhole and every tiniest curve of space-time. Planet Earth will be hours within the week."
"Planet Earth?" an audible rustling began spreading amongst the confused troops. "That's the planet that our enemy came from. Our troops are gone… Our military is crushed without even having to take part in the battle and our King was either killed or crippled by those monsters… Lord Regent… How…?"
"How are we going to get it all back?" Paragus finished the question before the petrified for their lives soldiers could finish it. "Simple–we won't. As the state of our fine empire is now, there is no conceivable way for us to return to form. Our military is flattened and unusable against the full might of the enemy. They have leveled our palaces and infrastructure to the ground. However, you forget we are not engineers, we are not architects, we are not inventors and we are not builders. We are Saiyans. What we want we take with superior power, crushing all that opposes us. Queen Chayote, Kakarot, and their Earthling crew proved themselves to be loyal to King Vegeta. They crushed our fragile, fledgling empire and so now we will not respond in kind. We will crush King Vegeta IV, we will take all of his soldiers, we will take all of his infrastructure, we will take all of his technology, we will take every single Earthling as our slave and make them repay their debt with bloody labor. I was foolish to think that two Saiyan peoples could ever exist in the universe. It is time that we get this civil war over with and unite the Saiyans under one King. A Legendary Super Saiyan King Broly!"
"A battle power signal!" a soldier screaming off the top of his lungs sped up to Paragus and his personal guard from behind as they positioned themselves onto a mechanical platform and a pair of soldiers began hot-wiring it to see if the platform could still ride down the shaft into the underground warehouse where all the junk spacecraft was stored. "Lord Regent, a voice came from the depths! King Broly is alive!"
"Impossible… Soldiers witnessing the battle claimed that Queen Chayote had blown King Broly's heart out from the cavity in a bloody downpour… He fell straight into the mantle and should've surely been disintegrated in the magma!" a soldier of Paragus' personal guard muttered with an unbelieving pair of eyes and a pale expression.
"Surprised, soldier?" Paragus smirked. "No need to be. Hell itself can't contain my son. Broly conquered hell, tamed all the ogres and devils, and crawled back to us to conquer the kingdom of the living too. He'll show King Vegeta the sweet lick of hellfire he's tasted down in the underworld, you can be sure of that!"
The Saiyans chanted out together in unison. Singing praises of the unbelievable devotion of Lord Regent and his loyalty to his son and his cause. Then cheering for the unbelievable revival of Broly and his return from what should have been certain death. Even if they couldn't fathom how a heartless King could still crawl back to life and take reigns, they'd obey them to their dying breath, just like how the Lord Regent never lost faith in King Broly.
"Lord Regent…" mechanical doors creaked open, revealing a slightly taken aback soldier that hesitated to enter the lab and face the Lord Regent in a sensitive moment of need. Paragus stood in front of a bubbling medical pod, where a pathetic-looking lump of charred coal sizzled in the medical juices of the pod. No one believed that a handful of charred flesh carrying just pathetic sprinkles of Broly's surviving DNA could be restored to full power, no one except Regent himself, it seemed.
"Enter, don't hesitate," Paragus encouraged his subordinate, who gulped down something heavy and carefully paced across the busy yet sunken in shade laboratory where Paragus worked on restoring Broly to life. The fearful soldier observed bubbling and twitching patches of perky flesh that hung like breasts without nipples. Ragged with veins, these lumps twitched and moved while plastic tubes connected all of them to a single network and sucked something out of them, pumping all the extracted genetic material back into the medical tank. "How are the preparations going?"
"The soldiers are excited about our objective, Lord Regent. They're glad to make a move against King Vegeta, after long last. We have intercepted a Galactic Patrol cruiser and spaced all the Galactic Patrol officers onboard. We can reach Earth in two days now, everything is going better than planned, in fact…" the soldier reported what he sought the Regent out to report. The uneasy shifting of the soldier's tongue and dry swallowing couldn't come unnoticed by the Regent. Paragus turned to his subordinate with an apathetic look on his face.
"Good. Now out with it," he said.
"Well… Lord Regent… Some soldiers… Well… They are… Questioning your decision of hijacking Planet Earth's radio waves. They believe that…" the soldier closed his eyes and began sweating profusely, looking terrified that he'd become an example to the others that secretly second-guessed Lord Regent's decisions.
"That we should use the element of surprise, correct?" Paragus sighed.
"Well… Yes…" the soldier nodded.
"What is your name, soldier?" Paragus' look softened.
"Beetro," the soldier replied, without skipping a beat.
"Well, Beetro, do you share the concerns of the other soldiers?" Paragus wondered with a fatherly look.
"Well… No. That's because I believe in Lord Regent and I trust his judgment to be sound. Lord Regent has got us this far, he rescued his son, he evaded capture by both Frieza Army and King Vegeta III's empire. He gathered all of us Saiyan throwaways together and made us all soldiers where the empire rejected us. He brought back the Legendary Super Saiyan and nurtured him back to health… Lord Regent even restored our Planet Vegeta's ecosystems, restoring what King Vegeta IV had run into the ground and corrupted. Before the Vegeta loyalists ruined it all again…" the soldier looked down with a solemn and depressing pair of eyes, lamenting the loss of Planet Vegeta's glory forever.
"Hmph…" Paragus smirked. "I like you, Beetro. From now on, you won't be just a footsoldier. You'll be a member of my personal guard."
"Me!? B-But… Lord Regent, I am not that strong…" Beetro shook his hands out before realizing he was disobeying Lord Regent's direct order, at which point he collapsed to his knees and bowed his head to the ground. "I mean… Lord Regent, I am humbled and eternally honored by this decision but… Out of respect, I must ask you to reconsider!"
"Relax. You won't just be a member of my personal guard. You'll be my personal assistant, and that role does not require physical strength. In fact, our entire military may just be obsolete. Broly is all the power we need. He is the fearsome weapon of mass destruction. He is a force of nature to succeed common military power. A weapon to surpass any other…" Paragus turned to Broly's charred, fetus-shaped remains that had sizzling genetic material being pumped into the medical liquid that soaked him. Patches of black hair had grown out the side of a fleshy patch that cracked through the charred shell. The handful of hair gave Broly's exposed fleshy bits a cancer-like look. "All I expect out of my assistant is loyalty. Based on my interaction with Queen Chayote, I've come to realize that I am a sensitive target of the enemy. If I am taken out, all could be lost. That's because I haven't been entirely truthful with all of you about some things. I will let you in on some confidential information if you accept the responsibility of succeeding my work and carrying it to completion if I am to be killed."
"Lord Regent…" Beetro stood up on shaky legs and stumbled back, looking pale in existential terror. "I am humbled by such glorious duty!"
"Very well… What you must know, Beetro. I want you to listen here and understand what I am about to tell you because you might one day have to continue my work…" Paragus gave his newly elected personal assistant a stern and confident look before turning to the mechanical door behind him and snapping his fingers that made the door shut tightly and begin glowing red, signaling that a magnetic lock was now in place to prevent any unwanted intrusion.
All of this was to ensure that no one would hear what the Lord Regent discussed with his assistant as they oversaw Broly's healing process.
The bustling Earth's cities went about with their normal routine. The mechanical hums and screeches of the speeding monorail system, the civilian hovercars speeding through the city and the hypnotized by the city beats busy bees went along with their day. Initially, very few even noticed that someone had taken the massive screens displaying nothing but ads and movie trailers the whole day over and flashed them brightly before transitioning them into static.
As more and more people stopped to look up and acknowledge the misbehaving screens, realizing that this was no glitch since the takeover was systematic and widespread, some of them became bored and continued on with their day, finding it dull to stare at mere static whole day. Then, in a snap, a strict face of a spiky-haired, scarred Saiyan appeared centered on the screen. This caught the audience's attention but also made a few Saiyans that worked menial service jobs dash out of the workplaces and look up at the screens as well. While Saiyans looked relatively similar to some Earthlings, it was impossible to confuse the black spiky hair, the deep and reflective black eyes, like a single gem of onyx centered in the whites, and the modified Saiyan military uniform. Not to mention the Saiyan regalia.
"Earthlings and Saiyans of Planet Earth. My name is Lord Regent Paragus and I am the advocate for the reigning, revived, ultimate warrior of the universe–the Legendary Super Saiyan Broly. To address the Saiyans living on Planet Earth, King Vegeta IV is not your rightful ruler. His bloodline may have been the strongest Saiyans once, solely because his scheming pit viper of a father drowned in the blood of babies capable of challenging his bloodline's position on top. But now is the time for our redemption. Now is the time that a Legendary Super Saiyan rises to take his throne. The position of king rightfully belongs to the Legendary Super Saiyan, you all know this to be true, the Vegeta bloodline merely held the seat warm until the Legendary Super Saiyan returned to take his throne. That hour is now. Abandon your traitorous idol and serve King Broly and you will not have to slave the Earthlings for basic human needs for another day. Together, we will reclaim our position as the elite warrior race of the universe. To the Earthlings listening to this, I apologize that you had to be dragged into this resolution of the Saiyan civil war I've just started. I'll make sure to end it soon enough, however, your species has committed grave transgressions against the Saiyan kingdom and you will repay those transgressions with hard work. You've used the Saiyans for cheap labor in your melting pot galactic petting zoo long enough. It's time that the positions are reversed. You will now serve the Saiyans as they've served you. This is not a request, you needn't fulfill any demands. We're coming and the Legendary Super Saiyan Broly shall prove his ability to rule and trample any opposition before him by enacting his royal decrees with his own two hands. All you need is to squirm, heed our orders, or die."
The door of a Capsule Corps office building opened up with Bulma walking through it, holding a cup of coffee in hand. The blue-haired woman noticed almost immediately the eyes of the audience had been transfixed to a screen. She realized that she may have missed an important civil protection announcement while she left the board meeting and went down the entire skyscraper on an elevator. When Bulma looked up at the nearest announcement screen and witnessed the latter end of the announcement that then began running on repeat, she froze with the cup of coffee, stopping horizontally by her mouth. Having drowned her mouth in hot coffee, Bulma tossed the cup aside and began trying to get a sense of her numb and scolded tongue while an energy beam washed over her and beamed her up into the Capsule Corps Star.
Bulma approached the nearest wall and saw a holographic panel appear in front of it. Dragging and tapping her fingers along it, Bulma opened a com line and held her finger down to keep it open while leaning closer to the wall. "Vegeta, I need you to see this," she said with a slight irritation in her voice. She wanted to sound direr but, honestly, Saiyan attacks were a trend that she thought she'd outlived already, that was feeling boring now.
The chiseled Saiyan monarch walked in through a mechanical door as the corridor behind him shifted to bring him closer to Bulma's location from the training chambers. He had a towel laying on his flexed and rock-hard muscles and was sweating profusely. By his side, young Trunks kept his eye on his father and tried imitating his mannerisms, wearing cargo shorts and a sleeveless basketball shirt and a swoosh headband slipped over his forehead.
"This better be worth interrupting our training, Bulma…" Vegeta grumbled while slipping his towel off to wipe the sweat off of his forehead and snagging a lemonade can from a nearby Bulma's supply of refreshments when she was working. While Bulma worked her magic to produce the record that was running across the ad screens down on Planet Earth at her station, Vegeta tossed another can to Trunks before popping it open and flipping it up to down almost half of it in a gulp.
After seeing Paragus' scarred mug flashing in front of him, Vegeta froze up. He lowered the can of refreshments with stiffened mannerisms and stood ajar in front of the screen as if completely frozen. He noted everything about this daredevil invading asshole, including his Saiyan appearance and the peculiar model of the Saiyan battle armor that he wore.
"That's the same guy from Yamcha-san's wedding…" Trunks pointed out by pointing at the screen.
"He's dead meat is what he is!" Vegeta's face turned to an absolute reflection of ire before he crushed the lemonade can whole, like crinkling a piece of paper and splattering lemonade all over the lab. Even if Bulma knew better than to wait for her husband's apology, the livid king of Saiyans stormed out of the lab. Trunks stopped drinking from his can of lemonade and began frantically looking around, switching from his mother to his father's leaving back, unsure of where he was supposed to go and what he was supposed to do.
"Don't even think about it," Bulma pressed her hands to her hips with a displeased look on her face. "This is your father's mess. He has to clean it up.