A space pod blasted through the final stretches of open space leading up to Planet M-2. The final one of the four cybernetic planetoid space stations assembled for the Four-Stars plan by Dr. Lychee. The sky-rocketing heat around Vegeta's space pod turned red and granted the re-entering space pod a comet-like tail of blazing gases.
The Machine Mutant forces were greatly strained by their invasion of Earth, however, there were more than enough to launch a valiant planetary defense. Against any lesser foe, it would have sufficed. Moon-busting rockets spiraled around in the sky in fusillades, accompanied by anti-aircraft ground weaponry ripping with hot plasma bolts and coloring the skies red. A handful of the missiles hit Vegeta's pod head-on, causing a blinding white flash and spewing masses of bright yellow flame that soon burnt up and turned to black smoke.
Vegeta punched through the smoky cloud, continuing his straightforward flight as if nothing had happened. Rotating around in a spiral, he homed in on the tallest sky-scraping citadel on the planet. Gargantuan spacecraft and air carriers flooded the atmosphere while ground soldiers sat atop of anti-aircraft turrets and tried to beat the relentless Saiyan invader out of the sky.
The King of Saiyans didn't even need to fight, he merely flew clean through the Machine Mutant dreadnaughts and left them to break down and collapse after coming into contact with him and facing Vegeta's indomitable will to find the one responsible for all this mess and punish them. What tiny fragments of collapsing juggernauts remained in the sky soon blew up from the ludicrous turret fire that was so cluttered that most of it couldn't help missing their seemingly microscopic target.
Spreading his arms out, Vegeta spun rapidly while unleashing a hail of yellow energy blasts. The spray of Ki blasts decimated the defending Machine Mutant military and leveled the M-2 surface in a single dominant display of force. Sneering at the smoldering destruction and the scrap heap of his making, Vegeta somberly took off toward the tower he was dead set on reaching.
The previously sky-high citadel was now broken in half, with the upper half of the tower having plummeted onto the crowded cybernetic system complex below and blown up into useless pieces. What little remained of the tower lingered in smoke and flames, causing M-2's atmosphere to turn red, as if the planet itself had been bleeding. Vegeta may have gone a bit overboard with how widespread he made the destruction, then again, these mechanical pests were hassling him and the constant flashing of plasma bolts was making it bothersome to see where he was going.
A red light on the front section of a round Machine Mutant foot soldier blinked in a slow rhythm, mirroring a human heartbeat. It picked up its pace and each successive blink tried racing with the previous ones. That was before the blinking light reached climax and slowly dimmed away, leaving the busted Machine Mutant in the demolished metallic trenches black and lifeless.
Trembling on the ground, his robe torn and tattered by the surrounding destruction, Dr. Myuu drooled from the mouth, gazing up at a suspended beacon of psychic energy cradled before him. Complex DNA strings weaved together as the King of Saiyans rapidly approached him as if he knew exactly where Dr. Myuu's signal was coming from.
Through the torn robe, crude mechanical parts from Dr. Myuu's incalculable cybernetic upgrades and implants peeked through. Primitive metallic joints screwed in by elementary technology when compared to the magnum opuses of both Dr. Myuu and Dr. Lychee. Back when Dr. Lychee upgraded Dr. Myuu from being a mere powerless organic lifeform with meek psychic potential into the original blueprint of what the Machine Mutants would become, they didn't have anywhere near the resources they do at the moment to work with. After those resources became available–the two of them as figures became obsolete in the face of their grand Four-Stars Plan.
The sky-blue paint chipped off lavender-colored skin. Myuu's right scouter was cracked and dysfunctional, with the left one being completely blown out, exposing the bloodshot and trembling red eye with standard Machine Mutant ocular enhancements. The golden helmet piece decorating Dr. Myuu's scalp was under very real threat of collapsing and exposing his brain to the elements. The babbling and drooling Machine Mutant leader met the approaching King Vegeta in a very disgraced and humbled position. It may have been this non-threatening state of Dr. Myuu and his lab that prevented Vegeta from blowing all of M-2 into pieces and taking off back home to his wife and kid.
"So… You're the final one left…" Vegeta grumbled. With a methodical scan, the King of Saiyans examined the destroyed laboratory hosting nothing but obsolete computer server rooms, the humbled Machine Mutant leader, and his psychic orb. "Hatchiyack doesn't seem to have made it here yet. I lucked out. Though I shouldn't be surprised. The Saiyan race has remained at its peak exactly because of this initiative of striking first and thinking about how scary it is and how unlikely victory was after it's already within our grasp."
"Hatchiyack?" Dr. Myuu babbled in his miserable, torn-up state. The punishment Vegeta put his cybernetic star through really banged him up badly. "Dr. Lychee sent Hatchiyack here!?"
"He did, he chickened out when he realized we were coming for him. Not that it matters. Your little pet project won't touch Hatchiyack. I'll destroy it, I'll destroy Hatchiyack and then I'll tear your head from your shoulders and let the last things you ever register in that cyber-noggin of yours before you black out be the utter failure of your plan. This universe belongs to the Saiyans. The only compromises are the races agreeing to work under us and Earthlings," Vegeta's gaze became fixed upon the levitating psychic energy orb. "So… This is the Baby I've heard so much about? The crux of all the Tsufurian legacy, combined with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and the very pinnacle of bio-engineering? The artificial Tsufurian brain set to inhabit Hatchiyack's body and rule the cyber-verse that the Big Gete Star was to create?"
"Damn you, King Vegeta!" Dr. Myuu flopped on the ground, slamming his already pathetic grazed to the point of a legitimate threat to his life face into the floor and pounding it with his free hand. "Why…? Why must the Saiyans pursue the Tsufurian extinction? Why couldn't you let it be?"
"Hmph…" Vegeta extended his hand, unleashing an energy blast that blew up the levitating psychic orb and splattered the exposed DNA and genetic material all over the place. All burnt up and dead, both inside and outside. If he was to enjoy the miserable groveling of his enemy, he may have done so with the peace of mind of having successfully eliminated Baby and ruined the Four-Stars Plan for good.
"No! Baby… Why!?" Dr. Myuu wailed out, reaching out into the air to cry and catch just a single shred of falling ash to grieve the centuries of work that vanished in a flash of light. "Why would you do this? Baby wasn't mature enough to inhabit Hatchiyack yet, anyway! You didn't have to destroy it, you could have co-existed…"
"Your boss didn't seem too excited about co-existence when he sent Destron Gas to Earth or the Machine Mutant Army… Oh, wait. That last one was you," Vegeta extended his hand with a stern look that was entirely apathetic to the psychological and physical torment that this pathetic little alien man was going through. "Don't pretend like you ever offered the Saiyans or the Earthlings a choice. You've spent entire centuries equipping and preparing yourselves for war. The Big Gete Star even came and conquered Planet Vegeta and made it uninhabitable. Doesn't it just suck when your inventions go out of hand and destroy your planet? Exactly what the Tsufurian technology would've done if the Saiyans didn't put a stop to their greed and ignorance!"
"Curse you, curse you, King Vegeta! Psychic Bomber!" Dr. Myuu chanted out, raising his arm and forming a violet psychic energy ball in front of the cold and ruthless Saiyan monarch that ripped through the demolished lab in a violent explosion. Vegeta walked out from it and placed his hand up to Dr. Myuu's face near point-blank.
"I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I'm on quite the hot streak of over-achieving. During my reign, we sent Frieza packing, ended King Cold's entire operation, found a suitable living environment for Saiyans, and put down multiple rebellions. Now I get to finish the first genocide we Saiyans started, but no one could see through to the end. I'm either that lucky or just the greatest Saiyan king in history! I guess that makes me simply a higher class of sovereign," Vegeta smirked with mischievous glee before stopping in bewilderment as… He could see that same glee reflected at him from the human-like left eye of Dr. Myuu.
"Great?" Dr. Myuu looked up with a near maniacal simper stretching across his entire mangled face. "Oh, you're simply the best, King Vegeta! The best body to host Baby until he matures enough to merge with Hatchiyack, in fact!"
As if thrown into the air by some inner force, Dr. Myuu's body flew upward and slammed against the wall. His bones began churning and breaking. All that and Dr. Myuu's spine and head cracked sideways in a rude jerk that nearly curled the Machine Mutant up like a donut. Something large, something residing inside of Dr. Myuu's very own body, began bubbling up. From within his countless wounds, jets of lavender-colored goop began squeezing through, coming at Vegeta from all sides. Baffled, Vegeta bellowed and ignited a destructive Ki wave around him, but the thick and sticky lavender ooze created an asphyxiating bubble of artificial flesh around Vegeta, and the Saiyan King couldn't have held up his energy field forever.
Eventually, his arms weighed down and twitched from the strain while strands of lavender goop seeped through his flesh and substituted his very nervous system. Discarded like a torn rag, Dr. Myuu flopped onto the ground and howled in mirth. Still broken by the gruesome exit from his body of the bio-engineered parasite he hosted, Dr. Myuu's mechanical joints somehow forced him up through flocks of sparks and mangled squeaks.
"You should have given yourself ample time to recover from the scrapes and bruises you received on M-1, King Vegeta. That would've made it harder for Baby to enter your system!" Dr. Myuu chortled, losing himself in the evident success of his plot.
"B-Baby!?" Vegeta winked while feeling something solid and thick wrestling control over his own body away from him. "Y-You mean… You bastard!"
"That's right, King Vegeta!" Dr. Myuu snickered. "Just before you arrived, I graciously removed Baby from his containment and hosted him inside my very own body. Then I replaced the empty containment pod with one of the early, failed prototypes of what Baby eventually became. I knew you couldn't resist dragging my face through the dirt, but you were too much of a coward to let Baby live one second longer than you could help it. Now Baby will grow and mature inside of your body and, when it's mature, it will take control of Hatchiyack and become the ultimate creature of body and mind!"
Vegeta twitched and stared at his own hands in disbelief as his vision began growing dimmer. The Saiyan royalty coughed up and began grunting, grabbing hold of his head while wrestling against the internal body snatcher that shoved his consciousness down into deep and long slumber at the most remote corners of Vegeta's mind while robbing control over for itself. Red lines began stretching across Vegeta's face from both sides of his forehead and disappearing into his eyebrows. Another vertical red line split Vegeta's chin down in the middle while the Saiyan King looked up with glee that was as malevolent as it was childish.
"Oh… Baby, you've taken roots inside of that body!?" Dr. Myuu coughed up on his knees through his injuries. "No surprise, the King of Saiyans is quite the powerhouse, isn't he? With this body, nothing in the entire universe can stop you from maturing into an adult form and taking control over Hatchiyack at long last!"
"Yes. I believe King Vegeta's body to be the best option until I mature to my Adult Stage and can finally take control of Hatchiyack. Vegeta seemed to have known that Dr. Lychee sent Hatchiyack here, to M-2, so we don't have to look for it. Hatchiyack will come to us," Baby examined his new sublime body and performed some light stretching to get better accustomed to it. While the polished Tsufurian collective intelligence organism known as Baby was the peak bio-engineering achievement in this universe, he was quite literally born the same day so movement still felt odd to him and he relied on the phantom memories of bodies he inhabited to understand how he was meant to do all the physical activity.
"Excellent!" Dr. Myuu rubbed his hands, looking meek and pathetic in his blown-up and busted state. While Vegeta's assault on M-2 caused some grievous damage to the whole of Dr. Myuu's body, Baby's violent exit from the Machine Mutant's body caused identical if not greater amount of damage. It was only because of Myuu's mechanical anatomy that he remained alive and somewhat functional still, despite the tremendous battery inflicted upon him. "We can work on restoring M-2 then. Our priority should be to restore communications. We haven't heard from General Rilldo in a while. Though, I suppose, with your unparalleled power and new body, we don't really need Rilldo anymore. As it is painfully clear, based on King Vegeta's effortless invasion, our whole military force is redundant compared to the might of King Vegeta's body!"
"There is another reason I chose King Vegeta's body to bond with, as opposed to merely riding inside him as a drone, as I did with you, Dr. Myuu," Baby Vegeta continued, looking up and chilling the paraplegic Machine Mutant to his core. It was as if Dr. Myuu's and Dr. Lychee's grandest pet project, the new overlord of their cyber-verse they sought to create, completely dismissed Dr. Myuu and the fact he was talking and plotting to help Baby. "I sought to understand him. Understand the Saiyan perspective."
"The… Saiyan perspective?" Dr. Myuu grumbled, acting like he was humoring Baby, when in fact he was merely following Baby's act with this conversation on a smoldering scrapyard of a cybernetic star. "You mean why the Saiyans slaughtered the Tsufurians and occupied Planet Vegeta, formerly known as Planet Plant, all to themselves?"
"That and plenty of other things…" Baby replied, looking around the ruins of M-2 with restlessness. "When you treated with Vegeta for time, King Vegeta raised an interesting point. That the Tsufurian technological expansion would've eventually driven Planet Plant to ruin. Now that I occupy Vegeta's body and am one with his mind, I can confirm that he truly believed that to be the case. He thought the Saiyans of that time genuinely thought Tsufurians were a threat to Planet Plant."
"Even if that was true," Dr. Myuu pulled on the collar of his torn uniform while coughing and sweating in discomfort. "Dr. Lychee could terraform a ruined planet back to its prime condition even back then. With our current level of technological advancement, we can even terraform the current Planet Vegeta back to a livable home for its new inhabitants. Whomever you choose, as the Overlord of the Cyber-Verse!"
"Hmm… Now that I am all that King Vegeta is and can peer into his simpleton mind, I can see exactly how insecure he truly was. Even if what he said was true, he was only saying it to shrug off responsibility. Such a sad and pathetic man should have never been the king. Even of a species as savage as the Saiyans. He is a peerless warrior, though. His battlefield intelligence is second to none. It feels like I could not lose a battle even against a stronger foe in this body!" Baby marveled at King Vegeta's chiseled body for a second while analyzing and reflecting on the feelings that were now one with him as they used to be with King Vegeta.
"King Vegeta indeed was a sad case. He only cared for himself and only knew oppression and violence! I'm overjoyed that his legacy in history we will write together will be that of a sad fool rather a grand monarch he saw himself as," Dr. Myuu clamored. The Machine Mutant's face invited Baby to cheer for their common victory alongside Dr. Myuu, but Baby seemed like he was somewhere else entirely.
"That is not true," Baby replied after a brief pause. "Vegeta has a great deal of compassion toward a handful of Earthlings. He also cares more about his people than he does himself. It confused me at first when these emotions flooded me, but… It must have been because Vegeta kept them repressed, burrowed underneath layers upon layers of arrogance. It's only when I've taken the reins and stayed oblivious to the fact I needed to keep these feelings buried they surfaced. Makes you think, doesn't it? If even a savage monster like King Vegeta is capable of compassion…"
"Don't tell me you have grown soft toward the Saiyans? They deserve to merely serve as batteries for the creation of the cyber-verse! Just like all the other organic species in the universe!" Dr. Myuu shook his hand out, trying to snap Baby out of it and get him back on track. Neither Dr. Myuu nor Dr. Lychee had ever considered that Baby would end up occupying a Saiyan body, so they hadn't covered the eventuality that Baby might become exposed to the Saiyan way of thinking and soften up to their cause. This could have been a disaster for the Four-Stars Plan, shambled as it was.
"No. But I don't intend to cause widespread genocide and use people as battery cells. A mechanized universe is boring and predictable," Baby Vegeta brought himself down and tapped his feet against the ground, turning to Dr. Myuu with a sullen look and chilling him to the Machine Mutant's broken steel frame. "There is joy and genuine happiness in the universe's chaos and the multitude of emotions it brings."
"B-Baby! What are you saying…!?" Dr. Myuu babbled, realizing he had lost all trace of control over his and Dr. Lychee's greatest creation.
"I'm saying that Dr. Lychee was a cynic and that you are far worse than he ever was. I'm saying that I want to live and restore the Tsufurian race on my home planet, Planet Plant. And that now there are no obstacles to prevent that. None, except for you…" Baby Vegeta took one step forward, making the terrified Dr. Myuu flip out and begin crawling backward with a twitching and open jaw.
"N-Now… Hold on… Just a second there… B-Baby… Have you forgotten who created you from disembodied thoughts and feelings of an extinct race?! Who bound you with a genetic code and gave you flesh? Who raised you and sheltered you in his own body to keep you from dying!?" Dr. Myuu begged Baby to see reason, pulling his hair out and chipping off his golden helmet, revealing a corner of his brain underneath.
"To further your own goals. Don't forget, Dr. Myuu, we shared a body. I laid dormant alongside the darkest corners of your mind. I know you sent General Rilldo and the Machine Mutant military to Earth and acted from behind Dr. Lychee's back," Baby Vegeta extended his arm and raised his palm open, ready to do away with the final remnant of the Machine Mutant civilization on M-2. "Even if only for a few minutes, I was you. I know you, perhaps better than you would ever come to know yourself because your insecurities and biases do not bother me. Just like Vegeta's don't…"
"I did it all to further the Four-Stars Plan!" Dr. Myuu bellowed from the depths of his lungs, flopping over on his front and ruined knees to crawl out in front of Baby Vegeta and look as pathetic as possible so that Vegeta's pride would make it seem too pitiful to kill something groveling from so far beneath him. "I merely intended to use the Earthling starry wishing orbs to power the Four-Stars Plan, since stars M-3 and M-4 had failed! I worked behind Dr. Lychee's back, yes, but only to accomplish his dream! I was serving him better when he himself was a detriment to his own plan!"
"A plan to subjugate all races under some machine rule. A despicable plan that makes you no better than the Saiyans that eradicated my predecessors. The Four-Stars Plan is over. Planet Vegeta is now New Planet Plant and I am its new king. I shall restore the Tsufurian culture and legacy once I reach Adult Stage by creating other Neo-Tsufurians like me. Your existence is a threat to that dream, begone!" Baby Vegeta decreed, blasting Dr. Myuu away into ashes with one flashy blink.
Thus, the Four-Stars Plan, a machination centuries in the making, was undone by a peak creation of bio-engineering that wished to break the circle of violence and co-exist. To live again and to live amongst its peers.