Armed and armored soldiers flooded the landing base as a swarm of smaller fighters dragged the Capsule Corps spaceship, which surpassed their size several times and planted it on the ground. Because the Earthling spaceship didn't have its landing legs extended at the time of touching down with the floor, the round spaceship caught a bit of a rough tumble that would have sufficed to scramble anyone and anything inside and deprive them of all sense of fighting spirit.
"Alright, standard procedure, nice and easy…" one soldier instructed the others before strutting up closer to the spaceship and breaking tight formation to kneel and activate thick, round hi-tech goggles that made the soldier's eyes light up with rings of a spectrum of different colors. With a scroll of a thin wheel on the side of the tech goggles, the soldier adjusted the scope to his needs before standing up and turning to the rest of the squad that had the spaceship surrounded.
"One life-form. Humanoid, average-sized. Priority–capture, elimination as a last resort only," the soldier with the radar goggles muttered into the speaker that his mask was equipped to, which translated through the earphones that all the others had on their oval-shaped metallic helmets.
The soldiers looked like they knew their role better than to need the reminder, but they closed in on the spaceship, weapons raised, at a methodical pace regardless. It was a choking maneuver meant to wall whoever and whatever was inside of a confiscated spacecraft off from escaping. Preventing the owner's escape was prioritized for the same reason live capture was so lucrative–labor force.
Missions such as the capture of spacecraft used manpower, they used military technology, and burnt spaceship fuel. An average spacecraft operator laborer had to work for at least four years to pay off the debt to Imeckan society for the trouble of their retrieval. If the soldiers were lucky, stronger and more adaptable species could last as long as twelve years. It all depended on how hopeful the pilot and their crew were to escape the planet's clutches.
It was for some time that Don Kia had figured out the golden truth that captives worked extra hard if they had the smoldering fire of hope in their hearts. Hope that they could at some point make it out of Planet Imecka if only they repaid the debt. It was at that point that Imecka's tyrannical ruler restructured the laws of his own drafting to renege on a lifetime capture, promising the captives that they were free to leave whenever they repaid their debt to the Imeckan society. This was fuel for hope, hope made the longevity of the captives soar through the roof. Hope made them adaptable to Imecka's rules, its lifestyle, and the captive's new role in society.
Another soldier ran up to the downed spacecraft, ripping off an armored plating panel and beginning to hot-wire the spacecraft's systems. A white vortex of blinding electrical flash surrounded the spacecraft, shooting off stray jolts in every direction that made the surrounding ring of soldiers fall to the ground and clutch their helmets, hoping for the fortune of their survival. Bulma's spacecraft proved to be protected against tomfoolery such as outside hot-wiring.
"Hacking method of infiltration is a bust. Forceful infiltration is a go," the bespectacled soldier was the first to pull himself off the ground and gesture for a drone of the Imeckan military, equipped with a quad-barrel colossus of military might, thicker than the body of a sequoia tree, to run out and take a knee as he aimed the ridiculously oversized gun at the soon-to-be appropriately named blast door of the ship.
The quad-barrel behemoth of metal howled in start-up, showing glowing light deep within the heart of the monstrous example of firepower. The abundantly enormous weapon roared as it sent four streams of plasma, converging into a singular tunnel of sheer, rowdy obliteration, slamming against the Capsule Corps spacecraft door. It seemed like the light of the moon-busting weapon had seeped inside the spacecraft itself as it emanated through the rattling cracks in between the separate armor plates and different crevices of the ship.
The agent of heavy-duty weaponry proved to be one tasting sweet victory that day against a shut spaceship door, for after the Capsule Corps spaceship stopped rattling, its blast door shook off its hinges and slammed down on the ground. Many soldiers exclaimed in awe at the sturdy nature of this spacecraft as, usually, most spaceships would have been reduced to spare parts by such a strident blaze. Even if the inhabitant insisting on staying fortified inside were to be vaporized, the price of the parts of such a spacecraft would have paid the cost of their head in spades.
It wasn't the galactic market that Don Kia would have sold the stripped parts off to. When you sell to the agents of the market, you get the market price. For a tyrant who operated more like a mob boss, that would have been unacceptable and any officer of his committing the economic atrocity of selling something for the price it was worth would have been stripped of rank and forced to repay the debt through physical labor, just like any common criminal had to.
No, Don Kia would sell these parts to the market of his own creation–the wastelanders, the city dwellers, the outcasts, and the captives hungry for freedom. Those the most successful in robbing those less fortunate or less powerful than themselves, as well as those savvy enough to make it in such dreadful conditions, or even more impressively–thrive, would have paid tenfold of their makings of what those parts were worth. Naturally, Don Kia would need to make sure those parts were broken and worthless first, he wouldn't want good earners to actually be able to leave Planet Imecka.
Like vultures salivating to taste their strip of carrion flesh, the soldiers approached the hole where the blast door fell off. The gasses necessary to sustain the perfect atmospheric and gravitational conditions to sustain the life of whoever dwelled within this spacecraft flooded the landing hall, making it impossible to rush inside first thing. Before the soldiers could step any closer, however, they saw a shadowy figure with a curvaceous, bipedal figure with the upper section of the shadow obscured by curls.
"EAT SHIT AND DIE!" a shrill battle cry made the soldiers stiffen up, as they expected anything but this level of ungodly violence to come from an entrapped pilot of this confiscated spacecraft. Someone who spent so much effort and time hiding would have had no reason to explode with such a level of vitriol and bloodlust. However, this one did.
The shrouded figure became lit up by the muzzle flashes of two submachine guns. Based on their composition and appearance, the architect of these tools of murder meant for either of these rifles to be wielded in both hands, however, this mad-lass couldn't be troubled with the restriction of limited capacity for murder and so she cut loose.
The thunderous and rowdy rods of black metal spewed hot flares that bit like steel wasps. The soldiers, when kissed by their sting, stiffened up in torment. While the thwacks couldn't quite scramble their organs and skewer them like the user of these submachine guns undoubtedly intended them to, bulletproof skin proved to not be durable enough to prevent all harm that would have come from these weapons. And so, after emptying both magazines and forcing the singing of the rifles to cease and be replaced with erratic clicking, the blond bombshell dropped the guns and picked a satchel from her side, throwing it on her shoulder in a manner not unlike that in which the heavy duty soldier that blasted the blast door off did earlier.
"Let's see how you fuckers like it!" Launch bellowed, sending four infernal missiles twirling around each other in a tango that was a mere calm before the rowdy storm. With a booming rip, the entire landing pad went up in smoke and became cluttered with firestorms. More and more spacecraft that had all their armor padding stripped and were waiting to be emptied of their fuel caught a whiff of the blast force and decided to join the revolution of chained explosions.
While the bodies of the soldiers proved durable enough to withstand the calamity that befell the landing station without being quartered and singed on the spot, they may have preferred a violent and outrageously violent end to the crippling torment of survival with the entirety of their joints dislocated, most muscles torn and rendered temporarily blind and permanently deaf by the raucous malady that the blond bombshell brought about Planet Imecka.
Dropping the rocket launcher, Launch pulled out an oversized single action .50 Cal pistol and began her strut across the landing pad, stomping on the heads of any soldiers that could still move and shooting one in the head. While even the excessive for a handgun round bullet couldn't blast through the skull and spill the brains of those alien soldiers, they, at the very least, knocked them out for good with as much success as a baseball bat swing would have on her home planet.
By opening the Capsule Corps spacecraft, the band of soldiers unleashed something akin to a Pandora's box and taught Planet Imecka the meaning of that idiom.
After the raging fireballs died down somewhat and the ringing silence launched its valiant siege of taking over the tarnished landing station, Launch noticed one of the broken helmet pieces with black leather pads vibrating and some kind of muzzled gibberish coming off from it. Leaning down, Launch picked it up and pressed it to her ear.
"Progress report on Landing Station 4! I repeat, progress report! You've gone radio-silent after a wave of static!" a growling, low-pitched, and masculine tone yelled at whoever was supposed to wear this helmet from the other end. Launch noticed a chipped piece of microphone, still connected by a wire to the busted helmet, and picked it up, moving it to her lips, as if she was about to whisper something subtle and mysterious.
"COME GET YOUR NUTS KICKED, PRICK!" Launch roared from the top of her lungs, hoping she rendered the squad leader issuing commands from the other end completely deaf with this trick.
After satisfying her instinct to be mean, Launch dashed back to the sash she left the ship with and reloaded her submachine guns, her rocket launcher, and her heavy semi-automatic pistol with the spare ammunition she brought along against Bulma's advice. After doing her fair share of locking and loading, considering herself ready to take on this whole planet of army boot jackasses who stood in her way, the blond Launch ran headfirst at the busted mechanical door, blasting it off the hinges with a rocket launcher blast and then charged into the endless hallway ahead.
From the other end, Launch heard thick military boots tapping, she took a knee and hunkered down, aiming with both submachine guns at the marching enemy line. The blond bombshell let the sash of ammo slip off her shoulder. It had so much weight that it lightly ripped the right side of Launch's knit green top and slammed against the floor with a scary thud. Likely alarmed by this noise, the rest of the gang looked scared to approach, suspecting they'd be walking into an ambush.
Instead of seeing a flood of the soldiers Launch saw earlier coming to take their lead medicine by the dozens, a light jasmine-skinned alien with short orange hair and long, pointy ears, wearing a skintight moss-green bodysuit underneath a sleeveless red casual-style dress rushed out into the open. The alien stared back at Launch with violet eyes, unflinching, as if challenging the Earthling woman to do her worst.
Launch took this daunting stare personally, opening fire at once with a loud battle cry that made the ripping cacophony of a ludicrous amount of gunfire all the more appealing. The pale jasmine-skinned alien stiffened up, catching most of the shots that Launch sent her way, but withstanding the onslaught with nothing more than spotty holes in her dress and green hairband resting on her forehead. The plump, pink-lipped alien woman even smirked upon realizing how little Launch's firepower stung her.
"Pathetic! To think that both Gale and I got involved for something puny like this," the alien who posed herself like some sort of military commander pressed her knuckles to her sides as another comrade of hers joined her from the side. A bald, brown-skinned, browless muscleman with long, pointy ears and a thick red beard, wearing an armored teal-colored sleeveless bodysuit.
"Gunpowder weaponry… This foreigner actually wields the limited weaponry of wastelanders by choice, it seems…" the bearded, brown-skinned baldy said in calculated observation. "You'd think that a race that's discovered intergalactic space travel would possess weaponry more advanced than this… W-Wait!"
"You know this creature, Gale?" the slender alien woman turned to her shorter yet much thicker partner while blond Launch got busy reloading and soldiers flooded the hallway.
"Don't shoot to kill!" Gale barked an order out at the rest of the soldiers. Most of them would have operated under those rules anyway, but some may have needed a reminder that such priorities still applied when the enemy proved to be this trigger-happy and ferocious.
"Can you explain to me why we're not blitzing and crushing this fragile weakling?" the alien woman shrugged at her partner commanding the Imeckan military while Don Kia was too engaged enjoying his lavish tyrannical dictator lifestyle.
"Because that thing right there is an Earthling female from Planet Earth," Gale replied with sweat pouring down his forehead. "Our best bet is to either capture this one alive or scare it into leaving."
"Earthling? Isn't Planet Earth the planet where the Saiyans moved to?" the alien woman gasped, joining her ally in his sweating routine.
"That's right. If we're to capture someone from Planet Earth, we risk pissing the Saiyans off, which means they might make a hasty return for a second round over here. I don't know 'bout you, Sheila, but I know all too well that our military's been trained to fight wastelanders and unarmed, starving merchants, not one of the top fighting forces in the universe!" Gale exclaimed, glancing back at his partner.
"But… Isn't that why Don Kia-sama hired that mercenary?" Sheila wondered out loud.
"Get real! Both of us saw first-hand what Saiyans are capable of! Not to mention how they wouldn't shut up about growing stronger from every grueling battle! Even if this Ledgic is all he cracked himself up to be, and not some scammer looking to exploit Don Kia-sama's Saiyan paranoia, he could probably defeat a Saiyan in battle, not an entire army of them!" Gale objected. "That's even if he can back his talk up, which is a big if! Have you actually ever seen Ledgic fight?"
"He trains, he leaves on jobs he feels like taking all the time…" Sheila muttered, fumbling her way through words in an attempt to justify the faith she and Don Kia had placed in their superstar mercenary hire.
"All off-world… How convenient…!" Gale put his arms on his hips. Before the two commanders could settle their quarrel, however, a concussive rip scattered soldiers like pins after a devastating bowling strike. The two dashed to the demolished landing station to survey the situation there, but saw only flat bodies, some still smoldering with licks of flames and all passed out or grievously injured.
"What in the world!?" Sheila gasped in terror upon setting her sights on blond Launch, seated behind a makeshift turret and aiming with the weaponry of some destroyed ship by aiming the turret cannons with her bare hands.
"Bulletproof!? Don't joke around! I JUST NEED A BIGGER GUN!" Launch growled, opening the ripping cascade of merciless firepower. Gale and Sheila braced themselves, while the spacecraft fire that was meant to obliterate space debris, meteors, and small moons laid waste to the ordinary platoons of Imeckan military units, Gale and Sheila appeared to only barely be grazed by the excess of firepower.
"This is getting out of hand!" Sheila exclaimed, barely managing to raise her voice above the threshold set by the rampant spacecraft cannon wielded by a lone, gung-ho Earthling woman. "If we keep holding back, she'll destroy the entire sector and then we'll have to explain ourselves to Don Kia-sama! You might have your doubts about Ledgic, but Don Kia-sama certainly doesn't!"
"Damn… You're right!" Gale gnashed his teeth. "Aww… To hell with it!"
The two alien military commanders bent their forearms and clenched their fists. After the tag team opened them, green and pink lights flashed in their respective hands while they channeled energy spheres in their hands. Standing side-by-side, the pair launched them together, merging their energy waves into a convergent tunneling power burst that turned fuchsia in color.
"Sturdy pricks, goddamn it!" Launch grumbled, noting her lack of success in splattering the pair of Imeckan military commandos, only to space out when the white light washed over her and it seemed like it was about to obliterate her makeshift weapon and her with it. A broad and tall shadow with spiky hair stepped up in front of Launch.
"Y-You…!" Launch yelled out in shock with the rumbling from the combined energy blast still muzzling her speech in contrast to its roar.
After briefly holding the energy wave off in his hand, the spiky-haired masculine shadow punted it off to the side, causing it to blast a hole in the landing station roof. Gale and Sheila shivered in place, faces long and stiff from terror at seeing that which the Imeckan people have been seeing in their nightmares for over a decade–a Saiyan.
"Shit, shouldn't have taken my luck for granted," Bardock murmured to himself after glancing back at Launch and her current form and closing his eyes. "Then again, if you didn't transform and cause all this mess, I might not have been able to pick up your location, so even trouble has a way of sorting itself out like this."
"A S-S-Saiyan!" Gale winced, shivering in horror and awe.
"R-Retreat! L-Ledgic… Help!" Sheila screamed as she threw herself back like a rag doll, swimming with her hands with no grace of reason as her partner was quick to follow. The pair tripped over one another on their way out through the hallway, racing to Don Kia's quarters where Ledgic enjoyed the life of luxury when he was on Planet Imecka.
"Ledgic, huh? Must be that fabled guy everyone's been scaring me with," Bardock sighed after dusting his hands off. It took him no effort at all to deflect the combined energy wave of two commanding officers in Planet Imecka's military, so Bardock almost hoped a little that this Ledgic would deliver with at least cause for some light stretching.
"You asshole!" Launch snarled, jumping over the fallen turret gun and hammering a sturdy blow at the back of Bardock's head. Because the Saiyan didn't want the raging bombshell to break her fist, he powered down to where the hit rocked his head a tiny inch, but barely hurt at all. "You put the Other Me in danger by leaving her alone with those soldier goons! We could 'a been killed!"
"That's fair," Bardock shrugged. "But I've found the Ultimate Dragon Ball and if we really want to retrieve it, we best follow those two to wherever this Don Kia guy is and flatten him. Then we can be off this depressing rock for good and you can tell me all about what you're thinking about right now."
"You sly dumbass!" Launch gnashed her teeth to where surely she must have chipped one. "You're just biding your time until I sneeze and transform into Other Me again so that you can escape what's coming at you!"
"If you're not coming, you're welcome to hide and wait here," Bardock threw nonchalantly as he hovered a bit above the ground, prompting Launch to grab the nearest Imeckan assault rifle and follow Bardock through the labyrinthine hallways leading to the elevator that would escalate them to the Don Plaza–the brightest diamond of Don City and the estate Don Kia spent his lavish days in.