"Please," Raditz choked out, his eyes darting frantically toward the sky. "I absolutely cannot stay out here in the open."
He wasn't begging; he was delivering a grim, factual threat assessment and desperately hoping the humans would process it as such. "Vegeta does not tolerate defection. He doesn't even stop to ask questions. If he sees me standing on the same side of the dirt as you, my life expectancy officially drops to zero."
Tien Shinhan stared at him. "Saiyans don't even spare their own people?"
"Vegeta will execute a subordinate simply for being a mild inconvenience," Raditz stated flatly. "And I mean that literally, not metaphorically."
A brief, heavy silence fell over the group.
"The pale stone pillar at the far edge of the canyon," Krillin said, pointing. He offered the practical generosity of a martial artist who had decided that a man genuinely willing to change deserved at least a fighting chance to survive the catastrophic consequences of his previous employment. "You can safely watch from behind there. Do not step into his line of sight until we fully understand the tactical situation."
Raditz looked at the monk.
"Thank you," he breathed.
The profound sincerity of the gratitude was somewhat undermined by the sheer, terrified velocity with which the massive Saiyan instantly sprinted toward the indicated pillar and threw himself behind it.
The Earth warriors watched him hide, wearing wildly varying expressions.
"He's utterly terrified," Yamcha noted, his brow furrowing.
"He's been brutally training with us for six straight months," Tien replied, his three eyes locked onto the burning stratosphere. "He knows exactly what Vegeta is."
The upper atmosphere directly above the Eastern Capital was highly crowded for approximately forty seconds.
Two spherical Saiyan drop-pods were violently burning through their descent trajectory. Their glowing heat shields were doing the heavy lifting, their automated guidance systems flawlessly locked onto the coordinates of the massive population center below. Inside the first pod, Vegeta was wide awake. Inside the second, Nappa was awake. Both elite warriors were watching the vibrant blue planet rapidly grow in their reinforced viewports.
"My knuckles are stiff," Nappa grunted over the comms.
He aggressively rolled his thick neck, the massive vertebrae popping with a series of sharp cracks that strongly suggested his physiology had been genetically engineered primarily for blunt-force trauma, and only secondarily for basic biological functions. "Lord Vegeta, let me warm up by glassing that city—"
"Later," Vegeta commanded smoothly.
The Prince of all Saiyans was staring out the viewport with the cold, clinical expression of a predator conducting a highly specific analysis. Raditz had managed to transmit a partial audio file before he died. Raditz had been completely humiliated and defeated. The unknown entity directly responsible for that defeat was currently somewhere on this miserable mudball, and that entity possessed a combat power that had violently shattered a scouter's measuring ceiling. That was the only tactical variable Vegeta currently found interesting.
"The anomaly that killed Raditz," Vegeta murmured, a cruel smirk touching his lips. "That one is exclusively mine."
"Of course," Nappa agreed instantly.
Vegeta looked down at Earth.
Below them, sprawling cities. Massive, unbroken oceans. The general, disorganized layout of a planet that was, by every objective imperial measure, hopelessly underdeveloped. He had personally purged heavily defended, technologically advanced worlds that had unconditionally surrendered based on his scouter reading alone.
Yet, this pathetic dirtball had somehow produced a biological anomaly capable of breaking standard Frieza-Force hardware.
He was incredibly looking forward to meeting it.
Then, the spacecraft stopped.
It didn't violently decelerate—it simply stopped. It transitioned from a high-mach orbital descent to absolute, suspended stasis in zero seconds, completely devoid of any physical inertial sensation whatsoever. The thrusters were still roaring. The massive propulsion force was still actively being applied. The spacecraft physically was not moving an inch.
Nappa aggressively slammed his fist into the manual hatch release. The reinforced door didn't even click.
Vegeta scowled, tapping the tactical scouter over his left eye.
The digital readings were absolutely not behaving like standard Frieza-Force software should behave. The glowing green display was stubbornly feeding him the exact same telemetry data it had been feeding him at atmospheric entry. It shouldn't still be showing that data, because the atmospheric conditions had obviously changed, yet the display absolutely refused to update. Which meant either the scouter was critically malfunctioning, or—
The view through the reinforced porthole violently blurred.
It wasn't a digital artifact. The actual, physical visual field outside the glass completely lost its structural definition for exactly two seconds, and then violently resolved back into reality.
They were no longer hovering directly above the Eastern Capital.
The sprawling, metropolitan skyline that had been visible outside the glass was entirely gone. What had instantly replaced it was barren, open wasteland. It was the specific, sun-baked pale tan of a high-altitude desert. Dry scrub vegetation. Jagged rock formations. A howling sandstorm churning in the middle distance. The sun was sitting at a completely different geographical angle.
They had been forcefully relocated.
Vegeta was completely quiet for a long moment.
Someone physically moved the drop-pods, he realized, his eyes narrowing. Not by hacking the ship's navigation systems—the manual controls weren't responsible for this trajectory shift. Something grabbed the vessel in mid-descent, and instantaneously relocated it to a completely different sector of the planetary surface. Without triggering a single inertial dampener. Without any physical indicator that the spatial event had even occurred.
Standing casually on a jagged rock formation several hundred meters away was a small group of figures wearing matching, bright orange martial arts uniforms.
Vegeta stared at them through the glass.
They had clearly been waiting.
He tapped his scouter again, reading the telemetry. The average combat power across the assembled group was hovering at approximately 1,000. There were a few minor outliers slightly above that pathetic range. Absolutely nothing standing on that rock should have possessed the reality-warping capability to execute what had just happened.
Vegeta's scowl deepened.
Something was fundamentally, tactically wrong with this situation in a highly specific way that he found, despite his overwhelming arrogance, deeply interesting.
"Lord Vegeta," Nappa snarled over the comms. His voice carried the specific, highly combustible mixture of deep embarrassment and homicidal rage that naturally came from an elite warrior of his caliber being casually moved across a continent like a chess piece, without being able to prevent it. "Let me out. Let me slaughter them."
"Shut up."
Nappa's mouth instantly clicked shut. He had painfully learned, over years of brutal servitude, exactly which instructions required verbal clarification, and which ones absolutely did not.
Vegeta was still staring intently at the group. He stared at the glowing scouter readings that completely failed to mathematically account for the spatial anomaly that had just occurred. He stared at the highly disturbing fact that these native humans were standing there, completely devoid of apparent concern, casually watching two elite Saiyan warriors prepare to emerge from their pods. They projected the relaxed, unbothered attitude of stagehands who had personally set up the location, and were highly satisfied with the resulting arrangement.
Suddenly, the invisible, azure spatial containment field that had been aggressively holding the vessels aloft simply withdrew.
The roaring engines, suddenly freed from the spatial lock, fired violently against empty air. Both heavy spheres plummeted from the sky and slammed into the desert floor—two massive, concussive explosions of kinetic impact and choking dust. Deep craters formed. The pressurized hatches violently deployed.
Vegeta stepped out of the smoking crater.
He was significantly shorter than the planet's native defenders might have expected. He was also Vegeta, which instantly rendered that physical observation completely irrelevant in every single way that tactically mattered. The Saiyan Prince's black hair stood straight up in the aggressive shape of a burning flame against the desert sky. His cold expression, as he surveyed the assembled Earth warriors, was the calculating look of a predator who had already written the post-battle casualty report, and was simply checking it for spelling errors.
Nappa stepped heavily out of the second crater.
The hulking giant glared up at the humans standing on the rock formation, specifically analyzing the expressions on their faces.
Those expressions contained absolutely zero fear.
In fact, loud, genuine laughter broke out among several of them. It was the relaxed, unhurried laughter of people who had been waiting a very long time for a highly anticipated punchline, and had finally just heard it. The laughter washed over the desert before Nappa had even finished drawing breath for his opening, villainous statement.
"Pathetic Earthlings! We see you've actually prepared a welcoming party—"
He stopped.
They were still laughing.
Nappa's expression violently moved through several catastrophic stages. The cruel, sadistic smile he had meticulously prepared froze, becoming rigid and brittle. Then, the giant's face did something incredibly complicated and ugly.
"What the hell is so funny?!" Nappa roared.
A heavily scarred warrior with three eyes and no shirt, standing with his thick arms casually folded across his chest, stared down at the giant. Tien looked at him with the highly specific, cold disdain of a man who had recently undergone a divine potential upgrade that meant Nappa's heavily advertised 4,000 combat power simply did not register as a biological threat. Beside him, a small, floating psychic figure with round red cheeks was currently, entirely unsuccessfully, trying to smother a giggle behind his pale hands. A bald, bruised monk at the absolute front of the group had stopped actively laughing, but absolutely hadn't bothered to adjust his highly amused expression.
Nappa physically felt a blood vessel beginning to violently throb behind his eyes.
"Lord Vegeta!" Nappa's voice had acquired the specific, vibrating timbre of homicidal outrage. "These miserable insects are actively disrespecting—"
"I know," Vegeta cut him off smoothly.
The Prince was still staring intently at the glowing green readout on his scouter.
1,000 average. A handful of minor outliers.
Something mathematically did not add up.
He stared at the group. He cataloged the relaxed, casual confidence of their combat postures. He noted the absolute, chilling absence of the primal fear response that his presence should have instantly triggered in their weak biology.
They definitively know something that I don't, Vegeta concluded, his eyes narrowing. Or they are holding something highly lethal that my scouter physically cannot see.
Vegeta was arrogant. He was absolutely not stupid.
"Nappa," Vegeta said softly. He utilized the highly specific, silky tone of a commander who had just made a tactical decision designed to aggressively test the waters while keeping his own exit options wide open.
"Yes, Lord Vegeta?"
"Entertain yourself."
Nappa's face violently split into something that could only charitably be called a smile.