Chapter 19: The Return of the God
The coffin was not a coffin. It was a sealed ecosystem, a prison of fluid and silent, whirring machines. For days, it tumbled through the absolute blackness between stars, a glittering, blue-tinged sarcophagus carrying its brain-dead king on a silent, purposeless journey. The nano-machines within performed their endless, mindless work, stitching flesh, fusing bone, rebuilding a temple for a ghost. They worked without a blueprint, for the architect was gone. They built a perfect, powerful body around a silent, hollow core.
The first sign of its failure was a single, internal alert. A pressure sensor in the outer hull, microfractured by the violence of the Ginyu Force's visit and the crude handling of the outpost techs, finally gave way. The breach was microscopic, a sigh of air escaping into the void. But to the tank's programming, it was a catastrophic systems failure.
Emergency protocols, cold and logical, overrode the maintenance cycle. The objective shifted from repair to preservation. Navigational systems, long dormant, powered up. Its scanners, weak and short-ranged, swept the void. They found only one viable target: the life-bearing world whose coordinates were still burned into its memory from its last arrival. The planet its occupant had painted red.
With a silent burst of its maneuvering thrusters, the tank ceased its aimless tumble. It oriented itself, a bullet aiming for the heart of a world it had already stopped.
Days passed as it approached the planet.
The re-entry was not a landing; it was a judgment.
The outer shell, never designed for atmospheric friction, began to heat. The polished metal turned a dull red, then orange, then white-hot. Layers of it slagged away, boiling into vapor, leaving the inner ceramic skeleton exposed. It became a screaming spear of fire and light, tearing across the twilight sky of the Southern Continent. Below, the scarred plains and shattered forests of Kakarot's genocide were illuminated by its passing, a second sun of vengeance.
Inside, the world became hell. The fluid, once a cool, life-giving medium, began to boil. Alarms blared silently, lights flashing crimson against the cooking gel. The body within convulsed, neural pathways screaming at the agony, the brainstem reacting with primal fury to the torture. The sedatives and stabilizers pumped in by the frantic machines were burned away by the escalating heat. The tank was no longer healing him; it was broiling him alive.
It struck the atmosphere above the jagged, bioluminescent forest where he had slaughtered the Emerald Clan. It streaked over the wide, fertile valley where he had massacred the fishing village, its shockwave rippling the blood-red river. It shot past the canyon where he had spared eight women and twenty-five children in exchange for a price of flesh. It was tracing the map of his own sins.
Its velocity bled away, its angle steepened. It came down finally not with a controlled impact, but with a world-ending crash into the heart of the vast, arid plain where he had hunted the nomads to extinction.
The impact was a cataclysm. The sound was a thunderclap that rolled across the entire continent, echoing off the distant mountains. The earth itself recoiled. A crater fifty feet wide was blasted into the hard-baked soil, throwing up a plume of dust and superheated rock that blotted out the sky. The mangled, smoking ruin of the tank's core lay at its center, half-buried, its metal glowing a faint cherry red, hissing and popping as the evening air cooled it.
For a long time, there was only the sound of settling dirt and the crackle of dying fires. The dust cloud settled like a shroud.
Then, figures emerged.
They did not come from the open plain. They came from the earth itself. From cleverly concealed fissures in the ground, from camouflaged hatches that opened into buried shelters, the last, desperate redoubts of a people who had learned to hide from the sky.
They were led by Kael. The stocky, broad-shouldered nomadic hybrid moved with a new, feral grace, her body hardened by over a week of desperate survival. Her leathery hide was covered in a fine layer of dust, her coarse dark mane was tied back tightly, and her earthy brown eyes, once resigned, now burned with a fierce, protective fire. In her hands, she held not a blunt club, but a vicious-looking spear tipped with a sharpened shard of Saiyan armor she had scavenged from the ruins.
Behind her came others. Lyra, the avian hybrid, her delicate features sharpened by hunger and grief, her iridescent blue feathers dulled by dust. She held a crudely strung bow, crystalline arrows nocked and ready. The other six females followed, armed with sharpened stones, heavy bones, and a desperate, hardened will. They were no longer the cowering, resigned victims from the canyon. They were survivors, their spirits tempered in the forge of annihilation. Their children, the twenty-five, were hidden deep below, silent and terrified.
They approached the crater rim with the hyper-cautiousness of prey that has learned its lesson. They fanned out, weapons raised, expecting a trap, another Saiyan pod, another god of death come to finish the job.
Kael peered over the edge, into the smoking pit. She saw the wreckage. It was unlike the spherical pods she had seen before. This was something else, a mangled, torn-open cylinder. And within the twisted wreckage, she saw a form.
She signaled silently. The women surrounded the crater, arrows and spears aimed down. Lyra joined her, her large, dark eyes narrowing.
Then, she saw the face.
Through the grime, the blood from a fresh gash on his forehead, the steam rising from his scorched skin, she knew him. The sharp, brutal angles of his jaw. The hair, black and wild even in ruin. It was him. The monster. The God of Death. The one who had taken her, who had taken Lyra, who had shattered their world and left them to live in its ashes.
A sound escaped Lyra's throat, a choked gasp of pure, undiluted terror. She stumbled back, her bow shaking violently. The other women murmured, their weapons wavering, a primal fear freezing their muscles.
But Kael did not move. Her grip on her spear tightened until her knuckles were white. Every fiber of her being screamed for her to charge down the slope and drive her spear through his heart. To tear him limb from limb. To finally, finally, give back a fraction of the pain he had inflicted. The memory of his weight on her, his violation, the feeling of being less than an animal, surged through her with a nausea so potent she almost vomited.
She took a step forward, down the crater's slope. Her spearpoint aimed at his throat.
He lay amidst the shattered machinery, half-naked, his Saiyan armor mostly burned away. His body was a landscape of horrors, the terrible old scars from his fight with Vegeta, now mostly healed into thick, ropy lines, and new, livid burns and deep cuts from the crash. His chest rose and fell in a shallow, ragged rhythm. He was alive. But he was broken. Helpless.
Kael stood over him, her shadow falling across his face. She raised the spear, its Saiyan-metal tip glinting in the fading light. This was it. Vengeance.
But she stopped.
Her eyes scanned the wreckage. This was not a conquering arrival. This was a crash. A failure. He had been thrown away. He was as much a victim of his own kind as they were. The thought was so alien it was dizzying.
Another thought, cold and pragmatic, cut through the rage. If he was here, broken and discarded, did that mean the others were gone? For good? Or was this a trick? A test?
Killing him would be justice. But it would also be… a waste. A dead god was just a corpse. But a living god… a broken, captive god… that was a tool. A shield. A source of knowledge. What if they could learn the secret of his power? What if they could learn about the others? What if he could be used as a bargaining chip?
The internal war raged on her face, hatred warring with strategy, vengeance with survival.
She lowered the spear. The other women stared at her, confusion and fear on their faces. Lyra whispered, "Kael… what are you doing? Kill him! Now!"
Kael turned to them, her expression hardening into that of a leader making an unbearable choice. "No," she said, her voice rough but firm. "We take him."
A chorus of hissed protests erupted. She silenced them with a sharp look.
"We are not killers in the dark," she said, though the words tasted like ash. "We are survivors. He is a weapon. And we will learn how to hold the handle. If the others return, he is our answer. If they do not… then we will decide his fate later. On our terms."
She knelt beside him. She did not check his wounds with compassion. She assessed him like a piece of dangerous machinery. She roughly rolled him onto his stomach, ignoring his faint groan of pain. She used thick, fibrous vines from her belt to bind his wrists together behind his back, pulling the knots brutally tight. She bound his ankles with another length.
She stood and looked at the others. "We take him to the deep caves. The hidden ones. No one speaks of this. Not even to the children. He is our secret. Our burden. Our weapon."
With a wave of her hand, two of the stronger women came forward. They looked at Kakarot's bound form with undisguised loathing, but they obeyed Kael. They hauled him roughly out of the wreckage and onto a makeshift stretcher of hides and branches.
As they dragged him away from the crater, Kael took one last look at the smoldering tomb that had delivered him back to them. A grim, cold smile touched her lips. It was not a smile of joy, but of grim possession.
The God of Death belonged to them now.
[Author's Note: So I know, you have a lot of questions and it may seem like a massive plot hole but I had to do a lot of thinking and I think I can explain it away. Your probably screaming at me but here me out. With the help of some AI I came up with an in universe explanation. So here it is dudes and dudets. The Saiyan healing trance was a state far beyond any standard medical coma. It was a biological imperative, a last-ditch survival mechanism forged by a warrior race. When his body registered damage past a critical threshold, every non-essential function, consciousness, higher thought, motor control, shut down entirely. All energy was diverted inward, into a brutal, cellular-level reconstruction powered by the very trauma he had endured. The Frieza medics saw a vegetative patient because their scanners could not perceive this profound metabolic lockdown. His journey through the void, cocooned in the sterile, silent pod, provided the perfect environment for this process to complete. The violent re-entry was not a new injury, but the massive systemic shock that finally jolted his rebooted nervous system back online. Therefore he will not simply awaken; he will be rebooted, his body whole, his mind clearing from a deep, healing static, the genetic memory of his near-death now hardwired into his cells as newfound power. In all thanks to the potential energy of the Zenkai Boost and the healing tank and nanos.]
[A/N: Can't wait to see what happens next? Get exclusive early access on patreon.com/saiyanprincenovels. If you enjoyed this chapter and want to see more, don't forget to drop a power stone! Your support helps this story reach more readers!]