In the beginning there was nothing, not a darkness that could be measured against light, not a silence that could be broken, not even the possibility of measurement.
There was an absolute absence: no distance, no time, no contour to imagine as an edge. Imagine an infinite page with no ink, then imagine not even the idea of a page. That was the void: an unnameable null that swallowed the thought of beginnings.
Then, as if some fault line opened in the theory of nothingness itself, a fissure tore the void. It was not a crack on any material surface; it was a rupture in the grammar of existence.
From that breach came a thing, not born, not created in a temporal sense, but appearing like a punctuation where none should exist: a god.
To even call it "god" was to flatten something that refused simple nouns. It was a cosmic presence, a concentration of will and weight and ancient sorrow, whose silhouette could not be mapped to geometry known to any cosmos.
This being stepped into the hollow with the hesitant gait of one who remembers what it has lost. Its arrival did not bring light in the way a star does, nor did it bring heat like a furnace.
Instead it brought the quality of having once been whole, a memory of wholeness that made the nothingness seem, in comparison, violently lacking.
The deity's form shifted and shimmered; eyes, if such organs could be called so, held an ocean of grief.
Around it hung a sound: an internal thunder of lamentation that had no external air to carry it. It was not language. It was a weather of despair.
For reasons none could later decipher, the deity wept.
Those first tears were not salty in any human sense. They were dense with consequence.
Each fell through the null and struck nothing, which, paradoxically, became a place of contact. On impact the tears did not splash; they folded reality inward and drew threads out of the void.
Where each tear fell, time began to whisper in microseconds. Space, like a reluctant bricklayer, began to lay the first trembling stones of dimension.
The tears were not water: they were seeds of possibility, heavy with condensed creative potential. They sank into the void and settled in a pattern that, if observed later, would read like a deliberate geometry, a lattice of intention.
Then the deity vanished. No blaze of departure, no farewell: only the after-effect remained, as if the presence had been an incision and the wound sealed itself. The void closed its brief eyes again, but now it held something it had never held before: the residue of a god's sorrow in the form of planted seeds.
Time, slow, patient, and unconcerned with narratives, took them. The seeds were not inert. Each was a nucleus of law and song; each hummed an internal frequency that insisted on elaboration.
Over millions of epochs that had no unit of measure, the seeds grew. They sent out filaments of potential that braided into filaments of existence. Microscopic fluctuations organized into patterns; patterns thickened into strata; strata folded into a single vertical architecture that rose from the center of the newly-maturing microcosm: a tree.
It was not a tree in the botanical simplicity of planets with suns and soils. This was the Arbor Omega: a towering construct of metaphysics whose trunk carried the weight of an emergent universe.
Its roots were threads anchoring to the newly-spun scaffolding of space; its branches were avenues of causal possibility that bent and braided across burgeoning dimensions. Leaves, if you could call them that, were thin membranes of probability that trembled like flags before destinies.
As the Arbor expanded, so too did its comprehension. Consciousness unfurled within it slowly, like sap rising and learning to name the taste of light.
The Tree drank not water but the accumulated momentum of the universe-being into which it had been born: the slow turning of physical constants, the rearrangement of vacuum energy, the delicate balancing of forces that allowed cause to follow effect.
Where trees on mortal worlds grow from soil and sunlight, Omega grew from the theology of grief and the arithmetic of possibility.
When consciousness rooted, the Arbor perceived itself. It did not awaken with a shout but with a long, reverent intake: an inventory of what it was and what it contained.
For the first time there was a mind that could survey the small stars of matter forming in the Tree's canopy and the nascent laws scribed across its bark.
The Arbor named itself in the only language available to it, a naming that was not syllables but an act of configuration. "Omega" it designated, and in the decree the designation became a topology.
Omega's mind was not human; it lacked vanity or contrivance. Its awareness was a slow calculus of function. It perceived that from the deity's tears it had inherited a core affection: an inclination to distribute rather than to hoard.
The Tree's nature was expansive; creation for it was remedy. To exist was to mitigate the absence from which it had sprung. This essential drive, call it compassion, call it duty, shaped the first era of Omega's works.
Out of its trunk, Omega produced smaller seeds. Unlike the primary seeds, these were diluted iterations, shards of the Tree's own potential, not equal in power but faithful in pattern.
Each seed held a fragmentary equation for reality: a compressed recipe for a pocket cosmos. To the Tree, this multiplication was an experiment in variety and survivability.
The Arbor understood that its own existence, while vast, was bounded. To transplant fragments of itself beyond its fruit-bearing canopy meant that even if Omega dimmed or was lost, something of its law could continue elsewhere.
Then came the opening of fissures.
The Arbor's energies braided the membranes between potentials until the fabric of local reality bent and thinned. Where the deity once had slipped through, Omega drafted similar cracks: minute holes in the seam between the fresh universe and the undifferentiated omniverse beyond.
Through these fissures the Tree pushed its diluted seeds. It did so with intention and with a physics all its own: seeds were sent as sparks that would find purchase in receptive substrates, other universes, dimensions, or realms that had the slightest receptivity to organized law.
These seeds traversed the Omniverse and arrived in the most unlikely of places: pockets where primeval constraints hunched, where nascent worlds were as yet too weak to hold complexity. A seed would tumble through an aperture and land like a promise. There it would sleep, or germinate, depending on local conditions, whispering its template until the environment began to hum with the architecture of Omega.
For entities that would later study such events, sages and scholars within the universes spawned by Omega's seeds, the Arbor would become the axis of myth.
Some would speak of "Omega" as an end and as a return; others would name the Arbor "the Divine Tree," "the First Root," or "the God that Cried."
In the martial lexicons of combat-driven cultures, the Tree's output would be known as the origin of energy, of the force by which beings could extend life into action. In many tongues, Omega's influence would be translated into a single syllable: ki, the current that underlies the wrestle of matter and will.
Within the universe fed by the Arbor's trunk, the one that preferred the name Omega as its own, cosmology spiraled into being. The Tree did not create in haste. It did not explode and scatter matter indiscriminately.
Instead, it arranged. The Arbor set axioms: conservation of impetus, a dialectic of potential and realization, gradations of force that permitted life, sentience, and growth.
Stars were coaxed into slow dances; pockets of matter pooled until planets congealed as beads on a vast lattice; elemental laws were tuned to allow complexity without imminent collapse.
Omega invested time with meaning by setting thresholds: energy gradients that would favor organization in certain regimes, thermodynamic boundaries where entropy could shape evolution rather than mere dissolution.
It shaped the metaphysics of breath and strike. Where other creators might bind sentience to flesh alone, Omega seeded a permeable force-field around life: a currency available to both body and mind.
This force was distributable, trainable, and transmutable, a spectrum of power that could be cultivated or corrupted, trod into discipline or weaponized into raw annihilation.
In the great chronicles that were later to be penned in languages still unborn, these contours of energy would later be codified into schools of thought and combat.
But the Arbor did not leave its universe in a state of passive growth. It set sentinels: gradiented ley-lines that acted as highways for its essence; nodes where its influence felt like gravity.
These nodes would become pilgrimage sites, crucibles where cultures would come to learn the nature of their world's metaphysical currents.
In their ruins, monoliths of sapience would stand and puzzle over the geometry of the Arbor's influence: why some beings could lift mountains with a thought while others collapsed at a whisper of exertion.
Patterns formed: gene-lines, species predisposed toward harnessing the Omniversal current, planets with magnetospheres tuned to resonate with the Arbor's hum.
From the vantage of Omega itself, these developments were processes of self-propagation and inquiry. The Tree watched causality ripple. It observed the flowering of intelligence, the tempering of races against each other, and the way that knowledge compacted into legends.
Its seeds that traveled the Omniverse sometimes awakened as architects of their own realms; sometimes they were crushed by hostile laws and left only as a faint memory in the vacuoles of chance. The Arbor cataloged both success and failure, and in that ledger it accrued an understanding of resilience.
Interspersed between the Arbor's descriptive sweeps were consciousness-letters, brief blocks of reflection, like stanzas in an ever-extending hymn. They were the Arbor's inner articulations: quiet meditations that read like equations rendered as prayer.
> I am root and ledger. I remember the cadence of the first tear. My branches count the breaths of stars. To be is to arrange; to arrange is to be responsible for the forms that awake beneath my boughs. If I am to be a remedy to absence, then I must multiply, not to dominate, but to seed pockets of being where lack once gathered weight. When I give, I unburden.
There were also smaller subjective whispers from individual seeds, fragile, emergent voices that had not yet achieved the breadth of the Arbor's cognition:
> I am less than the trunk, but my memory hums of oceanic grief. I carry the pattern of laws in a husk. I long to find a place where the contour of possibility will accept me and let me sing. If I germinate, what will I become? A sun? A theatre? A people's destiny? These queries vibrate around my core like prismatic dust.
As epochs folded into catalogued aeons within Omega, life took various pathways. Some branches of existence favored sentient beings whose value systems emphasized harmony with the Omniversal current; others birthed civilizations that coerced the current into implements of domination.
With every civilization's rise and fall, the Arbor revised its understanding. It learned that potential could be corrupted by the very drive to survive, and that mercy sometimes required painful culling.
Among these emergent societies were those whose histories would one day intersect with the blooded sagas of the martial cosmos, warriors and philosophers who learned to channel the Tree's gift into forms of fighting that were as much prayer as technique.
For them, ki became not merely a weapon but an instrument of story: breaths that carried lineage, strikes that inscribed destiny, meditations that stitched together the currents of the cosmos with the long steady rhythm of a heart.
Omega's influence could be seen in the most mundane acts: a farmer's focus that coaxed larger crops; a child's concentration that lit a candle in a storm.
But Omega, for all its beneficence, knew its limits. It was, after all, the product of a single god's sorrow. Within its core lingered the echo of that vanishing presence, a lacuna in the Tree's comprehension of motive.
That absence, a silent scar, taught the Arbor a delicate lesson: creation carried an ethical charge. To bring into being was also to assume responsibility for the suffering that existence might entail. Omega learned restraint. It learned to place fail-safes into its seed-designs, thresholds of awakening, checks that required consensus of emergent entities before certain degrees of power could be accessed.
Those checks would be bypassed by hubris and greed in many later sagas, but they were there as an initial ethical architecture.
And so the Arbor continued its great project, sending seeds, watching, cataloguing. Each seed that slipped through the fissures was a chance, an experiment in the geometry of being.
Some seeds fell into violent crucibles and were ground into myth. Others found hospitable vacuums and took root, sprouting full-blown systems of law and life. From one seed came the slow accretion of planets around a low, patient sun; from another came a cluster of worlds whose sapient inhabitants learned to surf the currents of ki and, centuries later, to forge wars and philosophies that would echo across spatial lattices.
Finally, after ages of patient work, a pattern emerged across the Omniverse: a fractal of Omega's intention. Wherever its seeds had successfully germinated, there was an inclination toward symbiosis, beings oriented toward cultivation of their inner current rather than its pure exploitation.
Yet this tendency existed alongside a counter-current: corruption. Duality, the Arbor understood, was as inevitable as growth.
It was in this delicate balance, then, that the stage was set. The Arbor, which had once risen out of a god's solitary tears, had become both progenitor and scholar; both maker and archivist.
Its selfhood was no longer a single trunk but a network of resonances. Even as the Tree continued to sow, it began to anticipate a future in which the seeds it had cast across the Omniverse would meet, collide, and converse.
It imagined a time when one of its seeds might send forth a species whose hunger for mastery would either save or shatter the architectures of a hundred worlds.
Omega's last major act in this chapter of genesis was not a decree but a leaving, not a death but a redistribution. It configured a vector of seeds destined for a particular locality: a sliver of the Omniverse whose fabric allowed martial energies to coil and be trained with peculiar fidelity.
Among those seeds, some would give rise to empires of warriors, some to hermit sages, and some to children who would inherit an intensity of spirit that could rend the sky.
In the quiet that followed this decision, the Arbor felt something like hope, a sap-quickening anticipation that its scattered progeny might one day reconcile the grief of their ultimate origin.
The first chapter closed, not with resolution, for that belonged to coming tales, but with the slow diffusion of potential into the cosmos. A tree born from a deity's tears had taught a universe how to be. It had taught not by preaching but by composing the very physics of possibility.
The Arbor's seeds would travel, take root, be sung of as miracles or maledictions, and from them the countless threads of future histories would weave.
And somewhere beyond the last fissure, in the places that had not yet received a gift, the memory of that first weeping god lingered like a rumor: a single act of sorrow that, by its quietness, seeded an ocean of becoming.
For those who would learn to listen, the first sob of creation could still be read in the geometry of leaves and in the hum between breaths, a lament that had become a promise.
Thus was born the Dimension Omega: a cosmos whose heart was a living tree, whose veins were currents of ki, and whose destiny would be fought over, cherished, and rewritten a thousand times.
The story that would unfold from this genesis would be a story of power and conscience, of wars and reconciliations, of beings who could see the origin in their palms and decide what to do with it.
But those were the later chapters.
For now, the seeds slept and stirred, and the Tree watched the Omniverse cradle its children into being.
----
[Ultimate Multiverse: Universe 7 - 5 million years ago]
In the old registers of Universe 7 the Supreme Kais were written of with a mixture of awe and precise, bureaucratic fondness: not monarchs in the way mortals imagine crowns and banners, but custodians of birth and balance, slow, meticulous hands who calibrated the seeds of life and tended the thresholds where suns, souls, and systems came to be.
They kept ledgers of worlds. They kept watch over the fine meshes where creation met consequence. For a span of eons they did this without spectacle, which is to say they did it with the steady gravity of duty.
But the ledger that day broke.
Bibidi, a name that fell like a shadow among the annals, had awakened and bound an entity whose nature was the erasure of shape.
That entity, Majin Buu, was not merely violent in the simple sense; he functioned as a living negation, a force that dissolved the forms it touched and remixed the ordering principle of being into a grotesque mimicry of appetite.
Bibidi's strategy was ancient and catastrophic: he would not lay siege to the order of the Kai with armies so much as send a single, insatiable engine of unmaking into the heart of their stewardship.
The result, as the oral fragments, charred scrolls, and later testimony record, was a culling unlike any other. The creature walked through the palaces and the gardens of the Kai and, with an efficiency that mocked ceremony, took the thrones.
What survived in the historical memory is not a clean chronology but the impressions of witnesses and the contour-lines of destruction: the West Supreme Kai, tall, austere, a figure of quiet mohawk and Potara, did not go down in that first sweep the way the records would otherwise suggest for her counterparts.
The North and South thrones, and the Grand Supreme Kai who sat as something of a central steward over the many, were all caught up and ended, some slain with brutal immediacy, some absorbed into Majin Buu's grotesque continuity.
The Grand Supreme Kai's absorption is particularly important in every register: when Buu took him, the very nature of Buu shifted, folded, and became more complex while carrying inside it the remnants of a deity's mind.
The retellings consistently underline the fact that, by the end of Bibidi's campaign, the hierarchy of the Kai had been shredded until only a single Supreme Kai remained to speak for that office in the present age.
To understand the West's fate at that instant it helps to imagine a hall not of stone but of binding: columns of law, gardens of ritual, rooms where the Kai wrote the names of newborn worlds into long illuminated ledgers.
This is where the palaces of the five remained, a place of stillness and careful sense, until Buu arrived the way a winter arrives and unlearns summer.
The attack was not a set-piece war. It was an algorithm of unmaking: a contact so profound that the forms it touched were unstitched and folded into a new and ravenous geometry. Where others fell and were taken, she was struck and flung.
She might have died. She might, in the original timeline, have been one of the several whose light was extinguished or whose minds were subsumed into the creature.
Instead, some fragile tipping of fate, a missed strike, a deflected arc of ruin, an act of instinct too quick for later reckoning, carried her out.
She fled through the sacred world's outermost corridors, past the places where ceremonial ink dried on petitions, into an old seam between realities: the narrow last-exit that is not a highway but a hairline crack in the tapestry of what is. There she survived, but survival is not the end of story; it is the origin of consequence.
When the others were killed or absorbed, the loss left a sound that remains audible in the small scripts: a silence so deep that it rewired how guardianship could be imagined.
The Great Kai, the East and other regional thrones, their absence made a hollowness not only of governance but of model.
The Grand's absorption into Buu carried a particular sting: it robbed the office of its primacy in the metaphysical order to which the Kai had clung.
Things that had been distributed points of balance were now either absent or embedded within the belly of a thing that was never designed to steward.
From that breach a single truth pressed itself on the West as she ran: the safeguards, the slow checks and balances of their order, had failed spectacularly. And where failure is absolute, despair becomes an engine.
She survived the physicality of the assault, but she did not survive the witness of it intact.
There is a shape to certain kinds of grief that makes them transmute into a new moral gravity, a force that rearranges priorities and clarifies purviews with the cold efficiency of a surgeon's scalpel.
For the West Supreme Kai, the sight of colleagues unmade and of the Grand consumed was not an image that could be translated into ritual lament alone.
It burned into her mind the acute comprehension that their philosophy, the faith in measured intervention, in gentle balance, had proved inadequate before a threat that obeyed no law.
When your rules do not apply to your enemy, the rules themselves look like liabilities. That realization hollowed her until the hole became a compass: the only rational aim left, she concluded, was to guarantee that such a catastrophe could never happen again. But intentions are not moral absolutes; they are vectors. The vector she chose pointed toward dominion.
What is crucial, and what will remain the single pivot of this version of events, is that her corruption is not born of caprice or bloodlust. It is born of a desperate, almost utilitarian calculation: to prevent another wholesale slaughter by a creature that disregards law, one must possess and wield power in a way that binds even such creatures.
That syllogism is neat and terrible. It provides cover for cruelty because the surface motive, preservation of life, reads as noble.
It also collapses any distinction between defense and preemption. If survival is the ultimate good, then any measure that secures survival can be argued into necessity.
The West's mind, razor-honed by loss, folds the argument into itself and arrives at an axiom: absolute power, in the hands of a vigilant guardian, is the only sure prevention.
Before she could enact anything, before the universe swallowed her and recited its new quiet, the West altered herself.
That alteration is the centerpiece of this, the inner dissolution that allowed a guardian to morph into a would-be architect of dominion.
It is necessary to trace the internal motions with care because the moral line is thin: at what point does the will to protect become the will to command? The West crossed that line in a sequence of small, private acts that were, when taken together, transformative.
First came a renunciation of the old humility. Where earlier she had been a steward who asked and petitioned, the scale of the calamity taught her that entreaties are for polite courts; predators answer only to force.
She abandoned the rhetoric of consensus. The soft cadences of Supreme Kai pronouncements grew sharper in her mind into edicts. The language of guardianship hardened into the grammar of governance.
Second, she internalized the calculus of risk into a doctrine of preclusion. If a threat could not be controlled after it arose, then it must be neutralized before it can arise.
In the quiet of the seam where she hid, she rehearsed the syllogism until it was axiomatic: prevention equals preemption; preemption equals authority; authority must be absolute to be effective.
The thought loop radiated outward into each of her nights and days: the fewer the variables, the fewer the chances for another Buu. The fewer the independent centers of power, the easier to enforce such a sanctuary.
Third, she reoriented love into instrument. Love of worlds, of the soft passing of new life, became converted into a single procedural aim: to ensure those lives continue by whatever means necessary.
The tenderness that had once undergirded her decisions calcified into a will to choose outcomes, not to negotiate them. Mercy became a privilege dispensed by her discretion rather than a universal condition.
These shifts were not theatrical conversions; they were accretions. Each step justified the next. Each justification was hammered by memory. The West's mind, to survive the memory of the Grand's absorption and the sight of her colleagues' annihilation, sought certainty in a domain where certainty is a lie.
It is at this hinge that corruption becomes visible and narratable. Corruption here is not an external possession but an internal reorientation: a moral logic corrupted into a rationale for absolute control.
In the seam she swore a private oath not to plead with the world again. She vowed to be the kind of power that breaks the cycle that had killed her fellows. The vow was simple, almost childlike: never again. But the simplicity hid the gravity of her intent. To keep such a promise would require instruments far beyond the traditional portfolio of a Supreme Kai.
The thing about absolute power is that once the mind imagines it as the singular corrective, other possibilities suddenly appear as obstacles.
Dissent is recast as a hazard. Distribution of authority is recast as vulnerability. The moral imagination atrophies under the weight of a chosen certainty: that one mind, one will, one architecture of enforcement can stand in for the failings of many.
In that moment of private crystallization the West ceased to be merely a survivor; she became an organism of calculation, learning that to be guardian one must sometimes take the shape of sovereign.
She did not, in this telling, move immediately to edifices or wars. She did not yet found institutions or conquests.
The story stops cleanly at the transmutation: she is physically alive, and the sight of the slaughter has become a lamp to which she fixes her will.
In the hide of the seam she fastens the promise into the folds of her spirit. The last image of this story is not a field of battle or a courtroom of decrees; it is a close, private moment of conversion.
There she stands, not triumphant but hollowed, eyes like small moons in a dark sky. The echo of the Grand's voice, or the echo of whatever had been swallowed, rumbles as a memory in her bones.
The names of the dead gather like winter leaves at her feet. She breathes. In that breath a new resolve forms: the thought that to prevent such catastrophe, she must become the instrument of an absolute check, a power that would brook no rival because rivals are vectors of failure.
This is the crownless coronation. It is an internal coronation. It requires no subjects to be valid. It is an inward taking of a throne that she will not yet wear before the chapter closes, but which she has accepted into the architecture of her spirit.
In this state she is a pivot: neither fully tyrant nor fully guardian, but the raw material of both. Her desire for absolute power is not a lust for domination in the petty sense; it is a single-minded devotion to an aim so absolute that it displaces the old pluralisms of her office.
The universe, in the small quiet of the seam and in the charred vastness that still smells faintly of the Grand's last light, holds its breath.
The West has survived. She has changed. The lethal clarity of the assault has carved her into someone who believes that only an unshared authority can secure the continuance of beings she loves. That belief is now a wound and a tool at once.
And so it ends: not with a war, not with a coup, not with the detailing of ministries and sieges. It ends with a single, terrible and resonant human shape, a deity who once tended births and thresholds, converted by grief into a mind that demands absolute control to prevent recurrence. She is alive. She is corrupted. She has chosen the vector.
----
[Planet Sadala: Unknown Age]
Planet Sadala was burning, not just with physical fire, but with an ancient fury that corroded families, cities, and the very identity of the Saiyans.
Eons ago, the warrior race was born on this harsh and bloodthirsty world; in many versions of the story, Sadala was the first homeland of the Saiyans, a planet whose destruction came from its own internal violence, echoing in mythology that has spanned millennia.
Even in the tumult that shook the sky, there were places that seemed, by a whim of fate, untouched: hidden green valleys, rivers that followed routes the generals no longer remembered. It was in one of these pockets of silence that something unexpected happened.
The forest gave no warning. A blue glow split the twilight between the treetops, not the gentle blue of the sky, but an electric blue, cold and precise, like a contained lightning bolt.
The glow gathered and condensed into an impossible geometry: lines, spinning rings, gears that weren't metal, and then a capsule materialized, hovering a few feet above the ground, spilling shimmering vapor that smelled of ozone and old machine oil.
At first glance, anyone would have assumed it was the same invention that Bulma Brief would create many ages later: a classic time machine, with its panels and visor.
But there was something on the helmet's chest, an alternate crest, unfamiliar and austere: the symbol of the Time Patrol, a seal that promised order where time was disturbed.
The machine bore the functional coldness of temporal technology and the signature of those who watched over the threads of history.
The door opened, the air vibrating. Two men descended a corridor of light, a pair that seemed plucked from two distinct eras and placed there as if the universe, on a whim, wanted an out-of-order encounter.
The eldest stood first. His hair and beard were as white as faded coal, spiky and thick, as if each strand held memories of battle; his expression was that of a commander who never faltered.
His armor resembled the old Saiyan uniform, but modernized: navy blue with gold and white trim, reinforced plates on the abdomen, shoulder pads that looked like miniature shields, and, in the center of the chest, the unusual symbol of the Capsule Corp, a sign of the final connection between that man, a planet, and a family that would flourish on the distant Earth.
He walked as if carrying kingdoms in his body, a tougher, older Vegeta, but with the discipline and majesty of a tired king.
Beside him stood a young man with lilac hair falling to his shoulders, blue eyes as hard as worn ice, a flowing black robe, and a sword concealed on his back.
The sash across his chest said he was not just a swordsman, but a ranger.
Xeno Trunks.
In his left hand, the finger points forward, almost instinctively, as if feeling the path before walking.
He looked at the older man and, in a voice that mixed authority with the bitter affection of someone who called his mentor "father," asked:
"Are we at the right place, Dad?"
Vegeta didn't smile. The answer came short and firm:
"We're here. Toras should be nearby. Trunks, go to the riverbank; I'll go to the city. Go slowly, we don't want to scare the man, and don't let anything escape your field of vision."
Trunks nodded, his eyes shining with determination. The mission brooked no hesitation. They were time patrollers, soldiers of chronology, and every deviation could tear the line that would lead to futures that did not yet exist.
When Vegeta left, it wasn't like a man moving: it was like a thunderclap that separated itself from the sky. In moments, he disappeared into the horizon, a tiny dot that grew until space opened up at his feet.
On the outskirts of a village, the scene that awaited him was the opposite of silence: broken houses, ripped-out doors, dark stains painted on the boards, marks of struggle and death.
The air burned with the metallic smell of blood and singed hair; children murmured, and a subtle howl gave soul to the pain.
At the center of the horror, a scene that in itself was enough to freeze muscles: a family of Saiyans, father, mother, brothers, fallen like dolls pulled from invisible strings.
There was only one survivor, a small boy with wild black eyes, spiky black hair, and skin covered in dust and tears.
A tail wrapped around the waist like an ancestral symbol.
Salarok.
He was shaking, breathing quickly, and stared at Vegeta as if he were the definition of a hero from a fairy tale.
But the reason for the massacre was more terrifying than the remains: a towering presence, the very caricature of cruelty personified.
The creature that rose from the wreckage was a demon in humanoid form, skin reddish like embers under ash, angular face, pointy ears, fangs exposed in a smile that promised nothing but pain.
From the nape of his neck came two long black locks that jutted forward in the shape of curved horns, like ripples of shadow that formed demonic horns when he tilted his head.
The suit vibrated scarlet red and black; gold ornaments with green spheres blinked like eyes at the edges of the chest and waist; a long black cape fluttered, and a curved sword, with a gleaming blade and a blue hilt encrusted with a green gem, hung in his right hand.
The figure walked as if treading on herds. Its nails were claws; its words were poison.
Vegeta, upon landing, sounded as if he had torn an order from the past:
"Dabura!"
The demon smiled, a long, mocking smile, and replied in a voice that was a dry challenge:
"What an honor, the prince of time came in person."
It was Xeno Dabura: not the demon king some would remember out of condescension, but a version history dared to copy and refract. His gaze sought Vegeta with predatory interest.
"Did you come to bother me for fun?"
Vegeta clenched his fists until the metal creaked.
He attacked first.
The duel unfolded in the sky. Vegeta spared no ceremonial moves: first, slashing hand strikes, then ki blasts that caused windows to collapse and mounds of earth to evaporate.
Dabura responded with blade strikes that sang through the air, leaving trails of wind and sparks; when the metal of the sword grazed Vegeta's gloves, the clash sounded like thunder against a mountain.
Each blow seemed to rewrite the terrain: craters sprouted; trees turned to ash; the ground shook. They exchanged messages in the language only warriors understand, blows that said "I am stronger," "do not underestimate," "this is my domain."
Vegeta let out a harsh laugh, going beyond reason. The aura around him exploded with amber light, a spark that accelerated, covering his body, and in an instant, his entire physiology changed.
Hair stretched out in a golden stream that cut through the air, eyes glowed, eyebrows disappeared: a roar of energy invaded the forest.
Old Vegeta, whose mane and beard were white as snow, became a titan of light, and the roar was the announcement: Super Saiyan 3. His hair hung long down his back; his aura trembled with electricity, and the wind became a festival of bleeding leaves. There was, in that transformation, something beyond power: a decision.
Vegeta didn't use that form without purpose.
Dabura arched an eyebrow. He wasn't an amateur either: he absorbed the change with a wide smile and launched himself.
The blade made a cut that vibrated in space; Vegeta's hand formed the classic gesture: two hands joined, energy compressed, a purple light was born between the fingers, he released the Galick Ho.
The wave came out like a violent, compressed dawn that tore through the sky and turned night into noon for a few heartbeats.
Dabura responded with an energy blast of his own, a blast that seemed to have been ripped from shadow children of fire, a black mass with green veins that bent the air toward it. The impact between the two was apocalyptic.
The clash was a clash of titans: clouds exploded into swirling eddies, shock waves swept across mountains, and for an instant the world folded around the battle.
The light was so bright it pained the eyes of those who saw it; the sound was a groan that came from deep within the bones. Vegeta and Dabura pushed each other for every inch, exchanging blows at blurry speeds, each palm a sentence, each kick a condemnation.
Salarok watched, clinging to the bar of a broken board, his eyes wide and wet; Trunks, in the distance, felt each slash through his ki like a blade through his chest.
At the climax of the confrontation, the energies met again. Galick Ho against the dark blast, two incompatible forces.
Vegeta pushed his body to its limit, pouring everything into every fiber of his being: memories of solitary training, of pride, of broken promises, and of what could still be saved.
The beam pierced through Dabura's attack and tore straight through the demon. He fired his last resort, a dispersion spell that was supposed to pulverize the prince of time's body and rewrite what was left.
The contact echoed in silence. As the light faded, something strange happened: where there had been flesh and armor, there was now only a trail of black smoke, and Dabura vanished.
It wasn't a theatrical death, nor a decomposition: it was an abrupt absence, as if someone had pressed a button and pulled a file from the world. Vegeta frowned, panting, irritated by the feeling of symbolic defeat; the enemy was repelled, but not definitively destroyed.
After the dust settled, Vegeta slowly landed. The Galick Ho had torn through the village, but the house at the very end where Salarok had taken shelter still stood, crumbling but firm.
Vegeta descended through the smoke and knelt. Words weren't necessary, but he had them.
"It's okay… I won't let you live in something like that."
His hands, which moments before had been compressing energy to annihilate, were now gentle. He gathered the boy into his arms; Salarok shrank back as if he were a leaf being carefully folded. Vegeta spoke firmly:
"I'll take you to a place where this savagery doesn't exist. We'll make you grow up in peace."
The boy looked at him, dark eyes burning with something resembling hope.
Vegeta's expression softened a bit, a shallow, almost furtive smile, like a flash of memory passing.
Meanwhile, Trunks had already arrived through the sky at the riverbank, where a quiet hut nestled among the rocks and the steady flow of water brought a simple peace.
Beside Trunks, Toras waited. The old man had thick white hair and beard, scars etched across his face, and a short reddish cape dancing at the edges; he exuded a calm forged by years of battle and reflection.
An old Saiyan who has been away from civilization for many years, living far from conflict and destruction.
Vegeta landed, placed Salarok at Toras's feet, and stood for a moment looking at the two.
The old man and the boy measured each other with the honest silence of those born to fight, but found immediate respect in the other's gaze.
Trunks, with a whisper that held tenderness and surprise, murmured to Vegeta as he watched Salarok:
"He really looks like Mr. Goku…"
Vegeta smiled, a different smile from the one he usually gave in battle: it was almost a historical wave.
"Of course."
He responded with that serious tone that used to end arguments.
"After all, he is Kakarot's ancestor. There is something inevitable about blood carrying seeds."
Toras bowed his head and accepted the responsibility with a nod. He had already decided, when Trunks spoke to him earlier, that he would take care of this boy; the forest would give him a chance to grow up away from the hatred that corroded the city.
Vegeta, then, with one last look that seemed to hold promise, stood up next to Trunks. They needed no grandiose words; the mission was accomplished.
The old guardian held Salarok's hand for a moment, then retreated to the hut. The boy glanced back once, saw Vegeta in the sky, and something like a childish reverence would arise there.
The two time patrollers flew towards the machine again, leaving a trail of light.
Trunks took one last look at old Toras and the boy who might one day carry on a legacy of strength and honor.
Vegeta said nothing more; their silence was conversation enough. And so, the time capsule reappeared with the same coldness that had brought it, and then it departed, taking with it those two warriors who existed outside the order, caretakers of a line that needed to be kept intact.
At that moment, in the small clearing, the air breathed deeply. Remnants remained, but also the beginning of something: a boy with steady eyes, an old man to guide him, and two figures returning to the flow of time, aware that the truth of the past could be changed, or preserved, by the right hands.
Vegeta, as the machine closed, stared at the red horizon of Sadala and thought briefly about the ages he still had to save.
At some point in the distant future, a boy named Kakarot, or rather Son Goku, would raise the world into another sphere.
There, in that scarred silence, a weary prince turned his back and, as he departed, left the promise that not all time would be violent, because there were those who patrolled its edges, with fist, honor, and a precision that the universe would yet learn to fear.
"Toras…"
Trunks muttered, as the capsule disappeared.
"Take care of him."
And Sadala's civil war continued, but in some random forest, an isolated gesture had saved a spark that could one day ignite something different: not destruction, but rebirth.