Beep-beep-beep~
Just then, an urgent, high-priority alert screamed from Dodoria's scouter. The message was terse and absolute: Frieza-sama's order: All forces, immediate withdrawal.
A wave of profound relief washed over Dodoria, immediately followed by a spike of sheer, electric terror. He looked at Bardock—the Saiyan's eyes still blazed crimson, his power a palpable storm—and felt only one imperative: Run.
Without a word, without a glance back at his soldiers, Dodoria erupted with ki, shooting skyward like a lavender comet, desperate to put distance between himself and this suddenly monstrous low-class warrior, and more importantly, to escape the planet itself.
Bang!
But the sound wasn't of his escape. It was of an interception. Bardock moved not with speed, but with an instinct that bent space. He was there, above Dodoria, a foot lashing out to kick the fleeing general back to earth like a meteor.
BOOM!
Dodoria cratered the ground anew, blood trickling from his lips. "Damn it!" he snarled, scrambling up, his eyes a maelstrom of shock, rage, and, above all, escalating fear. He wasn't afraid of Bardock's newfound power, not truly. He was afraid of the order. Frieza had given the retreat command. That meant the planet's death warrant was seconds from being signed. Staying meant being erased.
Ignoring Bardock, he tried to flee again, his movements frantic.
Hm? Bardock's furious momentum faltered. Dodoria's panic wasn't from him. Something else, something far worse, was happening. A deep, primal dread seized him.
Bang! Fueled by this new, chilling unease, Bardock's aura flared brighter, hotter. He shot after Dodoria, blocking him once more.
"Bastard! Get out of my way!" Dodoria shrieked, lashing out in a blind panic.
They exchanged two more blows before Dodoria's entire body froze. His eyes, wide with a horror that had nothing to do with Bardock, snapped upward toward the sky. Instinctively, Bardock followed his gaze.
What he saw stole the breath from his lungs.
High above, blotting out the stars, a sphere of energy was descending. It was not an attack; it was an event. A miniature sun of pure annihilation, swelling as it fell, its light casting long, stark shadows across the entire continent. The Planet Destruction Ball.
"NO!!!"
The roar tore from Bardock's very soul. He forgot Dodoria, forgot the battle, forgot everything. He became a streak of blazing white light, shooting vertically into the sky, a single, defiant mote racing to meet the apocalypse.
On the ground, Saiyans looked up. Their ferocity, their battle-lust, evaporated. They saw the scale of the oblivion descending upon them. Despair, cold and absolute, settled over the planet.
Yet, against that backdrop of universal hopelessness, one figure rose. Bardock, the anomaly, the low-class warrior who felt too much. Enveloped in a corona of desperate, white-hot ki, he flew toward the end, not away from it. He placed himself between his people and extinction.
"FRIEZA!!!" His voice was a thunderclap of defiance lost in the vacuum.
He raised his hands, pouring every ounce of his being, every spark of his strange, surging power, into a counter-energy ball. It grew, fueled by a will that refused to break, a love for his home and his kind that defied the cold calculus of destruction.
It can be done!
It must be done!
His energy sphere, a tiny star of hope and rage, expanded to meet Frieza's planet-killer. For a heartbeat, they hung in the sky, a colossal violet orb of death and a fiercely shining white orb of defiance, on a collision course with destiny.
Yet, even as Bardock's will burned with the fire of a thousand suns, the gulf in raw power was a chasm of cosmic scale. His desperate, full-power energy blast, the strongest he had ever unleashed, struck the surface of the descending Planet Destruction Ball.
It was a pebble thrown into a star.
The white sphere of his defiance was snuffed out without a flicker, absorbed without resistance, not even slowing the cataclysmic orb by a fraction of a millimeter.
In that final, agonizing moment, as the annihilating light washed over him, Bardock's eyes held only a sea of impotent rage. He could do nothing. His body, his spirit, his last stand—all of it meant less than nothing.
Swoosh.
Contact. His flesh, his bones, his very essence, vaporized into motes of light, erased from existence.
"Bardock!"
The last sound to reach his dissolving consciousness was her voice—Gine's. He managed a final, straining turn of his head. He saw her, his wife, tears streaming down her determined face as she rushed forward, not away. He thought of Kakarot and Raditz, his sons, light-years away.
His mouth opened, a final, silent word meant for them all, lost to the roar of the void.
Then, the Planet Destruction Ball swallowed the space where he had been and continued its inexorable descent.
In the cold silence of space, Frieza watched from the viewport of his ship. He had seen the tiny, defiant flare of light rush upward. For a fleeting second, a flicker of curiosity had sparked. Perhaps…?
But no. It was snuffed out instantly. How predictable. How utterly boring.
He leaned back, a smile playing on his lips, ready to enjoy the grand, cleansing fireworks of a planet's death.
Beep-beep-beep-BEEEEEP!
The emergency alarm from his scouter was a shrieking, digital banshee. Frieza's head snapped to the side. The numbers on the display, designed to read up to 530,000, were going haywire.
Tens of thousands… one hundred thousand… two hundred thousand… three hundred thousand…
They were climbing in violent, impossible leaps.
BANG!
The scouter on his ear, overloaded beyond its design limits, exploded in a puff of smoke and sparks.
For the first time in living memory, a cold, sharp prickle of something other than amusement ran down Frieza's spine. His crimson eyes narrowed, locked onto the green planet below. All languid amusement vanished, replaced by a razor-sharp focus.
Could it be…? Could that ridiculous legend… be true?
A sliver of unease warred with a sudden, thrilling surge of excitement in his chest. The boredom of the extermination was gone. Something unexpected was happening.