"He will recover slowly in the future... He is still young, his brain is still developing, and the memory of childhood is inherently unstable. When he grows older, those memories about Planet Vegeta may surface automatically." Bardock stepped forward and stretched out his hand to gently press his wife's shoulder.
"We'll return immediately. It's been several days since we left Planet Vegeta, and we've wasted too much time going back and forth. That bastard Naseru is still alive and well, and I don't want him to live another day." Gine raised his hand and quickly wiped the corners of his eyes, then turned and walked toward the cockpit.
Her steps became crisp again, and she looked completely different from when she held her son and cried bitterly.
"Naseru killed Raditz... we must not let it go like this. Raditz died on his home planet, at the hands of his own compatriots. This way of death is even more unacceptable than dying on the battlefield." Bardock's voice came from the back cabin, and his tone returned to the calmness of a battle-hardened person, but underneath this layer of calmness, there was an active volcano that could erupt at any time.
"Bardock... are you sure you can beat him? Naseru is an elite warrior. The number of Combat Power recorded in the file is close to 10,000. He has been outside these years All the tasks performed above are the most dangerous high-level tasks, and the actual Combat Power may be even higher than the data on paper." Gine sat in the passenger seat and looked back at Bardock.
Bardock did not answer immediately.
He walked to the main driver's seat, his face as cold as a rock that had been frozen for a thousand years, and looked through the porthole to the vast starry sky that he had watched for most of his life. After a long time, he squeezed out two words from the gap between his teeth.
"Return."
"Okay... let's go back now. Kakarot has brought it back. Now it's time to give Raditz an explanation." Gine slapped the launch button of the spacecraft with one palm.
"Phew..."
The tail engine of the spacecraft suddenly burst out with a dazzling blue flame. The ship's hull shook violently and shot straight into the sky at an extremely steep angle. In just a few seconds, it broke through the Earth's atmosphere, leaving the beautiful blue planet behind and plunged into the vast sea of stars again.
Far away in the deep forest, Grandpa Gohan had just brought down a fat and strong adult black bear with his bare hands. When he was bending over to tie the bear's legs with hemp rope, he suddenly saw an unknown fireball with a long blue tail flame flying towards the sky in the opposite direction at an incredible speed.
"What is that?" Grandpa Gohan straightened up, held the awning with his hands and squinted at the blue flame that was getting farther and farther away, until it completely disappeared above the clouds and could no longer be seen.
After a brief moment of sluggishness, an inexplicable sense of foreboding suddenly seized his heart for no apparent reason.
He looked down at the bear that had just been killed on the ground, and then looked up at the direction where the light disappeared. Suddenly he threw away the hemp rope in his hand, took off his legs and ran towards home.
When he rushed back to his yard out of breath, the first thing he saw was that more than half of the vegetable patch in the yard had collapsed. There were three circular landing marks deeply sunk into the soil. There was still a faint residual warmth on the edge of each mark.
He rushed to the door of the cabin, pushed open the half-open wooden door, and stared straight at the small bed...
The bed was empty except for a few removed bandages and a small pillow he had sewn from rags.
"Goku... Where are you? Goku! Grandpa is back. Grandpa shot a particularly fat bear, which is enough for us to eat for several days!" Grandpa Gohan rushed out of the wooden house and stood in the yard, put his hands around his mouth, and yelled with all his strength into the mountains and forests in all directions with his hoarse voice.
The only thing that responded to him was the rustle of the wind blowing through the treetops, and the tinkling sound of the distant stream hitting the rocks in the mountain stream.
There was no familiar childish voice coming from any direction.
Grandpa Gohan shouted several more times, each one hoarse and each one lower than the last.
It wasn't until his throat could no longer utter any complete syllables that he finally stopped and stood alone next to the vegetable patch that was mostly crushed. He stared at the empty blue sky above his head for a long time with his old eyes that had become cloudy.
Planet Vegeta.
Every day spent by father and son Naseru and Nappa during this period was like walking barefoot on hot coals.
Naseru's face, which had always been filled with the usual arrogance of an elite warrior, now only had two deeply sunken eye sockets and a chapped and peeling lip.
He would pace back and forth dozens of times every day, from the courtyard door to the street corner, and then from the street corner back to the courtyard door, like a beast trapped in an iron cage.
Nappa's condition wasn't much better. He suffered from insomnia all night long. When he finally managed to squint for a while at dawn, he would always be woken up from nightmares by the image of Raditz being blown into a bloody mist.
The father and son once had the last bit of luck and sneaked to Spaceship Launch Base at night, intending to grab a spaceship and leave the planet, which they had regarded as a place to die.
However, when they walked to the entrance of the launch base, the guard showed the emergency edict personally signed by King Vegeta without saying a word.
The content of the edict is brief and clear: Naseru and Nappa, father and son, are strictly prohibited from leaving Planet Vegeta for any reason, taking any spaceship, or leaving Planet Vegeta.
The father and son returned home as dejectedly as two wild cats caught red-handed. After closing the door, they sat face to face in the dark living room and remained silent for an unknown length of time.
"Father... this is not the way to go. Bardock may come back at any time. We can't just sit here and wait to die." Nappa whispered.
"Of course I know there's no other way! Do you think I want to sit here and waste away! Every night when I close my eyes, all I see is the scene of Bardock rushing into this room and tearing me to pieces!" Naseru clenched his fists tightly and was silent for a moment, then suddenly turned his gaze to the completely darkened night sky outside the window, with a cold light of determination flashing in his eyes, "It seems... there is only the last way left to go."
"What else can we do? King Vegeta personally issued the order, and we can't even enter the gate of the launch base." Nappa leaned forward.
"Tonight, in the middle of the night... during the break after the patrolling guards change their shifts, we will sneak into Spaceship Launch Center and directly grab a spaceship to leave this damn planet." Naseru said the plan that he had rehearsed countless times in his mind.
"This is a good idea! The second half of the night is when people are most relaxed, and the guards must be too sleepy." Nappa nodded excitedly, and then frowned again, "But... even if we successfully take off, they should immediately send a faster spaceship to catch up, right? King Vegeta has several high-speed pursuit ships under its name, which are much faster than ordinary spaceships."