Broly looked up at the sky that had always weighed on him, so oppressive he could barely breathe.
The aged, dark-red star still hung in the leaden sky, miserly in its gifts, offering only a few faint rays of light and a little warmth.
It had smeared the entire wasteland with a color like dried blood. Cracks and rubble were everywhere, making it look like the last bones left in the world.
The planet was barely three thousand kilometers in diameter, a dead rock abandoned by the universe.
Broly was still its only intelligent life.
Still the exile whose name had been struck from his family's records, who couldn't even reach the nearest stars—the eternal prisoner.
The wind grew colder.
In the dead silence, his fingers slowly curled into fists, his knuckles cracking.
His hand was covered in scars, the years of wind and frost etched into his flesh. Now, though, it trembled slightly from the strain.
Sand trickled through his fingers, each grain like a countdown, waiting for a silent verdict.
"Why...?"
Those words hadn't come from his lips.
They seemed to grind their way out between clenched teeth, from the deepest corner of his soul, from the years forgotten, from every chain of pain.
Every syllable brimmed with the magma that hadn't cooled in his forty-one years—why was the only thing he could see when he opened his eyes this lightless cage?
Why had he been born a monster in everyone's eyes, a source of fear, a tool to be used, only to be thrown away as worthless in an exile's land?
Why could blood powerful enough to tear stars apart still not free him from this wretched rock and sand?
Bzzzz—
A deep resonance shook through him from the very depths of his body, arriving even before the light.
It wasn't his reason. It was an ancient instinct, suddenly awakening amid his boundless fury.
Then emerald light erupted—not fire, nor electricity, but something alive, a churning, surging energy.
At first, a thin layer of light wrapped around him. Then it swelled all at once, soaring skyward into a raging pillar of energy.
The air crackled as it baked. The light warped and wavered, and everything blurred and shattered, like the world seen through a blazing furnace.
"Why—!!!"
He shouted the words, and this time his roar tore through every last bit of restraint.
The sound exploded outward from him, shock waves surging across the ground in widening rings.
The bedrock beneath his feet, weathered over countless ages, instantly cracked like glass.
But the cracks didn't spread slowly. They exploded all at once!
Crack! Boom!
For several kilometers around him, the earth collapsed and disintegrated at once! Huge chunks of rock were flung into the air by an invisible force, only to be seized by an even more violent field of green energy, crushed, and ground to dust—until all that remained was a sky full of crystal dust, still warm to the touch.
At the heart of the vortex of destruction, Broly's body was changing too.
His untrimmed black hair, which reached his waist, turned emerald from the roots down.
The green was terrifyingly rich, uncanny, as if the life of a forest and the gloom of the deep sea had been compressed into a single drop. It was neither the gold of a Super Saiyan nor the crimson of the divine realm.
This color belonged only to ancient taboos and legends—it was the color of the "Legend" itself.
His face contorted in the blazing aura.
His black irises burned to molten gold, and his pupils narrowed into two sharp emerald points, like the eyes of a beast stalking its prey—cold and lethal.
With a series of explosive cracks, his body grew larger and taller. His muscle fibers seemed to be rewritten, becoming stronger and faster. Yet he didn't turn into a clumsy monster. Instead, his form took on an almost perfect shape, brimming with destructive power.
His old clothes had turned to ash when his energy first erupted. Now, all that remained on his body was a dense green aura, like a suit of armor.
This wasn't a "transformation" achieved through training.
This was the cage breaking, the beast let loose.
This was the "true self" sealed away for forty-one years, finally set free!
"Ahhhhhhh—!!!"
Broly threw his head back, the veins in his neck bulging, and let out a soul-rending roar at the eternally dim sky of Vampa.
Forty-one years of rage, loneliness, resentment, despair... every dark thing inside him erupted together, smashing through the last barrier.
A torrent of energy, a hundred times thicker than before and as solid as a giant pillar of jade, surged from his open mouth and every cell in his body, stabbing straight into the heavens! Wherever the beam passed, it didn't pierce through—it annihilated.
Vampa's dense, poisonous atmosphere was like a thin membrane, pierced by a red-hot iron spike. The planet gave a deafening, anguished roar as a horrifying hole blasted open.
But once this eruption of destruction burst beyond the sky, it didn't stop. It only grew more violent, more unstoppable.
It was no longer a pillar of light, but a green wave of destruction sweeping across the universe! Starting from Vampa, the torrent formed from rage and energy surged into the cold, lifeless depths of space.
It moved so fast it defied reason; even space itself trembled.
Along its path, an asteroid belt that had drifted for a million years was the first to be struck.
Stones of every size barely touched the edge of the green light before they were vaporized outright, without even a fragment left behind.
Farther away, several asteroids weren't hit directly, but the energy radiation alone knocked them off course, sending them tumbling into the unknown darkness.
The force warped the space around Vampa, sending out rings of strange spatial ripples, as if an invisible giant hand had crumpled the starry sky.
At the source of it all, Vampa was enduring the most violent agony since its birth.
Broly's roar was no longer a sound. It had become a continuous, high-frequency energy pulse.
The pulse burrowed into the earth, tore apart the rock layers, stirred the sea of magma beneath the crust, and finally slammed into the planet's core.
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