Whis nodded. The crystal ball atop the staff in his hand shimmered with starlight, as if responding to his thoughts.
"So, Lord Beerus, you think the Saiyan who caused such a commotion on Vampa might be the very baby who was exiled all those years ago?"
"It's just a possibility." Beerus's voice fell, and even his tail seemed to droop.
"Decades have passed. Vampa... That godforsaken place is so hostile that even the hardiest cockroaches in the universe couldn't survive there. It's hard to imagine an abandoned baby making it through even the first day."
Whis picked up the thread. His voice remained as calm as ever, but a glint of deeper meaning shone in his eyes.
"But what if he really did survive? What if, in that extremely hostile environment, where energy was scarce, he somehow made it this far all on his own—becoming strong enough to give Goku and Vegeta a hard time, and perhaps even surpassing the limits of Super Saiyan Blue..."
He didn't continue, only looking at Beerus with a faint smile.
Beerus understood what he was implying.
If someone really had survived in a forgotten hell like Vampa, breaking through his limits on instinct and sheer perseverance until he'd become this strong, then he wasn't just a genius. He was a legend in the making.
"Heh..." Beerus fell silent for a long while. Then a rare, excited smile crept across his lips, tinged with anticipation.
A gleam seemed to light up his crimson eyes.
"I thought nothing would interest me again before the Tournament of Power. I never expected there to be a 'surprise' like this waiting for us."
He uncrossed his arms and pointed toward the distant passageway, where countless streaks of light converged. "Whis, stop dawdling. Hurry up!"
"Of course, Lord Beerus." Whis replied with a smile, lightly tapping his staff once more.
The tip of the staff touched down, and space rippled more violently, like a stone striking the surface of a lake.
In an instant, the streaks of light in the hyperspace passage surged. The bands of starlight stretched into dazzling torrents, enveloping them as they hurtled toward Vampa.
On that forgotten, desolate world of intermingled crimson and gray-brown—the planet Vampa—
Broly stood motionless, like a bronze statue, his muscles solid and his green Battle Suit in tatters.
The rock beneath his feet, once at least somewhat intact, now lay cracked and scorched, scarred by the fierce battle that had just ended.
The thin, icy atmosphere swirled around his massive frame, carrying an endless cloud of dust that howled without cease.
The battle had long since ended. The heat in his blood had slowly cooled, and the rage that could tear stars apart had faded, leaving only bottomless exhaustion and an almost absolute silence.
He began to clear away the remnants of the battle that belonged only to him. His movements were slow, even a little clumsy.
Not far away, the soil at the edge of the ravine still bore fresh signs of disturbance.
Paragus—the man who had given him life, yet bound him in chains for all those years—was gone.
With hands that could crush rock, Broly dug a deep hole beneath the ravine's hardest layer of stone.
There was no coffin, no gravestone, not even a word of farewell.
He simply picked up the cold body in silence, handling it with extraordinary care, nothing like the brute force he was capable of.
Then he laid the body in the pit and covered it, handful by handful, with dirt mixed with fragments of stone.
At last, he pressed the earth down with his huge palms, making the spot look no different from the cracked ground around it, as though nothing had ever happened.
No marker, no ceremony. Like the stones that Vampa's sandstorms buried every day, it quietly returned to desolation and eternity.
When he was done, Broly stood perfectly still.
His green eyes gazed across the land that had been his companion for decades, cruel yet familiar. He looked toward the perpetually dim sky on the distant horizon and the faint star that hung there like a cold, indifferent eye.
The wind grew stronger, tossing his unruly hair and ragged cape until they snapped and fluttered, but it couldn't blow away the suffocating loneliness clinging to him.
He was like the planet itself: powerful, desolate, covered in scars, forgotten by the entire world.
He didn't really know why he had done any of it.
Perhaps forty-one years together had carved certain habits into his bones. Perhaps some instinct deep inside him still pulled him onward. Or perhaps he simply needed a reason—any reason—to keep doing something, rather than stand frozen like a statue forever on this silent wasteland.
Broly slowly raised his head, his black hair whipping wildly in the dry, hot wind.
He stared at the sky, his gaze passing through Vampa's ever-present, dust-laden orange-red atmosphere.
Beyond the deep darkness of space, at the edge of his beastlike senses, something was disturbing the void.
It wasn't a sound or a light, but a sense of something approaching.
Like a stone tossed into a still lake, the ripples were spreading at astonishing speed, heading straight for him.
"Am I imagining it...?" he murmured hoarsely, his deep voice almost swallowed by the wind.
He shook his head, trying to dispel the strange sensation that had come out of nowhere.
Forty-one years of solitude were enough to make anyone's senses dull and unreliable.
His heavy foot crushed a weathered rock. He was about to turn and return to the crude cave he had carved out of stone.
But just as his muscles tensed and his weight began to shift—
A beam of light tore through the sky without warning.
It didn't come from Vampa's dying star. It suddenly erupted beyond the atmosphere.
At first, it was just a blindingly bright point. Then it abruptly swelled into a mass of silver-white flames, impossible to look at directly.
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