Berserk Awakening

Above Vampa's barren crimson wasteland, two figures tangled wildly like burning meteors.

Every collision erupted in blinding halos, shockwaves sweeping across the sky like ripples and tearing the already ruined surface below even further apart.

Broly shot out of a deep crater, the rocks beneath his feet instantly pulverized into dust.

The muscles all over his body swelled, and his right fist was wrapped in boiling emerald-green energy, its radiance so fierce it was like he held a miniature sun in his hand.

His fist tore through the air with a string of explosive booms, as though the sky itself were roaring.

The path of that punch forcibly ripped open a vacuum tunnel that lingered for a long time.

It was absurdly fast—so fast that even light refracted within that warped space.

Beerus floated thirty meters in the air, his purple robe utterly unmoving amid the raging currents, as if the winds of this world could do nothing to him.

Faced with a devastating blow capable of shattering an entire mountain, he did not even shift his feet. He merely tilted his head slightly, the movement clean and precise, as though he had calculated the trajectory beforehand.

Broly's fist skimmed past his pointed ear, whipping up a gust that sent the silver hair before Beerus's forehead flying high.

At the very instant Broly's attack exhausted its momentum, Beerus moved.

His right hand suddenly shot out, moving so fast it barely seemed human.

One second it had hung naturally at his side; the next, his five fingers had locked around Broly's wrist like a venomous snake.

His fingertips were as cold as metal, yet his grip weighed as heavily as a mountain.

Beerus gave a light pull along with Broly's forward momentum. The motion was as graceful as a dance, but Broly felt as though he had been crushed beneath a cosmic wheel. He completely lost control of his body and pitched forward.

With a turn of Beerus's wrist—it was nothing more than an extremely simple shoulder throw.

Heaven and earth flipped over. Broly felt the sky spin and the ground whirl as the blood-red sky and scorched earth crazily inverted before his eyes.

The next second, his back slammed heavily into Vampa's ground.

BOOM—!!!

That was no ordinary impact—it was the wail of the planet's crust.

From where he landed, spiderweb-like cracks spread madly in every direction, each one terrifyingly deep and as wide as a ravine.

Amid the dust, a crater over fifty meters across appeared. The rocks at its bottom had been flash-baked by the heat into glass that glimmered with a dim crimson light.

The shockwave hurled earth and stone dozens of meters into the air. Charred soil, shattered rock layers, and crystallized sand were all swept into the sky, slowly forming a mushroom cloud that blotted out the heavens.

At the deepest point of the crater, Broly lay on his back atop the scorching rocks, every bone in his body screaming.

He clenched his teeth so hard that blood seeped from his gums, mixing with the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth and dripping onto the rocks with a sizzling hiss of evaporation.

His black eyes stared fixedly at the purple figure in the sky. Deep within his pupils, something was awakening.

"Ugh—AAARGH—!" He let out a low roar and sprang up like a beast.

This time, his eruption was even fiercer. The crater floor beneath him collapsed again, and he shot toward Beerus like a cannonball, trailing a long emerald-green plume behind him.

"Your speed isn't bad, and your strength is passable." Beerus hovered where he was, arms folded across his chest, his tail lazily swaying back and forth.

His voice was terrifyingly calm, forming a stark contrast with the scene of destruction around them.

"But you're too straightforward. To put it bluntly, your fighting style is that of a mad bull that only knows how to charge forward. On a real battlefield, a brute like you wouldn't last three seconds."

Broly said nothing.

But his attack changed.

His left fist smashed in from the side at a tricky angle, aimed straight for Beerus's temple.

At nearly the same time, his right knee crashed toward Beerus's abdomen like a battering ram.

This was not the technique of a martial artist at all, but the killing instinct he had forged over forty years of battling all kinds of savage beasts in Vampa's wilderness—a two-pronged assault that sealed off the opponent's room to evade, every strike vicious enough to kill.

Beerus finally moved.

He did not dodge. He simply vanished.

He had been standing there one moment, then the next his entire figure blurred like a ghost.

Broly's left fist and right knee both missed, striking nothing but air. The sonic boom made even his own eardrums ache.

Just then, Beerus appeared half a meter to his side without warning, like someone rising from beneath the water.

"Too slow." Beerus spoke casually as his right leg swept out like a steel whip.

There were no tricks—just the most direct side kick.

But it was absurdly fast. Broly saw only a streak of purple afterimage. Its force was so immense that even the space around Beerus's foot twisted, with ripples visible to the naked eye.

BANG—!!!

The impact sounded too dull to be a blow landing on flesh. It was more like two mountains colliding head-on.

A sharp pain tore through Broly's side, and his entire body was sent flying like a soccer ball struck with full force, smashing through three rocky peaks in succession.

The first mountain exploded through the middle, boulders raining down; through the second, he plowed a tunnel through its belly and burst through the far side; at the third, he shattered its summit and went tumbling toward a distant ravine.

Finally, Broly crashed heavily onto the edge of a bottomless chasm.

He lay sprawled amid a pile of rubble and spat out a mouthful of blood, which quickly seeped across the scorched ground.

The searing pain in his side crashed over him like a tide—at least two ribs were broken, and his internal organs had been badly injured.

Every breath carried the taste of rust, and his vision began to darken.

"Is that all you've got?" Beerus's voice came from several kilometers away, yet it was as clear as if he were standing right beside him.

He made no effort to hide his disappointment, or even his faint irritation.

Broly's fingers dug deep into the rock, one inch, then two... His nails split, his knuckles turned white, and blood ran through the gaps between his fingers.

But he could no longer feel the pain. Or rather, the pain of his body had long since been drowned out by something far more violent.

It was rage, resentment, the savage fury accumulated over forty years of fighting the heavens and beasts in the wilderness.

And deep within his bloodline, there was that berserk power—suppressed by his father's control device for decades, yet longing to erupt all along.

"Cough... cough, cough..." Broly pushed himself up from the ground, his movements slow and heavy. Rubble clattered down around him, every stone stained with blood.

He wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth, as though every joint in his body were protesting.

Then he raised his head.

Deep within his once pitch-black eyes, an emerald glow began to emerge.

At first, it was only a pinpoint. Then, like ink dropped into clear water, it rapidly spread and bloomed through his pupils.

This was not the golden light of a Super Saiyan, but a more primal, more profound green—like the gloom in the depths of an ancient forest, or thunderclouds pressing down before a storm.

"It's not over yet." Broly spoke, but his voice had completely changed.