The ground beneath his feet cracked into fragments, and the rocks were pulverized in an instant.
Every rocky mountain within several kilometers collapsed. Dust surged skyward like an enraged beast, making the already gloomy sky even murkier.
The oppressive force was enough to make the entire planet tremble.
Yet at the very heart of the destruction, Broly stood like a boulder.
He pushed the energy within him to its limit, not to attack, but to protect himself with everything he had.
A green aura poured from his body. Rather than spilling wildly, it formed rippling layers that compressed one after another, eventually condensing into a massive energy shield a hundred meters across—like a green asteroid that had suddenly plummeted from the sky.
Inside the shield, Broly's gaze grew ever more resolute.
He began to use an ability he'd been honing for a long time: controlling and compressing the air.
He held his hands out as if pressing down on something, and an invisible force field immediately formed inside the shield.
Vampa's thin atmosphere rushed into the shield, its molecules compressed again and again under the pressure of his energy, growing denser until faint ripples became visible to the naked eye.
He compressed and replenished it without pause, locking the air within the entire hundred-meter space in place, as if forging a giant bomb with an atmosphere for a shell.
Under the immense pressure, the energy shield trembled faintly and gave off a deep hum.
Space began to warp, and a strange green halo refracted across the shield's surface.
At last, the compression neared its limit.
A glint flashed in Broly's eyes, and he abruptly stopped.
The terrifying energy around him slowly receded, leaving only the tightly compressed green shield, floating silently in place.
Light shimmered across its surface. Inside was an atmosphere compressed to its absolute limit.
At a thought from Broly, the shield lifted him and began to rise slowly.
A hundred meters across was nowhere near his limit, but it was the safest, most controllable range—and more than enough for his next plan.
The enormous green sphere gradually picked up speed, pierced the dust, and raced beyond Vampa's thin atmosphere into the cold depths of space.
Behind him lay only a ravaged landscape and the lingering aftershocks of energy.
A silvery-white energy barrier flowed like crystal around Broly, glimmering against Vampa's dark red atmosphere.
Inside the barrier, the extremely compressed air circulated steadily. With every breath came the familiar scent of a planet, mixed with dust and sulfur.
He bent his knees slightly, his leg muscles tensing. The rock beneath his feet shattered, and he shot skyward like a cannonball, tearing through the thick clouds with a long trail of energy streaming behind him.
The moment he broke through the atmosphere, the pressure and sound vanished, leaving only the absolute silence of outer space.
Broly floated at the edge of the planet and looked back. Vampa resembled a massive, rusted iron ball, scarred all over, turning slowly beneath the dim light of its star.
Before him stretched the boundless universe, deep as ink and flecked with countless stars. A galaxy of glittering diamonds flowed across the heavens.
The magnificent sight was reflected in his golden eyes, and a complicated emotion rose in his chest—one he couldn't quite name.
He remembered how, long ago, he'd huddled deep inside a cave and gazed up at that tiny patch of sky, his heart filled with nothing but burning longing—longing to escape gravity, cross the sea of stars, and set foot on worlds that existed only in legend. He'd wanted to clash with all manner of powerful warriors and witness incredible civilizations and wonders.
Now he had the power to shake the stars and reshape the mountains and rivers with a casual gesture, yet he was still trapped beneath this same sky by invisible shackles.
"Otherworlder..." Broly murmured in self-mockery, his voice echoing inside the energy barrier.
Energy surged through him like a river, and his muscles held enough explosive force to shatter an asteroid. But the very nature of life was an impassable chasm barring his way.
A Saiyan's body had ultimately evolved for life on a planet.
It needed air, atmospheric pressure, and specific temperatures and radiation to survive. In the cold vacuum of space, his body was, in the end, laughably fragile.
Even if he forcibly simulated a livable environment with his energy, it would only be a desperate, short-term fix.
The idea in those stories that "you can cross the universe with your bare body if you're strong enough" seemed utterly absurd now.
The vacuum wouldn't accommodate his strength. Absolute zero and lethal radiation wouldn't relent just because his aura blazed.
Here, survival was the most precious and harshest challenge of all.
Broly drew a deep breath, and the air inside the energy barrier trembled faintly.
"Let's see how long I can hold out." He looked toward the nearest point of light in his memory. There was theoretically life there, but it was so far away that even measuring the distance in light-years was enough to make him despair.
He didn't hesitate. His aura suddenly surged, and silvery-white light blazed.
He didn't choose conventional flight. Instead, he crossed his arms and swept them sharply forward! The space ahead seemed to be torn open by an invisible giant hand, warping like rippling water.
The next instant, his figure blurred and plunged into the distortion, vanishing without a trace.
Tens of thousands of kilometers away, somewhere in space, the same ripples spread, and Broly stumbled out.
A short-range space jump!
He'd spent countless years developing this technique, inching toward it at the edge of energy overload and loss of control, through pain and loneliness.
By compressing his energy to the extreme and releasing it in an instant, he forcibly tore open a temporary passage through the structure of space, achieving an effect similar to Instant Transmission.
The technique demanded exceptional precision and a tremendous amount of energy control, and it placed a heavy strain on his body.
At that moment, his insides churned, and the energy barrier flickered.
But he didn't stop. He immediately focused again, his golden aura meeting the silvery-white barrier as he tore through space a second time.
His figure flashed through the cold void again and again, vanishing and reappearing. Each time, he was farther from Vampa and closer to that faint glimmer of hope.
He was like a lonely shooting star, rushing desperately through the eternal darkness.
Behind him lay his shrinking home—the cage.
Ahead lay a distant shore, impossibly far away.
His energy drained rapidly, and the supply of compressed air inside the barrier visibly dwindled. Each breath became precious.
But he didn't stop. He couldn't.
This was his all-out attempt to break free from fate, using every means at his disposal. Even if failure was inevitable, he would never back down.
Besides, his destination lay dozens, perhaps hundreds, of light-years away.
So he had to compress the energy in his protective barrier to its limit before making each short-range jump.
Short range—the distance had to be controllable, visible to the naked eye.
He had to complete the folding and leap within that limited space.
You might ask: if that was the case, why not learn Goku's Instant Transmission, the technique he learned from the Yardratians, which could cross interstellar distances?
It wasn't as if Broly hadn't tried.
Day after day, he sat cross-legged on barren rock, closed his eyes, and strained to sense that elusive "energy signature."
But without any guidance or instruction, relying on only those few vague lines from the original story—"sense an energy signature, then move"—was like searching in the dark for a star that didn't exist.
What exactly was an energy signature? How could he find one? And how could he use it as a coordinate to tear through space? Whenever he focused, it felt as though he were casting his consciousness into a bottomless abyss. All he got in return was dizziness; he couldn't grasp anything.
To find another way out in the midst of desperation and work out the rudiments of "short-range Instant Transmission" on his own was already a testament to Broly's stubbornness and ingenuity as an otherworlder—his refusal to bow to fate.
Before you continue