Failure

"Still not working..."

Broly raised his hand, the back of it still trembling slightly.

He wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and stared at the unfamiliar starfield before him.

A bitter smile tugged at the corner of his lips. "At this distance, it doesn't even count as a fraction of the way."

His entire body felt as if it were falling apart, and deep within his soul, only exhaustion remained.

He forced himself to stay focused, quickly calculating what he had left to do.

The energy within him was nearly depleted, and his body had reached its limit—at most, he could manage another two or three such forced jumps.

Even more alarming than the energy drain was the dwindling supply of oxygen.

The alarm sounded like a countdown to death, hammering against his eardrums and pounding in his heart over and over again.

Every breath became a luxury, and the tightness in his chest grew.

Hope, like a flickering flame, was on the verge of being extinguished in the face of this cold reality.

If he pressed forward, the most likely outcome was that he would exhaust his final reserves and vanish into this strange space without a sound.

But if he turned back...

Broly took one last look into the distance, toward his theoretical destination, though he couldn't even sense it anymore.

The complex emotions in his eyes—unwillingness, struggle, and helplessness—eventually all sank into a profound sense of exhaustion and resignation.

He slowly turned around, facing the direction from which he had come, the part of the universe that was, at least to him, somewhat familiar.

In truth, there was no real home to return to there, either.

"Go back."

The words spilled from his lips, low, hoarse, and heavy. They landed in the deathly silent space, serving as a bleak full stop to this desperate sprint.

He began to mobilize the pitiful amount of energy left in his body, no longer thinking of warping, but carefully stabilizing the energy shield that was on the verge of collapse as he drifted slowly back along the path he remembered.

His movements were sluggish, a struggle in every sense.

The starfield behind him remained vast and indifferent, making his lonely figure look incredibly insignificant.

The decision made his heart contract sharply, as if gripped by an invisible hand, and for a moment, even his breathing stopped.

Forty-one years—forty-one whole years. This was what he had waited for: four hours of lonely drifting through space, all his hopes, plans, and grueling training... in the end, they had only bought him a cold, merciless "go back" from the communicator.

It wasn't a refusal, nor a delay; it was a total, absolute expulsion.

The feeling was worse than a punch to the gut from an enemy.

It felt as if fate had grabbed him by the throat from behind and slapped him across the face—shame, despair, and anger churned together, only to be cast aside, discarded through the starfield, and dropped back into this cage he had fought so hard to escape, a place he had long since grown to loathe.

Broly didn't say a word, the muscles along his neck twitching slightly.

Slowly, almost stiffly, he used his will to manipulate the crude energy shield.

That faint, pale green glow was like a candle in the wind; as he turned, it dragged a weary trail of light through the dead void—and just like that, he began his return journey toward Vampa.

Four hours later, the familiar dark red planet finally reappeared at the edge of the porthole like an ominous stain.

There wasn't a ripple of emotion in Broly's eyes.

It was right there, rotating slowly and stubbornly in the eternal darkness, ugly, desolate, and lifeless.

The ravines on its surface looked like wrinkles on an old man's face, and the thin atmosphere glowed with a sickly red hue.

In his eyes, it was no longer a planet, but a natural prison.

He was its only prisoner, and he would be its prisoner forever.

He didn't even have the interest to sense the energy signatures on the planet's surface.

Disappointment and exhaustion weighed on him like lead; he simply controlled the energy shield to plunge toward the dark red surface of Vampa.

The energy shield scraped violently against the planet's thin atmosphere, erupting in a series of piercing shrieks, like metal being torn apart.

Outside the porthole, there was only a scorching red glare, and the violent tremors made the crude cabin rattle.

The surface expanded rapidly in his field of vision, from a blurry red disc to a landscape where he could make out winding canyons and jagged mountain ranges, finally becoming an endless wasteland of charred black and deep red.

Fierce winds, carrying intense heat and grit, lashed wildly against the outer wall of the energy shield.

Finally, with a muffled thud and a cloud of rising dust, Broly landed on a patch of hard, scorched rock on Vampa.

The cracked ground spread out like a spiderweb.

The energy shield that had protected him for eight hours, carrying his last sliver of hope, dissipated with a soft "pop."

The true environment of Vampa instantly swallowed him whole.

The scorching air rushed into his nose and mouth; the stench of sulfur mixed with the dryness and decay of ten thousand years of dust scrubbed harshly against his senses.

Every cell in his body instinctively resisted this harshness, but forty-one years of torment had long since ground that resistance into numbness.

He didn't even furrow his brow, his eyelashes merely trembling slightly.

"Failed."

The dry voice rolled out of his throat like a weary sigh.

He lifted his head and stared at the dark red star that hung forever in the dim yellow sky.