Failure

"Still no..."

Broly raised his hand. The back of it was 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 his lips. "This distance isn't even a fraction of what I need."

His whole body felt broken, and deep in his soul, all that remained was exhaustion.

He forced himself to quickly assess what else he could do.

His energy was almost depleted, and his body had reached its limit. At most, he could manage two or three more forced jumps like that.

Even more frightening than running out of energy was the dwindling oxygen.

The alarm sounded like Death's countdown, pounding again and again against his eardrums and his heart.

Every breath had become a luxury, and his chest felt tighter by the second.

Hope flickered like a flame, nearly extinguished by the cold reality.

If he kept going, he would most likely use up his last bit of energy and vanish without a sound in this unfamiliar starfield.

What about turning back...

Broly took one last look into the distance. That was his theoretical destination, but now he couldn't even sense it.

The complicated emotions in his eyes—resentment, struggle, and helplessness—all sank at last into deep exhaustion and grim resolve.

He slowly turned around to face the direction he had come from. At least that part of the universe was somewhat familiar to him.

There wasn't really anything there that he could call home, either.

"Go back."

The words slipped quietly from his lips, hoarse and heavy. They fell into the dead silence like a helpless full stop at the end of this desperate charge.

He began to marshal what little energy remained in his body. No longer attempting to jump, he carefully steadied the energy shield that was on the verge of collapsing and slowly drifted back along the route he remembered.

His movements were slow, almost a struggle.

The starfield behind him remained vast and indifferent, making his solitary figure seem especially small.

The decision made his heart clench, as if an invisible hand had seized it. His breathing even stopped for a moment.

Forty-one years—an entire forty-one years—and all he had waited for was these four hours of lonely drifting through space. All his hopes, plans, and painstaking training... in the end, they had earned him nothing but that cold, merciless "go back" from the communicator.

It wasn't a rejection or a postponement. It was an absolute expulsion, with no room for appeal.

That feeling hurt more than an enemy's punch to the gut.

It was as if fate had throttled him from behind and slapped him hard across the face. Shame, despair, and anger twisted together, only for him to be casually tossed aside, sent streaking through the stars, and dropped back into this cage he had risked everything to escape—a cage so familiar it made him sick.

Broly didn't say a word. The muscles beside his neck twitched faintly.

Slowly, almost stiffly, he used his will to control that crude energy shield.

The faint green glow was like a candle guttering in the wind. As it turned, it dragged a weary trail of light through the dead silence of space. That was how he headed back toward Vampa.

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

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

It was right there, turning slowly and stubbornly in the eternal darkness—ugly, barren, and lifeless.

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

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 couldn't even be bothered to sense the energy on the planet's surface.

Disappointment and exhaustion weighed on him like lead. He simply controlled the energy shield and plunged toward Vampa's dark red surface.

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

A scorching red glow filled the viewport, and the violent shaking made the crude cabin rattle.

The surface rapidly grew in his field of vision, changing from a blurry red disk to a landscape of winding canyons and jagged mountains, then finally to an endless wasteland of charred black and dark red.

The wind, carrying scorching heat and grit, lashed wildly at the outside of the energy shield.

At last, with a dull thud and a cloud of dust, Broly landed on a stretch of hard, scorched rock on Vampa.

Cracks spread across the ground like a spiderweb.

The energy shield that had protected him for eight hours and carried his last shred of hope vanished with a soft pop.

Vampa's harsh environment swallowed him whole.

Scalding air rushed into his mouth and nose, and the stench of sulfur mingled with the dry, decaying dust of a million years, assaulting his senses.

Every cell in his body instinctively recoiled from the hostile conditions, but forty-one years of torment had worn that resistance down to numbness.

He didn't even furrow his brow. Only his lashes trembled faintly.

"Failed."

The dry words rolled from his throat like a weary sigh.

He lifted his head and looked at the dark red star forever hanging in the dusky yellow sky.