Crushing

The monster was over a thousand meters long.

As it heaved its upper body from the fissure, its massive shadow instantly swallowed the entire landscape, rising like a living mountain of black stone.

Its entire body was covered in thick, obsidian-black armor that looked as if it had been forged from metal.

The edges of every plate were terrifyingly sharp, glinting with a cold, metallic sheen under the dim light of the dark-red star.

The body was segmented into hundreds of parts, each bristling with barbs several meters long.

As it moved, these barbs scraped against one another, emitting a teeth-gritting, scalp-tingling metallic screech.

But what truly tightened the heart was its head.

Its colossal mouth spread open like a fan, wide enough to swallow a small spacecraft.

Rows of spiral-shaped, razor-sharp teeth glinted coldly within.

At this moment, the edges of those giant jaws and the gaps between the teeth were still smeared with dark red blood and shredded fabric—all belonging to Paragus.

High atop its head, hundreds of compound eyes were embedded in the black armor like bizarre, alien gemstones, each one fixed intently on Broly, reflecting his solitary figure.

It emitted a high-pitched, piercing shriek that seemed to drill into the bone, making one's head throb with pressure.

Broly stopped.

He slowly turned his head, his golden eyes calmly observing the towering, murderous monster that had just emerged.

His silver hair fluttered gently in the gale stirred up by the beast, and his tattered battle suit snapped in the wind.

Yet he stood straight, as steady as a rock, without a ripple of emotion in his eyes.

"You killed him."

Broly's voice was so cold it hardly sounded human.

He did not shout, he was not angry, nor was he sorrowful; he simply stated it in a tone devoid of feeling, as if he were commenting on the weather.

The voice was not loud, yet it easily pierced through the monster's screeching and the rumbling of the earth, drifting clearly through the air.

The monster seemed to sense an indescribable threat.

Its massive, arrogant body instinctively recoiled, its armor writhing with unease as the scraping of its barbs grew even more shrill.

Though Broly appeared small within the reflection of its compound eyes, he radiated a pressure that made its soul tremble.

But the beast's ferocity soon overcame its fear.

To it, while this bipedal creature was unsettling, it had just killed and devoured another Saiyan—the one who had suppressed and enslaved it for forty-one years with some sort of device, keeping it in nightly terror. That man's aura was gone!

The aftertaste of victory, the ecstasy of breaking free, and the hunger for fresh flesh instantly washed away its unease.

"Screeee--!!!"

The monster let out an even more violent roar, spewing a plume of foul, putrid air from its giant maw.

The next second, its mountain-like body tensed, and it lunged forward like an arrow!

Its giant, tooth-filled jaws opened to their limit, descending upon the small silver-haired figure on the ground with the force to crush mountains.

It moved so fast that the air blurred into a trail, and space itself seemed to shudder.

Facing an onslaught that could flatten a city in an instant, Broly did not even shift his feet.

He merely raised his right hand casually, as if brushing dust off his shoulder, and flicked his index finger toward the incoming, hideous head.

Shoo—!

A thread of emerald-green energy, so thin it was almost invisible, shot quietly from his fingertip.

It was so slender that it nearly blended into the dim background, yet the moment it appeared, the surrounding chaotic air seemed to freeze for an instant.

The energy streak sliced through the air without a sound and precisely pierced the thickest part of the armor in the center of the monster's head, vanishing inside.

Time seemed to stop.

The giant jaws, capable of snapping alloy, ground to a sudden halt less than three meters from Broly.

The massive kinetic energy of the monster's charge was drawn away by an invisible hand, and its enormous body stiffened in mid-air.

Then—pop!

With a dull thud, the monster's head bulged violently from within, and like a rotten watermelon squeezed by immense force, it exploded with a bang!

Fragments of black armor, dark green slime, severed nerve cords, and shattered compound eye crystals sprayed in every direction.

Foul-smelling fluids rained down like a storm, staining the scorched earth a filthy green.

The massive body, now headless, lost its life instantly and slumped from the air like a severed vine.

BOOM—!!!

The thousand-meter-long carcass slammed into the ground, shaking the earth like an earthquake.

The land groaned and collapsed, forming a massive crater as dust, rubble, and bodily fluids shot into the sky, swirling into a gray-green mushroom cloud.

A violent wind whistled past, carrying smoke and the stench of decay.

Broly remained where he stood, not a single speck of filth touching his clothes.

A thin, refined layer of formless energy swirled around him, shielding him completely from all the filth.

He slowly withdrew his finger, his face devoid of any expression.

There was neither the relief of defeating a powerful foe nor the thrill of vengeance.

In his golden eyes, there was only a bottomless, cold indifference.

A monster like this might have been an apex predator on Vampa, enough to strike terror into the hearts of countless local creatures.

But to Broly, it was merely an ant he could crush with a flick of his hand, not even worth a moment of his focus.

Forty-one years of bitter training, fighting, and despair had relentlessly squeezed every drop of potential from him.

Now, his strength had long since surpassed every living thing on this planet, reaching into an entirely different dimension.

Yet, this absolute power brought him no ripple of emotion.

The monster's death, the cold and broken corpse of Paragus, the eternal, desolate silence of Vampa, the scent of blood and dust hanging in the air—all these things intertwined, leaving him with nothing but a bone-chilling weariness and emptiness that threatened to freeze his very soul.

"Forty-one years of imprisonment, two failed attempts to leave, and now... even the last person I could talk to is gone."