Crushing

The monster was more than a thousand meters long.

As it raised its upper body from the fissure, its enormous shadow instantly swallowed the entire land, like a living black mountain rising from the earth.

Its whole body was covered in thick, glossy black armor that looked as though it had been forged from metal.

The edges of every plate were terrifyingly sharp, glinting coldly in the faint light of the dark red star.

Its body was divided into more than a hundred segments, each studded with meter-long spines.

As the spines scraped against one another with every movement, they made a metallic grinding sound that set teeth on edge and raised goosebumps.

But what made the blood run cold was its head.

Its enormous mouth gaped open like a fan, wide enough to swallow a small spaceship.

Spiral rows of razor-sharp teeth gleamed inside.

At that moment, dark red blood and scraps of torn clothing clung to the edges and crevices of its jaws—all of it Paragus's.

Hundreds of densely packed pairs of compound eyes studded the top of its head like strange gems embedded in its black armor. Every one of them was fixed on Broly, reflecting his solitary figure.

It let out a high-pitched shriek that seemed to burrow straight into the bones, making the mind throb.

Broly stopped.

He slowly turned his head, his golden eyes calmly regarding the towering monster that had just emerged, its killing intent surging.

His silver hair fluttered gently in the gale stirred up by the monster, and his simple Battle Suit snapped in the wind.

Yet he stood perfectly straight, steady as a rock, not the slightest ripple in his eyes.

"You killed him."

Broly's voice was so cold he hardly sounded alive.

He didn't shout or rage, and there was no grief in his voice. He simply spoke in a frigid, emotionless tone, as if stating the weather.

His voice was quiet, yet it pierced through the monster's shriek and the rumbling earth, carrying clearly through the air.

The monster seemed to sense some indescribable threat.

Its immense, swaggering body instinctively shrank back, its armor writhing more restlessly as the scraping of its spines grew even harsher.

Though Broly looked tiny reflected in its compound eyes, he exuded an oppressive presence that made its very soul tremble.

But the beast's ferocity soon overwhelmed its fear.

To the monster, the two-legged creature before it was unsettling, but it had just killed and devoured another Saiyan—the one who had used some device to suppress and enslave it for forty-one years, leaving it to live in fear night after night. His presence was gone!

The afterglow of victory, the ecstasy of breaking free, and the craving for fresh meat instantly swept away its unease.

"SKREE—!!!"

The monster roared more violently, blasting a foul, stinking breath from its gaping maw.

The next second, its mountain-sized body tensed and shot forward like an arrow!

Its enormous jaws, packed with razor-sharp teeth, opened to their limit as it lunged at the tiny silver-haired figure on the ground with enough force to crush mountains.

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

Broly didn't so much as shift his feet in the face of an attack that could level an entire city in an instant.

He simply raised his right hand at his leisure, as if brushing dust off his shoulder, and flicked his index finger lightly at the monstrous head hurtling toward him.

Whoosh—!

A hair-thin stream of emerald-green ki quietly shot from his fingertip.

It was so slender that it nearly blended into the dim sky, but the moment it appeared, the wild air around it seemed to freeze for an instant.

The stream of ki silently sliced through the air, pierced the hardest armor at the center of the monster's skull with pinpoint accuracy, and vanished inside.

Time seemed to stop.

The jaws that could bite through alloys halted abruptly less than three meters from Broly.

The immense momentum of the monster's charge seemed to be snatched away by an invisible hand, leaving its massive body frozen in midair.

Then—pfft!

With a muffled thud, the monster's head suddenly swelled from within, like a rotten watermelon crushed by tremendous force, and exploded with a bang!

Shards of black armor, dark green slime, severed nerve cords, and shattered compound-eye crystals shot in every direction.

Foul fluids poured down like a torrential rain, staining the charred ground below a filthy green.

Lifeless without its head, the enormous body plunged helplessly from the air like a vine severed at the root.

Boom—!!!

The thousand-meter-long bulk slammed into the ground, shaking it like an earthquake.

The earth groaned and collapsed into a massive crater as dust, rocks, and bodily fluids surged skyward, billowing into a gray-and-green mushroom cloud.

A gale swept past, carrying clouds of dust and the stench of blood.

Broly was still standing where he had been, not even the hem of his clothes touched by the filth.

Only a thin layer of condensed, invisible ki swirled around him, keeping every trace of grime at bay.

He slowly lowered his finger, his face utterly expressionless.

There was no relief at defeating a powerful foe, nor any satisfaction in revenge.

His golden eyes held only bottomless indifference.

This sort of monster might have been an apex predator on Vampa, enough to terrify countless native creatures.

But to Broly, it was just an ant he could crush with a flick of his hand—not even worth taking seriously.

Forty-one years of hard training, battle, and despair had relentlessly pushed his potential to its limits.

By now, his strength had long surpassed every creature on this planet, reaching an entirely different dimension.

Yet this absolute power stirred nothing in him.

The monster's death, Paragus's cold, mutilated corpse, the eternal desolation of Vampa, the mingled scents of blood and dust in the air... All of it came together to leave him with a bone-deep weariness and emptiness that seemed 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."