He still clearly remembered Bulla's tiny hand reaching toward him as she babbled her first words, Bulma's smile beneath dark circles after staying up all night in the lab, and those fierce battles with Kakarot that had been enough to shake the stars.
The scenes were all still there, but that burning paternal love, that tender attachment, that boiling competitive spirit—those emotions seemed to have been drained away, rapidly vanishing from his heart.
Looking back now, those memories felt as though they were separated from him by a thick pane of glass.
They were obviously real, yet he could never touch them, nor could they stir even the slightest ripple in his heart.
In their place, an unfamiliar and icy emotion, carrying the bloody tang of rust, began to breed wildly within the hollow space in his heart.
Hatred.
Not anger toward a powerful enemy, nor frustration at losing a battle, but a hatred that had settled over countless years, steeped in the blood of an entire race.
Hatred for the Saiyan race itself.
Before his eyes appeared the wails of the Tuffles before their extinction, the sight of their civilization being swallowed by flames, and the curse passed down through generation after generation, one that could never be dispelled... These obsessions had been compressed, refined, and planted within Baby's core. Now, they all became the poisonous fire of vengeance, flooding wildly into Vegeta's soul through the bridge formed by the tentacles.
"No... Get out... I, Vegeta... won't be controlled by something... like you...!" he roared, but his voice was already trembling.
His teeth ground together with sharp clacks, nearly breaking apart.
Every muscle in his body tensed, veins throbbing beneath his skin like coiling dragons.
He threw every shred of his will into resisting that tide-like invasion, desperately trying