Abandoning Darkness for Light

Deep within the Water Drop Ship, inside the medical bay.

Pale green, high-concentration healing fluid bubbled away. Wearing a respirator and covered in tubes, Raditz floated inside a cylindrical glass chamber.

He was having a nightmare.

Beneath a dark crimson skyline, countless Saiyan warriors fell from the sky. The small demon seated upon a floating throne merely raised one finger, and a sphere of destructive energy crushed all of Planet Vegeta. Amid the desperate wails as the planet shattered, Raditz saw Vegeta's eternally disdainful face and heard Nappa's crude laughter...

In the end, it all became that black-haired young man who had shattered every shred of his pride with a single kick in the mud.

"No—!"

Raditz's eyes flew open, and he thrashed violently in the healing fluid.

With a sharp hiss of venting air, the glass chamber door slid open, spilling green liquid everywhere. Raditz crashed onto the metal floor like a discarded sack, retching up the remaining fluid and greedily gulping in air.

"Alright, stop throwing up. That healing fluid costs a fortune."

A crisp voice rang through the chamber.

Raditz abruptly looked up, baring his teeth like a beast driven into a corner.

At the control console, Bulma sat in loose pajamas, tapping at the keyboard without even turning around. "There are clean clothes on the table. Go wash up and change. Clean that alien mud off yourself."

"Earth woman?!" Raditz's memories came flooding back, and fury instantly surged through him. So what if he couldn't beat Kakarot? Couldn't he still crush an Earth woman?

With an angry roar, he was about to spring up from the floor.

Bulma finally spun her chair around. Holding a cup of coffee, she rolled her eyes at him without a hint of politeness. "Give it a rest. Stop yelling in here. If Goku hadn't said you were his biological older brother, I'd have tossed you, you stinking savage, into space as garbage."

Raditz froze, the strength he had just gathered locking in midair.

"I already threw your piece-of-junk scouter into the shredder." Bulma pointed outside. "After you wash up, head to the gravity room on the bottom deck. Your brother's waiting for you there, so don't keep him waiting too long!"

Looking at this Earth woman, who had no fighting power whatsoever yet dared to order him around, Raditz ground his teeth in rage. But just then, an utterly terrifying aura faintly drifted up from the ship's lower deck.

That ki carried an absolute, crushing dominance. Raditz swallowed hard and forcibly swallowed his anger as well. He roughly grabbed the black tracksuit from the table and headed for the washroom.

More than ten minutes later, Raditz, freshly showered and changed, followed the corridor to the alloy doors on the ship's bottom deck.

He pressed the button to open them.

Hiss—

The instant the doors slid apart, Raditz had barely stepped halfway inside when a tangible, terrifying gravity crashed down on him like a mountain!

Raditz did not even have time to react before he was slammed flat onto the floor with a bang. His cheek was pressed tightly against the icy metal, every bone in his body crackling under unbearable strain as the air in his lungs was violently squeezed out.

He struggled to move his eyes and saw the flashing red words on the display: 150G.

One hundred and fifty times gravity! In such an extreme environment, Raditz witnessed a sight he would never forget for the rest of his life.

The man called Kakarot was bare-chested, calmly doing one-handed handstand push-ups. The instant sweat seeped from his skin, the heat radiating from his body evaporated it into white mist. His breathing was as steady as if he were taking a stroll through a park.

Hearing the movement at the door, Son Goku flexed at the waist and lightly flipped to his feet, then casually pressed the shutdown button on the console.

The gravity vanished instantly.

"Cough, cough, cough..." Raditz felt as though he had been granted a reprieve, collapsing on the floor as he coughed and gasped wildly.

Son Goku picked up a towel, wiped the sweat from his face, and walked over to Raditz.

"You've been lying in the healing chamber for three days. Is your head clear now?"

Raditz braced both hands against the floor and slowly pushed himself up. Looking at this younger brother several years his junior, at that face identical to their father's, the inferiority he had suffered for so long under Vegeta's oppression, along with the humiliation of having just been crushed by gravity, suddenly erupted like a volcano.

Why?! He had fought his way through piles of corpses since childhood and had never given up on becoming stronger. Why did this low-class warrior, who had been thrown away to Earth like trash, possess such despair-inducing power?!

"Don't speak to me in that tone like you're lecturing a subordinate!!"

Raditz roared, his eyes bloodshot. He suddenly lunged forward, compressing all fifteen hundred units of his power into his right fist. Accompanied by a piercing sonic boom, he smashed it brutally toward Son Goku's face.

Son Goku did not even bother to dodge.

Facing the violent fist wind rushing at him, he casually raised his left hand, pressing his index and middle fingers together. When Raditz's fist was still half an inch from his nose, he lightly touched it.

Slap.

A dull impact rang out. The kinetic force behind Raditz's mountain-shattering punch was instantly dissipated completely. It did not even stir a single strand of Son Goku's hair.

"Your power is too scattered. You rely entirely on instinct to exert force. If you fight like that, in a few years, you might not even beat Earth's native martial artists."

Son Goku's voice remained perfectly flat. His paired fingers pressed downward along the motion, tapping Raditz's wrist joint.

Crack!

A sharp crack came from Raditz's right arm as it dislocated and hung limply at his side. Before he could scream, Son Goku's right leg became an afterimage, sweeping precisely into the back of his knee.

Raditz's legs gave out, and he dropped heavily to his knees before Son Goku.

In just a few seconds, it had been an utterly one-sided crushing defeat. Relying only on his understanding of martial arts and how to exert force, Son Goku had completely shattered all of Raditz's resistance.

"You rely too much on your scouter. You judge strength by numbers alone, and when you fight, you only look at whose energy wave is bigger."

Son Goku turned around and looked at him. "That's why you're just bottom-rung trash with a power level of fifteen hundred. Frieza never taught you how to control ki, because he doesn't need warriors who can think. He only needs obedient wild dogs."

"Frieza..." At the sound of that name, Raditz trembled all over. A flicker of fear flashed through his eyes, only to be immediately drowned by overwhelming humiliation.

He remembered what Son Goku had said to him beside the mud pit.

"Back then, you said... Planet Vegeta was destroyed by Frieza. Is that true?" Raditz raised his head, his voice hoarse. "But why? We Saiyans had always been fiercely loyal to him!"

"In the eyes of an emperor sitting high above everyone else, a dog's loyalty is worthless. It's the dog's fangs that keep him awake at night."

Son Goku walked to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of water, and twisted it open. "Saiyans are a race that can only break through their limits on the brink of death. Frieza feared us—feared the legend of the Super Saiyan. That was why he personally turned Planet Vegeta into fireworks. And you and Vegeta, proudly bearing the title of elite warriors, served the murderer of your father as loyal hunting dogs all these years."

Son Goku's words were like a poisoned blade, piercing precisely into the most vulnerable part of Raditz's heart.

Raditz stared fixedly at the metal floor.

He frantically searched his mind for reasons to refute him, but every detail from his time in the Frieza Force—the aliens' looks as though they were watching monkeys, Vegeta's contempt, the suspicious circumstances surrounding his father's death... everything came together at that moment into a bloody truth.

The collapse of one's faith was even more despairing than the torment of the flesh.

"That bastard Vegeta always treated me like trash, and Frieza toyed with us like monkeys..."

Raditz's shoulders began to shake violently. Slowly, he lowered his head deeply, his intact left hand clawing at the metal floor so hard that his nails curled back and drew blood.

"Dad and Mom are dead, our home is gone... and I still served our enemies like an idiot!"

A shrill, beastlike roar echoed through the gravity chamber.

Raditz suddenly raised his head. His savage face had twisted completely under the weight of overwhelming hatred and regret. He looked at Son Goku, all his earlier arrogance gone, leaving only a bone-deep thirst for revenge.

"Kakarot..."

Raditz gritted his teeth until they cracked, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. He slammed his head heavily against the metal floor with a dull thud.

"Teach me."

The two words were forced from his throat, carrying the resolve of a man with nothing left to lose.

"Teach me how to become stronger! I want to kill Frieza with my own hands! I want to crush Vegeta beneath my feet! I want them to know what an elite warrior they treated like trash can really do!"

Seeing the pure will to survive and burning fire of vengeance in Raditz's eyes, Son Goku nodded.

This was the true nature of a Saiyan. If he thoroughly brought out the resentment Raditz had suppressed for twenty years, then combined it with the system's gravity training and ki guidance, Raditz would undoubtedly unleash astonishing potential.

"I can teach you."

Son Goku tossed the empty water bottle into the trash can and turned toward the exit of the gravity chamber. "Saiyan training is about breaking first, then rebuilding. Getting beaten is part of the routine. Starting today, forget that ridiculous status of yours." Reaching the doorway, Son Goku stopped and glanced back over his shoulder.