Ch. 203: Vegeta's Intense Training Regiment (2)

Vegeta could feel the weariness in his body mounting. At first, protecting his spaceship had been easy. There were a lot of rocks, but Vegeta was almost absurdly strong. For the first hour, he destroyed the meteors with single energy beams from the tips of his fingers, using it as shooting range practice. 

But unfortunately, there were far more meteors than Vegeta had expected. With no end in sight to the meteor shower, Vegeta had begun looking for different tactics, better, less straining tactics, relying on the control that he'd been training with single-minded determination ever since his humiliating defeat at the hands of that girl. 

That was three, maybe ten long days ago. Vegeta had lost track. This asteroid didn't have days the same way that Earth did, after all. With his focus situated on the meteors constantly threatening to destroy his only way home, figuring out what time it was had been Vegeta's last worry.

Despite that, though, he could feel himself improving, even as his body began to fail him due to lack of food, water, and sleep. He'd entered a sort of null state within his mind, where every single motion his body made was on impulse alone. 

Or more specifically, he simply didn't have the mental facilities to care about anything other than keeping himself upright, anymore. Still, the amount of energy in his body was still beginning to flag at an alarming rate. He knew that pretty soon, he'd have nothing left in the tank, and he'd be forced to watch, helpless, as his only way home was mercilessly destroyed by meteorites.

'home.' Vegeta hadn't thought that word since the day he'd learned that Planet Vegeta had been destroyed, but it came to the forefront of his mind now. Earth had become his home, hadn't it?

For the longest time, Vegeta had lived every single day for the sole purpose of killing Frieza and avenging his home, Planet Vegeta, but now, he subconsciously had begun considering another place his home, planet Earth. And for some reason, the idea of being helpless as something terrible happened to it was absolutely unacceptable for Vegeta.

When had it started? When had he been freed from his curse of hatred and revenge? Vegeta wasn't sure, but for the first time in his life, Vegeta had something he cared about. 

'they'll never know me, growing up. They'll never truly understand their heritage as the princes of the Saiyan race, without me there to teach it to them. They may even forget their Saiyan pride, becoming as soft as the other earthlings around them.' Admittedly, that last part wasn't so terrible, in its own way. They'd be happy and safe, but the idea of his own sons forgetting their Saiyan heritage made Vegeta's blood run cold. He knew in his bones that he needed to be there to teach them who they were. Nappa was the only one, other than Vegeta, who would understand what it meant to be a true Saiyan elite, but the idea of leaving his children in the large brute's hands... It infuriated Vegeta. He was going to be the one who taught his children about the duties they carried, as the princes of a dying race. He was going to be there. And no stupid meteor shower was going to get in his way.

That was the trigger. After all of this time, Vegeta's wish became true in that instant. His energy surged with the unrivaled force of a legend, despite his physical exhaustion. His aura surged with a golden light and his hair slowly turned blonde, standing on end in a way that it'd never done before. Instinctively, Vegeta now understood. He'd become a Super Saiyan.

This was his one chance. Vegeta's current power now dwarfed his original full power by so much that it seemed like a joke to even compare. If he couldn't use this moment to save his ship and escape this hellish asteroid field, he would be trapped here until he died of starvation. Just imagining his child one day finding this rock after searching for the spot in which his ship had disappeared, eventually finding nothing but his father's desiccated corpse, drove Vegeta nearly insane with rage. 

...

"Hey, Vegeta. Working on some new moves?'"Nappa had once popped into Capsule Corp and asked him that question in the midst of his training. 

''I was stronger than her, Nappa. Yet I still couldn't win. I figured out the path to becoming the greatest. Extreme control. I'll train to control my energy until I can run circles around Kakarot's brat using half the energy." Vegeta had roared angrily at his old friend. 

Nappa had simply shaken his head. "Vegeta, you need to understand that there may be some things that are simply impossible. I've seen her terrifying control. She could spread her energy and kill every single bug in a hundred mile radius without even leaving scorch marks. You'll never surpass a monster like that, Vegeta. Nobody can." He'd probably been right. It was likely impossible for anyone to ever surpass my energy control with the tiny quantities of energy available to us. Maybe Raika... but that was it. 

But Vegeta would never accept that. "GET OUUT!!!"

...

"I will surpass them all. HEAVENSFALL STARBREAKER!!!!" On earth that day, if you looked up towards the sky in the right direction, perhaps you would see a new star, blinking into existence for a single moment before fading once more. 

The technique was a crystallization of Vegeta's drives and ambitions. Spreading his energy out as far as he could, Vegeta locked onto every single piece of rock that he could sense. Then, in an instant, a blinding white light erupted out of him, a wave that would follow his energy and destroy every single rock as far as the eye could see, further, maybe, while still conserving his energy as best as possible. That was Heavensfall Starbreaker, a technique devised to literally break the stars as they fell from heaven. 

With that, Vegeta's Super Saiyan form disappeared, and he fell from the sky not of his own volition. Landing near his ship, he only barely managed to turn it on and instruct it to take off, back to Earth.