Chapter 14: The Cost of Defiance
The silence Vegeta left in his wake was heavier than the planet's gravity. It was a vacuum, sucking all sound and hope from the clearing, filled only by the ragged, wet struggle for air coming from the ruin at their feet. Raditz and Nappa stood frozen, not in obedience, but in sheer, primal shock. The air stank of ozone, voided bowels, and the thick, cloying copper of Saiyan blood.
Nappa was the first to move. The giant took a step forward, his massive boot sinking into the churned, bloody earth. He looked down at what was left of Kakarot, and a sound escaped his lips, not a word, but a low, guttural exhalation of disbelief. It was the sound a man might make finding a prized weapon shattered beyond repair.
Raditz remained rooted, his hands still half-raised in his futile plea. His brother's blood was a fine mist on his armor, cooling against the skin of his face. He watched the shallow, irregular rise and fall of Kakarot's chest. It was less a breath and more a series of agonized, microscopic seizures. Each one produced a faint, sickening gurgle from deep within the crushed cavity.
"He's not gonna make it to the pod," Nappa finally grunted, his voice uncharacteristically subdued. He knelt, the movement clumsy for his size, his knees cracking. The ground around Kakarot was a dark, soaking mud.
"We have to," Raditz whispered, the words tasting like ash. He forced himself to move, to approach the scene of the slaughter. Every instinct screamed at him to leave the weakling to die, to let nature cull what their Prince had broken. But the ghost of Okure, of Kado, of a million extinguished Saiyan lights, held him fast. "We are the last."
Nappa reached out a hand, then hesitated, his fingers hovering over Kakarot's body as if it were a unstable bomb. There was no good place to touch. The chest was a concave nightmare of shattered armor and pulverized bone. One arm was bent at a nauseating angle, the white sharp edge of the ulna protruding through a tear in the black fabric of his undersuit. His face was a mask of swollen, purple meat, barely recognizable.
"You take the legs," Nappa ordered, his voice regaining a shred of its usual command. "Gently, you idiot. Any more shaking and his lungs will come out his mouth."
Raditz nodded, his throat tight. He moved to Kakarot's feet, his own hands trembling slightly. He hooked his hands under the knees. The contact made Kakarot's body jerk violently, a muffled, animal sound of pure agony escaping his bloody lips. Raditz flinched but held on.
Nappa, with a surprising and grim delicacy, slid his massive arms under Kakarot's back and shoulders. As he lifted, the true damage was revealed. A wet, sucking sound accompanied the movement. The back of Kakarot's armor was not just cracked; it was fused to the flesh beneath by the heat of Vegeta's initial blast. As Nappa lifted, a section of scorched armor and cooked skin peeled away with a sound like Velcro tearing, revealing the glistening, raw meat and the stark white of a fractured spine.
"Kami," Raditz breathed, his stomach lurching.
"Shut up and move," Nappa growled, his face a stony mask. He adjusted his grip, trying to keep the body as level as possible. A river of dark blood immediately began to sheet down his arms, soaking into the joints of his armor.
Their progress through the forest was a slow, macabre procession. They couldn't fly. The jostling would be fatal. So they walked, a grim funeral march for a man not yet dead. Every step was a negotiation with gravity and trauma. Kakarot's head lolled against Nappa's bicep, his one partially open eye showing only a sliver of white, rolled back into his skull. With every slight jostle, a fresh bubble of pink, frothy blood would form at his lips and pop.
They reached the clearing where Kakarot's pod stood, a silent, polished sphere amidst the primordial chaos. The ramp hissed down, revealing the cramped, sterile interior.
"Get the med-kit. The heavy one," Nappa grunted, pausing at the base of the ramp. His arms were trembling from the strain of holding the dead weight with such precision.
Raditz scrambled inside, returning a moment later with a large, gunmetal grey case marked with the Saiyan Empire's crest. He popped the latches. Inside, nestled in molded foam, was not the gentle equipment of healing, but the brutal tools of battlefield triage. Hyposprays filled with murky, green stimulant solutions. Clamps and sealants for arterial breaches. A vicious-looking auto-injector for bone-knitting nanites.
Nappa laid Kakarot on the cold, metal floor of the pod as gently as he could. The body made a wet, slapping sound against the deck. "Hold his head. Don't let him choke."
Raditz knelt, gripping his brother's skull. The feel of the cracked bone beneath the skin made him want to vomit. Nappa worked with a brutal, efficient speed. He ripped the remnants of the armor and undersuit away, exposing the full horror of the damage. The sternum was completely gone, a crater of bruised meat and splintered bone. With each faltering heartbeat, they could see the ragged, torn tissue of his lungs struggling to inflate.
Nappa grabbed the largest hypospray, jammed it against Kakarot's neck, and fired. The stimulant cocktail hit his system like a lightning bolt. Kakarot's body arched off the floor in a violent, seizure-like spasm, a raw, silent scream tearing from his throat before he collapsed back down, his heart hammering a frantic, runaway rhythm.
"Now the nanites. Chest cavity. Deep setting," Nappa commanded, handing Raditz a terrifying gun-like injector with a long, thick needle.
Raditz's hands were slick with sweat and blood. He positioned the needle over the worst of the damage, took a breath, and plunged it deep into the mess of Kakarot's chest. He pulled the trigger. There was a hard, mechanical CHUNK from the injector. Kakarot's body jolted again, but weaker this time, his systems overwhelmed.
Nappa was already working, squeezing thick, grey sealant into gaping wounds, using metal clamps to pinch shut severed vessels that pulsed weakly. It wasn't medicine; it was mechanics. They weren't healing him; they were patching a leaking hull, trying to keep the occupant alive long enough to reach a drydock.
Next came the regen tank. It was a coffin-sized cylinder in the rear of the pod, filled with a viscous, oxygenated amniotic fluid laced with aggressive cyber-organic repair agents. They manhandled Kakarot's limp form into the thick gel. tubes were snaked into his nostrils and down his throat. Electrodes were attached to his temples and chest. The lid hissed shut.
For a moment, nothing. Then, the fluid within began to churn, turning a murky pink as it filtered out blood and debris. Bubbles streamed from the respirator tube. On a small display, Kakarot's vitals flickered, a dangerously erratic heart rate, catastrophic organ damage, severe neurological trauma. The line representing his power level was a flat, near-zero smear at the bottom of the screen.
Nappa wiped his bloody hands on his thighs, leaving dark smears. "That's all we can do. It's up to the tank. And his damned low-class stubbornness."
Raditz stared through the viewport of the tank. His brother floated, suspended in the pink-tinged fluid, a broken puppet. The nanites would be swarming through his body now, stitching bone, mending tissue, scavenging raw material from non-essential systems to repair critical damage. It was an agonizing process, one performed without anesthesia for a Saiyan. Even unconscious, his nervous system would be screaming.
"He challenged Vegeta," Raditz said quietly, as if saying it aloud might make it make sense.
Nappa snorted, a harsh, ugly sound. "He got what was coming to him. But he's still Saiyan." He turned his back on the tank, his face grim. "Let's go. The Prince is waiting. This planet reeks."
Raditz took one last look at the figure in the tank. The fluid was already getting darker. He thought of the blue-skinned woman on the station, of the cold efficiency with which Kakarot had cleared a continent, of the sheer, stupid bravery of talking back to Vegeta. Something had changed in his brother. Something had broken long before today, and what was emerging from the cracks was terrifying.
He followed Nappa out of the pod, sealing the hatch behind him. The ramp retracted, closing Kakarot in with the whirring, clicking machines and the silent, painful work of rebuilding a body that had been turned to pulp. The cost of defiance was measured in blood and nanites, and the bill was far from paid.
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