Kakarot shrieked with laughter as a root wrapped around his ankle. He didn't even try to dodge—just let it drag him toward a gaping hollow in the trunk. Raditz moved faster than I'd ever seen, gripping Kakarot's wrist so hard I heard bones creak. Their combined weight snapped the root like overcooked meat. The ground convulsed beneath us in response.
Bardock's scouter lit up with frantic purple warnings. He crushed it in his palm without looking. "Formation," he barked, but the word meant nothing to me—only Raditz fell instinctively into position, back-to-back with him. Something warm dripped onto my shoulder. I looked up into a canopy of teeth.
The first vine pierced Raditz's bicep with a wet crunch. He roared, not in pain but in outrage, ripping it free with a spray of black fluid that sizzled where it hit the mud. Bardock's grin widened. "Good," he said, and I realized with a jolt: this was our training. The planet was the drill sergeant. And failure smelled like digested flesh.
Kakarot had stopped laughing. His tiny hands clutched my tattered sleeve as the hollow tree belched out a cloud of spores. They glittered in the moonlight like diamond dust—beautiful until they landed on Raditz's armor and began dissolving it with a hiss. My throat burned with every breath, the air thick with the scent of melting metal and something worse: the sweet, cloying smell of the planet tasting us.
Bardock's tail whipped out to knock my knees from under me an instant before a root speared the space where my head had been. His eyes never left the advancing trees, but his voice cut through the chaos: "Weakness dies. But so does fear." The unspoken order hung between us—move or be moved, fight or be food. My fingernails dug into Kakarot's arm as I finally understood: there were no retrieval teams because we weren't meant to be retrieved.
The tallest tree split open vertically, revealing a pulsating throat lined with thorns. The howl it emitted rattled my ribs. But beneath it, fainter, I heard Mother's lesson—the one she'd whispered while braiding my hair the night before the pods launched: "The strongest survive. But the smartest live." As the tree lunged, I did something no Saiyan should: I closed my eyes. And listened.
The roots hit with the force of a charging Beebean rhinoceros, but I was already rolling, dragging Kakarot with me into the boiling mud where someone remains had been. The planet recoiled—its own corrupted flesh sizzling against ours. Raditz screamed something obscene, but Bardock's answering roar drowned it out: "Adapt!" I felt the word more than heard it, vibrating through my back where his tail suddenly pressed, guiding me sideways as bark-teeth snapped where my neck had been.