Chapter 81
"Stop squirming—you'll rip your suit!" Gine hissed, wrestling Kakarot's flailing legs into the cramped escape pod. The toddler screeched, smearing purple plant sap across her visor as Bardock slammed the locking mechanism with a grunt. Outside, the pod bay shuddered under another impact, metal groaning like a dying
beast.
Raditz's voice crackled through the comms, ragged with static. "Engines at twelve percent. They're boarding sector nine." James—always too quiet, always watching—pressed his forehead against the porthole glass. His reflection stared back, warped by the swirling green acid rain eating holes in the docking bay floor
.
Bardock didn't bother with orders. He wrenched the emergency launch lever. Alarms howled as the pod tore free, throwing them all sideways. Gine's elbow connected with James' ribs. Someone's knee jammed into Raditz's throat. Kakarot laughed like this was the best game he'd ever played.
Through the rear camera feed: their ship's lower decks detonating in slow motion, taking half the Frieza Force troopers with it. The explosion lit up the poisonous atmosphere in brief, ugly orange before the clouds swallowed the light whole.
Raditz coughed blood onto his gauntlet as the pod's stabilizers shrieked. "We're overheating," he spat. Bardock's hands flew across the console—too fast for human eyes—rerouting power from life support to thrusters. The temperature spiked instantly. Sweat rolled down James' temple, stinging his split
lip.
Gine didn't scream when the gravity failed. She just clutched Kakarot tighter, using her own body to pin him against the seat as the pod began tumbling end over end. The toddler giggled, reaching for floating globules of his own spit. James thought he might vomit.
Then: the gut-punch of atmospheric entry, the sound of their heat shield cracking like eggshell. Through the viewport—blue. Impossible, endless blue. James had never seen an ocean before. His breath caught just as the first plasma fires licked at the viewport glass.
Bardock roared something wordless, slamming his fist against the navigation panel until the cracked screen spat out coordinates. Raditz swore violently when he saw them. "That's primitive territory!" Gine just smiled—the first real one since the evacuation alarms started—and pressed her forehead to Kakarot's.
They hit the atmosphere at the wrong angle. The pod didn't so much land as carve a smoking trench through some poor farmer's cornfield, sending charred husks spiraling skyward. Gravity returned in brutal pulses—James' teeth clacked together hard enough to taste copper—before everything went still. Eerily, impossibly still
.
Smoke curled through the buckled interior. Somewhere outside, a creature bleated in alarm. Raditz was the first to move, kicking the warped hatch with a snarl. Daylight flooded in, framing his silhouette against an expanse of green so vivid it hurt. And below, at his feet: soft, loamy earth. Not metal. Not poison. Earth.