Chapter I: Exodus- Escape From Planet Vegeta

CHAPTER ONE: THE EXODUS

Part I — Red Sky, Last Light

The sky over Planet Vegeta was always red.

Teilanne had never thought much of it before. It was simply the color of the world — the color of blood, of fire, of conquest. But tonight, standing in the shadow of the launch bay with the acrid scent of scorched metal thick in her lungs, she found herself staring at that crimson expanse as though memorizing it. As though she already knew it would be the last time.

Stop it. She turned away, jaw tight, and resumed loading the final supply crate into the escape pod. Saiyans don't wallow. They move.

Her hands worked on autopilot — checking seals, securing latches, verifying fuel-cell integrity with the practiced efficiency of a warrior who had survived dozens of campaigns most soldiers never came back from. The routine helped. It kept her from thinking about what they were actually doing.

What they were actually leaving.

"Is that everything?"

Rhubar's voice cut across the hangar, and she looked up. Her husband moved toward her with the unhurried stride of a man who had long ago made peace with danger, though she could read the tension in the set of his shoulders, the way his tail hung slightly lower than usual. He carried Brussel in the crook of one arm — their son, barely a year old, dark hair sticking up in soft, downy spikes nothing like the rigid crown his father wore — while a specialized harness across his chest cradled the two infants. Uruk, Tora's boy, slept with his tiny tail curled neatly around his own midsection. Sala, Faasha's daughter, watched everything with round, curious eyes that made Teilanne's chest ache for reasons she refused to examine too closely.

Don't think about Faasha. Not right now.

"Everything we can carry," she said, keeping her voice flat and businesslike. "The rest stays."

Rhubar didn't flinch, but she felt his gaze linger on her face for a half-second longer than necessary. He always could read her silences.

"Bardock was certain?" he asked, though she knew the question was not truly about certainty. Rhubar was not a man who did anything without sufficient reason. He had not come here tonight because of doubt — he had come because he trusted Bardock with his life, the way you only trusted someone who had bled beside you across a dozen burning worlds.

"You know Bardock doesn't make predictions lightly." Teilanne activated her scouter, watching the familiar stream of readouts scroll across her vision. Frieza Force patrol patterns. Power signatures. Atmospheric pressure in the upper exosphere. "Whatever he saw in that vision, it was enough to make him warn us. For Bardock, that's not nothing."

"No," Rhubar agreed quietly. "It's not."

A silence settled between them — not uncomfortable, but weighted. The kind of silence that preceded irrevocable decisions.

Teilanne had faced death more times than she could count. She had charged into battles against enemies three times her power level and walked out the other side with nothing but scars and a story. But this — loading children into an escape pod and running from her own homeworld — stirred something in her chest that no enemy blade ever had.

This is wrong. Saiyans don't flee.

She knew the counter-argument, had made it to herself a hundred times already.

But Saiyans protect their young.

"Brussel's getting fussy," Rhubar observed, bouncing the boy gently against his shoulder. "He can feel it, I think. The tension."

"Then we need to move before he starts broadcasting it." She cast a glance toward the upper atmosphere. "The patrol pattern shifts in three minutes. That's our window." She crossed to the pilot's seat, fingers settling over the pre-launch sequence. "Once we're past the thermosphere, radio silence. Power levels suppressed. If the Frieza Force gets even a faint reading on us—"

"They won't."

The absolute conviction in his voice almost made her smile. Almost. "Those were missions we could fight our way out of."

Rhubar settled into the co-pilot's seat, adjusting the harness around the sleeping Uruk with hands that were surprisingly gentle for their size. "Then we won't get caught."

They loaded the children into the reinforced restraint system Teilanne had spent three nights modifying for exactly this purpose — for this contingency she had hoped would never become necessary. She secured each latch with methodical care. Three children. Three lives that had nothing to do with war or glory or the survival of the fittest.

Three lives that were simply hers to protect.

The weight of it settled across her shoulders like gravity set too high.

"Thirty seconds," Rhubar announced, hands moving across the controls.

Teilanne felt the familiar crawl of deliberately suppressing her ki — forcing her power inward, making herself small and invisible to the sensors that networked across every Frieza Force patrol ship above them. It ran against every instinct hardwired into her Saiyan blood. She forced herself to breathe through it. Beside her, she sensed Rhubar doing the same.

The infants were too young to control their power levels. But infants barely registered on standard scanners. That was the hope.

"Ten seconds."

Through the viewport, she could see other pods launching from the planet's surface — soldiers bound for conquest, workers being shipped to distant labor posts. The mundane commerce of Frieza's empire, grinding on as it always had. One more pod would not draw a second glance.

"Five—"

Brussel began to cry.

The sound detonated through the cabin like a warning klaxon, high-pitched and utterly impossible to ignore. Teilanne moved on pure instinct, unstrapping from her seat and gathering the boy against her chest, pressing him close, whispering soundless words against the top of his soft hair.

"Launch."

Rhubar did not hesitate. The pod exploded forward, acceleration hammering them back as the launch sequence burned through in full. Teilanne braced against the restraint rail with one arm, holding Brussel tight with the other, and watched the red-stained planet fall away beneath them — smaller, smaller, smaller.

She had told herself she would not look back.

She looked back anyway.

"Come on," Rhubar muttered through his teeth, eyes locked on the sensor display. "Come on—"

A Frieza Force patrol ship swept past less than a kilometer overhead, its scanning array cutting through the dark in sweeping arcs. Teilanne held her breath. Held Brussel tighter. Willed the universe, just this once, to look the other way.

The patrol moved on.

"Clear," Rhubar exhaled. "We're actually—"

The pod lurched.

Warning systems screamed across every console as space itself seemed to tear open ahead of them — not the clean blue-white of standard warp, but something violent and hungry, a vortex of impossible colors that bent light and geometry alike into shapes that had no names in any Saiyan language.

"What is that?!" Teilanne caught herself against the bulkhead as the controls went dead in Rhubar's hands.

"I don't know—"

"We're being pulled—"

"The reports called them wormholes." She remembered the Frieza Force database entries, late-night reading during long campaigns. Theoretical. Naturally occurring near stellar collapse. Cannot be artificially sustained. "They're not supposed to—"

She felt it before she understood it.

A surge of raw energy from the infant in her arms — unformed, uncontrolled, and vast in a way that made no sense for a creature so small. The pod's internal sensors shrieked as Brussel's power level spiked, every readout climbing into ranges the system simply wasn't designed to process. Something primal in the boy's Saiyan blood had been woken by the chaos around him, and it had reached outward without knowing what it touched.

"Rhubar—"

"I see it." He abandoned the useless controls in an instant, reaching back to lay his palm flat against their son's forehead. His ki rose carefully — not a weapon, but a shelter, wrapping around Brussel's wild surge with the precision of a warrior who understood the difference between power and control. "Easy, son. Easy. We have you."

But the wormhole already had them.

Teilanne pulled all three children against her body, curling herself around them as the pod spun deeper into the tunnel between places. Colors she had no words for streaked past the viewport. Physics stopped being reliable. She felt Rhubar's hand find hers in the chaos — fingers interlacing with a grip that was, beneath its desperation, completely steady.

"Whatever happens," he said.

"We stay together," she finished.

"Always."

The wormhole collapsed.

Reality snapped back into place with a sensation like being turned inside out and then — with brutal, ordinary finality — the pod was simply falling. The stars beyond the viewport were wrong. All wrong. Different constellations. A nearby planet swelling rapidly in the viewport — blue and green — rushing up to meet them with the indifference of something that did not know or care what they were.

"Brace—!"

The emergency thrusters fired. Rhubar had never once stopped being a pilot even as reality had been coming apart around them — his hands found the controls the instant they responded and he dragged their angle of descent from certain annihilation to something merely catastrophic. Heat shields ignited white-hot. The atmosphere screamed against the hull.

Teilanne's last coherent thought was not a warrior's thought. It was not tactical or calculated or resigned.

Let them survive this. Let the children survive.

The pod tore through the canopy of a forest she had never seen. Trees snapped and earth flew and everything became noise and force and the grinding shriek of metal against rock until, at last, the world went mercifully still.

In the silence that followed, three children cried — frightened, unharmed, and very much alive.

It was, Teilanne decided when consciousness found her again, a perfectly Saiyan arrival.

Part II — First Light

She woke to the smell of smoke and burnt circuitry, and the sound of children.

Combat instinct brought her upright before her eyes fully opened, her body cataloguing the situation with the reflex of a warrior who had survived ambushes on six different planets. Buckled hull. Flickering emergency lighting. No immediate hostile contact. Three small heartbeats — close, frightened, but steady.

"Brussel." Her hands found him in the darkness, still buckled into his reinforced restraints, crying with the full-throated indignation of someone who had been badly inconvenienced. She pressed her palm to his cheek and exhaled. "There you are."

"Teilanne." Rhubar's voice came from the pilot's seat — groggy, but sharpening by the second in the way that was so fundamentally him. Even half-stunned from impact, he sounded like a man taking inventory. "Status."

"Brussel's uninjured. Checking the others." She moved to Uruk, who had joined his companion in vocal protest. Sala, improbably, had slept through the entire thing. "All three alive. No visible trauma." She let out a breath that carried rather more relief than she typically permitted herself. "Saiyan durability."

"Let's not test it again unnecessarily." He was already running the emergency hatch sequence, servos grinding as the mechanism labored against the warped frame.

The hatch opened with a pressurized hiss, and cool air rushed in.

Teilanne paused.

She had not expected it to smell like this. Planet Vegeta's atmosphere had always carried the taste of metal and dust and ionized particles from the perpetual orbital bombardment runs. This air was clean — almost startlingly so, carrying the green-dark scent of vegetation and something damp and living that she had no name for. She breathed it in twice, involuntarily, before her discipline caught up with her.

Rhubar stepped out first, scouter already active, his tail bristling with a tension that he kept carefully away from his face.

"Readings?" she asked, joining him at the threshold with all three children gathered against her.

A pause that lasted slightly too long.

"Nothing," he said.

"Malfunction?"

"Both scouters. Simultaneously." He turned slowly, scanning the forest around them. Massive trees rising toward a yellow sun — yellow, not red, the light falling through the canopy in patterns that were almost delicate compared to Vegeta's harsh glare. Undergrowth. Running water somewhere close. The sounds of unfamiliar creatures. "The scouters are functioning, Teilanne. This world is simply... like this."

She activated her own unit and watched it confirm his assessment with quiet indifference. Every living reading in range sat at power levels so negligible they barely qualified by any standard she had ever used as a metric. Small creatures in the brush. Trees. The air itself.

How does anything survive here? The question surfaced before she could stop it.

Rhubar crouched, examining the soil where the pod had buried itself to its midpoint. "The wormhole threw us a long way from home."

"How far?"

"Without knowing our galactic coordinates?" He rose, brushing dirt from his glove. "We may as well be in a different universe."

The words landed quietly between them. Neither of them chose to examine what they meant for the moment.

"Then we find shelter," Teilanne said. "Assess. Adapt." She adjusted her grip on the children, settling into the practical logic that had carried her through every crisis she had ever faced. One problem at a time. Start with what's in front of you.

What was in front of her emerged from the undergrowth at that precise moment.

Three meters of matte-black fur and plated bone, moving with speed that would have been impressive by any other standard Teilanne had ever used. Its eyes burned red and empty — not the red of predatory intelligence, but something older and more mindless. Hunger. Pure hunger. No thought behind it at all.

Her hand went to a weapon that wasn't there.

"Stay back!" Rhubar moved between her and the creature in the same instant, power level flaring. Exhausted, crash-landing aside — a Saiyan warrior was still a Saiyan warrior. That particular equation did not change.

The creature lunged.

Rhubar sidestepped it with the casual economy of motion that Teilanne had always loved about watching him fight — no wasted movement, nothing showy, just the absolute minimum required to not be where the attack went. His fist connected with the bone plating over the creature's skull and the impact was total. The thing disintegrated into dispersing black smoke before it reached the ground.

He stared at his hand.

"That," he said slowly, "was nothing."

"Behind you," she said.

Three more broke from different directions. He handled them with the unhurried efficiency of a man clearing minor obstacles — a palm strike that collapsed bone, a kick that sent one creature into a tree with enough force to crack the trunk lengthwise, a ki-infused strike that vaporized the third mid-leap. The entire engagement lasted perhaps four seconds.

Silence returned.

Rhubar turned back to her, and she could read the shift in his eyes — not from the combat, which had registered as barely worth noting, but from the thinking.

"They came from different angles," he said. "Coordinated, but not intelligently. Like they were drawn here." His gaze dropped to Brussel, who had been crying steadily throughout the encounter. "Negative emotion. That's my guess. Whatever these things are, they hunt by feeling rather than sight."

She understood the implications immediately. Children cry. Children are afraid. Children are a beacon.

"We need to move."

"Agreed." He was already moving back to the pod, pulling what could be salvaged — emergency rations, medical supplies, tools, their scouters. No weapons worth mentioning. They had made room for children instead of armaments, and that choice was not one she regretted, even now.

"Can you manage all three?"

She looked at him steadily. "I've carried heavier through worse."

They moved.

The forest received them with periodic hostility — more of those creatures appearing at intervals, drawn by Brussel's crying and, Teilanne suspected, by the general emotional turbulence of crash survivors navigating unknown terrain. Each encounter lasted less than a minute. Rhubar dispatched them with growing efficiency as he learned their movement patterns, and Teilanne managed the children with the same single-minded focus she had once applied to battlefield triage.

It was, she thought, a strange sort of mission.

The first sign of civilization appeared as a gap in the canopy — cleared land, geometric shapes that meant deliberate construction. She caught sight of it through the trees as they crested a low hill and nodded toward the break in the horizon. "There."

Rhubar studied the settlement visible below with a soldier's eye. Wooden architecture. Paved roads, hand-laid by the look of them. Small scale. And people — humanoid, moving between the structures with the ordinary rhythms of people going about ordinary lives. "Power levels?"

"Negligible." She watched a figure pause in the settlement below, looking up toward the forest. "But alive."

"We need their knowledge of this world more than we need their combat capability," he said — which was, she reflected, a sentence she had never expected to hear from either of them in a tactical context. The thought carried an edge of something she couldn't quite name. Pride in their own power, maybe. Or the strange disorientation of being the strongest things in a room.

"Carefully," she said. "We learn what we can before we offer what we are."

Brussel chose that moment to announce his hunger, his discomfort, and his general objections to the day's events at full Saiyan volume, projecting the sound across the entire valley below.

The figures in the settlement turned.

Rhubar looked at her. She looked at Rhubar.

"When," he said, "have Saiyans ever been subtle?"

She adjusted her grip on three children, straightened her shoulders, and began walking toward whatever waited for them below. Toward a world called Remnant. Toward a future she had not been able to imagine twelve hours ago and could barely imagine now.

Behind them, the forest fell still — as though the world itself had paused to watch.

Part III — New Ground

The settlement was farther than it appeared.

It took them nearly an hour of terrain navigation, punctuated by four more skirmishes with those black creatures and one near-miss when Sala finally woke and added her voice to the general protest Brussel and Uruk had been maintaining since the crash. Teilanne filed away notes on everything — the lighter gravity her legs kept recalibrating for, the yellow-spectrum sunlight that was already noticeably warmer than she was accustomed to, the rotation speed of a sun that moved faster across the sky than any she had known.

"Twenty-four hour day cycle, give or take," Rhubar said at one point, watching the sky without slowing his pace. "Lighter atmosphere. Point-eight to point-nine standard gravity."

"We'll need to recalibrate our training loads accordingly," she said automatically, and then realized what she was actually saying — that they were thinking about living here. Putting down roots on a world she hadn't known existed until this morning.

She turned the thought over carefully and found she was not as unsettled by it as she might have expected.

The dock came into view as they cleared the last of the tree line — a small harbor structure, several moored boats, and a cluster of people who had clearly been alerted to their approach. Teilanne counted five: four men and a woman, no visible weapons, no combat stances. Their power levels registered below the threshold she had spent her entire career dismissing as non-threatening.

How had these people built a civilization? How did they face those creatures every day, with this?

The question rewrote itself before she finished thinking it: they had to face those creatures every day, with this, and they were still here. That meant something.

The oldest man in the group stepped forward — weathered face, gray at his temples, the kind of eyes that had learned to measure strangers quickly and quietly. "Travelers?" The word carried careful neutrality. "Unusual to see people coming out of the forest. Grimm are thick in there this time of year."

"Grimm." Rhubar catalogued the term with the same precision he catalogued everything. "The black creatures. Bone armor, red eyes."

The man's brows lifted. "Encountered them and survived, with children?" A brief pause. "You're either very lucky or very skilled."

"Skilled," Teilanne said simply, and left it at that.

Something shifted in the man's assessment of them — subtle, but she caught it. He was recategorizing them.

"Our vessel crashed," Rhubar said. Close enough to truth to be useful. "In the forest. We are not from this region."

"That much I can see," said the younger man at the back — curious where the older one was cautious, his eyes moving over their scouters and armor with open fascination. "Atlas? The cut of your gear, that equipment — never seen tech like that. Are you from one of the academies?"

"Farther than any of your kingdoms," Rhubar said, "would account for."

A moment of quiet while the man considered that.

"Our people are gone," Teilanne said — because it was true and because there was no version of this conversation that worked without some approximation of the truth. "We are looking for a place to start again."

She had never said those words aloud before. They tasted foreign. Not shameful — she was surprised to find they were not shameful — but entirely new, like speaking a language she was only beginning to learn.

Understanding moved across the older man's face. Not comprehension of the specifics, but recognition of the shape of the thing. Loss. Survival. The need for somewhere to land. Whatever else separated their worlds, that particular grammar appeared to be universal.

"Marcus," the man said, extending a hand in a gesture she recognized as greeting from the translator's linguistic analysis. "This is Patch — island off the coast of Sanus. Settlement's called Amber Vale, though most of us just say 'the docks.'" He studied them with the quiet directness of someone who made decisions for people other than himself. "Can you fight? The Grimm, I mean."

"Yes," Rhubar said, without qualification.

"Then we'll figure out the rest." Marcus nodded toward the settlement. "Come on. Let's get those children somewhere warm first. Whatever your story is, it'll keep until after dinner."

Teilanne felt the creature before she saw it — the subtle shift in the forest behind them, the almost subliminal awareness that something with predatory intent had fixed on their position.

"Behind you," she said sharply.

Marcus spun. The villagers scattered. Three Beowolves — she had the name now — erupted from the tree line.

What followed lasted approximately six seconds.

Rhubar covered the distance to the first creature in a blur that she could see the villagers simply could not process — he was there and then he was not where they expected him to be and then the creature was gone, broken apart into dissolving shadow. The second came from his flank; he let it come, absorbed its claws against a forearm that gave nothing, and brought it down into the dock boards with a strike that cracked the timber. The third attempted to circle.

Teilanne acted without thinking — her leg snapped out in a kick that she made work despite three children in her arms, and the creature flew backward through the air, splintered through a tree trunk, and ceased to exist.

Silence.

She settled Brussel more securely against her hip and looked up to find Marcus staring at them with his mouth very slightly open.

"You're—" He stopped. Started again. "You don't have Aura. You don't have weapons. You're not using any Dust. How did you—"

"We told you," Rhubar said. "We can fight."

The word strong seemed to want to form in Marcus's expression, and she watched it wrestle with the obvious inadequacy of the term. She had seen that look before, on different faces, on different worlds — the particular expression of someone recalibrating their sense of what was possible.

The difference was that on those other worlds, that recalibration had typically preceded attempts to either weaponize or eliminate them.

Marcus, to his credit, simply exhaled, and decided.

"Right," he said. "I'm not going to question it. You'll be the best thing that's happened to this settlement's defenses in years." He turned toward Amber Vale and gestured for them to follow. "Come on. I meant it about dinner."

They followed.

Teilanne walked at Rhubar's side through the gates of the settlement, children quiet for the first time since the crash, the yellow sun declining toward the western water and painting the harbor in shades of amber and violet that reminded her of nothing she had ever seen before — and she found, unexpectedly, that this was exactly the right thing.

She was not looking for a place that reminded her of home.

Home was gone.

She was looking for a place that could become something new.

"Well," Rhubar said quietly, so that only she could hear, "we're alive."

"We are," she agreed.

"The children are alive."

"They are."

"And apparently we've become defenders of a fishing settlement on an island called Patch."

"Apparently."

He was quiet for a moment. Then, with the grave understatement of a man who had once fought across three star systems in a single campaign: "Could be worse."

Teilanne looked at the settlement around them — small, improbable, full of people who faced monsters every day with the only tools available to them, and who still thought to offer strangers food and warmth — and felt something stir in her chest that she recognized, at last, as the particular kind of relief that arrives after you have survived something you were not certain you would survive.

Hope. A strange word for a Saiyan to carry. But perhaps that was what this world was — a place for strange words, new beginnings, and children who would grow up without knowing what it meant to serve an empire.

Behind them, the forest settled into twilight. Remnant turned quietly toward night.

And the survivors of a dead world walked forward into it.

— To be continued in Chapter Two: Kindred Spirits —