Planet Vegeta

Fasha moved first.

She closed the distance in a blink and hit Jeice clean across the face. His head snapped to the side. She was already winding up for the second shot when his hand shot out and caught her fist.

He sneered. Kicked her straight down.

She hit the ground like a comet. The crater splintered outward, deep and wide. Dust poured up in a massive column.

Jeice raised his hand. Crimson light gathered above his palm.

"Crusher Ball."

He hurled it down into the crater. The explosion swallowed the whole area—dirt, rock, light, everything. The ground buckled. The Ginyu Force felt the shockwave from where they stood.

Jeice hovered above the blast zone. Watching. Waiting for the dust to clear.

Nothing moved.

He scoffed. Started to turn away.

Something shifted behind him. Not above. Not in the crater. Below. To his left. The ground bulged and cracked and Fasha exploded out of it, covered in dirt, eyes locked on him.

She'd tunneled straight through the planet's crust to flank him.

"Eat shit, sucker!"

A beam of energy tore through the air. Jeice jerked to the side at the last possible second. It missed his face by inches and kept going, cutting a line across the sky until it disappeared.

He looked back. Fasha was standing in the hole she'd come out of. She smiled. Cracked her neck.

Jeice gritted his teeth.

They clashed in the air.

Fists met fists. The sound didn't echo—it rippled. Every impact sent a shockwave out in a ring, kicking up dirt and splitting the ground below them. They moved through the sky trading blows, neither one landing clean, both of them pushing.

Then Jeice caught a punch. Deflected the next one. Slid inside her guard and hit her twice in the ribs. She gasped. He grabbed her leg before she could retreat and swung her like a weapon.

He grabbed her leg before she could retreat and spun once, twice, then released her in a wide arc.She crashed into the mountain. Stone exploded around her. She hit the wall and stuck there for a second before falling.

Jeice floated where he was, looking around.

Below, Fasha pushed a chunk of rubble off her chest. She looked up at the mountain above her. Looked at Jeice. Then she raised both hands.

Boulders lifted off the mountain. They hovered around her, spinning slowly. Then energy blades appeared around each one. Thin. Sharp. Glowing.

She moved her hands forward. The boulders flew at Jeice.

He braced himself and started blasting them out of the air. One. Two. Three. Each one exploded into fragments. He punched through a fourth. Elbowed a fifth. They kept coming and he kept destroying them.

"Is that all you've—"

One of the boulders passed behind the others. No energy blade on it. Just rock. He didn't notice. He was too busy destroying the ones in front of him.

Fasha was behind it.

Jeice obliterated the last boulder and saw her. Right there. Close. A blade of ki formed around her hand, glowing white and thin as paper.

She swung.

Jeice threw himself backward. The blade caught him across the chest—not deep enough. He'd moved just enough, but not nearly enough at the same time. A thin line of blood opened across his armor. The cut was shallow but long, stretching from his shoulder to his opposite hip.

He landed. Looked down.

Blood. Running down his stomach. Soaking into his suit.

His eyes went wide.

She'd aimed to cut him in half.

Jeice gripped his chest. Blood seeped between his fingers. His breathing went shallow.

"What's the matter, insect?"

Fasha's voice hit him like a slap. She was standing where she'd slashed him, grinning. Looking down on him.

Jeice saw red.

He charged. No technique. No plan. Just rage. His aura flared crimson and he flew straight at her, fist cocked back, teeth bared, screaming.

Fasha didn't move.

She grinned wider.

Behind her, something hissed.

Jeice heard it too late. One of her energy saucers, spun off from the main barrage, had been circling back as she taunted him. Completely silent until it was right on top of her.

She jumped backward, giving her attack the room it needed to connect.

The saucer caught Jeice at the waist.

He didn't have time to react. His upper half kept moving forward. His lower half didn't.

What was left of him hit the ground in two pieces. Blood pooled out across the dirt. His expression was still frozen between anger and shock.

Fasha landed in front of the corpse. Looked down at the two halves of Jeice.

"Special Forces my ass."

She spat into what was left of him.

Silence.

Ginyu stared. Recoome's mouth was hanging open, Burter just stared in disbelief, and Guldo just took a step back in fear.

As for Bardock he said nothing, but the corner of his mouth twitched in a grin.

Fasha walked back toward her team. Wiped the dirt off her hands. Didn't look back.

“So, who’s next?” Bardock asked, tilting his head.

“I will avenge Jeice!” Buter hissed, before turning his attention to his leader. “Captain, let me avenge Jeice!”

The dust hadn't settled yet. Fasha was still walking back, blood on her knuckles, Jeice's body in two pieces behind her.

Ginyu exhaled. "Well. That was—"

His scouter beeped once. Then glitched into nothing. He frowned. Tapped it again. No response. He looked at Burter. Burter was tapping his own scouter, confused.

"Captain, mine's dead."

"Mine too," Recoome said.

Guldo wasn't tapping his. He'd already ripped his off and was holding it up. "It just... stopped. It just stopped working."

Ginyu pulled his scouter off. Turned it over in his hands. No damage. No cracks. The lens was clean. He pressed the button on the side. Nothing. Pressed it again. Still nothing.

This left them in the dark…

"What the hell," Burter muttered.

Miles away, in the command compound, Garlik sat in front of a console.

The console in front of him was cobbled together from scavenged parts—scouter components, communication relays, stolen Frieza Force circuitry, a project of his. It had taken him months to build. Most of that time was to figure out how to link it into the Frieza Force system without triggering any security protocols.

He'd done it.

It had been incredibly hard, but he had done it. One frequency at a time. Slipping into their network like a virus that didn't want to be noticed.

Now he was shutting them the network, and their systems one by one.

Starting with the scouters of the elite force of Frieza.

His fingers moved across the keys. Each keypress killed a scouter. Jeice's—though it didn't matter anymore. Recoome's. Burter's. Guldo's. Ginyu's.

Four green lights on his console turned red.

Garlik leaned back.

He picked up the communicator. Pressed it once.

"It's done."

Bardock heard the confirmation he had been waiting through the earpiece tucked inside his left ear.

"Every scouter on the Ginyu Force is dead. They're blind."

Bardock didn't react. Didn't turn his head. Didn't change his expression. He kept his eyes on Ginyu.

He could see it happening. Ginyu messing with his scouter. Burter doing the same. The confusion spreading through the rest of them. They didn't know what was going on. Couldn't figure it out.

Good.

"Step two," Garlik said. "All up to you."

The line went silent.

Bardock's hand twitched at his side. His mission was clear, to kill Ginyu and Guldo, because their powers made them problematic, Guldo could stop time according to King Escarot, and Ginyu had the ability to switch bodies which he did if the enemy proved to be stronger than him.

This was part of the reason I wanted their scouter’s dead, to get the element of surprise and kill him before he realized what had happened.

Bardock grinned.

Tora saw it. He was the only one close enough to notice. He didn't say anything. Didn't ask. He just shifted his weight slightly, settling into a different stance.

Shugesh saw Tora move and understood. He stopped slouching. His hands came up.

Borgos and Fasha were the last ones to catch on.

Now that the Ginyu Force was blind, they couldn't tell that Bardock's power level had been suppressed this entire time, and their leader would be overconfident basing his ideas of Bardock on what he saw before his scouters were hacked.

Ginyu finally looked up from his scouter. He looked at Bardock.

Bardock was still grinning.

"Something wrong, Ginyu?"

Ginyu stared at him. The scouter hung loose in his hand. "What did you do?"

"Nothing."

Ginyu's eyes narrowed. Something was wrong. He could feel it— in all his years working for the Cold Clan, in all his fights, wars, and more, he had acquired the ability to tell when he had been led into a trap, and his instincts told him he had been caught… in what exactly, he wasn’t sure.

"Recoome. Burter. Guldo. Get ready."

"Let's go,” Bardock's aura exploded as his power nearly tripled.