Mel didn't have any problems with telling the story of how she'd been defeated by Tarble. What had once been a sore spot had been turned over in her mind like a broken record for so long that her perspective had subtly shifted, as the raw nerve that had once connected her emotions to the thought of that scrawny little boy in blue dulled over years of constant playback.
She told the story from a practiced, third-person perspective that didn't favor her any more than it did Tarble.
She explained the mission that King Vegeta had personally imparted to her: To ensure that the only one other than her who came back from the mission was a severely beaten Tarble. The goal: To ensure that Tarble's strength grew, while also permanently humbling the boy. Then, strong enough to stand beside his brother, but humble enough to never attempt to surpass his superiors, Tarble would be placed on his older brother's squad as the Prince's second in command. His greatest general.
It was barbaric, and even by Planet Vegeta standards, incredibly illegal. Deliberately forcing someone to the brink of death simply to increase their power level was, on Planet Vegeta, almost as illegal as deliberately murdering four children.
So, it was no surprise that her second mission was to kill Tarble if he learned the truth, about how the mission was just a trap.
"...The scouter." Vegeta whispered to himself, connecting the dots in an instant, remembering that high-quality custom scouter he'd gotten to ensure that his brother's survivability chance was as high as possible.
Mel nodded in response, unsurprised. Only a handful of Saiyans could even theoretically get their hands on scouters of custom colors, like Tarble's blue one. Tarble wasn't on that list, but even back then, Vegeta had been.
She went on to describe the fight that'd taken place with the accuracy of someone who'd reviewed it millions of times in their head.
How Tarble had started off by destroying her scouter in a sneak attack for three reasons: To keep her from contacting anyone else, to keep her from appraising his real power level, which had clearly been nearing 2,000 or so at the time, significantly higher than what he'd allowed others to believe, and to catch her off guard, since she had been stronger than him.
She had been. This was fact. She was much stronger than the child who'd beaten her. However, his precision and control had closed what was, in technicality, a significant gap. She described the Regalia Wave in detail. Mentally, Vegeta compared it to the Vegeta Family Special technique, the Galick Gun.
"The little bastard… planned all of it." Vegeta noted aloud once Mel had finished with the recount. A perturbed, but impressed little grin-like expression showed on his face, but it quickly gave way to his usual serious frown as he processed the information.
Mel had felt Tarble's real power level for herself. Every bit of it. She knew what she'd seen was the younger prince's real power, and she'd absolutely swear by it. Feeling how Tarble controlled his power for herself, even just for the duration of a short battle, was the main reason that Mel's foundation had expanded as far beyond her natural limits as it had. A normal Saiyan stuck in Mel's situation would've likely hit their limits at a power level of 10,000 at the absolute most. And honestly, her natural talent wouldn't have even taken her that far. Using that one brush against Tarble's budding energy control abilities as a template, Mel's natural power level ceiling had roughly doubled.
But Vegeta was a different story. He'd seen Tarble's power grow incrementally, steadily, from the boy's original 85 to around 750. He attributed this to the boy's strange ki control technique allowing him to release some of his latent potential, which was locked away at birth. Vegeta's goal in finding his brother was to learn the secrets of this and use it to unleash some more of his own locked potential.
But even so, there was absolutely zero chance that Tarble's potential went that far. Vegeta's own power level at the age of five had been around 2,000 or so.
They may have had the same blood, making Tarble a genius by bloodline, but Vegeta himself was the absolute pinnacle of Saiyan capability. Under little to no pressure, he'd learned the Galick Gun at the age of four, in only three months, even though he'd been restricted by a severe lack of experience at the time. His power level at birth had been nearly a thousand, and the legend, a pure heart, awakened by rage, directly described Vegeta's own heart. Void of anything save for gaining more strength, and constantly broiling with the extreme rage that came from the various indignations he'd suffered throughout his life.
No Saiyancompared to him, the one who was destined to become the Super Saiyan of legend and defeat Frieza himself.
In Vegeta's mind, this wasn't ego, this was fact.
Which meant that Tarble's power level, back then, could not have been near 2,000. Even if it was impossible to deny the fact that, as a child, the boy had managed to create a facsimile of the Galick Gun, there was zero chance that he'd been able to defeat a Saiyan as strong as Mel had been without utilizing some sort of trick to alter her perceptions somehow.
Which told Vegeta two things. One: The boy's stunt had been meticulously planned. Either he'd known, beforehand, the truth about his mission, or his soft heart had made him decide to go rogue no matter what the mission was.
Which led to the second fact: Tarble's intelligence was incredible. His mind for combat may have been inferior to Vegeta's, but his mind for planning and intelligence gathering was not to be underestimated, even at that tender age.
In other words, even if Vegeta went to Planet 7046-ZW, he would not find traces of his brother's movements.
It would be an entirely wasted trip.
Vegeta pulled up his scouter and began transmitting an emergency signal to his other scouter.
This was a built-in function for cases where scouters ended up in hostile hands. So long as one knew the scouter's code, they could remotely back the data up. However, doing so would trigger the original scouter's self-destruct sequence.
Before long, he had the list of potential Saiyans pulled up on his new scouter.
Just in case this scouter was destroyed, too, Vegeta backed the data up to the ship's mainframe as he looked it over.
Though Planet 7046-ZW was an obvious dead end, this list was clearly meticulously compiled, and only partially from data stolen from King Vegeta's servers, before Planet Vegeta's destruction.
The fact that they had those particular scraps of lost data on hand meant that, whoever this was, they had a long reach. If Vegeta followed this, there was an exceptionally high chance that he would find his brother eventually.
The next morning, Vegeta programmed his chosen destination into the computer: The nearest one on the list. The ship was programmed to track a scouter that, according to the list, likely belonged to a Saiyan.