While Dragon Ball’s greatest heroes who's proven himself instrumental in the protection of Earth throughout the course of the series, even he isn’t aware of how significant he was to the continued existence of the entire universe free of the ever-present force of pure and unstoppable evil during one of his earliest, and darkest, Dragon Ball adventures.
Before Vegeta redeemed himself as a Dragon Ball hero, he was first introduced as a despicable villain who threatened the lives of every living creature on the face of the Earth. Upon his debut, Vegeta and his fellow evil Saiyan, Nappa, invaded Planet Earth with the intention of stealing the Dragon Balls and then killing everyone in the world, so they could then sell the vacant planet to the highest bidder. Thankfully, Nappa and Vegeta were defeated by Goku, Krillin, and the other Z Fighters in a battle that resulted in Nappa being killed and Vegeta barely escaping with his life. Before Vegeta fled the planet, however, Krillin almost killed him as he was wielding Yajirobe’s sword and Vegeta was too weak to defend himself. The only reason Vegeta survived was that Goku told Krillin to let him go–an act of mercy that saves the entire universe.
In Dragon Ball chapter 257 by Akira Toriyama, Vegeta is fully healed from his fight on Earth and is now on Planet Namek, once again hunting for the Dragon Balls. Unfortunately, Vegeta has some competition as Frieza and his entire army is also on Namek looking for the very same magical orbs. However, after surviving his near-death experience on Earth, Vegeta is much more powerful than the Frieza Force re, and he easily kills a number of Frieza’s best soldiers as they were misinformed about Vegeta’s power level. Little did Vegeta know, his interference in Frieza’s plans to steal the Dragon Balls directly benefited the people who almost killed him on Earth: the Z Fighters.
Krillin, Gohan, and Bulma also traveled to Planet Namek to use the Dragon Balls to bring back their friends Vegeta himself was responsible for killing. The Z Fighters didn’t know thatmboth Vegeta and Frieza had the same idea, and they certainly didn’t know that the two villains were at odds, though it was a good thing they were. If Vegeta had been killed by Krillin, he wouldn’t have been able to kill off Frieza’s soldiers on Planet Namek–soldiers who would have quickly killed all three of the relatively weak Z Fighters and taken the Dragon Balls for themselves. If Frieza did get the Dragon Balls, he would have wished for immortality and gone on to rule the universe as an unstoppable, unkillable force of evil.
The universe as the Z Fighters knew it would have ceased to exist if Frieza had gained immortality, and Vegeta was solely responsible for keeping that from happening. While Vegeta, himself, did some pretty evil stuff in his own quest to find the Dragon Balls (and would have been an all-powerful villain just as bad as Frieza if he was able to make his own wish for immortality) the fact of the matter is, he single-handedly saved the universe from an all-powerful Frieza–proving that Vegeta’s death, the one that Goku prevented on Earth, would have essentially destroyed Dragon Ball’s entire universe, as all of existence would have been flooded with a god-tier power of a pure and perpetual evil force.
