Planet Vegeta was beautiful.
That was the first thing that almost broke him.
It wasn’t the blood-red sky that looked like a permanent bruise across the atmosphere.
It wasn’t the gravity, though it pressed down on his bones like the world itself had clenched a massive, heavy fist around his shoulders.
It wasn’t the extra limb twitching nervously at the base of his spine, or the strange, echoing voices of a life he hadn’t actually lived flooding his brain.
It wasn’t even the completely unfamiliar face staring back at him from the cracked reflection of a polished black window.
It was just the raw, overwhelming beauty of a world that shouldn’t have been there.
The city below him didn’t look like a collection of houses or a place where people lived.
It looked like a weapon.
A hundred massive towers of dark, jagged stone and brutal Saiyan architecture rose straight into the crimson morning, their edges sharp enough to look like they were trying to pierce the heavens.
Ships screamed overhead, tearing through the clouds and vanishing into the upper atmosphere in bright, blinding streaks of white light.
Below them, the training yards shook.
Impact after impact echoed through the heavy air as armored warriors slammed each other into reinforced stone platforms, spitting blood and laughing through shattered teeth.
Markets roared with life.
Vendors yelled out prices for raw meat and imported tech.
Children darted between the legs of giant adults, their tails whipping behind them like whips.
Old soldiers sat outside food stalls, pointing scarred fingers and arguing about ancient battles that nobody alive could verify anymore.
There were armored warriors everywhere you looked.
Cruel faces.
Hard, unblinking eyes.
Scars worn proudly like medals of honor.
But if you looked past the armor, there were also families.
Ordinary, regular families.
A mother grabbed her son by the collar of his chest piece, yanking him away from a street fight he was clearly losing to a kid twice his size.
“You want to embarrass me before breakfast?” she snapped, her voice carrying over the din of the market.
The boy, who couldn’t have been more than seven, wiped a smear of dark blood from his upper lip and grinned up at her.
“I almost had him, Ma.
I had his rhythm.”
“You almost ate the pavement,” she muttered, shoving him forward.
“Move.
Your father’s waiting.”
A few yards away, a group of low-class Saiyans laughed around a massive, steaming grill, tearing into huge chunks of roasted meat with the enthusiasm of starving wolves.
Two mechanics cursed loudly under a half-open space pod, grease covering their faces.
One of them lifted a heavy boot and kicked the engine housing hard.
*Clang.*
The other mechanic jumped back, waving a wrench.
“That is not how you fix a primary thruster, you idiot!”
“It worked last time,” the first one grunted, wiping his brow.
“Last time it exploded!”
“Only a little.
We made it to the moon, didn’t we?”
Somewhere nearby, a baby cried.
It was a normal, angry, hungry baby.
The sound felt entirely wrong.
It didn’t belong here, surrounded by stone fortresses and people who lived to kill.
It belonged in a supermarket.
A quiet neighborhood.
A little apartment where some exhausted parents hadn’t slept in three days.
It belonged to a world with monthly bills, morning traffic, phone chargers, and stupid arguments about what to get for takeout.
Not here.
Not on Planet Vegeta.
Not twenty-four hours before the entire thing turned into dust.
## Act I: The Awakening
The young Saiyan staggered backward from the window, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps.
His hand slapped against the wall to steady himself.
No.
Not a hand.
*His* hand.
It was brown skin.
Strong, thick fingers.
Heavily callused knuckles.
A wrist wrapped tight in dark, coarse training cloth.
He could feel the sheer weight of the body around him.
It was dense, packed with muscle and power in a way that made every single one of his old human memories feel fragile, like glass ready to shatter.
He looked down at himself, his eyes wide.
Armor.
Black undersuit.
Scuffed, white-and-grey chest plating.
Heavy combat boots.
And then there was the tail.
The moment he looked at it, the tail moved, curled tightly around his thigh like a nervous snake.
He choked on his own spit.
“No,” he whispered.
The tail lashed out behind him, snapping against the stone floor as if it had heard him and taken personal offense to his panic.
Without thinking, he reached down and grabbed it with both hands.
Big mistake.
A weird, nauseating electric shock snapped straight up his spine, hitting his brain like a bolt of lightning.
His knees buckled, and he dropped to one knee, gasping for air while his vision blurred.
“Okay,” he breathed, his voice trembling violently.
“Okay.
Note to self.
Don’t grab the damn tail.
Great.
Wonderful.
Good to know.”
His voice was different too.
It was lower than it should have been.
Rougher.
It sounded younger than he felt inside, but it definitely wasn’t a child’s voice.
Late teens?
Early twenties?
The body felt prime, fully grown enough to fight, old and hardened enough to have survived brutal training regimens and off-world missions.
He stumbled back toward the polished window, forcing himself to look at the reflection again.
A dark-skinned Saiyan stared back at him.
It wasn’t Goku.
It wasn’t Vegeta, Raditz, or Nappa.
It was someone completely different.
Someone who hadn’t existed in the stories he used to watch.
He had a sharp jawline, broad shoulders, and wild black hair.
But it wasn’t that familiar, flame-shaped crown that most Saiyans wore proudly.
This hair had been cut shorter on the sides—rough, uneven, and practical.
It looked like the person who owned this body had literally taken a combat blade to his own head, deciding that personal style mattered a hell of a lot less than not giving an opponent something to grab onto during a fight.
His eyes were dark, almost pitch black, but when a spike of pure panic hit his chest, a faint, erratic green pulse flickered deep within his pupils.
His breath caught in his throat.
A name rose up from somewhere deep inside his mind.
It wasn’t a memory, and it wasn’t exactly instinct either.
It was just an objective fact.
*Kallard.*
That was his name now.
Or rather, that had been the name of the guy who owned this meat suit before he woke up in it.
His knees almost gave out again as a massive wave of images slammed into his brain.
A glowing television screen.
Anime openings with rock music blasting.
Bright explosions.
Goku smiling with that stupid, innocent grin.
Piccolo standing on a wasteland cliff with his arms crossed.
Vegeta screaming through a mask of wounded pride.
Frieza laughing from a hover-chair.
A purple cat-god in ancient clothes, looking bored and terrifyingly casual.
*Beerus.
The Destroyer.*
Then the images shifted, turning darker, sharper.
Frieza’s pointed finger.
A massive, roaring red sun of energy.
A doomed planet.
A Death Ball.
Bardock flying upward into a swarm of soldiers, completely alone, screaming a final, desperate defiance.
Kakarot’s small round space pod rocketing away into the dark.
Earth.
Namek.
Androids.
Cell.
Buu.
Gods.
Universes.
Total erasure.
A massive tournament where the only prize for losing was non-existence.
The memories came like a literal flood with knives hidden in the water.
They sliced through his thoughts until he hit the floor, hard.
His palm slammed into the stone to break his fall.
*Crack.*
The stone flooring fractured beneath his fingers.
He hadn’t even meant to break it.
He hadn’t put any weight into it.
The body was just that naturally strong.
It was a terrifying, wrong kind of strength.
He sucked in air, his chest heaving.
“No, no, no, no…”
The heavy stone door to the quarters slid open behind him with a dull grind.
“Kallard?”
He froze, his muscles locking up instantly.
A Saiyan woman stood in the doorway.
She was broad-shouldered, tall, and carried herself with a stern, imposing weight.
Her dark hair was tied back tightly, and a nasty, jagged scar ran clean across her left cheek.
She was carrying a heavy bundle of freshly polished armor under one arm, looking down at him with an annoyance that had a very thin, well-hidden layer of actual concern buried underneath it.
“What the hell are you doing on the floor?” she asked, her voice a low, gravelly rasp.
Kallard just stared at her.
His body recognized her instantly, even if his brain was still trying to catch up.
It wasn’t a recognition born of love or warmth.
It was a physical reaction.
Aunt?
Military handler?
Squad leader?
Then the name clicked.
*Morga.*
She wasn’t his mother.
Saiyans didn’t really do the whole doting mother thing anyway.
She was just the person who had trained him.
She had fed him when it was absolutely necessary to keep him from starving, insulted him whenever it was useful to motivate him, and cuffed him hard across the back of the head more times than he could count.
Morga narrowed her dark eyes, stepping into the room.
“Did you hit your head in the gravity chambers again?
I told you to stop pushing the settings past your limit.”
Kallard forced himself to stand up.
The motion was entirely too easy.
He barely pushed off the ground, but the body reacted so fast he overcorrected, nearly throwing himself face-first into the stone wall behind him.
Morga’s brow furrowed deep.
“You’re moving strange.
Like a newborn pup trying to find its legs.”
“Didn’t sleep,” he muttered.
The lie came out rough and clumsy, but his voice was deep enough to carry it off as general irritation.
Morga grunted, tossing the heavy bundle of armor onto a metal bench near the door.
“Nobody’s sleeping.
Not with Frieza’s damn dogs crawling all over the capital streets.”
That name hit him like a bucket of ice water.
*Frieza.*
Kallard turned his head, looking past her, through the open doorway and out toward the distant, hazy sky.
Massive, saucer-shaped ships hung motionless above the city.
They weren’t Saiyan ships.
They were the sleek, high-tech vessels of the Frieza Force.
They looked like giant ticks clinging to the upper atmosphere, just waiting to drain the planet dry.
His stomach twisted into a tight, agonizing knot.
Morga followed his gaze out the door.
She spat onto the stone floor, her lip curling into a sneer.
“Filthy little tyrant calls every single squad back to the home world like we’re common house pets, and then he keeps his personal guard hovering right over our houses.
King Vegeta should have ripped his horns off years ago.”
Kallard almost laughed out loud.
It wasn’t because he found it funny.
It was pure, unadulterated tragedy.
King Vegeta was probably already dead, or he was currently walking into a room where he was about to be turned into a stain on the floor.
Almost every single person walking these streets was already dead.
They just hadn’t caught up to the fact yet.
They were going about their daily lives, trading insults, eating meat, sharpening blades, completely oblivious to the massive finger hovering over the delete button.
Morga picked up a piece of the armor bundle and tossed it straight at his chest.
He caught it entirely on instinct, his hands snapping out to grab the hardened material before his brain even registered the movement.
“Get your gear on and get yourself together,” she said, turning back toward the hallway.
“There’s been a lot of chatter down at the barracks about new assignments.
If they try to hand you an off-world scout route, take it without asking questions.
Anything is better than sitting around here waiting for Frieza to decide whether he wants to use us for entertainment or actual work.”
*Assignments.*
*Send him out.*
A thin, desperate spark of hope ignited in his chest.
He looked up at her quickly.
“What kind of assignments are we talking about?”
Morga shrugged, not looking back.
“Border moons.
Structural inspections.
Quick cleanups of some failed slave stock on the outer rim.
Frieza’s high-ranking lackeys keep filing requests and then canceling them an hour later.
Nobody down at the command center knows what the hell they actually want from us.”
*I know exactly what they want,* Kallard thought, his hands tightening around the cold chest plate.
*They want you all in one place.
They want the planet full.
They want the maximum amount of targets gathered in a single radius so nobody slips through the cracks.*
His chest felt so tight he could barely breathe.
Twenty-four hours.
Maybe less.
He had to get off this rock.
He had to find a way out, or he was going to burn with the rest of them.
But he couldn’t just leave.
He had to warn someone.
Anyone.
A memory flashed through his mind—sharp, clear, and desperate.
*Bardock.*
Bardock might actually listen to him.
Not because Bardock was some soft, heroic savior like the stories on Earth would eventually make him out to be.
Bardock was a Saiyan through and through.
He was hard, violent, stubborn, and brutal.
But he was also deeply suspicious.
He was a veteran who spent his life looking for traps, and right now, he was probably already smelling the copper tang of blood in the air.
He was the only person on this entire miserable planet who might already be looking in the right direction.
Kallard gripped the armor so hard the metal straps creaked.
Morga stopped in the doorway, noticing the tension in his shoulders.
She turned her head slightly, her one unscarred eye boring into him.
“What is wrong with you today?
You look like you’re staring at a ghost.”
He looked back at her.
For a split second, the human part of his soul wanted to scream the truth at her.
He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and tell her everything.
*Frieza is going to kill us all.
This entire planet is going to be a cloud of burning space rocks by tomorrow morning.
Run.
Hide.
Go steal a pod from the western hangar.
Take whoever you give a damn about and get out of here.*
But he looked at her eyes—proud, angry, fiercely stubborn—and he knew exactly what would happen if he said it out loud.
She wouldn’t run.
She would call him a lunatic.
Or a coward.
Or a weakling.
And if she thought he was a coward, she might report him to the local guard just to clear the family name of shame.
They would throw him in a brig, and he’d be trapped in a cage when the sky finally caught fire.
He swallowed the truth down, and it felt like swallowing broken glass.
“I just need to check on something down at the lower docks,” he said, his voice flat.
Morga snorted, stepping out into the hall.
“Then check it armed.
A Saiyan without his chest piece is just an open target.”
She paused for a brief moment, her voice dropping an octave.
“Kallard.”
He looked up.
“If something feels off down there…
don’t stand around waiting to see where the blast lands.”
Then she walked away, her heavy boots clicking against the stone until the sound faded completely.
Kallard stood alone in the small room, the armor heavy in his hands.
He let out a long, shaky breath.
Maybe she didn’t know the details.
Maybe she didn’t know about Frieza, or the Death Ball, or the betrayal.
But something deep in the blood of this planet knew that a predator was circling overhead.
The instincts were there.
They were just too proud to admit they were the ones being hunted.
He began to put the armor on.
His fingers moved with a weird, borrowed familiarity that didn’t belong to his conscious mind.
Strap under the left arm.
Shoulder plate locked into place.
Wrist guards sealed tight.
Boots laced and tightened until they bit into his ankles.
When he finally stepped out into the hallway, he wasn’t just a panicked human soul trapped in a fictional universe anymore.
He looked like a real, living Saiyan warrior.
And he absolutely hated how natural it felt.
## Act II: The Streets of the Damned
The moment he hit the main streets, the heat and noise slammed into him like a physical blow.
The capital city of Planet Vegeta wasn’t clean, and it certainly wasn’t pretty.
It was functional, brutal, and raw.
The main roads were carved massive and wide, specifically designed to accommodate heavy troop movements and massive supply haulers.
The buildings looked like fortresses stacked on top of larger fortresses, built from dark, volcanic stone that seemed to absorb the red sunlight rather than reflect it.
Saiyans moved through the crowds like apex predators in a tight cage.
Nobody gave ground.
If you walked into someone, you either bared your teeth until they moved, or you ended up rolling in the dirt fighting over who had the right of way.
Kallard kept his head pulled down, his eyes scanning every intersection.
Frieza Force soldiers were everywhere.
They stood at the corners of the main thoroughfares in small squads, wearing their sleek, colored armor and those glowing scouters over their ears.
Some of them looked bored out of their minds, while others looked incredibly nervous, their eyes darting around the crowds of massive, muscular Saiyans who could clearly crush their skulls with a single hand if things went sideways.
But despite the nerves, they still sneered.
They carried themselves with the annoying, unearned confidence of men who knew a giant monster was backing them up from orbit.
A blue-skinned, reptilian soldier with a green scouter laughed loudly as a small Saiyan child snarled up at him from the sidewalk.
“Careful there, little monkey,” the soldier jeered, resting a hand on his blaster holster.
“Bare those tiny teeth too much and someone might decide to pull them out for you.”
The child’s mother appeared out of nowhere, grabbing the boy by his tail and dragging him backward into the crowd before he could lunge.
She didn’t say a word to the soldier.
She just gave him a look that could have curdled milk, her hand twitching near her waist.
Kallard’s fists clenched so hard his knuckles turned white.
*Not now,* he told himself, repeating it like a mantra in his head.
*Not now.
Not yet.
You can’t save everyone.
You can’t even save yourself if you pick a fight over a stray comment.*
The thought made him feel physically sick, but he kept his boots moving, walking faster through the heavy red dust of the street.
The old Kallard’s memories were fragmented, like a puzzle missing half its pieces, but they were functional enough to guide him.
He knew the layout of the barracks.
He knew where the lower-class launch platforms were located, away from the high-tier elite hangars where the royal guard kept their customized ships.
He knew which alleys to take to avoid the heavy military checkpoints, and he knew which commanders were likely to kill a low-ranking fighter just for looking at them wrong.
He found Bardock near the edge of a lower-class secondary launch platform.
The area smelled like high-grade fuel, burning metal, and ozone.
Bardock was standing near the landing gear of a scuffed, dented space pod, deep in a heated argument with two other Saiyan warriors.
Seeing him in person was surreal.
He looked exactly like he did in the old media, but there was a different kind of weight to him.
The animations back home made people look clean, defined, and sharp.
Reality didn’t care about clean lines.
Bardock’s armor was heavily scratched, the white paint chipped away to reveal the dark, dull alloy underneath.
His wild black hair was caked with dried dirt and space dust, and his face looked incredibly tired—not the kind of tired you get from a long day of work, but the deep, bone-weary exhaustion of a soldier who had spent too many years watching his friends get torn to pieces on alien dirt.
There was a smear of dark, alien blood across the knuckle of his left glove.
He hadn’t bothered to wipe it off.
One of the warriors standing next to him, a tall guy with a thick mustache, shook his head dismissively.
“You’re seeing things in the dark, Bardock.
You’ve been out on the rim too long.”
Bardock snapped his head around, his voice a sharp, dangerous growl.
“Then explain the recall.
Why order every single combat squad back to the home world at the exact same time?
Why now?”
“Frieza does what the hell he wants,” the other warrior muttered, leaning against the pod.
“Maybe he’s planning a massive expansion into the southern sectors.
Maybe he wants a full head count.
It’s not our job to guess what goes on in that monster’s head.”
“That’s a coward’s answer,” Bardock spat, stepping closer to him.
“It’s a stupid answer, and you know it.”
“It’s the only one we’ve got, unless you’re planning on flying up to his flagship and asking him yourself.”
Kallard slowed his pace, his combat boots scraping lightly against the grit of the platform.
Bardock’s head twitched.
He sensed the approach before he even turned around, his sharp eyes cutting sideways to lock onto Kallard.
“You need something, kid?
Or are you just lost?”
The other two warriors stopped talking, turning their heads to look Kallard up and down with open contempt.
The one with the mustache snorted.
“Who the hell is this?
I haven’t seen his face around the primary barracks.”
“Kallard,” the second one said, glancing at a small datapad on his wrist.
“Low-rank filler.
Mostly handles border assignments and cleanup detail on dead worlds.
Nothing worth noting.”
*Low-rank.
Perfect.* That meant nobody was paying attention to him.
Bardock didn’t look at his companion’s pad.
His eyes stayed locked onto Kallard’s face, narrowing slightly as he took in the frantic, un-Saiyan panic hidden behind the kid’s eyes.
“You’re staring hard.
Speak up or get out of my way.”
Kallard took a deep breath, stepping closer until he was just outside arms’ reach.
He dropped his voice so low it was barely audible over the roar of the nearby thrusters.
“I need to talk to you.
Alone.”
The two warriors broke out into a short, mocking laugh.
“Alone?
Listen to this little rat,” the tall one jeered.
“Go back to the training pits, kid.
The real fighters are talking.”
Bardock didn’t laugh.
He didn’t even blink.
He just kept studying Kallard’s face, his instinct telling him that something was deeply wrong with the picture in front of him.
“About what?”
Kallard glanced at the two men, then met Bardock’s gaze directly.
“Your son.”
The laughter stopped instantly.
The air on the platform seemed to drop twenty degrees.
Bardock moved so fast Kallard’s eyes couldn’t even track the blur.
One millisecond he was standing three feet away, and the next, his heavy forearm was jammed brutally into Kallard’s throat, slamming him backward into the side of a metal support beam.
The impact dented the metal with a loud, ringing *boom*.
“Choose your next words very carefully,” Bardock whispered, his face inches away.
His eyes were cold, dangerous, and completely devoid of mercy.
Kallard didn’t fight back.
He didn’t try to pull the arm off his windpipe, even though every single primitive Saiyan instinct inside his body was screaming at him to strike, to flip the attacker, to fight dirty and tear out his throat.
He forced his hands to remain flat against the support beam, holding the human mind firmly in control of the beastly flesh.
“Kakarot,” Kallard choked out, the name scraping against his compressed throat.
“You need to…
send him away.
Now.”
Bardock’s eyes sharpened like daggers.
Behind him, the other two warriors exchanged a weirded-out look.
“Who the hell told you that name?” Bardock growled, his grip tightening until Kallard could feel the cartilage in his neck creaking.
“He’s a newborn in a nursing capsule.
Nobody knows his designation outside of my house.”
“I don’t have the time to explain it the way you want,” Kallard gasped, his vision starting to spot around the edges.
“Just listen to me.”
“Give me a reason not to snap your neck right here.”
Kallard leaned forward against the pressure, putting everything he had into his voice.
“Because Frieza is going to blow this fucking planet into space dust.”
Silence fell over the platform.
True, heavy silence.
The tall warrior with the mustache barked out a short, nervous laugh, but it died instantly when he realized Bardock wasn’t joining in.
Bardock didn’t release the pressure on Kallard’s throat, but his eyes didn’t leave the kid’s face.
“What did you just say?”
“You already know something is wrong,” Kallard said, the words tumbling out in a desperate rush.
“You feel it in your gut.
That’s why you’re standing out here arguing with your crew.
That’s why you’re asking questions that nobody else on this dense rock has the brains to ask.”
Bardock’s jaw muscles worked, clamping down hard.
“He recalled everyone,” Kallard pressed on, his voice cracking.
“Look up at the sky.
His ships are hovering like vultures.
His soldiers aren’t out here patrolling; they’re guarding the exits.
This isn’t military discipline, Bardock.
It’s containment.
They’re gathering the herd.”
The two warriors behind Bardock weren’t laughing anymore.
They looked unsettled, their eyes darting up toward the massive flagship visible in the upper clouds.
The tall one stepped forward, his hand dropping to his belt.
“Hey, watch your mouth, kid.
That’s treason.
If a scouter picks up that kind of talk—”
Kallard ignored him completely, staring straight into the eyes of the man holding him against the beam.
“Your son is low-class.
His power level is pathetic.
Nobody cares about him.
No one is going to notice if a single, low-tier pod leaves the western racks with an infant inside.
Send him to Earth.”
Bardock’s eyes flickered with a strange, sudden confusion.
“Earth?
That backward mudball on the edge of the galaxy?”
“It’s a nothing planet,” Kallard said.
“Frieza’s scouts mapped it years ago and forgot about it.
Low power levels.
No valuable resources.
No active technology worth stealing.
There is absolutely no reason for them to ever check it.”
Bardock pressed his arm harder into Kallard’s throat, his voice dropping to a dangerous hiss.
“And how the hell would a low-class filler rat like you know anything about galactic coordinates or Frieza’s tactical maps?”
*Because I watched your son grow up on a screen in another life.*
*Because he saves everything.*
*Because he becomes the absolute heart of a universe that doesn’t deserve his kindness.*
*Because if Kakarot dies on this rock tomorrow, everything gets a thousand times worse.*
Kallard couldn’t say any of that.
If he did, Bardock would think he was possessed by a demon or completely brain-damaged and finish the job.
So he just looked Bardock dead in the eye and said, “Because unlike the rest of these idiots, I actually listen when people talk.”
Bardock stared at him for what felt like an eternity.
The silence stretched between them, heavy and suffocating, broken only by the distant hum of ship engines and the faint cries of the city below.
Then, slowly, Bardock pulled his arm back.
Kallard dropped to his feet, coughing violently and clutching his bruised throat.
He leaned against the metal beam, sucking in huge gulps of the metallic-tasting air.
The tall warrior stepped up next to Bardock, his face twisted in disbelief.
“You’re actually listening to this garbage?
He sounds like a terrified coward who’s looking for an excuse to tuck his tail and run before the next deployment.”
Kallard looked up through his tangled black hair, his eyes dark and dead serious.
“I *am* trying to run.”
That stopped the warrior dead in his tracks.
He blinked, clearly not expecting a Saiyan to admit to cowardice without a fight.
Kallard stood up straight, wiping his mouth with the back of his glove.
“And if you idiots had more than two brain cells between you, you’d be trying to run too.”
The warrior’s face flushed red with pure rage.
“You little piece of trash!
Saiyans don’t run from anyone!”
Kallard looked past him, pointing a finger up at the massive, bruising red sky.
“Tomorrow morning, a whole lot of Saiyans are going to wish they had.”
The man swung.
It was a wild, furious right hook aimed straight at Kallard’s jaw.
Kallard saw it coming, his human mind screaming to duck, but his unfamiliar Saiyan body was a fraction of a second too slow to coordinate the movement.
The heavy gloved fist clipped the side of his cheek, the sheer force of the blow sending him skidding two full steps across the gritty metal floor.
Pain flared bright and hot across his face.
Instantly, his Saiyan blood responded.
A surge of raw, violent heat flooded his chest, a primitive urge screaming at him to leap forward, to drive his knuckles into the guy’s face, to beat him until his skull cracked against the launch platform and he didn’t move again.
Before he could step forward, Bardock moved, stepping directly between them like a stone wall.
“Enough.”
The warrior snarled, his fist still raised.
“You’re just going to let him stand there and talk down to us?
He’s insulting the entire race!”
Bardock turned his head slightly, his gaze cutting sideways with enough cold malice to freeze a sun.
“I said…
enough, Radu.”
The warrior, Radu, swallowed hard, his fist slowly dropping back to his side.
He muttered something under his breath but stepped back, clearly knowing better than to push Bardock when his voice sounded like that.
Bardock turned back to Kallard, his expression completely unreadable.
“Why warn me?
If you’re so desperate to save your own skin, why waste time standing here talking to a squad leader you don’t even know?”
Kallard looked at him, his voice returning to that flat, exhausted tone.
“Because someone from this place needs to live.
Someone who can actually fight back later.”
Bardock’s face didn’t soften.
Not even an inch.
But deep behind his dark eyes, something shifted—a small, icy realization that the kid’s words lined up perfectly with the paranoia he’d been carrying around for days.
“You said Earth,” Bardock muttered.
“Yes.”
“Do you have the specific coordinates for the sector?”
Kallard didn’t have them memorized, not the exact numbers.
But he knew the old Kallard’s memory banks had basic galaxy-mapping codes, and his human soul knew enough about the general location of the solar system in the Dragon Ball universe to fake it until it worked.
“I can get them from the primary terminal down at the pod office.”
Bardock studied him for three more seconds, then leaned in close, his voice a low whisper that didn’t travel an inch past Kallard’s ear.
“If you’re lying to me, kid…
I don’t care what galaxy you hide in.
I will find you, and I will rip your limbs off one by one.”
Kallard let out a dry, humorless laugh.
“If I’m lying, Bardock, we’re both going to be dead before you ever get the chance.”
For a split second, the ghost of a smile appeared on Bardock’s face.
It wasn’t a friendly expression; it was the grim, twisted smirk of a warrior who appreciated a good death joke.
“Go,” Bardock said, turning back toward his pod.
Kallard didn’t wait around for him to change his mind.
He turned on his heel and walked away, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Behind him, he could hear Radu and the other warrior immediately starting to argue again, their voices loud and angry.
But Bardock’s voice cut through them like a blade, sharp, clear, and final.
“Shut up and prep the pod.
We’re moving the kid tonight.”
Kallard stopped for half a second, his boots freezing against the concrete.
A small, heavy weight lifted from his shoulders.
One thing.
He had changed one single thing.
Maybe that was all he could do.
Maybe it wouldn’t save the world, but it ensured the story would at least have a chance to begin.
## Act III: The Bureaucracy of Death
The next few hours blurred together in a haze of dry heat, frantic movement, and absolute desperation.
Kallard navigated the lower corridors of the western launch facility until he found a small, dusty pod assignment office.
The place was mostly abandoned, save for a few flickering screens and a massive, old-style computer terminal built into the stone wall.
He stepped up to the console, his fingers hovering over the interface.
His human brain had no idea how to read the weird, geometric alien script flashing on the screen, but the moment his callused fingertips touched the keys, his body’s muscle memory took over.
He punched in the original Kallard’s access code.
*Clearance level: Low-Class Fighter / Standard Infantry.*
It was a pathetic level of clearance that wouldn’t let him see high-level troop movements or royal decrees, but right now, low clearance was exactly what he needed.
High-clearance accounts were monitored by Frieza’s tech specialists.
Low-class accounts were ignored, left to rot in the automated system because nobody gave a damn what a foot soldier was doing with his free time.
Working quickly, he opened the automated launch queue and began creating a false mission marker.
He needed something simple, something boring enough that a supervisor wouldn’t bother reading past the first line.
*Log entry: Outer Route Inspection.
Sector 44-Green.
Possible rebel equipment theft / minor communication array disturbance.*
It was small enough to be completely ignored by the high command, but official enough to automatically authorize the release of a single standard space pod from the lower racks.
He assigned the mission to himself: *Kallard.
ID: 882-Delta.*
Once the automated authorization token popped up on the screen, he quickly buried the request deep within the visible launch queue, hiding it beneath a pile of routine cargo transfers and automated drone maintenance logs where only a completely bored, sleep-deprived clerk would ever find it.
Fortunately for him, bored, lazy clerks existed even on a planet full of bloodthirsty space warriors.
As he hurried out of the office and headed toward the main launch yards, the sheer weight of what was coming started to crush him again.
He looked at the faces of the people he passed in the hallways.
Most of them were just regular soldiers, mechanics, and workers.
He tried to warn three more people.
He couldn’t help himself.
The human part of his soul simply refused to let them all die without trying.
The first was the female mechanic he had seen earlier that morning.
She was currently standing by a fuel line, wiping grease off her wrench with a dirty rag.
Kallard stepped up to her, his voice urgent.
“You need to leave.
Right now.
Take one of these ships and get off-world.”
She stopped wiping the wrench, looking at him like he had suddenly grown a second tail out of his forehead.
“Leave?
With what ship, kid?
You think these things are just sitting around for anyone to take?
You think pods grow on trees?”
“Steal one,” Kallard pleaded, his hands reaching out toward her.
“I’m not kidding.
Just grab a functional pod, set the coordinates for the outer rim, and don’t look back.”
She laughed, a bitter, harsh sound that had no joy in it.
“You low-class fighters are all the same.
You think every single problem in the galaxy can be solved with a punch or a stolen ship.
Go home, kid.
Get some sleep before your commander catches you talking crazy.”
“Please,” Kallard said, the word tasting incredibly strange and alien coming out of a Saiyan’s mouth.
The mechanic froze, her eyes widening slightly as she looked at him.
For one brief, terrifying second, she looked like she might actually see the raw, genuine terror hidden behind his eyes.
She looked like she might believe him.
But then a Frieza Force patrol marched past the end of the corridor, the heavy clicking of their boots echoing against the stone walls, and the brief moment of vulnerability vanished, replaced by hard, practical survival instincts.
“Get out of here,” she muttered, turning her back to him and picking up her tools.
“Get out of here before you get us both killed for talking crazy.”
The second person he tried was a young soldier sitting on a stone bench outside a food stall, carefully polishing his white combat gloves with a piece of leather.
He couldn’t have been older than eighteen.
Kallard dropped down on the bench next to him, his voice a low whisper.
“Frieza is going to kill us.
All of us.
The whole planet is a target.
You need to get out while the launch gates are still open.”
The young soldier stopped polishing his glove.
He turned his head slowly, looking at Kallard with a mixture of confusion and intense disgust.
He spat onto the dirt between his boots.
“Frieza kill us?
The entire Saiyan race?
You’ve been fighting weaklings on the border worlds for too long, kid.
It’s rotted your brain.”
“I’m telling you the truth—”
“You’re telling me you’re a coward who wants to live with his spine missing,” the soldier snapped, standing up and shoving his polished gloves into his belt.
“If you’re so scared of the little lizard up there, go hide in a cave.
The rest of us are waiting for the next war.”
He turned and walked away, not even looking back.
The third person was Morga.
He found her standing near the edge of a massive, open-air training yard, her arms crossed tightly over her chest as she watched two younger Saiyan recruits beat each other absolutely bloody on the stone platform below.
The sound of fists striking flesh and bones cracking echoed through the hot air, followed by the harsh shouts of the trainers.
She didn’t turn her head when Kallard approached, but she knew he was there.
“You’re leaving,” she said, her voice flat and even.
Kallard stopped a few paces behind her.
“How did you know?”
“You look guilty,” she muttered, her one good eye still tracking the fight below.
“You’ve had that look on your face since you woke up.
Where are you going?”
“Off-world,” he said quietly.
“An official mission?”
“Something like that.”
Morga turned her head then, studying him with a long, uncomfortably sharp gaze that seemed to slice right through his armor.
“You went down to the lower docks.
You talked to Bardock.”
Kallard’s stomach dropped into his boots.
He felt his muscles lock up, ready for a blow that didn’t come.
A faint, grim smirk touched Morga’s scarred cheek.
“The entire training sector heard about it.
One of Bardock’s men was down at the mess hall an hour ago, yelling about some low-rank filler rat preaching about doom and gloom like a crazy old hermit.”
Kallard looked down at his boots, his jaw tight.
“It’s true, Morga.”
The smirk vanished from her face, replaced by a cold, heavy seriousness that he hadn’t seen on her before.
She turned her body completely away from the training yard, looking up toward the crimson sky where the Frieza Force ships hung like dark stains.
“Frieza,” she said, the name sounding like a curse word.
Kallard nodded once.
“How long do we have?” her voice was barely a whisper, completely drowned out by the shouts of the recruits below.
“Less than a day,” Kallard said.
“Maybe a few hours.
By tomorrow morning, there won’t be a stone left standing on this rock.”
Morga exhaled slowly through her nose.
There was no panic in her expression.
No screaming, no crying, no frantic denial.
She was a Saiyan warrior; she absorbed the news of her impending execution like a physical blow she simply refused to show the world.
“Can you stop it?” she asked.
Kallard let out a dry, hollow laugh that felt like tearing paper.
“No.
Not even close.”
“Can Bardock?”
“No.”
“Can the King?”
“The King is probably already dead,” Kallard said flatly.
Morga’s jaw worked, her teeth grinding together so hard he could hear the sound.
Then, without warning, she reached out and grabbed him by the front of his chest plating, yanking him forward until their faces were inches apart.
Her dark eye was wide, fierce, and terrifyingly intense.
“Then you live,” she growled.
Kallard froze, his breath catching in his throat.
“You hear me, kid?” Morga shook him once, hard enough to make his teeth rattle.
“You live.
If this whole damn world is going to burn, then you make sure you fly fast enough to stay ahead of the fire.
You live long enough so that somebody, somewhere down the line, remembers that we were actually here.
You remember that we weren’t just numbers on a Frieza Force spreadsheet.”
The human part of his soul cracked completely open, the raw emotion of the moment overwhelming his defenses.
“I don’t even know if I’m really—”
“I said *live*, Kallard!” she barked, cutting him off before he could say something stupid.
His throat tightened up, a lump forming that he couldn’t swallow.
In that moment, the old Kallard’s memories surged forward again with terrifying clarity—images of Morga throwing him into a stone wall during his first training session, Morga shoving a hard, stale ration bar into his chest after he came back from a brutal border skirmish bleeding from three different wounds, Morga standing over him and telling him that pain was just weakness getting bored and leaving the body.
She had never been gentle with him.
She had never been kind or loving in the way a human mother would be.
But she had been real.
She had kept him alive in a world that chewed up weaklings and spat them out as paste.
Kallard managed a single, tight nod.
“I will.”
Morga released her grip on his armor, stepping back.
Then, without a single word of warning, she drove her fist straight into his solar plexus.
*Oof!*
The blow was incredibly hard, the sheer force of it knocking the wind clean out of his lungs and sending him stumbling back three steps, clutching his ribs and coughing violently.
“What the hell was that for?” he gasped, his eyes watering.
“For luck,” Morga said, her face returning to its usual stern, unreadable mask.
“That’s your version of luck?”
“It is if you survive it,” she muttered, turning her back to him and looking back down at the training yard where one of the recruits had just been knocked unconscious.
“Now get out of here before I change my mind and drag you into a fight that’s actually worth dying for.”
Kallard stood there for a brief moment, looking at her broad, scarred back.
He wanted to say something else—a thank you, a goodbye, anything—but he knew it wouldn’t fit the skin he was wearing.
So he just turned and walked away, leaving her standing on the edge of a world that was already dead.
## Act IV: The Launch and the Snipe
The lower launch yard smelled like high-octane fuel, hot metal, scorched earth, and unearned arrogance.
Rows upon rows of standard Saiyan space pods lined the automated launch racks.
They were ugly, round, compact little miracles of engineering, specifically designed to throw a single warrior across impossible galactic distances and smash into an alien world like a meteor.
Frieza Force guards walked the upper platforms, monitoring the launch bays with their weapons drawn, while low-class Saiyan technicians handled the final fueling sequences, looking thoroughly irritated by the extra surveillance.
Kallard walked through the yard with a steady, purposeful stride.
That was the trick he had learned from his old life on Earth, though the stakes back then had never been quite this high: if you look like you have an official reason to be somewhere, half the world won’t bother asking questions, and the other half will usually ask too late.
As he reached the gate for Platform Seven, a tall, reptilian Frieza Force soldier stepped directly into his path, raising a scaly hand.
“Hold it right there, monkey.
State your assignment.”
Kallard didn’t say a word.
He just reached into his belt, pulled out the digital mission tab he had generated at the terminal, and shoved it into the soldier’s hand.
The soldier grunted, pulling the tab close to his face while his green scouter flickered with data.
“Outer route inspection?
Sector 44?” He looked up, his yellow eyes narrowing with suspicion.
“Since when does the high command authorize solo scouting routes during a full-scale recall?”
Kallard let a little bit of that natural Saiyan irritation leak into his face.
He crossed his arms, his tail twitching aggressively behind his boots.
“Do you see a squad standing behind me, lizard?”
The soldier’s face twisted with anger, his hand moving slightly toward his blaster holster.
“Watch your mouth, low-class trash.
I can have you thrown in a detention cell for insubordination.”
Kallard took a half-step forward, leaning his face in close until the soldier could see the faint, erratic green pulse deep within his dark eyes.
“And I can tear your arm off and beat you to death with it before your little radio can call for help.
You want to check the authorization code again, or do you want to see how fast low-class patience runs out?”
For a tense, heavy second, the soldier looked like he was genuinely considering making it a life-or-death issue.
But then a loud, angry shout echoed from across the main platform—a superior officer yelling about a jammed fuel line on an elite transport—and the soldier spat on the ground, tossing the mission tab back at Kallard’s chest.
“Pod seven,” the lizard hissed, stepping aside.
“Get out of my sight, monkey.
Try not to get lost in the dark.”
Kallard didn’t waste a single breath responding.
He walked past the guard, his boots clacking against the metal grating of the walkway until he reached the round, white pod designated as Seven.
The hatch opened automatically with a long, metallic hiss, tilting upward to reveal the cramped, padded interior.
It was a space that felt completely familiar to his physical body, but utterly terrifying to his human mind.
The control dashboard curved around the single leather seat like a cage, glowing with primitive red and green indicator lights.
He climbed inside, forcing his large frame into the small seat.
The moment his back hit the padding, the automated systems engaged.
Hard, plastic restraint straps snapped across his chest and thighs, locking him down tight.
Through the rapidly shrinking gap of the closing hatch, he took one last look at Planet Vegeta.
It was still alive.
Still loud.
Still burning with a brutal, beautiful kind of energy.
He saw the jagged towers rising into the bruised sky.
He saw the distant streaks of training blasts exploding against the mountains.
He saw the thousands of people moving through the streets below, completely unaware that they were already ghosts walking through an open grave.
His breathing turned shaky, a single tear escaping his eye and rolling down his dark cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to the empty air.
The hatch sealed shut with a heavy, pressurized *thud*, cutting off the sounds of the world outside completely.
*SYSTEMS ONLINE.*
*TARGET SECTOR: 44-GREEN.*
*LAUNCH SEQUENCE ENGAGED.*
The pod beneath him shuddered violently as the automated launch clamps disengaged.
A split second later, the primary thrusters ignited with a deafening, bone-rattling roar.
The sheer, crushing weight of the G-force slammed Kallard back into his seat, pressing against his chest until his ribs groaned under the pressure.
But his Saiyan anatomy handled it with ease, his dense muscles tightening automatically to keep the blood flowing to his brain.
Through the thick, reinforced glass of the forward display, he watched the clouds split open around him.
The sprawling capital city shrank at an impossible speed, turning into a small, dark patch on a massive red canvas.
The horizon began to curve, revealing the true scale of the planet—vast red continents, deep black oceans, massive storm belts circling the poles.
Then, with a sudden, violent jolt, the pod broke through the upper atmosphere.
The roaring sound of the thrusters died instantly, replaced by the eerie, absolute silence of outer space.
The stars opened up ahead of him—cold, endless, and beautiful.
For one fragile, beautiful second, Kallard actually thought he had made it.
He thought he had beaten the clock.
Then the pod’s emergency klaxons started screaming.
*WARNING.
TARGET LOCK DETECTED.*
*WARNING.
PROXIMITY ALERT.*
A massive, terrifying shadow fell over the stars, blocking out the light of the distant suns.
Kallard looked up through the forward display, his blood turning to pure ice in his veins.
Frieza’s flagship hung directly above the planet like a giant, golden disk of doom.
It was silent, completely motionless, and so massive it looked like a second moon designed specifically to bring about the end of days.
On the central command deck of the flagship, the air was cool, clean, and smelled faintly of sterile metal.
Lord Frieza sat comfortably in his small, hovering pod-chair, one white-skinned cheek resting lazily against his knuckles.
His dark, crimson eyes watched the massive red marble of Planet Vegeta spinning slowly below him through the giant panoramic viewing glass.
He looked thoroughly bored, like a child waiting for a tedious chore to finish.
A few paces behind him stood Dodoria, his thick, pink-skinned arms crossed over his massive chest, a cruel, heavy grin splitting his spiked face.
On Frieza’s other side stood Zarbon, elegant, green-skinned, and completely unreadable, his long braided hair resting neatly over his shoulder.
A low-ranking technician turned quickly from his console, his voice hesitating slightly as he spoke into his headset.
“Lord Frieza.
An automated launch has just been registered from the western low-class platform.
A single Saiyan space pod is breaking orbit.”
Frieza’s red eyes didn’t move from the planet below.
He didn’t blink.
“Has it?” he murmured, his voice smooth, polite, and completely devoid of any human warmth.
Dodoria snorted loudly, stepping forward and cracking his massive knuckles.
“Want me to have the defense turrets vaporize it, my Lord?
It’ll take less than a second to turn that little tin can into scrap metal.”
Frieza slowly lifted one finger, holding it up in the air to halt him.
“No.
No, let’s not be crude, Dodoria.”
The entire command deck went dead silent, the technicians holding their breath.
Frieza’s thin lips curled into a tiny, theatrical smile that made the skin on the back of Zarbon’s neck prickle.
“Let us be precise.
I do so despise sloppy work.”
Inside the tumbling space pod, Kallard saw the energy spike register on his dashboard.
The red warning lights were flashing so fast they looked like a solid beam of light.
His heart stopped beating.
*Move.
Move.
Move!*
His body reacted entirely before his conscious thought could finish the sentence.
He slammed his palms against the manual override controls, tearing the pod away from its pre-programmed trajectory and angling the nose sharply to the left.
The Death Beam came out of the dark like a single, impossibly thin thread of purple-white judgment.
It didn’t hit the cockpit.
Kallard’s frantic maneuver had saved his life by a fraction of an inch.
Instead, the beam struck the primary engine housing at the back of the pod.
The entire craft convulsed violently.
A loud, metallic explosion ripped through the rear compartments, and Kallard screamed as the pod was sent into a frantic, chaotic spin.
The internal systems burst into sparks, smoke filling the cramped cockpit instantly.
The stars became dizzying streaks of white light across the glass.
The red planet vanished from view, then returned, then vanished again as the pod spun completely out of control.
Warning symbols began flashing across the secondary monitor in a geometric language his brain somehow understood with perfect clarity.
*CRITICAL ENGINE FAILURE.*
*NAVIGATION ARRAY: DESTROYED.*
*LIFE SUPPORT: COMPROMISED (RESERVES ONLY).*
*TRAJECTORY: UNSTABLE.*
The damaged pod tumbled away from Planet Vegeta, caught in a erratic, drifting orbit that carried it deeper into the cold void of space.
Back on the flagship’s command deck, Dodoria burst into a loud, mocking laugh, pointing a thick finger at the display screen.
“Ha!
Look at that!
You missed the cockpit, Lord Frieza!
The little monkey’s still drifting!”
Frieza’s smile widened slightly, his crimson eyes turning slowly to lock onto Dodoria.
Dodoria’s laughter died instantly.
He swallowed hard, stepping back a pace as a cold sweat broke out across his pink forehead.
“I-I mean…
a fine shot, my Lord.”
“I did not miss, Dodoria,” Frieza said lightly, turning his gaze back to the window.
Zarbon glanced at the tracking monitor, noting the pod’s ruined engine and the rapidly failing life support readings.
“A slow, agonizing death in the dark?
How delightfully cruel, Lord Frieza.”
“A fitting one,” Frieza corrected him, his voice smooth and airy.
“A Saiyan who attempts to flee his own world should be given ample time to sit in the dark and appreciate the exact consequences of his species’ arrogance.
Don’t you agree?”
Dodoria chuckled nervously, wiping his brow.
“Want me to send a scout squad to finish him off after we’re done here?”
Frieza waved a single white hand dismissively.
“Eventually, if you feel the need to stay busy.
Confirm the debris if it makes you happy, Dodoria.
There is absolutely no rush.”
Then Frieza raised his hand toward the window, a single spark of bright, terrifying orange energy appearing at the tip of his pointed finger.
“Now then.
Where were we?”
## Act V: The Fire and the Void
Kallard drifted.
Minutes turned into hours, and hours turned into something infinitely worse.
He had no idea how long he managed to stay conscious inside that smoky, dark tin can.
The pod’s emergency reserves had kicked in, keeping a thin stream of oxygen flowing through the mask attached to his seat, but the main engine was completely ruined.
He couldn’t steer.
He couldn’t accelerate.
He could barely manage to stabilize the erratic rotation of the craft using the tiny manual thrusters on the sides.
Sometimes, through the cracked glass, the massive red shape of Planet Vegeta would fill his entire field of view.
At other times, the window showed nothing but the cold, indifferent stars of a galaxy that didn’t care if he lived or died.
Then, he saw it.
It started as a tiny, brilliant point of light on the horizon of the planet.
Within seconds, that tiny point grew into something impossible.
A massive, roaring sun of pure, blinding orange and yellow energy descended from the upper atmosphere, sinking deep into the crust of the world like a heavy stone falling into a pool of water.
Kallard didn’t make a single sound.
His voice was gone, trapped in his throat.
The explosion didn’t look like fire.
It looked like the universe itself had decided to tear an open wound in reality.
A blinding, silent wave of white light erupted from the center of the planet, fracturing the continents into billions of burning pieces.
The dark stone towers, the training yards, the markets, the families—everything was swallowed up in a single, instantaneous microsecond of pure, unadulterated destruction.
For a long, agonizing moment, there was no Saiyan warrior body.
There was no alien blood, no inherited instincts, no desperate survival plans.
There was only a regular human man, sitting inside a broken metal ball, watching an entire world turn into ash.
The blinding light slowly faded, leaving behind nothing but a massive, expanding cloud of fire, glowing planetary debris, and absolute, terrifying silence.
Planet Vegeta was gone.
Kallard slowly lifted his gloved hand, pressing his palm flat against the cold, cracked glass of the display.
His breath shuddered against the oxygen mask.
He remembered Morga’s fierce, scarred face.
He remembered Bardock’s tired eyes.
He remembered the female mechanic wiping grease off her tools, and the proud young soldier polishing his white gloves on the bench.
He remembered the little boy wiping blood from his lip and grinning up at his mother.
He remembered the sound of that normal, hungry baby crying in the market.
An entire world of ordinary, brutal, living people.
Gone.
Turned into space dust because a spoiled monster was afraid of a myth.
“I’ll remember,” Kallard whispered into the dark, his voice cracking with an emotion that felt too large for his chest.
“I’ll remember all of you.
Every single one.”
The pod spun slowly away from the debris field, drifting deeper into the dark void of space.
Sometime later, the emergency life support systems finally gave out.
The red indicator lights flickered twice and died, leaving the interior of the cockpit completely dark and freezing cold.
Kallard curled himself as tightly into the leather seat as the restraint straps would allow.
His teeth chattered violently, his lips turning blue as the sub-zero temperature of space began to seep through the cracked hull.
Instinctively, his tail wrapped itself tightly around his waist and chest, trying to preserve the last remaining drops of body heat.
His mind began to blur, his thoughts turning slow and heavy like syrup.
The Saiyan biology was an absurd, terrifying thing—it fought to keep him alive long after a regular human body would have shut down from the cold and the lack of air.
His heart slowed to a dull, heavy thud, entering a state of semi-hibernation as the pod drifted aimlessly through the black.
He woke up to pure, blistering heat.
The interior of the cockpit was glowing a brilliant, terrifying orange.
The air inside was boiling, the sweat drying on his skin before it could even form.
The pod was screaming.
A loud, deafening roar tore through the metal hull as the craft slammed into the upper atmosphere of an unfamiliar planet at terminal velocity.
Through the smoke and the cracked glass of the display, Kallard managed to open his eyes.
He saw land below him—a wild, alien landscape dominated by massive, blue-green forests, jagged grey mountain ranges, and three small, pale moons hanging in a twilight sky.
It definitely wasn’t Earth.
The pod hit the ground like a fist thrown from the heavens.
*BOOM.*
The impact was so violent it tore the leather seat straight off its tracks.
The world spun into a chaotic blur of tearing metal, exploding dirt, and shattering glass.
Then, everything went completely black.
## Act VI: The Fungal Wasteland
When Kallard finally opened his eyes again, he was upside down.
A single droplet of warm, dark blood floated right in front of his eye.
No, it wasn’t floating.
It was dripping from his forehead onto the shattered display screen below him.
The pod had carved a massive, smoking trench through hundreds of meters of dense, black soil before finally smashing into a bizarre field of giant stone fungus.
These things were massive, looking like colossal, gray mushrooms taller than three-story buildings, their thick caps blocking out most of the twilight sky.
Steam hissed loudly from the cracked, twisted hull of the craft.
The main hatch was jammed completely halfway open, stuck on a broken piece of rock.
Kallard tried to move his arm.
Instantly, a blinding white flare of pure agony detonated through his left ribs, making his vision turn white.
He bit down on his lower lip so hard he could feel a tooth crack under the pressure.
*Saiyan body,* he reminded himself, his mind screaming through the pain.
*You’re a Saiyan.
You don’t die from a rough landing.
Move.*
He forced his right arm free from the twisted remnants of the restraint straps, reaching up to grab the edge of the console.
He dragged his heavy, battered shoulder out of the wreckage, then swung both of his boots around until they were planted firmly against the inside of the jammed hatch.
He kicked.
*Bang!* The metal groaned, but didn’t move.
He kicked again, putting every ounce of his remaining strength into the blow.
*Bang!*
On the third strike, the heavy reinforced hatch finally tore off its hinges with a loud scream of twisting metal, flying through the air and crashing into the black dirt outside.
Kallard dragged himself out of the smoking hole on his stomach, collapsing face-first onto the alien soil.
He lay there for a long time, gasping for air.
The atmosphere of this world tasted strange—heavy, metallic, and weirdly sweet, like crushed copper and sugar.
He coughed violently, spitting out a mouthful of dark blood, and then he did something completely insane.
He laughed.
It was a terrible, ragged, hollow little sound that echoed through the quiet fungus forest.
He was alive.
Frieza’s perfect little snipe hadn’t killed him.
The vacuum of space hadn’t killed him.
The crash hadn’t killed him.
He had beaten the odds.
As he lay there beneath the unfamiliar triple-mooned sky, he felt a strange, terrifying sensation start to stir deep within the center of his chest.
It wasn’t the clean, bright energy of a Super Saiyan—he wasn’t anywhere near that level yet, not even close.
This was something much older.
Something darker, heavier, and completely untamed.
It felt like a sudden, violent pressure in his bones, a low, rumbling roar buried just beneath his skin that wanted to tear its way out.
His fingers curled into claws, digging deep into the wet, black dirt of the planet.
For one single, fleeting second, his eyes flashed a brilliant, dangerous green.
His power level spiked, an invisible wave of kinetic energy erupting from his body with enough force to cause a massive, five-foot stone fungus next to him to fracture down the middle and shatter into pieces.
Then the feeling vanished as quickly as it had arrived, leaving him shaking violently and completely drained of energy.
He didn’t know the proper name for that feeling yet.
One day, years down the line, he would learn to call it *Primal Instinct*.
But right now, it was just raw, undeniable proof that this alien body wanted to survive just as badly as his human soul did.
Suddenly, a sharp, whining sound cut through the quiet air of the forest.
The sound of ship engines.
High-tech, high-speed engines.
Kallard’s heart stopped.
He rolled over onto his side, his eyes widening in pure horror as a sleek, white-and-purple Frieza Force space pod dropped out of the clouds, its single thruster burning bright against the twilight sky.
The pod didn’t hesitate.
It circled the crash site once before dropping straight down, landing with a heavy *thud* barely twenty meters away from where Kallard was lying.
The hatch hissed open, tilting upward to reveal the massive, terrifying figure stepping out into the dirt.
He had a thick, pink-skinned body covered in brutal, organic spikes.
He wore the standard high-ranking warrior armor with a golden shoulder piece, and a yellow-lens scouter was clicking rapidly over his left eye.
A cruel, thuggish grin split his face, revealing rows of sharp, yellow teeth.
*Dodoria.*
## Act VII: The Hunted and the Hunter
Kallard’s mouth went completely dry, his throat locking up with pure, unadulterated terror.
*No.
No, no, no.
This has to be a joke.*
He wasn’t ready for Dodoria.
Not like this.
Not with broken ribs, a concussed head, and a power level that probably barely hovered around the low thousands on a good day.
Dodoria was an elite enforcer with a power level somewhere around twenty-two thousand.
In a straight, fair fight, the massive pink monster could blink and turn Kallard into a puddle of grease on the floor.
Using every ounce of discipline he possessed, Kallard forced his body to remain absolutely still, dragging himself slowly behind a massive, fallen slab of stone fungus that lay right next to his wrecked ship.
Dodoria walked slowly through the black soil, his heavy combat boots sinking into the mud with every step.
He didn’t look like a soldier on a mission; he looked like a guy out for a casual stroll in a park, completely relaxed.
He adjusted the scouter on his ear, his yellow lens flashing as it scanned the area.
“Well, well, well,” Dodoria chuckled, his deep, gravelly voice echoing through the quiet forest.
“Lord Frieza really was feeling generous today, wasn’t he?
Letting you drift all the way out here to the outer rim just so you could have a nice, scenic view for your final landing.”
Kallard held his breath, pressing his back flat against the cold stone growth.
He could feel his heart hammering against his cracked ribs so hard it felt like it was going to break through his chest piece.
Dodoria reached the edge of the smoking trench, looking down at the mangled wreckage of Kallard’s pod.
“Come on out, little monkey.
If you’re still breathing in there, I’ll make it quick for you.
Probably.
Depends on how much you make me chase you around this miserable swamp.”
His scouter suddenly began to beep, a series of rapid, high-pitched tones indicating a scan.
Kallard squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force his mind into a state of absolute blankness.
He had no idea how to suppress his power level—he hadn’t undergone any of the special training that the Earth fighters or the Namekians used to hide their energy signatures from technological devices.
He was just a low-class soldier who had spent his entire life being measured by numbers.
The scouter clicked three times, then let out a low, flat tone.
Dodoria stopped walking, his brow furrowing as he looked down at the device.
“Power level…
huh?
What’s wrong with this piece of junk?”
The device scanned the wreckage again.
*0.*
“Nothing?” Dodoria muttered, tapping the side of his scouter with a thick pink finger.
“The crash must have turned him into paste already.
Or maybe the local radiation from these stupid rock mushrooms is scrambling the sensors.”
Kallard’s mind raced.
*The radiation.
The pod’s burning fuel cell.* The cracked engine was currently leaking a thick, green, radioactive sludge into the soil, creating a massive localized energy distortion that was completely masking his biological signature.
It was a miracle born of pure, mechanical failure.
*Use it,* he told himself.
*Do not stand up.
Do not fight him fair.
You have one shot at this, and if you miss, you’re dead.*
Dodoria walked up to the edge of the ruined pod, reaching down with one massive, clawed hand to rip the twisted hatch completely open, wanting to inspect the interior for any sign of a corpse.
He leaned his massive bulk over the opening, his back completely turned to the fallen stone fungus where Kallard was hiding.
“Empty?” Dodoria’s grin vanished instantly, replaced by a deep, ugly scowl of irritation.
“What the hell?
Where did the little rat go?”
Kallard moved.
He didn’t think about the pain in his ribs.
He didn’t think about the absolute absurdity of what he was doing.
He just let the pure, unadulterated terror in his soul sharpen into a single, razor-focused point of absolute violence.
He launched himself from behind the stone growth like a spring-loaded trap, every single muscle in his legs exploding with power as he threw his entire weight into a desperate, silent ambush.
Dodoria’s scouter picked up the sudden displacement of air at the absolute last microsecond.
The yellow lens flickered wildly, the numbers spinning out of control in a frantic series of high-pitched alarms.
*POWER LEVEL: 3,200…
3,600…
4,000!*
Dodoria’s single visible eye widened in pure shock.
“What the—”
Before the massive alien could even begin to turn his heavy body around, Kallard’s heavy combat boot smashed directly into the side of his face with a sickening, heavy *CRACK*.
It wasn’t enough to break Dodoria’s jaw—the enforcer’s raw durability was simply too high for a four-thousand-power strike to do any permanent structural damage.
But it was more than enough to completely surprise him.
The sheer, unexpected kinetic force of the kick sent the massive pink brute stumbling sideways, his balance completely broken.
The yellow lens of his scouter shattered into a thousand tiny pieces under the impact of the boot.
Kallard didn’t stop.
He couldn’t afford to let Dodoria recover his footing for even a fraction of a second.
Twisting his body in mid-air with a frantic, clumsy grace, he landed on his hands, swung his legs around, and drove both of his open palms straight toward the sides of Dodoria’s head.
“Die!” Kallard screamed, his voice a raw, primal roar.
A massive, erratic burst of green-white ki energy erupted from his palms point-blank.
The explosion was loud and concussive, the bright light illuminating the entire fungus forest like a flash of lightning.
The remainder of Dodoria’s scouter headset exploded into sparks and melting plastic.
The massive alien roared out in pure, agonizing fury, stumbling backward into the mud as his hands flew up to cover his bleeding, scorched face.
“MY EYE!
YOU MISERABLE LITTLE MONKEY, I’LL SKIN YOU ALIVE FOR THAT!”
Kallard hit the ground hard, rolling through the black dirt and coming up onto his feet already moving at full speed.
Dodoria swung his massive arm blindly through the air, a wild, furious backhand that carried enough raw power to split the atmosphere.
The heavy pink fist missed Kallard’s head by a matter of mere inches, the sheer wind pressure of the blow alone throwing him completely sideways and shattering a six-foot stone fungus behind him into tiny pebbles.
*Too strong,* Kallard’s brain screamed as he scrambled for balance in the dirt.
*He’s entirely too strong.
If a single one of those punches connects, I’m going to turn into a smear.*
*Do not fight fair.
Do not play by their rules.*
Kallard reached down, grabbed a massive, jagged chunk of reinforced metal plating that had torn off his wrecked pod during the crash, and hurled it with everything he had straight at Dodoria’s face.
Dodoria didn’t even try to dodge.
He simply charged forward, smashing through the metal plate with his chest, turning the alloy into crumpled foil.
But the brief distraction gave Kallard the split second he needed to get underneath the monster’s guard.
Dropping low to the ground, Kallard drove his knee with maximum force straight into the side of Dodoria’s right knee joint.
*Thud.*
It was like striking a mountain of solid granite, the impact sending a jarring shockwave of pain straight up Kallard’s leg.
But the sheer weight of his four-thousand power level behind the strike forced Dodoria’s joint to buckle slightly, the massive alien staggering forward with a loud grunt of frustration.
Working on pure adrenaline, Kallard didn’t try to back away.
He planted his palms firmly against the wet dirt right beneath Dodoria’s boots and released another massive, unrefined burst of ki energy straight into the ground.
The earth exploded.
A massive geyser of black mud, jagged stones, and shattered fungus roots erupted upward, completely obscuring the battlefield in a thick, blinding cloud of debris.
Dodoria coughed violently, his arms flailing through the dust as he tried to clear his vision.
“You little piece of trash!
Where are you?
Face me like a warrior!”
Kallard appeared out of the dust cloud right in front of him, his face masked in a look of absolute, desperate determination.
He slammed both of his open hands flat against the center of Dodoria’s scorched chest piece, digging his boots deep into the mud to anchor himself.
He didn’t use a technique.
He didn’t know any of the famous named blasts from the stories.
He just reached deep into that dark, heavy reservoir of Saiyan energy inside his chest and released every single ounce of power he had left in his body all at once.
It wasn’t a clean beam of energy.
It was a raw, chaotic, survival-driven explosion of green-white light.
The point-blank blast hit Dodoria right in the sternum, the sheer concussive force of the energy sending the massive, three-hundred-pound alien flying backward through the air.
Dodoria crashed brutally into the smoking wreckage of Kallard’s space pod, his heavy body folding the reinforced metal walls inward like paper.
The impact caused a massive shower of sparks to erupt from the rear compartments, and a high-pitched, terrifying shriek began to echo from the damaged fuel cell.
Kallard saw the green, glowing light leaking from the engine block.
He didn’t wait around to see what happened next.
He turned on his heel and ran for his absolute life, throwing himself over a nearby stone ridge just as the world behind him turned into sun-bright fire.
*BOOOOOOM!*
The pod’s fuel cell detonated with the force of a tactical missile.
A massive fireball rolled over the clearing, the intense heat singing the tops of the giant fungus trees and sending a massive shockwave through the ground that lifted Kallard completely off the earth and slammed him into the dirt behind the ridge.
For several long, agonizing seconds, there was nothing but a loud, high-pitched ringing in his ears and the sound of burning metal raining down around him.
Slowly, painfully, Kallard pushed himself up onto his elbows, coughing up a thick cloud of gray smoke.
He peered over the edge of the stone ridge, his eyes wide.
In the center of the clearing, a massive, black smoking crater had completely replaced his old space pod.
Inside the crater, Dodoria was slowly pushing himself up onto his hands and knees.
The massive alien looked absolutely terrible—his golden shoulder armor was completely melted away, his pink skin was covered in deep, ugly black burns, and a stream of dark purple blood was flowing freely from his swollen left eye.
His scouter was entirely gone, and his body was twitching violently from the sheer concussive shock of the blast.
He wasn’t dead.
Of course he wasn’t dead.
An enforcer of his level could survive a planetary explosion if he had his guard up.
But he was down.
He was dazed, blinded in one eye, completely disoriented, and lacked any technological means of tracking an energy signature.
Kallard staggered to his feet, his entire body screaming in absolute agony.
His ribs felt like they were floating around loose in his chest, his hands were covered in severe plasma burns, and his energy reserves were almost completely depleted.
He hadn’t beaten Dodoria.
Not even close.
He had ambushed him, blinded his technology, tricked him using the environment, and used a suicidal mechanical explosion to temporarily knock him on his ass.
There was a massive, life-or-death difference between winning a fight and surviving an encounter.
He stumbled across the clearing, his boots dragging through the mud as he headed straight for Dodoria’s pristine, undamaged space pod.
The hatch was still wide open, the interior lights glowing a soft, welcoming green.
*Thank God,* Kallard thought, his mind slipping back into his old human habits.
*No.
Thank whatever cosmic bastard thought it would be funny to throw me into this meat grinder.*
He scrambled inside the pod, his large frame collapsing into the leather seat.
He didn’t waste a single millisecond looking around; his hands flew straight to the main console, his fingers hitting the heavy manual launch override switch.
The heavy hatch slammed shut with a pressurized *thud*, locking him inside the quiet comfort of the cockpit.
Through the forward display screen, he could see Dodoria finally staggering out of the smoking crater, his one good eye wide with pure, maniacal rage as he realized what was happening.
The massive pink monster sprinted forward, his mouth opening in a deafening, silent scream of fury as he reached out his clawed hands toward the ship.
“SAIYAN!”
Kallard slammed his palm down onto the primary ignition button.
The thrusters engaged instantly.
A massive column of white fire erupted from the base of the pod, the sheer kinetic force of the launch throwing Dodoria backward into the mud as the craft rocketed straight up into the twilight sky like a shooting star.
## Act VIII: A Vow in the Dark
Within seconds, the wild, blue-green forest and the three pale moons faded into a small, distant memory as the pod broke through the atmosphere and entered the deep, quiet void of space.
Kallard leaned his head back against the leather headrest, his chest heaving as he let out a long, ragged breath that turned into a painful groan.
His body was shaking violently from the adrenaline crash.
His ribs hurt with every single micro-movement, his hands were raw and blistered, and he was completely alone in a galaxy that wanted his entire species dead.
His old world on Earth was gone, reduced to a collection of memories that felt increasingly like a dream he had dreamed a lifetime ago.
His new world on Planet Vegeta was literally a cloud of burning pebbles drifting through the dark behind him.
Frieza thought he was dead, a minor statistical anomaly cleared from the books by a precise beam.
Dodoria was stranded on a weird, fungal rock with a ruined face and no scouter, probably currently screaming at the sky.
And Kallard—a random human soul trapped in a stolen body, flying a stolen ship, embarking on a stolen second life—was still breathing.
He looked out through the thick glass of the forward display, watching the infinite stars spinning slowly past.
For the first time since he had opened his eyes in that dark stone room that morning, the frantic, suffocating panic inside his chest began to settle down, cooling until it turned into something much harder.
Something icy, sharp, and absolute.
A vow.
It wasn’t a loud, dramatic speech meant for an audience.
It was just a quiet statement of fact made to the empty dark.
“I’m going to get strong,” he said, his rough voice barely a whisper over the hum of the pod’s life support systems.
He looked down at the glass, watching his own reflection stare back at him from the dark window.
Dark skin.
Wild, short-cut black hair.
The fierce, unblinking eyes of a Saiyan warrior.
A face that Lord Frieza had looked at from his high chair and completely forgotten about a minute later.
Kallard’s fingers slowly curled into a tight, heavy fist, ignoring the stinging pain of his burned gloves.
“I’m going to get strong enough so that the next time he sees this face…” his voice dropped an octave, turning cold and heavy like iron.
“…he remembers exactly who I am.”
The white space pod adjusted its trajectory automatically, its small maneuvering thrusters firing once as it turned its nose toward the deep, uncharted sectors of the outer rim, vanishing into the endless dark of space.
this is my first time writing a fanfic so guys go easy on the new kid if anyone has any suggestions or question about anything in the story tell me and I’ll try and input it into the story.
Also thanks for anyone whos reading and want to be apart of this journey with me also I have a game of thrones and walking dead fanfic coming out so please check those out when any of you have time thanks and have a good day.
I plan to drop a new chapter everyday and if not then every 2 days.