## Act I: Three Years of Dust and Scheduling
Three years after the white pods of the Ginyu Force slammed into the crimson landing pads of Veyra-Tal, Kallard could still hear the sound of the metal hitting the stone.
It wasn’t an explosion.
It was a heavy, structural thud that traveled straight through the red volcanic rock of the canyon, vibrating through the soles of his combat boots long before the dust cloud even cleared the market stalls.
He remembered the sheer, overwhelming absurdity of the spectacle—five high-tier galactic monsters wearing pristine armor pieces like they were primary performers in a holovid theater, right before they unleashed a level of physical energy that could alter a planet’s weather patterns in a single microsecond.
Most of all, he remembered running away from them.
At first, the primitive Saiyan bloodline caked into his muscles had absolutely, profoundly hated the choice.
Every predatory cell inside his framework had screamed out against the indignity of turning his back on an active deployment lane while an enemy was still breathing behind his tail.
He had hated the way his core heat had boiled when Burter chased the *Wayfarer* through the narrow cable gaps, knowing with an absolute, mathematical certainty that if the blue speedster had managed to lock his fingers around the hull rails, the subsequent exchange wouldn’t have even been interesting for the ledger.
But three standard cycles was a long time in the deep trenches of the outer rim.
It was three cycles of low-margin contracts.
Three cycles of clearing local bounty dens, rebuilding faulty fuel line manifolds, and learning how to fix a cracked scouter lens using nothing but scrap copper pins and patience.
It was three cycles of listening to Brakka deliver his favorite piece of professional engineering advice over the galley table:
> “Running from a direct structural collision with a mountain isn’t a sign of cowardice, you muscle-brained idiot.
It’s called proper maintenance scheduling.
You live long enough to clear the invoice, or you turn into scrap material before the turn of the shift.”
>
Kallard had grown since that bloody afternoon in the canyon.
He was twenty-one years old now, though sometimes the number felt like a complete design joke inside his head.
The human soul burrowed deep beneath his armor still carried the fragile, distant memories of a completely separate universe—an ordinary world where being twenty-one meant making exceptionally poor choices regarding cheap diner food, staring at college debt notices on a digital screen, and pretending you understood how to file your annual tax parameters.
Out here in the dirt lanes of the rim, being twenty-one carried a significantly heavier specification sheet.
It meant he had already watched his entire birth world turn into a cloud of burning space gravel.
It meant he had traded plasma fire with high-gravity raiders inside frozen mountain shafts, nearly had his internal cells drained by a parasitic outlaw using bootleg Yardrat control loops, systematically blown apart a self-replicating machine core that was trying to turn a mining colony into processing parts, and outrun the most expensive special operations unit in Frieza’s empire.
### Structural Development Log
His resting base power level had climbed through an unyielding, day-by-day grind to a solid peak of seven thousand five hundred units of raw output.
CURRENT PHYSICAL RECKONING: AGE 740 (ESTIMATED RADIAL CALIBRATION)
BASELINE POWER LEVEL: 7,500 (SUPPRESSED TO 900 FOR PORT NAVIGATION)
PRIMAL STABILITY INDEX: 42% MAXIMUM DURATION (RESTRICTED ENCLOSURE
“`
It hadn’t been a massive, legendary leap born of an emotional breakthrough or some hidden genetic cheat code.
Every single digit added to his core registry had been earned through honest, back-breaking labor and caked in thick white scar tissue.
The *Primal Instinct* state had become significantly more stable under his skin over the cycles, thanks in large part to the violet focus stone the Yardrat merchant had left in his palm.
He could hold the emerald green light inside his pupils for short, calculated minutes now—provided the workspace around his knuckles was completely clear of civilian targets and his internal emotions were locked behind a firm wall of discipline.
But the tap still exacted a brutal, physical tax on his central nervous system every single time he pulled the lever.
It still chewed through his muscle tissue, starved his lungs of oxygen, and whispered a low, animalistic roar into his brain—a primitive code telling him that ending a galactic conflict was a hell of a lot simpler if he just let the beast behind the stone door make all the management decisions.
He had not allowed it to take the handles.
Not yet.
## Act II: Malkor’s Shelf
The *Wayfarer* drifted on a low-power standby cycle within the long, silent perimeter of an ancient orbital trade graveyard known across the tracking charts as Malkor’s Shelf.
The location was a chaotic, decaying cluster of broken communication satellites, ruined pre-imperial temples, hollowed-out mining husks, and independent scavenger stations that spun slowly around the dull glare of a dead red star.
The space around their wings was caked in a thick, shimmering fog of radioactive volcanic dust and old metal shards that made their long-range radar monitors flicker with constant static.
Brakka, predictably, hated the environment within thirty seconds of dropping out of the hyperspace lane.
“This entire station looks completely, profoundly haunted, kid,” Brakka growled, his gravelly voice sounding exceptionally low in the darkened bridge deck.
He sat hunched over the primary pilot console, his organic left hand wrapped around a clay mug of black sludge while his titanium right arm remained braced against the main thruster joystick.
Kallard sat in the co-pilot’s chair to his right, his callused fingers scrolling through the lines of a digital contract file on his data slate.
“Machines and iron plating don’t get haunted, old man.
They just run out of fuel cells and gather rust.”
Brakka turned all four of his unblinking eyes around slowly to glare across the table, his white hair mane shaking with irritation.
“Do not use that specific tone of voice with me, Ronin.
That is exactly the kind of arrogant sentence a scrapper utters right before a primary bulkhead door opens by itself and starts whispering his childhood memories through the ventilation scrubbers.”
“You’re still thoroughly mad about the machine mind down on Morrow Rock,” Kallard noted dryly.
“I am still systematically and professionally *correct* about the structural dangers of Morrow Rock, boy!” the old mechanic spat, setting his mug down with a sharp *clink*.
“We spent three rotations clearing silver wires out of my primary bilge pumps after that run!
I’m allowed to suspect an old rock of having an agenda!”
Kallard chose to skip the argument, hitting the toggle switch to project the primary bounty details into the air between their seats.
### Contract Specification Sheet
* **Target Designation:** Sorvek Nall
* **Primary Profession:** Black-market archivist, illegal relic broker, independent information thief.
* **Guild Offense:** Unauthorized theft of restricted historical data arrays from the sealed subterranean vaults of the dead planet Gromas-9.
* **Client Registry:** Anonymous preservation guild operating within the core sectors.
* **Bounty Premium:** High-tier credit distribution (Alive preferred, registry core intact).
* **Danger Rating:** Unknown (Target behaves like an academic, but operates with high security).
A small warning text at the very bottom of the data slate caught Kallard’s eye, the letters glowing with a weak yellow light:
> *WARNING: Target is believed to be in possession of several pre-imperial magical artifacts and un-vetted regional technology clusters.*
>
Brakka reached out with his thick titanium finger, tapping the word *magical* on the screen with a sharp metallic click of his knuckle.
“No.
The transaction is officially canceled right here.
Clear the slate.”
Kallard let out a slow breath through his nose, his dark pupils steady.
“We haven’t even uncoupled the docking clamps yet, old man.”
“Magic is nothing more than a piece of high-grade technology that flatly refuses to provide its own specification sheets to the mechanic, boy,” Brakka growled, his upper pair of eyes narrowing.
“Every single time we cross paths with some old relic merchant who claims he can manipulate the world using nothing but his thoughts…
my repair log grows by another five pages.
It’s an absolute waste of my maintenance hours.”
“Isn’t that the exact same lecture you delivered to me before we took the Yardrat escort contract?” Kallard asked, a tiny smirk touching his lips beneath his bandana.
“The Yardratians are completely different, you idiot!
Their *Spirit Control* is just a highly structured form of biological engineering that comes with a formal invoice at the end of the shift!
You can read the current lines if you have the proper gauges!
But this pre-imperial junk?
It’s a complete system failure.”
Kallard leaned his back against the leather headrest, his crossed arms resting over his green armor trim.
“The premium is more than enough to cover our secondary thruster repairs, Brakka.
And the client explicitly noted that some of the stolen historical files detail mass-destruction events that occurred along the outer rim before the Cold Force even started expanding its perimeter.”
The old mechanic went completely still on his stool, his organic hand freezing on the thruster lever.
Kallard noticed the sudden physical shift in the old man’s posture immediately—Brakka’s gray ears had dropped low against his hair mane, all four of his eyes fixed on the dead red star visible through the panoramic viewscreen.
The cynical, sarcastic mask he usually wore like a shield completely thinned out, leaving behind only the tired look of a technician who remembered how the galaxy looked before the white ships ran the lanes.
“What is it, old man?” Kallard asked quietly.
“Before King Cold ever signed the primary treaties with our generals,” Brakka said, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly whisper that tasted like old dust, “there were…
stories, kid.
Old logs that even the senior imperial logistics officers avoided bringing up during the shift briefings.
Not because they were ashamed of the data—Frieza’s people don’t possess a single drop of moral shame inside their code.
They avoided them because they were terrified of the numbers.”
Kallard’s chest plates tightened up, a sudden spike of interest hitting his thoughts.
“What kind of stories?”
“Worlds being completely erased from the tracking charts in a single afternoon without a single warship clearing orbit,” Brakka whispered, his mechanical fingers clicking against his leather knee guards.
“Elite planetary kings kneeling in the dirt before voices that nobody else in the room could resolve on their receivers.
A bunch of children’s nursery songs from the dead systems that detailed a…
a pink demon who enjoyed turning cities into sugar before he broke the rock.”
Kallard’s hand went completely rigid over his data slate, his breath catching in his throat as a cold shock wave ran straight down his spine.
*A pink demon.*
His mouth went completely dry, his human memories from his past life exploding back into his mind with the force of an artillery shell.
He hadn’t heard those syllables in years—not since the day he woke up in a Saiyan quarters with a tail and realized all the fictional stories he used to watch on a television screen back home had transformed into absolute, life-or-death future problems waiting for his boots in the dark space between the suns.
Frieza was immediate, sure.
He was a political tyrant who could be mapped by his ships and his power levels.
Vegeta was coming along the tracks, and Namek was waiting down the line.
The Androids, Cell, the Gods…
they all had boundaries.
But Buu?
Majin Buu was a completely separate tier of existential horror.
He was chaos given a physical shape—an ancient, ridiculous, and completely unfair entity that could turn a planetary population into candy, swallow them whole, and laugh like a toddler while the crust of the world shattered beneath his heels.
And behind that pink flesh was a legacy of wizards, possession seals, and ancient magic that defied the standard rules of a power level monitor.
*Bibidi.
Babidi.* The names rose inside his memory like corpses surfacing in dark water.
Kallard swallowed hard, his dark eyes locking onto the blinking white target icon for Sorvek Nall.
“We’re taking the contract, Brakka.
Reroute the secondary systems and lock the docking vector.”
Brakka turned his broad gray-blue head around slowly, all four eyes evaluating the sudden intensity in the kid’s face.
“That…
that was definitely not the technical reaction I expected from you based on the face you’re currently making, Ronin.
You look like you just resolved a ghost on your scouter.”
“I need to know exactly what kind of records Sorvek Nall pulled out of those Gromas vaults, old man,” Kallard said, his voice flat, low, and absolute.
“Why the hell do you care about some pre-imperial history logs, boy?”
Kallard stood up from his chair, his callused fingers checking the manual straps on his wrist guards.
“Because if those records contain the specific names I think they contain…
this contract isn’t just a simple bounty job for the ledger, Brakka.
It’s a complete sector warning flag.”
Brakka hit the manual save switch on his console, letting out a long, exhausted grunt that rumbled deep in his broad chest.
“I absolutely, profoundly hate whenever a contract turns into something ‘bigger than the premium,’ kid.
It’s a complete mechanical disaster.”
“Me too, old man,” Kallard muttered, heading toward the airlock ladder.
“Me too.
Just keep the engines hot.”
“I should have retired significantly harder when I had the opportunity,” the mechanic growled as the bridge hatch slid shut.
## Act III: The Rings of Prayer
Malkor’s Shelf had once been a holy place for an ancient, dead civilization.
Kallard could tell the moment his combat boots cleared the *Wayfarer’s* primary boarding ramp, his heels hitting the dark, grit-covered floor plates of the docking ring with a soft thud.
It wasn’t because he possessed a single drop of religious reverence inside his thoughts—he wasn’t even sure what the word “religion” meant in a universe where the actual gods were known to neglect their administrative paperwork and occasionally order the total genocide of a species because a local population had annoyed their sense of style during a weekend visit.
But the architecture of the station carried the distinct, heavy bones of old reverence.
The primary central structure had been carved from a massive ring of volcanic black stone and polished gold metal, the layout shaped like a series of broken prayer towers that circled a hollowed-out asteroid core.
Colossal stone statues were floating in shattered, independent pieces near the outer docking rails, their massive faces worn smooth by centuries of vacuum exposure and old solar radiation.
Some of the stone figures had their giant hands raised high toward the dead red star like they were begging for a spark, while others had no heads left on their shoulders, their necks caked in space dust.
Brakka had manual-forced the *Wayfarer* into a half-functioning cargo dock along the lower ring, her side clamps locking onto the iron rails with a heavy *clank*.
“The local artificial gravity generator is running on an incredibly unstable four-percent cycle, kid,” Brakka’s voice crackled through the radio static, his tone thoroughly unimpressed.
“The atmospheric life support systems are fully active only inside the inner temple corridors.
If you step outside the primary archway, you’re going to hit a total vacuum line in less than three paces.
Comms are going to bounce like a broken signal drone, and my external scanners aren’t resolving a damn thing through this radiation fog.”
Kallard adjusted the high collar of his long gray canvas cloak, his callused fingers checking the fit of his black gloves.
His green-and-black armor plates had been meticulously repaired since their run through the machine colony, the metal painted back into a matte finish, though his left shoulder guard still bore a faint, permanent score mark where a mining laser had nearly punched through his muscle tissue.
He reached down to his utility belt, clipping his dead red-lens scouter over his left ear with a clean mechanical click out of pure behavioral habit.
“Magic?” Kallard asked into his collar microphone, his dark eyes scanning the dark corridor ahead.
“Do I look like a goddamn wizard to you, boy?” Brakka growled back on the channel.
Kallard smirked, his boots moving through the grit.
“You’ve got the general disposition for it, old man.
You just need a long white beard and a floating robe to finish the configuration.”
“You say one more single syllable about my facial hair metrics, Ronin, and I am turning this transport scow straight back toward the trade hub without your boots inside the hatch!” the old man snapped, his fingers slamming down on his console keys.
“I am a senior technician, not a mystical performer!
Keep your eyes on the corners; the sensor noise is getting thicker.”
The air inside the ancient temple hallway smelled of centuries of dry dust, stale metal plates, and a strange, faint sweetness that made the skin along Kallard’s neck crawl with an immediate instinctual dread.
The corridor curved slowly ahead of his boots, illuminated only by a series of weak amber light strips that had been mounted along the floorboards by local scavenging crews.
Vertical lines of old geometric writing covered every square inch of the volcanic black walls, most of the script worn beyond any legible meaning by time and radiation.
Kallard didn’t recognize the specific linguistic root, but his Saiyan anatomy—or rather, the latent data fragments caked into his body’s memory banks—provided him with enough basic alien literacy to know it wasn’t a standard dialect.
It wasn’t Saiyan military script, it wasn’t Frieza-standard trade code, it wasn’t Yardratian, and it certainly wasn’t Galactic Patrol registry.
It was infinitely older.
It belonged to an era before the white ships ran the grid.
Suddenly, a soft, whispering sound rippled through the dark hallway lines from the far end of the gantry.
It wasn’t a human voice or the sound of an alien tongue—it was a low, rhythmic sighing noise that hummed through the air vents like a physical pressure, causing the hair on his arms to stand up.
Brakka’s radio line immediately let out a sharp burst of static, the old man’s breath sounding short.
“Tell me…
tell me that specific audio signature was just the station’s primary air filtration scrubbers clearing a line, kid.”
Kallard stopped his boots in the center of the path, his dark pupils narrowing as his internal ki-sensing grid automatically expanded.
“The air filtration systems on this rock have been dead for three hundred years, old man.
Your ‘probably’ is doing entirely too much work today.”
“I profoundly hate this contract already,” the mechanic growled as the channel dropped into a hiss.
## Act IV: The Archive Vault
Kallard walked forward with a slow, deliberate hunter pace, his energy signature compressed tightly down to his nine hundred baseline.
He found the first body lying face-down near a collapsed stone doorway forty yards down the hall.
The corpse wasn’t fresh—it had been sitting in the dry air of the corridor for at least two rotations.
It belonged to a local independent scavenger, a gray-skinned bipedal alien wearing a torn leather suit caked in oil grease.
His primary electronic breather mask had been cracked wide open down the center line, but there were absolutely zero visible blast wounds on his uniform, no plasma marks across his chest plates, and no signs of a physical struggle along the bulkheads.
His long thin fingers were clutched tightly around his own throat casing with an iron vice grip, his face locked into a permanent, bone-shattering expression of pure, unadulterated mental terror.
Kallard dropped into a low crouch, his fingers checking the collar line.
“No blood on the target, Brakka.
No signs of kinetic force.”
“Poison gas leak inside the lower vents?” the mechanic asked, his tone tight.
“Maybe,” Kallard whispered, his eyes closing as he focused his internal mind past the material static of the stone walls.
“But the energy signature doesn’t feel like a chemical death.
The lines are caked in a weird kind of cold.”
He extended his sensing needle deeper into the subterranean levels of the ancient temple structure.
The static of the radioactive dust was heavy, but he managed to resolve a small cluster of living sparks moving through a large archive chamber sixty yards below his boots.
There were six…
maybe seven distinct energy signatures active in the room.
Five of them were small, unrefined grunts registering barely around the one-thousand mark—common border mercenaries carrying standard plasma blasters.
But the sixth signature…
the one sitting in the very rear of the vault…
was completely strange.
It wasn’t physically large or battle-dense, but it burned in his internal mind with a slow, greasy purple light that threw off a disgusting, oily pressure that made his skin crawl.
Kallard opened his eyes, his dark pupils steady.
“The archivist has got a personal guard detail waiting inside the vault, old man.
And he’s holding something that’s throwing off a very bad frequency.”
“Of course he does,” Brakka growled through the speaker.
“Clear the line before the timers run out.”
Kallard stepped through the collapsed stone doorway, his boots making absolutely no sound as he glided into the entrance of the primary archive chamber.
The room was an enormous, circular vault lined with hundreds of broken stone shelves and cracked holographic record pillars that had turned dark decades ago.
Sitting directly in the center of the space was a small, portable electronic generator box that had been recently activated by the scavenging crew, its internal capacitors humming with a low-vibration power cycle.
Heavy-duty copper cables ran from the generator across the floorboards, their ends spliced straight into the primary security panel of a massive, sealed iron vault door at the far end of the room.
Four armed mercenary guards were positioned around the generator box, their fingers resting flat against the triggers of their low-grade commercial plasma rifles as they watched the shadows.
They looked thoroughly nervous, their eyes darting toward the dark ceiling arches with every click of the machinery.
Kallard stepped out from the deep shadow of a broken stone statue, his tattered cloak falling back over his shoulder plate to show his green armor trim.
“Leave the clearing, scrappers,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that filled the circular chamber like iron.
“The contract on this room is officially closed for the day.”
The closest guard, a thick-bodied alien with dark blue scales across his face, let out a terrified shriek of surprise and frantically jerked his rifle barrel upward to aim straight for Kallard’s visor line.
“Intruder!
We’ve got a solo hunter clearing the threshold!
Kallard didn’t give them the room to coordinate a proper alignment.
He triggered a short, explosive *Flash Trigger* pulse through his boots, his velocity jumping to his combat baseline in less than a millisecond.
He vanished from the doorway threshold, appearing directly beneath the first guard’s rifle sight line before the man’s finger could even finish contracting around the switch.
He caught the heavy alloy weapon barrel with his left hand, his callused fingers bending the metal tube downward by three inches with a sharp mechanical *crunch*.
The guard pulled the trigger in a panic response, the superheated plasma bolt blasting straight into the concrete floor plates between his own boots, launching a shower of hot rock chips into his shins.
Kallard drew his right fist back and delivered a single, clean punch straight to the center of the man’s chest vest.
*THUD.*
The physical density behind the seven-thousand-power strike was absolutely monumental for a low-tier grunt.
The mercenary’s breath escaped his lungs in a wet, ragged gasp, his eyes rolling into the back of his head as his body dropped flat onto the floorboards like a sack of lead, completely unconscious.
The second guard lunged forward from the side, swinging a long iron shock baton through the air in a wide arc aimed straight for Kallard’s neck.
Kallard simply leaned his upper torso back four inches, letting the crackling orange prongs clear his bandana by a fraction of an inch, before his palm snapped forward in a sharp, mechanical strike that caught the guard squarely across his elbow joint.
*CRACK.*
The bone joint folded completely backward under the pressure, the iron shock baton slipping from his limp fingers.
Kallard caught the crackling weapon mid-air with his right hand, executed a tight pivot on his heel, and flung the baton across the room like a throwing knife, the electrical prongs striking the third advancing guard squarely in his knee plate.
The third mercenary let out a sharp howl of pain as thousands of volts of orange static electricity snapped into his leg armor, his muscles locking up instantly as he tumbled backward into a row of broken stone shelves.
The fourth and final guard panicked completely, raising his blaster pistol with both hands and firing a wild volley of red plasma rounds into the dark.
Kallard didn’t try to roll away or duck behind a record pillar.
He lifted his left hand, a small, highly dense pocket of baseline ki forming a flat green guard shield directly over his open palm.
The red blaster bolt struck the energy shield point-blank, the kinetic impact pushing against his callused skin with a hot, bright feedback loop that he absorbed with ease.
He shoved his palm forward with a violent, athletic snap of his wrist, releasing the reflected kinetic force of the blast outward in a wide concussive ring.
*BOOM.*
The sudden air displacement launched the final guard ten yards across the archive room, his body slamming heavily against the volcanic stone face of the bulkhead wall before sliding down into the dirt, completely unconscious.
Four down.
The line was processed to the last digit in less than nine seconds, and not a single drop of blood had been wasted on the floorboards.
Brakka’s voice instantly crackled through his ear speaker, the old man let out a low whistle.
“Did you seriously just use the phrase ‘bad weather’ to describe your entry vector to a bunch of low-tier outlaws, Ronin?
That is an absolute piece of garbage theater code, kid.
It sounds remarkably childish.”
Kallard walked over a fallen rifle, his boots stepping over the unconscious blue-scaled guard as he approached the sealed vault door.
“It sounded significantly better in my head before I cleared the threshold, old man.
Just keep the data lines open.”
“It didn’t sound good anywhere in the universe, boy,” the mechanic growled as the channel clicked off.
## Act V: The Archivist and the Ancient Name
Before Kallard could even reach out his hand to plant the relay spike into the security panel, the massive, three-inch-thick iron vault door at the far end of the room slid open automatically with a long, rusty screech of its pins.
A tall, narrow figure stepped out through the red shadows of the threshold, his long body wrapped in a series of layered silk robes caked in dark violet and rust-red travel dust.
Sorvek Nall didn’t look like a dangerous combat mercenary or an imperial enforcer; he carried himself with the slow, calculated arrogance of an academic who spent his life trading secrets inside dark spaceports.
His thin gray face was caked in a row of jagged black tribal markings, and a large, ancient tattoo shaped like a spiral broken down the center line was stamped directly into the skin of his broad forehead.
Clutched tightly beneath his upper left arm was a long, cylindrical black metallic storage case, covered in a series of glowing purple geometric runes that hummed with a low-frequency vibration that filled the entire room with that same eerie, sweet scent.
His pale yellow eyes scanned the four unconscious guards covering his floorboards, before shifting slowly upward to lock onto Kallard’s dark face through his visor lens.
He didn’t look panicked, and his hand didn’t move toward the long blaster holstered at his hip—his mouth simply split into a cold, knowing smirk that revealed rows of sharp yellow teeth.
“Ronin,” the archivist said, his voice a low, wheezing whistle that sounded like steam leaking from an old pipe.
“The independent bounty hunter with the highly selective set of moral parameters.
The scrapper who thinks his black-and-green armor plates make him a ghost story on the border boards.”
Kallard stopped his boots five yards from the altar steps, his arms crossed over his chest plating.
“You’re a remarkably easy asset to locate on a map, master Nall.
The preservation guild has been tracking your identity keys since you cleared the vaults on Gromas-9.
Hand over the data cylinder.”
Sorvek Nall let out a short, cackling laugh that shook his thin neck robes.
“You sell information to fools for a living, kid, but you don’t possess a single drop of true operational context regarding the weight of the material currently stored inside this casing.
You think I merely stole a bunch of common shipping manifests or local trade logs?”
“History,” Kallard said flatly, his dark pupils steady.
“That’s the word listed on the contract slate.”
“History is an exceptionally pretty, polite piece of vocabulary for the unrefined minds of the guilds, hunter,” the archivist smiled, his yellow eyes wide with a cold, academic obsession.
“But history is also a highly explosive commodity…
right up until the second it finds a hand that knows how to connect the wire terminals to the main current.”
Kallard’s eyes drifted down to the glowing purple runes on the black cylinder, his internal senses picking up a massive, sickening wave of that cold, oily pressure rising from the alloy.
“Tell me what’s inside the log, Sorvek.
Before I decide to break those long fingers of yours to save myself the travel time.”
Sorvek Nall’s smirk widened by another inch, his thin hand slowly tracing the edge of the metal casing.
“Do you possess enough literacy inside that bandana of yours to recognize the ancient names, monkey?
Do you know the true designation of the wizard who cased the first demon before your dead empire even learned how to melt iron?”
The ambient air inside the cavernous archive room seemed to drop twenty degrees in less than a microsecond, the temperature turning freezing cold as the amber light strips along the floorboards began to flicker and dim.
Kallard felt Brakka’s radio line go completely dead silent all at once, the old technician holding his breath in orbit.
Sorvek Nall leaned his long silver neck forward, his yellow eyes burning with a terrifyingly raw intensity as his lips formed a single, two-syllable word that cut through the howling of the wind like a physical blade.
“Bibidi,” the archivist whispered.
## Act VI: The Purple Spell
The syllables hit the circular room with the force of an absolute system failure.
Kallard’s jaw locked so tight he could hear the bone joints clicking inside his head, his human soul wrestling with an immediate, blinding wave of memory images that cleared his thoughts.
He saw the vivid, television-born shapes of a small, green-skinned wizard wearing a large black M stamped into his robed chest.
He saw worlds turning to cinders, stars collapsing into darkness, and a massive, pink-skinned creature laughing like a maniacal toddler through a cloud of nuclear smoke.
*Majin Buu.*
Sorvek Nall watched the sudden physical freezing of the hunter’s torso, his pale yellow eyes narrowing into small, calculated circles of profound surprise.
“Oh,” the archivist whispered softly, his voice dropping its mocking edge completely.
“Look at the data lines clearing your face, kid.
You…
you actually recognize the frequency of that name.
That is an absolute historical impossibility for a rim scrapper.”
Kallard took a slow, heavy step forward across the gravel, his boots crushing a loose metal fragment with a loud *crunch*.
His voice dropped into a low, terrifying primal rumble that carried the full physical density of his seven thousand parsec baseline.
“Hand the cylinder over to my glove, Sorvek.
Right now.
Before I turn this whole vault into an open furnace.”
The archivist let out a high-pitched, panicked shriek, his thin fingers frantically tapping a rapid sequence of keys along the side of the black metal casing.
“No!
I refuse to let a guild grunt clear my metrics!
All units…
override the termination logs!
Clear the path lane!”
*FLASH.*
A blinding wave of deep purple light erupted from the geometric runes caked into the cylinder, the cold energy rolling across the concrete floorboards like a wave of liquid nitrogen.
The moment the purple light touched the boots of the four unconscious mercenary guards lying in the dirt, their physical frames suddenly gave a sharp, violent jerk.
Their limbs began to move wrong—shifting with a loose, uncoordinated precision that looked like a puppet being tested by an invisible handler from above.
Their eyes snapped wide open, but the dark pupils were completely missing from their sockets, replaced by a solid, glowing sheet of brilliant purple fire that cast a clinical glare across their scaled skin.
“Oh, I absolutely, profoundly hate magic,” Brakka’s gravelly voice muttered through the radio speaker, the signal caked in a fresh layer of static noise.
“The data signatures are completely out of boundary, kid.”
“The spell connection can be broken if we hit the primary terminal hubs, old man!” Kallard called back, his boots already moving down the lane in a fast, low-to-the-ground sprint.
The first purple-eyed mercenary launched himself straight toward Kallard’s left shoulder, his hand snapping out with a force that had significantly increased since his unconscious state—his active power level had jumped from one thousand straight up to twenty-five hundred units under the influence of the spell.
He didn’t show a single drop of pain response or caution; he didn’t care about his broken bones.
Kallard didn’t try to dodge.
He drove his right elbow straight into the side of the guard’s helmet casing with all his remaining launch velocity.
*CRUNCH.*
The structural impact broke the plastic shield and fractured the man’s jaw joint, but the mercenary didn’t drop to the floor.
He completed a tight pivot on his heel, his remaining arm looping around to lock its fingers tightly around Kallard’s chest guard straps, anchoring his mobility.
The second and third reanimated guards closed the perimeter loop from the side, their heavy iron shock batons raising high in unison as they aimed straight for his rib cage armor.
Kallard snarled through his teeth, his right boot snapping out in a heavy back-kick that caught the third guard squarely in his soft abdominal lining, while his left hand reached up over his own shoulder to grab the first mercenary by his canvas collar.
He hoisted the two-hundred-pound body completely off his back plates and slammed his frame face-first into a broken stone shelf with a thunderous *thud*.
The fourth purple-eyed guard stood ten yards away near the generator box, his mouth opening wide in an unnatural, geometric line that stretched his jaw skin past its biological limits.
A thick pocket of dark purple-black energy began to gather inside his throat marrow, the light humming with a disgusting, freezing pressure that made the air lines warp with heat.
Kallard’s green visor flinched.
*Not a blaster bolt.
That’s a raw magic discharge.*
*ZIP-BOOM.*
The purple-black beam shot from the guard’s mouth at terminal velocity, a cold, heavy torrent of mystical force that tore through the archive room.
Kallard didn’t have the space to execute a low slide; he crossed his forearms over his chest guard in a tight military brace, his base ki flaring bright to meet the impact.
The beam struck his armor plating point-blank, and the kinetic shock wave drove his boots five yards backward across the concrete floorboards, his heels leaving deep, glowing red scores in the iron grates as he fought to hold his center of gravity.
The intense, sub-zero cold of the magic passed straight through his armor plates, leaving a thick layer of white frost caked into his mesh underlayer fabric while his chest guards smoked with a foul, sulfurous vapor.
“Brakka!” Kallard growled through his teeth, his side ribs flaring with white-hot pain.
“The…
the data lines on that blast didn’t match a standard plasma battery!”
“I can resolve the thermal drop on my monitors, kid!” the mechanic roared back through the line.
“The core temperature inside your sector just dropped forty degrees in a millisecond!
Don’t let those puppets touch your skin armor again!”
The four reanimated guards lunged forward in a perfect, synchronized flanking pattern, their faceless purple eyes unblinking through the smoke.
Kallard realized with a cold precision that traditional martial arts blocks and bone-shattering punches were a complete waste of his stamina metrics against an army that couldn’t feel its own destruction.
He needed to systematically sever the wireless communication lines between Sorvek’s cylinder and the guards’ central nervous systems.
He stepped inside the second guard’s lunge lane, his left glove catching the iron shock baton barrel to redirect the voltage into the grates, while his right index finger focused a tiny, needle-thin spark of green ki energy into a sharp palm edge.
He delivered a single, highly precise downward chop straight to the base of the mercenary’s neck marrow, right where the skull caked into the spine.
*BANG.*
The localized green ki pulse detonated point-blank against the nerve hub, short-circuiting the wireless magical current running through the bone traces.
The brilliant purple fire inside the guard’s pupils instantly snuffed out like a candle in a windstorm, his gray skin returning to its natural lifeless pale as his body dropped forward onto the floorboards, completely flat and motionless.
“The…
the signal line just clicked flat for that terminal, Ronin!” Brakka cackled through the line, his confidence returning.
“The neck hub is the primary receiver gateway for the spell!
Hit them across the marrow lines!”
Kallard completed his rotation with a grim smile beneath his visor, his boots pushing off the concrete grates in a fast, zigzagging sprint through the smoke.
One, two, three consecutive downward chops cleared the remaining three puppets from his path lane, their purple eyes going dark before their bodies even hit the gravel.
He straightened his back, his dark eyes snapping straight toward the far end of the archive room.
Sorvek Nall was already eighty yards down a narrow volcanic stone corridor, his dark violet robes flapping through the wind as he ran toward the ancient temple chapel with his black data cylinder clutched tight against his ribs.
Kallard cursed loudly into his microphone, his boots breaking into a full-scale sprint as he chased the shadow into the dark.
## Act VII: The Chapel of the Demon
The narrow archive corridor bent sharply into a colossal, low-ceilinged volcanic stone vault that had once served as the primary inner chapel chamber for the Malkor station.
The walls were lined with dozens of twenty-foot-tall stone statues representing covered, faceless figures caked in centuries of methane frost, every single one of them carved in a permanent posture of absolute, terrified kneeling toward a central black iron altar platform in the middle of the room.
High-pressure radiation vents hung from the ceiling arches like iron cobwebs, spitting thin clouds of amber vapor into the dry air lines.
Sorvek Nall was standing directly on top of the black altar steps, his long gray travel coat torn at the sleeve, his shaking hands holding the black metal cylinder wide open over a central terminal receiver.
A massive, fifteen-foot holographic data display had been activated above his head, the blue light illuminating the faceless stone statues with a clinical, terrifying clarity.
The hologram wasn’t displaying standard trade codes or logistics coordinates—it showed a rapid, broken loop of ancient, pre-imperial data fragments that had been pulled from the Gromas vaults.
Kallard came to a smooth halt at the base of the altar steps, his combat boots sinking into the deep layer of dust covering the floorboards, his eyes wide as he looked up through his green visor at the monitor feed.
The images were crude, heavily distorted by static, and caked in centuries of electronic degradation, but the parameters were completely unmistakable to his human soul.
He saw the vivid shape of the small, cruel-faced wizard Bibidi standing over a massive, egg-shaped gray stone cocoon caked in ancient runes.
He saw entire planetary systems turning into clouds of white ash in a fraction of a millisecond, their crusts breaking apart without a single cruiser clearing their orbits.
And then, he saw the crude, holographic silhouette of the pink creature itself—laughing like a maniacal toddler through a cloud of nuclear fire, its round hands clapping through the cinders of a dead universe.
*Majin Buu.*
Kallard’s breath stopped completely inside his chest casing, his fingers locking into fists until his knuckles popped like small crackers.
The reality of the future was standing straight in front of his boots, and it felt a hell of a lot heavier than a Frieza Force logistics spreadsheet.
Sorvek Nall snapped his head around slowly, his pale yellow eyes wide and burning with a terrifyingly raw, maniacal obsession as he looked down at the hunter.
“You…
you genuinely do recognize the data patterns clearing this screen, don’t you, Ronin?
It’s caked into your face!
It’s absolutely impossible for a low-tier rim scrapper to possess literacy regarding the pre-imperial chronicles!”
Kallard took a slow, heavy step up the black iron altar rungs, his voice dropping into a low, terrifying primal rumble that cut through the humming of the vents like iron striking iron.
“Close the cylinder casing, Sorvek.
Right now.
Lock the data lines down before I decide to tear this whole platform off its structural pins.”
“Do you have any single shred of operational understanding regarding what this file represents, you black-armored monkey?” the archivist shrieked out, his long fingers tracing the glowing purple runes above the console.
“Before Lord Frieza ever signed his first contract…
before King Cold ever drew a blaster line across the core port…
there was a creature that made the entire galaxy pray for an immediate, non-existence execution!
A destroyer who didn’t carry a divine office or a governor’s seal!
A literal child with the bottomless appetite of a total extinction event!”
“Close the case,” Kallard repeated, his green visor sliding up into his bandana to reveal his dark, sweat-stained face, his pupils burning with a steady, unyielding focus.
“The chronicles say the old wizard Bibidi managed to case the demon inside a sealed stone vault after the core sectors were turned to dust,” Sorvek whispered, his eyes wide as he leaned over the terminal.
“Others claim he merely found something older than the stars themselves and gave the horror a fresh direction line.
But the logs don’t stop at the father’s execution file, hunter…
there is a valid successor listed in the margins of the Gromas vault!”
The entire circular chapel room seemed to pulse with a sudden, high-voltage pressure wave that made Kallard’s skin tingle with static.
“Babidi,” the archivist whispered, his yellow eyes locking onto Kallard’s face with a twisted, manic grin.
The name hit the center of Kallard’s brain like a heavy iron bell rung inside a fresh grave.
A massive storm of memories exploded behind his eyes all at once—he saw clear flashes from his past life on Earth clearing the screen.
He saw the small, robed wizard Babidi standing inside a hidden spaceship core, his long mouth spitting out orders.
He saw the Demon King Dabura kneeling in the dirt, his sword raised high.
He saw the black *M* symbol flaring bright across the forehead of a proud Saiyan prince whose eyes were caked in dead, wounded pride.
He saw the gray stone egg cracking wide open, the Supreme Kai weeping on his knees in the mud, and the entire blue marble of Earth breaking apart into a cloud of fire while the pink demon laughed through the cinders.
Sorvek Nall continued his frantic, maniacal speech, completely unaware of the terrifying cosmic storm he had just awakened inside the hunter’s mind.
“Whispers only, Ronin!
A single, encrypted call sign hidden in the sealed margins of the ancient trading stations!
A child of the old wizard who has been moving through the dead sectors of the galaxy for centuries, using his hidden agents to systematically collect the baseline energy of strong fighters to break the primary seals on the cocoon!
He’s searching for the egg, hunter!”
Kallard took another step up the altar, his boots leaving dark depressions in the dust caked into the metal rungs.
“I told you…
close the case, Sorvek.”
The archivist reached into the wide sleeve of his dark violet robe, his long thin fingers pulling out a small, circular purple metallic charm caked in ancient, geometric carvings that glowed with a blinding purple light.
He held the relic high into the air between them, his voice rising into a sharp, commanding whistle.
“Do not take another single step across that altar grate, scrapper!
This relic holds an active obedience command loop that is older than your entire dead race!
You will bow your head before my console!”
## Act VIII: The Obedience Charm
Sorvek Nall hit the manual engagement toggle on the side of the purple charm.
*FLASH.*
An invisible, immensely heavy wave of mental pressure slammed into Kallard’s central nervous system all at once, hitting his brain with the kinetic force of a physical hammer blow.
It wasn’t an energy beam that could be blocked with a ki guard, and it wasn’t a physical weight that his muscles could lean against.
It was a absolute, direct mental command that materialized inside his thoughts, shaped like the crushing gravity of a high-density star core.
*Kneel.*
The word didn’t enter his head as an outside voice—it felt like his own neurons were rewriting their programming, his muscle groups suddenly receiving an automated system command from his brain to contract the joints.
His knees bent half an inch toward the iron grates of the altar, his breath escaping his throat in a short, ragged gasp as a cold sweat broke out across his dark cheeks.
*Serve the master.
Obey the line.
Drop your knuckles into the dirt.*
“No,” Kallard growled through his clenched teeth, his dark pupils narrowing into two sharp needles of absolute, unyielding fury as his primitive Saiyan biology reacted to the insult.
Every single warrior cell inside his seven thousand parsec framework absolutely, profoundly *hated* that word.
The apex-predator code coded into his DNA since the day he dropped out of the breeding tank refused to accept the concept of submission to an inferior creature.
The *Primal Instinct* state began to scratch violently at its thin stone door behind his spine, a savage, hot-blooded wave of green fire boiling through his arteries as the beast demanded to be let loose to turn the whole chapel into an open incinerator pit.
*This is an ancient magical spell loop.
If you flood your entire nervous system with an unrefined dump of green energy without understanding the boundaries of the charm…
you’re just going to give the magic more volume to grab onto.
You have to close the valves, like Lin taught you on the freighter.*
He closed his eyes beneath his bandana, his breathing falling into that slow, rhythmic cadence that kept his energy perfectly sealed beneath his skin.
He didn’t force his ki to explode outward—he compressed the full seven thousand five hundred units of his base power level down into a single, dense iron anchor inside the center of his mind.
He anchored his thoughts using the real, solid marker stones of his current life: the oil-stained walls of Brakka’s workshop, the worn leather of the pilot’s seat on the *Wayfarer*, the memory of Morga’s final punch for luck, and the faces of the twelve miners he had cut down from the chains on Morrow Rock.
He pictured the blue marble of Earth waiting for his boots across the tracking charts, and the image of Goku laughing with an innocence that this galaxy couldn’t afford to lose.
“I don’t…
I don’t take management instructions…
from a thief with a piece of purple glass, Sorvek,” Kallard snarled, his eyes snapping wide open as the emerald green fire flared bright for a single microsecond inside his pupils.
He forced his leg muscles into a hard, rigid brace, his combat boots pushing off the altar grates as he stood back up to his full, broad-shouldered height, completely breaking the command loop’s gravity.
Sorvek Nall’s manic grin vanished from his silver face in less than a hundredth of a second, his yellow eyes wide with a sudden, blinding primordial terror as his hand began to tremble violently.
“How…
how the hell are you still standing vertical?
This relic holds the master command codes for the deep-sector labor units!
Your neural lines are supposed to be completely flat under the pressure!”
Kallard took a slow, heavy step forward across the altar platform, his boots making a dense metallic sound against the iron grates.
“Your software is completely out of date for my workspace, archivist,” he said, his voice cold as an iron anvil.
The command pressed harder against his skull, a frantic, screaming wave of purple static trying to force its way back through his neural block.
*Obey the master.
Kneel before the line.
Drop your weapon.*
Kallard ignored the noise completely.
He took a second step.
Then a third.
The distance between his knuckles and the archivist’s silk robes closed down to zero in less than a breath.
Sorvek Nall frantically tried to raise the purple charm higher into the light to double the potential current, his gray skin turning a light shade of yellow from the panic.
“Get…
get away from my terminal, you monster!
Back your boots out of my lane!”
Kallard didn’t draw a blaster, and he didn’t use a ki blast.
He simply reached out his right hand, his callused fingers locking around the circular purple metallic charm with an iron vice grip.
He didn’t pull the relic away from the archivist’s long fingers—he clamped his fist shut, his base Saiyan density exploding through his knuckles in a single, focused pulse of pure physical mass.
*CRUNCH.*
The ancient pre-imperial charm didn’t just break; it completely collapsed inward under the pressure, the internal mystical logic boards and the purple crystal core shattering into a cloud of fine white dust and loose metal pins between his fingers.
A sudden, sharp flash of purple static light burst out from his palm, dying out into a harmless hiss of ozone against the cold air of the chapel.
The mental pressure wave inside Kallard’s head vanished instantly, leaving his thoughts completely clear and steady.
Sorvek Nall let out a short, pathetic wail of absolute despair, his long thin limbs sagging downward as all the structural confidence left his framework, his body turning into dead weight before the altar console.
Kallard’s left hand snapped out, catching the long black metal storage cylinder by the primary handle a fraction of a millisecond before it could hit the metal floorboards.
He checked the display interface: the internal data seals on the Gromas logs were completely unbroken, the green verification light flashing once to signal that the files were locked down.
He slid the cylinder straight into a secure loop on his utility belt, right next to his dead red-lens scouter, before looking down at the trembling archivist kneeling at his feet.
The circular holographic display above their heads flickered once, twice, the ancient image of the pink demon’s laughing face freezing mid-motion before the power lines clicked completely flat, plunging the chapel back into the dim red twilight of the canyon vents.
The silence returned to the ancient stone vault, heavy, thick, and absolute.
Brakka’s gravelly voice suddenly crackled through his ear speaker, the tone remarkably low, tight, and completely stripped of its usual biting mechanic humor.
“Kallard.
Talk to me, boy.
The…
the thermal monitors on the bridge just registered a total system collapse inside your sector.
Tell me you’ve secured the container.”
Kallard reached down, grabbed the unconscious archivist by the back of his silk robes with one hand, and hoisted his frame off the altar platform with a single firm pull.
“I have the target in the restraints, old man.
And the data cylinder is locked to my belt.”
“What…
what was that name he dropped down there through the line, kid?” the old mechanic whispered, his typing fingers unusually slow against his keys.
“The name…
Babidi.”
Kallard looked up at the empty, dark space above the altar where the image of Majin Buu had been spinning a minute ago, his dark eyes sharpening into two cold points of light beneath his bandana.
“It’s a massive piece of cosmic trouble, Brakka.
That’s the only asset clearing the ledger today.
Get the medical bay airlocks open; we’re leaving this shelf tonight.”
## Act VIII: The Summary of the Dark
They did not turn Sorvek Nall over to the anonymous preservation guild brokers immediately.
That had been Brakka’s professional engineering decision, and for once, Kallard hadn’t offered a single drop of moral objection to the configuration.
Technically, the contract terms on the guild board required them to bring the black-market archivist back to the primary trade hub alive with his stolen files intact to collect the twelve thousand credit premium.
Technically, turning him over to the marshal’s office would clear the contract from their dataslates and finish the shift.
But the tall, narrow information thief knew entirely too much about the sealed margins of the pre-imperial chronicles.
He didn’t possess the full tactical context yet, sure, but his merchant brain had already resolved the frequency of the name *Babidi*.
If they simply dropped him onto a common independent detention moon, it wouldn’t take him more than two cycles to sell that specific string of data syllables to the wrong class of buyers—perhaps to a corrupt Frieza Force logistics officer or a high-priced corporate syndicate boss who wanted to use the old wizard’s energy collection routes to clear their own margins.
The name alone was a viral piece of code; it was a beacon that would attract a significantly worse class of monsters down into their border sector if the rumors started throwing sparks across the spaceport bars.
So, Brakka had systematically locked Sorvek Nall inside the *Wayfarer’s* primary lead-lined holding cell beneath the lower deck levels, securing his four thin wrists under three separate sets of magnetic Galactic Patrol restraints, injecting two full doses of a slow-acting regional sedative into his shoulder joint, and mounting a large handwritten cardboard warning sign directly over the cell’s reinforced observation pane that stated in bold black grease-marker:
NOTICE: TARGET REGISTRY LOG
OPERATIONAL PARAMETER: DO NOT ALLOW THIS ASSET TO MONOLOGUE
STATUS: HIGHEST SECURITY LOCKOUT ACTIVE
Kallard sat alone on a rusted iron storage crate in the center of the dark cargo bay floorboards, his long gray canvas cloak discarded on the bench beside his gloves.
The long black metal storage cylinder from Gromas-9 lay flat on the deck plates directly between his heavy combat boots, the purple geometric runes along the alloy housing caked in a thin layer of grey frost.
He hadn’t hit the manual toggle switch to open the casing again.
He didn’t want to look at the static face of the pink demon spinning in the blue light lines anymore.
He had seen enough of the future to know exactly how deep the dark could go once the seals started to crack.
The primary airlock door of the bay slid open with a sharp pneumatic *hiss*, and Brakka walked into the room with his heavy boots clicking against the iron grates.
He was carrying two large clay mugs filled with a steaming, amber-colored liquid that threw off the clean, bitter scent of real rehydrated herbal leaves—not the foul-smelling, copper-caked thruster runoff he usually brewed down in the kitchen corner.
The old mechanic walked over with a slow, heavy pace, his four eyes tracking the quiet line of the kid’s jaw through the dim light before he extended one of the clay mugs toward Kallard’s hand.
“The…
the data lines are fully copied, kid.
I managed to run a complete, factory-encrypted extraction pass through the cylinder’s secondary logic gates before I locked the housing back into the shipping vault.”
Kallard reached out, his callused fingers locking around the warm clay casing of the mug.
“Is the fluid actually safe to drop into the stomach cells tonight, old man?
It smells remarkably like real tea for once.”
“It’s a completely clean, high-grade reserve blend I stole from Varkos’s private luxury locker back at Kessik Yard, you uncultured little scrapper,” Brakka grunted, dropping his massive frame down onto a nearby cargo crate with a loud structural pop from his mechanical knee joint.
“I’ve been saving the tin for a special occasion, and in my professional opinion…
an active tactical encounter with an ancient pre-imperial obedience spell counts as an extreme parameter.
Drink the current.”
Kallard took a slow, cautious sip of the hot amber liquid, the clean warmth instantly spreading straight down his parched throat and into his chest muscles, relaxing the tight knots around his ribs.
“Thanks, old man.
The ledger feels a fraction more stable now.”
Neither of them spoke for three long minutes.
They just sat together in the quiet twilight of the cargo bay, listening to the steady, rhythmic *squeak-clack* of the *Wayfarer’s* primary ventilation scrubbers filtering the cabin air while the ship drifted through the radioactive dust fields of the dead star outside.
Brakka set his clay mug down against his knee guard, all four of his unblinking eyes shifting slowly downward to lock onto the black cylinder resting in the dirt.
His gravelly voice dropped into a low, flat register that lost all of its usual sarcastic mechanic humor.
“You were genuinely terrified down in that archive vault today, weren’t you, Ronin?
I could feel the frequency variance on my bridge monitors before you even cleared the altar steps.”
Kallard stared down at his own callused knuckles, his fingers tracing the white lines of scar tissue covering his thumbs.
“Yes, Brakka.
I was terrified.
The math inside my head was completely red.”
The old mechanic didn’t break out into a loud, hacking cackle, and he didn’t throw a tool at the wall.
He just sat perfectly still on his crate, his white hair mane catching the amber reflection from the wall indicators.
That reaction worried Kallard more than any lecture about an engine bill ever could—it meant the old technician’s memory banks were running logs that he was too afraid to write onto a data slate.
“Was it because of the old wizard’s name?” Brakka asked softly, his lower pair of eyes closing.
“The name Bibidi?”
“It’s because of what the wizard’s successor is actively searching for across the dead systems, old man,” Kallard said, his voice dropping into a low, dead whisper.
“The creature from the nursery songs?” the mechanic asked, his upper eyes cracking open into tight slits.
“The pink entity…
Babidi’s father cased inside the stone?”
Kallard closed his eyes briefly, his dark bandana cold against his forehead skin.
“Don’t use those syllables too much on the open channels, Brakka.
The air in this sector has a habit of carrying echoes.”
Brakka adjusted his chest harness, his mechanical hand flexing with a slow hydraulic whir.
“Is the numbers rating on that thing genuinely as massive as the Gromas chronicles suggested, boy?
The files claim it can turn a whole planetary sector into cinders without a single cruiser clearing the berths.”
Kallard opened his eyes, his dark pupils fixed on the black metal cylinder.
“It’s significantly worse than that, old man.
The numbers don’t even have a valid boundary line once the demon wakes up.”
“Worse than Lord Frieza’s primary flagship output?” Brakka muttered, his voice skeptical.
“Frieza can erase a birth world with the tip of his little finger, kid.
We watched the light from orbit.”
Kallard thought carefully about the distinction, his mind mapping out the structural differences between the two threats based on his human memories of the television screen.
“It’s a completely separate tier of system failure, Brakka.
Frieza is a political tyrant.
He destroys a world because he wants to maintain absolute strategic control over the local supply lines.
He kills because it amuses his sense of personal superiority, or because an anomaly like our race creates a metric risk to his metrics.
There’s an economic logic behind his cruelty—you can map his ships, you can track his governors, and you can outrun his patrol windows if you’re clever enough with your scheduling.”
“And this…
this pink Majin entity?” the old man asked, his voice dropping an octave.
“Buu doesn’t care about the metrics, old man,” Kallard said, his voice cold as iron.
“He doesn’t want to run an empire, he doesn’t care about the credits, and he doesn’t have a corporate strategy to balance his ledgers.
He destroys a planetary civilization for the exact same reason a five-year-old child kicks a sandcastle apart on a beach—because the destruction is an amusing piece of play for his thoughts.
He turns people into candy because he likes the flavor of the sugar.
You can’t negotiate a treaty matrix with an extinction event that laughs like a toddler while your core locks down.”
The old mechanic sat perfectly still on his crate, his broad gray-blue face turning a light shade of yellow beneath his hair clips as the sheer, unadulterated horror of the explanation settled between their seats.
Kallard stood up from his iron box, walking over to the small built-in data terminal mounted to the cargo bay wall.
He hit the manual interface switch, his fingers rapidly opening his private electronic journal file—the hidden digital vault where his human soul preserved the names of the cosmic entities that were currently moving along the tracks of the future:
### Secret Chronicle Registry
* **Frieza / Cold Force:** Immediate structural hazard.
Control limits defined by logistics.
* **Prince Vegeta / Raditz / Nappa:** Independent remnants.
Vectors aligned with Earth transit.
* **Infant Kakarot (Goku):** Sector 44 landing verified.
Core developmental asset.
* **Androids / Cell System:** Biomechanical prototype anomalies.
Future sector warning flags.
* **Beerus / Destroyer Core:** High-tier universal hazard.
Keep energy signatures flat.
He paused for five long seconds, his fingers hovering over the glowing keyboard, before he added three fresh lines of text to the bottom of the digital registry in cold, bold black script:
* **Bibidi / Babidi:** Ancient system manipulation specialists.
Active energy collection vectors.
* **Majin Buu:** Total existential system failure flag.
Cocoon location currently unmapped.
Kallard stared at the newly added names on the monitor feed, a sudden, heavy sense of personal insignificance hitting his chest armor.
For the first time since the day Planet Vegeta had turned into a cloud of space vapor, the shadow of Lord Frieza felt remarkably small inside his thoughts.
Not harmless—never harmless, the white lizard was still a massive, terrifying monster who could crush his skull with a single finger strike right now.
But Frieza had boundaries.
Frieza was part of the machine.
Babidi and the pink demon?
They were the dark spaces that sat completely beneath the floorboards of the universe.
“You want to go out there and chase down this wizard’s tracking lines yourself, don’t you, Ronin?” Brakka’s gravelly voice broke the silence of the room, the old mechanic watching his back from the crate.
Kallard slowly closed the electronic journal file, the screen turning dark before his face.
“The…
the data logs say Babidi’s agents are going to be moving through these dead border sectors for decades, old man.
They’re looking for any fighter with a high power level rating to drain their cells for the cocoon core.
If I just sit around in this ravine fixing fuel pumps…
one day, one of those possessed slaves is going to find our transponder frequency.”
His fingers slowly curled into a tight, heavy fist against his utility belt.
“But the admission tastes remarkably bitter in my mouth, Brakka…
I am completely, profoundly not ready to handle a contract like this yet.”
The old mechanic stood up from his box, walked over to the side of the terminal, and delivered a short, firm pat straight across Kallard’s green shoulder guard with his titanium hand.
The metal joint let out a soft hydraulic whir.
“Good, boy.
That is easily the most intelligent piece of engineering logic that has ever cleared those lips of yours since you woke up in my dirt.”
Kallard look down at his hand, his brow furrowing.
“Good?
Admitting that I’m too weak to stop a wizard is a sign of a successful shift, old man?”
“It means your brain has officially survived the growth of your muscles, you stubborn idiot!” Brakka growled, a wide, genuine smirk splitting his gray face.
“Three cycles ago, you would have demanded that I plot a high-speed hyperspace vector straight into the dark sectors so you could go growl at a wizard’s cocoon before your ribs had even finished fusing!
You’ve finally learned how to calculate the difference between real courage and pure, unadulterated brawler stupidity.
That is an invaluable piece of progress for the ledger.”
Kallard let out a short, tired laugh through his teeth, his shoulders dropping.
“What do we do with Sorvek’s cylinder then?
The preservation guild brokers are still waiting at the relay station.”
“We make a full digital copy of the entire database architecture and lock the files deep inside the *Wayfarer’s* dead archive vault where no external scanner can resolve the data traces,” Brakka said, his fingers hitting the console switches to clear the screen logs.
“Then, I am personally going to spend the next two hours using my heavy-duty plasma cutter to systematically remove every single line of text from that black cylinder that screams, curses, glows with a purple light, whispers childhood memories through the vents, or looks at me with an unusual expression through the glass.
Once the metal is completely clean and boring…
we hand the container back to the client, collect our twelve thousand credits, and buy those fresh sub-light coolant cells we’ve been needing.”
“Can your bridge computers actually filter out an ancient pre-imperial magical curse script, old man?” Kallard smiled faintly, picking up his gloves from the bench.
“Absolutely, profoundly no, kid!” the old mechanic cackled, marching back toward the flight deck ladder.
“The logic is a complete design guess from start to finish!
But I’m going to do it anyway because I refuse to let a dead wizard run my workshop schedule!
Now get down to the kitchen corner and finish that terrible tea before the heat cell clicks off; I’ve still got a fuel pump manifold to tune before sunrise!”
Kallard watched the old man’s broad gray-blue back disappear up the ladder hatch, the iron door sliding shut behind his clips with a final pneumatic *thud-lock*.
He turned his head around slowly, looking out through the small cabin viewport at the infinite, dark space field of the trade graveyard outside.
The dead red star was throwing off a faint, bloody glare across the broken satellites and the headless stone statues, its light casting a pale silver pattern over his matte-black chest guards.
He reached down to his belt utility rack, his callused fingers gently tracing the smooth, warm surface of the violet focus stone hidden inside his tunic lining.
He wasn’t a legendary prince born with a planet-busting power level, and he didn’t carry a clean, predictable path laid out for him by a master’s hand.
He was just Ronin—an independent rim bounty hunter, a space-faring vigilante with a tattered gray cloak, a broken scouter, and a family inside a junk transport scow that was worth bleeding for every single parsec of the road.
He closed his fist tight around the stone, his breathing falling into that slow, rhythmic cadence that kept his energy perfectly sealed beneath his skin, his mind dropping straight down into the quiet dark of his framework.
“One monster at a time, kid,” he whispered to the empty cargo bay, repeating the old man’s words like an anchor.
“One single invoice at a time.”
The *Wayfarer’s* primary sub-light engines suddenly engaged with a deep, deafening roar that shook the deck plates, the black-and-green hull of the cutter detaching from the iron rails of Malkor’s Shelf before rocketed forward into the white-hot blur of the next hyperspace lane, vanishing completely from the dead sector.
Ahead of his boots waited the long, bloody grind of the border worlds, deadlier contract slates, stronger imperial enforcers, and a universe that was slowly, systematically starting to turn in his direction.
He wasn’t ready to face the dark wizard Babidi or the pink demon inside the stone cocoon yet—but as he closed his eyes to rest his battered muscles, Ronin knew that he was getting stronger with every single breath he took.
And by the time the white ships finally reached the atmosphere of that blue-and-white planet named Earth…
the galaxy was going to find a hell of a lot more than just an ordinary scrapper waiting for them in the dark lanes.
They were going to find a warhound that knew exactly how to break the machine, hold the fire, and keep the future from burning out before the turn of the shift.