## Act I: The Weight of a Name
Three years after the white pods of the Ginyu Force slammed into the red canyon platforms of Veyra-Tal, Kallard could still hear the exact sound of the metal hitting the stone.
It wasn’t an explosion that cleared the air lines.
It was a dense, heavy thud that traveled straight through the volcanic crust of the city, vibrating through his bones long before the dust clouds even rose above the market stalls.
He remembered the ridiculous, loud shouting of the performers, the flashing colors of their elite combat uniforms, and the absolute, terrifying pressure of five genetic monsters who wore their armor like stage costumes but cleared out entire defense details like a seasonal storm.
Most of all, he remembered the deep, freezing shame of running away.
At first, the primitive Saiyan bloodline caked into his muscles had absolutely, profoundly hated the choice.
Every single predatory instinct coded into his DNA since his days in the breeding tanks had screamed at him because he had turned his back on an active workspace while an enemy was still breathing behind his tail.
He had hated the way his core heat had boiled when the blue speedster, Burter, chased the *Wayfarer* through the narrow mining cable lines, knowing with an absolute, mathematical certainty that if the monster had managed to lock his fingers around the hull rails, the subsequent fight 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 bounty contracts.
Three cycles of clearing out lawless scavenger stations, chasing spice smugglers through radioactive asteroid fields, and learning how to fix a cracked hull plating using nothing but scrap titanium pins and patience.
It was three cycles of listening to Brakka deliver his favorite piece of professional engineering advice over a bowl of rehydrated protein moss:
> “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 an absolute design joke inside his head.
The human soul burrowed deep beneath his white armor plates 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.
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.
### The Power Ledger
His resting base power level had climbed through an unyielding, day-by-day grind to a solid peak of seven thousand six hundred units of raw output.
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.
Every point of strength had a collection of broken bones, torn muscle groups, and long nights in the medical bay behind its entry.
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.
Kallard learned something incredibly important after the shootout at Malkor’s Shelf: some names in this universe were never meant to be spoken casually.
Frieza was a name people hissed in the dark corners of spaceport bars, cursed under their breath when the local taxes were raised, or said with the careful, defensive hatred of people who knew an imperial scout drone might be monitoring the local frequency.
King Cold was older.
Heavier.
A name the veteran merchants said with a profound, unshielded respect they didn’t actually feel and a deep structural fear they didn’t bother hiding from their logs.
Babidi was different.
Babidi was nothing more than a whisper caked in dust.
A string of syllables folded into old historical records, dead languages, and the kind of dark legends independent spacers told each other only when the primary cabin lights were dimmed and the sub-light engines were running loud enough to drown out superstition.
But Beerus?
Beerus was a name people did not even bother to curse.
That specific piece of galactic vocabulary bothered Kallard a hell of a lot more than he was willing to admit to the old man.
When a whole sector full of cutthroats, murderers, and imperial generals agreed to pretend a name didn’t exist, it meant the danger level didn’t have a number you could display on a monitor screen.
Three weeks after the incident with the ancient archive cylinder, the *Wayfarer* drifted on a low-power standby cycle near the absolute edge of a pale violet gas nebula.
The primary sub-light engines were completely silent, the cockpit dark, while Brakka finished using his heavy plasma torch to systematically wipe the remaining tracking marks, un-vetted curses, and “unfriendly archival residue” from the black metal cylinder they had taken from Sorvek Nall.
Kallard hadn’t bothered to ask what the phrase “archival residue” actually translated to in the blueprints.
Brakka had attempted to explain the parameters once during a fuel shift, his voice dropping into a low rasp as he muttered about “a specific class of historical dust that actively remembers your face after you touch the casing,” and Kallard had immediately decided that professional ignorance was a hell of a lot healthier for his sleep cycles.
The long-nosed archivist had been delivered alive to the preservation guild brokers two systems over, his limbs still wrapped tight in the Yardratian white cords.
The payment had been transferred into their primary ledger without a single discrepancy—a premium so high that it practically screamed that the client knew a hell of a lot more about the old wizard’s cocoon than they were willing to admit on the guild terminals.
Brakka had spent twelve hours running a data extraction pass through the cylinder’s secondary logic gates before handing the metal over, making three separate, factory-encrypted copies of the forbidden history logs.
He had buried those drives deep within different structural compartments of the ship to ensure they couldn’t be resolved by a casual customs scan: one inside the primary bridge archive archive, one behind the insulation plates of a fake auxiliary coolant regulator down in the bilge, and the third copy…
dropped straight into the copper wiring of the old, broken red-lens scouter Kallard kept hanging from his utility belt as a trophy.
“You seriously decided to put a bunch of forbidden demon-wizard history files inside my personal scouter, old man?” Kallard had asked, adjusting the belt straps.
Brakka hadn’t looked even remotely guilty about the choice.
He had just adjusted his industrial goggles with his titanium hand and spat onto the floorboards.
“The logic board inside that frame was already completely fried from the Veyra-Tal deployment, boy.
It was nothing but a dead piece of gray plastic taking up space on your hip.
Now the casing has a productive professional hobby to occupy its processor.
Stop complaining about the storage space.”
Since that afternoon, the trade lanes had been completely quiet.
Which meant, according to every single mechanical metric Kallard had recorded over the last three years, that they were entirely overdue for a massive, multi-faction disaster to clear the gates.
## Act II: The Meditation and the Monitor
Kallard was sitting cross-legged in the center of the *Wayfarer’s* lower cargo bay, his bare torso exposed to the cool ventilation draft, his palms resting flat against his knees.
His modified green-and-black armor plates lay folded neatly on a rusted metal crate near the wall, the painted edges dull under the yellow halogen bulb.
For once, his thick brown furry tail was completely free of its leather binding cloth, moving in a slow, rhythmic circle behind his lower spine to help his muscles balance his massive framework against the ship’s artificial gravity field.
He breathed in through his nose, the clean filtered oxygen filling his lungs.
He held the air deep inside his chest for four seconds, letting his mind drop down past his muscles, past his bones, straight down into that dark well of energy sitting at the base of his spine.
He let his ki rise.
Slowly.
Methodically.
Gently.
He didn’t force the energy to explode outward in a bright green aura cloud, and he didn’t trigger the explosive *Flash Trigger* pulse through his boots.
That was the specific technical distinction he had been trying to master since his fight with the parasite, Sable Korr.
The Saiyan biology was an aggressive, primitive machine—it always preferred full-scale expression, impact, and a loud declaration of its power metrics.
It wanted to pressure the air lines, to turn the floorboards to glass, to announce its presence to every scouter in the sector like a physical challenge.
But the Yardrat *Spirit Control* philosophy taught a completely backwards engineering doctrine: the energy didn’t need to be a fire thrown across a clearing.
It could be a liquid held tight inside a perfectly sealed, reinforced titanium vessel.
The *Primal Instinct* state made that compression sequence incredibly difficult to manage.
The ancient, hot-blooded beast still lived right behind the stone door of his DNA, pacing back and forth through his cells, always offended by the presence of a leash, always eager to rip the door off its hinges and let the fire loose to turn a workspace into cinders.
It was calmer now than it had been during his teenage years, sure—he could reach his mental hand through the crack and touch the power without his chest plates instantly collapsing inward from the shock—but he had to maintain a white-knuckled grip on his discipline to keep the container from cracking.
His baseline power level sat steady at seven thousand tubes.
When he pushed the door open just a fraction of an inch, the ancestral current still tripled his muscle density in a single microsecond, launching his output past twenty-two thousand units.
It was an entirely massive amount of brute force—more than enough to terrorize any outlaw den or break through the defense plates of a corporate transport cruiser.
But Kallard knew, with a cold clarity that sat behind his eyes, that twenty-two thousand was nothing more than a statistical rounding error to the monsters that were currently moving along the wider tracks of the timeline.
He visualized the energy as a single green spark trapped inside an iron cage.
The spark expanded, pressing its heat against the bars.
He tightened his thoughts, forcing the boundaries of the cage to contract by a microscopic millimeter, his shoulder muscles tensing up until his skin turned hard as stone.
A single jagged line of emerald green light cut across his dark pupils.
*SQUEAK-CLACK.*
Before the energy could even leak into the upper frequencies, the ship’s primary intercom speaker on the wall let out a sharp burst of static, the old mechanic’s gravelly voice booming through the cargo bay with enough volume to break his concentration completely.
“If you are currently turning green and baring your teeth at my bulkheads again down there, Ronin…
I am formally ordering you to move your boots three feet away from my primary electrical conduits!
I am entirely too old to spend my evening replacing the junction boxes because your ego required a localized light show!”
Kallard let out a long, slow breath through his teeth, the emerald light instantly snuffing out from his pupils as his tail dropped flat against the metal deck plates.
He stood up from the floorboards, grabbing a clean white towel from the rack to wipe the sweat from his jawline.
He hit the talk toggle with his thumb.
“I’m not throwing sparks, Brakka.
I’m meditating.
It’s an approved alignment exercise for the control lines.”
“You don’t meditate like a normal civilized hybrid, boy,” the old man growled through the speaker mesh.
“You sit down in my bilge looking exactly like a un-exploded ordnance unit that’s currently trying to file its annual tax parameters.
The hull sensors on the bridge are throwing a vibration warning every time your heart rate shifts.
Put your shirt back on and get your ass up the ladder companionway.”
Kallard slid his dark green tunic over his head, buckled his leather utility belt back around his waist, and checked the knot on his bandana.
“Did another contract clear the guild terminals?
I thought we were bypassing the sector slates until the thruster manifold was finished.”
“It isn’t a standard contract from the marshal’s office, kid,” Brakka muttered, his tone shifting into that specific, low register that usually indicated a massive complication for their fuel ledger.
“It’s an independent salvage claim.
A direct corporate posting from the Fandrel brokers.”
Kallard paused on the first rung of the iron ladder, his dark pupils narrowing.
“A salvage claim?
Those files are usually nothing but a bunch of dry engineering data regarding old cargo scows and rusted scrap hulls.”
“This one carries a hell of a lot more weight than a common junk pile, boy,” the mechanic said plainly.
“And the premium listed on the front page is entirely too stupid for my ledger to ignore.
Get up here.”
## Act III: The Ruins of Nekara
The primary flight deck was cast in a deep, cool blue twilight when Kallard cleared the ladder hatch.
Brakka was sitting hunched over the main steering column, his heavy leather coat pulled up high over his gray-blue neck clips, his organic left hand wrapped around his clay mug while his titanium right fingers tapped a fast, nervous rhythm against his armrest.
A massive, three-dimensional holographic projection was spinning slowly in the empty space between their chairs, casting a pale, clinical light over the instrument panels.
The file displayed the structural schematic of a colossal, ruined space station orbiting the cracked surface of a dead gray moon.
Unlike roughly ninety percent of the dead industrial platforms Kallard had cleared across the border lanes, this station had once been constructed with an incredible, unparalleled sense of cosmic luxury and architectural beauty.
Massive, interlocking gold rings circled the primary hull like the halos of a star.
Pearl-white marble towers rose from the central decks, their sharp edges cased in polished crystalline glass domes that had once held entire artificial atmosphere garden halls and rolling green terraces.
Elegant luxury docking ports, designed to accommodate the high-end yachts of planetary royalty and core system governors, ran along the lower perimeter like a row of ivory teeth.
Now, more than half of the beautiful white structure had been completely ripped open to the cold vacuum of space, the gold rings fractured into a thousand drifting metal shards.
One of the primary marble towers had been snapped clean off at its structural base joint, drifting slowly alongside the main hull like a severed, petrified finger caked in space dust.
But the gray moon floating directly beneath the platform was in a significantly worse condition.
The entire northern hemisphere of the planetoid had been split completely wide open by an enormous, three-hundred-mile-wide claw-shaped crater—a deep, jagged wound in the crust that was still glowing with the dull, sickly red heat of an ancient atomic displacement.
Kallard stepped closer to the projection table, his dark eyes fixed on the schematic.
“What the hell am I looking at, old man?
That isn’t a standard mining platform or a regional trade hub.”
“The official registry files call the place the Nekara Palace Station, kid,” Brakka said, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly rasp that sounded remarkably old.
He hit a key with his thumb, causing the hologram to zoom in on the central banquet deck.
“Thirty standard cycles ago, before you were even a spark inside a breeding capsule, this rock was the premier luxury resort, diplomatic banquet hall, and high-end smuggler meeting ground for the entire eastern quadrant.
Kings from the core worlds brought their treaties here to be signed, planetary princes rented out the garden domes for their weddings, and the wealthiest information brokers in the galaxy used the back rooms to trade Frieza Force route keys for a premium.
It was an absolute palace of gold and silk.”
“And then someone put a high-caliber anti-ship battery through their primary reactor core,” Kallard muttered, tracing the line of the severed tower with his finger.
“No, they didn’t, boy,” Brakka said flatly, turning all four of his unblinking eyes around to look straight into the kid’s face.
“That’s the point of the salvage brief.
There was no military fleet action recorded in this sector.
There was no corporate war, no pirate raid, and no planetary rebellion.
The whole station was broken into scrap material in less than ten seconds…
because a single individual got slightly annoyed by the service parameters during a dinner shift.”
Kallard felt his stomach drop into a cold, familiar void, his breath catching behind his teeth as a sudden line of sweat ran down his neck.
He reached out his hand, hitting the manual interface switch to open the secondary archive files hidden beneath the schematic.
A large, stylized ancient symbol unfolded in the center of the blue light.
It was the graphic depiction of a narrow, stylized purple catlike face with long, pointed ears, narrow unblinking eyes, and a pair of decorative gold rings caked into the design, carved inside a circle of three shattered planetary icons.
The bridge of the *Wayfarer* went completely, terrifyingly silent all at once, the only sound being the slow, rhythmic *squeak-clack* of the air filtration scrubbers.
Kallard’s knuckles popped as his hands locked into fists, his voice dropping into a low whisper that didn’t travel an inch past his collar mesh.
“Beerus.”
## Act IV: The Shadow of the Mountain
Brakka watched the sudden, complete freezing of the kid’s posture through the amber light of the instruments, his gray ears dropping low against his hair mane.
He adjusted his industrial goggles with his mechanical hand, the metal joints emitting a soft hydraulic whir.
“You…
you said that name like you were standing inside a temple room, Ronin.
Like you were worried the air lines might carry the frequency straight back to the core.”
Kallard didn’t look away from the cat symbol.
His throat felt like it was coated in dry sand, his human memories running logs that his Saiyan frame couldn’t ignore.
“In the wider chronicles of the universe, old man…
Beerus isn’t a common king you can buy out with a pouch of credits.
He isn’t an emperor like Frieza who has to manage his logistics lines, count his soldiers, and worry about his planetary margins.
He is a God of Destruction.
A cosmic entity whose single professional job description is to erase entire star systems from the tracking charts whenever the balance of the universe turns sloppy.”
Brakka swallowed hard, his organic chest harness tensing up beneath his coat.
“And…
and that kind of planetary annihilation is formally allowed by the central command structures?”
“Allowed?” Kallard let out a short, hollow laugh that had zero humor left hidden inside its lines.
“It’s his job, Brakka.
It’s a fundamental part of the machine’s programming.
He doesn’t need an excuse, he doesn’t need an imperial charter, and he doesn’t need a formal execution decree from a governor.
He can turn a whole birth world into space dust simply because he’s having a bad morning or because the local population is entirely too loud for his nap cycles.
It makes someone like Frieza look like nothing more than a common pocket knife sitting in a much larger hand.”
The old mechanic turned his face back toward the viewscreen, his four eyes tracking the massive claw-shaped crater glowing on the gray moon below.
“I profoundly, deep-seatedly hate when the answer to a basic engineering question turns out to be a hell of a lot worse than the nightmare I had drafted inside my head, kid.
The whole quadrant is an open grave.”
“What’s the specific parameter for this salvage claim then, old man?” Kallard asked, forcing his fists to open up as he sat down in the co-pilot’s chair.
“Why is a Fandrel collector paying us to clear a god’s playground?”
“The client is a wealthy black-market antiquity broker who specializes in the preservation of ancient culinary manifests,” Brakka said, his fingers hitting a key to clear the cat symbol from the screen.
“He’s looking for a sealed, high-security data cylinder currently stored inside the station’s primary subterranean kitchen vaults—a cylinder that contains the complete banquet logs, recipe files, and guest registries for every single royal event Nekara Palace hosted over the last century.
Apparently, the old records contain some completely unique information regarding the personal tastes, dietary requirements, and sleeping habits of the core divinities.
The premium listed on the slate is…
twenty-five thousand credits.”
Kallard blinked his dark eyes through his visor.
“Twenty-five thousand?
For a bunch of old dinner recipes?
That’s a completely stupid amount of money for a salvage file.”
“It’s an entirely offensive number, boy!” Brakka cackled, his confidence returning as the financial figures cleared his monitor line.
“It’s enough to pay for our secondary engine coil replacements, three full crates of high-grade medical healing gel, a brand-new cloaking regulator cell that doesn’t scream at me when it rains ionized particles, and more than enough spare alloy plating to reinforce that training bay of yours so the walls stop crying every time you practice your *Starfall* sequence.
It clears our ledger completely for the next six cycles.”
Kallard looked back out at the ruined marble tower drifting through the purple gas nebula.
He thought about the version of the history he carried inside his soul—the cold, hidden truth regarding the destruction of his own race.
In the chronicles he remembered, Frieza had been the one who pulled the trigger on Planet Vegeta, yes; he had been the one who fired the Death Ball into the atmosphere because his imperial paranoia had reached its execution phase.
But Beerus had been the one who permitted the strike.
He had been the one who casually suggested to the white lizard that the Saiyan race was entirely too arrogant, too troublesome, and too dangerous to be tolerated in his quadrant anymore before he went back to sleep for thirty years.
Frieza was the blade, but Beerus was the shadow that allowed the cutting to start.
“The station has been completely abandoned since the day the tower snapped?” Kallard asked, his voice flat.
“According to the long-range sensor sweeps I ran before we cleared the lane, yes,” Brakka said, hitting the thruster engagement toggles.
“There are zero active ship signatures registered on the docking pads, and the primary life-support systems have been dead for three decades.
It’s nothing but an empty stone tomb floating in a dead sector.
It’s a completely dry, low-risk extraction run…
provided we don’t go tripping over any old structural traps.”
Kallard adjusted his bandana across his forehead, his dark pupils narrowing as the *Wayfarer’s* nose tilted downward toward the gold rings of the palace.
“Let’s go find that data cylinder then, old man.
I want to see what kind of a universe allows a man’s home world to be turned into cinders over a bad dinner shift.”
Brakka threw the primary throttle handles forward, the cutter’s sub-light engines releasing a steady, muffled roar that carried them down into the violet mist.
“If the sleeping cat suddenly decides to wake up mid-shift and starts asking questions about who opened his kitchen doors, Ronin…
I am formally going to point my titanium finger straight at your face and tell him the whole operation was your private non-profit design choice!
I am entirely too old to be erased over a recipe book!”
## Act III: The Interrupted Feast
The closer the *Wayfarer* glided toward the outer ring of the Nekara Palace Station, the less it looked like a standard planetary ruin.
It didn’t look abandoned; it looked completely, terrifyingly *interrupted*.
The primary visual viewscreen displayed a snapshot of absolute, instantaneous panic frozen in time across thirty years of vacuum.
Inside the massive, shattered crystalline garden domes, long-dead luxury fountains were frozen solid in mid-spray, their blue water lines transformed into jagged, glittering sculptures of methane ice that hung motionless in the zero-gravity drift.
Long gold-threaded silk banners, bearing the elegant crests of forgotten planetary dynasties, drifted slowly through the broken glass panes like tattered gray ghosts.
The main banquet tower had been split completely wide open down its central axis line, exposing seven floors of dining decks, grand kitchen galleries, observation balconies, and orchestral stage platforms straight to the cold void of space.
And sitting along those iron dining decks were hundreds of tables that still had plates, silver serving trays, and half-filled crystal wine goblets resting flat against their linen cloths.
That specific visual detail disturbed Kallard a hell of a lot more than a field of broken hull plates would have.
The plates meant that people had been sitting right there—laughing, trading insults, signing trade treaties, and celebrating their fortunes—and then something had occurred with such a blinding, instantaneous speed that the meals never even had the time to drop off the forks before the atmosphere cleared the room.
It was a monument to a god’s sudden, careless tantrum.
Brakka guided the cutter down into a half-functioning maintenance docking bay located beneath the station’s lower archive level, the titanium landing struts biting into the iron grates with a heavy, pressurized *crunch* that echoed through the empty hull.
“The local gravity generator is running on an incredibly erratic seven-percent capacity loop, kid,” Brakka muttered, his multi-jointed arms checking the hull pressure indicators as he buckled his safety harness.
“Atmosphere pockets are active only inside sections six through eleven.
The primary culinary archive is located deep within the central basement tier of Section Nine.
Keep your visor down; the sensors are throwing a massive amount of data interference through the lines.”
Kallard unhitched his tattered cloak from his shoulder guard, throwing the fabric over his chair to give his arms full clearance, and checked the manual slide on his utility belt.
He kept his energy signature clenched tight down to his nine hundred baseline, his internal senses mapping the cold, dead space of the corridors ahead.
“What kind of data noise are your monitors resolving, old man?”
Brakka picked up his heavy plasma cutter, checking the charge levels on the lithium battery cell casing.
“It’s a completely weird frequency variance, boy.
It isn’t a standard ki signature, and it isn’t an electronic signal from a broken drone.
It’s something else…
some kind of a heavy, ancient residual pressure caked into the stone walls that keeps making my scanner meters think the primary bulkheads are actively breathing through the vents.
It’s an absolute pain in the mechanics’ logs.”
Kallard closed his eyes beneath his bandana, extending his internal focus past the airlock door.
He felt the old mechanic’s steady, irritated spark burning bright beside his shoulder, and deeper within the dark corridors of Section Nine…
It wasn’t the active energy signature of an enemy soldier or a pirate squad waiting for an ambush—it was a low, hollow echo of a massive, ancient fear caked straight into the geological fractures of the stone, like a permanent scream that had been frozen into the walls thirty years ago and never managed to clear the system.
“Something absolutely horrific cleared the gates of this room, Brakka,” Kallard whispered, his eyes snapping open.
“And the station still remembers the weight of the blow.”
“That is exactly why ruins exist in the rim, kid,” the old man growled, hitting the manual release switch on the wall panel.
“Now let’s go find that data box before the local scavenger droids realize my ship’s transponder is active on this pad.”
## Act IV: The Chef of the Dead
They stepped through the ruined threshold into a long, grand service gantry tunnel that had been carved from blocks of white marble and polished gold trim.
The overhead illumination grids were dead, but as their combat boots hit the floorboards, a series of automated, low-power ambient light strips activated along the baseboards one by one, casting a soft, golden glow over the scene.
The walls of the corridor were caked in a massive network of elaborate, hand-painted murals that detailed the historical triumphs of the Nekara palace.
Kallard stopped his boots before the largest mural in the center of the gantry, his dark pupils tracking the geometric lines of the art.
The painting depicted rows of alien kings, core sector governors, and planetary nobles, all caked in fine silk robes, their bodies bent low into positions of absolute, terrifying submission as their faces were pressed flat against the floorboards.
And sitting at the head of a massive, golden banquet table directly above their heads was that same narrow, purple catlike figure—his thin arms crossed over his chest plating, his long pointed ears high, his expression completely flat, bored, and indifferent to the submission of the world below his feet.
Perched directly behind his floating pod-chair was a second, tall silhouette—a calm, green-skinned attendant with a massive crown of white hair caked into a circle behind his neck, his lips curved into a tiny, polite smile that looked sharper than a combat blade hidden inside a silk sleeve.
*Whis.* The angel of the destruction core.
Brakka stepped up alongside Kallard’s shoulder, his four eyes tracking the line of the mural before he let out a low, disgusted snort through his nose.
“A remarkably subtle piece of interior design choice, kid.
The station engineers certainly knew how to flatter the management.”
Kallard didn’t answer.
He stood perfectly still against the marble wall, a cold, heavy fury boiling through his veins as he stared into the painted eyes of the cat god.
“He doesn’t look like an emperor who’s proud of his conquest lines, Brakka.
He looks like a spoiled child who’s completely bored by the fact that an entire star system is begging for its life in front of his plate.”
“You’re entirely too angry at a painted piece of stone plaster, boy,” the old mechanic growled, his titanium hand tapping the side of his plasma cutter.
“Move your boots down the corridor before the fuel cells drop.”
“I’m angry at what the wall represents, old man,” Kallard whispered, his voice dropping into a low primal rasp.
“Frieza is a monster, sure; he enjoys the cruelty because it makes his empire look solid.
You can map his agenda.
But this thing?
This Beerus?
He doesn’t even care enough about the people he erases to learn their names.
He treats entire planetary civilizations like a handful of loose breadcrumbs that he can scrape off a table if the kitchen staff doesn’t move fast enough for his schedule.”
Brakka went quiet on the channel, his lower pair of eyes closing for a second as he remembered the claw-shaped crater on the moon outside.
“Yeah.
Well.
The universe has a completely garbage specification sheet when it comes to justice, kid.
That’s why we carry blasters instead of prayer books.
Section Nine’s kitchen doors are directly ahead.”
The primary entrance to the culinary archive vault was blocked by a pair of massive, ten-foot-high pressure doors constructed from reinforced white alloy and heavy gold plating.
The automated magnetic locks had been caked in a thick layer of methane frost, the internal logic lines completely frozen by thirty cycles of abandonment.
Brakka stepped up to the control housing, his utility arms pulling a series of diagnostic wire pins from his harness to splice straight into the manual release relays.
“Who…
who in the name of the gods decides to gold-plate a high-pressure security door seam?
It’s an absolute piece of garbage engineering philosophy.
It does nothing to improve the structural seal.”
“Rich people, old man,” Kallard said, his hand resting on his utility belt.
“They care about the presentation metrics.”
“Rich people deserve to experience an immediate vacuum decompression line then, boy!” the mechanic growled, his titanium fingers twisting a wire pin until the panel let out a loud electronic *pop*.
The heavy white alloy doors slid slowly apart with a long, rusty screech of their tracks, a massive wave of warm, filtered, and thoroughly insulated air rolling out from the interior of the room.
Kallard instantly raised his right hand into the air, his dark pupils narrowing as his primitive sensing grid caught a sudden, unexpected displacement in the room’s ambient heat.
“Brakka.
Hold your boots,” Kallard whispered, his energy signature automatically rising to his combat baseline.
“The room isn’t empty.
There’s a active living spark sitting in the center of the vault.”
The old mechanic froze on the threshold, all four of his eyes wide as he looked past the kid’s shoulder.
The primary culinary archive room was an enormous, circular vault caked in a strange mixture of high-end library shelving and commercial kitchen galleries.
Hundreds of black metal storage cylinders containing old recipe logs lined the walls from the floor to the high ceiling, while holographic dinner menus from forgotten banquets floated slowly above the central preparation tables, their blue light casting a pale glow over the scene.
A row of heavy-duty stasis cabinets was still humming with a weak, auxiliary power cycle in the corner.
And standing directly in the center of the polished black stone floorboards was an old alien.
He was tall, but his physical frame was completely bent and warped by decades of age and joint trauma, his pale lavender skin caked in a thick network of deep wrinkles and gray liver spots.
His three large eyes were completely cloudy, covered in a thick milky layer of cataracts that made his gaze look blind and blank.
He was wearing a faded, heavily decayed chef’s robe that had once been a pristine white, now turned a light shade of yellow and caked in a dozen coarse canvas patches.
Around his neck hung a broken iron medallion bearing the official royal crest of the Nekara palace.
He held a massive, three-foot-long solid steel soup ladle cradled in his long thin fingers, his arms trembling violently with a mixture of old age and pure, survival-driven terror as he aimed the metal bowl straight toward the door threshold.
“No…
no more tasting parameters today, you monsters!” the old chef rasped out, his voice a dry, rattling whisper that sounded like dead leaves scraping across iron.
“The…
the kitchen line is officially closed for the shift!
I refuse to deliver another single ounce of sauce to your tables!”
## Act V: The Legend of the Split Pudding
Kallard slowly lowered his hand, his energy signature dropping back down to his suppressed baseline as he took in the fragile, pathetic figure of the old alien.
“We’re not here to adjust your kitchen metrics, chef.
We’re just an independent salvage detail from the guild networks.
Lower the ladle.”
The old alien’s cloudy eyes shifted slowly toward the sound of the syllables, his pointed lavender ears twitching against the hum of the stasis cabinets.
He lowered the heavy steel spoon by an inch, his voice trembling.
“You…
you are not the regional command inspectors from the logistics wing?”
“No,” Kallard said plainly, stepping into the vault light.
“Not…
not the high-tier culinary tasters from the core worlds?”
“Not even close, old man,” Brakka grunted, his titanium hand dropping to his side as he rolled his shoulders.
“Not…
not the divine attendants carrying the long staves and the silk robes?” Oru whispered, his third eye twitching with an absolute, breathless dread.
Kallard’s jaw tightened beneath his bandana.
“No, chef.
The white ships are thousands of parsecs away from this system.
Nobody from the core is clearing your gates today.”
The old lavender alien let out a long, ragged sigh that seemed to drag the last remaining drops of structural tension clean out of his broad chest, his long fingers releasing their grip on the steel ladle.
The heavy tool clattered against the polished black stone floorboards with a loud metallic *clang*, and his knees buckled completely beneath his robes, his physical frame fainting forward into a deep snowdrift of old data sheets before Kallard could even cross the clearing to catch his shoulder.
Brakka stared down at the crumpled pile of yellowed silk robes, his lower pair of eyes blinking slowly.
“Well.
I absolutely like his character parameters already, kid.
He has a remarkably prompt sense of dramatic delivery.”
An hour later, the old chef, whose name was registered in the archive files as Oru, was sitting on a low metal stool inside the archive’s small maintenance break room.
He was wrapped tightly in a thick wool blanket Kallard had brought down from the ship’s storage bays, his thin fingers clutching a clay mug of warm water while Brakka adjusted the heating coils on a portable space heater near his boots.
Oru drank from the mug with a fast, desperate hunger that told them he had spent the last several cycles surviving on nothing but emergency moisture condensers and old stasis ration bars caked in dust.
Kallard sat flat on an iron crate directly across from his stool, his dark pupils fixed on the chef’s graying face.
“You’ve been sitting down in these basement tier vaults completely alone for thirty standard cycles, Oru?
How the hell did your body manage to preserve its vital indicators on a dead station?”
The old alien looked around the small room with his cloudy, blind eyes, a bitter, hollow smile touching his lavender lips.
“I wasn’t completely alone inside these corridors, young warrior.
The memories are entirely too loud down here.
Every time the ventilation scrubbers click, I can still hear the screams of the guests clearing the gantry rails.”
Brakka let out a low, disapproving grunt from the corner, his mechanical hand scratching his blue-gray jaw.
“Fantastic.
An absolute masterpiece of a salvage run, Ronin.
We came down here to collect a dry recipe cylinder, and we’ve successfully managed to locate a haunted lavender chef with a terminal case of psychological erosion.
The ledger is looking spectacular.”
Oru turned his pale head slowly toward the sound of the old man’s voice, his third eye tracking the clicking joints on his right shoulder socket.
“You…
you possess the thick, callused hands of a master senior technician, old man.
I recognize the specific cadence of your engineering steps.”
Brakka lifted his titanium forearm into the yellow light, the metal fingers flexing once.
“Only some of my hands are original factory spec, chef.
The rest are just parts I took from an imperial scrap heap to keep my roof over my head.”
Oru’s cloudy eyes shifted slowly back to Kallard’s dark face, his voice dropping into a low, serious drone that cut through the hum of the heater.
“And you…
young warrior…
you carry the specific, cold anger of a completely destroyed birth world beneath that black bandana.
Your energy signature tastes exactly like a storm that’s trying to find a target.”
The break room went completely still, the air lines freezing between them.
Kallard leaned his broad shoulders forward, his hands resting flat against his knees, his voice dropping into a low primal rumble.
“Tell me exactly what cleared the gates of this station thirty cycles ago, chef Oru.
What did the cat god do to your palace?”
Oru’s small hands began to tremble violently around the clay mug, a few drops of the warm water spilling over the brim onto his yellowed silk robes as his voice lost all of its remaining academic drone, turning into the ragged whisper of a survivor.
“The Nekara Palace Station had served every high-tier empire, divine sovereign, regional prince, stellar devourer, and wealthy merchant lord in this quadrant for a century, Kallard,” the old chef whispered, his third eye wide and unblinking.
“We were the premier culinary artists of the stars.
We cased our dishes with the finest spices from seven systems, we aged our blue nectar inside volcanic stone vaults for decades, and we signed the largest peace treaties of the rim across our dining tables.
We were incredibly proud of our craft.”
He paused, his breath coming in a short, ragged whistle through his lavender nose.
“And then…
Lord Beerus woke up from his long sleep cycle,” Oru whispered, his teeth grinding together with a sharp click.
“He cleared his planetary gates and informed his attendant that his stomach required an immediate, thirty-parsec multi-course banquet to balance his metrics.
He arrived at our primary docking platform alongside his tall companion, Whis—the one who smiles like a collection of sharp knives hidden inside a silk robe.
The Lord requested a specific, monumental feast consisting of seventy-seven independent dishes.
Sweet plates, sour star-pastes, flame-grilled krakens from the ocean moons, comet-salted nectar bars, living blue spices, dead spices, impossible spices…
the entire kitchen tier spent three rotations without a single second of sleep just to clear the order lines.”
Brakka shook his broad gray-blue head, his white mane caking in the heater light.
“Seventy-seven separate courses?
In my line of work, that is called an absolute logistical nightmare for a kitchen manager.
That is too many goddamn spices for a single belly to process.”
Oru completely ignored the mechanic’s comment, his yellow eyes fixed on the memory.
“We prepared every single dish to absolute, textbook perfection.
The entire station was singing with joy, the alien kings were bowing their heads till their crowns hit the grates, and the head chefs were weeping with pride.
My master served the final dessert course himself—a magnificent, triple-star cream pudding imported from the agricultural moons of Planet Yosha.
It was our premier masterpiece.
A delicate, difficult dish that required the stabilizing sugars to be kept at a perfect, sub-zero temperature configuration throughout the transit.”
“What went wrong with the entry vector?” Kallard asked, his dark pupils sharp as needles.
Oru looked down at the floorboards, a tear escaping his cloudy eye to roll down his wrinkled cheek.
“The stabilizing sugar had a microscopic fracture along the primary crystal casing, hunter.
A tiny variance caused by the vibration of a cargo loader crane three levels down the dock.
We didn’t resolve the defect before the plate cleared the line.
When Lord Beerus lifted his silver spoon and tasted the pudding…
the internal texture displeased his palate.
He said the cream felt…
lumpy.”
## Act VI: The Tapped Table
The room fell back into a heavy, suffocating stillness, the only sound being the steady, annoying buzz of the portable heater core.
Kallard sat perfectly motionless on his iron crate, his hands locking around his knees with an absolute, unyielding grip.
He didn’t break out into a sarcastic laugh, and he didn’t call the old alien a liar.
He knew the parameters of the Dragon Ball universe entirely too well to doubt a single syllable of the narrative—he knew that Beerus was the kind of careless, indifferent deity who could systematically erase an entire planetary civilization from existence simply because a dessert course lacked the proper level of sugar or because a fat pink demon refused to share his food.
“He…
he didn’t scream a battle cry, and he didn’t unleash a massive, visible energy beam from his palms,” Oru whispered, his body shivering beneath the wool blanket.
“He just sat in his floating pod-chair, let out a short, bored sigh through his long nose, and tapped the edge of the golden banquet table once with the tip of his left index finger.
Just once.”
The old chef lifted his long thin hand, replicating the tiny, casual motion in the air.
“The structural shock wave from that single finger tap traveled straight down through the central gantry core of the station and hit the gray moon floating directly beneath our docking pads,” Oru wept, his head dropping into his hands.
“The entire northern hemisphere of the planetoid cracked wide open in less than a millisecond, the volcanic lava lines exploding straight out into the vacuum.
Half of the station’s primary marble towers snapped off their joints from the kinetic displacement, the glass domes shattering into a million pieces.
The guests panicked completely, scrambling to reach their transport ships, but the Lord just waved his hand carelessly…
and three full fleets of planetary royalty were turned into a cloud of white ash before their engines could even clear the platform gates.
My master, the head chefs, the servers…
all erased from existence because the texture of the cream was non-standard.
I only managed to survive because I was young and I hid myself inside a lead-lined cold storage shaft beneath the floorboards.”
Kallard turned his dark face slowly around, his eyes locking onto the massive claw-shaped crater glowing with a dull red heat on the moon outside the archive window.
The puzzle pieces clicked together behind his eyes with a cold, terrifying click.
It hadn’t been a high-level military action or an imperial orbital bombardment.
It was nothing more than a god’s casual, careless tantrum over a bad pudding shift.
Brakka’s face had gone hard as iron, his four eyes wide as he looked at the old alien.
He reached down into his harness, his mechanical fingers snapping shut with a sharp hydraulic ring.
“And…
and the cat god just left you down in that ditch after turning your home world into a junk pile, chef?
He didn’t even bother to check if there were any survivors left inside the shafts?”
“His attendant, Whis, looked down into the kitchen ruins before they cleared orbit,” Oru whispered, wiping his eyes with his sleeve.
“He smiled his polite, knife-like smile and told the empty air lines that our secondary dessert menu showed an ‘exceptional amount of long-range promise,’ before their pod vanished into the upper hyperspace lanes.
They never looked back once.”
Brakka muttered a string of the most vile, creative profanity Kallard had ever heard in his life, his titanium fist slamming against the steel storage crate hard enough to leave a deep, circular dent in the alloy casing.
Kallard stood up slowly from his crate, walking over to the large panoramic viewscreen to stare out at the cold wilderness of the stars.
His dark pupils were wide and unblinking, his reflection staring back at him from the dark glass—the sharp jawline, the short-cut black hair, the dark bandana covering his forehead skin.
He thought about the millions of families who had died inside those marble towers thirty cycles ago—turned into cosmic vapor because a spoiled deity found their cream lumpy.
He thought about the thousands of proud, stubborn warriors who had died under the red sky of Planet Vegeta because that exact same careless deity had found their species too troublesome to tolerate in his sector.
There was no justice in the tracks of this galaxy.
There was no grand ledger of balance, no moral measuring stick, and no divine judgment that weighed each life based on its merits.
There was only the absolute, unyielding indifference of the strong—the careless whims of emperors and gods who treated entire civilizations like a handful of loose breadcrumbs on a dining table, clearing them from orbit whenever they felt bored or hungry.
“Where is the God of Destruction currently registered on the tracking maps, chef Oru?” Kallard asked, his voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly calm rumble that made the break room walls shake.
Oru swallowed hard, his cloudy third eye tracking the kid’s silhouette against the glass.
“Asleep, young warrior.
The independent pilot networks down at Port Kappa claim he returned to his private world to sleep for many cycles after his last banquet shift.
Perhaps decades.
Perhaps centuries.
He only wakes when the alignment demands a fresh extraction.
And when he wakes…
entire star systems bend their knees to pray for a prompt execution.”
Brakka stepped up to Kallard’s shoulder, his four eyes fixed on the side of the kid’s jaw line, his voice dropping into a tight, defensive warning rasp.
“You are completely, profoundly banned from chasing this particular contract, Ronin.
I know that look behind your visor—you’re imagining finding a valid way to put a *Galaxy Breaker* beam through a god’s chest plate.
If you try to cross paths with a monster of that tier…
we turn into space dust before I can even finish drawing my blaster.”
Kallard didn’t turn his head around to face the mechanic.
He kept his eyes fixed on the cold stars outside, his right hand gently tracing the smooth surface of the Yardrat focus stone inside his tunic.
“I know exactly what the risk parameters look like, old man.
I’m not a complete idiot.
I know I’m not anywhere near ready to stand in the same room as a mountain with teeth.”
“Good,” Brakka grunted, his hand dropping to his belt.
“Then say the parameters out loud for the record logs.”
“I am flatly not chasing the God of Destruction today, Brakka,” Kallard said quietly, his fist closing tight.
“But I am going to keep his name caked into the very top of my personal journal.
Because if the universe allows a being to erase thirty worlds over a split dessert course…
then someone, someday, has to become strong enough to stand on that platform and make him think twice before he taps his finger again.”
Brakka let out a long, heavy breath through his nose, his shoulders dropping as he turned back toward the archive cylinders.
“Wonderful, kid.
Put that specific project on your long-range target list, right below ‘fix my favorite primary thruster manifold’ and ‘stop making my insurance provider cry before noon.’ Now let’s go collect this recipe book so we can clear this rock before the storm turns mean.”
## Act VII: The Scavenger Standoff
The extraction of the culinary archive cylinders took another two hours of dirty, tedious labor.
Brakka worked the central console lines, his mechanical hand moving with a fast precision to copy the ancient guest registries and banquet logs onto their hidden encrypted drives, while Kallard helped chef Oru gather his remaining personal items, a portable stasis space heater, and three crates of old station mapping tools from the lower vaults.
The old alien had refused to leave his kitchen tier at first, his thin fingers clutching the rusted handle of his steel ladle like an anchor.
“I am the primary senior saucier of the Nekara Palace, hunter,” Oru had rasped, his cloudy eyes wide.
“My master left these recipe logs in my custody.
If I clear the threshold…
there’s nobody left to verify that we were actually the greatest artists of the sector.”
Brakka had walked over, grabbed the steel ladle out of his hand with his titanium fingers, and tossed the tool carelessly into a scrap crate near the ramp.
“You’re not keeping a palace alive down in this ditch, chef; you’re just keeping a bunch of ghosts and a terminal case of bad structural plumbing company.
Nekara Palace is nothing but a tomb caked in a lot of expensive gold seasoning tonight.
Get your boots onto my boarding ramp before I decide to charge your account for the extra oxygen units you’re burning.”
Kallard had dropped down onto one knee in front of the old alien, his green visor raised to show his dark eyes, his voice softening.
“I know exactly what it feels like to think that leaving a ruin means you’re betraying the people who died inside the fire, Oru.
I spent years sitting in a cargo bay waiting for the universe to correct its mistake.
But dying down in the dark where they died doesn’t honor their names.
Living better out in the open lanes does.”
The old chef had stared down at the kid’s face for three silent seconds, his pointed lavender ears twitching, before he slowly let his shoulders drop, his long fingers reaching out to wrap around the wool blanket.
“I… Find the original chapter at g.com.
I do not know how to manage a regular life outside of a royal kitchen, young warrior.”
Kallard had stood back up to his full height, bucking his chest guards tight.
“Neither did I, chef.
Neither did I.
You try useful first, and you work your way up from there.”
The decision to clear the station became significantly easier when the primary radar monitors inside the *Wayfarer’s* cockpit suddenly let out a sharp series of electronic alarms.
Three independent, unregistered salvage vessels—clumsy, blocky cargo haulers caked in rust and red paint—had just docked illegally along the far side of the station’s primary ring.
A multi-species crew of independent scavenger outlaws, wearing mismatched infantry armor plates and cracked chemical breathing masks, had breached the secondary bulkhead lines of Section Nine, their heavy iron boots clacking loudly against the gantry grates as they ran down the kitchen corridor toward the archive vault.
The leader of the scavenging team—a broad-shouldered, horned alien woman with dark red skin and a massive, five-foot-long high-frequency plasma axe cradled in her large hands—stepped through the ruined white alloy doors of the archive, her yellow eyes widening with a predatory grin as she noted the four crates of copied cylinders resting on the main preparation table.
“Well, well, look what the dead star just dropped into our laps, boys,” the woman jeered, her voice wet and raspy through her mask speaker.
“Looks like some independent black-armored scrapper has already performed all the hard, tedious engineering labor for our shift.
We appreciate the efficiency, hunter.”
Brakka let out a long, exhausted grunt, his organic left hand dropping straight down to the handle of his blaster pistol.
“I profoundly, deep-seatedly hate this sector.”
Kallard took two slow steps forward, his broad frame stepping directly between the scavenging team and the old chef’s stool.
He let his arms hang loose at his sides, his tattered gray cloak pulled back over his green shoulder guards, his suppressed energy signature remaining flat at its nine hundred baseline.
“This particular archive sector is currently under a active private contract, lady.
Turn your boots around and clear the corridor before the room gets violent.”
The horned woman eyed the scuffed green trim on his chest plating, her predatory grin thinning out into a hard line of calculation as her electronic scouter clicked over her ear.
“You’re the independent scrapper they call Ronin on the border boards, aren’t you?
The kid who dismantled Varkos’s enforcers on Kessik Yard.”
Kallard didn’t answer a single word.
“I’ve heard you’re a remarkably reasonable mercenary when the parameters are dry, Ronin,” the woman said, adjusting her grip on the plasma axe handle, the heavy blade beginning to hum with a bright blue electrical current.
“Let’s make a simple business transaction here: you slide those four crates of recipe cylinders across the black stone floorboards toward my scouts, and you take your ship, your mechanic, and your old yellowed cook out of this system alive.
Nobody gets spaced today, and nobody has to write an execution report to the marshal.”
Kallard looked past her shoulder guards, his dark pupils tracking the gear configuration of the six independent scavengers standing in the hallway lines.
Their individual power levels were completely pathetic—none of them registered past twelve hundred units on his internal grid.
Their weapons were standard commercial surplus, and their postures were loose, sloppy, and completely undisciplined.
There was absolutely no reason to open the tap for the *Primal Instinct* state.
There was no reason to waste his stamina cells, and there was certainly no reason to shed a single drop of blood over a bunch of old recipe logs.
“This palace is officially closed for looting today, lady,” Kallard said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp that filled the vault.
“And I’m in an exceptionally poor mood to negotiate my margins with crows.”
The horned woman let out an angry snarl, her feet pushing off the floor grates as she launched her massive five-foot plasma axe through the air in a wide, horizontal swing aimed straight for Kallard’s visor line.
Kallard moved.
## Act VIII: The Diplomacy of the Axe
He didn’t try to roll away or duck behind a preparation table.
He stepped straight *into* the path of the swing, his left gloved hand snapping out like an iron vice to lock around the rusted shaft of the axe mid-motion, right beneath the blue electrical blade housing.
The sheer physical density of his Saiyan biology brought the five-foot weapon to an instantaneous, jarring halt in mid-air, the blue static sparks snapping harmlessly against his leather glove fabric.
Before the horned woman could even register that her primary weapon had been caught by a teenager’s fingers, Kallard drove his right knee straight into the center of her soft abdominal lining.
*CRUNCH.*
The caked titanium armor plates covering her stomach caved inward by three inches under the force of the three-thousand-power combat strike.
Every single drop of air blasted out of her lungs in a wet wheeze, her eyes rolling into the back of her head as her grip on the axe handle went completely limp.
Kallard twisted the heavy weapon clean out of her fingers, executed a tight pivot on his heel, and drove the flat iron side of the axe blade straight into the side of her helmet casing.
The plastic visor shattered into a dozen pieces, and the woman dropped flat onto the polished black stone floorboards like a sack of lead, completely unconscious.
The remaining five scavengers inside the hallway let out a terrified chorus of shrieks and frantically raised their plasma blasters to open fire on his position.
Kallard didn’t give them the room to coordinate their alignment angles.
He swung the massive five-foot plasma axe around his torso in a wide, circular loop and flung the heavy weapon across the room like a throwing disk, aiming straight for the primary electrical junction console mounted to the wall directly behind their shoulders.
*BOOM-CLANG.*
The heavy iron axe blade cut clean through the copper wiring harness inside the panel, resulting in a massive concussive explosion of blue static sparks, melted circuit fragments, and white smoke that filled the kitchen corridor entirely.
The primary overhead light strips along the baseboards flickered twice and died, plunging the hallway into a deep, dim twilight lines.
“Starfall Cannon,” Kallard whispered through his teeth.
Six rapid, highly concentrated green pellets of baseline ki energy shot from his right hand in a fraction of a millisecond, the tracer rounds traveling through the smoke cloud like sniper bullets.
He didn’t aim the blasts to kill—he kept his output strictly controlled within his three thousand baseline parameters to display the level of physical restraint he had practiced since his run on the machine colony.
The first green sphere struck the closest scout’s plasma rifle receiver, the localized explosion turning the alloy into a cloud of melting plastic that scorched his fingers.
The second round struck the boots of the second scavenger, destroying his automated ankle stabilizers and sending his frame tumbling sideways into a snowdrift of data sheets.
The third and fourth rounds caved in the shoulder plates of the two middle thugs, the concussive force knocking the wind clean out of their lungs, while the fifth and sixth spheres struck the ceiling support joists directly above their heads.
*CREAK-CRACK.*
A massive, decorative marble support beam caked in gold trim sheared clean off its joints from the ceiling, plummets down through the smoke cloud to crash onto the floorboards with a thunderous *thud* that completely blocked the hallway path, creating a solid twelve-foot barrier between the remaining outlaws and the archive cases.
Brakka leaned his broad gray-blue head over the edge of the table, his lower pair of eyes blinking slowly as he looked down at the old chef.
“You see that sequence of physical choreography right there, master Oru?
That is what this muscle-brained kid formally refers to as ‘extreme professional restraint’ during an investigation.
It’s an absolute miracle of a performance.”
Oru watched the entire nine-second shootout through his cloudy, blind third eye, his pointed ears vibrating with intensity.
“It…
it was remarkably loud for a diplomatic negotiation, senior technician.”
“He gets that specific volume parameter straight from my engineering influence, chef,” Brakka grunted, lifting two of the archive crates onto his broad shoulders.
“Now let’s get these cylinders moved onto my boarding ramp before the rest of her crew decides to clear the rubble.”
A short-armed scavenger rushed through a gap in the stone blocks, swinging a pair of long combat knives through the red neon light.
Kallard caught both of her wrists with a single, fluid closing motion, drove his forehead straight into the center of her mask visor to break the glass, and executed a clean leg sweep that dropped her flat onto her back.
A final thug lunged from behind a pillar carrying a heavy iron shock staff, the prongs crackling with thousands of volts of yellow electricity.
Kallard dropped his torso low, letting the electrical staff strike the first scavenger’s armor plates instead, before he grabbed the metal shaft with his hand, yanked the attacker forward into his workspace, and delivered a short, clean palm strike straight to his center chest vest.
The blast from his palm was tiny, compressed, and strictly physical—just enough to launch the final mercenary ten yards down the length of the kitchen corridor where his body slammed face-first into a large golden banquet table that had somehow managed to survive thirtycycles of divine pudding wrath, only to be turned into a cloud of loose splinters by a bounty hunter with a terminal case of patience issues.
The remaining two scavengers at the far end of the hall froze completely in their tracks, their weapons dropping from their trembling fingers as they looked through the smoke at the dark face beneath the bandana.
“Clear the platform gates,” Kallard said, his voice a low, terrifyingly calm rumble.
They didn’t wait around for an official command.
They grabbed their unconscious leader by the heels of her boots, dragged her frame frantically back through the airlocks, and rocketed their hauler ships away from the station at full speed within forty seconds.
Brakka watched their trail disappear from his wrist monitor, a small grin splitting his gray face.
“No property damage logs recorded over two full corridors of an abandoned god station, Ronin.
I’m starting to think your brain cells are experiencing a massive professional upgrade this cycle.”
Kallard looked back at the shattered remnants of the golden banquet table caked in wood splinters, his hand rubbing his side ribs.
“One corridor and a half, old man.
The kitchen table didn’t survive the alignment.”
“Practically a masterpiece of international diplomacy then, boy!” the old mechanic cackled, marching back toward the *Wayfarer’s* airlock.
“Get the cook inside the hatch!”
## Act IX: A Mountain with Teeth
They left the Nekara Palace Station behind their tail nozzles before the white marble towers could become any more crowded, haunted, or symbolic for their ledger.
The *Wayfarer* cleared the station’s lower docking grates with a smooth, silent launch, her primary sub-light engines engaging on a low-vibration cycle as she rocketed straight back up into the quiet comfort of the orbital lanes, the dark green wings catching the pale light of the dead red star.
Chef Oru was currently sitting on a low wooden stool inside the ship’s small galley kitchen, his lavender shoulders wrapped tightly in a clean thermal blanket as he stared down into a clay mug of actual, high-grade herbal tea with an expression of pure, unadulterated treasure.
Brakka had explicitly warned him three separate times not to touch a single button on the primary engine access panels unless he wanted to be automatically adopted into an unpaid professional apprenticeship, but he had left a large plate of fresh ration biscuits on the table anyway to keep his mouth busy.
Kallard stood entirely alone on the primary flight deck, his broad shoulders leaning against the reinforced glass of the front viewport as the cracked moon of Nekara slowly turned below his ship.
The massive claw-shaped crater was still visible on the gray surface, a permanent scar left behind by a deity’s finger tap.
The iron door of the bridge ladder slid open with a soft pneumatic hiss, and Brakka walked into the room, his mechanical right arm making a low, quiet maintenance hum as he carried a fresh data slate.
For once, the old mechanic didn’t speak the microsecond his boots cleared the rungs; he just walked over to his pilot chair, sat down heavily, and looked out at the dead star field for a long, silent minute.
Kallard appreciated the quiet space.
It was a rare configuration of spirit for the old man.
Then Brakka ruined the artistic tranquility of the moment completely because he was Brakka, his gravelly voice dropping into a flat, level rasp.
“If you tell me…
if you utter a single syllable clearing those lips of yours that says you’re planning on finding a valid way to punch a God of Destruction in his face before the next cycle clears, Ronin…
I am formally going to inject three full doses of regional sedative straight into your neck marrow and lock you inside the lead-lined cell for the next three parsecs.”
A tiny, dry smirk touched the corner of Kallard’s mouth beneath his bandana.
“I want to punch a god, Brakka.
I want to hit him with enough weight to break his jaw joint.”
The old mechanic let out a long, heavy groan that rumbled deep in his broad chest, his hand covering his face goggles.
“I knew it.
The logic is a complete system failure.”
“But I possess enough working brain cells to know that I can’t do a damn thing to clear his guard today, old man,” Kallard said quietly, his dark pupils steady as he watched the stars.
“That’s the technical distinction behind my thoughts.”
“That is…
remarkably close to a valid piece of adult wisdom, boy,” Brakka muttered, his hand dropping back to his knee guards.
“Frieza is a cruel, power-mad monster, Brakka,” Kallard said, his voice dropping an octave as his fingers traced his belt utility belt.
“But you can understand his agenda.
He knows exactly what he’s doing every time he signs an execution decree—he does it because it makes his imperial borders look solid, or because he enjoys the sensation of dominance over a weaker race.
There’s a human kind of evil caked into his code that makes him exceptionally easy to map and hate in a ditch.
You can build a weapon to break an emperor.”
“And the cat god?” the old technician asked, his upper pair of eyes narrowing.
Kallard kept his gaze fixed forward on the dark space lanes ahead of his nose.
“Beerus doesn’t even carry enough personal interest in the worlds he erases to record their names in his logs, Brakka.
He doesn’t hate the populations he turns to space dust, and he doesn’t feel a single drop of malice when he taps his finger against a golden table.
He might not even remember that this station ever existed by the time he wakes up from his next nap cycle.
It’s a complete cosmic indifference…
a careless divinity that treats a living star system full of families like nothing more than a speck of dust on a lens.
That’s the part of the configuration that terrifies my soul.”
Brakka leaned his broad gray-blue back against the leather headrest of his stool, his unblinking eyes tracking the green reflection from the navigation monitor.
“Yeah.
Well.
It should scare you, kid.
It’s an absolute mountain of a problem, and the mountain has a full set of teeth caked into its geology.”
He paused, his mechanical finger tapping a slow rhythm against the console.
“I know the code of your lineage, Kallard,” Brakka said softly, his gravelly voice losing all of its biting humor.
“You can turn a heavy fear into a fresh training conditioning grind.
You can take a raw warrior rage and shape it into a discipline like the *Galaxy Breaker* beam.
That is a remarkably useful asset for a bounty hunter running the rim lanes.
But don’t you go letting this specific god name turn into a permanent obsession inside that head of yours, boy.
Frieza is a tyrant you can hunt down; the Ginyu Force are common executioners you can outrun; Babidi is a shadow you can dig out from a hole.
But this Beerus?
That is a fundamental law of physics with an attitude problem.
And a mountain doesn’t give a single damn if you hate the stones.”
Kallard looked down at his own wrapped forearms, the dark skin showing through the white canvas training cloth caked in tiny red micro-fissures from his last compression drill.
They were Saiyan hands—hands that had grown stronger through honest sweat, broken bones, and an absolute refusal to let the galaxy dictate his margins.
But they were still completely, layout-impotent against a cosmic entity who could crack a moon using the tip of his finger.
The realization of his own physical insignificance should have caved his armor plates inward, leaving him feeling helpless in the dark.
Instead, as he felt the steady, warm pulse of the Yardrat focus stone against his ribs, the data lines inside his brain turned remarkably sharp and clear.
“There are multiple, high-level tiers of power operating inside this universe, old man,” Kallard said, his voice level.
Brakka nodded his broad head once.
“An exceptionally ugly piece of operational truth, boy.”
“I spent the last three years training my cells specifically to break the monsters,” Kallard whispered.
“And what’s the next phase of the specification sheet, kid?”
Kallard looked back out the viewport window as the ruined gold rings of the Nekara palace finally shrank away into a small white dot against the purple gas nebula behind their tail nozzles.
“One day…
if I’m going to keep these worlds from being turned into cinders over a lumpy dessert course…
I’m going to have to learn how to understand the gods.”
Brakka let out a long, dry sigh through his yellow teeth, his fingers reaching over to engage the primary hyperdrive capacitors.
“Wonderful, kid.
An absolute masterpiece of a layout.
More homework for the senior technician.
Let’s see if our fuel ledger can survive the study cycles.”
Kallard smiled faintly, his shoulders dropping as he relaxed into his chair.
## Act X: The Log of the Indifferent
They fell into a comfortable, silent stillness for a long mile of space, the only sound being the steady, rhythmic *squeak-clack* of the ventilation scrubbers as the *Wayfarer* prepared to enter the next hyperspace corridor lane.
“What’s the management plan for the old cook down in the kitchen, Ronin?” Brakka asked, his hand hovering over the master throttle lever.
“We can’t just keep an ancient lavender saucier sitting in our galley storage bins for the next three parsecs; he’s already complained twice about the quality of my seasoning starch.”
“We’ll find him a quiet, secure enclave world somewhere three systems over, Brakka,” Kallard said.
“Somewhere far away from the primary Frieza Force patrol lines where the local councils don’t check the immigration papers.
A quiet place with decent soil and a warm sun.”
“Safe is a remarkably relative piece of vocabulary out here in the gray zones, boy.”
“Then we’ll find him somewhere safer than a dead god station with broken windows, old man,” Kallard grunted.
“That’s the parameter we can afford today.”
“And what about the culinary archive cylinders?” the mechanic asked, pointing a finger toward the four crates caked in lead-shielding on the lower deck.
“The Fandrel broker is waiting at the relay platform with our remaining six thousand credits.”
“We deliver the recipe manifests we were officially hired to recover from the vaults,” Kallard said, his callused fingers tapping a key on his wrist screen to synchronize the data keys.
“We collect our premium, we buy the engine parts…
but we keep the master copies of the ancient guest registries and the banquet logs locked deep inside our own dead archive drive.”
Brakka’s upper two eyes narrowed into tight points of light, his professional suspicion flaring back into life.
“Because of what technical asset, kid?
Why do you want to keep a list of thirty-year-old dinner guests inside my primary data bus lines?”
“Because if the God of Destruction has a set of favorite regional transit routes…
if his attendant Whis has a recorded list of preferred sleeping cycles, dietary requirements, or port habits that they logged over the last century…
I want that data stored straight inside my scouter casing,” Kallard said, his voice flat and absolute.
“I want to know which direction the mountain is looking before the stone starts sliding down the ridge.”
Brakka pointed a thick titanium finger straight at the kid’s face, his white hair mane shaking.
“That…
that specific engineering philosophy right there, Ronin…
is exceptionally close to a terminal case of obsession-adjacent behavior.
You’re starting to look exactly like one of those crazy border hermits who own five different notebooks full of conspiracy data.”
“It’s not an obsession, old man,” Kallard smirked, sliding his green visor back onto his utility belt loop.
“It’s called tactical preparation logs.
Subsection 4 of the manual recommends mapping the boundaries of the workspace before you clear the gate.”
“That is exactly the kind of slippery code words that an obsessed teenager always uses to justify a bad storage choice, boy!” the old mechanic growled, his organic hand slamming the master throttle handles forward with a sharp mechanical click.
“Drink your terrible leaf tea and clear off my flight deck before I raise the interest rates on your training room welds again!”
Kallard broke out into a genuine, bright laugh that filled the quiet bridge corridor as he turned his boots toward the lower ladder hatch, the heavy iron panel sliding shut behind his cloak with a final pneumatic *thud-lock*.
Later that night, long after chef Oru had fallen fast asleep inside one of the lower-level quarters and Brakka had returned to the engine access corridor to check the hydraulic seals on the thruster loops, Kallard sat alone on his bunk inside the spartan cabin, the yellow light of his single halogen bulb casting a dim glow over his knees.
He reached into his utility pouch, pulled out his private data logbook casing, and hit the activation switch with his thumb clearance print.
The blue screen flickered into life, displaying the long, scrawled columns of names and historical markers he had painstakingly recorded over the last three cycles—the interstellar vault of his human soul.
His dark pupils tracked the lines down the text face:
### Fictional Reality Registry
* **Frieza / Cold Force:** Immediate structural targets.
* **Prince Vegeta / Nappa / Raditz:** Remnants.
Vectors locked on Earth transit lane.
* **Infant Kakarot (Goku):** Sector 44 landing fully verified.
Baseline core asset.
* **Androids / Cell System:** Biomechanical security threats.
* **Bibidi / Babidi / Majin Buu:** Pre-imperial magical system failure flags.
Cocoon unmapped.
He paused for several long, silent seconds, his callused fingers hovering over the glowing keyboard interface, before he reached down to the absolute bottom of the digital slate, clearing a final, empty line of text.
With a slow, deliberate movement of his thumb, he typed the single, five-letter word into the registry core:
**Beerus**
He stopped, his teeth grinding together as he stared at the geometric letters flashing on the blue screen.
Then, after a long breath of the cabin oxygen, he added a short, six-word specification note directly beside the title block:
*Not evil.
Infinitely worse.
Completely indifferent.*
Kallard stared at the completed line for a long time, the green light from the monitor reflecting across his jaw line and his dark bandana fabric.
For the first time since the day he had woken up inside this universe with a tail and a scuffed white chest piece, the terrifying shadow of Lord Frieza felt remarkably small inside his thoughts.
Not harmless—never harmless, the white lizard was still a world-shattering monster who could turn his bones to powder paste with a single finger blast right now.
But Frieza had boundaries.
Frieza was a part of the machine’s operational metrics; you could map his pride, track his fleets, and outmaneuver his governors if you had enough discipline with your scheduling.
But this Beerus?
This God of Destruction core?
He was the absolute, unyielding dark space that sat completely beneath the floorboards of the entire universe—the mountain with teeth that could erase thirty star systems over a lumpy cream dessert and forget the names of the dead before he went back to sleep for half a century.
Kallard closed the digital logbook casing, the blue light lines snuffing out as he slid the box back into its hidden seam beneath the bed frame.
He stood up, walked over to the small cabin port window, and rested his right palm flat against the cold iron frame.
“Not yet,” he whispered out into the empty space of his quarters, his voice a low, gravelly rasp that was completely swallowed by the hum of the ship.
“Not yet.
But I’m going to keep the road open anyway.”
The *Wayfarer* glided quietly through the deep space drift, her matte-black hull caked in a thin layer of violet gas smoke as she moved away from the Nekara Palace Station, away from the cracked northern hemisphere of the dead moon, and away from the ruins left behind by a deity’s appetite.
Somewhere beyond the unmapped sectors of human imagination, wrapped inside a colossal tree structure caked in ancient runes, the God of Destruction Beerus slept his long sleep cycle, completely oblivious to the fact that a single drop of Saiyan blood had slipped through the net of his careless decree.
Somewhere ahead along the trade lines, Lord Frieza still ruled his empire of steel and spreadsheets with an absolute, unyielding iron fist.
Somewhere much farther away across the tracking charts, a blue-and-white planet named Earth was spinning slowly around its yellow sun, completely unaware that the pieces of its future story were currently being rewritten inside a junk mechanic’s transport scow four quadrants away.
Kallard hit the wall switch, plunging his small cabin into absolute darkness.
In the dark behind his closed eyelids, his dark pupils flared bright with a single, sudden spark of that ancient green ancestral fire—a spark that didn’t explode outward into the room, and didn’t throw a single concussive static arc against the bulkheads.
It wasn’t a wave of unrefined brawler rage, and it wasn’t a sign of teenage pride flaring up in a ditch.
It was a absolute, white-knuckled promise made by a human soul to a dead planet.
And as his heavy combat boots settled into the sheets for the night shift, Ronin knew that he had just cleared the most important specification barrier of all: he had learned how to look straight into the face of a god’s indifference…
and refuse to let the mountain dictate the boundaries of his road.
One day, the white ships would clear the cloud gates of Earth—and when that alignment finally reached its execution phase…
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 container that was completely sealed, a weapon that belonged entirely to its master, and a warhound that had finally learned how to hold the fire until the real striking started.