Chapter 2: The Mechanic at the edge of nowhere

## Act I: The Fall and the Shadow

The pod came down screaming.

It wasn’t a controlled descent.Full novel: Dragon ball: Primal instinct — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠

It wasn’t a standard atmospheric entry with thrusters adjusting for wind shear and gravity fields.

It was an outright, unchecked fall.

Inside the cramped, circular cockpit, Kallard’s world narrowed to a blurry, suffocating red.

Crimson warning lights pulsed from the dashboard, casting long, jagged shadows over his scuffed armor plates.

Every time the stolen Frieza Force craft hit a pocket of dense air, the entire frame shuddered so violently that it felt like his spine was being compressed into a single, solid block of bone.

Every single breath he took felt like someone was taking a handful of broken glass and grinding it directly into his cracked ribs.

The impact with Dodoria on that fungal moon had already done its damage, but this landing was going to finish the job if he didn’t find a way to slow the ship down.

Smoke—thick, black, and smelling heavily of burnt synthetic oil—leaked from the seams of the cracked control panel.

Sparks snapped across the dark space, biting into his cheek and leaving tiny, stinging burns.

Behind the console, the primary engine let out a wet, hollow cough.

It died completely, leaving the pod in a terrifying, dead-weight plunge.

Then, it sparked back to life for half a second, the sudden thrust jerking Kallard’s head back against the padding, before dying once more.

It felt like the machine was only waking up to laugh at him before it finished breaking.

“Come on,” Kallard hissed through his teeth, his jaw locked so tight it ached.

He wrapped both hands around the manual guidance handles, his callused fingers slipping on the greasy alloy.

“Come on, you ugly, piece-of-trash tin can.

Just give me the thrusters for three seconds.”

The pod punched through a massive, thick layer of heavy gray clouds, and the world below finally opened up.

A vast, unfamiliar planet stretched out toward the horizon under a pale, sickly orange sky.

It wasn’t the pristine, blue-and-white marble of Earth that he remembered from his old life.

It wasn’t the green-skyed, triple-sunned expanse of Namek either.

It was completely foreign.

Massive, dark-blue forests covered the northern valleys like a thick carpet of mold, bleeding directly into vast, rust-colored deserts that cut across the equator.

White rivers, swollen and violent, sliced through deep green canyons.

But it wasn’t a dead world.

Small settlements dotted the landscape below like scattered beads dropped in the dirt.

As the pod plummeted lower, Kallard could see the distinct shapes of automated farms, tall communication towers, flat landing pads, and thin trails of gray smoke rising from domestic chimneys.

There were roads cutting through the valleys, and moving dots that had to be vehicles.

There were people down there.

Millions of them, probably.

Living regular, quiet lives completely separate from the galactic wars turning the stars into graveyards.

His stomach sank into his boots.

A bright, jagged red trajectory line flashed across the cracked display screen, calculating the point of impact based on his current speed and weight.

*IMPACT ZONE: SETTLEMENT DISTRICT 4.*

“No,” Kallard snapped.

He dug his boots into the floorboards, threw his entire weight backward, and yanked the manual control handles toward his chest with everything his battered muscles had left.

The space pod shrieked in protest, the metal frame groaning as the small steering flaps on the outer hull forced themselves open against the tearing wind.

Pain—pure, white-hot, and blinding—blasted through his torso.

It felt like his chest plating was collapsing inward, stealing the air right out of his lungs.

But he didn’t let go of the handles.

He kept pulling, his teeth grinding together until he could taste the copper tang of blood in his mouth.

The craft tilted.

It was a clumsy, microscopic adjustment, but it was just enough.

The settlement directly below began to slide out of the primary impact path.

Houses built from local stone, flat-roofed barns, irrigated fields, and tiny, fleeing figures passed beneath the pod’s viewport in a dizzying blur.

The ship tore over them like a dying meteor, trailing a thick column of black smoke and dropping red-hot pieces of its outer hull into the dirt.

A child was standing in the middle of a dirt road near the edge of the town.

Kallard saw them through the glass for maybe half a second.

A small, blue-skinned kid with long ears, frozen in pure terror, looking straight up at the roaring metal monster about to smash into their world.

Then the pod cleared the town line, rushing toward the deserted hills beyond.

The impact didn’t just stop the ship; it completely folded the world around it.

The sound of metal shrieking against solid rock was loud enough to blow his eardrums.

The safety harness bit into his shoulders and chest so hard the fabric sliced through his undersuit, pinning him to the seat.

His head snapped forward, cracking violently against the side display screen.

White light exploded behind his eyes, swallowing his vision whole.

The pod bounced once, a horrific, bone-breaking jolt, then carved a massive, fifty-foot trench through the black dirt before slamming sideways into a rocky hillside.

The force of the final stop buried half the hull deep inside the stone.

Then came the silence.

It wasn’t a peaceful, quiet kind of silence.

It was the heavy, suffocating silence of a dead machine cooling down in the dirt.

The only sound left was the slow, rhythmic *drip, drip, drip* of hydraulic fluid hitting the red-hot exhaust pipes.

Kallard hung loosely in his seat, suspended sideways by the ruined harness.

His breath came in short, shallow gasps that made his entire left side twitch with pain.

Something warm and thick was running down the left side of his face, pooling in his eyebrow before dripping onto the shattered console below.

He blinked against the wetness, his vision cloudy and distorted.

Blood.

Lots of it.

His ribs were definitely broken now.

They might have been fractured back on the fungal moon, but this crash had finished the job, snapping them like dry twigs.

It was hard to tell where the old injuries ended and the new ones began.

Everything from his left shoulder down to his hip felt like one massive, throbbing bruise with its own heartbeat.

He tried to shift his weight to relieve the pressure on his chest.

Bad idea.

A sharp, agonizing needle of pain stabbed straight through his lung, stealing what little air he had left and leaving him spots in his eyes.

“Okay,” he whispered, his voice nothing more than a wet rasp against the plastic of his oxygen mask.

“Okay.

Rule number one…

don’t move.

Just sit here and stop dying.”

The pod’s primary console was dead, but a tiny, auxiliary backup light near the floorboards started to flicker, casting a weak, green glow over his boots.

Along with the light came a sound.

A soft, steady, mechanical beep.

*Beep.*

*Beep.*

The sound was coming from a small, square housing located beneath the main steering column.

The emergency tracker.

His concussed brain dragged itself back into focus, the pieces of his memory clicking together with a cold, terrifying click.

It was a Frieza Force pod.

Which meant it possessed a Frieza Force military tracker.

A hardened, deep-space beacon designed to automatically broadcast an encrypted distress signal the moment a craft registered a catastrophic hull failure.

Dodoria.

Frieza’s scouts.

The regional cleanup squads.

If anyone in the empire was listening to the frequencies in this sector, they would have the coordinates of this planet within the hour.

And if they came here looking for a rogue Saiyan who had stolen an officer’s ship, they wouldn’t just take him back in chains.

They would vaporize the whole valley from orbit just to clear the spreadsheet.

They would kill that kid on the road, the town, the blue forests, everything.

Kallard reached out with his right hand, his fingers shaking so violently he could barely aim them.

The tracker beeped again, louder this time, its internal battery warming up to send the first long-range pulse into the upper atmosphere.

He grabbed the edge of the metal panel covering the housing, trying to pry it open.

The alloy didn’t budge an inch.

His human mind forgot, for a split second, how damaged the body was.

He pulled harder, but his fingers slipped, the rough metal slicing into his calluses.

Frustrated and terrified, he pulled his hand back into a fist and punched the console.

*Crack.*

The plastic casing fractured, split down the middle by the impact, but the sudden shockwave traveled straight up his arm and into his broken collarbone.

Kallard choked back a scream, his head falling back against the headrest as his vision tilted dangerously toward the dark.

“Come on…” he muttered, his teeth covered in red saliva.

“Not like this.

Wake up.”

No.

He had to stay awake.

If he passed out now, he’d wake up inside a Frieza Force interrogation cell, or he wouldn’t wake up at all.

He forced his eyes open, staring at the small, blinking red light deep inside the cracked panel.

He couldn’t use physical strength anymore; his muscles were entirely spent.

He had to use the other thing.

The energy.

He closed his eyes for a second, reaching into the deep, volatile well of energy inside his belly.

It felt chaotic, sparking like a frayed live wire in a storm.

He managed to gather a tiny, microscopic spark of ki, channeling it down his arm and into the tips of his fingers.

It wasn’t a blast or a beam—just a raw, localized heat.

He pressed his glowing fingertips directly against the tracker’s primary wire harness.

A thin trail of foul-smelling gray smoke curled upward as the insulation melted.

The tracker let out one high-pitched, distorted whine, sparked twice against his knuckles, and then died completely.

The red light went dark.

Kallard let out a long, ragged breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, his arm dropping limply to his side.

Then, the main hatch groaned.

## Act II: The Four-Eyed Mechanic

Every muscle in Kallard’s body locked up instantly, the sudden tension causing his broken ribs to flare with a fresh wave of agony.

Something was moving right outside the ship.

Heavy, deliberate footsteps crunched against the loose rock and dry dirt of the hillside.

They were slow.

Careful.

The footsteps of someone who knew exactly how dangerous a crashed spacecraft could be if its core was unstable.

Kallard tried to gather another spark of ki into his right palm, desperate to have some kind of weapon ready before the hatch opened.

But nothing came.

The well was empty.

His body was too broken, his mind too scattered by the concussion to focus the energy into anything stable.

He couldn’t even form a basic spark.

He was completely defenseless, pinned to a chair inside a metal coffin.

The heavy hatch, already warped by the crash, was suddenly forced upward from the outside with a loud, mechanical screech.

A massive metal crowbar had been wedged into the seam, prying the alloy apart until the locking pins snapped.

Bright, pale orange sunlight flooded into the smoky cockpit, blinding him instantly.

A tall, broad silhouette leaned over the open hole, blocking out the sun.

As Kallard’s eyes adjusted to the glare, he realized the figure looking down at him wasn’t human, wasn’t a Saiyan, and definitely wasn’t wearing the standard, polished armor of a Frieza Force soldier.

The stranger had gray-blue skin that looked as tough as old leather, and a massive, thick mane of coarse white hair that was tied back neatly behind his head with heavy metal clips.

But the most striking feature was his face: he had four distinct, blinking eyes arranged in two perfect pairs across his broad forehead.

His left arm was completely organic, covered in thick muscle and old burn scars, but his right arm was entirely mechanical from the elbow down to the fingertips—a complex, industrial piece of machinery made from dull gray titanium and exposed copper hydraulic lines.

He was wearing a sleeveless, grease-stained leather coat over a heavy canvas undersuit, and a thick tool harness crossed his chest, loaded down with wrenches, diagnostic meters, and heavy-duty plasma cutters.

The four-eyed stranger stared down at Kallard inside the wreckage, his upper pair of eyes blinking in unison while the lower pair tracked the smoke rising from the console.

He looked at Kallard’s bleeding face, then down at the scuffed armor plating on his chest.

He didn’t look afraid.

He just looked deeply, profoundly annoyed.

He spoke in a low, gravelly voice that sounded like two stones grinding together.

“Kid, if you’re planning on shooting me with a hidden blaster, you’d better do it fast.

My knees are entirely too old for this kind of crouching.”

Kallard’s lips parted, but his throat was so dry it felt like it was coated in sand.

“I’m…

not…”

His voice failed him completely, turning into a wet cough that sprayed red onto his chest plating.

The stranger leaned a little closer into the cockpit, his nose wrinkling up as he sniffed the air inside.

“Fresh blood.

Burnt insulation material.

High-grade military fuel.” He paused, his lower eyes locking onto the Frieza Force insignia stamped onto the steering yoke.

“That’s a lot of Frieza Force stink for one little valley.

Is this your ship, boy?”

Kallard tried to pull himself upright, his instincts screaming at him to get away from the giant alien, but his limbs simply refused to obey the commands.

His vision started to tilt sideways again, the orange sky outside spinning like a top.

“Easy there,” the stranger said, his voice dropping a fraction of an octave, losing some of its sharp edge.

“Don’t go dying in my dirt just yet.

I watched you come down through the clouds from my shop.

You yanked the manual handles hard back there, didn’t you?”

Kallard managed a weak blink.

The mechanic nodded slowly, his mechanical fingers flexing with a soft, hydraulic whir.

“You moved the impact vector.

If you hadn’t pulled that nose up, this little tin ball would have slammed straight through the middle of the residential market down in the district.

I saw the whole thing from the ridge.”

Kallard closed his eyes, his head dropping back against the seat.

He didn’t care about the market.

He didn’t care about being a hero.

He had just seen a kid on the road and pulled a lever because his old human soul couldn’t bear the thought of starting his new life by crushing a child.

He forced his eyes open one more time, staring at the mechanic’s gray face.

“The…

tracker…” he managed to wheeze out.

The stranger’s expression sharpened instantly, all four of his eyes narrowing into tight slits.

He reached down into the cracked console, his large mechanical hand moving past Kallard’s shoulder with surprising speed and precision.

He spotted the melted wire harness and the small, square box Kallard had fried with his ki.

A faint grin touched the mechanic’s wide mouth.

“Smart kid.

Most of the imperial soldiers who crash out here are too stupid to realize their own ships are barking like dogs to the high command.”

He wrapped his metal fingers around the tracker box, gave it a short, violent twist, and ripped the entire housing clean out of the structural frame with a loud snap of tearing metal.

He stepped back out of the hatch, weighed the box in his hand for a second, and then crushed it into a flat, useless piece of scrap metal inside his titanium fist.

He tossed the ruined pieces down the hillside into the rocks.

Kallard let out a long, shaky breath, the last bits of tension leaving his shoulders.

The mechanic leaned back over the opening, reaching his large, organic hand down into the cockpit toward the safety harness straps.

“There.

No one’s following that frequency to this rock.

Now let’s get you out of that seat before this fuel cell decides that exploding is its final act of service to the empire.”

Kallard tried to lift his arms to help unbuckle the heavy straps, but his body had finally hit its absolute limit.

The world outside the pod began to gray out around the edges, the sounds of the valley turning distant and muffled, like he was listening to them from the bottom of a deep well.

He felt the mechanic’s thick, callused arms slide under his shoulders, lifting him out of the metal seat with the effortless ease of a man who spent his life moving heavy engine blocks.

He caught a brief, fleeting glimpse of the orange sky, the massive gray mushroom-like structures on the ridge, and a crowd of small, blue-skinned townspeople watching from a safe distance down the road.

Then, the darkness came back, and the world went completely silent.

## Act III: Restraints and Revelations

When Kallard woke up, the first thing he realized was that he couldn’t move his hands.

That was problem number one.

Problem number two was that every single bone in his upper torso felt like it had been systematically broken, rearranged, and glued back together with hot lead.

Problem number three was the smell.

The room didn’t smell like a hospital or a battlefield.

It smelled like a chaotic mixture of heavy engine oil, bitter herbal medicine, hot welding metal, and a thick, savory meat soup that was currently bubbling over an open burner somewhere nearby.

He opened his eyes slowly, his pupils flinching against the dim, yellow light of the room.

A large, three-bladed ceiling fan turned lazily above him, wobbling on its central axle with a loud, rhythmic *squeak-clack, squeak-clack*.

The mounting bracket was covered in rough weld marks and extra bolts, looking like it had been repaired fifteen times by someone who absolutely refused to admit the thing belonged in a scrap pile.

The room itself was small, low-ceilinged, and completely packed with mechanical junk.

Heavy iron tools hung from metal pegs on every square inch of the stone walls.

Disassembled engine blocks, glowing plasma batteries, and crates of copper wiring sat on reinforced shelves along the perimeter.

A massive, steel workbench took up one entire side of the room, buried under a mountain of exposed circuit boards, old handheld blasters, broken scouter lenses, and the half-hollowed-out shell of an old security drone.

Kallard tried to pull his arms up to rub his throbbing temples.

*Clank.*

A sharp, heavy metallic ring echoed through the room as his wrists jerked to a violent halt.

He looked down.

His arms were pinned to the sides of a heavy, iron-framed cot by a pair of thick, matte-gray metal cuffs.

The moment he pulled against them, a sudden, high-frequency pulse of blue electricity rippled across the metal, snapping into his skin like a dozen angry hornets.

“Ghh—!”

Kallard grunted, his teeth slamming together as the shock traveled up his forearms.

He dropped his head back onto the coarse fabric of his pillow, his breath coming in short, angry gasps as his skin tingled.

A dry, gravelly voice called out from the darkness near the workbench.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, kid.

Those things don’t have a very good sense of humor.”

Kallard turned his head sharply toward the sound, his eyes narrowing.

The four-eyed mechanic was sitting on a low, three-legged stool by the workbench, casually eating from a large clay bowl of steaming soup with his organic left hand.

With his upper two right hands—or rather, his upper right organic arm and a secondary, smaller utility limb attached to his shoulder harness—he was carefully adjusting the internal wiring of an old blaster pistol with a small solder iron.

His primary mechanical arm was sitting completely detached on the table beside his bowl, its titanium fingers twitching and flexing occasionally on their own, as if they were annoyed to be temporarily out of work.

Kallard glared at the heavy restraints around his wrists, his tail twitching restlessly beneath the heavy blankets at the foot of the bed.

“What are these?”

The mechanic didn’t look up from his soldering work, his lower pair of eyes tracking the tiny wisps of blue smoke rising from the blaster’s circuit board.

“Galactic Patrol restraints,” he said smoothly.

“Old model, maybe military surplus from the western sectors.

Supposed to hold anyone with a power level up to ten thousand, provided they’re already half-dead, exhausted, or stupid enough to keep yanking on the chain.”

Kallard went still, his eyes tracking the mechanic’s movements.

“Am I supposed to be a prisoner?”

The mechanic took a slow, deliberate sip of his soup from the clay bowl.

“Are you planning on jumping out of that bed, smashing through my reinforced stone wall, and tearing up my shop?”

“No.”

“Are you planning on using that four-thousand power level of yours to put a ki blast through the back of my skull the second I turn around?”

Kallard hesitated for a fraction of a second, his dark eyes darkening.

“No.”

The mechanic set his spoon down against the edge of the bowl with a soft *clink*, finally turning all four of his eyes toward the cot.

“Good.

Then let’s consider them a temporary safety insurance policy.

For both of us.”

Kallard tested the cuffs again, much slower this time, feeling the way the internal magnetic locks shifted against his skin.

The metal let out a low, warning hum, but as long as he didn’t apply sudden force, the electric shock didn’t trigger.

He forced his muscles to relax, leaning his head back into the mattress.

His head was spinning from the concussion, and his throat felt like it was coated in ash.

“Who are you?”

The mechanic pointed his soup spoon at him, his mouth twisting into a dry smirk.

“That’s a pretty funny question coming from a kid who just dropped out of the sky inside an imperial death ball.

I was about to ask you the exact same thing.”

“I’m not one of Frieza’s soldiers,” Kallard said, his voice flat and hard.

“You crashed in their ship.”

“I stole it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s exactly what every single Frieza Force rat says when his ship goes down in the outer rim and he realizes he’s surrounded by people who hate his uniform,” the mechanic grunted, turning back to his workbench.

He picked up his mechanical arm from the table, lined up the heavy titanium socket at his right elbow, and shoved it home with a sharp, pneumatic *click-hiss*.

The fingers flexed in unison, the copper lines humming with fresh hydraulic pressure.

Kallard stared at the metal limb, then looked back up at the alien’s face.

“You took out the tracker before it could send the primary signal.

If you thought I was one of them, you would have left me in the dirt to rot.”

The mechanic paused, his four eyes blinking one after the other in a slow, calculated sequence.

“I took that tracker out because if Frieza’s cleanup squads come to this sector, they don’t just arrest the pilot.

They burn the farms.

They salt the water.

They make the whole valley regret having eyes to see them with.

I don’t give a damn about your politics, kid.

I care about my roof staying over my head.”

He stood up from his stool, his massive, broad-shouldered frame blocking out most of the light from the workbench as he walked over to the side of the cot.

He leaned against the stone wall, crossing his arms over his chest harness.

“Name’s Brakka,” he said, his voice a low, rhythmic rasp.

“Local mechanic.

Part-time salvager.

Former galactic idiot.

Current old man who just wants to drink his soup in peace.”

“You don’t look that old,” Kallard muttered, his eyes tracking the thick muscles on the mechanic’s organic arm.

Brakka snorted, a sharp sound that shook his white mane.

“That’s because you’ve only got two eyes to look with, boy.

Four eyes gives you a whole different kind of perspective on how fast the years pile up on your hide.”

Kallard didn’t smile, but the intense, defensive tightness around his jaw relaxed by a fraction of an inch.

He looked away from the mechanic, his gaze drifting toward the small, reinforced window on the far side of the room.

Outside, the sky had turned a deep, dark purple, the three small moons casting a pale, silver glow over the jagged hills.

“Your turn,” Brakka said, his voice dropping its sarcastic edge, turning quiet and serious.

“What’s the designation, kid?”

Kallard hesitated, his tongue feeling heavy in his mouth.

*Kallard.* No.

That name belonged to Planet Vegeta.

It belonged to a dead boy who had worn an imperial undersuit and trained under a blood-red sky.

If he used that name here, it wouldn’t take long for a passing trader or a local scouter network to connect the dots.

A Saiyan name was a death sentence in this era.

It was a beacon for every bounty hunter and imperial scout within three sectors.

He remembered a word from his old life—a word from a language that didn’t exist in this universe, a word that meant a warrior without a master, a traveler with no home, a ghost walking through the world alone.

“Ronin,” he said, his voice steady.

“My name is Ronin.”

Brakka’s upper left eye twitched slightly, a subtle sign of skepticism.

He rubbed his gray-blue chin with his mechanical fingers, the metal making a faint scratching sound against his tough skin.

“Ronin, huh?

That’s not a standard linguistic root from any sector I’ve ever serviced.

Where’s your home world, Ronin?”

Kallard’s jaw tightened, his lips forming a thin, hard line.

He didn’t answer.

Brakka’s gaze drifted slowly down the length of the cot, his lower two eyes locking onto the edge of the thick wool blanket near Kallard’s waist.

The heavy brown tail was wrapped tightly around his midsection under layers of medical bandages, but the thick, coarse fur was still visible through a gap in the cloth, its tip twitching occasionally with a life of its own.

Brakka let out a long, heavy sigh, the sound rumbling deep in his broad chest.

“Kid.”

Kallard remained silent, his muscles stiffening up again as he prepared for the worst.

“I already saw the tail when I pulled you out of the wreckage,” Brakka said plainly, his hands remaining crossed over his harness.

“You don’t need to hide it under my blankets.

If I wanted to sell you out to the local syndicates, I would’ve done it forty-eight hours ago while you were still coughing up your own lungs.

A real, living Saiyan survivor is worth a disgusting amount of credits on the black market right now.”

Kallard felt his stomach drop into a cold, empty void.

His eyes snapped back to Brakka’s face, his voice sharp and dangerous.

“So people know?”

“People know that Planet Vegeta is nothing but a cloud of burning gravel,” Brakka said, his voice completely flat, devoid of any comfort.

“Frieza’s official media channels are calling it a tragic cosmic accident.

A rogue meteor cluster hitting the core, a sudden volcanic chain reaction, a localized rebellion cleanup that got out of hand…

the story changes depending on which sector’s comm-array you’re listening to.

But the trading stations talk.

The independent pilots talk.

The refugees talk.

Frieza orders every single Saiyan combat squad back to the home world for an emergency meeting, and twelve hours later the entire planet vanishes from the charts?

It doesn’t take a divine genius to smell the blood in the water.”

*Beerus,* Kallard thought, his mind flashing back to the ancient memories of his old life.

*A divine genius is exactly who ordered it.*

The sheer, monumental injustice of it hit him all over again, a cold, heavy weight settling behind his ribs.

The families, the mechanics, the kids playing in the red dirt—all turned into statistics because a giant purple cat wanted to take a nap and a little white lizard was afraid of a campfire story.

His face must have changed, the raw, unshielded grief showing through his warrior mask, because Brakka stopped talking.

The mechanic studied his face with all four eyes, the silence in the room turning heavy and thick.

“You were actually there, weren’t you?” Brakka asked softly.

Kallard closed his eyes, the image of that massive, orange Death Ball descending into the atmosphere flashing behind his eyelids like a permanent scar.

“Yes.”

Brakka’s mouth tightened into a grim line.

For the first time since Kallard had met him, the cynical, sarcastic defense mechanism of the old mechanic completely vanished, leaving behind only the tired look of someone who had seen too many worlds break.

“I’m sorry, kid,” Brakka said quietly.

“Nobody deserves to see their home go out like that.”

Kallard opened his eyes again, staring up at the wobbling ceiling fan.

The words hit him strangely.

In his old life, people apologized for small things—late trains, bad weather, spilled drinks.

In this life, an alien mechanic was apologizing for the complete annihilation of his entire race.

He didn’t know what to do with the emotion.

He didn’t know how to receive it.

So he did what any Saiyan would do: he swallowed it down and turned it into stone.

“Your ribs were completely snapped,” Brakka said, shifting back into his professional, detached tone as he walked over to a small shelf and picked up a black electronic diagnostic scanner.

“Your left shoulder was completely out of its socket, you had a grade-three head wound, third-degree plasma burns across your hands, and enough internal bleeding to kill a wild bull.

But your body…

it patched itself together faster than anything I’ve ever seen.

By the second day, the internal bleeding had stopped completely.

Saiyan biology is an absolute joke.

It’s like your cells are made of rubber and iron.”

“Am I healed?” Kallard asked, testing the movement of his left arm against the cuff.

“Not even close,” Brakka snorted, checking the readings on his scanner.

“You’ve got enough scar tissue in there to look like an old coat.

If you try to exert yourself right now, those ribs are going to pop loose again and puncture your lungs for real.”

“Can I at least sit up?”

“Also no.”

Kallard glared at the Galactic Patrol restraints around his wrists.

“When do these damn things come off, then?”

“When I decide you’re not going to panic, smash my favorite workbench, and sprint out into the desert like a wild animal,” Brakka said, setting the scanner down on the nightstand beside the bed.

“I don’t panic,” Kallard growled.

Brakka broke out into a loud, hacking laugh that shook his white mane so hard a couple of metal clips rattled.

“Kid, you dropped out of orbit from a dead universe, fought an imperial enforcer on a fungal rock, and woke up cuffed to a bed on a planet you don’t know after your entire species was turned into space dust.

If you weren’t panicking inside that little head of yours, I’d be a hell of a lot more worried about you.”

Kallard looked back up at the ceiling, his voice turning small and distant.

“How long was I out?”

“Two full planetary rotations,” Brakka said, walking back toward his stool.

“Two days.”

Kallard turned his head sharply, his eyes wide.

“Two days?

Are you serious?”

“Easy, kid.

Don’t go jerking those ribs.”

“Did anyone come looking for the ship?” Kallard asked, his voice rising with a sudden spike of anxiety.

“Did the local authorities check the ridge?”

“No,” Brakka said, sitting back down and picking up his soup bowl.

“Like I told you, your little ki stunt fried the tracker before it could send the primary location beacon.

The moment I got you out of there, I brought my heavy loader crane down to the ravine.

I stripped that pod down to its structural skeleton in less than three hours.

I buried the main engine signature under four tons of lead-lined scrap metal, scattered the hull plating across my junk shielding networks, and told the local district marshal that you were just a low-tier fuel-line accident from a cargo transport.

They don’t care enough to check a junkyard’s inventory.”

Kallard stared at the gray-blue alien, his mind trying to process the sheer amount of effort the old man had put into hiding him.

“You did all of that?

For a stranger?”

Brakka shrugged his massive shoulders, his mechanical fingers clicking against his clay bowl.

“I’m a very good mechanic, kid.

When I want something hidden, it stays hidden.”

“Why help me?” Kallard asked, his dark eyes boring into the alien’s four eyes.

“You said it yourself—a living Saiyan is worth a fortune.

You could have turned me in and retired to a pleasure moon in the core sectors.

Why risk your life and your shop for a rogue fighter?”

Brakka set his soup bowl down, his expression turning flat and completely serious.

He reached up with his organic left hand, touching the heavy titanium socket where his mechanical right arm met his elbow.

“Because thirty years ago, before you were even a spark in a breeding tank, I was a primary senior technician for the Frieza Force engine divisions,” Brakka said, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly register that tasted like old dust.

Kallard remained perfectly still, listening.

“I didn’t do it proudly,” Brakka continued, his lower two eyes closing as he remembered.

“Not at first.

I was just a young engineer from a poor system whose world got bought out by the empire.

But after a while…

the survival became a routine.

The routine became a steady paycheck.

The steady paycheck became an excuse to look away from the things happening right in front of my face.

One morning, they brought me a heavy-duty military transport ship with a cracked hyper-drive.

They told me to patch it up fast, not to ask questions about the cargo.

I fixed it.

I did a perfect job.

Three days later, I found out that transport was carrying twelve hundred political prisoners from a conquered system down to a heavy-gravity mining moon.

Most of them were dead within six months from radiation exposure and exhaustion.”

He lifted his mechanical hand, the titanium fingers gleaming in the yellow light of the workshop.

“I went to my commanding officer the next morning and told him I wanted out of my contract,” Brakka said, a bitter, hollow smile touching his lips.

“They told me they don’t do voluntary retirements in the Frieza Force.

They took my right arm at the joint as a ‘severance fee’ for breaking my non-disclosure agreement, threw me into a garbage scow, and dumped me on this dusty rock at the edge of nowhere.”

He leaned forward, all four of his eyes locking onto Kallard’s dark face with intense clarity.

“So when a half-dead kid drops out of orbit inside an imperial ship, takes the time to steer his crashing pod away from an innocent civilian market, and spends his last remaining spark of energy trying to kill a military tracking beacon before he even asks me to save his own skin…

I make certain assumptions about what kind of person he is.”

Kallard swallowed hard, the lump in his throat feeling like an iron weight.

“I’m not a good person, Brakka.

I’m a Saiyan.

I spent my whole life training to take worlds for the same monster who took your arm.”

“Good,” Brakka said, standing up and walking back over to the cot.

“Good people are entirely too exhausting to deal with anyway.

They’re always worried about the rules.

Try being *useful* first, kid.

You can work your way up to being a good person later if you’ve still got the energy for it.”

A short, dry laugh escaped Kallard’s lips, though the sudden movement made his left side flare with pain again.

He winced, clamping his hand over his ribs as best as he could within the cuffs.

Brakka reached into his harness, pulled out a small, circular remote control device, and tapped a red button on the interface.

*Clack-clink.*

The heavy matte-gray Galactic Patrol restraints popped open automatically, the magnetic locks releasing his wrists with a soft hiss of air.

Kallard slowly pulled his arms back, rubbing the raw, red skin where the metal had chafed against his wrists.

“Rest up, Ronin,” Brakka said, turning back toward the kitchen corner of the shop.

“The cuffs stay off as long as you stay in that bed.

If I see you trying to stand up before morning, I’m going to use my heavy plasma cutter to weld you to the frame.”

“I could break through your welds,” Kallard muttered, though there was no real heat behind the threat.

“No, you couldn’t,” Brakka said without looking back.

“I checked your power signature while you were out, kid.

You hit around four thousand when you were fighting for your life on that moon, but right now, your body’s so drained you’re barely registering at eight hundred.

You couldn’t break through a wet piece of canvas right now, let alone my industrial welds.”

Kallard froze, his fingers tightening against the coarse fabric of his blanket.

*Eight hundred.* His power level had dropped that much from the trauma of the crash and the exhaustion of using his ki to fry the tracker.

It was an incredibly vulnerable feeling—a dangerous feeling for a Saiyan.

In his old life, a power level of eight hundred meant you were nothing but a common foot soldier, a grunt meant to be thrown into the front lines of a meat grinder and forgotten about.

He looked back out the window at the distant, cold stars glittering in the dark sky.

Somewhere out there, Frieza was sitting in his high chair, sipping wine and laughing about a dead world.

Somewhere out there, the remnants of the universe were moving along the tracks of a story he had already seen play out on a screen.

“I need to get stronger,” Kallard whispered into the quiet room, his voice flat and absolute.

Brakka stopped by the stove, his gray-blue back tensing up slightly.

He turned his head around, his upper two eyes looking back at the cot with a heavy, serious look.

“Most young fighters say that exact same phrase right before they find a loud, spectacular way to die in the dirt, kid.”

Kallard met the mechanic’s gaze directly, his dark eyes flashing with a cold, internal fire that didn’t belong to a normal twenty-year-old soldier.

“I mean it, Brakka.

I don’t want power for pride.

I don’t care about being the strongest in the universe or running a empire.”

Brakka waited, his wooden spoon hovering over the bubbling pot of soup.

“Frieza destroyed my entire planet with the tip of his little finger,” Kallard said, his voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly calm whisper.

“I ran because I was too weak to stop him.

I survived because he didn’t think a low-class piece of trash like me mattered enough to check for a pulse.

If I stay at eight hundred…

if I stay weak…

then he was right about me.

He was right about all of us.”

Brakka studied him for a long, silent moment, the only sound in the workshop being the steady *squeak-clack* of the old ceiling fan.

Then, the mechanic tossed the circular remote control onto the foot of the bed.

“Unlock yourself from the room when you can sit up without looking like you’re about to vomit all over my floor,” Brakka said, turning back to his cooking.

“Until then, shut your mouth and let the protein moss do its job.”

“Where are you going?” Kallard asked as the old man walked toward the heavy stone exit door.

“To get more fuel for the generator,” Brakka grunted, pulling his coat collar up.

“And more root starch.

You eat like a starving wolf, kid.

I’m going to go bankrupt just keeping you fed.”

“What’s actually in that soup anyway?” Kallard called out, his stomach letting out a loud, traitorous rumble.

Brakka paused at the door, a small, genuine smirk touching his wide face.

“Local protein moss, crushed root starch, and a couple of chunks of something that used to have six legs and a nasty habit of biting people who got too close to the river.”

“That’s incredibly vague.”

“Welcome to the outer rim, kid,” Brakka said, hitting the door control.

“Vague is the only thing that keeps the morale alive out here.”

The heavy stone door slid shut with a loud, grinding thud, leaving Kallard alone in the dim yellow light of the workshop.

He lay there for a long time, listening to the rhythmic ticking of the cooling engines, his fingers clenched into tight fists beneath the blankets.

*Ronin.*

The name felt heavy on his tongue, like an old iron coin.

But as he looked out at the distant, uncaring stars, he realized it didn’t feel wrong anymore.

It felt like the only real thing he had left.

## Act IV: Unlearning the Beast

Over the next ten planetary rotations, Brakka taught him two very important things.

First, he taught him how to walk through a crowded market without looking like a Saiyan warrior who was about to murder everyone in the room.

Second, he taught him exactly how terrible he was at hiding it.

“No,” Brakka said, his gravelly voice echoing sharply through the cavernous metal hangar behind his workshop.

Kallard stopped dead in his tracks, his heavy combat boots freezing mid-stride on the oil-stained metal floorboards.

He let out a sharp, irritated breath through his nose, his shoulders tensing up.

“What now?

I was doing exactly what you told me to do.”

“You’re doing it again,” Brakka said, not even looking up from where he was replacing a fuel line on an old cargo speeder.

All four of his eyes were focused on the delicate brass fittings under his hands, but his mechanical ears were twitching with every sound Kallard made.

“Doing what, exactly?” Kallard snapped, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Looking for an immediate physical altercation with the floor,” Brakka grunted, setting his wrench down with a loud *clank*.

He turned around on his stool, wiping his greasy gray-blue hands on a dirty rag.

“Look at your posture, kid.

You’re not walking down a street; you’re *stalking* a target.

Your shoulders are hunched up like you’re trying to shield your throat from a blade, your knees are bent too low, and your eyes are scanning every corner of the room like you’re looking for an exit or someone’s skull to crack open.”

“I’m just walking normally,” Kallard muttered, defensive.

“You’re walking like every single low-class Saiyan mercenary I ever had the misfortune of servicing back in the empire,” Brakka said, stepping off his stool and walking over to him.

He tapped the side of Kallard’s left shoulder with his heavy titanium finger, the metal making a sharp clicking sound against his armor.

“Drop the shoulders.

Loose.

Let your arms hang naturally by your sides.

And for the love of the gods, do something about that tail.”

Kallard glanced down at his waist.

His brown, furry tail was wrapped tightly around his midsection beneath a thick leather utility belt, completely hidden from sight by a long, dark canvas tunic he had borrowed from Brakka’s old supply crates.

“It’s completely wrapped.

Nobody can see it.”

“They can’t see the fur, kid, but they can see the way you’re holding your hips,” Brakka pointed a finger at his lower back.

“Even when it’s wrapped, your lower spine is constantly twitching.

Every time a door opens or a tool drops, that belt of yours jumps an inch to the left.

It’s an absolute dead giveaway to anyone who’s ever spent more than five minutes around your people.

A Saiyan’s tail is his center of gravity; when you’re tense, the tail is tense.

You want to survive in the ports?

You have to learn to let it go limp.

Let it be dead weight.”

Kallard let out a long, frustrated sigh, forcing his muscles to relax one by one.

It was an incredibly difficult exercise.

For twenty years, this body had been trained to be a weapon—to be constantly ready for an ambush, to move with explosive, predatory grace, to claim space through pure physical intimidation.

Unlearning those physical habits felt like trying to rewrite the programming of a combat droid using nothing but a hand file.

“Every single Saiyan I ever met,” Brakka said, leaning his broad back against the speeder’s chassis, “walked through the galaxy like the universe owed them either an immediate tribute or a bloody war.

They carried themselves like they were the apex predators of every system they touched.

And you know what that got them?

It got them a one-way ticket to a dead world because the biggest monster in the galaxy decided he didn’t like the way they looked at him.

You want to stay alive out here, Ronin?

You have to learn how to look like *nothing*.

You have to look like just another broken-down mercenary who’s looking for a cheap drink and a bad job.”

So Kallard practiced.

Hour after hour, day after day, he walked laps around the dusty metal hangar while Brakka sat on his stool, throwing old nuts and bolts at him whenever his posture stiffened up or his tail twitched against the leather belt.

He practiced walking slower, letting his heels hit the ground before his toes.

He practiced keeping his chest relaxed, his shoulders loose, his head up but not tilted back in that classic, arrogant Saiyan tilt.

He practiced ignoring sudden noises—the sharp crack of a plasma torch, the heavy thud of a crane, the high-pitched whine of an engine—forcing his head to remain steady and his eyes to stay fixed forward instead of snapping toward the sound like a wolf looking for a target.

It was an exhausting, frustrating grind, but by the eleventh day, the bolts stopped hitting him in the back of the head.

“Sit down,” Brakka said on the afternoon of the twelfth day, pointing a pair of long, heavy-duty industrial hair shears at a rusted metal crate in the center of the workshop.

Kallard looked at the shears, then up at the mechanic’s four eyes.

“What are you doing with those?”

“The silhouette has to go, kid,” Brakka said, clicking the metal blades together with a sharp, metallic *snip-snip*.

“Your posture’s getting better, but that hair of yours is still a giant neon sign screaming ‘Planet Vegeta’ to anyone with a working set of eyes.

That wild, flame-shaped crown look…

it’s completely unique to your species.

If an imperial scout sees that silhouette from three hundred yards away through a sniper scope, he’s not going to wait to ask for your identification papers.”

Kallard sat down slowly on the metal crate, throwing a coarse gray towel over his broad shoulders.

He looked at his reflection in the cracked, greasy mirror hanging on the stone wall.

His black hair was wild, thick, and stood up in jagged spikes that hadn’t altered an inch since the day he woke up in this universe.

It was a physical trait deeply coded into his DNA—a permanent martial crown.

Brakka stepped up behind him, his large organic hand gripping the back of Kallard’s head to steady him, while his mechanical right hand brought the heavy steel shears close to his temple.

*Snipe.*

A massive, thick chunk of coarse black hair fell onto the oil-stained stone floorboards, landing with a soft rustle.

Kallard watched it fall in the reflection, a strange, hollow feeling settling in his chest.

That hair had belonged to Kallard.

It had been grown on a world that no longer existed, washed in waters that were now cosmic vapor.

Brakka worked quickly and completely without any sense of style or artistry.

He was a mechanic; he approached the haircut the exact same way he approached stripping down an old engine housing—purely for utility and function.

He clipped the sides down incredibly short, almost to the skin, taking away the wide, flared volume that gave the traditional Saiyan hairstyle its aggressive, imposing shape.

He took massive amounts of weight off the back, thinning out the thick, matted layers until his neck was completely bare, leaving only the top section wild, short, and unevenly cropped.

When he was finished, Brakka reached into his tool harness, pulled out a long strip of dark, weathered black canvas cloth, and wrapped it tightly around Kallard’s forehead, tying it off in a heavy knot at the back of his skull.

He stepped back, wiping the loose black hairs off his mechanical fingers.

“There.

Take a look.”

Kallard leaned forward, staring intently at the stranger in the cracked mirror.

The face was still unmistakably his—the sharp jawline, the dark, intense eyes, the small scar on the side of his cheek from the raider fight on the moon.

But the silhouette was completely broken.

With the sides sheared down to the bone and the dark bandana covering his hairline, he didn’t look like a proud, high-ranking Saiyan warrior from the imperial core anymore.

He looked rougher.

Younger.

Like a cynical, desperate teenage scrapper or a runaway mercenary from a dirt system who had spent too many years sleeping in cargo bays and fighting over scrap metal.

“Better,” Brakka said, nodding with satisfaction as he kicked the piles of black hair into a trash bin.

“You look like someone who’s worth about fifty credits in a street fight, instead of a political target worth half a million to the governor.”

Kallard touched the coarse fabric of the dark bandana, his fingers tracing the knot at the back of his head.

“I look like a common street criminal.”

“Out here in the rim, kid, a criminal is just another word for a guy who’s still breathing,” Brakka grunted, walking over to a heavy storage locker in the corner of the room.

“Now let’s do something about that armor of yours.

I refuse to let you walk out of my shop wearing those ridiculous Frieza Force colors.”

## Act V: Transforming the Shell

The armor modification took another two full days of dirty, tedious labor.

Brakka refused to let him keep any part of the original white-and-gray paint job on his chest plating.

“You walk into any independent spaceport wearing those specific imperial colors, kid, and half the room is going to draw their blasters because they think you’re a tax collector, and the other half is going to pull out their comm-pads to report your location for a bonus.

We need to turn that uniform into scrap.”

They laid the heavy chest piece out on the primary welding table under a massive, glowing halogen lamp.

Kallard worked the heavy metal file himself, his newly healed shoulder muscles groaning under the strain as he spent hours systematically scraping away the glossy, high-tech polymer coating from the alloy plates.

He filed down the raised ridges on the shoulders, ground away the small, circular imperial identification stamp near the left collarbone, and used a heavy-duty pneumatic sander to score the entire surface until the metal was dull, scratched, and completely bare.

Once the surface was prepared, Brakka brought out a heavy can of industrial-grade, matte-black heat-shield paint—the kind used to coat the inside of thruster nozzles on cargo haulers.

They applied three thick, uneven layers to the plates, followed by a secondary trim of deep, weathered hunter-green along the flexible rib guards and the lower waist straps.

When the paint dried under the heat lamps, it looked completely different.

It didn’t look like the mass-produced, high-tech gear of an elite galactic military anymore.

It looked heavy, battered, and industrial.

The matte-black finish absorbed the light rather than reflecting it, and the deep green edges gave it the distinct look of surplus security gear from an old planetary mining corporation.

Brakka added several custom modifications to the suit as they reassembled it.

He tore away the old, high-comfort synthetic under-sleeves and replaced them with a coarse, double-layered black mesh cloth that was much better suited for hiding physical scars and keeping the skin cool in desert climates.

He replaced the high-tech magnetic clasps on the shoulders with heavy-duty, mechanical iron buckles that snapped together with a loud, primitive *thud*.

Finally, he attached a heavy, weathered dark gray cloak clasp to the left shoulder plate, allowing a long, tattered canvas cloak to hang down across Kallard’s left side, completely masking the distinctive shape of his shoulder guards and his wrapped tail from a casual glance.

Kallard put the modified suit on, standing up straight in the center of the workshop as he buckled the heavy iron straps across his ribs.

The weight felt different now—heavier, more grounded, less like an imperial uniform and more like a personal shield.

He looked down at himself: the matte-black core, the deep green edges, the coarse black mesh sleeves, the tattered cloak hanging over his shoulder, the dark bandana covering his wild hair.

“The name Ronin actually fits the shell now, kid,” Brakka said, walking around him with a diagnostic meter in his hand, checking the structural seals on the armor.

“You look like a ghost walking out of an old mercenary chronicle.

No master, no faction, no history.

Just a man with a gun or a blade looking for a reason to keep moving.”

Kallard looked down at his gloved hands, his callused fingers flexing into tight fists.

“Yeah,” he said softly, his voice echoing slightly inside the quiet stone room.

“I guess it does.”

## Act VI: The Wayfarer

The ship was the real surprise.

Brakka revealed it to him near the end of the second week, after Kallard’s power level had finally stabilized back around his baseline and his broken ribs had healed enough for him to carry heavy tool crates without groaning.

Behind the main workshop, buried deep inside a massive, natural stone ravine that cut into the side of the mountain, sat a hidden hangar facility.

A large, retractable scrap canopy made from rusted iron plates and camouflage netting covered the top of the canyon, completely shielding the interior from any orbital surveillance satellites or high-altitude scout drones.

And sitting directly in the center of that hidden trench was a ship that looked far too sleek, far too expensive, and far too dangerous to belong to an old junk mechanic on a dirt planet.

It was much bigger than Kallard had expected—not a tiny, single-seat space pod or a clumsy, blocky cargo scow, but a compact, long-range military-grade cutter.

It was roughly eighty feet from its pointed, armored nose down to its massive, triple-clustered rear thruster assembly.

The hull was shaped with the rough, aggressive elegance of an predatory bird, featuring short, swept-forward wings that housed dual plasma cannons, and heavily layered alloy plating that looked thick enough to withstand a direct hit from a orbital defense battery.

The outer hull was painted in an uneven pattern of dull gray and matte black, heavily scratched, pitted, and scorched from years of high-speed re-entries and asteroid dust, but beneath the cosmetic damage, the structural lines were perfectly straight and tight.

Kallard stopped at the edge of the landing platform, his dark eyes wide as he took in the sheer scale of the vessel.

“What the hell is that, Brakka?”

Brakka stepped up next to him, his four eyes softening slightly as he looked at the ship’s scarred nose.

For a brief second, the old, cynical mask of the junk mechanic completely vanished, replaced by the proud, melancholic gaze of a man looking at the best thing he had ever built in his life.

“My ship,” Brakka said quietly, his mechanical hand flexing with a low, rhythmic hum.

“The only thing of real value I managed to bring with me when I fled the core sectors.”

Kallard turned his head, looking at the alien.

“You used to fly this thing?”

“Used to,” Brakka grunted, his voice dropping into that low, gravelly register.

“A long time ago, kid.

Before my knees started protesting every time the gravity core shifted, and before I lost my primary steering hand to an imperial bone-saw.”

They walked down the metal ramp toward the main entry hatch located beneath the starboard wing.

The heavy airlocks slid open automatically with a long, pressurized *hiss* of filtered oxygen, a soft, green ambient light illuminating the interior corridor.

Inside, the vessel was designed with a brilliant, highly efficient sense of space that made it feel much larger than its outer dimensions suggested.

The upper level housed the primary flight deck—a wide, semi-circular bridge featuring a massive pilot’s chair built from reinforced leather, a co-pilot’s navigation station loaded down with deep-space scanning arrays, a small tactical tactical display table, and a massive, wrap-around reinforced viewscreen that offered a perfect, unobstructed view of the stone canyon walls outside.

The lower level of the ship was divided into four compact, functional living quarters, each featuring its own small pull-down bunk, an independent washroom unit, and a built-in storage locker for gear.

Further down the central corridor was a fully equipped galley kitchen, a small medical bay containing a basic automated diagnostic bed and shelves of healing serums, a large cargo storage bay with heavy-duty magnetic tie-down straps, and a long, narrow access corridor that led straight into the roaring heart of the primary hyper-drive engine room.

Kallard ran his right hand along the smooth, cool alloy of the corridor wall, feeling the faint, steady vibration of the ship’s auxiliary power generator humming through the deck plates beneath his boots.

“This thing…

it’s incredible, Brakka.

It’s built like a military stealth ship, not a civilian transport.”

“Smart structural layout, kid.

Not magic,” Brakka said, stepping onto the bridge and dropping his heavy frame into the co-pilot’s chair with a long groan of relief from his knees.

“She’s a custom build.

I designed the primary engine layout myself back when I had access to the imperial experimental shipyards.

She’s fast enough to outrun any standard patrol cruiser the Frieza Force has in this sector, and her hull is lined with high-grade lead-and-carbon shielding that can completely absorb her energy signature while she’s running on low-power mode.”

“Weapons?” Kallard asked, stepping up to the main pilot’s console and looking down at the complex array of sticks, levers, and glowing flight indicators.

“Dual forward-facing plasma cannons, a single automated defense turret on the lower belly for anti-missile tracking, and a hidden mine-layer array at the back of the exhaust housing,” Brakka said, his mechanical finger tapping a red weapon toggle on his armrest.

“But don’t get any big ideas, kid.

This isn’t a front-line warship.

If you find yourself locked in a dogfight with a full squadron of imperial fighters, you’re already dead.

This ship was built for one specific purpose: to run, to hide, to slip through the cracks of the border walls, and to survive when the rest of the galaxy is burning around you.”

Kallard looked out through the large front viewport, his dark eyes reflecting the dim green light of the instrument panels.

Brakka turned his stool around, all four of his eyes locking onto Kallard’s back.

“The ship’s name is the *Wayfarer*.”

Kallard didn’t say anything, his fingers gently touching the worn leather of the pilot’s steering handles.

“She’s been sitting in this ditch for over seven years,” Brakka continued, his voice quiet.

“She needs high-grade fuel, fresh cooling fluids, new hydraulic lines for the landing gear, and a pilot who doesn’t mind sleeping next to a noisy engine core and a mountain of unpaid mechanical debt.”

Kallard turned around slowly, his back against the console.

“Why are you showing her to me, Brakka?

Why give a ship like this to a kid you barely know?”

Brakka gave him a long, sideways look, his mechanical hand scratching his gray-blue jaw.

“I’m not *giving* you a damn thing, Ronin.

I’m making an investment.”

“An investment in what?”

Brakka’s voice lost all of its usual sarcastic humor, turning cold, hard, and terrifyingly serious.

“In the chance that one single kid…

with enough anger in his chest and just enough of a human conscience left in his head…

can go out there and cause some real, genuine, expensive trouble for Frieza’s goddamn empire.”

Kallard stared at the old mechanic, the weight of the statement settling between them like a block of lead.

Brakka suddenly shrugged his massive shoulders, his mouth twisting back into that familiar, cynical smirk as if he hated how sincere the moment had just gotten.

“Also, let’s be practical—the moment you fly this ship out of my ravine, you’re going to owe me a disgusting amount of credits for parts, labor, and medical fees.”

There it was.

The practical, blue-collar reality of the outer rim.

Kallard let out a genuine, short laugh, the tension leaving his shoulders.

“How much are we talking about?”

“A truly offensive number, kid,” Brakka grunted, handing him a digital data slate loaded down with rows of red numbers.

“You’re going to be working for me for a very long time just to pay off the interest on the cooling fluid alone.”

“I don’t have a single credit to my name, Brakka.”

“That’s exactly why the local independent bounty boards exist, boy,” Brakka said, pointing his finger at the primary communication screen on the console.

“The core sectors are full of high-priced contracts for pirates, spice smugglers, imperial deserters, and local syndicate bosses who have crossed the wrong people.

The empire doesn’t patrol the outer rim systems; they leave the security to the bounty hunters and the mercenaries.

You take the jobs, you bring back the targets, you pay me my cut for ship maintenance, and you spend the rest on fuel and food.

That’s the routine.”

Kallard stared down at the glowing flight indicators on the dashboard, a strange, powerful sense of purpose settling behind his ribs.

A custom stealth ship.

A new name.

A perfect disguise.

A weathered, stubborn mentor who was too practical to let him die a stupid death in a ditch.

And a clear, dangerous path forward through the stars.

“What kind of targets do I look for?” Kallard asked, his voice hardening.

Brakka’s face went dead flat, his upper two eyes narrowing into cold points of light.

“You do not touch escaped slaves.

You do not touch political refugees or planetary defectors.

You do not touch hungry kids who stole a piece of bread from some local merchant lord who calls them beasts.

You hunt the monsters, Ronin.

You hunt the raiders who burn supply caravans, the slave traders who kidnap children from the agricultural moons, the Frieza Force deserters who brought their imperial cruelty with them when they fled the uniform, and the local gang bosses who think ordinary civilians are just target practice for their enforcers.”

Kallard looked at him for a long moment, a grim, knowing smile touching his lips.

“That doesn’t really sound like standard, neutral bounty hunting, Brakka.

That sounds a hell of a lot like systematically choosing your enemies.”

Brakka nodded once, his mechanical hand snapping shut with a sharp hydraulic ring.

“Now you’re finally starting to learn how to think like a real survivor, kid.”

## Act VII: The First Contract

The first contract Brakka handed him was intentionally small.

A localized raider gang consisting of five independent mercenary dropouts had been systematically shaking down the agricultural supply caravans that traveled between the rural mountain settlements and the primary district market down in the valley.

They weren’t connected to Frieza’s empire, they didn’t have any cosmic destiny or high-tech planetary weaponry, and none of them were famous villains from the chronicles.

They were just cruel, lazy men with old blasters and stolen armor plates who enjoyed picking on old farmers who couldn’t fight back.

Kallard’s first instinct when he read the data slate was to dismiss the job as beneath him.

He was a Saiyan warrior with a power level of four thousand; his mind was entirely focused on Frieza, Dodoria, and the high-level survival of the universe.

Spending his time chasing common highway bandits through a dirt desert felt like a massive waste of his potential.

But then he remembered the small, blue-skinned kid he had seen through his cockpit window during the crash—the frozen child standing in the middle of the road, waiting to be crushed by a falling star.

He remembered that this settlement was full of families just like the ones on Planet Vegeta, people who were completely helpless against the violent whims of stronger men.

He took the data slate from Brakka’s hand, strapped his modified black-and-green chest plate onto his shoulders, and headed out into the desert on one of the shop’s old mechanical repulsor-cycles.

The five raiders were sitting around a small campfire in a rocky canyon three miles outside the town limits when Kallard found them.

Two large supply hover-wagons, loaded down with crates of root vegetables and medical supplies stolen from that morning’s caravan, were parked nearby under a camouflage tarp.

The men were loud, drunk on cheap local grain alcohol, and laughing about how easy it had been to make an old farmer beg for his life on the road.

The leader of the gang was a massive, bulbous alien with yellowish skin and a thick, greasy leather vest.

He had an old, heavily scratched green-lens scouter strapped over his left ear—a model so ancient it looked like it belonged in a historical museum or a scrap heap.

Kallard stepped out from behind a large boulder at the entrance of the canyon, his tattered gray cloak hanging loosely over his left shoulder, his boots making no sound against the loose sand.

He kept his energy signature suppressed down to his absolute baseline, his power level registering as barely a spark.

The scouter on the leader’s ear suddenly let out a low, rapid series of electronic beeps.

The large yellow alien paused mid-laugh, his eyes widening with amusement as he looked up from his drink, tracking the silhouette walking into the campfire light.

He tapped the side of his ancient headset, reading the data flashing across the lens.

“Well, well, look what just crawled out of the rocks, boys,” the leader jeered, his voice wet and raspy as the other four raiders stood up, drawing their blasters from their belts.

“An active power level of…

three hundred?

Are you completely lost in the dark, bandana boy?

Or did your mother forget to lock the door to your room tonight?”

The other four mercenaries broke out into a loud, mocking chorus of laughter, aiming their weapons straight at Kallard’s chest.

Kallard looked past them, his dark eyes taking in the stolen cargo wagons, the broken locks on the crates, and a small, handmade toy doll that had dropped out of one of the family luggage pieces into the dirt.

“No,” Kallard said, his voice incredibly quiet, flat, and completely devoid of any fear.

“I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

You’re the ones who are out of place.”

“The little rat’s got a big mouth for a three-hundred power level,” the closest raider snarled, a thin, four-armed bipedal alien with jagged black teeth.

He raised his heavy plasma pistol, his finger tightening around the trigger.

“Let’s see if he can talk with a hole through his neck.”

He fired first.

A bright, blue bolt of superheated plasma tore through the dark canyon air, aimed straight for Kallard’s face.

Kallard moved.

It wasn’t a perfect, elegant martial arts maneuver.

It didn’t look like the clean, lightning-fast defensive techniques that Goku or Piccolo would one day master through decades of spiritual discipline.

Kallard fought like a raw, unrefined weapon—someone who was still actively learning how to coordinate the massive, terrifying physical strength of a Saiyan body with a human mind that was desperate to control the output.

He didn’t dodge the plasma bolt; he simply tilted his head two inches to the left, the blue energy rushing past his ear close enough to singe the edge of his black bandana, before exploding harmlessly against the canyon wall behind him.

Before the raider could even register that the shot had missed, Kallard vanished from the campfire light.

*Hiss.*

He reappeared directly in front of the four-armed alien, his movement creating a sharp vacuum of air that sucked the campfire flames toward him.

He didn’t use a ki blast.

He simply dropped his weight low, drove his right shoulder straight into the center of the man’s chest plating, and exploded upward.

*CRACK.*

The sheer, terrifying density of Kallard’s Saiyan muscles acted like a moving battering ram.

The raider’s heavy steel chest plate collapsed inward with a loud metallic scream, his ribs shattering instantly under the pressure.

The impact lifted the three-hundred-pound alien completely off his feet, launching him thirty yards across the canyon where he slammed into a stone pillar and dropped into the dirt, completely unconscious and coughing up green fluid.

The other three mercenaries stopped laughing, their faces turning completely pale with sudden, blinding terror as they realized their scouter reading had been a lie.

“He’s a monster!” one of them screamed, panicking as he started firing his blaster wildly into the dark, the red bolts tearing up the sand around Kallard’s boots.

Kallard didn’t let them recover their formation.

He stepped forward, his right leg snapping out in a low, sweeping kick that struck the second raider directly across the knee joint.

The bone snapped with a sound like a dry branch breaking, the man screaming in agony as he dropped to the ground, clutching his ruined leg.

The remaining two mercenaries turned their weapons in unison, trying to lock onto his position, but Kallard brought his hands together at his waist, gathering a tiny, highly concentrated pocket of green ki energy into his palms.

He didn’t fire a lethal beam; he simply shoved his palms downward, releasing the raw kinetic shockwave directly into the sand beneath their feet.

*BOOM.*

A massive explosion of dirt, rocks, and hot sand erupted upward into their faces, blinding them instantly and knocking them off their balance.

Kallard stepped through the dust cloud like a shadow, his fists moving with brutal, mechanical precision.

One heavy left hook to the jaw dropped the third raider into a crumpled heap on the floor.

A sharp, downward elbow strike to the back of the neck silenced the fourth, sending him face-first into the dirt where he stayed perfectly still.

The leader of the gang was the only one left standing.

He was backed up against the side of his stolen hover-wagon, his yellow skin trembling violently as he looked at the four elite mercenaries he had hired, all taken down in less than twelve seconds by a kid with a bandana.

He reached for a massive, heavy-duty repeating cannon mounted on the back of the wagon, his shaking hands trying to turn the primary turret barrel toward Kallard’s chest.

Kallard walked up to him slowly, his tattered gray cloak snapping lightly in the desert wind.

He didn’t rush.

He didn’t even lift his hands.

He simply looked up at the yellow alien, his suppressed energy signature suddenly expanding by a fraction of an fraction.

A wave of pure, heavy physical pressure rippled across the clearing, the sheer, crushing weight of a four-thousand power level hitting the leader’s primitive green scouter all at once.

The ancient device let out one terrifyingly high-pitched, electronic squeal.

*Beep-beep-beep-beep—*

*BANG.*

The green lens shattered into a cloud of glass dust, the internal processor smoking as it melted from the sudden data overload.

The leader let out a short yelp of terror, dropping his weapon and falling to his knees in the sand, his hands raised above his head as he wept with fear.

“Please,” the yellow alien blubbered, his head hitting the dirt before Kallard’s boots.

“Take the wagons.

Take the credits.

Take everything.

Just don’t kill me, please…

I beg you.”

Kallard looked down at the massive, trembling brute, his face completely cold and unreadable under the orange twilight.

For a split second, the primitive, violent Saiyan blood inside his chest screamed at him to lift his boot and crush the man’s skull into the sand—to finish the contract the way his race had finished a thousand worlds across the galaxy.

It would be so easy.

Nobody would care.

Nobody would look for a dead bandit in a dirt canyon.

But he looked down at the handmade toy doll sitting in the dust near his boot, and the human soul held the reins tight, pulling the beast back into its cage.

He reached down, grabbed the leader by the collar of his leather vest with one hand, and lifted him effortlessly until their eyes were level.

“The wagons go back to the district market tonight,” Kallard said, his voice a low, terrifyingly calm whisper that made the alien’s teeth rattle.

“Every single crate.

Every single credit.

If I see your face anywhere within three systems of this valley ever again…

I won’t use my fists.

Do you understand me?”

The yellow alien nodded so hard his jowls flapped, his eyes wide with a total, primal understanding of his own mortality.

“Yes!

Yes!

I swear it!

We’re gone!

We’re leaving the sector tonight!”

Kallard tossed him back into the sand like a sack of old garbage.

“Gather up your friends and start walking.

The wagons stay here.”

He turned his back on them, walking over to the primary hover-wagon and clearing the tarp off the crates.

Behind him, he could hear the yellow leader frantically dragging his unconscious and broken companions into the back of an old transport speeder, the engine starting up with a panicked whine before rocketed away into the desert night at full speed.

An hour later, Kallard drove the two stolen supply wagons back into the primary square of the settlement district, parking them directly outside the main administrative building.

The caravan master, an old, wrinkled blue-skinned alien with long gray ears, walked out of the building with a large group of armed town guards, his face a mixture of absolute disbelief and profound relief as he inspected the unbroken seals on his medical crates.

The old master ran up to Kallard, reaching into his coat and pulling out a heavy leather pouch that clinked loudly with the sound of solid platinum credits.

He held it out toward Kallard’s hand, his voice trembling with gratitude.

“This is incredible, young man.

We thought those monsters had ruined us.

Here…

take this.

This is the official bounty reward from the council, plus an extra five hundred credits from my personal account for saving the medicine.”

Kallard looked down at the heavy pouch of money, his hand hovering over his belt.

He could feel the severe burns on his palms from the pod crash still stinging under his gloves, and he knew exactly how much fuel the *Wayfarer* needed just to turn on her main navigation computers.

But then he looked past the old man, his eyes catching the shape of that same small, blue-skinned kid from the road, currently peeking out from behind a stone doorway, holding his mother’s hand as he looked at the green-and-black armored stranger who had brought back their food.

The human part of his soul won the argument before it even started.

Kallard pushed the old man’s hand away, his voice quiet.

“Take the extra credits back.

Use them to buy better security walls for your road.

I only take what’s written on the official contract slate.

Not a single coin more.”

The caravan master stared at him, his long ears twitching with profound confusion.

A mercenary refusing extra money was an absolute myth in the outer rim systems.

“Are you certain, son?

You’ve risked your life out there in those canyons.”

“I’m certain,” Kallard said, turning around and climbing back onto his repulsor-cycle.

“Just make sure the credits reach Brakka’s shop by morning.”

He hit the primary throttle, the cycle lifting off the ground with a low hum before tearing away into the dark desert night, leaving the townspeople staring after him in absolute silence.

## Act VIII: The Grinding Wheel

When he returned to the workshop, Brakka was waiting for him at the entrance of the hangar, holding a long, grease-stained cleaning rag in his organic hand.

The old mechanic didn’t say a word as Kallard parked his cycle, unbuckled his heavy chest plate, and dropped it onto the primary maintenance bench.

He walked over, picked up a data slate that had just registered the electronic credit transfer from the town council, and squinted at the numbers flashing across the screen.

Suddenly, Brakka swung the dirty cleaning rag through the air, smacking Kallard hard across the back of his bandana-wrapped head.

*STRIKE.*

“Ow!” Kallard barked, spinning around and clutching his head, his dark eyes flashing with irritation.

“What the hell was that for?

I brought back the cargo!

I cleared the canyon!

The contract is completely finished!”

“You refused the extra five hundred credits from the caravan master, you absolute, monumental idiot!” Brakka roared, all four of his eyes wide with pure, professional outrage.

“I just got a communication link from the town hall!

They’re calling you a ‘noble savior of the valley’!

Do you know what a noble savior is out here in the rim, kid?

It’s another word for a guy who’s going to go bankrupt before he can afford his next oil change!”

“They needed the money more than we do,” Kallard muttered, looking away defensively.

“They have families down there.

They have kids.

The raiders had already ruined half their harvest.”

“We need high-grade hydrogen fuel cells for the secondary thrusters, Ronin!” Brakka yelled, waving the data slate in his face.

“The *Wayfarer* doesn’t run on good intentions and happy children’s smiles!

It runs on liquid combustible propellant!

You want to clear your debt with my shop?

You take every single coin a target offers you, and then you ask if they’ve got any gold teeth you can pull out before you leave!”

Kallard turned his head back around, his eyes dark, hard, and completely unyielding as he met the mechanic’s four-eyed glare.

“I told you before, Brakka…

I’m not going to be an imperial thug.

I’m not going to turn into another version of the monsters who took your arm or blew up my planet.

If I start robbing the people I’m supposed to be protecting, then the armor we spent two days painting black is just a lie.”

Brakka froze, his mouth opening to unleash another wave of angry mechanic profanity, but the words died in his throat as he looked at the kid’s face.

He saw the absolute, unbreakable wall of conviction behind those dark Saiyan eyes—a moral stubbornness that was entirely un-Saiyan, yet fiercely powerful.

The old mechanic slowly lowered the data slate, let out a long, defeated sigh, and tossed the cleaning rag onto the bench.

“Fine,” Brakka grunted, turning his back to him and walking toward his stool.

“The noble idiot discount applies to the first contract only.

Next time you feel like being a saint, you’re paying for the cycle’s fuel out of your own food rations.”

A small, genuine smile touched the corner of Kallard’s mouth.

“Fair enough.”

## Act IX: The Primal Beast

That night, long after the generator had dropped into its low-power night cycle and Brakka had gone to his quarters to sleep, Kallard walked out into the cold, empty desert behind the hidden hangar ravine.

The planet’s gravity was roughly three times heavier than Earth’s would have been, though it was still nothing compared to the extreme environments of high-level training worlds like King Kai’s.

Still, for a body that was still recovering from a catastrophic orbit crash, it was more than enough to act as a grinding wheel.

He stripped off his modified chest guards and his tattered cloak, standing in the cold sand wearing nothing but his black mesh undersuit and his dark bandana.

The three small moons hung high in the pale orange sky, casting long, dramatic silver shadows across the rusted landscape.

He began the physical grind.

Punch.

Breathe.

Step.

Strike.

He moved through the basic martial arts forms he remembered from his old human life—clean, geometric lines that felt weirdly small inside the massive, explosive musculature of a Saiyan framework.

He ran laps across the rocky ridges until his lungs felt like they were filled with boiling oil, his breath coming in white plumes in the freezing night air.

He lifted massive, discarded iron engine blocks from Brakka’s scrap piles, holding them over his head for hours until his arms shook violently and his veins stood out like thick cords against his brown skin.

After the physical conditioning came the hard part: the energy control.

He stood in the center of a wide, flat clearing of dry mud, his boots planted firmly in the earth, his palms extended toward a massive, fifty-foot stone pillar that rose out of the desert sand a hundred yards away.

He reached down into his belly, searching for that volatile well of ki.

He didn’t want to just throw a wild, destructive explosion like he had during the raider fight.

He wanted to shape it.

He wanted to compress the energy into a single, razor-sharp point of force—a clean beam that could pierce a target without wasting power on a useless light show.

He gathered the green light into his right palm, his fingers twitching as the energy began to hum.

*Whine.*

The light expanded, turning bright, erratic, and violent.

Kallard focused his mind, trying to force the spinning energy into a tight, perfect sphere.

But his control was too clumsy, his human consciousness still acting like an outside interloper trying to drive a high-powered tank with loose steering lines.

The energy fractured.

A sudden, sharp backlash of kinetic force snapped backward into his wrist, the green blast veering wildly to the left.

It missed the stone pillar completely, striking Brakka’s secondary solar-powered water pump located near the edge of the ravine.

*BOOM.*

The water pump exploded into a spectacular cloud of twisted metal, shattered plastic pipes, and pressurized steam, the hot water instantly vaporizing into the dry desert air.

Kallard froze, his right hand still smoking, his mouth dropping open in pure horror.

He looked at the ruined pump, then turned his head slowly toward the entrance of the hidden hangar corridor.

Brakka was standing in the doorway, wearing an oversized flannel night-shirt, holding a massive, four-barreled industrial wrench in his organic hand.

All four of his eyes were wide, blinking in absolute disbelief at the smoking pile of scrap metal that used to be his only source of fresh well water.

Kallard swallowed hard, his face turning a light shade of gray.

“I…

I can fix that, Brakka.

I’m pretty sure I saw some spare copper piping in the third storage bin.”

“You are going to pay for that pump if it takes you the next forty years of your miserable life, you destructive little monkey!” Brakka screamed into the quiet night, his white mane standing up on end with pure, unadulterated fury.

“Fair,” Kallard muttered, dropping his head into his hands.

“That’s completely fair.”

For three more hours, long after the mechanic had stormed back inside cursing in seven different galactic languages, Kallard remained out in the dark sand, refusing to let the failure drive him back to his bed.

He stood perfectly still, his eyes closed, his breathing dropping into a slow, rhythmic cadence that matched the low whistling of the desert wind through the canyons.

He didn’t try to force the energy this time.

He let his mind drop deeper into his physical framework, searching past the surface layer of his muscles, past the bone marrow, down into the deep, dark, primitive core of his genetic code.

And there, deep inside the darkest corner of his DNA, he found it again.

The beast.

The ancient, wild pressure of the primitive Saiyan bloodline—the heavy, copper-tasting roar of the Great Ape that lived inside every single child born on Planet Vegeta.

It felt like an enormous, hungry animal locked behind a very thin stone door, scratching at the wood, waiting for a single moment of weakness or pure rage to tear its way out and reclaim the flesh.

It wasn’t a friend.

It wasn’t a helpful power source.

It was a terrifying, chaotic force of pure destruction that didn’t care about contracts, or families, or small kids on dirt roads.

It wanted to consume, to break, to dominate everything it touched.

Kallard stood in the dark, his fists clenching so hard his knuckles popped like small firecrackers.

He didn’t back away from the door.

He leaned his mind right against the stone, his thoughts turning into an absolute whisper.

“I’m not afraid of you,” he muttered into the empty space inside his chest.

“You don’t own this house anymore.

I do.”

The ancient pressure suddenly pulsed, a violent, hot wave of energy exploding outward from his core into his bloodstream like a dose of raw adrenaline.

His eyes snapped open.

The dark black pupils vanished completely, replaced by a brilliant, terrifyingly intense glow of deep emerald green.

The air directly around his boots began to warp and shimmer with heat, the loose sand lifting off the ground and floating in the air in a perfect, three-foot circle around his ankles.

His power level didn’t just rise—it completely detonated, tripling in a matter of a single microsecond, jumping from his suppressed baseline straight up past his previous peak, hitting a raw, unrefined register that made the entire ridge shake.

His physical body groaned under the sudden, massive influx of energy, every single nerve ending feeling like it was being burned with a live wire.

He lunged forward, his movement creating a loud, concussive sonic boom that cracked the air in the canyon.

He drove his right fist straight out toward the center of the fifty-foot stone pillar.

He didn’t touch the rock.

The punch stopped three inches short of the surface, but the sheer, focused wave of compressed kinetic force that flew out of his knuckles struck the stone like an artillery shell.

*CRACK-BOOM.*

The massive, solid stone pillar didn’t just fracture—it completely exploded from the inside out, the top thirty feet of the rock formation shattering into a cloud of fine gray dust and gravel that rained down across the desert floor like a storm of pebbles.

A split second later, the green state vanished.

The emerald light inside his eyes snuffed out like a candle in a windstorm, and Kallard dropped to both knees in the sand, his chest heaving violently as he coughed up a thick splatter of dark red blood onto the dry earth.

His whole body felt like it was on fire, his muscles twitching with severe, exhausting tremors as the lactic acid built up all at once.

The *Primal Instinct* had given him a fraction of its true power, but it had exacted a heavy, physical tax on his frame for the privilege.

Brakka’s low, dry voice came from the darkness near the hangar doorway.

“Well…

that looked incredibly spectacular, kid.

And also remarkably stupid.”

Kallard didn’t look up from the sand, his hand wiping the blood from his lower lip as he tried to find his breath.

“It was…

training,” he gasped out.

“Training is when you make your body stronger without almost turning your own internal organs into soup, Ronin,” Brakka said, stepping out into the campfire light, his broad shoulders covered in a heavy leather coat.

He walked over to the cot, dropped a clean white cloth onto Kallard’s shoulder, and looked at the mountain of pulverized stone dust where the pillar used to stand.

“I need to get stronger, Brakka,” Kallard repeated, his voice small, ragged, but completely unbroken as he forced himself back up onto one knee.

“Frieza’s enforcers aren’t going to wait for me to have a perfect training schedule.

I need better results.”

Brakka crossed his arms over his harness, his four eyes softening by a microscopic fraction as he looked down at the bleeding, battered kid.

He reached down, grabbed Kallard by the arm with his heavy titanium hand, and hoisted him back onto his feet with a single, firm pull.

“No, kid,” Brakka said, his voice dropping its harsh mechanic edge, turning quiet and steady.

“What you actually need…

is patience.”

Kallard looked away, his jaw tight.

“I don’t have time for patience.

Every day I spend sitting on this rock is a day Frieza gets further ahead.”

“Kid, if you try to chase down Frieza tomorrow morning, you die in less than a second,” Brakka said, his voice hard as iron.

“If you try to chase down Dodoria next month to settle your little grudge, you die in less than ten seconds.

If you spend your whole life chasing every single monster in the galaxy that’s bigger than you just because your rage feels better than waiting in the dark…

you’re going to end up exactly like the rest of your race.

A collection of bones on a dead world.”

The words hit Kallard like a physical blow, his head snapping back around to look at the old alien.

He wanted to argue, to scream, to tell him about the things he had seen on the screen back home.

But he knew the old man was right.

The reality of this universe didn’t care about plot armor or narrative destiny.

If you walked into a fire with a power level of four thousand, you burned to ash.

Period.

“You want to honor the people who died on that planet, Ronin?” Brakka asked, his upper two eyes looking straight into Kallard’s soul.

Kallard swallows the blood in his mouth, his chest tightening.

“Yes.”

“Then have the goddamn brains to live long enough to actually matter,” Brakka said plainly.

The words echoed through the quiet canyon, sounding exactly like Morga’s final command to him before the sky caught fire.

*Live long enough for someone to remember we were here.*

Kallard let out a long, slow breath through his nose, the violent, chaotic heat inside his chest finally cooling back down into a steady, controlled embers.

He nodded once, a single, firm movement of his head.

“Okay.”

Brakka tossed him a second water skin from his belt.

“Clean your face, kid.

Tomorrow morning, the real work actually begins.”

“What kind of work?” Kallard asked, wiping the dust off his forehead with the white cloth.

“We’re going to finish the primary hyper-drive repairs on the *Wayfarer*,” Brakka said, turning back toward the warmth of the workshop.

“Then we’re going to set up your official bounty tracking license under a fake identification code from the outer rim guilds.

Then I’m going to teach you how to read a stellar navigation map without getting sucked into a black hole’s gravity field, how to spot a pirate ambush before your scanners even register their presence, and how to land my ship on an independent spaceport platform without trying to systematically murder the planet’s crust.”

Kallard let out a long, dry sigh, following the old man back toward the heavy stone door.

“I told you, I saved that town today.”

“You also created a crater in my backyard that’s currently big enough to charge local tourists admission to see,” Brakka grunted without looking back.

“Get inside, kid.

The soup’s getting cold, and we’ve got a water pump to rebuild before sunrise.”

## Act X: The Horizon Ahead

Kallard paused at the threshold of the stone doorway, turning his head back around to take one last look at the dark, expansive desert sky.

The three small moons glittered like cold diamonds against the pale orange void, their light illuminating the vast, uncharted frontier of the outer rim systems that stretched out before him like an open ocean.

Somewhere out there, deep in the wealthy, polished core systems of the galaxy, Lord Frieza was currently sitting in his floating chair, completely oblivious to the fact that a single drop of Saiyan blood had slipped through his perfect fingers.

Somewhere out there, in a distant sector, the young prince Vegeta was currently walking through the corridors of an imperial base alongside Nappa and Raditz, their hearts hardened by a pride that would eventually lead them to their own breaking points.

Somewhere far across the tracking charts, a tiny, round space pod was currently rocketing through the dark toward a blue-and-white planet named Earth, carrying a newborn infant named Kakarot toward a destiny that would change the face of the universe forever.

And here, at the absolute edge of nowhere, standing in the mud of a junk mechanic’s backyard, was him.

He had no masters to guide him.

No legendary martial arts schools to teach him their ancient secrets.

No team of heroic friends to back him up when the fights got too big for his frame.

No clean, predictable path laid out for him by a writer’s hand.

But as his fingers closed around the worn fabric of his dark bandana, he realized he didn’t need any of those things anymore.

He had a custom stealth ship built for running through the dark.

He had a fake name that felt more real with every single breath he took.

He had a grumpy, one-armed gray-blue mechanic who was too stubborn to let him die a stupid death.

And he had a powerful, primitive body that could grow strong enough to shake the heavens, provided he was willing to bleed for every single inch of progress.

“Ronin,” he whispered to the cold desert wind, the word no longer sounding like a clever disguise or a stolen mask.

It was a real beginning.

A clean slate carved out of the ashes of a dead world.

Behind him inside the workshop, Brakka let out a loud, impatient shout from the kitchen corner.

“Hey!

Bandana boy!

Are you going to stand out there staring at the sky all night like a broken drone, or are you coming inside to eat your moss?”

Kallard smiled, a genuine, quiet expression that reached all the way to his dark eyes.

He stepped through the doorway, his boots hitting the stone floorboards with a loose, relaxed, and perfectly balanced stride.

“I’m coming, old man,” he called back, the heavy stone door sliding shut behind him with a loud, final thud, locking out the cold dark of the desert and opening up the long road ahead.