## Act I: The Wrench and the Reckoning
By the time he turned seventeen, Kallard had learned three fundamental truths about deep space.
First, nobody ever told you the whole truth unless they were bleeding out from a plasma wound, blind drunk on fermented grain liquor, or actively trying to sell you a hyperdrive core that was missing its secondary stabilization rings.
Second, every single contract on the bounty boards looked simple on a digital data slate until the first round of explosive ammunition started tearing through the bulkhead doors.
Third, Brakka laughed at absolutely everything.
It wasn’t because the old man found the galaxy particularly funny.
It was a practical, mechanical survival strategy.
Kallard had spent enough time around the four-eyed mechanic to know that if Brakka wasn’t laughing at a disaster, he was about to start yelling.
If he started yelling, he would inevitably start throwing heavy industrial tools.
And if he started throwing tools, something incredibly expensive, structural, or living was going to get broken.
Usually, that something was Kallard.
“Primal Instinct?” Brakka repeated, the words rolling out of his mouth like a bad joke he couldn’t quite swallow.
The old mechanic was standing beneath the massive, matte-black belly of the *Wayfarer*, his lower right organic arm braced against an exposed fuel manifold while his primary mechanical hand gripped a heavy-duty titanium torque wrench.
A fresh smear of dark, synthetic grease sat across his left gray-blue cheek, and all four of his unblinking eyes were narrowed into an expression of deep, theatrical disappointment.
Kallard was sitting ten meters away in the dry, red dirt of the landing ravine, his bare back exposed to the harsh, orange glare of the afternoon sun.
He sat cross-legged, his palms resting flat against his knees, his breathing slow and measured.
His modified green-and-black armor lay neatly folded on a rusted metal crate beside him, the painted edges scuffed from their last run through the outer sectors.
His thick brown tail was wrapped tight around his waist beneath layers of dark, coarse binding cloth, completely hidden from sight even though there was absolutely no one around for fifty miles except the old man and a small flock of stupid, round local birds that kept trying to peck at the loose engine bolts scattered near the landing gear.
Kallard opened his left eye, staring across the grit.
“Yes.
That’s what I’m calling it.”
Brakka didn’t move for three seconds.
He just stared through the shimmering heat waves rising off the desert floor.
Then his broad chest began to rumble.
A low snort escaped his nose, followed by a dry, hacking chuckle that quickly escalated into a full-blown roar of laughter that shook his white mane.
Kallard let out a long, heavy sigh, his shoulders dropping as he closed his eye again.
“I knew you were going to do that.
Every single time I try to explain the internal mechanics to you, you do this.”
“Primal Instinct,” Brakka wheezed, leaning his massive bulk against the ship’s primary landing strut to keep his knees from buckling.
He waved the heavy wrench through the air like a conductor’s baton.
“That is the grand, majestic title you’ve settled on for the little trick where you turn green-eyed, rupture three minor blood vessels in your own chest, and fall over in the mud like a dramatic, over-wound combat droid?”
“It isn’t just a physical reaction, Brakka, and it isn’t just about the eyes,” Kallard muttered, his voice flat.
“It’s a localized compression of the genetic energy pools.
It’s pulling the raw output from the primitive lineage without letting the cerebral control lines snap.”
“Oh, missing your forgiveness, great master,” Brakka cackled, wiping a drop of fluid from his upper right eye with his greasy sleeve.
“Sometimes I forgot that you also growl at inanimate objects while you’re doing it.”
Kallard opened both eyes now, his dark pupils narrowing as he glared across the yard.
“I don’t growl at rocks.”
“You growled at a five-ton granite boulder during the training cycle last week.”
“The boulder was sitting directly inside my lateral movement lane.”
“It was a stationary piece of geology, kid!
It didn’t have an agenda.
It was just sitting where it had been sitting for three hundred years, and you stood there baring your teeth at it like it owed you money.”
Kallard pulled his eyes away from the mechanic, staring out toward the jagged crimson ridges that defined the horizon of this backwater rock.
“The names matter.
If you don’t give a specific state a boundary in your mind, the ki doesn’t have a track to follow when the pressure hits.
You have to define the cage to use the beast.”
“Sure, kid, sure,” Brakka said, his laughter finally winding down into a low, rhythmic grunting as he turned back to the fuel manifold.
“Names matter.
Which is exactly why choosing one that sounds like something a drunk mercenary writes on his own wanted poster is a terrible design choice.
One of these days, you’re going to cross paths with a real martial artist from the core systems—someone who names their techniques something simple and practical, like ‘energy beam’ or ‘heavy punch.’ And you’re going to stand there with your chest puffed out, saying, ‘Behold the fury of my Primal Instinct,’ and they’re going to hit you square in the jaw while you’re still finishing the sentence.”
Kallard didn’t answer.
He let his eyes close completely, pulling his awareness away from the old man’s bickering and back down into the heat of his own skin.
## Act II: Chronicling the Warhound
The hot desert wind moved across the repair yard, carrying the heavy, familiar scents of sulfur, burning insulation, and hydraulic fluid.
Somewhere deep inside the main workshop structure, a primary coolant pump let out a wet, uneven click—a mechanical stutter that had been getting progressively worse for three days.
Kallard noted it automatically; he would have to tear the casing down and replace the internal impeller blades later that evening before Brakka spent another week pretending his right knee wasn’t aching from limping around the vibration.
He breathed in.
Slow.
Deep.
Controlled.
The physical frame he inhabited was no longer the alien, terrifying machine it had been when he first woke up under the red sky of Planet Vegeta.
The sheer density of the bones, the explosive potential hidden within the tendons, the constant, shifting weight of the tail, the bottomless, predatory hunger that required three pounds of meat before noon just to keep his blood sugar stable—it had all integrated into his daily reality.
He had once lived a life where his biggest physical exertion was walking to a corner store or sitting at a desk for eight hours, staring at digital interfaces while the world moved past outside his window.
Now, his standard definition of a slow morning involved sitting in three-times gravity after spending two hours lifting dead cargo haulers off their mounts, followed by a thorough manual check to see if his rib cage had finished fusing back together after being thrown through an armored bulkhead by a space pirate three rotations ago.
He was seventeen years old now.
Almost eighteen.
Or at least, this specific arrangement of Saiyan muscle and bone was.
His mind still carried the distinct, fragile memories of that other life on Earth—the movies, the books, the quiet nights, the names of fictional characters like Goku and Piccolo that still glowed like distant, cold stars in the corners of his brain.
But that old life had grown quieter with the years.
It hadn’t vanished; it was still there, sitting like an old journal in an attic, providing him with cultural references nobody here understood and a deep, underlying empathy that kept him from turning into a monster.
But Kallard had stopped waking up every morning expecting some cosmic entity to fix its mistake and drop him back into his old shoes.
This was his dirt now.
This was his armor.
This was his fight.
And the name *Ronin* was no longer just a clever string of syllables he had invented to keep an imperial scouter from registering his lineage.
The wider sectors of the outer rim had actually started to learn the name.
He wasn’t famous—not by a long shot.
He hadn’t done anything that would cause someone like Frieza or the high-ranking generals of the imperial core to look at a monitor.
He wasn’t a legend yet, thank whatever gods or demons were currently keeping watch over the dark spaces between the suns.
But down in the dirty, oil-soaked trenches of the border sectors, in the lawless refueling docks, the pirate-controlled trade lanes, and the low-priority Frieza Force supply hubs, people had started to talk about the shadow in the green-and-black armor.
They talked about a young bounty hunter who wore a heavily modified, matte-black chest piece with deep green trim.
They talked about a masked kid who carried an old, red-lens scouter that looked like it had been dragged through five separate trash fires but could still track an engine signature through an asteroid field.
They talked about a mercenary who possessed a strict, unyielding code of ethics—a fighter who would flatly refuse to touch a slaver contract or a corporate enforcement job against striking miners, even if the payout was enough to buy a secondary transport vessel.
They whispered about a warrior who hid his physical traits a little too well, who moved with a terrifying, predatory speed that didn’t match the numbers displayed on a standard scouting monitor, and who left entire crews of hardened outlaws wondering how their security droids had been turned into scrap metal in less than ten seconds.
*Ronin.*
Kallard let his breath drop lower into his stomach, past the lingering soreness in his pectorals, past the steady, heavy thudding of his heart, down into the raw reservoir of energy that sat at the base of his spine.
He reached out his internal hand and touched the door.
The beast was still there, sitting in the dark, scratching at the wood.
*Primal Instinct.* Brakka could mock the name until his white hair turned gray, but Kallard had paid for every single syllable of that title in blood, broken bones, and cold sweat.
He had spent the last three years systematically tracking his own growth, learning how to handle the terrifying progression of his own power level.
He remembered the numbers clearly, having recorded them in a small, grease-stained data log hidden beneath his bunk on the ship, mapping out his progression from a high-class potential kid on Vegeta to a veteran-level scrapper in the rim:
### Power Level Progression Log
| Age | Base Power Level | Status & Operational Notes |
|—|—|—|
| **Birth** | 62 | High-class baseline potential.
Noted by regional technicians for unusual neural stability.
|
| **Age 3** | 180 | Aggressive ki spikes during fear or anger.
First structural damage recorded in local nursery.
|
| **Age 5** | 420 | Surpassed average low-class adult infantrymen.
Placed under regional command tracking.
|
| **Age 8** | 950 | Weird, instinctive bursts caused by internal soul-body misalignment.
Highly erratic.
|
| **Age 10** | 1,600 | First deployment as a battlefield asset.
Under stress, could spike to 2,500 for several seconds.
|
| **Age 12** | 2,700 | Mid-class soldiers stopped calling him a kid.
High physical density, difficult to control.
|
| **Age 14** | 3,900 | **Great Ape:** 39,000.
Border deployments.
Survival spikes touched 5,000+ before crashing.
|
| **Age 16** | 5,200 | **Great Ape:** 52,000.
Cornered spikes touched 7,000.
Chronic nosebleeds and ki leakage after use.
|
| **Age 17** | 6,800 | **Current Base.** Suppressed to 900 for daily operations.
Standard combat output: 3,000.
|
He wasn’t born a legendary monster like Broly or some kind of genetic freak whose power level could naturally crack a small planet before he learned how to talk.
He was more like a late-blooming warhound—dangerous from the day he dropped out of the tank, terrifying as a teenager, but with a ceiling that remained completely hidden because his human soul and his Saiyan flesh were constantly out of alignment, fighting each other for control of the central nervous system.
When he had first dropped onto Brakka’s planet inside that ruined Frieza Force pod, his power level had spiked to an unstable four thousand during that desperate, terrified ambush on Dodoria.
That hadn’t been a real, controlled level; it had been nothing more than an unrefined dump of adrenaline, panic, and ancestral survival instinct hitting his muscles all at once.
But over the last three years of constant, brutal hunting in the rim, he had forced the two halves of his nature to stop fighting.
He had earned every single digit of his current six thousand eight hundred base power level through honest, back-breaking labor.
It wasn’t a royal level.
It wasn’t enough to make someone like Zarbon or Dodoria nervous in a straight, open ring.
It certainly wasn’t going to make Captain Ginyu or Frieza look up from their tactical maps.
But it was more than enough to ensure that entire crews of space-faring outlaws had learned to become very, very good at math whenever he walked into a port.
It meant that standard Frieza Force grunts under captain rank were no longer opponents—they were targets, provided they were foolish enough to mistake him for an ordinary teenager with an attitude problem.
It also meant that Brakka had stopped telling him he was going to die every time he pulled the *Wayfarer* out of the ravine, reducing the warning to an occasional grunt whenever the bounty slate looked particularly messy.
“Alright,” Kallard whispered to himself, his fingers digging slightly into the dry soil.
“Let’s see if we can open the tap without tearing the plumbing apart.”
He let his base ki rise.
The air around his cross-legged form began to warm, the temperature spiking until the small pebbles near his knees started to crackle from the heat.
The loose red dust of the ravine lifted off the ground, forming a slow, rotating ring of dirt around his body.
The round birds near the landing gear let out a series of panicked, high-pitched shrieks and fluttered away into the rocks, their tiny brains recognizing the immediate presence of a high-tier predator.
Brakka stopped his torque wrench, all four of his eyes shifting sideways to look through the shimmering distortion.
“Hey.
Mind the paint job, kid.
If you melt the secondary hull seals again, you’re the one who’s going to be scrubbing the carbon filters for three rotations.”
Kallard didn’t answer.
He didn’t even blink.
He reached down into the base of his spine and pulled the door open a fraction of an inch further.
*Primal Instinct.*
The emerald light flared deep within his dark pupils, an erratic, jagged pulse of green energy cutting across his irises.
Every single muscle fiber in his broad shoulders and back tightened all at once, turning as hard as reinforced stone plating under his skin.
The tap was fully open now.
His baseline power level of six thousand eight hundred didn’t just climb; it detonated, his raw energy output tripling in less than a second as it surged past twenty thousand.
The entire world around him changed.
The dull, muffled sounds of the desert desert vanished, replaced by an overwhelming, razor-sharp clarity.
He could hear the distinct, metallic *clack-click* of the impeller blades inside the workshop pump three hundred yards away.
He could hear the soft, frantic buzzing of a six-legged insect burrowing beneath a flat rock ten meters to his left.
He could hear the wet, heavy thudding of Brakka’s two hearts beating inside his massive gray-blue chest, and the slight, microscopic creak of the alloy inside the *Wayfarer’s* left landing strut as the ship shifted its weight in the wind.
He could feel his own blood moving through his arteries like liquid fire.
It was too fast.
Too hot.
The physical pain arrived right on schedule, hitting his central nervous system like a wave of boiling acid.
His shoulders burned as the muscle tissue strained against the sudden influx of energy, his spine feeling like someone was trying to bend a steel rod into a circle.
His fingers clawed into the dry dirt, his knuckles turning white as his tail strained violently against the heavy binding cloth around his waist.
The wild, ancient monkey part of his genetic code pushed up against his brain like a tidal wave, a primitive scream echoing through his thoughts.
*Move.
Strike.
Break everything.
Claim the valley.
Tear the machine down.*
“No,” Kallard growled through his clenched teeth, a small line of red blood trickling from his left nostril.
He forced his mind to anchor itself, using the memories of his old life like heavy iron stakes driven into a riverbed.
He pictured Morga’s scarred, stern face standing on the edge of that doomed training yard.
*You live.*
He pictured the messy, oil-stained walls of Brakka’s workshop.
He pictured the worn leather of the pilot’s seat inside the *Wayfarer*.
He pictured that blue-and-white planet he still hadn’t managed to find on any navigation map, and the image of a little boy in a bright orange gi, laughing with an innocence that this galaxy didn’t deserve.
He pictured Piccolo standing alone on a wasteland cliff with his arms crossed, a monster who had looked at his own violent programming and decided to become something better.
“Focus,” Kallard whispered, his body trembling violently as the green energy crackled across his skin like small bolts of static electricity.
“Aim the weight.
Do not let the weight aim you.”
The wild, green light inside his pupils steadied, the jagged pulses turning into a solid, brilliant ring of emerald.
He held the state.
Ten seconds.
The sand beneath his boots turned to dark glass from the localized heat.
Fifteen seconds.
His lungs felt like they were collapsing inward, his vision spotting with dark patches as the pressure ground against his skull.
Twenty seconds.
The veins along his neck stood out like thick blue ropes, his teeth grinding together so hard he was worried the enamel was going to crack.
Twenty-five seconds.
Thirty.
With a sharp, agonizing jerk that traveled from his tail straight to his neck, the burning sensation turned into a direct tearing feeling, as if his muscles were about to pull themselves free from the bone.
Kallard dropped the state instantly.
The massive green energy signature vanished from the ravine so fast the air let out a loud, hollow *pop* as the atmospheric pressure rushed back into the space.
Kallard’s upper body collapsed forward, both of his callused hands slamming into the red dirt to keep his face from hitting the ground.
He hung there on his knees, his chest heaving like a winded animal as thick drops of sweat ran down his jawline and dripped into the sand between his fingers.
He breathed hard, his lungs dragging in the hot desert air while his heart gradually slowed its frantic, terrified rhythm.
Thirty seconds.
A new record.
Three rotations ago, twenty-two seconds had been enough to leave him unconscious in a cargo bay for four hours.
A pair of heavy, steel-toed combat boots appeared in the dirt right in front of his hands.
Kallard slowly lifted his head, his vision clearing as he wiped the small trail of blood from his upper lip with the back of his hand.
Brakka was standing over him, his heavy torque wrench resting over his shoulder, all four of his unblinking eyes looking down at the kid with a mixture of quiet evaluation and deep, professional concern.
The old mechanic reached into his tool harness, pulled out a thick leather water skin, and tossed it down into the sand between Kallard’s hands.
“That,” Brakka muttered, his gravelly voice flat, “looked slightly less stupid than the attempt you made on Tuesday.”
Kallard grabbed the skin, pulled the wooden plug out with his teeth, and squeezed a long, cold stream of water down his parched throat.
It tasted like iron and mineral salts, but it felt like life returning to a desert.
“High praise coming from you, old man,” he gasped out, his voice hoarse.
“I’m pretty sure that kind of compliment is illegal in this sector.”
“It should be,” Brakka snorted, turning around and walking back toward the ship’s engine bay.
“I usually charge at least three hundred credits for any sentence that doesn’t include the word ‘idiot.’ You’re getting a massive professional discount today.”
Kallard wiped his mouth with his sleeve, slowly pulling his legs underneath him until he could stand up straight, though his knees were still trembling slightly from the energy drain.
“Thirty seconds, Brakka.
I held the output stable for thirty full seconds without my energy signature leaking into the upper frequencies.”
“Thirty seconds before your entire skeleton looked like it was trying to leave your skin through your mouth?” Brakka called out from beneath the hull, his tools clanking against the manifold.
“Still thirty seconds, kid.
In a real tactical situation against an imperial squad, thirty seconds is just enough time for them to realize you’re a threat and draw their heavy blasters before you fall over on your face.”
Kallard walked over to the rusted crate, picking up his dark green tunic and sliding it over his head, his muscles groaning at the movement.
“That’s exactly why I keep training it.
You have to build the container’s structural integrity before you can increase the volume of the fluid.”
Brakka crouched down beneath the landing strut with a loud, mechanical pop from his knee joints, his gray-blue face wrinkling up as he adjusted a pressure valve.
“That is like saying you practice stabbing yourself with a small blade every morning so that one day your stomach learns to respect knives, Ronin.
It’s a completely backwards engineering philosophy.”
Kallard stopped buttoning his collar, looking across the landing platform at the old alien.
“You’re not wrong, old man.
But out here…
it’s the only tool I’ve got.”
Brakka didn’t answer for a moment, his mechanical hand moving with absolute precision as it tightened a series of micro-bolts along the fuel line.
He set the wrench down against the landing gear, took a clean rag from his belt, and began wiping the grease from his titanium fingers with slow, deliberate movements.
“You keep pushing that tap, kid,” Brakka said softly, all four of his eyes fixed on the dirty rag in his hands, “and one of these days your genetics aren’t going to forgive you for the insult.
A body isn’t a machine.
You can’t just replace the primary gaskets when they melt.”
Kallard leaned his back against the rusted crate, his eyes drifting up toward the pale orange sky where the planet’s primary sun was slowly dipping beneath the gray mountain ranges.
“If I don’t push it, Brakka…
then the next time an imperial transport stops at this port, I’m just a kid with a bandana and an unregistered scouter.
If I stay inside my baseline, I’m just a target waiting for someone to do the math.”
Brakka stood up slowly, tossing the dirty rag into a scrap bucket near the ramp.
He looked out over the quiet ravine, his white mane catching the last red rays of the sun.
“Yeah.
Well.
Just don’t go breaking yourself before the fuel bills are paid.
I’d hate to have to carry your corpse out to the scrap piles; it’s bad for my lower back.”
## Act III: The Ghost of Vorda Station
Kallard let out a short, quiet laugh, the tightness in his chest finally starting to dissipate.
It came easier now—the humor, the casual bickering, the strange, domestic rhythm of a life built on a foundation of grease and outlaws.
He remembered a time, two years ago, when he hadn’t known how to laugh in this skin.
The first real realization that Brakka had become something more than just an employer or a fence had happened after a minor bounty contract went completely sideways on a backwater trading hub named Vorda Station.
He had been fifteen years old then, completely full of himself after completing three consecutive, successful tracking jobs in the border lanes without taking a single hit to his armor.
He had even managed to win a massive, chaotic bar brawl in a lower-tier spaceport that left him with a full stomach, a pocket full of imperial credits, and a permanent ban from two separate moons in the core system.
He had thought he was a genius—that his knowledge of the future and his growing Saiyan biology made him completely untouchable.
The contract had looked simple enough on paper: a localized syndicate lieutenant named Vane, an Appule-species enforcer who had been systematically hijacking medical supply ships and reselling the sterile capsules to Frieza Force frontier bases at a three-hundred-percent markup.
The guild had listed his personal power level at barely twelve hundred.
*Find him.
Separate him from his guards.
Take him alive.
Collect the three-thousand-credit payout.*
Instead, the moment Kallard had stepped into the cargo bay on Vorda Station, the trap had snapped shut behind his boots.
Vane hadn’t been alone; he had hired three independent corporate bodyguards from the western rim, each carrying an active power level of over two thousand, a high-frequency plasma containment net designed specifically for heavy infantry targets, and a trained, acid-spitting desert crustacean the size of a standard commercial hover-wagon.
Kallard had won the encounter.
Technically.
He had managed to drag the target back to the *Wayfarer’s* airlock alive.
Also technically.
He had returned to Brakka’s workshop at dawn, his green-and-black armor melted down to the raw alloy plates on his left side, his eyebrows completely burned off by a plasma discharge, his face covered in a layer of gray dust and dried black blood, and his left leg dragging behind him like a broken piece of landing gear while he carried the unconscious, bleeding bounty over his right shoulder.
Brakka had opened the heavy workshop door, taken one long look at the absolute disaster standing on his threshold, and said, “Well.
You look incredibly educational today, kid.”
Then the old man had spent six uninterrupted hours sitting by the medical cot, his mechanical fingers moving with a terrifying, gentle precision as he pulled melted piece after melted piece of synthetic under-suit out of Kallard’s scorched skin, injecting healing serums into his torn thigh muscles, and sewing thirteen separate stitches across his left cheek while delivering a constant, relentless monologue about every single stupid tactical decision Kallard had made since entering the system.
At some point during the fourth hour, Kallard, half-blinded by a severe chemical fever and thoroughly annoyed by the old man’s badgering, had muttered through his cracked lips, “You don’t…
you don’t have to keep doing this, old man.
I’m just a piece of scrap you pulled out of a ditch.
You can just take the bounty credits and leave the kit on the floor.”
Brakka had stopped his medical needle mid-air, all four of his eyes locking onto Kallard’s face with a sudden, freezing intensity that made the room go completely still.
Then, without a word, he had pulled a strip of medical tape across Kallard’s cracked ribs, tightening the binding with an intentional, brutal jerk that made Kallard yelp out in pain.
“Yes, I do,” Brakka had growled, his gravelly voice dropping into a low, terrifying rasp.
“Why?” Kallard had gasped out, clutching his side.
“Why do you care if a stupid kid breaks his neck on a border moon?”
Brakka hadn’t answered for a long, heavy moment.
He had just picked up a bottle of antiseptic fluid, poured a generous amount onto a clean rag, and started dabbing the wound on Kallard’s shoulder with slow, deliberate care.
“Because someone should, you stubborn little idiot,” Brakka had muttered, his lower pair of eyes fixed on the floorboards.
“Because the galaxy is already full of monsters who think everything is built to be broken for scrap.
And I’m entirely too old to watch another good engine burn out before its oil is even changed.”
Kallard hadn’t known what to say to that.
The raw, blunt honesty of the statement had pierced right through his warrior armor, leaving him feeling smaller and more vulnerable than he had since the day Planet Vegeta died.
So, being a Saiyan, he had done the only practical thing available: he had closed his eyes and pretended to pass out from the pain.
Brakka had obviously known he was faking, but he had pretended to believe the lie anyway, continuing his work in absolute silence until the sun came up over the mountains.
They were both very good at that specific kind of theater.
## Act IV: The Vigilante of the Rim
Now, two years after that bloody night on Vorda Station, they didn’t talk about things like family, or adoption, or fathers and sons.
Not directly.
The vocabulary of the outer rim didn’t have much room for those kinds of soft, sentimental definitions anyway.
Brakka called him kid, idiot, dramatic bounty boy, green menace, or “the walking repair bill.” Only once, during a terrible bout of space-flu that had left Kallard delirious and screaming about Death Balls in his sleep, had the old mechanic referred to him as “my boy” while pressing a cold cloth against his burning forehead—a minor slip of the tongue that Brakka denied so aggressively and violently the next morning that Kallard had chosen to let him keep the lie for the sake of his workshop droids.
Kallard, in turn, called him old man, grease goblin, four-eyed tyrant, or “the supervisor.” Only once, after a massive, multi-faction shootout on an outlaw docking platform where Brakka had used his old underworld communication codes to override the station’s automated laser turrets and save Kallard from a corporate execution squad, had Kallard looked at the mechanic and said, “Thanks, Dad.”
That particular choice of words had caused Brakka to drop a twenty-pound industrial hydrospanner directly onto his own organic left foot, resulting in three minutes of the most creative and terrifying cursing Kallard had ever heard in his life.
So, naturally, Kallard saved that specific title for absolute emergencies.
The *Wayfarer* had grown alongside them over the years, changing from a broken-down piece of surplus scrap into a legendary shadow in its own right.
When Brakka had first dragged him into that hidden ravine, the ship had been nothing more than an aging, long-range scout cutter with good structural lines and an incredible collection of bad habits.
Now, it was something entirely unique to the sector.
The silver-and-gray imperial hull plates had been completely stripped down and repainted in a dull, light-absorbing matte black, with long, jagged streaks of deep hunter green running along the leading edges of the wings.
The primary sub-light engines had been entirely overhauled, their internal nozzles bored out and replaced with custom titanium-alloy impellers that allowed for instantaneous, violent direction changes rather than long-range fuel efficiency.
The ship wasn’t built for a standard, prolonged dogfight against a military squadron; it was built to drop out of hyperspace without a sound, claim its target, and vanish back into the void before the local defense monitors could even resolve the blur on their screens.
The advanced stealth cloak device worked roughly eighty-five percent of the time—provided the ship wasn’t flying through a dense cloud of ionized space dust, getting too close to a blue giant star, or feeling personally insulted by Kallard’s handling of the navigation stick.
Brakka constantly insisted that machines were nothing more than cold arrangements of copper, silicon, and steel, completely devoid of emotional capacity.
Kallard, however, remained absolutely convinced that the ship’s primary cloaking computer possessed a deeply vindictive personality that actively hated him.
Both assessments were probably entirely accurate.
The upper flight deck was kept meticulously clean—a rule Kallard had enforced after a loose hydro-wrench had slid across the console during a high-G turn and accidentally wiped their primary destination coordinates.
Brakka called the clean, organized bridge “sterile, boring, and emotionally empty,” preferring his own workshop chaos, but he kept his loose tools off the flight deck anyway.
The lower deck housed their separate small quarters, the galley kitchen, two compact chemical washrooms, a large cargo bay that had been lined with reinforced lead plates to hold dangerous bounties, a fully functional medical station, and a secondary cargo bay that Kallard had completely hollowed out to use as a private training gym.
It was a space defined by the dozens of deep, fist-shaped dents and scorched blast marks covering the iron walls—proof of every single time Kallard’s training sessions had gotten out of hand.
## Act V: The Intercom and the Incinerator
Directly above the primary cockpit console, pinned to the wall with a pair of magnetic clips, hung a faded, yellowed digital printout of an official Galactic Patrol bounty notice.
GALACTIC PATROL BOUNTY NOTICE
TARGET ALIAS: RONIN
SPECIES DESIGNATION: UNKNOWN (SUSPECTED MERCENARY HYBRID)
PRIMARY OFFENSES:
– ILLEGAL PLANETARY TRESPASSING (SECTORS 12 THROUGH 19)
– UNREGISTERED BOUNTY ACTIVITY / GUILD LAW VIOLATION
– UNAUTHORIZED INTERERENCE WITH CORPORATE SECURITY OPERATIONS
– MULTIPLE UNPAID DOCKING FINES (VORDA STATION, PORT KAPPA)
– SUSPECTED ASSAULT ON LICENSED REVENUE ENFORCEMENT OFFICER
REWARD STATUS: PENDING STATUS REVIEW (LOW-PRIORITY TRACKING)
CURRENT TARGET PROFILE SKETCH: [IMAGE NOT FOUND / DIGITAL DISTORTION]
========================================================================
“`
The rough, hand-drawn digital sketch on the notice looked absolutely nothing like him—it showed a generic, three-eyed bipedal alien with an enormous jaw and a pair of pointed ears that looked more like an Appule grunt than a Saiyan survivor.
Kallard currently used the printout as a physical bookmark to keep his place in a handwritten training log where he recorded his daily ki outputs.
Brakka called keeping the notice on the bridge a sign of “unparalleled, teenage arrogance that’s going to invite a sniper bullet to the party.” Kallard simply called it “functional interior decor.”
Later that evening, long after the desert sun had vanished completely behind the mountains and left the ravine in a cold, blue shadow, Kallard stood alone in the center of the reinforced training bay.
He had left his tunic on the bench, his hands and forearms wrapped tight in clean white training cloth, his eyes fixed on a fresh row of heavy-duty iron armor plates that Brakka had bolted to the structural wall to replace the ones Kallard had destroyed during the previous week’s session.
He raised his right hand, his fingers curved into a loose claw shape as he drew a short, steady breath.
The ki gathered in the center of his palm.
When he had first started trying to manipulate his energy signature on this planet, the results had been incredibly ugly—nothing more than rough, unrefined balls of concussive force that exploded the moment they touched a surface.
They were bricks of energy, thrown with all the tactical sophistication of a street thug throwing a rock through a window.
But he didn’t want to throw bricks anymore.
He wanted moves.
His own moves.
He knew from his old memories that the legendary fighters of this universe all possessed distinct, highly refined techniques that defined their style.
Goku had the *Kamehameha* because Master Roshi had spent fifty years learning how to channel the body’s internal latent energy into a single, focused wave.
Piccolo had developed the *Special Beam Cannon* because he possessed a terrifying genetic genius combined with a cold, piercing hatred that allowed him to sharpen his ki into a drilling laser that could punch through a Saiyan’s chest armor.
Vegeta had shaped his royal pride into techniques like the *Galick Gun* and the *Final Flash*—massive, sweeping torrents of energy designed to erase entire geographic regions from a map.
Kallard had no ancient schools to guide him.
He had no legendary master sitting on a mountain, no secret scrolls hidden in a vault, and no inherited library of military techniques to download into his brain.
He had to build every single pathway from scratch, using nothing but his vague memories of a television screen and the brutal, immediate necessities of survival in the outer rim.
“Let’s try the compression sequence again,” he whispered to the empty room.
He closed his eyes, drawing the green ki up from his baseline, but instead of letting it expand into a sphere around his knuckles, he forced the energy to drop into a tight, linear falling pattern along his forearm.
He focused his mind, visualizing a series of small, highly dense points of light—like a string of stars falling through an atmospheric entry lane.
Five distinct, marble-sized spheres of green energy formed in a neat row above his wrist, rotating slowly around his skin, humming with a high-pitched, vibrating whine that sounded like a Nest of hornets.
“Starfall,” Kallard muttered, his eyes snapping open.
He thrust his right arm forward, his fingers snapping open.
The five marbles of energy fired in rapid, instantaneous succession, tearing across the hundred-foot training bay in a fraction of a second.
They didn’t move like a standard, slow-moving energy blast; they traveled like high-velocity sniper rounds, each one hitting the heavy iron armor plate on the wall with a sharp, metallic *ping-ping-ping-ping-ping*.
Every single blast struck within a microscopic three-millimeter radius of the last, the localized heat and kinetic force multiplying exponentially until the final round drilled clean through the three-inch-thick layered iron plate, leaving a neat, glowing red hole that went straight into the secondary reinforcement beams.
Kallard let out his breath, a genuine smile of satisfaction spreading across his face as he dropped his arm.
The structural compression was holding.
The technique was becoming reliable.
Then, the final, fifth blast, having punched through the armor plate at a slight, uneven angle against the hidden iron beams, ricocheted violently off the internal structural weld.
The green marble bounced straight backward across the room, zipped past Kallard’s left ear close enough to burn away a stray strand of his black hair, and slammed directly into the electronic control housing of the primary cargo bay door behind him.
*BOOM.*
A bright flash of blue sparks filled the back of the room as the control panel melted into slag.
The automated pneumatic seals on the cargo door failed instantly, the massive steel door sliding open six inches before jamming on its tracks with a horrific mechanical scream.
The cold, high-pressure night wind of the ravine rushed into the room, sending his training cloths flying across the floorboards while the automated emergency sealant nozzles began spraying a thick cloud of sticky white foam all over the deck plates.
A second later, the ship’s primary intercom speaker on the wall let out a loud, distorted screech as the mic line opened up.
“RONIN!” Brakka’s voice screamed through the speaker, the audio line clipping badly from the sheer volume of the old man’s shouting.
“What did you just hit?
The primary hull pressure monitors on the bridge are lighting up like a corporate festival!
Tell me you didn’t just put another hole in my transport structural frame!”
Kallard stared at the smoking control panel, then down at the white foam slowly accumulating around his boots, his smile turning into a guilty, awkward grimace.
He stepped over to the wall speaker, hitting the talk toggle with his thumb.
“I’m…
I’m improving, old man.
The directional focus on the compression sequence worked perfectly.
I drilled clean through the iron target plates.”
The intercom remained silent for two long, terrifying seconds.
Then came the sound of heavy, furious combat boots thundering down the upper metal companionway above his head.
“You’re not improving, you destructive little menace!” Brakka’s voice roared back through the speaker line.
“You’re *invoicing*!
That is the only thing your training is achieving!
Get away from that console before I come down there and use your tail as a primary fuel line winch!”
Kallard winced, letting go of the toggle speaker as the heavy iron door of the training bay was forced open from the outside, revealing a thoroughly enraged four-eyed mechanic holding a massive industrial fire extinguisher.
## Act VI: The Cryon-7 Manifest
The next morning, the incident with the cargo door was temporarily buried beneath the immediate, cold necessities of the guild economy.
They sat together at the primary galley table on the lower deck, eating a quick, silent breakfast of hard ration biscuits and rehydrated protein broth while the ship’s primary communication console scrolled through the latest updates from the regional bounty boards.
Kallard had a fresh strip of medical tape wrapped across his left knuckles, while Brakka’s mechanical arm was making a small, angry clicking sound with every movement—proof that the old man had spent three hours working on the door tracks before dawn.
The communication screen flickered with a bright red notification banner, indicating a high-priority update from the independent border sectors.
Kallard leaned his back against the bulkheads, his dark eyes tracking the text as it scrolled past:
BOUNTY ALERT – REGIONAL SECTOR 9
TARGET ID: KRELL (DESERTER CLASS-3)
SPECIES DESIGNATION: APPULE INFANTRY EXTENSION
CURRENT LOCATION: CRYON-7 (FROZEN MOON / ATMOSPHERE MINIMAL)
PRIMARY OFFENSE:
– THEFT OF CLASSIFIED IMPERIAL RECONNAISSANCE MANIFESTS
– UNAUTHORIZED SALE OF TACTICAL SECTOR DATA TO OUTLAW HUBS
GUILD REWARD: 12,000 CREDITS (ALIVE REQ / DATA CHIP INTACT)
========================================================================
“`
Kallard set his ration biscuit down against the metal table, his eyes sharpening until the pupils went perfectly still.
“Frieza Force recon files,” he said, his voice dropping into a low, serious tone.
“A real deserter from the logistics line.”
Brakka stopped his wooden spoon mid-air, all four of his eyes shifting upward from his bowl to look at the screen, then sliding sideways to study the kid’s face.
He let out a low, disapproving grunt through his nose.
“There it is.
Every single time that specific name flashes on a monitor, your ears perk up like a wild hunting beast smelling fresh copper in the grass.
It’s a disease with you, kid.”
“What kind of files are we talking about, Brakka?” Kallard asked, ignoring the old man’s commentary as he leaned forward over the map display.
“If he was working the regional logistics lines for Sector 9, those files don’t just contain standard cargo weights.
They contain active troop patrol windows, flagship refueling schedules, and the encryption codes for the automated border gates.”
“And they also contain enough imperial tracking flags to bring a full squadron of heavy interceptors down on whoever is holding the chip,” Brakka growled, setting his bowl down with a sharp thud that made the spoons rattle.
“Cryon-7 is a complete nightmare of a target, Ronin.
It’s a dead, frozen chunk of volcanic rock on the edge of the system.
The oxygen levels are practically non-existent, the temperature is low enough to freeze standard hydraulic fluid inside a speeder’s lines in less than ten minutes, and the surface storms are so thick you can’t see your own hand through a polarized helmet visor.
It’s the perfect place for a desperate rat to hide if he’s waiting for a black-market buyer.”
Kallard stood up from the table, walking over to the weapon locker near the door and pulling out his black-and-green chest plating.
“I’ll take the contract.
Get the engines warming up, old man.”
“I know you’re taking it, you stubborn idiot,” Brakka muttered, standing up from his stool with a loud groan from his lower spine.
He reached over to his tool harness, checking the charge levels on his primary plasma cutter.
“Which is exactly why I’m already changing the fuel ratios on the main thrusters.”
Kallard paused, his hand holding the chest plate buckle as he looked back over his shoulder.
“You’re coming with me on this one?
You told me last week that you were done traveling to frozen systems until your joints stopped aching.”
Brakka walked past him toward the bridge ladder, his mechanical hand snapping its fingers with a sharp hydraulic click.
“Someone has to keep the primary landing gear from freezing solid while you’re out there punching the weather, kid.
If I leave you unsupervised on Cryon-7, you’re going to find a way to growl at a glacier and get yourself buried under an avalanche before the bounty is even collected.”
Kallard felt a warm, quiet sense of security settle behind his ribs, though he kept his expression perfectly flat as he buckled his armor plates into place.
“I didn’t ask for a supervisor, old man.”
“You didn’t ask to crash into my valley three years ago either, but we’re both currently living with the consequences of that engine failure,” Brakka growled back from the top of the ladder.
“Get your gear secured and get up to the bridge.
The weather reports from the moon are getting worse by the hour.”
## Act VII: The Warning on the Screen
Before Kallard could clear the ladder, a second, massive alert banner suddenly flashed across the primary communication monitor, wiping the Cryon-7 data slate from the screen completely.
This banner wasn’t the standard red of a guild contract; it was a deep, pulsing crimson that indicated a total regional sector lockdown.
CRITICAL SECTOR NOTICE – SYSTEM LOCK
MILITARY TRANSIT CONFIRMED: SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCE 1
DEPLOYMENT VECTOR: NORTHERN TRADE ARC / SECTOR 9 PERIMETER
COMMAND RATING: EXTREME DANGER / IMMEDIATE EVACUATION ADVISED
UNIT CALL SIGN: GINYU FORCE (ALL MEMBERS ACTIVE)
“`
Kallard went perfectly still on the ladder rungs, his fingers locking around the iron bars with enough sudden, instinctive force to leave deep indentations in the metal plating.
The air inside his lungs went completely cold, a massive wave of ancient, television-born memories rushing back into his thoughts with the force of a physical blow.
He saw the vivid, primary colors of the elite combat suits.
He saw the ridiculous, highly choreographed military poses.
He saw the laughing, arrogant faces of Recoome, Burter, Jeice, and Guldo.
And then he saw Captain Ginyu standing in the center of a burning wasteland, his purple skin covered in deep ridges, his power level registering at an absolute, terrifying one hundred and twenty thousand on a standard monitor.
One hundred and twenty thousand.
At his current maximum output—even if he opened the tap completely and let the *Primal Instinct* state tear his muscles apart for thirty seconds—Kallard could barely touch twenty thousand before his heart stopped beating.
Against a single member of that squad, his current strength wasn’t just insufficient; it was a joke.
It was a statistical rounding error on an imperial spreadsheet.
Brakka had stopped at the top of the bridge companionway, his four eyes fixed on the crimson alert banner scrolling down the screen.
He looked down through the ladder hatch at Kallard’s white, tense face, his voice losing all of its usual sarcastic humor.
“You know that name, kid?”
Kallard swallowed hard, the saliva tasting like copper dust in his throat.
He forced his fingers to release their grip on the ladder bars, his voice dropping into a flat, dead whisper.
“Yes.
I know them.”
“Are they as bad as the guild rumors say?” Brakka asked, his lower pair of eyes narrowing.
“The trading pilots claim they’re nothing but a collection of theatrical freaks who enjoy playing games with their targets.”
“They are freaks,” Kallard said, his voice steadying as he climbed up onto the bridge deck, his eyes fixed on the map display.
“But they’re freaks who can erase a continent from orbit if they don’t like the local music.
If any member of that squad drops out of hyperspace in this sector, we are not on that planet.
We are not in that system.
We are not even in the same quadrant.”
Brakka checked the coordinate line flashing along the bottom of the alert banner, his mechanical finger tapping the navigation console to calculate the distance between the Northern Trade Arc and their current route toward Cryon-7.
“The trajectory shows them moving toward the core worlds, about four parsecs north of our target vector.
If we stick to the lower hyperspace lanes and keep the *Wayfarer’s* primary cloaking devices running on low-power mode, we won’t even show up as a ghost on their long-range scanners.”
Kallard reached over the console, his hand quickly dragging the navigation coordinates three degrees south, lengthening their travel path by four hours just to increase the safety buffer between their ship and the crimson sector line.
Brakka watched the adjustment, a low, approving grunt escaping his gray-blue chest.
“That’s cowardice, kid.
Pure, unadulterated running from a fight.”
Kallard sat down in the pilot’s leather seat, his hands wrapping firmly around the primary steering handles.
“No, old man.
That’s not cowardice.
That’s basic math.
And right now, the math is the only thing keeping us out of a body bag.”
Brakka smirked, dropping his heavy frame into the co-pilot’s station beside him and buckling his security straps.
“Good.
You’re finally starting to learn how to value your own skin over your pride, dramatic bounty boy.
Let’s see if that philosophy survives the weather on Cryon-7.”
## Act VIII: The Cold Road Ahead
The *Wayfarer* rose from the natural stone ravine with a slow, majestic grace, her custom sub-light thrusters emitting nothing more than a faint, low-frequency hum as the black-and-green hull cleared the camouflage netting.
The small, rural settlement down in the valley shrank away behind them, turning into a cluster of gray beads dropped in the red dirt before the primary atmospheric clouds swallowed the ship whole.
Kallard held the stick steady, his eyes tracking the altitude indicators as the pale orange sky began to darken into the deep, absolute black of outer space.
The stars opened up ahead of them—billions of cold, glittering points of light scattered across a canvas that didn’t care about dead worlds, or dead species, or the desperate plans of a seventeen-year-old kid in modified armor.
Brakka sat in the co-pilot’s chair, pretending to be deeply occupied with a digital repair log for a cargo hauler, but his organic fingers were tapping a nervous rhythm against his armrest—a clear sign that leaving the surface of his planet after seven years of self-imposed isolation was hitting him much harder than he was willing to admit out loud.
“You doing alright over there, old man?” Kallard asked, his gaze remaining fixed on the primary hyperspace lane indicators.
Brakka let out a sharp, defensive huff through his nose, not looking up from his data slate.
“I’ve flown through burning military debris fields while being chased by imperial capital ships, kid.
This little jaunt to a frozen moon is nothing more than a weekend vacation for my joints.”
“That wasn’t what I asked you,” Kallard said softly, his voice dropping its defensive mercenary edge.
Brakka’s mechanical fingers stopped tapping against the armrest.
He turned all four of his unblinking eyes toward the side viewport, watching the red marble of his home planet slowly curve away beneath the ship’s wing.
“I haven’t left that ravine since the day the garbage scow dropped me off with a bleeding elbow joint, Ronin,” the old mechanic whispered, his gravelly voice losing all of its biting humor, leaving behind only the deep, bone-weary exhaustion of an old veteran.
“After I lost the arm…
after I realized what that transport ship had been carrying to those mines…
I told myself I was done with the wider galaxy.
I told myself I was just going to sit in my dirt, fix broken engines for farmers, collect my little credits, and let the rest of the universe rot in its own filth.
Let Frieza take what he wants.
Let the Patrol arrest whoever they want.
It wasn’t my engine line anymore.”
Kallard glance sideways at him, his dark eyes serious beneath his black bandana.
“What changed your mind, old man?”
Brakka turned his head back around, all four of his eyes looking straight into Kallard’s face with an expression that was terrifyingly soft, protective, and completely genuine.
“You crashed into my dirt, you stubborn little idiot,” Brakka said plainly, a tiny, tired smile touching his lips.
“You dropped out of the sky inside a burning tin ball, took the time to save a bunch of blue-skinned farmers you didn’t even know, and then looked at me with a face full of blood and told me you were going to get strong enough to make a god remember your name.
A mechanic can’t just sit around watching an engine like that throw sparks without wanting to tune the cylinders.”
Kallard looked back toward the main viewscreen, his heart swelling with a strange, heavy emotion he hadn’t felt since the last time Morga had punched him in the chest for luck.
He didn’t answer.
He couldn’t.
The words were too big for his mouth.
“Alright,” Brakka grunted, hitting a series of toggles on the console to engage the primary hyperdrive computers.
“Set the course before I get entirely too sentimental and throw myself out of the main airlock to save my reputation.”
Kallard smiled, his fingers tightening around the manual guidance sticks as the primary hyperspace indicators turned from green to a solid, pulsing white.
“Course locked.
Cryon-7 sector.
Entering the lane…
now.”
He shoved the primary throttle handles forward.
The stars ahead of the *Wayfarer* didn’t just move; they stretched out into long, brilliant lines of silver light, the entire ship jumping into the white-hot blur of hyperspace with a sudden, violent surge of speed that pressed both passengers deep into their leather seats.
They flew deeper into the dark, uncharted sectors of a galaxy that had tried to turn them both into scrap metal—two ghosts walking out of a dead past, flying a stolen ship under a fake name, heading toward a frozen moon where a collection of stolen secrets was waiting for a buyer.
Kallard wasn’t ready for Frieza yet.
He wasn’t ready for the Ginyu Force, or Zarbon, or the high-level horrors that were currently waiting for him in the core worlds.
But as he watched the white light of hyperspace wash over his green-and-black armor plates, he knew he was getting closer with every single breath he took.
He had a ship that could run through the dark, a mentor who wouldn’t let him die a stupid death, and a beast under the door that was slowly learning how to listen to its master’s voice.
And out here at the edge of nowhere…
that was more than enough to start a war with.
## Act IX: The Interstellar Vault
The hyperspace lane was a tunnel of shifting, iridescent light that cast a rhythmic series of blue and white shadows across the bridge of the *Wayfarer*.
Kallard adjusted the secondary tracking monitors on his console, his brow furrowing as he noted the subtle fluctuations in the ship’s primary fuel pressure.
The journey to Cryon-7 would take roughly fourteen hours even with the custom thruster arrays engaged, a long stretch of silence that gave him entirely too much time to sit inside his own head.
Brakka had fallen asleep in the co-pilot’s chair, his head tilted back against the leather padding, all four of his eyes closed while his mechanical right arm hummed a low, quiet maintenance cycle on its own.
The old man’s breathing was heavy, a rhythmic, gravelly snore that filled the quiet space of the bridge like the ticking of an old clock.
Kallard unbuckled his safety straps, stood up from the pilot’s chair with a slow, fluid movement that didn’t disturb the sleeping mechanic, and walked down the small iron ladder toward the lower deck levels.
He needed to move his legs; the Saiyan biology didn’t handle long periods of physical inactivity particularly well, the muscles constantly demanding exertion to burn off the steady stream of latent energy circulating through his system.
He entered his private quarters—a tiny, spartan cabin containing nothing more than a built-in metal bunk, a single overhead halogen light, and a reinforced storage locker for his gear.
He crouched down by the foot of the bed, reached into a small seam beneath the metal framing, and pulled out his private data log.
The case was scuffed, covered in grease stains and scratches from three years of travel, but the electronic lock still clicked open instantly under his thumbprint clearance.
He clicked the monitor on, his eyes tracking the columns of numbers and historical dates he had painstakingly recorded over the years.
It was his personal interstellar vault—the only place in the entire galaxy where his real identity was preserved in cold, digital script.
PERSONAL LOG: KALLARD / ALIAS: RONIN
CURRENT RECKONING YEAR: AGE 737 (ESTIMATED MARGIN: +/- 3 ROTATIONS)
PLANETARY DESTRUCTION STATUS: RECORDED / VERIFIED
SURVIVAL RECORD – INDEPENDENT SQUADRONS:
– BARDOCK SQUAD: STATUS UNKNOWN (LOGS INDICATE DEFEDANCE PROTOCOL)
– PRINCE VEGETA SQUAD: RECON CONFIRMED / RUNNING IMPERIAL SCRIP
– INFANT KAKAROT DESIGNATION: SECTOR 44-TRANSIT VERIFIED
CURRENT PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT TARGETS:
– BASELINE OUTPUT STABILITY: REACH 7,000 WITHOUT CELLULAR TRAUMA
– STARFALL TECHNIQUE DRILL: INCREASE COUNT TO EIGHT RAPID ROUNDS
– PRIMAL STATE DURATION: EXTEND TO SIXTY SECONDS (CRITICAL NEED)
“
He ran his fingers over the screen, his mind drifting back to the numbers he had recorded for his childhood growth on Planet Vegeta.
He had been a weirdly shaped puzzle piece back then—strong enough to be placed under military command tracking by the time he was five years old, but too erratic to be trusted with a permanent squad leadership position.
The old commanders had called him a warhound, a primitive tool that was useful for breaking through a heavy planetary defense line but too unstable to be integrated into the long-range diplomatic expansion plans of the empire.
He remembered a mission when he was twelve years old, his power level hovering around twenty-seven hundred.
They had been sent to clear a subterranean bunker system on a rocky world named Tulu.
He had been cornered in a dark, narrow corridor by a squad of massive, insectoid defenders carrying high-frequency sonic lances.
His squad mates had already retreated, leaving him behind to hold the line while the extraction ships warmed up their thrusters.
The panic had hit him like a physical blow, a sudden, blinding heat exploding out of his genetic core that made his vision turn a sharp, jagged green.
He didn’t remember the details of the fight; he only remembered waking up three hours later in the extraction bay, his hands covered in blue insect blood, his nose bleeding so heavily he could barely breathe, and his power monitor showing a temporary peak reading of over thirty-five hundred.
The squad leaders hadn’t congratulated him when he woke up.
They had looked at him through the glass of the medical bay with a cold, suspicious fear in their eyes—the look a handler gives a hunting beast that has started to grow too large for its chain.
“They were afraid of the potential,” Kallard whispered to himself, shutting the data log off and sliding it back into its hidden compartment beneath the bunk.
“They knew that if a low-class filler rat learned how to handle that tap without breaking his own frame, the whole royal measuring stick wouldn’t mean a damn thing anymore.”
He stood up, adjusting his dark bandana before heading down the corridor toward the primary cargo bay to resume his physical drills.
He had a frozen moon to prepare for, a deserter to catch, and thirty seconds of emerald fire that he needed to turn into a permanent weapon.
## Act X: The Grime of Port Kappa
The *Wayfarer* dropped out of hyperspace on the perimeter of the Cryon system twelve hours later, the white lines of light snapping back into steady, cold stars across the panoramic viewscreen.
Directly ahead of the nose sat Cryon-7—a massive, jagged marble of blue-white ice and dark gray volcanic rock that looked like an old bone floating in a cold soup.
Two massive rings of metallic dust and frozen debris circled the moon’s equator, spinning slowly in the pale light of a dying white dwarf star.
“Alright, kid,” Brakka said, his mechanical hand tapping a series of keys to engage the secondary thermal dampeners along the hull wings.
“The weather monitors down on the surface are reading a level-four ice storm over the primary landing district.
The visibility is down to less than fifty meters, and the wind speeds are high enough to tear the steering flaps straight off a light speeder if you approach at the wrong angle.”
Kallard locked his helmet into place, the dark green visor sliding down over his face with a pressurized *hiss*.
The red-lens scouter interface flickered into life over his left eye, displaying a series of shifting terrain maps and localized temperature readings.
“Where’s the deserter’s signal originating from, old man?”
“A small, abandoned mining facility inside the sector named sector 4-Gray,” Brakka said, pointing his mechanical finger at a blinking white indicator on the tactical map table.
“It’s an old subterranean shaft that was bored out by a corporate mining guild twenty years ago and left to freeze over when the mineral veins ran dry.
It’s got three separate levels of reinforced concrete bulkheads, heavy structural insulation, and enough old power wiring to run a small scanner jammer.
The rat’s likely sitting down on the lowest level where the thermal sensors can’t resolve his heat signature.”
Kallard gripped the steering handles, his fingers moving with slow, practiced precision as he guided the black-and-green ship down through the upper atmosphere layers of the frozen moon.
“Keep the main thrusters running on a low-vibration cycle while I’m down there, Brakka.
If the local scrap dealers realize there’s a custom cutter sitting on the landing pads, they’ll have the primary engine components stripped before the ice even clears the glass.”
“I’ve got the primary security turrets synced to my personal armrest controls, kid,” Brakka growled back, his upper two eyes blinking with professional confidence.
“If any local scrapper gets within ten meters of my wings, they’re going to get an immediate, four-barreled education in private property laws.
Just focus on finding that Appule rat and bringing back that data chip before the storm drops the temperature past the freezing point of our backup batteries.”
The *Wayfarer* hit the upper layer of the ice storm with a loud, concussive *bang*, the entire frame shaking violently as the frozen winds slammed into the swept wings.
Kallard held the sticks tight, his Saiyan muscles tightening automatically to absorb the vibration as he guided the ship down through the whiteout, heading straight into the dark heart of the frozen moon.
## Act XI: The Subterranean Chase
The descent through the storm was a blind, bone-rattling nightmare of gray ice and screaming wind.
Kallard guided the *Wayfarer* down using nothing but the secondary terrain radar indicators on his scouter lens, the visual viewscreen completely obscured by a solid sheet of frozen whiteout.
The ship’s landing gear touched down onto the ice-crusted concrete platform of the abandoned mining facility with a loud, heavy *crunch*, the automated magnetic clamps engaging instantly to anchor the vessel against the seventy-mile-an-hour gales.
The lower airlock door slid open with a sharp, pressurized *hiss*, a blast of freezing, low-oxygen air rushing into the corridor.
Kallard stepped out onto the landing platform, his tattered gray cloak snapping violently in the wind like a broken wing, his heavy combat boots digging into the sheet ice as he walked toward the facility’s primary entry hatch.
The interior of the mining shaft was a cavernous, pitch-black labyrinth of frozen iron structures, hanging cables caked in white rime, and narrow stone corridors that echoed with the constant, mournful howling of the wind from the surface.
The temperature inside was low enough to turn his breath into immediate ice crystals against the inside of his helmet visor, the only illumination coming from the weak green glow of his scouter interface.
Kallard walked with a slow, deliberate pace, his energy signature suppressed down to his absolute baseline of nine hundred.
He kept his shoulders relaxed and his tail perfectly still beneath his leather belt, moving through the dark tunnels like a ghost hunting for a place to rest.
His scouter lens suddenly flickered, a tiny white indicator dot appearing at the edge of the tracking grid.
*PROXIMITY RADAR: TARGET SIGNATURE ISOLATED.*
*SECTOR: LEVEL 3 STORAGE VAULT.*
*DISTANCE: 200 METERS.*
*POWER LEVEL RECKONING: 1,150.*
“Found you, you little rat,” Kallard whispered to himself, his voice sounding small inside the enclosed space of his helmet.
He dropped into a low, predatory crouch, his combat boots making absolutely no sound as he glided through the frozen corridors, heading straight down the rusted iron companionway stairs toward the lowest level of the facility.
The Level 3 storage vault was a massive, circular room lined with hundreds of hollowed-out cargo lockers, the center dominated by a large, ancient geothermal generator that was currently letting out a weak, rhythmic hum.
Sitting by a small portable heater near the generator core was Krell, the Appule deserter.
He was a small, gangly alien with yellowish-green skin, a large bulbous head covered in small ridges, and a pair of wide, terrified yellow eyes that kept darting toward every shadow in the room.
He was wearing a scuffed, dirty Frieza Force infantry uniform with the shoulder plates torn off, his shaking hands trying to warm a small digital data slate over the heater coils.
Kallard stepped out from the shadow of a large cargo locker at the entrance of the vault, his tattered gray cloak hanging loosely over his black-and-green chest plate.
He didn’t draw a weapon.
He didn’t lift his hands.
He just stood there in the green twilight, his dark eyes fixed on the target’s face.
“Krell,” Kallard said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp that echoed sharply through the circular vault.
“The chase is completely finished.
Put the data slate down on the crate and step away from the heater.”
The Appule deserter jumped three feet into the air with a sharp, terrified shriek of surprise, his data slate slipping from his fingers and clattering against the icy floorboards.
He scrambled backward against the geothermal generator, his yellow eyes widening with pure horror as he took in the black-and-green armor plates, the dark bandana covering the wild hair, and the tattered cloak.
“A-A bounty hunter?” Krell blubbered, his voice cracking with panic as his hands shook.
“How did you find me here?
The storm…
the regional jammers…
nobody was supposed to be able to track this signal!”
“Your tracking sequence was sloppy,” Kallard said, taking a slow step forward, his boots crunching lightly against the sheet ice.
“You left a visible data trail through three separate refueling stations in Sector 9 before you jumped to this rock.
The guild slate has been active for forty-eight hours.”
Krell’s gaze flicked desperately around the circular room, looking for an open hatch or a dark tunnel to run through, but Kallard was standing directly inside the only visible exit lane.
The deserter’s face twisted into an expression of raw, cornered malice, his right hand sliding slowly toward a heavy plasma blaster holstered at his hip.
“Don’t do it,” Kallard warned him, his voice flat.
“The math doesn’t work out in your favor, Krell.
Your current power level is barely eleven hundred and fifty.
You won’t even clear the holster before the room gets violent.”
“Go to hell, you imperial trash!” Krell screamed, his panic completely overriding his survival instincts as he ripped the plasma blaster from his holster and leveled the barrel straight at Kallard’s face.
*ZAP-ZAP-ZAP.*
Three bright, superheated red bolts of plasma tore through the cold vault air, the intense heat vaporizing the ice crystals on the floor as they traveled.
Kallard didn’t dodge.
He didn’t lift his arms to block the incoming energy.
He simply stood his ground, his suppressed energy signature suddenly expanding by a fraction of a fraction as he allowed his combat power level to jump up to his standard three thousand baseline.
An invisible, incredibly dense wall of kinetic ki energy erupted from his chest plating all at once, creating a localized pressure field directly in front of his boots.
The three red plasma bolts struck the invisible wall six inches from his armor, their energy instantly dispersing into a harmless shower of blue sparks that died against the icy floor.
Krell stared at the smoking air in front of the hunter, his mouth opening in a wide, silent gasp of pure, primordial terror as his scouter lens—if he had been wearing one—would have completely shattered from the sudden output calculation.
He dropped the blaster from his limp fingers, his knees buckling beneath him as he fell face-first onto the ice, weeping with fear.
“What…
what are you?” the deserter sobbed, his head hitting the dirt before Kallard’s boots.
“You’re not a regular rim mercenary…
that kind of energy…
you’re an imperial executioner!
Frieza sent you to finish me!”
Kallard walked over to the generator core, bent down with a slow, deliberate movement, and picked up the digital data slate from the icy floorboards.
He checked the status screen: the reconnaissance manifest files were completely intact, the encryption codes undamaged by the cold.
He slid the chip out of the slate casing, dropping it into a secure storage compartment on his utility belt.
He looked down at the trembling, yellow-skinned alien weeping in the dirt, the primitive, violent Saiyan blood inside his chest letting out a low, familiar rumble that demanded a final, lethal strike to clear the contract books.
It would be so simple to end it—a single, low-power ki burst to the back of the neck, and the deserter would stay on this frozen moon permanently.
That was how the empire handled thieves.
That was how his race had cleared their sectors for a thousand years.
But Kallard looked at the torn shoulder plates on Krell’s uniform—the raw, frayed fabric where the imperial insignia had been violently ripped away by a man who was simply desperate to escape the machine—and the human soul held the leash tight, pulling the beast back into the shadows.
He reached down, grabbed Krell by the back of his dirty collar with one hand, and hoisted him off the floor until they were eye-to-eye.
“Frieza didn’t send me,” Kallard said, his voice a low, terrifyingly calm whisper that made the deserter’s teeth click together.
“If Frieza had sent someone, you wouldn’t be breathing enough to ask questions.
I’m Ronin.
I work for the guild, and I work for myself.”
Krell blinked through his tears, his yellow eyes wide with confusion.
“You’re…
you’re not going to kill me?
You’re not bringing my head back to the command hub?”
“The contract slate requires you alive with the data chip intact,” Kallard said, tossing him back against the generator casing like a sack of old rags.
“The guild will handle your transit to an independent detention moon in the western sectors.
It’s a hard life, Krell, but there aren’t any white ships or purple enforcers running the yard down there.
It’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.”
He turned his back on the deserter, hitting the communication toggle on his wrist console as he walked toward the companionway stairs.
“Brakka.
The target is secured, the data chip is in the pouch, and the exit lane is clear.
Get the medical bay prepped for an extraction lift; it’s freezing down here.”
“Copy that, dramatic bounty boy,” Brakka’s gravelly voice crackled back through the helmet speaker, a faint sound of static interference running through the line.
“The main engines are warmed up and the security turrets are clear.
Get your ass back up the ladder before this storm drops another six inches of ice on my primary viewscreen.”
Kallard dropped his arm, a quiet, solid sense of accomplishment settling behind his ribs as he stepped through the dark stone doorway.
He had caught the thief, secured the data, and kept the monster inside his chest firmly behind its wooden door.
## Act XII: The Hyperspace Horizon
Three hours later, the *Wayfarer* rose from the frozen surface of Cryon-7 like a dark bird clearing a winter forest, her powerful sub-light engines vaporizing the ice accumulation on the landing pads as she rocketed straight back up into the cold, quiet void of space.
The frozen moon shrank away behind the rear viewports, turning back into a small, pale bone floating in the dark canvas of the sector as the ship adjusted its heading toward the independent guild hub on Port Kappa.
Kallard sat in the primary pilot’s chair, his hands loose but steady around the steering handles, his dark green armor plates cool against his chest.
His black bandana was tied tight around his forehead, his dark eyes watching the navigation indicators scroll past as the hyperdrive computer finished its final calculations.
Brakka was sitting at the co-pilot’s station beside him, carefully cleaning the internal lenses of Kallard’s old red-lens scouter with a small piece of silk cloth and a bottle of specialized fluid.
All four of his eyes were focused on the delicate electronic components, his mechanical hand moving with absolute, effortless precision.
“The data on that chip is verified, kid,” Brakka said, his gravelly voice dropping its usual biting edge as he slid the clean scouter back across the console toward Kallard’s hand.
“I ran a quick diagnostic pass through the secondary encryption layers while you were securing the prisoner in the lower bay.
Krell wasn’t lying—those files contain the complete regional transit schedules for every single Frieza Force supply transport running through Sector 9 for the next six months.”
Kallard picked up the scouter, snapping the red lens over his left ear with a clean, familiar click.
“That means we don’t just have a bounty reward coming, old man.
We have a list of targets.”
Brakka turned his chair around, all four of his unblinking eyes locking onto Kallard’s dark face with a heavy, serious intensity.
“It means you have a map of the fires, Ronin.
It means that every time an imperial transport drops out of hyperspace with a cargo bay full of stolen wealth or slave collars, you’re going to know exactly which corner of the ridge they’re landing on.”
Kallard looked out through the massive front viewscreen, his reflection staring back at him from the dark glass—the sharp jawline, the wild cropped hair, the dark, intense eyes of a warrior who had lost his planet but found his purpose in the dirt of the outer rim.
He reached down into his chest, searching past the muscle, past the bone, down into that deep, dark genetic core where the beast was sitting behind its door.
The animal was quiet now, resting in the shadows, its scratching stopped as it waited for the next command from its master.
It was growing stronger every single day, its power level climbing slowly but honestly along the tracks of a story that he was rewriting with every single contract he pulled from the slates.
He wasn’t a hero in the clean, legendary way the chronicles back on Earth would pretend—he was a bounty hunter, a space-faring scrapper, a hero for hire who took outlaws for credits and protected the weak because his human soul simply refused to let them burn alone in the dark.
He was Ronin.
A warrior with no master, a traveler with no home, a ghost walking through a galaxy that had tried to erase his name before he even learned how to fight.
“Engaging the hyperdrive lines, Brakka,” Kallard said, his voice a low, confident whisper that filled the quiet space of the bridge like iron.
“Pull the lever, kid,” Brakka smirked, leaning back in his station.
“Let’s see if we can get back to the shop before the water pump explodes again.”
Kallard shoved the primary throttle handles forward with a single, smooth motion.
The stars ahead of the *Wayfarer* stretched out into long, brilliant lines of silver fire, the entire ship jumping into the white-hot blur of hyperspace with a deafening, triumphant roar that carried them away from the frozen moon and out toward the long, dangerous horizon of a universe that was finally starting to remember their name.