Cryon-7 looked completely dead from orbit.
It wasn’t the quiet, peaceful kind of dead that makes a traveler want to slow their ship down and look out the viewing windows for a while.
It was mean.
It was a frozen, jagged marble of blue-white ice and dark volcanic stone that looked like a collection of broken ribs floating in a cold corner of the sector.
The moon’s atmosphere was thin, sharp, and constantly in motion, wrapped in thick bands of white storm clouds that tore across the surface at ninety miles an hour.
Vapor clouds, heavy with frozen methane and sulfur dust, rolled across the valleys in slow, violent sheets.
One microsecond the ground below would be completely hidden from sight under a white blanket, and the next the storm would part just enough to expose the black mountain chains underneath, looking like a row of broken teeth biting at the red sunlight.
The *Wayfarer* drifted three hundred miles above the cloud deck, running on a low-power stealth configuration that left the cockpit cold and dark.
The ship’s matte-black nose was angled toward the moon’s northern hemisphere, using the massive, green-rimmed shadow of a nearby gas giant to stay completely invisible to any automated long-range scanning grids floating through the commercial spaceways.
Inside the small bridge, every single warning light Brakka had ever wired into the dashboard seemed personally offended by the environment below.
Red and orange indicator needles were twitching against their glass housings, their internal relays humming with a steady, high-pitched buzz that sounded like a nest of angry insects.
Brakka sat in the primary pilot’s seat, all four of his unblinking eyes shifting with a fast, practiced rhythm between the primary radar display and the hull temperature gauges.
He let out a low, gravelly grunt from deep inside his broad chest, his organic left hand dropping onto the main thruster levers while his mechanical right arm remained locked against his side harness.
“No,” Brakka said, his voice flat and hard like stone.
Kallard was standing directly behind his stool, his arms folded tight over his scuffed black-and-green chest plating.
The weak amber light from the diagnostic monitors caught the edges of his jawline and the dark, weathered fabric of the bandana tied around his short-cut hair.
Beneath his long canvas tunic, his brown furry tail was wrapped so tight around his midsection that the leather binding straps were digging into his lower spine, creating a dull, constant ache that he had been ignoring since they cleared the last hyperspace lane.
“You haven’t even heard the navigation parameters yet, old man,” Kallard said, his voice even.
“I don’t need to hear the parameters, kid,” Brakka growled, his upper pair of eyes narrowing as he tapped a flickering gauge on the panel.
“I heard three specific phrases come out of that mouth of yours down in the galley: ‘frozen moon,’ ‘Frieza Force deserter,’ and ‘stolen reconnaissance maps.’ In my professional engineering opinion, that is three separate, airtight reasons to keep the hyperdrive locked and the nose pointed toward a warm station with decent plumbing.
My joints are already screaming just from looking at the primary thermal sensor.”
“The reconnaissance maps are worth the frostbite, Brakka,” Kallard said, leaning over the back of the seat to point at a blinking indicator on the map display.
“Varkos’s private data core didn’t just contain common cargo logs.
It had a full operational tracking tag for this specific sector.
If the files are accurate, the deserter hiding down in those canyons has the complete transit manifests for every single low-priority imperial transport running along the outer rim routes for the next two cycles.”
“And he also has a level-four ice storm sitting directly on top of his last known coordinate ping,” Brakka spat, his mechanical fingers clicking against the console.
“Look at those atmospheric readings, boy.
The oxygen levels down in the valleys are practically non-existent.
It’s the kind of air that makes a man’s lungs file a formal union complaint after three steps.
The localized temperature is currently sitting several degrees below reasonable, three degrees past unpleasant, and about twelve inches into personally insulting to anyone who isn’t made of solid iron.”
Kallard smirked, his hand dropping to his belt where his old red-lens scouter was clipped next to his utility pouch.
“Can the armor’s internal heating layers compensate for the variance?”
“For a while, sure, if you don’t mind the primary battery cell draining down to zero in less than two hours,” Brakka muttered, his lower pair of eyes tracking a massive vapor plume rising from a volcanic fissure on the screen.
“But that scouter of yours won’t like it.
The lens casing is already cracked from the shootout at Kessik Yard; the moisture’s going to find its way inside the housing and freeze the primary logic board before you even finish climbing down the ramp.
Your suit seals are going to stiffen up like old leather, your exposed cheeks are going to turn blue before noon, and that massive, legendary ego of yours is going to take a severe hit, though I admit that last asset has managed to survive worse weather over the years.”
“Are you completely done with the maintenance report?” Kallard asked, his dark pupils steady.
“No, I am not,” Brakka snapped, turning his massive blue-gray head around to glare up at him with all four eyes.
“The magnetic ice caked into those canyon walls is going to bounce our primary sensor sweeps straight back into our own receivers.
Long-range comms are going to be completely dead the second you drop below the ridge line, and half my tracking gear is going to register nothing but static.
If you get turned around down in that whiteout, kid, I’m not going to be able to pull you out with the loader crane.
I’m going to have to find you the old-fashioned way.”
Kallard looked at him through the dim amber light.
“And what’s your version of the old-fashioned way?”
“Waiting around up here in orbit until you manage to cause an explosion large enough for my external navigation monitors to complain about,” the old man growled, turning back to his instruments.
“That sounds like an exceptionally solid tactical backup plan,” Kallard said.
“I’m comfortable with those parameters.”
Brakka spun his stool around completely, his titanium right hand coming off the weapons toggle to point a thick, heavy finger straight at Kallard’s chest armor.
The metal joint let out a sharp, pneumatic hiss that echoed through the quiet bridge.
“I am dead serious this time, boy,” Brakka said, his voice dropping into a low, rumbling rasp that lost all of its usual sarcastic bite.
“This specific moon has a nasty habit of eating independent hunters.
The guild boards don’t include that warning in the contract files because the boards are managed by cowards, accountants, and imperial bureaucrats who don’t have to clean the frost off a dead soldier’s visor.
If Frieza’s regional logistics wing wants this Appule rat badly enough to route the bounty payment through three separate corporate intermediaries…
it means they don’t want anyone looking too closely at what he took from their files.”
Kallard straightened up, his eyes drifting back toward the large panoramic viewscreen where the frozen white plains of Cryon-7 were spinning slowly beneath the ship’s wing.
“He was part of an elite reconnaissance team for the Sector 9 logistics wing,” Kallard said quietly, his voice flat.
“He spent two years mapping out the unreached systems along the southern perimeter before he broke his contract and fled into the rim.
He didn’t just take standard cargo manifests, Brakka.
He took the future target schedules.
The maps that detail which agricultural worlds are marked for forced labor harvests, which moons are designated for high-caliber weapons testing, and which independent populations are classified as ‘low-resistance acquisitions.’ If we secure those maps, we don’t just find a way to stay clear of Frieza’s patrol windows.
We find out where the fire is going to land before the ships even leave the core worlds.”
Brakka sat perfectly still for several long seconds, his mechanical fingers resting against his leather knee guards.
The only sound on the bridge was the steady, muffled humming of the auxiliary power core beneath the deck plates.
“We need other things too, kid,” Brakka muttered, his white mane catching the green reflection from the radar screen.
“We need high-grade fuel cells for the secondary thrusters.
We need fresh hydration capsules.
We need sleep.
You remember what sleep is, don’t you?
A magnificent little galactic invention.
Incredibly underrated by teenagers who think they’re made of solid rock.”
“Brakka,” Kallard said simply, his voice softening by a fraction of an inch.
The old mechanic let out a long, heavy breath that sounded like dry gravel sliding down a metal chute.
He turned his broad back around, his organic left hand hitting the primary ignition switches to bring the sub-light engines out of their low-power slumber.
“I absolutely hate when you use that specific tone of voice with me, Ronin,” the old man grunted, his fingers dancing across the control keys with an angry, mechanical precision.
“It sounds entirely too much like a responsible adult who’s made a logical decision, and it makes my job as a cynical, self-serving junk merchant a hell of a lot more difficult than it needs to be.”
Kallard let his hands drop to his sides, the tension in his broad shoulders finally relaxing.
“I know this one is a complete nightmare of a run, old man.
But if the deserter’s files are as complete as Varkos’s registry suggested…
we can stay three steps ahead of the empire’s hunter squads for the next five years.
We can hit their supply chains before the local commanders even realize their encryption codes have been compromised.”
Brakka adjusted the primary thruster nozzles, the ship’s deck plates beginning to vibrate with a low, deep power hum.
“Fine.
But you’re going down onto that ice completely light, you hear me?
No dramatic hero posing for the local wildlife, no opening the tap for that stupid beast form of yours unless you want your internal lung tissue to freeze solid inside your chest piece, and absolutely no flying unless a cliff face decides to collapse under your boots.
The air down in those canyons is entirely too thin for proper lift control; you try to use your ki for propulsion in a level-four blizzard, and the wind shear is going to throw you face-first into a granite wall before you can even adjust your center of gravity.”
Kallard unclipped his scouter from his belt, checking the small manual toggle switches along the casing.
“How long do I have before the static blocks the primary comm-link?”
“About four seconds after you clear the upper cloud deck,” Brakka said, reaching beneath the steering column to yank open a small maintenance panel.
He pulled out a small, circular metallic wrist beacon lined with a single blinking green indicator light and tossed it across the cockpit.
“Here.
Take this short-range emergency pulse transmitter.
If the primary radios fail completely and you find yourself buried under an avalanche or surrounded by a squad of imperial enforcers…
slap that button against an open piece of ice and pray that I’m flying close enough to the ridge line to hear the signal.”
Kallard caught the small metallic disc cleanly in his gloved palm, sliding the leather strap over his left wrist guard.
“Pray?
I didn’t think a pragmatist like you believed in divine intervention, old man.”
Brakka shrugged his massive shoulders, his upper eyes tracking the descent vector lines flashing across the screen.
“I don’t believe in a damn thing that doesn’t have a part number and a warranty certificate, kid.
But right now…
I’m more than happy to appeal to whoever handles reckless teenagers with dead home worlds, stolen imperial uniforms, and completely ridiculous names for their martial arts techniques.”
Kallard adjusted the bandana across his forehead, his dark eyes sharpening.
“I’m almost eighteen years old, Brakka.
I’m fully grown by Saiyan military standards.”
“Yeah, yeah.
Ancient.
Dusty.
Practically a walking museum piece,” the old man grunted, his left hand throwing the primary lever forward to commit the ship to the descent lane.
The *Wayfarer’s* nose tilted sharply downward, the dark green wings catching the first wisps of the gray upper atmosphere clouds as the ship committed its hull to the frozen moon below.
Brakka’s hand suddenly reached out, his thick organic fingers catching Kallard by the edge of his green shoulder guard before he could head down the bridge ladder.
The old man didn’t look up from his monitors, but his grip was firm, holding the kid in place with a heavy, steady weight.
“Ronin,” Brakka said, his gravelly voice dropping its sarcastic edge completely, turning flat, quiet, and serious.
Kallard stopped his foot on the first rung of the ladder, his face turning back around.
“What is it, old man?”
“If this Appule deserter down in the ditch turns out to be just some scared, low-tier logistics clerk who ran away because he couldn’t bear the smell of the blood on his uniform anymore…” Brakka paused, his lower eyes blinking once in the dark.
“…you take a long, hard look at his face before you decide to collect the premium from the guild boards.
You hear me?”
Kallard remained perfectly still on the ladder, the cold air from the lower deck ventilation lines blowing past his boots.
He thought about the numbers listed on his private data slate—the twelve thousand credits that would easily cover their secondary engine repairs, the fresh cooling fluids they needed for the primary hyperdrive loops, and the crates of food rations sitting in the port storage bins that were getting dangerously low.
He thought about the dead, burning towers of Planet Vegeta, the cruel, scarred face of Morga telling him to live long enough to matter, and the millions of ghosts currently drifting through the vacuum of space because they hadn’t been strong enough or cynical enough to run when the fire started.
“The contract slate explicitly says dead or alive, Brakka,” Kallard said softly, his voice dropping into a flat, neutral tone that sounded remarkably ancient.
“The guild doesn’t pay a single credit for an empty container or a list of moral objections.”
“The guild boards say a lot of things to keep the grunts moving along the tracks, kid,” Brakka growled, his hand slowly releasing its grip on the shoulder plate.
“Doesn’t mean you have to listen to the noise every time a terminal beeps.
Just think before you strike.
Thinking is a hell of a lot cheaper than medical gel, and it doesn’t leave nearly as many scars on your conscience.”
Kallard looked down through the ladder hatch into the dark corridor below.
“I’ll think about it,” he said quietly.
Brakka grunted, turning his face back toward the viewscreen as the first heavy sheets of white gray ice storm slammed into the front glass.
“Good.
Now get your gear secured before this blizzard tries to take my steering handles away from me.”
## Act II: The Breath of the Glacier
The *Wayfarer* descended through the lower cloud deck of Cryon-7, and the moon hit back with immediate, terrifying violence.
The whiteout storm didn’t move like a normal planetary wind; it slammed into the matte-black hull like a solid physical fist, the entire eighty-foot frame of the cutter groaning and twisting as the gales caught the swept-forward wings.
Thick, jagged needles of frozen ice and rock dust scraped across the panoramic viewport in a series of long, shrieking streaks that sounded like metal being dragged across a saw blade.
The advanced stealth cloak computer let out a high-pitched electronic whine, the green-and-black light patterns along the hull sputtering twice from the immense atmospheric friction before Brakka cursed loudly, lifting his mechanical right hand to smack three separate switches on the secondary panel with a heavy metallic *thud*.
“Remarkably friendly neighborhood you’ve picked out for our retirement years, kid!” Brakka shouted over the roaring of the thrusters, his four eyes wide as he fought to keep the navigation nose aligned with the valley line.
Kallard stood at the base of the primary boarding ramp, his feet planted wide on the iron grates, his hands loose but steady as he checked the buckles on his shin guards.
“The air is completely clear of imperial scout signals, old man!
I’d say the local security parameters are working perfectly in our favor!”
“Very funny!
I’m officially naming this miserable rock ‘Regret’ in the ship’s navigation archives!” the old man growled back through the intercom speaker.
“Bringing her down behind a ridge of black ice three kilometers south of the last known radar ping!
Hold on to something structural; the landing gear is going to hate this surface!”
The ship dropped through the last layer of gray fog, the lower stabilization thrusters firing with a deafening, wet roar that vaporized the snow blankets directly beneath the wings.
The *Wayfarer’s* heavy-duty titanium landing struts bit into the frozen volcanic stone with a loud, jarring *crunch*, the automated magnetic clamps instantly engaging to anchor the cutter against the seventy-mile-an-hour ground winds.
Kallard hit the manual release switch on the wall panel.
The heavy primary boarding ramp slid downward with a long, pressurized *hiss*, the hydraulic lines groaning against the immediate drops in temperature.
The moment the steel lip touched the frozen ground, the storm rushed into the lower deck corridor like a living, predatory animal.
The cold didn’t just drop the temperature; it felt like a physical weight, a thick wave of freezing methane gas and ice grit that stripped the air clean out of his chest before he could even close his mouth.
The first breath Kallard took felt like someone had taken a long steel needle, dipped it in liquid nitrogen, and driven it straight down into his lung tissue.
His Saiyan physiology responded instantly, his chest muscles tightening up into hard iron knots as the internal thermal layers of his black undersuit activated, a low hum vibrating through the fabric as the battery cells fought to preserve his core temperature.
Frost began to gather along the edges of his dark bandana within three seconds, his exposed cheeks turning a sharp, stinging shade of dark red as the wind grit bit into his skin.
He reached up, checking the fit of his green cloak clasp on his left shoulder, before stepping out onto the open ice of Cryon-7.
Behind his boots, the primary boarding ramp slid back upward into the hull, locking shut with a heavy, pressurized *thud* that cut off the last remaining drops of warmth from the ship’s galley.
Within five seconds, the massive, eighty-foot silhouette of the *Wayfarer* vanished completely behind the shifting sheets of white gray blizzard, leaving him entirely alone in the center of a freezing nothingness.
Kallard lifted his left arm, wiping a thick layer of frost off the screen of his wrist tracker.
The small digital display flickered erratically, the internal navigation software struggling to resolve the direction keys against the immense magnetic interference rising from the volcanic stone ridges around him.
“`
========================================================================
WRIST TRACKER: INTERNAL FEED
========================================================================
TARGET VECTOR: NORTHEAST (SECTOR 4-GRAY)
DISTANCE COMPENSATE: 4.7 KILOMETERS
SIGNAL STABILITY: POOR (HIGH MAGNETIC INTERFERENCE)
========================================================================
“`
He lifted his right hand, snapping the scouter frame over his left ear with a clean, mechanical click.
The small red-lens interface flickered into life, a series of green numbers and scanning lines scrolling across his visual field as it attempted to calculate the energy signatures moving through the valley.
*1,200.*
*ERROR.*
*0.*
*ERROR.*
Kallard let out a short, irritated breath through his teeth, the warm vapor instantly freezing into ice crystals against the bottom of his lens.
He tapped the side of the plastic housing with his gloved index finger, trying to clear the static lines from the display screen.
“Come on, you piece of junk.
Don’t go dying on me before I even clear the ridge.”
The red lens let out a low, pathetic electronic beep, a tiny puff of gray smoke curling upward from the secondary capacitor seam behind his ear as the moisture inside the housing froze solid.
The green display lines flickered once, turned into a solid block of distorted static, and went completely dark.
He stared at the dead piece of plastic for two seconds, before letting out a dry, hollow laugh that was completely drowned out by the roaring of the wind.
“Perfect.
Brakka is going to spend the next three cycles reminding me exactly how many credits that logic board cost to replace.”
Suddenly, his ear comm-speaker let out a sharp, crackling burst of static, the old mechanic’s gravelly voice coming through the line with a remarkable amount of distortion.
“…heard that, you…
destructive little…
hazard…”
Kallard looked back toward the white wall of the blizzard, his mouth twitching.
“I thought you said the magnetic ice in the canyon walls was going to block the primary radio signals completely, old man.”
“…it will…
you idiot…” Brakka’s voice rasped through the static, the signal rapidly fading as the storm thickened.
“…just…
enjoying the last…
five seconds of…
clear air…
before you become…
entirely too difficult to…
insult from orbit…”
“Use your remaining transmission time wisely then, grease goblin,” Kallard called back, his voice rising over the howling gales.
“…you walk like…
an incredibly arrogant…
snow-loader…
with an…
unpaid fuel bill…” Brakka muttered, the audio line letting out one final, high-pitched screech before dying out into a flat, level hum of absolute static.
The radio was fully dead now.
Kallard adjusted the cloak across his chest, pulled his head down low against his collar, and committed his combat boots to the frozen trail, heading straight into the teeth of the level-four blizzard.
## Act III: The Hunt in the Whiteout
Cryon-7 did not possess a single straight path or clear navigation lane.
Every frozen ridge Kallard climbed led straight down into a treacherous, hidden drop-off caked in loose powder snow.
Every jagged blue canyon looked completely identical to the last one he had cleared, the dark volcanic stone walls rising three hundred feet into the gray fog like the ribs of an ancient, petrified beast.
Every sudden gust of wind completely erased his boot prints within three seconds of his steps, making it an absolute impossibility to track his orientation by visual markers.
Flight was technically possible—the raw energy pools inside his Saiyan flesh were more than large enough to lift his frame off the ground and rocket him across the valleys at high velocity.
But the moment he lifted even two meters off the sheet ice, the horizontal ground winds caught his canvas cloak like a sail, yanking his body sideways with enough sudden, violent force to throw him straight toward the jagged rock formations.
The thin air offered zero lift control, his body sliding through the atmosphere like a stone skidding across greasy ice, forcing him to drop back onto his boots to avoid breaking his collarbone against a cliff face.
So he walked.
Then he climbed down the sheer ice walls using his bare callused knuckles to anchor his weight.
Then he slid down fifty-foot slopes of frozen gravel, using his tattered cloak to shield his armor plates from the friction.
Then he stood up, wiped the frost off his eyes, and walked again.
By the time he cleared the first kilometer of the trail, his fingers had gone completely numb inside his leather combat gloves, the joints clicking like dry wood whenever he flexed his fists.
By the second kilometer, the simple act of breathing had turned into an exhausting piece of physical labor, his chest heaving as his lungs fought to extract enough oxygen from the thin, methane-packed atmosphere to keep his massive muscle groups from cramping under the cold.
By the third kilometer, the small digital display on his wrist tracker began to stutter violently.
The white destination indicator dot was jumping erratically from northeast to southwest, spinning around the outer grid lines like a broken compass before the screen let out a low buzz and went completely blank.
“`
========================================================================
WRIST TRACKER: SYSTEM FAULT
========================================================================
TARGET SIGNAL: LOST
NAVIGATION ARRAY: TERMINATED (HARDWARE FROZEN)
========================================================================
“`
“Of course,” Kallard muttered, his teeth chattering slightly behind his high collar.
He ducked behind a massive, four-ton slab of blue glacial ice that offered a tiny, three-foot pocket of shelter from the direct path of the blizzard.
He slammed the side of the tracker housing against his knee guard once.
Twice.
The screen remained dead and dark, the internal copper circuits completely frozen beneath the alloy casing.
He lifted his dark eyes, staring out through the shifting gaps in the whiteout at the silent, howling wilderness around him.
White snow fields.
Deep blue shadows cutting through the ravines.
Black stone ridges that rose like spears into the gray sky.
No scouter to display the numbers.
No wrist tracker to guide his boots.
No radio comms to listen to the old man’s bickering.
No ship sensors to map the path ahead. New chapters come out on g.com first.
There was absolutely nothing left out here but a seventeen-year-old kid in modified armor and a dead world that didn’t care if he froze to death before sunset.
Kallard clamped his jaw tight, his fingers locking into fists.
“Fine.
Let’s do this the old-fashioned way then.
The real old-fashioned way.”
He closed his eyes completely, pulling his awareness away from the stinging pain on his cheeks and the howling roar of the wind in his ears.
He let his mind drop straight down into the heat of his own physical body, his thoughts settling into that slow, rhythmic cadence that kept his energy signature suppressed down to his baseline.
He had managed to sense a living energy signature once before—back on that outlaw docking platform near Vorda Station, when an enemy mercenary’s life flame had flared bright with a sudden wave of panic during a shootout.
But those had been close, hot, obvious spikes of power, separated by mere yards of open air.
This moon was a completely separate challenge.
The extreme, sub-zero cold seemed to act like a physical blanket, smothering the natural energy signatures of life and packing his senses in ice.
The roaring of the storm was creating a constant, high-frequency kinetic noise in the ether that blurred his internal awareness.
Kallard breathed in, the thin air scraping against his throat like sand.
He extended his mental hand outward into the dark space of the valley, searching for a spark.
Nothing.
Only a vast, empty wilderness of freezing stone and ice.
He reached out further, forcing his mind to ignore the tremors in his knees.
Nothing.
He let out a long, slow plume of white vapor from his lips, his brow furrowing beneath his bandana.
“It’s not about the numbers, kid,” he whispered to himself, recalling the ancient training philosophies he had recorded in his logbook.
“It’s not about the indicators on a screen or the radar pings on a dashboard.
It’s about life.
A living spark moving through the dirt.”
He closed his eyes tighter, reaching past the immediate perimeter of the canyon walls.
At first, the only thing his internal senses managed to resolve was a faint, mechanical absence located several kilometers behind his back—the massive, lead-lined hull of the *Wayfarer* sitting in the ravine, wrapped around a single, steady, and incredibly familiar living spark.
Brakka’s internal energy signature was small, dense, and perfectly balanced, burning with a stubborn, irritated fire that Kallard could recognize from a solar system away.
Even at this distance, the old man’s energy felt thoroughly annoyed by the weather.
Kallard almost laughed out loud in the dark.
Then, he pushed his awareness past the ship, extending his senses deep into the unexplored northern ravines where Sector 4-Gray cut through the mountain chains.
The world behind his eyelids transformed into a canvas of dull, gray shadows.
Cold stone pillars.
Freezing wind tunnels.
Infinite fields of silent ice.
And then—
A flicker.
It was incredibly small, incredibly weak—no larger than the dying ember of a match card sitting in a wet ditch.
It was located roughly eight hundred meters to the east, buried deep beneath a heavy layer of structural concrete and volcanic stone.
The signature was trembling violently, its output dropping with every second as the cold ground air drained its vitality.
It was the energy signature of someone who was completely exhausted.
Someone who was bleeding out from an infected wound.
Someone who was terrified for their life.
Kallard opened his eyes, his dark pupils sharp and clear as he stepped out from behind the blue ice slab.
“Found you, Vallo.”
He turned his boots toward the eastern ridge, dropped his weight into a fast, low-to-the-ground sprint, and glided down into the canyon, his tattered cloak trailing through the snow like a dark wing.
## Act IV: The Shadow in the Old Shaft
The descent into the lower trenches of Sector 4-Gray was a miserable, claustrophobic crawl.
The volcanic stone walls of the canyon narrowed as he dropped deeper, the rock faces closing in until there were places where Kallard had to turn his broad shoulders completely sideways just to squeeze through the gaps.
The horizontal wind continued to scream three hundred feet above his head, but down in the deep trench, the sound transformed into a hollow, mournful moan that vibrated straight through the blue ice sheets caked into the stone.
His heavy combat boots slipped more than once on the greasy rime, his callused fingers digging into the rock fractures to check his balance.
A fall down here wouldn’t kill him—his Saiyan density was entirely too high for a fifty-foot drop to do permanent structural damage—but it would flare his old rib injuries and waste valuable minutes he didn’t have to spare.
The weak, dying ember of the ki signature grew steadily stronger with every step he took.
It wasn’t an expansion of power; it was simply a clarification of the signal as he closed the physical distance.
A large, blocky shape finally appeared through the gray fog ahead.
It was an old planetary mining shelter, half-buried beneath a massive drift of frozen gravel and white powder.
The metal walls were constructed from heavy, low-tier industrial iron plates that had turned completely white with thick frost, and a single, cracked emergency heat lamp was glowing with a weak, dying amber light directly above the primary entrance hatch.
The heavy pneumatic doors had been manual-locked and sealed from the inside, the locking bars jammed into place with a desperate, clumsy hand.
Kallard slowed his pace to a casual walk, his combat boots scraping lightly against the sheet ice as he stepped into the small, sheltered clearing directly in front of the hatch.
He kept both of his hands open and completely visible at his sides, his tattered cloak pulled back over his shoulder guard to show he wasn’t reaching for a blaster.
“Vallo!” Kallard called out, his deep, gravelly voice echoing sharply off the narrow canyon walls, cutting through the hollow moaning of the wind.
There was no immediate answer from within the iron structure.
The only sound was the steady, buzzy hum of the failing heat lamp above his forehead.
“The name listed on the regional guild boards is Lemo, but Varkos’s private data core had your real registry encrypted under the logistics logs,” Kallard shouted, his dark eyes fixed on a small, narrow view-slit cut into the center of the iron door.
“I’m not one of Frieza’s enforcement dogs, and I didn’t come down this ditch wearing an imperial uniform.
Open the seal.”
Still nothing moved inside the shelter for five long seconds.
Then, with a sharp, metallic *clink*, a long, narrow rifle barrel made from dull gray titanium slid through a cracked structural seam in the shelter wall directly to the left of the door housing.
The weapon’s primary collector coils began to hum with a high-pitched, vibrating whine as they drew from a low-capacity power cell.
“Take one more single step across that gravel line, bounty hunter,” a raspy, shivering voice called out from behind the iron plating, “and I’ll put a high-caliber thermal round straight through the center of your green chest guard.”
Kallard stopped his boots exactly two inches from the line, his expression completely calm and unreadable beneath his dark bandana.
He looked down at the rifle barrel, noting the worn charging selector and the small wisp of blue vapor leaking from the emitter housing.
It was an old-style, thermal-powered infantry long-rifle—a weapon that was good enough to burn a smoking hole through a low-tier soldier’s armor plate, but nowhere near dense enough to stop a veteran-level Saiyan framework if he committed his body to a high-speed Flash Trigger lunge.
He chose to stay perfectly still anyway, keeping his hands open and relaxed.
“You’re the Appule-species reconnaissance deserter from the Sector 9 logistics chain.
The clerk who took the future target files before the invasion fleet left the core ports.”
The voice behind the wall let out a short, bitter chuckle that quickly deteriorated into a violent, racking cough that shook the iron plating.
“Deserter.
Thief.
Traitor to the empire.
Cowardly scoundrel.
It depends entirely on which regional bounty board you’re reading from today, doesn’t it?”
“I go by Ronin on the independent slates,” Kallard said plainly.
A long pause followed the statement, the hum of the rifle coils fluctuating slightly as the person behind the wall adjusted their stance.
“The…
the black-and-green hunter from the Kessik Yard reports?
The kid who took down Varkos’s entire guard detail?”
“Yeah,” Kallard said.
“That’s my workspace.”
“Then I was entirely right the first time, Ronin,” the voice rasped, the shivering turning more pronounced.
“Take one more step toward this hatch, and I shoot.
I’m not going back to a Frieza Force interrogation cell in chains.
I’ll blow my own reactor core before I let a guild mercenary claim the premium on my head.”
Kallard slowly lowered his open hands back to his belt, his eyes tracking the slight tremor in the rifle barrel.
It wasn’t the natural vibration caused by the level-four ground winds or the extreme sub-zero cold of the canyon; it was the erratic, unsteady shaking of absolute, bone-deep physical exhaustion and blood loss.
“You’re heavily injured, Vallo,” Kallard said, his voice dropping its sharp mercenary edge, turning flat and practical.
“Your internal energy signature is shivering like a dying fire in a rainstorm.
You’ve got an infected wound somewhere under that uniform, and you’ve been sitting down in this dark hole for at least three rotations without a fresh hydration capsule.”
The silence returned to the clearing, heavy and thick.
Kallard took a slow, deliberate half-step forward, his boot heel crunching against the gravel.
The rifle barrel let out a sharp electronic click as the internal capacitors reached maximum charge.
“I said…
hold your position, hunter!”
Kallard stopped again, his dark eyes narrowing as he locked onto the view-slit.
“Listen to me, you idiot.
If I wanted to take you back to the corporate buyers by force…
if I wanted to collect the twelve thousand credits from the logistics officers…
I wouldn’t be standing out here in a level-four blizzard having a philosophical debate with an iron wall.
I would have put a ki blast through your generator vent five minutes ago and dragged your corpse out by the heels.”
Vallo didn’t answer, but the high-pitched whine of the rifle coils slowly dropped an octave, the collector plates losing their bright red glow.
“You expect me to find that professional assessment comforting?” the deserter asked through the seam.
“No,” Kallard said.
“I expect you to find it accurate.
Now open the seal before my ears freeze off out here; I promised my mechanic I’d bring the ship back without any extra repair bills.”
## Act V: The Deserter’s Confession
With a loud, rusty screech of unlubricated metal pins, the primary iron door of the mining shelter slid open a fraction of an inch.
A single, wide orange eye peered through the narrow gap, tracking the black-and-green armor plates and the dark bandana across Kallard’s forehead.
The deserter was unmistakably of Appule’s distinct alien species, though his physical frame was significantly thinner, narrower, and more gaunt than the well-fed imperial grunts Kallard had dismantled at Kessik Yard.
His orange skin had turned a dull, grayish shade of yellow from the extreme cold, and a thick row of purple-black spots ran along the side of his neck like a line of small bruises.
His white infantry chest piece was heavily cracked down the center, the material scored by old plasma burns, and his entire left arm was wrapped tight in a strip of caked, oil-stained gray cloth that was soaked through with dark purple alien blood near the shoulder joint.
His factory scouter was completely missing from his ear, leaving behind a raw, irritated line of scar tissue across his left temple where the plastic housing had frozen solid to his skin during his flight and been violently ripped away to avoid gangrene.
He looked absolutely nothing like a dangerous galactic criminal or a high-value political saboteur.
He looked like an ordinary, broken-down clerk that the imperial war machine had chewed up, broken into pieces, and forgotten to swallow.
“What do you mean by ‘it depends’?” Vallo asked, his wheezing voice shivering as he held the heavy titanium rifle against his good shoulder.
Kallard met his orange eye through the crack, his own voice dropping into a low, steady register.
“It depends entirely on *why* a low-tier logistics specialist decided to stick a data core into a high-security military console, steal the future invasion routes for an entire sector, and sprint out into the outer rim without a squad to back his play.”
Vallo stared at him through the narrow gap for three long seconds.
Then, a short, hollow laugh escaped his dry lips—a laugh that turned into a violent fit of coughing halfway through his throat, forcing him to lean his heavy head against the iron door frame to keep his balance.
“You independent bounty hunters don’t ask why, Ronin,” the deserter wheezed out, wiping a drop of purple saliva from his mouth with his dirty glove.
“You don’t care about the names on the manifests or the reasons for the blood.
You just read the numbers on the terminal, track the energy signature through the stations, and collect the pouch from the marshal’s office.
That’s the whole routine.”
“I’m remarkably bad at following the standard professional routine, Vallo,” Kallard said, his hand resting casually on his hip belt.
“So I’ve been told by my employer on multiple occasions.
Now clear the doorway; the wind down this canyon is getting worse by the minute.”
The deserter studied the young hunter’s dark face for another long moment, his orange eye searching past the green visor for any sign of an imperial trap.
Then, with a slow, exhausted sigh, he pulled his weight away from the locking bar, allowing the heavy iron hatch to slide open completely.
The interior of the abandoned mining shelter was barely three degrees warmer than the frozen canyon outside.
A small, cracked electronic space heater was buzzing loudly in the far corner of the single room, its internal heating coils glowing with a weak, uneven orange light that barely managed to clear the frost from the floorboards around its base.
Deflated supply packs, empty hydration tubes, and broken structural tools lay scattered across the concrete floor like scrap metal.
Sitting on a low wooden crate in the center of the space was a heavy, military-grade black data case, covered in a thick layer of white rime but close enough to the bed for Vallo to reach it with a single lunge of his good arm.
He kept the titanium rifle cradled in his lap as he dropped down onto a rusted iron crate, his orange eyes never leaving Kallard’s armor for a single second.
“What’s the real name, kid?” Vallo asked, his voice shaking as he leaned his back against the vibrating heater housing.
“The ‘Ronin’ tag is just a ghost story the traders use to scare the smugglers down at Port Kappa.”
Kallard walked into the center of the room, his boots leaving dark, wet patches on the frosted floorboards as the ice began to melt.
He looked around the spartan, freezing space before meeting the alien’s gaze directly.
“Kallard,” he said plainly, his voice level.
Vallo flinched slightly at the syllables, his brow furrowing.
“Kallard?
That’s…
that’s an exceptionally old linguistic root.
A warrior’s designation from the core worlds.
What species are you under that bandana, kid?
You move entirely too dense for a common rim hybrid.”
Kallard didn’t answer the question.
He reached up, pulled his tattered cloak back over his shoulder plate, and leaned his broad frame against a heavy iron support pillar near the door.
“Varkos’s files said you were part of the primary reconnaissance squad for the Sector 9 logistics wing.
Tell me about the maps, Vallo.
Why did you take them?”
The deserter looked down at the titanium rifle in his lap, his thin orange fingers tracing the scratches along the receiver casing.
The silence inside the shelter was heavy, broken only by the steady, annoying buzz of the failing space heater.
“I spent four cycles working the automated data consoles for the regional command hubs,” Vallo said quietly, his voice losing its raspy edge, turning into the flat, professional drone of a common clerk.
“We were the scout lines, Kallard.
Our squad went out ahead of the primary conquest fleets, mapping out the independent systems along the rim perimeter before the heavy cruisers even left their berths.
We recorded the fuel reserve capacities, the communication frequencies, the local defense thresholds, the natural resource clusters…
and the populations.”
He spat the last word onto the floorboards like it was a piece of rotten meat.
“I told myself it was just business,” Vallo whispered, his yellow eyes darkening as he stared at the glowing heater coils.
“I told myself I was just an engineer doing an honest piece of data mapping for the development sectors.
I didn’t swing the blasters, I didn’t command the warships, and I didn’t sign the execution decrees.
I was just the guy who verified the numbers on the screen.
It was an easy routine, and the imperial paycheck kept my family fed on the home world.”
He paused, his breath coming in a short, ragged whistle through his nose.
“And then…
three months ago…
we completed the tracking logs for a small agricultural moon named Satha,” the deserter said, his hands locking around the rifle stock until his knuckles turned yellow.
“A quiet little colony of blue-skinned fruit farmers floating in a neutral system.
No standing military force, no advanced energy shields, no fighters with an active power level above fifty on a good day.
My official report classified the population parameters as ‘highly labor-compatible.’ I told myself that meant the corporate syndicates would be offering them standard mining contracts and trade agreements.”
He lifted his head, his wide orange eyes locking onto Kallard’s face with a sudden, terrifyingly raw wave of remorse that made his voice tremble.
“Three weeks later…
I was processing the shipping manifests for the western transport cells,” Vallo said, his teeth grinding together with a sharp mechanical click.
“I saw the name Satha on the registry sheets.
Half the colony’s active population had been sold directly to the deep-core asteroid extraction syndicates as forced labor stock.
The other half…
the women, the old ones, the infants…
had been relocated to an imperial medical station in Sector 11 for biological testing.
Every single child included in the manifest.
They turned my data report into a literal slave list, Ronin.
They used my coordinates to track them down like wild animals in a pen.”
The space heater let out a loud, buzzing snap, a tiny spark of blue light dying inside the casing.
Kallard didn’t move a single muscle in his chest armor.
He stood perfectly still against the iron pillar, a cold, heavy stillness settling behind his ribs that had absolutely nothing to do with the levels of the storm outside.
He knew that story.
He had seen it play out across a hundred different systems in his past life on Vegeta—the slow, bureaucratic transformation of living, breathing families into cold digits on an imperial spreadsheet, cleared from the universe to make room for a supply lines depot or an officer’s villa.
“I tried to file an official data correction,” Vallo whispered, his head dropping back against the wall.
“I went to my captain’s terminal and submitted a revised manifest.
I said the Satha population was entirely unsuitable for physical extraction due to localized genetic instability.
I thought I could confuse the logistics computers long enough for the survivors to clear the port gates.”
A bitter, hollow smile touched the deserter’s face.
“My captain didn’t even read the file,” Vallo said.
“He just cleared the notification from his screen, laughed in my face, and told me that compassion was a critical reconnaissance error that would cost me my next promotion bonus if I didn’t learn how to manage my metrics.
That was the whole conversation.”
Kallard’s eyes went perfectly dark beneath his bandana, the knuckles on his wrapped hands turning white.
“So you stole the future target files.”
“I waited until the midnight shift rotation,” Vallo said, pointing his finger toward the heavy black data case on the crate.
“I uploaded the complete target manifests for every single independent system the empire hasn’t reached yet in this quadrant.
Target maps for thirty-four separate worlds, Ronin.
Places marked for immediate labor harvest, weapons testing deployments, or low-resistance resource acquisitions over the next two cycles.
If Frieza’s buyers get this case back…
if the logistics officers patch the data leak…
thirty-four worlds are going to turn into open graves before the turn of the year.
Every family on them turned into scrap material for the war machine.”
## Act VI: The Choice and the Contract
Kallard walked away from the iron support pillar, his heavy combat boots stopping directly in front of the black data case.
He looked down at the frosted casing, his hand hovering over his belt utility pouch where his data slate was stored.
He thought about the twelve thousand credits again.
He thought about the fresh fuel cells they needed to cross the next sector, the hydraulic fluid lines that were caked in grease down in the hangar ravine, and the old man’s tired face looking out at the red sun.
Then he thought about Brakka’s gravelly voice echoing through the quiet galley that morning: *If this deserter is just some scared idiot who ran away because he couldn’t bear the smell of the blood…
you think before you collect, kid.*
He thought about Morga’s final, violent shove against his chest plate: *You live long enough so that somebody, somewhere down the line, remembers we were actually here.*
And then, Kallard realized something incredibly annoying about his current life.
Brakka had completely ruined him.
The old, stubborn gray-blue bastard had systematically infected his brain with a set of operational standards that didn’t belong to a proper, cold-blooded mercenary in the outer rim systems.
He had spent three years turning him into an honest person, and now he was stuck with the financial consequences of it.
Kallard turned his head around slowly, looking down at the shivering Appule deserter on the crate.
“Give me the data case, Vallo.”
Vallo’s orange eyes narrowed instantly, his hands tightening around the titanium rifle receiver as he lifted the barrel an inch into the air.
“So you can carry it straight back to the logistics wing and collect your bonus from the marshal?”
“So I can use the tracking coordinates to warn those thirty-four worlds before the invasion cruisers clear their hyperdrive berths,” Kallard said, his voice flat, calm, and absolute.
Vallo stared up at him through the dim orange light, his breath coming in short, terrified gasps.
“You…
you expect me to just trust the word of a masked rim bounty hunter?
A man who makes his living collecting heads for the guilds?”
“No,” Kallard said, taking a slow step closer until the shadow of his chest armor fell completely over the rifle barrel.
“I don’t expect you to trust a single syllable that comes out of my mouth.
But let’s look at the parameters of your current situation, you idiot: your shoulder wound is severely infected with gangrene, your space heater is going to die completely before the next hour clears, and that rifle in your lap has maybe two high-caliber thermal rounds left inside the cell before the battery clicks flat.”
Vallo flinched, his jaw tightening.
“The storm outside is erasing your tracks from orbit, sure,” Kallard pressed on, his voice dropping an octave, “but it’s also trapping your body inside a six-foot iron grave.
Rival bounty hunters are currently dropping out of hyperspace on the eastern platforms, and it won’t take them long to realize your signal didn’t clear the northern ridges.
You can sit down on that crate and freeze to death with your maps…
or you can hand the case over to me, let me fake your execution trail for the tracking grids, and let my mechanic move your body off this miserable moon inside a cloaked stealth cutter.”
Vallo swallowed hard, his orange throat clicking against his cracked collar.
He looked from the black data case up to Kallard’s dark eyes, his voice dropping into a whisper.
“You’d…
you’d genuinely do all of that for a stranger?
A deserter who has nothing left to pay you with but an old rifle and a list of dead worlds?”
“I’m not doing a damn thing for you for free, Vallo,” Kallard muttered, reaching down to grab the handle of the data case with his left hand.
“I’m taking the maps as my premium payment.
That’s the whole bargain.”
“That’s all?” the deserter asked, his orange eye searching his face.
“Just the data?”
Kallard clipped the heavy case straight to his utility belt next to his dead scouter, his expression returning to its cold, neutral mercenary mask.
“No.
It’s not the only reason.
But it’s the only part of the configuration I’m currently comfortable saying out loud without looking like a decorative holovid hero.”
For the first time since Kallard had stepped into the room, a tiny, genuine smile touched Vallo’s grayish lips, his shoulders dropping as he relaxed his grip on the rifle stock.
“Remarkably bad at being a noble savior of the galaxy, aren’t you, kid?”
“Terrible,” Kallard grunted.
“An absolute mechanical failure from start to finish.”
“Good,” the deserter whispered, sliding the titanium rifle onto the concrete floorboards.
“That makes me feel a hell of a lot more secure about your character parameters than if you started preaching to me about the law.”
## Act VII: The Fabrication of the Grave
“Do you have anything on your person that the guild tracking devices can identify as an official signature?” Kallard asked, reaching into his pouch for a small high-frequency welding torch.
Vallo frowned, his orange head tilting.
“What do you mean?”
“An armor identification tag, a genetic blood sample, a piece of your primary uniform casing…
something that says your body was completely turned into scrap material down in this ravine,” Kallard said, checking the battery cell on his torch.
“The hunters who are coming down the canyon aren’t amateurs; they’re going to want visible proof of a kill before they clear the contract from their dataslates.”
Vallo nodded slowly, understanding the logic.
He reached up to his cracked white shoulder guard with his good hand, gave the plastic material a sharp, violent wrench, and ripped an iron identification plate clean off the structural mounting pins.
The plate was stamped with his official imperial logistics serial number: *Log-882-Krell.*
“Take this,” Vallo said, tossing the cold metal plate across the room.
“And…
one more thing.”
He hesitated for a second, before slowly unwrapping a section of the dirty gray cloth covering his left shoulder joint.
The wound underneath was deep, jagged, and caked in dark purple alien blood that had turned a thick, blackish shade of violet from the infection.
He took a clean strip of white lining from his coat, pressed it firmly against the bleeding edge of the tear until the fabric was soaked through with a fresh, wet sample of his blood, and handed the stained bandage to Kallard.
“They’ll run a chemical test on the soil if they find a body site,” Vallo rasped, his face turning an even lighter shade of yellow from the pain of the movement.
“The Frieza Force scouts carry localized DNA scanners on their belts.
They’ll know the blood group matches my registry.”
Kallard took the stained bandage and the iron plate, dropping them into his secure utility pouch.
“Good.
That gives us enough materials to build a convincing grave.
Now sit tight by that buzzy heater and try to avoid dying for real while I go clear the trail outside.”
He turned on his heel, hit the manual release switch on the door housing, and stepped back out into the freezing, white-hot fury of the level-four blizzard, the iron hatch sliding shut behind his cloak with a heavy metallic *thump*.
## Act VIII: The Avalanche Protocol
The ground outside the shelter had completely changed in the twenty minutes he had spent indoors.
The white powder snow had drifted three feet deep across the gravel clearing, the howling of the horizontal winds through the upper peaks creating a constant, deafening roar that vibrated straight through the soles of his combat boots.
Kallard walked twenty paces out into the center of the narrow canyon pathway, his eyes tracking the steep, vertical walls of blue glacial ice and loose black volcanic stone that rose three hundred feet above his forehead.
He pulled the blood-stained white bandage from his utility pouch, squeezing three distinct drops of the wet purple fluid across a sharp, jagged shelf of black stone near the entrance of a narrow ravine.
He tossed the iron identification plate—*Log-882-Krell*—directly into the center of a fresh snowdrift beneath the shelf, leaving one corner of the metal visible through the powder, looking exactly like a piece of armor that had been sheared off a body during a violent fall.
He stepped back five paces, his boots sinking deep into the white drifts, his eyes fixed on the massive overhanging lip of blue ice caked into the canyon wall directly above the false grave site.
He closed his eyes for a single second, reaching deep down into his abdominal core to open the primary gates of his energy pool.
He didn’t touch the *Primal Instinct* tap—there were no enemies in front of his knuckles yet, and he needed absolute, microscopic precision to handle the clearance lines without destroying the mining shelter behind his back.
He allowed his base power level to rise up to his standard three thousand combat output, a soft, green-white aura of ki energy erupting around his boots like a ring of cold fire, the localized heat instantly vaporizing the snow blankets within a two-meter radius of his legs.
He lifted his right arm, his fingers snapping together into a tight, flat palm shape as he focused the spinning energy into a single, highly dense point of force along his forearm.
“Let’s see if the structural calculation works out,” he muttered through his teeth.
He thrust his open palm upward toward the overhanging ice lip.
“Static Buster.”
A compressed, high-frequency pulse of green ki energy shot from his hand like an artillery shell, traveling up the three-hundred-foot cliff face in a fraction of a millisecond.
It didn’t explode with a massive, blinding light show; the energy struck the central structural seam where the blue glacial ice met the black volcanic rock, releasing a violent, rapid sequence of high-frequency kinetic vibrations straight into the geological fractures.
*CRACK-CRACK-BOOM.*
The entire mountain ridge let out a deep, thunderous roar of protest that completely drowned out the howling of the blizzard.
The massive, ten-ton overhanging lip of blue ice sheared clean away from the stone face, fracturing into a million jagged blocks and boulders as it plummeted down into the canyon floor like a falling star.
Tons of frozen gravel, heavy ice plates, and white powder snow collapsed across the narrow ravine in a spectacular, blinding wave of debris, completely burying the false trail, the iron identification tag, and the purple blood drops beneath a twelve-foot blanket of solid, impenetrable winter slide.
The echo of the slide died away into the distance, leaving the clearing in a heavy, white gray fog of ice dust that swirled around Kallard’s boots like smoke.
If a rival hunter team dropped down into this ditch with their scouters running, they would see nothing but a catastrophic geological collapse.
If they ran a chemical pass on the exposed rocks near the edge of the slide, their belt scanners would register a positive match for Vallo’s DNA profile.
It was a perfect, iron-clad grave site—provided nobody spent three hours digging through twelve tons of frozen volcanic stone with an industrial excavator to verify the skeleton.
Kallard dropped his right arm, his breath coming in a short plume of white vapor as he pulled his energy signature back down to his suppressed nine hundred baseline.
He turned his head slowly back toward the western ridge of the canyon, his fingers flexing inside his leather gloves as his primitive Saiyan senses suddenly picked up a distinct, heavy change in the air currents through the valley.
The wind shear was shifting.
The whiteout storm parted for one single, fleeting microsecond, clearing the visual field across the upper gantry of the ridge three hundred yards away.
Four distinct figures were standing in a neat row along the black ice peak, their silhouettes outlined against the pale orange sky of the moon like four dark crows waiting for a carcass.
A rival hunter team.
## Act IX: The Four Crows
Kallard stood perfectly still in the deep snow drifts of the clearing, his eyes tracking the gear configuration of the four silhouettes through his green visor.
They weren’t low-tier station thugs or lazy corporate enforcers; they carried themselves with the steady, calculated discipline of high-priced guild veterans who made their living tracking political defectors through the border sectors.
The leader of the group was a tall, skeletal alien wearing a suit of high-grade, vacuum-sealed gray armor lined with secondary long-range radar arrays along his shoulders.
He held a massive, five-foot-long energy sniper rifle cradled in his long arms, the weapon’s scope glowing with a bright, dangerous purple target light that was currently aimed straight down into the center of Kallard’s chest plate.
To his left stood a broad, thick-bodied brute with red skin and a massive, hand-cranked mortar cannon mounted to his shoulder harness—a model that looked significantly larger and more dangerous than the one Kallard had dismantled at Kessik Yard.
The remaining two shapes were smaller, wire-muscled scouts wearing high-speed aerial flight packs and black thermal masks that completely covered their features, both carrying pairs of automated plasma pistols holstered at their hips.
The tall leader slowly lifted his left hand, tapping a small interface button on his helmet casing to open an unencrypted, short-range commercial communication frequency that crackled directly into Kallard’s ear comm-speaker.
“Ronin,” the tall hunter said, his voice a low, mechanical buzz that sounded like metal sliding over ice.
“The guild slate for Sector 9 explicitly lists your black-and-green hull registration as a registered contract participant for this moon.
We saw the avalanche sequence from the upper ridge line.
Tell us you didn’t just bury twelve thousand credits of prime imperial merchandise beneath ten tons of volcanic stone, kid.”
Kallard didn’t move his hands from his belt, his dark eyes remaining rock-steady beneath his bandana as the wind screamed through the valley.
“The target’s structural position was completely unstable, hunter,” Kallard called back through the open frequency, his voice flat.
“The cold got inside his suit seals two rotations ago, and he blew his own primary infantry rifle cell trying to force an exit hatch open.
The vibration triggered the ice lip above his head before I could even click my restraints shut.
Krell is completely dead down under that slide.
You can run a DNA pass on the rock shelf if you don’t believe the data.”
The broad red brute with the shoulder cannon let out a loud, coarse roar of laughter that shook the communication line with static.
“Listen to the little bandana rat try to clear the field for his own ship, Jarek!
He thinks we’re a bunch of low-class mining guards who can’t read a tracking grid!
If the deserter is dead under that ice, monkey…
then why is your belt utility utility rack currently throwing off a high-frequency digital encryption hum that matches an imperial logistics data case?”
Kallard’s hand didn’t move, but his jaw muscles tightened beneath his high collar.
He reached down into his utility rack with his thumb, checking the manual seal on Vallo’s data case.
The old, frozen casing had a micro-fracture along the primary hinge line that was leaking a tiny, invisible stream of digital data pings—a leak his dead scouter hadn’t been able to warn him about before he cleared the hatch.
The four hunters on the ridge didn’t wait around for an explanation.
The tall leader, Jarek, leveled his long rifle barrel straight toward Kallard’s visor, his mechanical voice turning cold and sharp.
“The contract rules are remarkably simple out here in the gray zones, Ronin: you slide that data case across the ice gravel toward our scouts, climb back into your little black cutter, and fly out of this sector without looking back…
or we use the heavy mortar to turn this entire clearing into an open incinerator pit and collect the premium on your head right along with the maps.
Choose your parameters fast, kid; the weather’s getting worse by the minute.”
Kallard slowly reached up with his right hand, his fingers touching the cold plastic casing of the dead scouter clipped over his left ear.
He gave the device a short, firm wrench, uncoupling it from his head frame and tossing the frozen piece of scrap metal down into the deep snow drifts by his boot heel.
He didn’t need the numbers anymore.
He didn’t need a screen to tell him how large the fire was about to get.
He looked back up at the four crows on the ridge, his dark pupils wide and steady beneath his bandana as his lips curved into a short, genuine smile that had zero humor left hidden inside its lines.
“The name Ronin isn’t an asset designation on an imperial spreadsheet, Jarek,” Kallard said, his voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly calm rumble that carried over the howling of the blizzard with absolute clarity.
“And I don’t take management instructions from hunters who still have to carry guns to feel tall in a fight.
If you want these maps…
you’re going to have to come down into this ditch and take them out of my cold hands.”
The four hunters on the peak froze for a fraction of a second, completely caught off guard by the total lack of fear from a lone seventeen-year-old scrapper cornered in a dead-end valley.
Then, the tall leader’s thumb clicked his rifle’s safety selector off.
“Kill the monkey.
Clean the field.”
## Act X: The Clashing of the Fists
The tall leader, Jarek, pulled the trigger of his long energy rifle before the sentence could even clear his helmet speaker.
*PEW.*
A bright, superheated purple laser round—dense enough to punch straight through the thick armor plate of a commercial combat transport—tore through the whiteout storm at terminal velocity, aimed directly for the center of Kallard’s face visor.
Kallard didn’t try to execute a low slide or duck behind the blue ice slab.
He reached deep down into his abdominal core, threw the gates of his energy pool wide open, and allowed his combat power level to jump straight to his maximum baseline of six thousand eight hundred all at once.
*Flash Trigger.*
He forced his base ki to explode through the muscle groups in his knees in a single, highly concentrated pulse of kinetic force.
The metal floorboards of his mind cleared instantly, and he vanished from the gravel clearing before the purple laser round could even touch the first strand of his dark bandana.
The heavy energy round struck the concrete floorboards of the clearing exactly where his boots had been a microsecond earlier, the localized heat resulting in a massive explosion of rock shards and white vapor that filled the air like a cloud of smoke.
Jarek tapped the side of his helmet radar array, all of his mechanical eyes widening in pure shock as his tracking lens registered a total absence of a target signature.
“He’s gone!
The monkey cleared the grid line in less than a hundredth of a second!
Track the upper frequencies!”
“Behind you, Jarek,” a low, gravelly voice whispered from directly behind his shoulder plates.
The tall leader spun his mechanical neck around with a sharp click of his servos, but he was entirely too slow to coordinate a defense.
Kallard had appeared on the upper ice ridge like a shadow walking out of a blizzard, his tattered gray cloak snapping violently through the wind as his right fist cocked back at a sharp angle.
He didn’t use an energy blast.
He simply drove his knuckles straight into the center of Jarek’s high-grade gray chest armor.
*CRUNCH.*
The sheer physical density of the Saiyan biology acted like a moving hydraulic ram.
The tall leader’s vacuum-sealed chest plates collapsed inward with a horrific metallic screech, the internal radar arrays exploding into a cloud of sparks and broken copper wiring.
The immense concussive force of the blow lifted Jarek’s skeletal, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound frame completely off the rock shelf, launching his body forty yards across the peak where he slammed face-first into a jagged stone spear before sliding down into the deep snow drifts, completely unconscious.
“Jarek!” the broad red brute with the shoulder cannon roared out in a panic, his large hands frantically cranking the manual handle of his mortar turret to swing the massive three-barrel assembly toward the ridge.
The remaining two scouts wearing aerial flight packs didn’t wait around for an order.
They ripped their automated plasma pistols from their hip holsters, their flight thrusters emitting a high-pitched scream as they launched themselves into the air above Kallard’s head, unleashing a relentless, overlapping torrent of hot red plasma bolts down onto the rock shelf.
*Zap-zap-zap-zap-zap-zap!*
Kallard moved through the path of the incoming plasma fire in a series of short, explosive bursts of speed.
He stayed low to the ground, his combat boots pushing off the black ice shelf with enough force to leave deep cracked depressions in the stone.
He shifted left, pivoted right, vanished into a complete green afterimage for half a second, and reappeared four meters away at a completely different tactical angle, the red plasma bolts striking the black ice exactly where his boots had been a microsecond earlier.
One stray plasma round caught the lower hem of his tattered gray cloak, burning the canvas material into a cloud of black ash, but Kallard ignored the heat completely.
He skidded to a halt beneath a heavy rock shelf, brought his right hand down to his waist, and focused his mind, his breathing dropping into that slow, rhythmic cadence he had practiced in the desert.
“Starfall,” he muttered through his teeth.
Five tiny, marble-sized spheres of brilliant green ki energy formed in a neat, rotating row along his right forearm, hovering just above his callused skin.
They hummed with a high-pitched, vibrating whine that filled the entire canyon peak, the localized heat instantly vaporizing the frozen methane dust floating through the storm.
He thrust his right arm upward, his fingers snapping open like an iron claw.
The five green marbles of energy fired in perfect, rapid succession, traveling up toward the two airborne scouts like a string of tracer rounds.
The first two spheres struck the right scout’s aerial flight pack directly at the primary fuel intake manifold.
The high-grade propulsion liquid detonated instantly in a spectacular flash of orange fire and white smoke, the explosion launching the screaming scout sideways through the air until he slammed face-first into the canyon wall and crumpled into a quiet heap.
The third and fourth green spheres struck the left scout’s automated plasma pistols, shattering the receiver casings into a dozen melting pieces and scorching his fingers.
The fifth and final round punched directly into his chest vest, the concussive force knocking the wind clean out of his lungs and sending his body tumbling down into the deep snow drifts below like a shot bird.
The red brute with the shoulder cannon was the only one left standing on the ridge.
He had finally managed to complete his manual alignment sequence, the massive three-barrel turret locking onto Kallard’s black chest armor with a high-pitched mechanical shriek.
“I’ll boil your skin off, you little bandana rat!” the brute roared out, his finger slamming down onto the primary firing switch.
## Act XI: The Static Buster
A massive, concussive torrent of superheated orange mortar fire erupted from the three barrels all at once, a living wall of flame that tore through the level-four blizzard with enough raw kinetic force to warp the atmospheric air lines across the entire peak.
Kallard didn’t try to dodge the blast this time.
He didn’t execute a low slide or jump off the side of the cliff face.
He stood his ground in the center of the deep snow drifts, his boots planted wide against the black ice stone, his face visor sliding down over his jaw with a pressurized *hiss*.
He reached deep down into his abdominal core, past the six thousand eight hundred baseline, his mind dropping straight down into the darkest corner of his DNA where the primitive beast was sitting behind its thin stone door.
He didn’t pull the door wide open—he couldn’t risk the *Primal Instinct* state tearing his frozen lung tissue apart in this thin atmosphere—but he reached through the crack, pulling a single, massive surge of ancestral survival energy straight into the muscle groups of his arms and forearms.
His dark eyes flashed with a brilliant, jagged pulse of emerald green light for a single microsecond, the air directly around his knuckles warping and shimmering with heat.
He thrust both of his open palms straight out into the path of the incoming orange mortar flame.
“Static Buster!” Kallard roared, his voice cutting through the thunder of the explosion like a blade.
A massive, highly compressed pulse of green ki energy erupted from his palms point-blank.
It wasn’t a clean, streamlined beam; it was a raw, chaotic shockwave of high-frequency kinetic force that detonated with a terrifying, crackling electrical roar that split the atmosphere across the peak.
The green shockwave struck the center of the incoming orange mortar flame directly in mid-air.
The two massive energy signatures fought for control of the space for a fraction of a millisecond, the localized heat and pressure turning the surrounding blizzard into a massive cloud of superheated steam that blinded the visual sensors on the brute’s cannon harness.
Then, the superior density of Kallard’s Saiyan energy broke the alignment.
The green *Static Buster* wave ripped straight through the center of the mortar flame, completely dispersing the orange energy into a harmless shower of blue sparks before it traveled across the remaining twenty yards of the ridge, striking the red brute squarely in the center of his weapon harness.
*BOOM.*
The heavy-duty iron shoulder cannon didn’t just break; it completely exploded from the inside out, the internal ammunition reservoirs detonating in a bright flash of white fire that tore the harness pins straight off the brute’s shoulders.
The immense concussive force of the explosion launched the four-hundred-pound mercenary completely off the rock shelf, his huge body tumbling backward down the three-hundred-foot cliff face like a loose boulder before hitting the concrete clearing below with a thunderous *thud* that shook the mining shelter’s iron walls.
He lay there in the deep snow drifts, his armor caked in black scorch marks, his single remaining hand twitching weakly against the gravel before he lost consciousness completely.
The clearing fell back into a heavy, silent stillness.
The level-four blizzard rushed back into the open space of the peak, the howling of the horizontal winds through the jagged canyons resuming its endless, mournful moan as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
Kallard dropped his arms slowly to his sides, his chest heaving violently beneath his black chest armor as his breath came in long, rapid plumes of white vapor.
His hands were shaking with severe, exhausting tremors from the energy output, a single line of fresh red blood trickling from his left nostril down onto his green collar trim.
He had held the tap closed against the beast, but the physical tax of forcing that much ancestral ki through a frozen framework was completely real; every nerve ending in his forearms felt like it had been systematically scraped with a wire brush.
He reached up with a trembling hand, wiping the blood from his lip before turning his face back toward the small iron hatch of the mining shelter.
He walked down the ridge stairs with a slow, heavy, but perfectly steady stride, his tattered cloak snapping through the gray fog like a shadow.
## Act XII: The Lift and the Ledger
He hit the manual release switch on the wall panel.
The heavy iron door of the shelter slid open with a rusty screech, revealing Vallo still sitting on his wooden crate by the buzzing heater, his titanium rifle cradled in his lap as his wide orange eyes tracked the hunter’s entrance.
“The…
the trail is completely cleared, Vallo,” Kallard gasped out, his voice hoarse and ragged as he leaned his broad shoulder against the door frame for balance.
“The four hunters who were tracking your signal…
Jarek’s squad…
they’re all down in the snow drifts with their gear turned to scrap metal.
They won’t be writing any reports to the logistics command hubs for a very long time.”
Vallo stood up from his crate, his mouth wide open in an expression of absolute, unadulterated marvel as he looked at the fresh scorch marks covering Kallard’s green armor plates and the line of blood on his chin.
“You…
you dismantled an entire veteran guild hunter team by yourself?
In less than three minutes?
In this atmosphere?”
“I’m remarkably good…
at clearing an invoice when the margins are high enough,” Kallard muttered, reaching down to grab the Appule deserter by his good shoulder, hoisting his thin frame off the crate with a single firm pull.
“Now move your boots.
My mechanic’s short-range emergency receiver is probably screaming its head off by now, and I have zero desire to spend the night sleeping on this frozen rock.”
They walked out of the freezing shelter together, Vallo leaning heavily against Kallard’s broad shoulder for support as they navigated the narrow, snow-drifted corridors of Sector 4-Gray.
Twenty minutes later, a low, deep-frequency power hum began to vibrate straight through the sheet ice beneath their boots.
The dark, matte-black nose of the *Wayfarer* dropped through the gray fog deck of the canyon like a hunting bird, her custom sub-light thrusters firing with a steady, muffled roar that cleared the snow blankets from the landing platform in less than a second.
The primary boarding ramp slid downward with a long pressurized *hiss*, the warm, filtered air from the ship’s galley kitchen rushing out into the freezing clearing like a blessing.
Brakka was standing at the top of the ramp corridor, holding a large industrial fire extinguisher under his organic left arm, while his primary mechanical hand was loaded down with a pair of advanced medical injection packs and a clean wool blanket.
All four of his unblinking eyes were wide as he took in the sight of the bleeding kid dragging a thin orange alien up the metal grates.
“Well,” Brakka growled, his gravelly voice flat as he slammed the ramp control button to seal the airlocks behind them.
“You look exceptionally educational today, kid.
I see you managed to find a way to make my primary paint job look completely offensive before noon.”
Kallard collapsed back against the corridor bulkhead wall, letting out a long, exhausted sigh as his chest plates relaxed.
He reached into his belt utility rack, unclipped the heavy black military data case he had taken from the shelter, and tossed it across the deck plates toward the old man’s boots.
“The…
the contract is completely finished, old man,” Kallard wheezed out, a tiny, tired smile touching his cracked lips.
“Thirty-four worlds.
Every future target manifest for the sector is stored inside that cylinder.
The encryption keys are fully intact.”
Brakka looked down at the caked data case sitting on his clean deck plates, then looked back up at the Appule deserter shivering beneath the wool blanket, his lower pair of eyes blinking once in the warm amber light of the galley.
The old mechanic let out a long, slow breath through his yellow teeth, a small, genuinely soft smirk touching his gray-blue cheek as he hitched his medical packs onto his harness.
“Go down to the medical bay and get those ribs wrapped before I decide to charge you an extra thousand credits for bleeding on my upholstery, Ronin.
I’ll handle the clerk’s shoulder infection; I’ve still got a couple of bottles of that high-gravity protein serum hidden in the back bins.”
Kallard nodded his head weakly, his boots dragging through the corridor as he headed down toward the lower level cabins.
“Thanks, Dad,” he whispered into the quiet air.
“That is an immediate, automatic fifteen-hundred-credit penalty to your ledger for unauthorized emotional manipulation, you destructive little menace!” the old man roared back down the hallway, his mechanical arm snapping its fingers with a sharp hydraulic click as he led the shivering deserter toward the medical bed.
Kallard smiled, his eyes closing as his head hit the soft fabric of his bunk mattress, the steady, rhythmic *squeak-clack* of the *Wayfarer’s* primary ventilation scrubbers filling his thoughts like a familiar song.
He had taken the maps, faked the grave, and kept the beast firmly locked behind its thin stone door.
He was still a long, bloody road away from that blue-and-white planet he had seen on the screens of his past life—but out here on the absolute edge of nowhere, surrounded by a frozen moon and a family that was worth bleeding for…
Ronin knew that the tracks of the universe were finally starting to move in his direction.
And the next time Frieza’s scouts checked the maps for Sector 9…
they were going to find a hell of a lot more than just a list of dead worlds waiting for them in the dark.