ESCAROT

Okara was watching me from a safe distance.

"Are you sure about this?" she called out.

No. I was not, but fuck it, I had no other choice, if I wanted to beat Frieza, I had to experiment with what I had.

"Yeah," I said, powering up into the Ikari state.

Ikari in short, was the Oozaru compressed into a body that was never meant to hold it. Every ounce of power that a Great Ape had — the raw, destructive, world-leveling bullshit that came with transforming into a giant ape — crammed into a regular-sized Saiyan frame, in my case a smaller one. It was like stuffing a nuclear warhead into a mailbox and hoping the metal held.

The metal did not want to hold. 

Needless to say, being in the Ikari state was painful, very painful.

I could feel it the moment I started pulling on the power. It didn't rise smoothly. It never did. It clawed at the inside of my chest like something trying to burrow its way out, hot and wild and utterly indifferent to whether I survived the process. My heartbeat spiked. My muscles twitched. The ground under my feet cracked.

Breathe. Just breathe…

The yellow aura flared up around me, and the world took on that familiar red tint at the edges of my vision. My pupils shrank. My teeth felt like they were getting bigger in my mouth, even though I knew they weren't — that was just the Oozaru instinct bleeding through, it was unnerving.

"Looking good," Okara said in absolute awe. "I can’t wait to learn that!"

I ignored her.

Because right now, every nerve in my body was screaming, every fiber was pulled taut like a piano wire about to snap. Controlling it was less like steering a car and more like trying to hold onto a greased pig that was actively trying to kill you.

Now came the fun part of my experiment.

Surge.

The first technique I'd developed by studying the way ki amplification worked on a fundamental level. The concept was simple — take your existing power and force it to output at a higher rate. Push the engine past its redline. Squeeze more out of what you already had by optimizing the route ki naturally flowed.

Simple concept. Difficult execution when your body was already about to burst.

See, while normally using my signature technique wasn’t much of a problem, the thing about Surge was that it wasn't free. It wasn't like unlocking some hidden well of power that you didn't know you had. It was literally just your body burning through its own energy faster and harder than it was designed to. 

On its own, with a clear head and a calm body, Surge was manageable. A bit wasteful, sure. But manageable. On its own.

I was not on my own. I was in Ikari. Which meant I was already at my limit. Which meant adding Surge was the equivalent of strapping a rocket to a car that was already driving off a cliff.

I reached inward, found the mechanism for Surge — that mental switch I'd built through months of practice and more than a few near-death experiences — and I flipped it.

The effect was immediate.

It felt like someone had poured gasoline directly onto my insides and lit a match. The Ikari aura, which had been a steady — if violent — burn, erupted outward in a violent spike. My vision went white for a half second. My blood felt like it was boiling in my veins. Every muscle in my body seized at once, and I heard something pop in my left shoulder that I really hoped was just a joint cracking and not a tendon snapping.

"Fuck," I said through clenched teeth.

"Fuck?" Okara repeated from her safe distance. "That sounded like a bad fuck."

Nothing broke. Probably.

I held it. Three seconds. Five seconds. The power was there — I could feel the Surge stacking on top of the Ikari, the two forces amplifying each other in a way that should have been incredible if it wasn't also trying to kill me. My output was spiking hard. But so was the pain.

Seven seconds.

My skin started to itch. Not a normal itch — a deep, full-body itch that felt like my cells were individually trying to evacuate my body through my pores. I knew what that meant. That was the warning sign. The body's way of saying "hey, idiot, you're about to exceed what this container can hold, and when that happens, there's not gonna be enough of you left to bury."

Ten seconds.

My nose started bleeding. Not a trickle — a steady stream that ran down my lips and dripped off my chin. The blood vessels in my sinuses were popping from the internal pressure. That was new. That was bad.

Twelve seconds.

My left eye started to twitch. Not a normal twitch — a rapid, involuntary flutter that made half my vision strobe. My heartbeat was so fast now that I couldn't distinguish individual beats anymore. It was just one continuous hum in my chest, like an engine revving past the point of no return.

"Fifteen!" Okara shouted. "You've been holding that for fifteen seconds! Drop it!"

She was right. I knew she was right. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to let go, to cut the power before something permanent happened. The rational part of my brain — the part that had meta-knowledge and common sense and a healthy fear of dying — was waving red flags so hard it looked like a parade.

But there was another part. The Saiyan part. The stupid, stubborn, deeply irrational part that looked at the pain and the bleeding and the very real possibility of exploding and said "just a little more."

I hate that part.

I killed the Surge. Then I killed the Ikari.

Both at once, because if I dropped them one at a time, the sudden imbalance might have done just as much damage as holding them. The power drained out of me like someone had pulled a plug, and the world went from white-hot to normal so fast it made my head spin.

I dropped to one knee.

Then both knees.

Gasping for air.

Then I just sort of… tilted forward and ended up on my hands and knees, staring at the cracked ground beneath me, blood dripping from my nose onto the dirt like a broken faucet. My whole body was shaking. Not the dramatic, anime-style shaking where it looks cool. The ugly, full-body trembling where you can feel every muscle misfiring and your limbs don't quite respond to what your brain is telling them to do.

Okara was next to me in an instant, crouching down, one hand on my shoulder.

"You idiot," she said. There was no heat in it. Just the flat, tired tone of someone who had watched me do something stupid and had already accepted that I was going to do it again.

"I'm fine," I said.

"You're bleeding from your nose and your eyes are doing something deeply unsettling."

"I'm fine."

"Escarot."

"I'm fine, okay? I just — give me a second."

I sat back on my heels, wiped the blood from my face with the back of my hand, and took a long, shaky breath.

Fifteen seconds. That's all I'd managed. Fifteen seconds of combining Ikari and Surge, and my body had come within a hair's breadth of falling apart.

Meaning I could probably use this at most for ten seconds in the heat of battle, eight if I wanted to keep it safe.

I needed more time than that.

A lot more.

Well, rinse and repeat. Blood, sweat and tears, and all that shit.

BARDOCK

The pods were ready.

I'd pulled some strings to get it prepped ahead of schedule. Called in a favor from the tech bay — one of the mechanics owed me for not reporting him for sleeping on the job during a mission resupply. Guy was lazy but he knew his way around the bay.

Small mercies.

Gine was holding Kakarot. The brat was asleep, which was pretty much all he did at this age. Eat, sleep, cry, shit. That was the full extent of Kakarot's repertoire. Looking at him, you'd never guess he'd grow up to be anything special. Then again, looking at most Saiyan babies, you'd never guess any of them would grow up to be anything special, and most of them didn't, most of them died before their sixth birthday.

Raditz was leaning against the wall next to his pod with his arms crossed. He had that look on his face — the one that meant he thought he was being mature but was actually just impatient.

"So that's it?" he said. "We just... leave."

"That's the deal," I said.

"And we're going to Planet 4032-877."

"Yeah."

"Never heard of it."

"That's the point."

Raditz pushed off the wall. He was trying to look casual about this, but I could see it in the way he kept shifting his weight. He was nervous. Not scared — Saiyans didn't get scared, or at least they'd die before admitting it — but nervous. He'd never been off-planet without a squad before. Now he was being told to pack into a pod with his mother and his baby brother and fly to some backwater world he'd never heard of, with no mission parameters and no backup.

That was a lot for a kid who'd only been a proper warrior for a couple years.

"Look," I said. "I'm not gonna sugarcoat this because you're too old for that and also I don't know how. You're going to Planet 4032-877, you're staying there, and you're keeping your head down. That's the assignment."

"Keeping my head down," he repeated slowly, like the words didn't make sense in that order, and I could understand why.

"You heard me."

"Dad, I'm a Saiyan warrior. I just got my first combat rating last month. You want me to go to some random planet and—"

"I want you to not get killed."

That shut him up.

"The King has made it clear that the Saiyans are to remain unnoticed for as long as possible. That's not a suggestion. That's not a loose guideline. That's a direct order from the strongest Saiyan on this planet, and if you think he gave that order for fun, you're dumber than you look."

Raditz bristled. "I'm not dumb."

"Then stop acting like it. What do you think 'remain unnoticed' means? It means no blowing things up. No picking fights with the locals. No showing off your power level because you feel like it. You land, you find a place to stay, you don't draw attention. Period."

"What if someone attacks us?"

"Then you handle it. But do it with touch, don't level the planet. Or blow up a city. You put them down and you move on. The goal isn't to conquer the planet, Raditz. The goal is to not be noticed."

"This is stupid."

"Maybe, but those are our direct orders."

Raditz stared at me. He had my jaw, my brow, but Gine's eyes. At that moment, those eyes were doing a very poor job of hiding how much he didn't want to do this.

"What about you?" he asked.

"I'll be here."

"And if something happens here?"

"Then it happens. Won't matter much if you're dead too."

That came out harsher than I meant it. Or maybe it came out exactly as harsh as I meant it and I just didn't like hearing it out loud. Either way, Raditz's jaw tightened and he looked away.

"Protect your mother and brother," I said. "That's your job. That's the only job that matters right now. Gine doesn't have a strong combat rating. She can handle herself in a scuffle, but against anything serious, she's going to need you. And Kakarot—" I glanced at the baby, who was still somehow asleep through all of this. Lucky kid. "—Kakarot can't do anything for himself. He's a baby. You're all he's got out there."

Raditz's expression shifted. Just slightly. The rebellious edge dulled, replaced by something else. Not sentimentality — Saiyans didn't do sentimentality — but something adjacent to it. A sense of duty, maybe. The closest thing our species had to familial obligation.

"I know," he said quietly. “I will.”

"Good. Then we're clear."

I turned to Gine.

She was looking at me with that expression she always had. The one where her mouth was doing something neutral but her eyes were doing something complicated. Gine had always been like that. She could say more with a single look than most Saiyans could say with a whole monologue.

It was annoying. It was also, if I was being honest, one of the things I liked about her. Not that I'd ever say that out loud.

"You heard all of that?" I asked her.

"I was standing right here, Bardock."

"Then you know the plan."

"Hide. Stay quiet. Don't make waves, not like I would do so anyways, you know me."

"Yeah."

She shifted Kakarot in her arms. The baby stirred, made a small noise that was halfway between a grunt and a yawn, and then went right back to sleep. Kid could sleep through anything.

"Raditz won't be able to keep a low profile," Gine said matter-of-factly.

"Hey!" Raditz said.

"He can't. You know he can't. He's your son."

"I'm aware."

"He's going to do something stupid within the first week."

"Probably within the first hour."

"And I'm going to have to fix it."

"That's why you're going."

Raditz opened his mouth to argue, caught the look Gine gave him, and closed it again. Smart kid. He was learning his mother was soft but would beat him up if he acted out.

"Gine," I said.

"Bardock."

"Go."

She climbed into the pod without another word. Raditz followed, shooting me one last look over his shoulder. I couldn't read it. There was a lot happening in that look.

Either way, he climbed in. And soon after, the hatch closed.

A few moments after, the engines fired. The pod lifted off the ground, hovered for a second, and then shot straight up through the atmosphere, gone in the time it took to blink.

I stood in the empty launch bay and stared at the sky until my eyes hurt.

Then I turned around and went back to work. I had no doubts the King was training, and it would look bad on me if I didn’t do the same, we all had to carry our weight one way or another.