Chapter 37

Crono's Story

Chapter 37

Yush

Life had never been a thing you could take for granted. I had learnt this, some would say, the hard way, as a child born and raised on Vannattasan. There, with the deaths of millions of innocent beings occurring each and every week, life was held in a higher regard than anything else, beyond even freedom or power. This simple yet expansive inferiority complex is what allowed the Caprians to enslave my race, and bind the millions of other planets it conquered.

Yet on Earth, life was taken for granted, and rightfully so it seemed. On this one small and diminutive, yet cosmically important planet, there was no fear of enemies and empires dominating innocent people, there was no such urge within the civilization itself. Wealth, power, supremacy, and prejudice… they were all extinct on Earth. And that, I realized, was why the planet's people loved it here so much.

In the month and a half I had spent on the planet, its beauty had never ceased to amaze me. There seemed to be no limit to the natural elegance that the lush green world offered, nor a boundary to the amount of man-made structures that both held their own grace, and also blended it with the Earth's natural splendor. There almost seemed an inexplicable balance of the two forces here, both natural and artificial constructs bringing their own aspect to the culture and society as a whole. Of all the things I never thought I'd see in my life, such a balance ranked near the top of my list.

Now I understood just why Crono, Yukia, Phoenix and the others fought so valiantly to protect this planet, there was just something about it that promised nothing but peace and hopefulness to the people that strode across it. Intangibles like this were also things that were sorely missed on Vannattasan and the other planets within the conglomeration of the Caprian Empire.

Still, all these realizations could never prepare me for the day Crono asked me to join his ragtag group of freedom fighters; a day I'll never forget. I'd come to think that he must've seen something within me, something that I didn't even know existed within myself, something the very Earth brings out in people. At that time though, I thought I could just delay my decision, holding off on a conclusion till something swayed me one way or another. And somewhere deep inside my heart, I was just praying that I would be persuaded towards betraying Crono and others. Instead though, my eyes and ears had only been tempted with the limitless fruits this planet had to offer, and the sheer innocence of its planet.

However, my eyes were not so astounded as to miss what I knew could become a very dangerous trait that almost all the Earthlings shared. The concept of trust was far too undervalued in this culture, with it often being thrown into the wind as quickly as the dispenser sees fit. This was not limited to merely the civilians of the planet either, but seemed to apply to everyone living on the sphere of water and dirt. Gideon, Nikita, Karnai, they all seemed more than willing to take me into the group, and even with my powerful sensory skills, I couldn't detect a hint of deceit from any of them. Even Phoenix, whom I had so severely injured in his Oozaru form, seemed more than willing to put that battle behind him, and concentrate on forming a new relationship, one that would benefit us both. The worst of them all though, was Crono. From the moment he'd offered me penance for my attack on his planet, right up until he'd given me a fully powered gravity device with which to train, I was amazed at how unconcerned he seemed about any chance of my betrayal.

There was a saying back at my home, "Only the foolish trust their enemies, and only the brilliant pretend to trust them." By the second week of my training, I had lost all idea of which type of trust Crono was putting into me. A very angular look at Crono's actions could reveal two different revelations: The first was that Crono was a complete idiot, blindly hoping that I had totally and utterly changed my morals, an idea that even the most headstrong would have trouble believing. The second theory was that Crono was in fact hoping I was the blindly gullible fool, the one with blinders covering his only access to the world. Neither of the understandings produced seemed very enjoyable to me.

So even as I carried on with my training, I was merely holding out for that one defining moment when I would leave all doubts about allegiances behind, and just fight. The longer I trained for this moment though, the harder I found it to believe that the moment even existed at all. Despite all I found beautiful on this planet, there was the lingering doubt that the Caprian army was just far too powerful for the humans to catch up to in the limited amount of time they had. As it stood, the first wave of the empire's army could easily lay waste to the Z Warriors of the planet Earth. Crono, the most powerful of the rebels, had barely reached a power level of two million during his fight against me, and his friends were all drastically lower in fighting potential than even he.

This thought would linger in my mind for the next couple of months, as I progressed with my training. And as the trust between my human associates and I increased, so did their supplementing of my training. Since I had been drafted into the Caprian army, I had been taught that the reason they only allowed certain warriors different amounts of gravity training was because their bodies were training under the maximum they could ever handle. This, it became known to me, was not true at all. When Nikita was showing me around my training pod, she'd said, "And this is the gravity device, where you can change the level of gravity anywhere from point one to five hundred times Earth-normal gravity."

I'd then replied, "Ah, I'll only be using a fifth of that maximum then, my body can't take all of it."

"What?" She'd asked back, her voice hanging on tedious. "One hundred gravities? I can almost train under that, so you should be able to do much more."

I'd regarded her strangely, considering she was lying in order to crush me under a level of gravity I couldn't handle, but the pure exasperation in her eyes told me she was speaking the truth. "Here, let me show you," she'd said.

She'd walked over to the control panel for the gravity device and quickly set it to fifty times normal gravity, before hitting the "ON" button. Almost instantly, the air gained its newfound weight, and I was pushed downward by the force, my legs holding strong under the newfound pressure. To my surprise, Nikita was also able to easily withstand the new weight on her back; in fact, she seemed to have a full range of motion under the heavy gravity. "See," she'd said cocksure, her face twisted in some sort of grin. She rose her ki to it's maximum in a few seconds, and then began to zanzoken around the room, her pace almost at the same speed as it would be in normal gravity. To say I was amazed by such a feat would be a drastic understatement, as I myself was barely able to perform such a feat a year before, and I was much stronger than her at that point in time.

After a few more seconds of demonstration, she'd come to a halt in front of the display panel again, and shut down the gravity well back to normal. She'd then exited, and left me to wonder just how far I was able to go…

I stood up from my bed, quickly changed into fresh training clothes, reluctantly put on the wrist, ankle and chest weights that accompanied the garb, and then set up the short ladder into the training center. I trotted over to the gravity device, and saw the preset level I'd been using for the past week, "170 G", seventy more gravities than I'd ever used while a Caprian soldier. I sighed heavily, leaning in to turn the machine on, but stopped myself just short. I paused for a short while, considering whether or not I thought I could do it, before finally punching in a few short numbers on the keypad, and then turning the piece of equipment on.

A hundred and eighty multiples of my normal weight suddenly pulled itself downwards, my legs quivering as they tried to support my newborn weight. It took me several seconds to adjust, but once I had, it seemed almost the exact same as when I'd been training under 170 gravities, just the day before. I figured at one point in a warrior's training, the sheer redundancy of the preparation must drive the person insane; I decided I was nearing that point very quickly.

I slowly walked away from the panel, into a more open space, then kneeled to the floor, placed my hands on the smooth metallic surface, and hoisted myself upright, my entire weight being supported by the sheer strength of my arms. I began doing pushups in this position, the weight of all those gravities bearing down on me, straining my strength to the utmost, and taxing my mind in a way that cannot be described. It took all I had to perform even a hundred of the push-ups, and, much to my chagrin, that wasn't anywhere near my target. Three hundred push-ups later, I'd lost all the feeling in my arms, my back also turning numb with each agonizingly long push, and the thought of doing two hundred more rested on the corner of my mind, nagging me like a small child does to a parent. My entire torso was covered in sweat, the blood rushing to my head providing an almost anesthetic opposite to the rest of my body. My hands were slippery, my eyes watering as every nerve in my body seemed to cry out for me to stop, only to be forced to endure another grueling test.

Just as the miniature counter in my brain was nearing the four hundred and fifty mark, a small beep went off from the main computer, alerting me it was supposed to be time for me to eat. My mind, numb as it was, reflexively responded, and my hand, wet from my own sweat, slipped off of the floor.

My head, close enough to the floor for my hair to touch the ground, yet not close enough for it to hit the ground first, crashed towards the flooring, only for my damned instincts to act up, whipping my head up, and forcing my neck to take the brunt of the nearly 80 tones of weight that came crashing down on me. A sickening crack shot out into the air, and I collapsed to the ground.

I lay on the floor, all the weight in the world seemingly being pulled down on me, the crack that had shot out from my neck still ringing its way through my ears and my mind. I breathed deeply, a dull and subtle pain creeping its way up through my back, into my arms and down my legs. My head spun, already exhausted from the mental anguish of my training, and the pain that rang throughout my body did little to relax me. I tried to sit up, so that I could breathe at a slightly easier rate, but I found myself strangely unable to do so. There was a small warning that instantly went off inside my brain, but I tried to pay it no mind, reasoning that my upper body was too sore from the exercise to move.

Naturally, I next tried to move my legs so that I could use them to get up, but also found that I was unable to even shift them in the slightest. I fought the urge of panic that was blaring within my head, and took in a few more deep breaths before realizing I was completely paralyzed.

My gasps became shorter and shorter as my body failed to respond to any command more complex than simple breathing. I tried to keep calm, but any attempts at that quickly proved futile, as the idea of becoming a prisoner within my own body didn't seem all that enticing. I quickly began to hyperventilate, as I also realized I'd lost all feeling within my body, even that of my face upon the hard metal beneath me. My lungs were quickly depleted of air, and before long, I had almost passed out from lack of oxygen.

Spent far worse than I'd ever been before in my life, I tried to cry out for someone to help me, but my throat wouldn't respond, as though it had been cut off from my mind. My breathing slowly returned to normal, but I was still unable to move any part of my body, even my neck or jaw. I lay on the floor for several minutes, just praying to Kami that the feeling would soon return.

Minutes soon turned to hours, as the sun slowly passed directly over my pod, and began to inch its way to the westerly horizon. After a while, the sun passed into the angle of the window of the space shuttle, and the streams of light poured themselves over the interior of the ship, and over me. My mind was frozen from lack of stimulation, but this newfound sunlight seemed to suddenly arouse its workings, as with each ray of light that pounded its way into my eye, a distinct cell within my brain seemed to fizzle to live. Unfortunately for me, almost all of the cells that were activated by the light seemed to come from the memory portion of my brain.

A slow rush of long-lost emotions and memories fought their way to the forefront of my mind, each playing before me as though I was supposed to be recalling them for a reason. In the back of my mind, I recalled a conversation Phoenix and Gideon had had about the memories of beings flashing before their eyes as they die. I tried to deny that what was occurring to me was such an experience, but something deep within myself told me that the memories I was calling out from the deep bowels of my mind could only be those accompanied with death.

There was the demise of my siblings, all six of them, when the Caprians had come to my house to take me into their training facilities. There was the vision of their six, small, fragile bodies lain awkwardly on the floor, nary a sign of blood to be found.

There was my first fight in one of the training arenas on the Caprian home world. There was the sound of the man's scream as I broke his neck, just as my teachers had taught me. They didn't tell me he'd scream, or that his death would be such a waste. That was one thing they'd never taught.

There was my one and only chance to leave the Caprians, an offer presented to me by one of my superiors, who turned out to be a traitor to the Caprian Empire. There was the pain I felt as I turned him into my other commanding officers, and watched them brutally murder him before my eyes.

There were so many wasted moments, so many feeble attempts at a real life. One came to the surface, and played before me, enchanting my mind, and symbolizing everything I had worked for.

"I want to be the strongest, I have to be the strongest."

Commander Iazola had never understood, he had only understood his loyalty to the Emperor, and nothing could ever touch that loyalty. The same could not be said of me, for anything.

"Don't you understand? No one can be the strongest, besides the King."

I'd hated him his entire life, because he was the one who'd held me back. He was the one who had always restricted what I could become, what choices I had before me, and what chances I had for my life. I'd hated him with an unrivaled passion, my very soul cursing his existence.

"Why is only he the strongest?"

But he wasn't the only one; there were countless like him, all the same, all just like Iazola, all those years ago. Each of their memories arose to the surface as well, all recalling exactly the same conversation I'd had with my mentor back on that day.

"Because he was born that way, it was determined by the Gods."

Each one was the same, each one tortured my soul as they burned their way into my mind, yet each was different, each was a separate voice that repeated the same message over and over through my flock of recollections.

"I know I could be stronger than him, if you gave me the chance."

And in the background of my flashback of memories, was a melody… an enchanting rhythm of beats and movements that signaled the end. A song unlike any other that called me into death, and yearned me towards eternal life. And the song was beautiful.

"Foolish boy, no one chooses to be the strongest, it's something you are the moment you're conceived."

The song beckoned me to hear it to the end; to listen to it's mesmerizing rhythm to the very conclusion, and every fiber in my body told me to do the same.

"Well I know when I was born, I was meant to be the strongest, and that's why I'm here, to become the strongest!"

It wasn't time for the song to win yet, it wasn't meant to be! I needed to survive; I needed to live, to finally become what I was meant to be, to finally hold my life in my own hands. My death was before me, but I couldn't let that song finish just yet, I had so much more to do, and so much more of this life to live. I had to reject this beautiful song, and carry on.

"I wish you the best, boy, but know that when your end comes, you will not be the one who holds the title of most powerful, you will never have that chance, have that choice."

My vision was lost into the song; any urge to live seeming less and less important with each passing second. A blind shadow of my former self, I lay with only the song as my companion, nothing else in the universe touching me in the slightest. Then, slowly, my vision returned, but it was changed, altered so that I was no longer stranded on the floor of my shuttle. Instead I stood in a grassy pasture on Vannattasan, my legs beneath me, and my eyes staring off into the green-blue sky. The song was part of the image; it was interwoven between each blade of grass, enthroned in the very soul of the scene itself. Then, there came a flash of magnificent yellow light from off the right edge of the sky, and the light was Crono, who was also somehow part of the magnificent tune, part of the grass from my home that tickled my toes and sent shivers up my spine. They were all knotted together, all three things, they were all one and the same. And they were all beautiful.

"I will prove you wrong, I know I will."

The song faded from my mind, seeped into nothingness at a snail's pace, and I knew I had survived. I had finally proved them wrong, and I finally had that chance to be the strongest, to become better than anyone else, even Crono. I'd been given the choice.

And as I curled my toes, and stretched my fingers, I realized that was the true meaning of this place, this sphere in the heavens they called Earth. Here, there was a choice of what you were, it wasn't bred in you as I was taught, it was whatever you wanted it to be; and there was nothing to stop you from fulfilling your chance, which meant there was nothing to stop me.

I slowly pushed myself up from the floor, all signs of pain gone from my body, my mind purged of any such agony. The memory of the song quickly fading away, as were all my other memories; all that was left was the newfound comprehension that I was limitless from this point on, and I owed it all to the Earth, to Crono.

The moment I'd been waiting for had come, and I'd made my decision. I would fight for Earth, for Crono, and I would win.