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Ahh...The chapters I start cramming kurumois in. You knew it would happen.
For Kululu, the aspect of learning more about himself was definitely a tempting one. But was it tempting enough that he wouldn't bother Natsumi's group and the other Pekoponian that joined her?
Kululu didn't know. He had power now. And he wanted to exert that power.
And there was a chance Dororo didn't know who he was searching for. He just needed a name, to know who the person hazily in his dreams and memories were. He could barely make out her face when he closed his eyes, the only thing firmly in his memories were her obnoxious, sparkly golden eyes.
She was the sparkly eyed girl in his dreams. And he needed to know who she was.
He knew she was dead. Probably finding out more about her wouldn't help him, anyway, but he was still drawn to her.
I want to know what we were like... What it was like to live happily with her. He wanted to know her name so he could properly avenge her.
It seemed her name was censored in his memories whenever Tamama told him. But it was still firmly in his mind that Tamama had killed her. "I ate her," he recalled Tamama saying.
And for that, Tamama needed to die.
He wanted to know more about her, what had made her happy, what they had done together, what it was like to be happy with her, but he wasn't sure who could give him those answers. After all, Natsumi didn't even know who he was talking about. She had only mentioned Saburo, who had blue eyes, not golden, so he wasn't who he was looking for.
All he knew about them was that they had been in love. He was clearly in love with her, even now. And he was happy enough to have at least carried over his feelings when he had mutated. It made him more him, but he wanted to know more.
Will Dororo know? he wondered. Was it worth it?
He played around on a tall broken building, surveying the city below him, finally able to see all over. He noticed four humans in the distance. One was probably Natsumi, and the others might have been her friends. They had multiplied.
I'm an invader. I shouldn't be thinking about this. The choice is obvious. I know Dororo knows about me now. I can get the information out of him some other way. I can take him down now that I can see,Kululu thought egotistically.
He wanted to take Natsumi's group down. To exert his dominance.
He looked around for parts, ready to attack them, to play around with his sight. "What's this?" he finally realized, looking at his tail. He knew there was a giant orb at the end of it, but he had never inspected it.
Flexing it, he opened the eyelid on it, having never focused on it much before. The eye opened, showing a green iris.
Kululu smiled. He experimented with moving it around like a radar. Well. This benefits me greatly. For some reason, though the things he saw out of this third eye weren't the same as the things he saw out of his other two eyes, it gave him a brilliant field of vision.
Even better, his brain was starting to interpert the things he saw faster than he could actually see them. He was seeing a future premonition of what was most likely to happen.
"KU, KU, KU!" Kululu laughed. He realized not only could he see, he could see the future. Nobody could defeat him now.
He rubbed his hands together. "I suppose now would be the best time to experiment with how strong I am. And hell, maybe I'll meet that Saburo guy while I'm at it and find out more about myself," he shrugged.
He wanted to feel powerful instead of weak and pathetic. He was tired of being pitied. He had been pitied too much by Natsumi and Giroro.
It was over.
Natsumi and her group stopped walked when they saw something approaching them. Natsumi drew in her breath as she saw the familiar yellow creature scurry to the top of some rubble to address them.
Oh nooo... She hadn't wanted Fuyuki to see any of the Keronians. At least Kululu was slightly more pathetic than the rest of them and easier to deal with.
"Hello, Natsumi. Ku, ku, ku," Kululu grinned. Saburo and Fuyuki froze as they looked up at Kululu.
Natsumi frowned. "You have eyes now." She said a very smart, observant thing. He seemed to have green, cat-like eyes.
"What do you mean now?" Saburo asked, confused,."Natsumi. Why is he here? Is... Is that Kululu?"
"But... the platoon is dead..." Fuyuki whispered. he was so confused, he just stood in shock.
"Ku. Yes, I have eyes now. I can see. And you'll regret escaping the explosion I made for you last time," Kululu told her.
"How do you intend to beat me? You're a weakling," Natsumi told him, chucking a rock at his head. He easily deflected it and hit it back toward her face, angling it like his future premonitions told him. It hit Natsumi in the face.
"Huh? When... When did you learn how to dodge anything?" Natsumi was confused.
"You won't be able to beat me now that I'm the sense of sight," Kululu bragged. "And I will destroy you for not killing Tamama."
Saburo and Fuyuki just blinked in confusion.
"Kululu... Why are you trying to kill us? We're... Well, I'm your friend!" Saburo corrected himself mid-sentence.
"Oh? Are you Saburo?" Kululu asked. Saburo nodded.
"He doesn't remember us, Saburo," Natsumi told him. "He doesn't remember anything after mutating from radiation," she whispered quietly, "except how to be a jerk. Something I think he could do without."
Kululu pressed a button of an invention he had quickly made. A swarm of mutant rats crawled out of dark shafts of rubble, all with collars designed by Kululu.
As if playing with a remote-control toy, Kululu moved them around to attack. Saburo, Koyuki, and Fuyuki tried to dodge, but the rats seemed to predict their every move and chomped down toward their legs.
Natsumi charged at Kululu, and he easily dodged. Predicting her movements, he stabbed at her with a sharp piece of glass, causing several wounds.
After a few minutes of easily dodging blows and the rats attacking the three others very easily, Kululu yawned.
"Well, this was way too easy and boring. I have better things to do then to play with you. You'll die from my hoard of rats," Kululu told them turning away.
Saburo screamed as the rats piled on top of him, bringing him to the ground. "Kululu... Don't do this. Please, for our past friendship, call them off," he begged, looking sadly at his friend.
Kululu turned to him, glancing at Saburo for a moment. Nobody moved against Kululu as they waited for him to give in.
"It's true. You were probably my friend," Kululu realized. "I get an odd satisfaction when looking at you. A sort of nostalgia." He walked closer to Saburo, looking pitifully at him.
"But something's still missing. You aren't what I'm looking for. So by that logic, I can assume that your death will cause me little pain." Kululu grabbed Saburo by the hair, pulling him up to look at his eyes as he laid on his stomach. The rats trampled over him and did not chomp him any longer.
"I might have once found you interesting, but we've both changed, Saburo. I into something much more powerful, and you... Well, you seem boring. I wouldn't be friends with a boring person. So you must have changed," Kululu told him.
"B-boring?" Saburo's eyes seemed to fill with tears. He had always feared being boring, and his real concern with being trapped in the base had been how boring it was.
"I won't even kill you myself. You're too boring." Kululu dropped his head. "Ku, ku, ku. Good-bye, former friend."
He turned away and walked off, leaving the group for the hoard of rats. The rats, no longer being controlled by Kululu, were now up for grabs of Natsumi attacking. She kicked and tore, letting Fuyuki climb up some rubble onto safety.
Saburo remained on the ground, weakly letting the rats' infected mouths chew on him. His motivation had faltered as he tried to be tough and not cry, just in shock from the words Kululu had said.
Natsumi pushed the rats off of Saburo and pulled him up. "Snap out of it!" she told him, looking at his wounds. He was by far the most wounded, even though she herself was bleeding and Fuyuki was physically the least strongest.
"He... He left me... He said I was boring... I always thought I was an interesting guy, but maybe I'm not. I... I don't know who I am anymore," Saburo confessed. He slumped to the ground again.
"Clean Fuyuki's wounds, Koyuki," she requested. "I'm... I'm going to cheer up Saburo." All the rats were gone. Her feet were tougher than them and she could kick pretty far.
"You got it," Koyuki told her. Natsumi dropped down to Saburo's level, sitting by his side. He looked so sad.
"Let's clean your wounds up." She had expected that Saburo would have been able to take the Keronians' new forms and minds the most out of them, but even he hadn't been that strong. And she felt incredibly sorry for him.
Natsumi tried to clean his wounds, hoping he wasn't in too much pain. She tightened some rags around where the bleeding was so she could focus on Saburo.
"You saved my life, Natsumi," Saburo realized. "I would have lied there and gotten eaten."
"No you wouldn't have. You're tougher than that," she complimented, trying to get him to cheer up.
"No. No I'm not," he told her. "And this makes me think, not only did I not know me and Kululu, I didn't know you, either. I always thought you were just another silly person with a crush on me. You were always chasing after me, and although it was amusing at times it sometimes got old," he confessed.
Natsumi frowned. He knew about her crush on him? She blushed awkwardly.
"But you're a lot stronger than I gave you credit for. You're your own person. I always thought you were just some school girl, someone who wanted to be some sort of damsel in distress, but you're nothing like that. I really knew nothing about you," Saburo confessed. "I'm sorry, Natsumi. You're so strong, and I never realized that until now."
Natsumi smiled at the compliment.
"You're not some school girl with a crush on me anymore. You've grown," he smiled at her. Suddenly he started leaning in toward her, his lips puckered.
Natsumi blushed. Was he about to kiss her? She closed her eyes and puckered her lips slightly.
Saburo and her... They could still be a thing. Giroro had pretty much told her to get together with him, so there were no worries.
Suddenly, she felt a small kiss on her forehead. She opened her eyes to see Saburo was just giving her a gentle forehead kiss. He pulled away smiling gently at her.
"Sorry... I almost kissed you." He laughed a little bit.
Natsumi frowned.
"Don't frown like that, Natsumi," he smiled kindly. "Kissing you right now wouldn't be good. I don't want to put you in that awkward state of cleaning up my emotional mess, to make me feel like I wasn't just some boring guy," he told her. "It wouldn't be good for anybody." He shook his head. "Especially not you. Do you want to kiss me like that? Me using you just because you once had a crush on me and I need someone to idolize me? No. It's not a good idea. And it wouldn't be good for me, either," he told her. "So I'm glad I didn't do it. It wasn't meant to be."
"Saburo..." Natsumi whispered.
"A relationship isn't something you should want. What you want is respect, which I haven't given you for a very long time. Let me respect you," he told her.
Natsumi nodded. Talking to Saburo like an equal was a nice feeling. She had believed for a while that they had talked like it, but she realized that they hadn't been as close as she had first believed.
She had put his name in the hat originally, and he had put hers. They were the person they found the least close in the group. And because of various things, Natsumi hadn't closed that gap between them in her year staying in the base.
She smiled, happy that Saburo respected her. "Don't be worried about what Kululu said. Before he could see, he was a major wimpy weenie. He was such a weakling. You should have seen him!" Natsumi laughed.
"I'd have liked to see that." Saburo smiled, turning his sadness to anger at Kululu's betrayal.
The two smiled at each other.
Kululu found a pretty broken large building that used to be a skyscraper.
Perfect, he smiled. He would become the ruler of this world. But a ruler required a fortress.
And right now he needed to put his sight to work and start inventing.
Inventing was even easier than it had been non-mutated. After all, now that Kululu could no longer feel things, he could work beyond his limit, letting his hands become callused and course, the tips of his fingers bloodied from making so many inventions.
Even losing a sense was somewhat benefiting. His hearing was better, now that his headphones were picking up sounds he couldn't usually hear, and his fingers no longer felt pain.
Sure, he couldn't taste things like curry or smell anything, but that wasn't helpful to a war. He didn't need to taste anything.
"KU, KU, KU!" Kululu laughed. "I'll become the ruler of this pitiful planet. And then... everybody will see who's pitiful. And it isn't me."
He would take Giroro's goal and rub it in the dirt. He'd be the one to get all the water and invade the planet.
He'd complete all his goals. After all, he could see it in the future.
He could see himself as the dictator of this barren planet. He grinned.
It was the life he deserved. It belonged to him.
I'm trying to write a better, nicer Saburo lately in my fics. Do you think I'm getting him right?
Please review.