Dirge growled as his claws dug into pale blue flesh, savoring the delightful cry of pain that came off the female writhing underneath him. Her beautiful skin came up in tatters between his claws.
The local creatures were a strange race, a hairless and scaleless society of bipedal beings with hooves and pointed teeth. Mammalian if he had to guess. Which only made their forms all the stranger to him.
His people were cold blooded, reptilian. Something of a rarity in the Cold Empire if he remembered right. Before his induction into the ship as a warrior he had never seen the point of things like breasts, or the subtle curves you could find among members of certain species. But years on a ship like this one had taught him that their joy to be found in females of just every species that walked, swam, or flew in the cosmos.
In mammals he found he enjoyed the softness of their flesh. The way it all shook when he took a crying window on cold earth, soaked with the blood of her loved ones. The way their flesh parted oh so easily when his hunger took a different direction than simple carnal desire. It was a pastime he found helped in times of stress, when the danger inherent to his profession reared its head.
He had found this particular local, along with a number of others, gathered together in the station the ship had been docked on. His admittance to the captain after his brief stint in the healing chambers had been a blow to his reputation and his pride, one that he immediately knew he wouldn't recover from in the foreseeable future. So he left the ship, decided to take the time to approach the situation with intelligence.
He had been considering the strange abilities the cook had been hiding, trying to gauge just how dangerous he was, and if it was worthwhile to find a time to attack or wait for the right moment. He had been worrying about the man ever since their first battle. What was he capable of? Did he hide his power or have some trick to hurt him while remaining so weak?
The questions had been plaguing him for some time, but then he saw them. They had likely been waiting for some shared family member to arrive today. There was something so warm about the way they spoke with one another, something so loving and innocent about the sight of the family gathered at the visitor arrivals station. It was beautiful enough to catch his eye.
They had been playing some kind of board game, laughing and giggling as they waited. Some aged grandsire looked over his family proudly as sisters and mothers laughed alongside brothers and husbands. He remembered the excitement the vision had brought upon him, the mixture of lust and hunger.
The idea of whatever poor soul or souls arriving to visit their families, only to find bloodstained floors and pitying expressions waiting for them, was wonderful to him, and it was achievable. A way to work through the anger without reacting blindly to the threat. So, taking advantage of the immunity the newest captain had dragged from the king of this backwater, he attacked. He tore the old and the young apart, eating as he wished, he ripped the beautiful and young from the bosom of their fathers and sons and husbands, and he left them to wallow in the carnage he wrought, knowing the fate of those he took alive would be far worse.
And he made certain it was.
The woman underneath him screamed as he ripped the arm from her socket, begging for some reprieve as he finally climaxed, her broken and twisted legs unable to do anything but lightly buck against him. He rewarded her by biting into her throat, and ripping the ability to scream right out of her.
She was the last of them. The third or forth of those he had taken. It was a shame their power level was so low. These ones in particular tasted good, better than most who had run afoul of him, yet he would not eat his fill, not strip the soft and pliable flesh from their bones. The beast who ate only fully consumed the strong, and so too would he. Even if he had a little snack here and there. Dennis had surprisingly enough marked himself as among the truly worthy.
His people could not form their victims into to chocolate and sweets as the beast did all those years ago, but they would eat and become strong just the same.
When the twitches stopped, and the last of the light faded from the girls eyes, he took the corpse by the throat and left his quarters and disappeared into the stark white of the ships halls. When he had first been transferred he had asked Commander Belk for a room by the nearest waste disposal shaft, and over the years they had seen much use.
A common fate for prisoners, especially those he personally took. The crew never appreciated it when bodies were left to rot, and unworthy meals were commonplace on the worlds they were expected to purge. With an almost appreciative amount of tenderness he guided the womans body into the square port on the wall, and as the body disappeared down the shaft Dirge could almost imagine the hum of the incinerator as it reduced her to ash, and jettisoned what was left into space.
He almost missed the soft sound of two feet touching down on the cool floor behind him. A sound that replayed in his mind often over the past hours. Just before that whistle. Dirge smiled. So the human was as dangerous as he had feared.
"Dennis."
His arm swung behind him at speeds faster than many beings eyes could follow, and with strength that crushed skulls, buildings, and landscape alike, just barely missing the cooks head as he ducked under the blow. A blade slid through the soft scale of his throat as the man rose back up. The humans arms wrapped around Dirge's own a moment later, tightening around his limbs with surprising strength to match his own rapidly growing weakness.
As Dirge bled out, A cold, blue pair of eyes locked into his own, and in them he recognized an expression of satisfaction he often saw reflected back at him by his own victims.
"Dirge."
After I wrapped that loose end up I moved on, playing out the rest of the day as if nothing happened. We lost many crewmembers over this purge, and were likely to lose more before were done. Without a body I doubt anyone would care enough to look for Dirge until the time came to account for the dead, and with him and his scouter and blaster gone with him, most would assume he went out in the fight.
By the end of the next day our reinforcements had arrived. Two other ships of the class of power of our own. They hadn't bothered to land on Naldinnas, citing they were well fueled from the next system over, and as a result the most interaction all the crews had with each other was the quick relay of commands to different battle groups. The increased danger of the planet in question had driven into everyone's minds that we needed to handle this professionally. As far as I'm aware that means no splitting off to fight on your own, and to stick with the command staff as support.
Everyone prepared in some manner. After the wounds from their first foray unto planet Herridan had been healed they crew had decided to take this purge more seriously, even with the draw on their payout. I myself kept my training relatively light in preparation for the battle I knew I would be taking part in soon. After feeding Apara the last of my roast porcine I even had her start doing stretches as our ship took to the sky. The girl argued about the use of such a practice, and to be honest I'm not sure how effective it is on a Saiyan, but to play it safe I insisted.
The official time frame was tomorrow morning on the southern pole of the planets surface. Enough time for everyone involved to prepare, and for the ships to get into position to bombard the planet if the need came about. It was expected that all three crews would manage, but expectations had already been broken before on this world and it seemed like no-one wanted to push it.
I had been keeping out of sight in the meantime. No one was going to request a meal at a time like this, and most were already aware I was just about out of stock. I "forgot" to tell them just how I had run out of my supply of nearly all the ships foodstuffs. All the better. I didn't need the added distraction of playing the cook right now anyway. The free time had given me just what I needed to handle Dirge, and stuff his body down a chute before anyone saw.
I only wish I had the chance to draw out the experience. I never forgot that pleasant ache he left on the side of my face.
On the other side of things, joining the warriors wasn't really the kind of job that needed a complex or subtle plan. The girl might have needed someone to vouche for her about an event that might have happened, but I had no such requirements.
When I entered the mess hall I took no care to hunch myself down and present a smaller target. I stopped trying to avoid the eyes of those who bore the privilege of power at birth. I stood straight and walked as a man, not a slave. My foot steps echoed loudly across the room, and in my gaze I made certain everyone knew I was looking for a fight.
Considering my reputation it wasn't too hard to find one. From the moment I walked in I knew who saw me, and who recognized me. Most of the chaff who knew of me didn't like my position on the ship. Engineers were easy to classify as valuable, but I cooked mostly for the important and the powerful. The crew just saw a slave who was too comfortable on this ship, someone who could, as incorrect as the assumption was, enjoy the full benefits of being a crewmember without any danger or real challenge to myself.
I sensed as blind anger and arrogance mixed into a beautiful cocktail of bloodlust directed at me and me alone. A few might have gotten up to challenge me directly, many were already lifting themselves from their seats at the tables to show me my "place" in the world. I found my target before they could make the choice for me.
An alien from the local populous, one of the rare beings on this moon with the power to call himself one of us. With a power level in the upper three hundreds he had a bright future here. He was a young man with a clean face, resembling humans in a way, if not for the hooves he stood on and the hairless blue skin covering his body. He'd likely been recruited at some point in the past week, and probably didn't have any friends. From his energy I could sense he was a killer, but not like those on this ship. He hadn't seen what its like yet, hadn't let the power go to his head like so many others did.
If his energy hadn't already told me that, it would have been the way his eyes slid over my form as he walked for the door I had just entered through. The instinctual way he dismissed me as just another person passing by. As he made to somewhat politely avoid me I pushed past him roughly, almost shoving him to the side as I passed. I held back a growl of annoyance at just how hard it was to move him.
"Wh-" His eyes roamed over my body, looking for the common uniform of a warrior on this ship. When he realized it was nothing more than the cheap underclothing everyone wore the anger I was looking for built in seconds. He didn't even process that if I was as weak as that implied I wouldn't have been able to move him in the first place.
"You!"
I looked back, my brow raised. "Yeah?"
"Get on your knees and apologize, and I might let you live past the next five seconds." His raised voice cut clearly through any of the other conversations going around the room. Out of vague interest if nothing else we had everyone's attention.
"How about I give you three?" I watched his arrogant expression fade into a blind rage. My grin couldn't have been wider.
My head moved to the side before he had really even understood that he was going to attack me, letting a pale fist pass me by with enough force to kill a regular human with the displaced air alone. In truth he had moved faster than I could react, but his energy told me everything I needed to know before my eyes could.
That was the shame about not knowing the truth of ki. These fools didn't understand that the power you could exert wasn't just decided by the volume of the strength you had, but how you could expend it. I myself discovered that truth not long after I began to use ki. It was how I learned my only original technique.
Theres no question you can put everything you have into a single blast, so why not do the same to a set of movements? or a physical attack?
If you forced your ki to act as if you had a higher reserve than you did, your body would respond in kind, producing results you could only expect from someone stronger than you.
The only downside was that while you fought harder, you wouldn't fight as long, and if I was guessing right, you can't take a hit from whoever forced you to fight on their level. A flawed technique, but my very own Burnout.
I breathed in.
My power ignited, bleeding out of me fast enough to end my life in less than a minute of use. By the time he had drawn back for another punch the world around us slowed to a crawl, and I was already in motion. My fist struck the side of his face, unbalancing him and sending a crimson spray to the floor. My boot met the inside of one of his knees, bringing him to a kneel on the floor. My arm wrapped around his throat, and squeezed.
As I exhaled the cracking of bone sounded throughout the room, and a body fell to the floor.
Silence met my ears.
Power Levels-
Dennis-183
Apara-78