I didn't let the silence last long, didn't allow them a moment to draw their own assumptions from the situation. I already had a plan, and I was speaking before any of them could even react.

I've often thought about how poorly slaves are regarded in a society like the one I live in. How grievous the punishment usually is to those who manage to actually kill a warrior of even low strength. In this societies eyes it was somewhat like a pet dog killing a child. Something less than human killed a valued member of society, if not a particularly important one. Without the emotional connection it came down to what it cost the empire at large, what it looked like to a people obsessed with the worth of battlepower.

Even weak warriors were worth their ki in gold, but a slave was more common than the air we breathed, and by that merit it was easy enough to see why the punishment for murdering one of the people of value was often as terrible as it was imaginative. However I had long been holding onto an idea about that. It was never a question of morality, but value and personal loyalty.

A kind of self governence suited to a society and an economy based on piracy, destruction, and looting on a planetary scale. It was quick, relatively effective if you didn't care about morality, and most importantly cheap. You didn't have to pay people to uphold the law when you had no real law.

If an established warrior, one of greater or at least equal strength than the victim was guilty of the killing, they were usually only reprimanded, and the punishment usually came from whatever friends the dead man happened to have. The greater the power of the being in question in comparison to the victim the less likely their would even be a punishment at all, with some mild exceptions of course.

So if a slave was guilty of a killing, what if they proved themselves stronger than the victim? What if they proved themselves to be of more value to society than the one they killed?

In all honesty I wasn't sure, but I figure in that circumstance the slaves power, and therefore value would have to at least be reevaluated before the punishment came about. With Dirge out of the picture, and with as little time as I had left, I used that to my advantage as best I could. As the corpse fell to my feet and the silence of the room met my ears I spread my arms wide, and as I spoke I was no longer the quiet cook, I was a caricature of every killer I'd had the displeasure of meeting on this ship. I kept things simple, and in a way everyone here could understand.

"I've been on the Dilligent Frost for over two years now. I've been cooking, cleaning, and working for many of you that survived long enough to call yourselves true veterans of Freeza Force. I've watched you seize credits, slaves, and glory with every conquest! I've served with you, but I've never been a true member of the crew. That changes today!" My grin was feral, and I didn't have to work too hard to force the bloodlust into my tone.

Either I would impress them, or I would piss them off. I was almost hoping it would be both.

"I decided that now is the time to join you, that I'd like to be a warrior! And would you look at that-" I drawled, pointing to the corpse on the floor. "An empty posistion! What luck!" I slowly swung around, making sure to face every side of the room with a confident smile on my face, I was relieved to hear laughter erupt throughout the mess hall. The monsters around me absolutely delighted at the entertainment, I felt only a few of the fresh crew members feel anything but amusement at the sight of me murdering one of their own. Fucking animals.

This was nothing but a show, a disturbingly common display of strength around places like this.

"So what do you say?" I kicked the corpse by my side, sending it tumbling across the room. "Can I burn this world with you!?"

I knew the answer before a single being spoke. The cheer was all I needed.

"Can I kill these FUCKING bugs with you!?"

A Saiyan girl watched from a hallway as the human took to the center of the mess hall, observing with eyes far more intelligent than a child had any right to be.

Apara watched as the strange man made his speech, her head tilted at the difference between the way he held himself now, and the ways he did it the other times she had seen him. Inside her cell he had been quiet, his eyes flickering about the room as if he expected a hidden attack to come about from any angle. He came off as a coward, but a dangerous one, one who would show his true strength only when backed into a corner.

Around the ship, as he ferried his...enticing food about, he was as submissive as any slave was, perhaps more so. He managed the act so well even the particularly aggressive warriors ignored him completely. It was a disturbing façade, but almost less so than the individual who had planned out her ascension to warrior. It was only natural for the weak to serve or die. She had seen it plenty of times even before she landed on her purge world. With Dennis it felt like a herd beast suddenly rearing up and spitting venom in her eyes. Completely unexpected and against all rightful nature in the world.

Then there was the man who stood in the center of the mess hall, doing everything she wished she could have done. For a brief, flickering instance she truly believed a Saiyan warrior had taken his place, openly challenging anyone in the room to question his place as one of them. It brought a warmth to her chest she hadn't felt since she departed her homeworld. Some distant sense of kinship.

Which of them were true? She wondered. The slave? The hidden predator? The Saiyan? The fact that he played at being anything but a warrior was all the evidence she needed to prove he wasn't a Saiyan, but what did that make him really? What kind of warrior would this man be when the time came for him to train her? Would he be able to keep his word?

Would she be made strong enough to escape the disgrace of her birth power-level?

Only the coming battle would give away the truth.

Within the bowels of the ship, behind several locked doors and within a fanciful room decorated with the last artifacts of dead peoples, a crimson skinned man nursed a bottle of Forellan wine. He was ignoring the blue skinned woman on his bed for the terminal at its side, looking through a dozen different reports on the most recent happenings of the ship. All of them were marked under the name of the ships only human crew member. A cook named Dennis.

Jernus couldn't help but snarl at his growing headache. The commanders had been monitoring the crew's behavior at his order, advising where they could. He had been fighting with them for the better part of ten years, and in spite of his strength he knew that if it wasn't for his popularity at the time he never would have gotten the vote to lead from the commanders. You either needed the vote, or a strength far exceeding anyone on your ship.

He had the vote, but the crew knew that as well as he did. It wouldn't take much more for a mutiny. Reports indicated that if the next attack failed there would be a near certainty of a riot among the crew, and a forty percent chance of a riot even now.

Jernus had always been proud of his strength, his battle power exceeding fourteen hundred, but it was only a distant second to captain Torin. She could have easily been one of those lucky few who traveled the stars on their own, relying on their power and nothing else for victory. For her it was easy to remain captain, no one on the ship with the presence of mind to carry a scouter would ever dare to challenge her like they could Jernus.

Things were different for him. Belk or Jell could just as easily have taken the position, even if he was a few dozen points higher than them. Not all battles were so cut and dry after all. Not to mention the newer commanders. The weakest one sat at eight hundred, and it would only take a couple of them to bring him down. This was all a mess.

Then there was the cook. That bastard Dennis killed one of the new recruits, and new readings from the scouters marked him at a power level far beyond any traditional slave, even if he was weaker than the average warrior. If that was even true. He had personally looked into the ships logs on Dennis. Since the day he was promoted from conscript to cook he had been by all accounts a model example of a weaker species still proving themselves useful. He kept his head down and didn't argue with crew members. The only anomaly was the strange fluctuations in his power level. Before today it had been shifting rather strangely between twenty five, and thirty.

An interesting and marked improvement from his first recorded power level, but one that confused him. Power wasn't supposed to fluctuate like it did for the cook. Only the sick, the wounded, and the armed saw changes in their power like that, and while Dennis had apparently kept a blade of bone from his first and only purge, that should not have been enough to be the reason behind the change.

Even the fight was strange, Dennis' power had fluctuated, rising to two hundred and fifty even as he dismantled an opponent far beyond his strength in moments. The earliest log mentioned that Dennis referenced his race as one with a difficult to read power level over being so low as to be in the single digits. So far the evidence had been clear on that end.

That had been the first recorded instance of him so much as raising his voice, and somehow he had both killed a valuable recruit and gotten the vague interest of the crew. Alongside the fact they were undermanned there was nothing to be done but let him join in, even if it was clear to everyone with a working brain that the shit had been planning this ever since the last battle was lost.

In any other position Jernus might have been impressed, but as the captain he had to consider just what they had lost. Even if the cook was smarter than he let on, they had still traded a prospect for future command for a recruit with a power of just under two-hundred, a recruit they already had to bend the standard rules of minimum battle-power for. That alongside the complaints he had already gotten from the rest of the new meat, was a hit to the already half ruined fighting power of this ship.

Between him and the Saiyan girl he had already made far too many exceptions than he would ever be comfortable with, exceptions he was already being forced to accept.

The captains of the Menacing Chilled and the Winter Malice were already busy sucking up any more potential warriors from Naldinnas, and even if they weren't, hiring more would dip into the crews already reduced payout. Jernus shook his head. He had already used all his savings to pad the crews payment as best he could, thinning it out now would be suicide. Once the numbers went through he would be granted a portion of Torin's savings for being the succeeding captain, but that would take weeks he didn't have.

He was burning this moon when he got back.

A little on the nose, but here you go, technically within 24 hours.

Power Levels-

Dennis-183

Apara-78

Jernus-1443