"This is 4561 Dennis of the Diligent Frost speaking. Me and Apara will be covering 11-D. Anyone still here in the next minute or so can expect friendly fire." Belk paused at the announcement, his hand wrapped around the neck of a whimpering sod who thought he was clever. The being in his grasp was a Galactic Patrol higher up. Their equivalent to a commander. A position he knew was primarily won on leadership skills. It hadn't been a bad idea to gather up a strike group to take out difficult opposition. Since this had been something of a siege since the PTO's arrival, hiding somewhere and concentrating your killing power on single targets wasn't half bad.
If the Patrol had selected their leaders better Belk might not have made it. That was the problem with those soft hearts, they looked for leadership skills when they should have been vetting for power. Killing potential. Leadership could be learned, clever tactics could be taught. Still, if they hadn't been using that strategy it might have got him. Instead Belk waited, keeping warriors he borrowed from other squads in reserve well within flying distance. When the so called "ambush" was sprung, they met a number of warriors more than capable of matching the assault. Over a thousand was very good for a place like this, but every crew had at least a few dozen warriors over 800. All were happy to provide.
It was over in seconds. That was the problem with clever fighters. They forgot the numbers. 1123 was a strong battle power, but it fell short of his own and left the beings weak creatures facing a larger and stronger one. They forgot what it meant to face a seasoned Freeza Force Commander. Years served aboard the Frost, years spent killing everything that or walked or crawled on worlds worth taking, and worth defending.
A high power level took years of experience and training from capable births. It was difficult to cultivate and valuable in every warrior. To ignore it for base morality or individual expression was foolish, and led to just this situation.
Screaming, with a hand crushing your windpipe. Watching as friends and loved ones are battered and broken. Looking into the face of a foe you couldn't overcome, and realizing he and his would relish in destroying everything you ever held dear. It was a feeling of oxygen not reaching your lungs, your brain rapidly wearing away, and hope fading into despair.
Belk squeezed harder, watching the visible skin of a furred aliens face purple. His ears twitched at the sound of rubble falling, and with a vicious backswing he dismantled one of the many robots the patrol was using to turn the tide. They were the new threat. If only because they didn't stop pouring out of their holes and attacking his battlegroup. Even now a circle of warriors surrounded Belk's position, fending off a wave of machines falling like rain from the sky, the cover of darkness doing well to keep them hidden until they landed just on top of their position.
Dennis was one of those clever fighters too. That was why Jernus had given the human over to him. He would play his games until someone just as clever and much stronger ground him into the dirt. Slaves were slaves because they were weak enough to be managed. If 275 was the best the human could muster, he would meet the same fate if only because he wasn't manageable anymore. Dennis would need both to survive as more than the cook.
The audacity of him was new though. He'd been a useful thorn in the defenders side for some time with that trick of hiding his power in dark places, but 11-D was an active battlezone in about as open a space as you get on this planet. Jernus wouldn't like the human using the emergency channel to thump his chest.
He- Belk stiffened as his scouter chimed with an update on one of his warriors battle power.
7478 Apara
Power Level- 2780
Active Combatant
The commander snatched a scouter off of another warrior's face, checking the reading even as a roar echoed across the battlefield. The same.
The Saiyan girl. The only scion of the growing legend of the warrior race aboard his ship. He had heard of something like that, but never imagined it could be true. A transformation unlocking a battlepower far exceeding that of their natural strength.
A beast that far exceeded any transformation seen or heard of outside of myth. The battlegroup watched in near silence as many of the robots broke off in the direction of this new threat. Fighting without a casual word between them, each warrior keeping an eye on the power in the distance.
Maybe… Maybe with the girl Dennis would stand a chance.
If Apara was any example, and I knew she was, Saiyans were a warrior people before anything else. Not soldiers, not killers, but warriors. Everything about them was evolutionarily designed to stand tall, stand alone, and stand unstoppable before anything nature could throw at them. In the coming years the known universe and all the powers from kingdoms to empires, to the Galactic Patrol and even the PTO, everyone that called themselves important would see the Saiyans and hail them as the ultimate warrior race. Even Freeza, who in his rightful fear of these creatures would one day destroy them, would acknowledge that certainty, if only in the fact he does act against them in the first place.
And why wouldn't they? By any account you could get from them if you managed to contact their homeworld and ask someone who knew and cared, Apara was a weakling sent to die on a world too strong for her. She was an outlier only in that she was so far below the cut her very existence was a shame to her family. Even now, after months under my wing and more than tripling her strength, she was a bad example. All the strength she could call upon now and that girl would still be considered less even then her peers in the lowest class of her race. Fodder that make up more than 95 percent of the population. If she stopped training and let nature take its course she'd be lucky to hit 600 by the time she was an adult.
Yet she got stronger following every battle, regardless of nearly any wound or injury, she got stronger. Apara learned martial arts at a genius level, pulling insights and flaws from simply watching me fight with a less developed martial art, she has no remorse or fear to give to her enemies, and if given an opponent would relentlessly pursue victory without care of the damage she took or the hurt someone could inflict on her, and all to the point of her own death. To top it all off, like every single intact member of her race, she could look at the full moon, and transform into something with a strength exceeding her own by a factor of ten.
All of that in a child considered too weak to succeed. A failure of biology. To her people she may as well have been born without arms or legs. To them 278 was nothing. On my earth the people would have dropped to their knees and declared the things she was capable of nothing less than proof of the divine.
In the PTO a battle power of 1000 was considered well above the average of the universe. The kind of strength that could well see a successful career and a wealthy lifestyle. Around 2000 and you'd be cleared to travel the universe on your own, taking an entire crew's salary and receiving respect, wealth and more in volumes you can't even imagine. accolades for the rest of your days. You would be trusted by the PTO because you had strength enough that many of the worlds the scouts would find every year wouldn't be able to stand up to you if they rose up as one and fought to the last. They expected you to sweep foreign worlds and see billions burn on their knees at a wave of your hand.
You could rule entire planets, have entire societies of slaves bound to your every whim if you had a strength exceeding five thousand, and a will to use it. Apara, a child of less than thirteen years of age, had a power level of 2780 if she looked at the moon on the right day.
She was still considered a worthless nobody by her own people. That was why Saiyans were feared. That was why only three years after being forced to join the PTO, rumor and superstition had already spread about them. What could a mutant of a species like that be capable of? What wouldn't it be capable of? I had no doubt in my mind that Freeza was right to be concerned about them. They would only grow stronger with time. As they were, that kind of strength couldn't be tolerated.
I poked my head through a cloud half made of water, and half made of treatment chemicals, watching as a furred beast over fifty feet in height laid waste to a horde of machines that had been on the verge of overwhelming an army of alien planet killers. A great ape with the head of a baboon. It had no rhythm or discipline as it swung its meaty fists into flesh and metal alike, it fought no better than a wild animal might. If it possessed anything other than power overwhelming, this form would have no value, but it did. Even the strongest captain I could feel on this planet would balk at the idea of fighting my student as she was now.
She was a titan, a symbol of apocalypse come to life. Ready to spit and roar defiance against anything that came her way. As I had hoped they would, everything did. Robots marching, crawling, flying and lurching from every direction they could. Some fresh and some pulling themselves along, half useless already. All of them would advance to see my student die. It was glorious.
Of course, I noted as she snatched one of our men out of the air, shoving the poor alien into her mouth with a crunch before moving on, that it was a bit of a bummer she couldn't control herself. We hadn't been able to take any time to look into this particular facet of her abilities. From my position in the sky I felt dozens of our warriors suddenly leaping to acknowledge my warning, the words "friendly fire" suddenly making much more sense to them now that they were on the receiving end of it.
I had warned them.
We'd need a considerable amount of open space and privacy to even attempt to train her control over the ape. I wasn't eager to try, but with the way current events have unfolded, I'm going to have to reconsider the idea somehow. This was far too useful an ace in the hole. Even if it was more like pulling the pin on a grenade and throwing it to somebody else in the room.
That said, I hadn't made the decision for her to transform lightly. I knew there would be consequences to our actions today long after I had forgotten this planet, that this shift in power dynamics would go far from unnoticed by the others onboard the Diligent Frost. That was why I had chosen this moment, placed Apara in a position where casualties and friendly fire would be minimized. Where the utility of that kind of power was impossible to ignore, and where I could maximize my own benefits, and it was to my benefit. This was more than a technique, it was a biological use of energy. Ki being activated in its basest form. Just bearing witness to that kind of thing was a privilege to a self-study like myself.
I licked my lips at the chaos unfolding below. I couldn't have wished for a more suitable battleground.
I only threw this particular grenade because I had a theory about how these machines worked. All of our bosses were being bombarded, yes, but so were all our heavy hitters. If I stretched my awareness that truth extended to the other crews as well. If you were worth more than 800 points it seemed the robots got real interested, attacking in droves if they could. It was either by design of their controllers, or a quirk in their programming. With how hard it would be to watch and react to a fight well past your physical abilities in real time, I was betting on the latter.
It made me think what might happen if I put an unrestrained battle power far exceeding any other on the battlefield. Something so strong it was beyond ignoring.
The answer to that question was robots giving up on their fights to seek out the largest threat they could find. It happened in a wave, thousands of ongoing battles suddenly coming to a halt as a significant portion of our attackers just up and left, completely ignoring retaliation as they did.
From my position I could see hundreds of machines getting dismantled as they tried to turn around, all suddenly focused on a new target. I could see thousands more coming in every minute from different directions. Bleeding in from buildings, descending from the sky, or crawling out from the rubble these cubes came in droves to do battle with Apara. If I looked deep into the well of her anger I could tell she was absolutely delighted about it. What was left of her rational mind exalted in this change of fortune and role.
Atop a mountain of rubble and destruction that was once titanic skyscrapers. A gigantic beast pounded its chest, creating a rain of sparking electronics and coolant in every direction as it swung it's massive arms into a cloud of robots. Every time she opened up her mouth to roar her defiance a blast of energy belched forth with it. Every stomp sent shockwaves throughout the ground. She hadn't even bothered to move from her landing spot, whatever bestial instincts ran the creature when Apara wasn't home, was now driving her to defend her position from this tide of insects.
To her, at that strength? They may as well have been.
I wouldn't be fighting tonight. This evening my job was to follow Apara's path of destruction wherever it led me and glean whatever insights I could off of her. If the time came she was overwhelmed by numbers I would intervene if I could. If by chance she turned back before she died I would risk taking her and fleeing, even in the steadily growing hellscape of sector 11-D.
In the tidal wave of metal and mindless robotic determination I observed that even as a mindless ape creature she utilized every weapon at her disposal. If she wasn't swinging a fist, she was stomping a gigantic leg. If she wasn't crushing something with her tail, she was belching blasts of superheated energy. Everything she could attack with used all at once in a cycle of bloodshed and dogged defiance.
An animal too distracted to do anything but snap in every direction it could. A creature of destruction sated by a never ending whirlwind of violence that didn't seem to ebb.
I watched as hours passed us by and strategies changed. Numbers giving away to coordination and planning, force becoming tactics as whatever intelligence behind the assault realized its folly.
Every time she took a wound or a robot proved resilient my students' monstrous form only redoubled its efforts, uncaring of damage or the material distraction of pain. It only fueled her rampage. When machines crawled up her body and stabbed uselessly at her legs she only jumped and swiped them off. When they focused on burning melted streaks of flesh across her matted fur she only roared and swiped them away with a wave of raw destruction.
When they forced themselves into her mouth in an attempt to halt the blasts coming from her bestial maw they only met teeth and a monstrous appetite more than willing to ingest metal.
All the while I watched, all the while I memorized every stray movement of ki, every reaction and action the Oozaru took in its lust for battle.
When the tide did break, and the waves of attackers slowly trickled to a few hundred, to a few dozen. I found myself sitting in the ruin of a bathroom, waiting in the dark and listening to the curious sounds of the oozaru as it picked through scraps and chewed at corpses. It finally grew bored enough to sleep 20 minutes after the last of the robots had dragged itself to her location.
The distant sound of combat had long faded as crews beat the enemy back into the tunnels. Many of them no doubt now speaking of the little Saiyan girl who fought with our ship.
I looked at the empty black sky above. No sun to rely on, but I assume it was around nine hours since Apara had changed.
It would be another ten minutes before the creature began to shrink, its size rapidly bleeding away into the naked form of a child. I would wait another ten just to be sure before I left the collapsed and half visible hole I had sequestered myself in, floating over to Apara as she curled into the center of a massive depression in the rock.
I looked over the myriad wounds covering her small form, checking for serious injuries or hidden surprises. I was careful not to wake her. Apara will be sad to find herself once again waking up inside a healing pod, but I'm sure the story I have to tell her when she leaves will more than make up for the disappointment.
When I was satisfied with what I found, I stalked away to some debris, stealing a heavy piece of burned cloth from a bent flagpole.
I returned to my ship with a child wrapped in cloth in my arms, and so many plans.
I would see hours of work and pages of my notebook filled when I finally return to my quarters, but it would mark the end of the most productive evening in any of my days aboard the Diligent Frost.