A Prior Engagement

[Axar]

Earth was a small world, and it smelled like rain.

Axar stood at the edge of a plateau overlooking a settlement the locals would have called a city. By the standards of any civilization that had achieved interstellar travel, it was a village — low structures of glass and steel in unremarkable grids, ground vehicles crawling along paved arteries, the ambient noise of a species that had not yet learned how quiet the universe could be. He'd made planetfall six hours ago in a descent trajectory calculated to avoid their rudimentary sensor networks. It had not been difficult. Nothing about this job had been difficult so far.

The contract had come through a Scorch Clan intermediary — a Changeling woman whose name Axar had not asked for and whose face he had already forgotten. The employer wanted thoroughness: the target eradicated, his associates dealt with, his operation on this world dismantled root and stem. Clean work. The kind Axar had done a dozen times across half as many species, though rarely for a mark this far removed from the trade lanes.

A Saiyan. Third-born of a family with some modest standing back home — enough to produce one sibling worth the name and two who weren't. This one had been exiled young and landed here, of all places. Running a mining and prospecting company on a planet whose dominant species didn't know what Ki was. The cover worked precisely because no one with real power would ever think to look. The target had bet his life on obscurity, and for years, that bet had paid.

It wasn't paying anymore.

The compound sat at the settlement's edge — warehouses, equipment yards, a modest office building. Human employees moved through their routines with the comfortable ignorance of people who had never once considered that their employer might be something other than what he appeared. Axar had spent two hours on the ridge above the site, motionless, reading the patterns of the place. Shift changes. Vehicle traffic. Entry points. Professional habit, mostly. For a target like this, it was overkill.
Ki Sense had confirmed a single signature inside the main building that didn't belong to the local species. Faint. So faint that without the specific biosignature markers Axar had been given, he might have mistaken it for a slightly above-average Human. Seventy. Maybe less. The kind of power level that, among Saiyans, got you exiled to a backwater in the first place.

Now Axar watched from the rooftop of an adjacent warehouse, close enough to see through the office windows. The Saiyan was there — dark-haired, lean, sitting behind a desk with actual paper documents spread in front of him. He moved with the unhurried ease of a man who believed he was safe. No combat readiness. No suppression technique. Just the open, unguarded energy of someone who had stopped expecting the universe to come find him.

Axar's tail curled once behind him, a slow and deliberate motion, and settled. The polycarbonate crest of his helm caught the flat grey light. Red skin, dark-edged armor plating, the warm tones of the Scorch Clan — all of it meaningless on a world that wouldn't know what it was looking at.

He studied the Saiyan the way he studied all of his marks in the final moments before contact. Not for threat — there was no threat here. For habit. How the target held himself. Where his attention went. Whether the eyes moved like prey or like something that had simply forgotten it could be hunted.

This one had forgotten.

 

[Gehn]

Prospecting and mining.

Gehn brought with him and scouter and other advanced sensors from Vegeta, when he arrived here nearly ten years ago. With those, beyond what most Human cities and corporations had at their disposal, it made him invaluable to resource extraction operations on the planet. Mining, primarily. What began as an independent venture to fund his living needs and his research into the Dragon Balls that, quite possibly, existed on Earth, turned into a business of its own.

A corporation with expenses, taxes, paperwork, employees, facilities, and more. With it came money, a need for assets and equipment, more money, and an endless cycle. Somewhere in there, Gehn stopped training, keeping himself sharp for the inevitable retribution from Celerus and Ollis – they would not permit him to be an embarrassment to their family for long.

All because that reprisal never came.

Slowly, Gehn relaxed. He began to live his life instead of living for his mission, his goal, the pursuit of this wild idea of wish-granting orbs that he simply could not shake. He got to know the Humans here. Learned more about them. Bought a home in the city his new office and warehouse – he had pivoted into offering storage for the mining companies he prospected for, as it just made sense to find what they wanted to mine and have a central location to keep it all – sat just outside of. Even met a few women, though nothing worked out.

“Boss?” A somewhat portly, middle-aged man lingered at the open door into Gehn’s expansive office. Gehn sat, black hair still neatly cut, wearing his fighting uniform: tight-fitted white shirt, grey pants, black poots, and a red sash held in place with a golden clip in the back.

He looked up from his desk at the man.

“Do you have it?”

Gehn’s brow furrowed and the older man laughed.

“That device of yours, the one that finds people? For tomorrow. To help make sure I can take the pilot to the meeting place out near the mountains and find the right people?” He laughed at Gehn.

Gehn smiled. Now he remembered.

“Of course, it’s right here,” he answered and opened the drawer of an industrial-style, mostly-metal desk. The green glass of the scouter clicked against the metal bottom of the drawer, he picked it up, activated it with the red button on the side, and—

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The tell-tale signs of a high-priority reading. He pulled it out and, without even bringing it to his eye, saw the text in the glass: a Power Level.

Something exceptionally strong, measured in the thousands.

Gehn’s blood ran cold. Time slowed. The portly man walked in to take the scouter, each step drawn out like the climax of a novel.

The scouter indicated direction and distance: the distance was short, effectively zero. Gehn’s head followed the directional indicator that sent him towards his left. He peered through the window, out towards the cliff-like overhang from a hill beyond his headquarters.

Perched atop it, barely visible, an exceptionally short creature: with short, black horns.

Changeling. Red-orange, at least vaguely from this distance.

Scorch Clan. The closest thing those people had to Saiyans.

“Buck, run for your car no—!” Gehn shouted, but it proved too slow.

 

[Axar]

Too slow.

Axar was off the ridge before the Saiyan finished the first syllable. The distance between the overhang and the office window closed in the span of a heartbeat — not flight, not yet, just the explosive forward motion of a body that operated on a scale this planet had never been asked to accommodate. The window didn't shatter so much as cease to exist, the frame buckling inward with a shriek of twisted metal and a spray of glass that peppered the far wall of the office.

He landed in the center of the room. One foot on the concrete floor, then the other, unhurried, as though he'd stepped through a doorway rather than a wall. Glass crunched beneath his weight. The ambient dust of the impact hung in the air around him, catching the overhead lights in a way that made his red-orange skin look like it was smoldering.

The Human had made it four steps toward the door. Axar didn't look at him. Didn't need to. The man's energy signature was so negligible it barely registered as biological.

"Leave."

One word. Flat, uninflected, spoken in the galactic trade common that most spacefaring species shared and that Humans had never heard. It didn't matter. Tone was universal. The Human stumbled, caught himself on the doorframe, and was gone — footsteps retreating down the corridor at a dead sprint, a strangled sound halfway between a shout and a sob trailing behind him. Furniture dealt with.

Axar's attention had never left the Saiyan.

He took a moment. Let the silence settle over the destroyed office like a second impact. Papers from the desk were still drifting to the floor. Somewhere deeper in the building, voices were rising — employees reacting to the noise, the tremor, the sudden wrongness of their ordinary morning. None of it mattered. None of them mattered.

The Saiyan was on his feet. Good reflexes for someone who'd let himself go soft — the chair pushed back, the body oriented toward the threat, the scouter still clutched in one hand. Axar noted the fighting uniform. Quaint. Like a soldier's dress clothes kept pressed in a closet for a war that never came.

"You're Gehn." Not a question. His voice carried the clipped precision of someone confirming a delivery manifest. "Third-born. Exiled. Mining company on a world that doesn't know you exist." A beat. His tail swept a single, slow arc behind him. "You made yourself easy to find."

He let that sit. Let the Saiyan do the math — the power level the scouter had screamed at him, the Changeling standing in the wreckage of his office without a scratch, the Scorch Clan coloring that told anyone with the education to read it exactly what kind of creature had come calling. Axar clasped his hands behind his back. The posture of a professional at the conclusion of a long job's boring phase.

"Someone wants you gone. I'm here to see it done." His head tilted, fractionally — the polycarbonate crest catching the fluorescent light, the dark eyes beneath it studying the Saiyan with the same detached interest he'd given the compound's shift schedules. "If you have questions, ask them now. You won't get another chance."

He meant it as a courtesy. A small one. The kind you extended to a mark who'd had the decency not to make the tracking phase tedious.

Whether the Saiyan used it to talk or to run would tell Axar everything he needed to know about which way this ended.

 

[Gehn]

Not even a blink.

It took less time than that. Gehn, compared to the power the scouter showed, was less than nothing: a smear on the wall if that monster so much as slapped him across the face. To Gehn’s perception, one moment he was a distant red-orange dot in the distance, out the window. Then the wall erupted, the metal framing twisted like candy, and glass erupted into the air all but vaporized.

What little fragments remained lodged themselves in Gehn’s arm. He stood, propelled by what strength he still had, in front of Buck who remained paralyzed entirely in that moment. A second after that, as Gehn stood there with glass lodged in his forearm – itself raised to shield his eyes – he heard Buck scream and run a moment after the Changeling commanded that he leave.

Before him, Axar saw a diminutive Changeling man. Their most condensed state, when they were at their weakest, as to not exhaust themselves by constantly wielding their full and true might. He was, as Gehn expected, primarily red, with some pink and orange to him as well. White, natural body orb. The glass-like section of his head and in his chest still present.

Gehn lowered his arm. He saw the tiny fragments in it. Normal glass should never have pierced his skin, even propelled by the impact of the Changeling through the wall. They should have simply bounced off him instead.

Have I gotten that weak? He asked himself.

His dark eyes flicked up to the Changeling who took his time: he repeated Gehn’s name, where he was from, his family, that he ran a mining company now. As if confirming that he showed up to the right office for a meeting.

Professional. He also demanded that Buck leave instead of ignoring or killing him – either entertained by it, irritated by the weak Human’s presence, or simply not a psychopath. None helped Gehn in this situation.

“Just prospecting, honestly. ‘Global Prospecting and Mining’ can get confusing, but marketing tells me it helps show our primary clients, actual mining companies, that we’re related to them…” Gehn answered slowly, with a dry humor given the situation, and plucked the fragments from his arm. They broke into dust before hitting the ground.

Droplets of blood joined the glass-ash.

Each word bought him time to think: A professional, he picked up his previous thought, meant hired. Sent here. By who? Someone who knew that he was an unofficial exile – Gehn left by choice, not by decree – and passed that along.

Who else knew, or cared, except his family?

“Celerus finally sent someone, then,” Gehn grinned, lop-sided like a smirk, to hide the abject fear turning his veins to ice.

It had to be Celerus. He was cold and calculating, thoughtful in a way unusual of a Saiyan. Ollis was too hot-headed to think so pragmatically. She would be here to kill him herself.

None of this helped his situation, either. After what the scouter, still in his left hand, read to him? He couldn’t possibly run. No trick would save him, either. He saw no scouter on the Changeling, but that likely just meant he could sense Power Levels.

Even in his current state, Gehn was ten times stronger or more than any normal Human.

“Just two questions. If I have to die, at least let me die curiosity sated,” Gehn suggested. “I hope we can both consider it part of your standards as a businessman.”

Gehn paused, but not refusal came.

“What’s your name, since you know mine, and how much did he offer to pay you?”

It sounded like Gehn might conter-offer. Buy his life back. Gehn hoped Axar thought that.

A moment after Axar answered: Gehn roared as countless pinpoints of red light, Ki, flooded the air. Wrathseeds, a technique where he could move them all in a swarm to chase down his targets. They used to be larger, when he was more powerful, but this would do.

With so many of them, it didn’t matter if he sensed energy or had a scouter hidden away. This technique would drench the very air in Gehn’s energy. And as they spread through the room, exploding against the walls, floor, ceiling, and spreading further yet throughout his company’s headquarters, Gehn’s feet lifted off the floor. A red aura burned around him and he raced through the corridors, away from Axar.

 

[Axar]

Axar watched the Saiyan talk.

It was a stall and they both knew it. The joke about the company name, the careful cadence of each word, all of it purchased seconds. Axar let him have them. He'd extended the courtesy, and a professional honored his terms.

Most marks begged. Some fought. Very few made small talk about marketing while their blood was still running cold. The Saiyan's composure was convincing if you weren't watching his face lose color one shade at a time.

"Celerus," the Saiyan said, like the name explained everything. The lopsided grin was good. Practiced. Wrong, but confident about it. Axar didn't correct him. The contract didn't require accuracy, and the truth wouldn't help Gehn where he was going.

The questions came next. Name and price. A transparent setup for a counter-offer the Saiyan couldn't afford on a prospector's salary.

"Axar." He gave the name freely. It cost him nothing. "As for the price — more than a mining company is worth."

The roar came half a second later.

Red light erupted from the Saiyan. Not one blast. Not a volley. Hundreds of pinpoint Ki signatures flooding the room, the corridors, the air itself. They detonated against the walls, the ceiling, the floor in rapid sequence. Plaster dust. Debris. The overhead lights shattered and the office strobed red and black.

Axar didn't move.

The tiny impacts peppered his armor plating like warm rain. Each one carried the full weight of the Saiyan's power behind it, which meant each one carried almost nothing. But that wasn't the point, and he recognized it immediately. The air was saturated. Every surface screamed with residual Ki. His Sense, which had tracked that faint signature with casual precision since planetfall, was suddenly reading energy everywhere and nowhere. A room full of noise drowning out one quiet signal.

That was not a seventy-power-level technique.

The body had atrophied. The mind hadn't. Axar filed that away. A Ki manipulation talent buried under a decade of soft living. It changed nothing about the outcome. But it meant the tracking phase had underestimated the target's toolkit, and Axar did not like being underestimated, even by his own intel.

By the time the last seed detonated, the Saiyan was gone. A red contrail of aura burned through the corridor leading deeper into the facility. Residual Ki clung to every surface he'd passed. False trails layered over the real one. The man had planned this. Maybe not today, maybe not for a Changeling specifically, but he'd kept this one card ready.

Axar stood in the ruined office. Glass dust on his shoulders. Paper ash still settling. The fluorescent lights in the hallway flickered, half of them cracked.

He could have caught the Saiyan before he cleared the building. The speed gap between them wasn't a gap. It was an absurdity. One step, maybe two, and this would be over.

His tail swept once. Stilled.

He stepped into the corridor and followed at a walk. No rush. The target was running, and runners always ran to something. A vehicle. A safehouse. A ship.

Axar would be there when he arrived.

 

[Gehn]

Red light flared around Gehn as he rushed out of his office, flying through the corridors of his company headquarters. Glass dust, plaster, and more debris from the room followed in his slipstream. Yet, despite how much weaker he had become, he flew without issue all the same. His head turned and, as he sailed forward down a long corridor – the walls cinder block with brick façade, the ceiling droptile with a strong and metal frame – he saw it behind him.

Axar, as he introduced himself. Red-pink, red-orange, depending on the flickering lights from the office door. Axar walked slowly and fell behind further and further by each passing second, because he knew that he could catch up in just a step. Maybe two, if he really waited for Gehn to get a lead.

With that green-glass scouter still in his let hand, Gehn attached it to his left ear. He read the number on the inside of the glass, felt nauseous as the sheer difference between them, and then suddenly came to a stop. That red aura flashed around him, crackling and popping as he floated in the hall, and then drew back his hand.

In it, dark red light collected in the palm. It whined for a moment, his body not used to summoning this volume of energy anymore.

Blackroot…! Gehn began, in the privacy of his mind.

Cannon!!

He thrust the arm forward and the red blast wave, bordering on black, punctured the walls and burst out into the center of the warehouse. It curved up into the dimming sky of Earth, the sun gradually setting.

Gehn raced, like a red star, through the hole it created. Before, he could have flown through the walls and stone with nothing but his body. Now? He felt far less certain. Yet, he flew through the smoke all the same, and stopped just outside.

Not quite a parking lot: more like a central courtyard where large trucks and other machinery moved about, either storing themselves or storing his clients’ hauls temporarily. None had been hit, Gehn noticed, but there was a small half-pipe carved into the concrete, smoldering red from the heat of his blast.

Not too far from it, a young woman. Tanned, but not dark skinned. Brown hair. Yellow eyes. Wearing the jacket of some freight or shipping company he had seen here many times.

Gehn floated there again, still glowing red with his aura, and pointed away.

“Leave! Now!” He told her.

She shouted something back about anyone being inside, having to help them.

“Just go!” Gehn demanded, then flew off into the sky above the headquarters.

As he did, he tapped through the communication buttons on the side. Connected to a line that brought him to the Spaceport of the city he lived in: the Quartz City Spaceport.

“Alien in pursuit!” Gehn shouted over the wind as he flew, the moment he heard the click of a connection. “Gehn coming in to take his space pod off-planet in an emergency departure! Deploy your strongest defenders in my direction and call in support from the city!”

Someone on the other end tried to argue, ask questions.

“Do it or the first people you send will go home in caskets!!”

Gehn looked behind him again, but it didn’t matter: Axar could catch him if he wanted, that wasn’t the point.

The point was all of Axar’s strength wouldn’t change that he couldn’t hear that call.