"Quick! Evade!"
The sight of the colossal energy wave screaming toward them at an impossible velocity drained the color from Pasda's face. Pure terror gripped him as he screamed at Geti, who was frantically wrestling with the controls.
"I'm trying!" Geti yelled back, sweat pouring down his face. His hands became a blur over the manual controls, jerking the ship into a desperate, lurching spin.
"It's over," Pasda whispered, his voice hollow. No evasion maneuver could save them now. He could only watch, paralyzed, as the Kamehameha filled their entire viewport.
BOOM!
Their pirate ship detonated in a spectacular, silent fireball of vaporized metal and plasma, a brief, violent flower blooming in the eternal night.
Yet, the explosion that consumed their vessel did not claim its crew. For beings with power levels ranging from tens to over a hundred thousand, a starship's death throes were survivable—if just barely.
Sizzle! Sizzle! Sizzle!
The three figures tumbled amidst the debris, wreathed in crackling auras of white energy as they shielded themselves from the worst of the blast. Their survival, however, was immediately threatened by a far more mundane enemy: the vacuum of space.
Gasping, faces purpling, they scrambled amidst the wreckage, their movements frantic as they fought to don the emergency space suits they'd managed to salvage. A second's delay would have meant a gruesome, airless end.
"Haaah… haaah…" The sound of their own ragged breathing, amplified in their helmet communicators, was the sweetest sound they'd ever heard. They had survived the unsurvivable.
But their relief was short-lived. They were now three specks of life adrift in the interstellar gulf between galaxies. Their suits had limited thrust and even more limited energy.
"Big Brother… what now?" Panai's voice quivered over the comm.
Pasda, the veteran pirate, knew the numbers. Flying to a habitable world under their own power was a fantasy. Their only chance…
"Take their ship!" he snarled, the order born of desperation. It was a slim hope—their suit thrusters were laughably slow compared to a starship's engines—but it was the only card left to play.
"B-Big Brother!" Panai's voice cut in again, shrill with a fresh wave of terror.
"Panai, shut up!" Pasda roared, a superstitious dread coiling in his gut. This woman was a walking omen of disaster.
His fear was instantly justified. A wave of primal danger screamed through his senses. He whirled, power flaring around him in a defensive shell.
What he saw made his blood freeze. "They're complete savages!" he spat.
The void before them was no longer empty. It was filled—choked—with a storm of energy blasts, a relentless barrage that blotted out the stars. Their attacker was leaving nothing to chance.
"Defend! DEFEND!" Pasda screamed. Their suits were their lifelines now. A single breach meant death. "Activate your power dampeners! Don't let their scouters get a lock, or this will never end!"
Whether they could ultimately survive was uncertain, but one thing was clear: under this endless hail of fire, they would be worn down to nothing.
His words were swallowed by the onslaught. A maelstrom of explosions engulfed them, their personal energy shields flaring brilliantly under the relentless punishment, adding more fleeting, furious light to the indifferent cosmos.
Clinging to the hull of his own ship, Rhode watched the distant, sustained fireworks display. His senses, stretched to their limit, finally registered the complete dissolution of the three malevolent auras.
Whoosh.
He ceased fire, the constant stream of ki blasts from his hands winking out. A deep, controlled exhale fogged the inside of his helmet slightly as he allowed the fatigue of sustained output to settle.
A flicker of regret passed through his eyes as he stared at the dissipating energy cloud. "A shame about the environment," he murmured to the uncaring stars. "Otherwise, that would have been excellent combat practice."
"After all, just three pirates. It's fine." Rhode murmured to himself as the echoes of the battle faded in the cosmic silence. "The universe is vast; there will be other opponents." He was momentarily curious about their identities—were they characters he might recognize from the lore?—but it was a fleeting thought. They were a problem, and the problem was now solved.
Whoosh.
He phased back through the airlock and into the ship's controlled environment.
"Scans confirm it," Aira stated without looking up from her console, her voice a mix of residual tension and something else—relief, perhaps, tinged with the frustration of a fight observed but not joined. "The target area is debris. No life signs. They're gone."
Rhode leaned over, examining the sensor logs. The data was clear. "Just an interruption," he concluded. "Resume course."
With a few commands, he restored the ship's systems to their pre-engagement state. Soon, their vessel pierced the boundary of the interstellar void and slipped into the swirling star-rivers of a new galactic arm.
An immeasurable time later, in the same patch of interstellar nothingness, three figures in battered, jury-rigged space suits drifted toward the coordinates of their former ship.
They moved with agonizing slowness, their suit thrusters long dead, propelled now by the sheer, draining expenditure of their own ki.
"I knew it!!!" Pasda's roar was a static-laced shriek of pure despair over their suit comms. Before them was only empty space, scoured clean by their attacker. All evidence, any potential salvage, was gone.
His cry was the sound of hope extinguished. Their suit power was critically low. They were stranded in a gulf between stars, a cosmic desert with no oasis in sight. They were, for all intents and purposes, already dead.
"Big Brother..." Panai's voice was a weak whisper, offering no solace because there was none to give. Geti merely floated listlessly, the fight gone from his eyes.
Time became a torturous abstraction. They flew on, not out of hope, but out of the primal refusal to simply stop. They conserved energy, then burned their own life force to move, becoming weaker, more hollow with each passing cycle.
Just as the last flickers of will were about to gutter out within them, a miracle—or a cruel joke—appeared. A pinprick of light resolved into the familiar shape of a Universe Spaceship, entering the fringes of the interstellar expanse.
Hope!
The sight was an electric shock to their dying systems. Desperation gave them a final, fierce surge of energy. As one, they unleashed their auras—not to fight, but to signal, to scream their presence into the void, a last, desperate plea for rescue aimed at the distant, unknowing ship.
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