The wall. The space between my hands. Resistance.
*BAM*
I hit the wall. Days of this, and nothing.
"It's not working." I needed to clear my mind.
I made my way out of the training hall, and stopped at what was in front of me.
"Don't pull your punches. He told us he's not going to lose control." Vegeta kicked Broly from behind to make the point, then jabbed a finger at Raditz.
Raditz answered on instinct, the way you answer a superior, "Yes." and dashed in.
Broly took the punch to the stomach without flinching, caught Vegeta by the ankle on the backswing, and threw him the other way.
And he was calm. Perfectly calm.
I stayed where I was and watched.
Vegeta hit the ground, rolled, and was back on his feet before the dust settled. He didn't look angry about being thrown. He looked interested.
"Again," he said.
Raditz was already moving. He came at Broly from the left this time, faster than he used to be, his footwork tighter. Three months ago he telegraphed everything, you could read his attacks a full second before they landed. Now there was a feint in there, a small one, a shift of the shoulder that said high before the strike came in low.
It didn't work. Broly caught the wrist and held it.
But he'd tried it. That was the thing. Raditz was thinking now, not just swinging.
Broly released him instead of countering, stepped back, and reset into a stance. Waiting. Giving them the opening on purpose.
Vegeta saw it and didn't like it. "I don't need you to let me."
"You're slow on the left," Broly said. Not an insult. A fact, delivered the way Broly delivered everything.
Vegeta's jaw tightened. Then, instead of arguing, he adjusted his stance and came in on the left.
I watched a Prince of all Saiyans take correction, and do it without a word of complaint, because the correction was right and some part of Vegeta had decided that being right mattered more than being above it.
Something settled in my chest. Warm. Uncomplicated.
I'd spent months bracing for Broly. Standing close on every mission, watching his hands, ready to put myself in front of him the second the temperature rose.
And here he was, taking hits and giving them, correcting the Prince's footwork, perfectly level, with no one holding the leash because there was no leash to hold.
It was working. All of it. Better than I'd planned.
I should have looked harder at why that thought felt so comfortable.
Instead I stepped out of the doorway.
"Your left's not the only thing that's slow," I said.
Three heads turned.
"You're dropping your guard every time you reset," I said, walking toward them. "All three of you. You finish an exchange, you exhale, your hands come down for half a second." I stopped at the edge of their circle. "Half a second is how you die."
Vegeta looked at me the way he always did, the look that hadn't decided yet whether to be insulted. "Then show us."
Raditz groaned. He knew what was coming. "He's going to make us do the thing."
"I'm going to make you do the thing," I agreed.
Broly didn't say anything. He just turned to face me and dropped into his stance, and for the first time I noticed he was almost smiling.
'This is exciting.' I almost grinned.
I rolled my shoulders and stepped into the circle.
They came at me together.
Vegeta went high and Raditz went low, the split-timing they'd been drilling, and Broly held back a half-step to read the angle. I let Vegeta's first strike come, slipped it by a hand's width, and felt the wind of it pass my ear. Raditz's sweep arrived at my ankles a beat later. I stepped over it, caught his trailing arm, and used the pull to turn him into Vegeta's follow-up.
They collided. Not hard, Vegeta checked himself in time, but it broke their rhythm, and a broken rhythm was all I needed.
I tapped Raditz once in the torso, open palm, enough to fold him. He went down to one knee, wheezing.
"One," I said.
Vegeta snarled and pressed. He was fast, faster than his father had been at this age, and his strikes came in clean three-beat combinations with no wasted motion. High, high, low. Elbow, knee, a spinning heel that would have taken my head off if it had landed.
It didn't land. None of it landed. I read the combinations off his shoulders before his fists committed and gave ground in small increments, letting him chase, letting him spend himself on air.
On the fourth combination I stopped giving ground.
I came inside his guard, turned my hip into his chest, and put him on his back in the dust.
"Two."
That was when Broly moved.
No announcement. No tell. One moment he was reading the fight from the edge and the next he was inside it, closer than he had any right to be that fast, and his fist was already traveling toward my jaw.
I got my forearm up. The impact ran down to my heels.
I'd blocked it clean and it still moved me.
I pivoted off the force instead of fighting it, let it carry me a quarter-turn, and came back around with a strike at his ribs. He took it. Didn't flinch. His counter was already coming, a short hook, no windup, the kind of punch you only throw when you've stopped thinking about throwing it.
It caught me across the cheek.
Not full force. He pulled it at the last instant, the way I'd taught all three of them to pull a spar strike. But it landed, clean, and my head turned with it, and for half a second there were two suns in the sky instead of one.
I reset. Hands up. Tasted copper.
Broly stood across from me, calm, balanced, waiting. Not gloating. Just present, in that complete animal way he had, watching to see what I'd do with what he'd just shown me.
"Good," I said.
I meant it. He'd landed a clean hit on me, controlled, no anger anywhere near it. A year ago that punch would have arrived with a scream behind it and enough force to level a city block.
I shifted my weight to give him the real answer —
"Well, would you look at that."
The voice came from the hall entrance. I knew it before I turned.
Nappa. Arms crossed, leaning in the doorway like he owned the frame. Zuto a step behind him, and Toma beside Zuto with one eyebrow already climbing.
"The Squad Leader," Nappa said, "letting a brat tag him in the face." He grinned, all teeth. "Must be getting old."
Nappa pushed off the doorframe and walked in, Zuto and Toma trailing him.
"Don't let me interrupt," Nappa said. "It's educational. Watching three Elites get handled by one man who hasn't broken a sweat."
"Two clean hits," Broly said, to no one in particular.
Nappa looked at him. "What?"
"I landed two."
Vegeta's head turned slowly toward Broly with an expression that suggested this fact was not going to be allowed to stand unchallenged later.
Nappa snorted. He looked the three of them over, Raditz still bent and breathing hard, sweat coming off him, and something shifted in his face toward the two at his back.
"You two see that?" he said, jerking his chin at Raditz. "That one. Lowest reading of the three brats when they got assigned to us. Couldn't hold a stance six months ago." He let it sit. "Look at him now. He's going to pass you both inside a year if you keep coasting."
Zuto's jaw tightened. "I'm not coasting."
"You're not pushing either," Nappa said. "There's a gap. It's getting smaller. That's not him slowing down to be polite."
"He's a kid," Zuto said. "He's supposed to climb. We've already climbed."
"Climbed and stopped," Toma said.
Zuto looked at her.
She shrugged, arms crossed. "He's not wrong. We hit a level we were comfortable with and we've been sitting in it. The brats haven't sat in anything. They don't know how yet." She nodded at Cress without looking at him. "And the one running us doesn't sit in anything on principle. We're the only two on this squad who decided we were finished."
"I didn't decide I was finished," Zuto muttered.
"Then prove it on the next mission," Toma said. "I could use the company up at the front."
It wasn't a jab. That was the thing about Toma, she said the true thing and left it flat, no hook in it, which somehow made it land harder than anything Nappa could needle out.
Zuto didn't answer. But something in how he was standing changed.
I let it run. It was a good conversation to be having and it was having itself without me, which was the point.
Then I put Broly down, caught his next strike at the wrist, stepped in, and dropped him cleanly onto his back in the dirt with a hand still on his arm so it didn't jar. He hit the ground and looked up at the sky, considering it.
"Up," I said, and let go. He got up.
"That's enough for now." I stepped back out of the circle and looked at all of them, the kids, Nappa, the two veterans. "While I've got everyone. We've got a deployment."
The reaction was immediate and unanimous.
"We just got back," Raditz said, still bent over. He straightened up slow. "Two days. We've been back two days."
"I'm aware."
"Two days," he said again, like the repetition might change something.
"Where," Nappa said. Not complaining yet.
"Outer rim. Conquest target, not a resistance cell this time." I'd read the briefing four times by then and it hadn't improved on any of the readings. "Fortified world. Established military. The kind of place you take in a week if everything goes right."
"And if it doesn't?" Toma asked.
"Longer."
Nappa's face did the thing it did when he was deciding to be loud about something. "Two days. We cleared a planet they expected to bury us on, walked off it without a scratch, and the reward is they turn us straight back around for something harder." He spat to the side. "There's no honor in being run like a courier. We're warriors, not delivery freight."
"It's not about honor," I said. "It never was."
"I know what it's not about." He jabbed a thumb toward the sky, toward the ship hanging up there in orbit where it always was. "Doesn't mean I have to like being his errand boys."
Nobody argued with that. There was nothing to argue.
Vegeta had gone quiet in the specific way that meant he was the angriest person in the room and refused to spend words on it. When he did speak, it was clipped. "He's keeping us moving so we don't have time to become anything." He looked at me. "You know that."
I did know that. I didn't say so. Vegeta saying it out loud was already more insight than I wanted him advertising.
"Doesn't matter what it's for," I said. "It's an order. We pack, we go, we come back. Same as always."
"Same as always," Raditz muttered. "I'm starting to hate those words."
"Brief's in two hours. Full kit. Zuto—" he looked up, "—you're on the drop-zone analysis with me, the terrain's bad and I want a second read on the landing." It wasn't a punishment and it wasn't a courtesy.
Zuto held my look for a second. Then he nodded. "Fine."
It was a small thing. But Toma caught it, and the corner of her mouth moved a fraction, and she didn't say anything.
The grumbling kept going as they sorted themselves out.
I let it wash over me.
That was when I felt her.
Ruca was leaning in the entrance to the hall.
She tipped her head toward the corridor behind her. Outside.
"Keep it to two hours," I told the squad. None of them were listening. Nappa was still going about couriers.
I left them to it and walked toward her.
—
<>
—
She started walking. I followed with no question.
We ended up behind the squad barracks, where the structures cut the wind and there was nothing around but the low hum of the compound and the dark above it. No arrays back here. No ears.
"Heard we're being redeployed." She stopped and turned. "It's because of that, isn't it."
'Beerus.'
"Pretty obvious," I said. "But it's fine. Let him keep sending them." I shrugged. "Nothing we can't clear."
"Confident."
"I'm allowed, occasionally."
She studied me for a second, then let it go. Whatever she'd come out here carrying, she set it down. "Well. You've got me." She leaned a shoulder against the wall, closing the distance between us by half. "So we're not dying on some random rock at the edge of nowhere. I won't allow it."
"So reliable," I said. "Quite the change from the girl who used to throw me into crates to test armor."
"That was once."
"Three times. And there was the time on Meat. You stood in front of me and screamed until I came back."
She went still. "That wasn't—"
"It was reckless. Effective. But reckless."
"Sto—" Her hand came up and pressed flat over my mouth before she'd finished the word. "Stop bringing it up." Her ears had gone red. So had the bridge of her nose. "I panicked. It worked. We don't have to keep revisiting it."
She was flustered. Ruca.
"Cute," I said. It came out muffled against her palm. I hadn't decided to say it. It just left.
Her hand dropped. "What?"
"Nothing."
"No. What did you say."
She was looking at me with her face red and her guard down for once. Not managing herself. Not performing the soldier. Just caught. Open.
I closed the distance and kissed her.
She froze, a half-second of pure shock, going rigid. Then she didn't. The breath went out of her, and her hand found the front of my armor and curled into it, pulling instead of pushing, and she stopped being surprised and started kissing me back.
I felt her other hand come up to the side of my neck, cool fingers against the heat there. She tasted faintly of the iron tang that came off all of us after training, and underneath it something that was just her.
It wasn't gentle.
Her grip on my armor tightened. I braced a hand against the wall beside her head, the stone cracking faintly under my palm because I forgot, for once, to be careful with my strength, and for once it didn't matter.
When we finally broke apart we were both breathing harder than the conversation called for.
She didn't step back. Neither did I. Her hand was still on my neck. Mine was still on the wall, in the small crater I'd put there.
There were about a hundred things that could have been said and every one of them would have been smaller than what just happened. So I didn't reach for any of them. She didn't either.
"...The brief's in two hours," she said finally. Her voice wasn't quite level.
"It is."
"We should go back."
"We should."
Neither of us moved.
She recovered first. She let her hand slide off my neck, pushed off the wall, and bumped my shoulder with hers as she passed. Hard enough to mean something. Light enough to deny it.
"Same place tomorrow," she said. Not a question. She didn't look back.
I stood there a second in the dark behind the barracks, with a handprint pressed into the wall and the taste of her still on my mouth.
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Author's note:Yo, I saw that we didn't reach 1000, but the stones were reset so I'll give this chapter for free, but next chapter is scheduled for Saturday. Yeah, don't got much time, But at each milestone, this book will hit, I'll drop a chapter, your objective right now is 1500.