Saiyans had no concept of hell, only that which they rained down on their victims. They were hell, they were the warmongers, they were the ones who brought fire and ash, setting seas aflame and reducing all to naught. They were the ones who chose who lived and who died!
A once iron-clad belief, it was now rusted and bent, soaked in Raditz’s blood and warped by the memory of his own murder. His traipse through hell had been a brief distraction from the thoughts that had been festering in the back of his own mind, small distractions to the pain that echoed through the cavity of his armor, a pain that ached in tune with his now beating heart. He was alive, in agony, but alive. If that was a good thing, he didn’t know.
Once normal sensations felt foreign. Pushing against solid earth felt wrong. Each breath felt awkward and even the light that hit his eyes stung. His bones felt heavy, his muscles disobedient to lift him from the ground. Every scent was overpowering, every sound was like a jackhammer to his brain. Had he grown accustomed to being a corpse so quickly?
He should have been dead, and even the part of him that so vehemently rejected it, that raged with Saiyan pride and Saiyan blood, had to acknowledge it.
“Bastards,” he said wearily, having no one to blame but refusing to pin it on himself. “Fucking bastards, all of them,” he said, finally catching the gaze of a buzzard whose tenacity quickly became its undoing.
“Go to hell!” he wanted to roar, to shout aloud, but nothing more than an aching whimper escaped his lips. Nothing more than a pathetic mewling, the sound of which enraged him, knowing that it slipped from his mouth.
The buzzard saw a flash of light, and then it was no more, caught in the sudden ki-blast that tore its head from its shoulders and flayed the feathers off its skin. The others were smart enough to disperse, wailing and baying as they took flight to the distant skies. Raditz looked at the scorched corpse that was once a living creature, the discord he had sown, and felt some tinge of satisfaction.
Hell.
Hell couldn’t keep him down, and though he didn’t remember how, he knew he had clawed his way out of it. Scraping by until his nails were bloody, biting until his jaw broke, he walked the path of a true Saiyan! He was alive in defiance of anything other than his own will, and he had done it all by hims-
He stopped, hearing his name from behind. Whoever it was had said it without a hint of the venom or vitriol he’d grown so accustomed to expecting with his name. It couldn’t have been anyone he knew, right?
Spinning around with a ki-blast ready, his vision still fuzzy, he barely held back as he recognized the voice’s owner.
“… Old Hag?”
The shimmering ball of energy faded as quickly as it had amassed, and Raditz finally understood where he was, and it reminded him of another sensation that had grown foreign to him in death: utter fatigue. With all the finesse and grace of a tumbling boulder, Raditz fell back, landing square on his ass.
“Damn it all,” he said, catching his breath, feeling the adrenaline in his system finally wear away. “Damn it a—”
Raditz’s words were cut off by the growling complaint of his empty stomach, a gruesome rumble that alone would have scared off the scavengers lurking about. He looked up to Kaki and scowled.
Brench. Everyone knows you can’t eat a Brench. Unlike some of the other races in the Freiza force, their blood just tasted foul.
He reached a hand out across the burnt earth and salvaged the buzzard, biting into it with neither shame nor restraint, once more looking to Kaki.
Pointedly, in between bites, he said plainly, “I’m not sharing.”
Upon finding him, Kaki’s face immediately twisted into a dour expression. The stupid nickname, his boorish attitude… That was Raditz, all right, for better and for worse.
Face it. It was most likely for worse.
Dealing with the crunch and chew of a hastily prepared meal left Raditz focusing more on the rarer side of his food than anything more constructive. He hardly parsed the question that should have loomed overhead, instead snapping at the fact it existed in the first place.
“Who the hell cares?” he said, speaking with his mouthful. Any place was better than literal Hell. Even the glossy, overly cleaned tiles of the PTO (shined to reflect Frieza’s likeness) were preferable to the dank, putrid, boiling lakes of poison and stinging clouds of acid that lingered throughout hell. The havoc they wrought on his armor, let along his poor hair, left him with no fond memories of the oppressive landscape.
Still…
Raditz paused his rabid chewing to take in his environment. “Where in the hell are we?” Blue skies? Green grass? He blinked twice, then focused as much as he could be troubled to focus. With a hand to the side of his head, he pressed a button, and the scouter quickly beeped to life, conducting a quick scan of the world around him.
Loath to admit it, the sound almost scared. Who would have expected a scouter of all things to have made with through the bowels of hell with him? For a moment it was quiet before it beeped out in alarm.
His eyes widened at a detected power source. It was massive, leagues in strength, enough to put him back in hell, and close. Following the scouter’s guide, his head spun, locking on to the source of such devastating strength.
And then he scowled.
The granny… of course…
Not that she hadn’t played her part in their escape, not that she hadn’t dealt with some unsavory elements in her own pace, not that she hadn’t, admittedly, helped free him…
But to be reminded of the chasm between their power levels left him feeling…
Raditz tossed what was left of the buzzard carcass aside, standing as he wiped his mouth with his arm.
“I’ve lost my appetite,” he declared, with a somewhat accusatory tone.
Removing the obvious outlier from the scouter’s readings, there was nothing in the immediate area it could pick up on.
“We’re in the middle of absolute nowhere,” he said. “Nothing but damned birds, anyways!” His mood only bounced back when he looked down to actually speak to her. At least he had that.
With any luck there was a civilization he could bully into getting a ride off this rock, wherever it was. Or perhaps one he could just bully to make up for lost time, assuming granny didn’t smack his hands for shooting at civilians.
“Wherever we are, let me do the talking.”
