Chapter 12: Broken Wings and Broken Pride
The air above the southern continent was cold and thin, a bitter wind whipping past Kakarot's face as he flew a lazy, predatory circuit. He was stalling, and he knew it. The act of defiance against Nappa had been a necessary pressure release, a declaration of intent, but it had also set a clock ticking. Vegeta would not wait long. The anticipation of the Prince's wrath was a tangible thing, a static charge building in the atmosphere, and Kakarot found himself almost craving it. He wanted the confrontation. He needed to measure himself against that smug, royal arrogance.
His scouter, still active on a passive broad-spectrum scan, chirped with a soft, almost hesitant ping. It wasn't the powerful, concentrated signal of a warrior or a settlement. It was faint, flickering, two life signs, isolated and weak, nestled deep within a vast, shadowy expanse of forest that carpeted the foothills of a mountain range below. Their energy signatures were familiar, a ghostly echo of the winged race he had exterminated high above the clouds, yet… wrong. Muted. Incomplete.
Boredom and a flicker of morbid curiosity shifted his trajectory. He angled downward, cutting through the cloud layer and plunging into the verdant gloom of the forest canopy. The world narrowed to a tunnel of thick, gnarled trunks and a dense ceiling of interlocking leaves that choked out most of the sunlight. He landed without a sound, his boots sinking slightly into a thick carpet of damp, decaying leaves and moss. The air was heavy with the scent of wet earth, rot, and a faint, cloying sweetness from unknown blossoms.
The two life forms were close. He moved through the undergrowth, a specter in armor, his presence causing the constant, chittering life of the forest to fall into a watchful, fearful silence. He found them in a small, poorly concealed clearing, a pathetic attempt at a shelter constructed of lashed-together branches and large, waxy leaves.
They were Sky-Born, or had been. But they were a grotesque parody of the majestic beings he had shattered in the clouds. Their wings were gone. Not broken or injured, but removed. The flesh of their backs was a horrific tapestry of thick, ropy, discolored scar tissue, a brutal testament to some ancient, cruel surgery that had sawed away the very things that defined their species. The scars pulled tight against their shoulder blades, distorting their postures, giving them a perpetual, pained hunch.
One was an adult female. Her body, beneath the disfigurement, still held the ghost of its former elegance, long limbs, a slender neck, sharp features that might have been beautiful once. But her skin was pale and sallow, stretched taut over prominent bones, and her large, avian eyes were sunk deep in sockets shadowed by exhaustion and hunger. She was frantically trying to patch a hole in the roof of her miserable hovel with a handful of mud.
The other was a child, a smaller female, perhaps a sister. Her scarring was just as severe, her frame even more fragile. She clutched a crude doll made of twisted vines and feathers, ironically, the feathers of her own lost wings, perhaps and stared into the middle distance with a hollow, broken look.
They hadn't noticed him yet. He watched them for a long moment, this pitiful remnant of a race he had considered too weak to deserve existence. A strange, disquieting feeling stirred in his chest, not pity, never pity, but a cold, analytical fascination. This was a new form of weakness. Not the weakness of a warrior who falls in battle, but the weakness of a creature that has been broken and left to crawl.
He took a step forward, a single, deliberate crunch of a twig under his boot.
The adult female froze, her body going rigid with an instinctual terror she must have known her entire life. She slowly turned, her large eyes widening further, her breath catching in her throat. She shoved the child behind her, a useless, instinctual gesture of protection. The little girl peeked out from behind her legs, her doll clutched tightly to her chest.
"Why are you not with the others?" Kakarot's voice was flat, devoid of curiosity. It was a demand for data.
The female flinched at the sound of his voice. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out at first. She swallowed, her throat working convulsively. "Th-the… the others?" she finally whispered, her voice raspy from disuse. "There are no others. Not for us. We are… were… outcasts. The Sky-Born do not tolerate imperfection." Her gaze flickered involuntarily to the child behind her, a world of pain in that single glance.
Kakarot's eyes swept over her from head to toe, taking in the malnourished frame, the horrific scars, the dirt smudged on her gaunt cheeks. She was a ruin. A discarded thing. And yet, there was a stark, tragic beauty in her lines, in the defiant, hopeless way she held herself despite everything. It was the beauty of a shattered vase, its value now lying only in the story of its destruction.
His gaze then shifted to the child. Smaller, even more fragile. The scars on her back looked angry and red, newer than the woman's. He saw the same sharp features, the same large, haunted eyes. A matched set of broken dolls.
He turned his attention back to the adult. "You live out here alone? A female and a child? The forests of this world are not kind. There must be a male. Someone provides for you. Protects you." The concept was alien to him, but he knew it was a driving force for weaker species.
A bitter, broken sound that might have been a laugh escaped her lips. "A male? No. No male would… would look at us. We are cursed. Unclean. Our own kind chased us from the skies. The ground-dwellers fear us. We are alone." The resignation in her voice was absolute, a bottomless well of despair.
"I see," Kakarot said, the words a low rumble. His eyes lingered on the female again, tracing the line of her neck, the curve of her hip visible through her ragged tunic. She was attractive, in a twisted, pathetic way. A perverse thought, a cousin to the one that had led him to the hybrid cave, began to form.
He looked back at the little girl. "Were the Sky-Born mean to you?" he asked her directly, his voice losing none of its hardness.
The child flinched and hid her face completely behind the woman's legs. The older female answered for her, her voice trembling. "They were cruel to us all. But to her… they were monsters."
Kakarot took a step closer. The female shrank back, pulling the child with her, but there was nowhere to go. Their pathetic shelter offered no protection.
"What if I told you they were all dead?" Kakarot said, his voice dropping to a conversational, almost intimate tone that was far more terrifying than any shout. "Every single one of them. The Patriarch with his multi-hued wings, the warriors with their lances, the graceful females I made dance in the sky before I tore them apart. What if I told you I ripped the wings from every last one of them myself and watched them fall? That the sky is empty now, save for the ghosts and the smell of scorched feathers."
The words hung in the damp, forest air. For a moment, there was only the sound of a distant drip of water and the frantic beating of the female's heart, which Kakarot could hear as clearly as his own breath.
Then, understanding dawned on the female's face. It wasn't a slow dawning; it was a supernova of pure, unadulterated horror. Her eyes, already wide, seemed to swallow her entire face. Her mouth opened in a silent scream. The little girl, sensing her protector's absolute terror, began to whimper, a high, thin sound of despair.
They didn't plead. They didn't try to run. They simply stood there, frozen in the devastating knowledge that the monster who had exterminated their entire species, the source of their deepest cultural nightmare, was standing before them. And that he had not come to save them.
The horror on their faces was the final answer. It was the only answer he ever truly needed.
Without a moment's hesitation, without a change in his expression, Kakarot moved.
His hands came up, not clenched into fists, but with fingers extended and rigid, his ki sharpening them into blades far keener than any metal. He didn't lunge; it was a movement of pure, efficient economy. A single, fluid cross-motion.
The adult female's silent scream was finally given voice as a wet, guttural gurgle. A perfect, crimson line appeared across her throat. For a split second, her eyes held his, filled with a bottomless, bewildered agony, and then her head tilted backward at an impossible angle, connected only by a shred of tendon and spine before it tore free.
Simultaneously, the same motion severed the little girl's head from her shoulders. Her whimper was cut off instantly. The crude doll tumbled from her lifeless fingers.
The force of the blows sent twin geysers of blood arcing high into the air, a horrific fountain of crimson that painted the surrounding leaves, the pathetic shelter, and Kakarot's armor in a warm, sticky shower. The bodies stood for a heartbeat, two, then crumpled to the forest floor in a tangled, lifeless heap. The heads landed with separate, soft thuds in the moss, their eyes still wide with the frozen image of their killer.
Kakarot stood amidst the spraying blood, watching it rain down, not with joy or satisfaction, but with a cold, clinical detachment. He had answered his own question. Their horror had been… sufficient. It was a small, bitter footnote to the main event of the day.
He was about to turn, to leave the forest and finally face the music with Vegeta, when the air behind him warped.
It wasn't a sound first, but a pressure wave, a violent compression of reality that sucked the air from his lungs and made the very light bend. Then came the sound, a deafening, earth-shattering CRUMP of pure energy being unleashed.
There was no time to react, no time to turn, no time to even think. An impact of cataclysmic force slammed into the center of his back. It wasn't a punch; it was like being hit by a meteorite. The sound of his armor cracking was a sharp, pathetic counterpoint to the roar of the blast.
White-hot, agonizing pain exploded through his entire nervous system. Every bone in his body screamed in protest. The world became a violent, disorienting blur of green and brown and red as he was launched forward like a cannonball.
He smashed through the trunk of a giant, ancient tree, the wood exploding into splinters around him. The impact didn't slow him. He tore through a second tree, then a third, a human projectile carving a devastating trench through the heart of the forest. He plowed through thickets, bounced off boulders, his body a ragdoll in the grip of an unimaginable force. Finally, after what felt like an eternity of violent, bone-jarring impacts, he skidded to a halt in a small clearing, his body gouging a deep furrow in the earth before slamming against the base of a massive stone outcrop.
The world swam. Pain was a universe, and he was at its center. He tried to push himself up, but his arms refused to obey. His vision blurred, doubling, then focusing with immense effort. His armor was shattered across his back and chest, pieces of it embedded in his skin. He could feel warm blood, his own this time, trickling down his sides. He spat a glob of crimson onto the leaf litter.
Through the ringing in his ears and the haze of pain, a figure resolved itself at the far end of the path of destruction he had just carved.
Prince Vegeta stood there, one hand outstretched, palm still smoking from the concentrated energy blast he had fired. He wasn't even breathing heavily. His other arm was cocked on his hip. His face was a mask of cold, regal fury, his lips peeled back in a sneer of utter contempt. His spiky hair was pristine, untouched by the violence he had just unleashed.
He slowly lowered his hand, his boots making no sound as he stepped onto the path of devastation he had created. He walked toward Kakarot with a slow, deliberate, predatory grace, each step echoing with finality.
He stopped a few feet away, looking down at Kakarot's broken form as if examining a particularly interesting insect he had just pinned to a board.
"You have been wasting enough of my time today, boy," Vegeta's voice was low, laced with a venom that could curdle blood. "With your tardiness. With your insubordination over the comm. With your… pathetic little games of slaughter." His eyes flicked dismissively toward the direction of the two dead outcasts. "You think this impresses me? This meaningless butchery?"
Kakarot tried to push himself up again, a growl forming in his throat, but a fresh wave of agony from his shattered back forced him back down.
Vegeta took another step closer, looming over him. "You spoke to Nappa about respect. You spoke of power. You dared to issue a challenge." He leaned down slightly, his dark eyes burning with arrogant fire. "So here I am."
He raised his hand again, not to fire a blast, but to point a single, accusing finger at Kakarot's face.
"Now," Vegeta commanded, his voice dropping to a deadly whisper that carried through the entire broken forest. "Show me your true power."
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