Rat King

Gold light emitted from the Android’s transformed body as he held the motionless Saiyan girl. Spawning a large pair of mechanical wings, the Android crouched while his wings began to apply lift.

“Like I said earlier, you are not going anywhere with her,” Jotaro hollered as he hopped onto the Android’s back. Snaking his arms around Frank’s neck, Jotaro whispered, “Go to sleep,” as he strained to apply some sort of haphazard rear naked choke.

Flexing his wings in an attempt to shake him free, Frank’s partially destroyed head spun on its axis to face Jotaro. “It’s over,” Frank began, “please, don’t try to stop me.” The Android jerked the human up and over his shoulder. He suspended Jotaro in the air for a moment before slamming him into the ground.

Witnessing the humiliation of his brother, Josuke engaged the Android head-on. The human grappled with the Android, switching between different combinations and styles to catch Frank off-guard. The intensity of the strikes could be heard a block away as Josuke unloaded his emotions on to his brother’s assailant. While some of the strikes landed, more and more missed.

As the onslaught continued, Josuke frantic techniques grew stiff and predictable. With every punch, kick, counter; Frank learned. Collecting data while simultaneously looking for a winning algorithm, the Android soon was never touched, seamlessly blocking or countering all incoming attacks from Josuke.

Using his wings to provide the needed momentum, the Android smashed his opponent into the wall of the Madani gym. Josuke knew he could only resist for a short while, sensing the power difference between the two growing.

“Not so fast, mi amigo,” said Jotaro, climbing the back of the Android.


Sinking his legs around Frank’s torso, the Champ attempted his famous rear naked choke one last time. His skin began to glow, switching between his normal rough and tan to a darker red. In one pulse his entire body flexed, his muscles growing larger as they ballooned from his inner Ki.

Two beings. Both ascended. And hanging unconsciously between them, laid unconscious the young woman.

The Earthling wept openly as he squeezed the neck of the metal monster. Attempting to sever the Android’s skull, Jotaro yelled louder as he saw the great pain his brother had to endure. Summoning all might, from a place deep inside himself, a place Jotaro didn’t even know existed, focusing and allowing it to fuel him. The moment he needed to prove to himself this was all for something, that this could allow him to be bigger than himself. He screamed! And he pulled! And ...

The head of the Android rocketed off of its body, sailing into the night's sky. Shocked, the Champ raised his arms in victory. “Hey, I did it,” he hollered from the top of Frank’s still standing body. The Madani family cheered, shouting about how great the Champ was.

Seemingly out of nowhere, three purple bolts of Ki were seen jet-setting towards Jotaro. With perfect precision, hitting only the intended target, the Champ crashed to the ground, immediately reverting to his normal form.

In a frightening display of athleticism, Frank’s body jetted at a diagonal into the open space, catching his own head. Hovering above the party, the Android shifted Casca to one side while supporting his dismembered head with the other. At an amplitude that would damage eardrums, the Android roared, “Stay down! You’re only hurting them.”

Jotaro laid exposed on his back. His vision blurred from the mere damage taken, the older Madani brother still found the strength to curse his aggressor. “You won’t get away with this. Even Androids —,” he managed to yield before he collapsed in exhaustion.

Flying to a point he no longer was visible from the ground, Frank and Casca were gone. Susy Q, the mother of the Madani boys, was the first to speak. “Well, I can’t get 'er. Who’s gunna go?”



The following night, during a full moon …

For a moment, Casca awoke and believed she was somewhere else. Forced back to reality, she was startled by her surroundings. The Saiyan scurried to her feet at the horror of seeing Frank’s head across from where she was sleeping. She scanned her new prison, the converted kitchen of a Company spaceship turned into a cage.

“You're awake! How are you feeling,” the Android asked?

More terrified by the talking head in the corner of the room than anything, Casca felt like she still should answer. “I’m fine, Frank.”

Growing multiple pairs of legs from the underside of his head, Frank eerily scooted closer to his former squad member. “I’m sorry for the imprisonment, I know how you hate being pent up,” the Android paused to try to touch Casca’s boot, an attempt that got him booted across the room. Ricocheting off two walls, the Android rolled on his face until his feet could once again carry his weight. “We do not intend on harming you —,” Casca cut Frank off before he could continue.

“You better mean we as in you and your other half,” Casca said, hoping they were the only two on board.

“What do you mean? Hohner and Lutein are in stasis, healing. I was told not to wake either one until they are one hundred,” Frank hesitated, “even though Lutein should be awake soon.”

Cries of what could be considered both celebratory and fury arose from outside the chamber. Following the outburst, collisions could be felt throughout the ship’s floor before an overwhelming crash blew the kitchen’s door off. Out of the void moved a colossal Saiyan. Hair braided close to his scalp and a large horizontal scar etched across his face, the man moved towards Casca. As he approached, he made it abundantly clear what had just happened in the other room.

Tossing a mechanical arm at her feet, the man laughed. “Well, well, well. What do we have here.” The man, shirtless, turned to reveal a back riddled with craters of scar tissue and blotches of discoloration as he opened the kitchen’s fridge. “Damn it, Frank,” the man exclaimed as he began assembling various ingredients. “I thought I told you to get better food!” Hands heavy with what looked like the whole fridge, said, “Take your pick,” as he delivered the spread.

Confused, Casca winced at the thought of where he was going. Knowing every choice from here on out would have consequences; she chose to play his game. “The zucchini,” she answered.

Clawing at his face in laughter, the Saiyan doubled over in delight. “Oh Casca, ever so complicated. Ever so mysterious! You can’t simply choose the apple; you gotta go and choose something exotic. Something different.” The Saiyan’s amusement reverted to hatred as he proceeded, “That’s why you chose Pepsi over me, isn’t it!” He crushed the apple in his hand as he waited for any kind of response.

“While we were all apart of the same thirty-two person platoon, you weren’t apart of our squad, Lutein,” intervened Frank.

“Was I talking to you,” screamed Lutein. “Don’t make me decommission the rest of you.” Casca sensed this wasn’t the first time Lutein destroyed most of Frank during one of his infamous fits of rage. Grabbing the zucchini, Lutein tossed the rest of the spread against the wall. “Just like when we were kids. You remember. When we had to fight for food. Only the strong survived,” he spat on the floor. “Ain’t that right, Casca.”

“I remember me kicking your ass,” Casca said, advancing toward him. “As I did on Konats, same as I’ll do here.” Casca rotated her arms in a circular pattern before turning sideways and assuming a defensive stance.

“Your right,” the battle scared Saiyan said as he turned towards the door. “When we were kids. But we aren’t kids anymore. And your boy robot ain’t in any shape to help ya, either.”

“I can still fire bolts of Ki from my mouth,” this ill-timed comment inserted into the conversation by Frank was the last straw for Lutein. Chucking the zucchini, the male Saiyan sniped the bodiless head from the room.

“Where were we,” Lutein questioned Casca while also stretching his limbs in preparation of combat. “Oh, yes. We were talking about our childhoods, right?” After-imaging within an arm’s distance to Casca’s side, Lutein seized the female’s throat. Moving with such force, Casca’s feet gave way and she became airborne for a moment.

Waiting till she was firmly touching the floor, Casca wrestled with the Saiyan’s fingers. She attacked his elbows. She attacked his neck and face. When she was close enough, she kicked at his knees and legs. No matter what the techniques, each proved to be unsuccessful. Realizing she soon wouldn’t be able to breathe, she formed her fingers into the shape of a gun. Bringing the hand up to eye level, Casca pointed her fingers.



Her target. Herself.


Panicked, Lutein released his captive from his grasp and instinctively shouted, “No,” as he reached to shield Casca from herself.


And in that hectic moment, a lot happened.


Falling to the floor, Casca gripped the hand that was summoning the sphere of Ki. Dropping her aim to the Saiyan’s forward leg, she stated, “Boom,” before firing. The violet bolt of Ki accelerated to top speeds before smacking into the Lutein’s knee. The attack was nothing more than a low-level jab, something to get a sense of what your opponent is thinking or can be utilized with your next combination. But where she hit, that was the important thing.

Hitting the Saiyan in the same leg as she did on Konats, Casca rolled out of the way as he tumbled onto the floor. “Works every time,” Casca said as she stood opposite the even more enraged Saiyan.

“You need to learn some respect,” Lutein insisted with a finger in her direction. “I saved you, I saved all of you. When we hadn’t eaten for days, when it was just us and your siblings. And the other Saiyans. I was the one who did all the fighting, I was the one who put his neck on the line when none of you at first did. And for what? A tailless, washed out piece of trash,” he again paused to spit on the floor. “Hating yourself isn’t going to change the fact your one of us, for life. No serpent can change its —,“ Lutein was cut off by Frank’s nearly unrecognizable voice from the other room.

Stopping in the doorway, Lutein made what would have been an awkward but hilarious attempt at pretending to close the door he previously destroyed, but due to circumstances, Casca wasn’t laughing. “Don’t go anywhere, we ain’t done here, ya here,” the Lutein cautioned.

Listening to what she could, Casca could make out some of the news. News so significant, the Android dared to interrupt Lutein. The male Saiyan screamed in outrage as Frank tried to explain the importance of having everyone conscious before leaving Earth’s orbit. Clearly displeased, someone caused a sound that could only be described as a metallic crunch. Assuming the worst for her disembodied friend, the female Saiyan readied her arm, extending two fingers to resemble a handgun she aimed at the door.

Strafing to her left, Casca knelt near the door frame as she charged a sphere of violet Ki. Holding the attack locked and loaded at her fingertips, she waited for her moment as she listened to the sounds of the ship. Footsteps approached and then withdrew, a direction Casca knew to be the hallway to the spaceship’s cockpit.

“He wouldn’t,” Casca muttered under her breath, remembering how bad of a pilot Lutein could be. If Casca would guess, she probably has witnessed the Saiyan crash at least twelve space choppers, four of which she was on when they went down.

Extinguishing her attack, Casca sprang from her prison and made her way to the most posterior cabin. Stopping short of colliding with the door, the young Saiyan paused as she heard a new voice in conversation with Lutein over some kind of communication device. Quickly, realizing it wasn’t Frank or Hohner, Casca feared the worse.

A voice she could never forget.

Bum rushing the door with her shoulder, the Saiyan rolled across the floor before extending a leg in the direction of her momentum, stopping her slide. “Who is that,” questioned the voice Casca feared most in the galaxy. “Is that you, Casca?”

The female Saiyan knelt in horror.

The hair on the back of her neck standing at end, Casca tried to assemble words but stumbled as she tried to contain the building animosity inside of her. “You’re … you’re alive? I thought,” Casca questioned as she glared at the Arcosian in communication with Lutein through a large monitor.

“You thought I was dead,” the Arcosian laughed rather mechanically before continuing. “What ever led you to believe that a tailless half breed like yourself could murder an entire Arcosian lifeline and get away with it?”

Casca rejected his version of the truth, “That isn’t how it happened. He killed Pepsi! And you knew it! You always knew it!” The female Saiyan boosted her power level as her body naturally reacted to the disturbing events of the past. “And you did nothing,” she screamed at the monitor.

“Lies! All of it,” the Arcosian replied as Casca finished her last syllable.

“How can you say that! You were there on Embasa! You know he would have killed my brother if —,” Casca tried to reason.

“So you kill mine! What fucked games are you trying to play, girl,” the Arcosian spoke with an ignited passion.

Just drained of all sense of what was right or wrong, Casca lost it. She bolted past Lutein towards the large monitor. Lowering her shoulder again, Casca collided into the screen, uprooting the station it was built to be protected within. Wisps of Ki radiated off the female Saiyan’s back as she was hunched over assaulting what was left of the communication device.

Casca rocketed her fists into the remains of the screen until there was nothing left. Completely oblivious to Lutein, he gave her some recognition. “Feeling better now? Hands all bloody and all,” the man paused before turning up the dial on Casca’s gravity vest.

The woman immediately was crushed into the shards she recently created, opening a plethora of wounds across the front of her body. Being held captive by her own training device, Lutein increased the gravity felt by Casca by a multiplier of two. While level four sounds like a small number, the experience what from twenty times that of a normal planet’s gravity to forty.

Lutein placed a foot on the base of his detainee’s back before speaking. “Yeah, I got her,” he said as if talking to someone other than who was in the room. “Yeah, was wearing a gravity vest. I know its funny, right,” he asked out loud. Not believing he was talking to her, Casca grew suspicious.

The woman watched, pinned to the ship, as Lutein moved to the ship’s controls. Preparing the spaceship for launch, Lutein kept talking as if everything was fine. “Yeah, leaving now. No Hohner is still in stasis. And Frank,” the Saiyan paused to look at the chair facing him. Barely recognizable as the face Casca remembered, Frank’s disembodied head rested with one eye remaining blinking eye.

Wait, it blinked again! And again, and again.

Fighting to just breathe due to the simulated gravity, Casca disposition was lifted at the thought of her friend still being a live in that damaged, blinking skull.

Frank was blinking Morse code!

“She’s not a threat. She can’t even move! Yes, she’s still on the floor,” Lutein continued the strange conversation with himself. “No, I’m not going to wake Hohner. I fly all the time by myself,” he tried to say with confidence as the spaceship shakily touched off the ground.

Casca stared intently at Frank as she tried to decipher the message he was trying to tell her. She quickly picked up that Frank kept his eye open for three different lengths. A dot was a quick, flash of his eyelid. A dash was held for a little longer. And a space was held for almost a second. Frank long ago before a mission taught Casca the importance of having various means of communication. Not thinking much of it at the time, Casca thought the Android was just unnecessarily covering all possible scenarios where something so stupid would be useful.

What she remembered would be astound them both.


Dash, dash. She remembered that as an “M”.

Dash, dot, dash, dash. Maybe a “Y”?

Dash, dot, dot, dot. That was a “B”.

Dash, dash, dash. This one was the vowel “O”.

Casca realized what Frank was trying to convey as he blinked the next letter.

Dash.
Dot.
Dot.

It was a B. He spelled, “M-Y” “B-O-D”.


Her head glued to the floor, Casca could still had a line of sight down the ship’s hallway. Toward its rear, she could see Frank’s headless body thrown around in pieces.

“You should of stuck around, Casca,” Lutein said as he spun around in the captain’s chair. “Things got good after you died. We all got upgrades,” he said as he pulled down one of his eyelids, revealing a mechanical implant. “They see what I see before I even see it. The Company spent big money making sure we didn’t lose anyone else after what happened on Embasa.”

Lutein jumped to his feet, as he wanted to be close to Casca when he said, “I could have taken care of you, you know that right? Pepsi died, don’t you see! You and me are strong, we survived.” He touched her face as she tried to speak. He put his hand to his ear in an attempt to hear better. “What did you say? I can’t hear you,” he asked.

Casca drooled as her lips could barely sustain shape at forty times gravity, let alone speak. Seeing this, Lutein apologized. “Oh, forgot about that. Let me turn that down for you,” he said as he returned Casca’s gravity vest to level two. Her lips started to move but still not words. “What? Speak louder,” Lutein demanded.

“Boom,” Casca whispered. Grabbing ahold of her friend’s bodiless head, Casca fired a bolt of violet Ki from her fingertips. Racing down the hallway, the attack collided with the chest cavity of Frank, igniting the bomb the Company left as a present.

Casca clutched her Android friend as she was thrown through the hall of the exploding ship. Clearing the fiery explosion in a fraction of a second, the Saiyan threw on the jets as she rocketed towards Earth. “Hold on Frank! Stay with me buddy,” she tried to reassure her friend. “I’ve done this before!”

Falling through Earth’s atmosphere, all Casca needed to do was find a place to land. No reason to overthink it, the ship was short of orbit. However, like all upper atmospheres, the air was still thinner and it was freezing at such altitudes. “Frank! We’re almost there,” she lied.

Headfirst into the night, Casca fell. Propelled by her own Ki through flight, aided by the forces of the Earth, the Saiyan felt like she was in control for the first time until she heard an ungodly howl. “Fuck,” Casca said as she recognized her mistake in not killing Lutein.

A Great Ape.

Turning her body in flight, Casca held Frank’s head with one arm while she took aim with her other. The Saiyan’s eyes frantically searched the falling debris of the ship for anything that moved apart from gravity. There! She aimed two extended fingers in her extended arm, quickly charging a violet sphere of Ki, before firing on what she thought was her target.

As the blasts of Casca’s attack roared toward her foe, the man’s body twitched as it showered in the light of the full moon. Lutein’s body slowly became bloated before starting to turn a darker shade. The male’s body hair began to stand on end, slowly growing in density before eclipsing the entirety of his body.

The already mammoth sized Saiyan erupted into screams of misery as his body instantaneously multiplied in size. Expanding at such a speed, the Great Ape didn’t notice when Casca’s attack pinned off his head.

Never before encountering an Oozaru in this kind of aerial arena, defending herself before recking herself on the Earth’s crust, Casca had a choice.

Fight or flight. 

Flight, the Saiyan was already doing that in reverse as fast as she could. No need to divert any more attention to possibly being killed by impacting into the Earth, Casca fired a rapid succession of Ki to try to disrupt the Great Ape. Not knowing if Apes were capable of flight, the best thought was he was going to have to race her if she was going to get her.

Seeing the Oozaru body her following attacks and further decreasing its distance between them, Casca now believed Ape’s could fly.

The massive hand of the Great Ape reached after the falling Saiyan, narrowly missing her by meters. Frustrated, the Ape released a beam of Ki out of its mouth in the direction of Casca out of its futility. Leaving her with no choice and nowhere to go, Casca after-imaged out of the conflict.

Reappearing only a meter or two from where she left, Casca now found herself falling on the reversed end of the action, now following Lutein. Unlucky for her, the Great Ape was already turned around to face her. Appearing between its outstretched hands, Casca was immediately crushed by Lutein.


Tried as she might, Casca would never be able to overpower the strength of the Oozaru’s grip. The searing pain of having Frank’s wounded artificial shell of a head pierce her side could not shake Casca from the thought of what was now, apparent. She was going to die.

Casca raged against the massive fingers of the Ape but to no avail. Summoning everything she had only seemed to tighten the living tomb around her. The ground growing in focus, Casca’s body shook looking at where she would be buried. “This is it. A life, well lived,” Lutein confessed, no amount of begging would change his mind.

Time slowed as out of nowhere, a force entered into both Lutein and Casca’s consciousness. A gold aura flashed into the scene as a distance battle cry could be heard. Casca lost all manipulation of her body as she reacted in awe, believing she recognized the cry. The Oozaru gripped her tighter, charging another head cannon attack. Casca watched as the Great Ape waited to fire. Fully primed, the Ape waited until the new combatant was in range of a lethal blast.

“Dragon,” the challenger screamed at a distance so close Casca could see her body beginning to supercharge her fist with Ki. Releasing the full force of the Oozaru’s signature attack, an impenetrable wall of fire erupted from its mouth.

Colliding with the Great Ape’s attack, the stranger screams grew less muffled as parts of her helmet disintegrated against the flames. Connecting eyes as the warrior passed, Casca knew. Her sister finished the name of her family’s signature with a bravado that sent shudders through Casca. As if her sister’s life depended on it, Aspen yelled, “Fist!”