“Callion.” Liek replied with a combination of surprise at his sudden appearance, and nerves at actually meeting the supposedly great man in person. He had heard stories from Roshi about the efforts and length the full-blooded Saiyan had gone to to defend the Earth, even at the cost of his life once. The great old man had spoken with great pride as the Saiyan’s mentor, imparting on the youth hopes that the young man could aspire for the same values and virtues. From what little the youth had learned from his own encounters with Callion it wasn’t all hype, the man certainly held himself up as the benevolent champion others saw him as.

But to Liek there was just things about Callion that irked him. The way the man spoke just came across as pretentious and self-important, like the guy held himself as above everyone else. He didn’t talk like the leader of a band of fighters who came together with a common goal and desire to protect, with different roles and ultimately equals. The older Saiyan sounded like he wanted to be some kind of religious leader; shepherding a flock of devout followers with himself securely at the top and everyone else beneath.

That was the impression Liek was getting, and he didn’t like it one bit.

“If I gave up and ran away or hid in a corner I’d shame everything I stand for.” Liek replied, “I’d shame myself because I showed myself to the world saying I’d be one of it’s defenders. If I ran away at the first sign of trouble I’d just be a hypocrite. I’d shame my Grandmother, and the J Numbers, since I am the Inheritor of the Fury and their legacy. They didn’t cower or run away when they where they stood as five against legions! They fought with everything they had and kept Earth safe!” He clenched and fist and grit his teeth, “I may not carry their blood, and I don’t know when or how it will happen, but how could I face them in Other World if I ran away?”

“Truth be told, I’m terrified.” The teen took a few deep breaths, “There is so much at stake. I don’t know much about Changelings or the Arctic guy, pretty just what you’ve told us. All I know is I can’t bear the thought of innocent people getting hurt…” He paused and looked down before admitting, “Well… that’s not the whole truth. Those innocent lives are a factor, but right now there is a certain person who is more important to me then any of them. The thought of that person getting hurt… I just… I can’t…” Both his fists clenched as frustration and anger at his own weakness, and the love he felt burning in his heart for that person, took hold.

The boy nodded as he took up his stance in the air ready to train. He wanted to go further, to break his limits, to reach heights to great no one could possibly be a threat to all he loved and cherished. With a nodded the boy said, “I’m always up for a sparring match!” He confirmed, “Show me how far I have to go, Old Timer!”

---

WC: 540
TWC: 1,060

The first move from Callion came without warning or even a wind up. This was not totally unexpected by the boy who was in motion the moment he noticed the subtle shift in the older man’s shoulders. But the he wasn’t able to totally evade the incoming attack. he hadn’t had a sparring partner since his grandmother had passed, and the fundamental flaw of shadow sparring and image training was that the imagined opponent would always act as the individual subconsciously wanted them to. As such when Liek attempted to dodge he moved sluggishly, the fist missing his gut but clipping his side.

The boy winced at the pain from the impact, but didn’t lower his guard or hesitate like one might expect. His grandmother hadn’t been soft in her training. While she had been clear she wouldn’t hit him harder then he could handle, she did hit him hard during training. It was a constant reminder that he was only being hit because he wasn’t moving as well as she knew he could. It had always been a rewarding experience when he could last a whole sparring session without her landing a hit… though she would always up the ante in the next spar.

His attention stuck to Callion’s shoulders, just as he’d been taught by his grandmother, because of one simple reason; no matter the fighting style one used, no matter how much someone trained, no matter the species of the fighter, everyone had two areas that telegraphed their moves and intentions, no matter what. The shoulders and the eyes. It could be subtle, but no matter how anyone moved, their shoulders would always, always, lean into the motion.

But the boy didn’t just evade. That would have been a waste of movement and of opportunity, instead he carried through with his half-failed evasion’s momentum and swung his own fist towards Callion’s face. Unlike the more experienced fighter there was no grand meaning behind the attack, no test, although if was one it was the reminder that every attack was an opportunity for your opponent to counter attack.

While Callion may have been channelling intensity and anger into the sparring match, Liek was doing no such thing. While fear danced in the back of his mind still, in this moment, as the two clashed, his training kicked in and his mind evicted unnecessary emotion from it’s focus. The boy’s expression was one of peace, of calm in the storm, clarity of the moment. He had never sparred while thinking too much, or really planning his moves ahead of time. He’d found it distracting, it was far easier to react to an opponents moves if you didn’t think you knew what moves they would make. That way, when they did something unexpected you weren’t caught by surprise.

Liek had never been prone to anger. For him it was a rare emotion. While other emotions that held relation to anger where common, frustration, agitation, annoyance and the like where common he hardly held to them. The fires of anger and rage found it had to hold purchase on Liek, and the moments when they did catch flame where intense but short lived, a brief explosion that consumed all of it’s fuel in and instant. It was not an emotion he could easily or readily channel for combat. Which was why he’d taken to clearing his mind of emotion and riding the clarity it gave.

He didn’t stop with just his punch however. Not wanting to leave himself open to a counter counter attack the boy generated a small crystal at one of his feet and used the force from the detonation to quickly move away from Callion. As he moved away he threw in a spray of distraction ki blasts and crystals for good measure.

---

WC: 635
TWC: 1,695

Liek was all to aware that keeping his emotions in check wouldn’t be enough to help him stop a force as destructive and immeasurable by his own reckoning as Artic was. That such a terrible, destructive being could exist absolutely terrified him, especially when he compared the power to destroy worlds with impunity to his own limited ability. He was like a tiny match being faced with the power of the sun, and he knew it. Anger was the absolute last emotion someone like Liek would be feeling at being confronted by something like the situation he was being confronted with. He had said it to Callion, he had told him with all honesty about the suffocating, all consuming fear he felt.

But it made sense that Callion wouldn’t, couldn’t have understood. While Liek had no doubt the older man understood the fear itself, there was no way for him to understand the boy’s fear of letting his emotions run wild. He, himself, had sought to suppress the memories that still plagued him as nightmares. The brief flashes of clarity and images of that one incident that had completely shattered all trust he’d had in himself in the tumultuous months before he became a teenager, when he’d let himself run wild and in rebellious tantrum and blacked out.

All he could remember was a scene of destruction, a portion of his forest home laid to waste. He could remember the heat of fires, the smell of the acrid smoke as it stung his lungs, the sweat on his brow. He could remember the sting of the bruises and cuts his Grandmother had inflicted in her efforts to stop him. He could remember his grandmother’s mournful gaze, the wounds she cradled. Wounds he had inflicted, wounds she never fully recovered from. And equally awful, he remember the sight of the lifeless corpse of the animal friend he’d had for years strewn on the ground, the blood all over… especially vivid was the blood on his hands.

He knew what had done all that, it was the monster lurking within.

Not the ape.

The other one.

The one he never wanted to let out again.

Thus why even as Callion urged him to release his anger he did exactly the opposite, kicking it back down into the depths of his mind and shielding himself with another emotion. He drew up thoughts that would stir up that emotion to drown away the anger. His thought’s turned to Opherla. The girl that had captured his heart both with her beauty and her charm. She shared his hopes on the kind of person he sought to be. He’d seen her at her worst, and through it their bond had grown stronger as he helped her reaffirm her vision of the person she wanted to be. And that was a person he couldn’t help but admire. More then anyone else, or anything else, she was what he wanted to keep safe.

His eyes focused on the oncoming barrage of ki blasts and surmised he had no way to avoid them all. But that didn’t mean he was just going to sit back and defend, instead he charged at the barrage and started weaving, not bothering to entirely avoid the attacks, instead using his hands to divert them from his path as he charged forwards. Then as the gap was closed he grit his teeth and gave one last surge forward coating himself entirely in Ki to try and strike Callion with a Fury Crash.

---

WC: 588
TWC: 2,283

It seemed to Liek like Callion had lost sight of a great many things. Maybe it was all the power the man had hidden away? Which, while Liek couldn’t sense it with it being suppressed he could tell the man had simply by the way he moved. Maybe it was because of the threat Arctic posed to everyone on Earth? Maybe it was just plain the older man’s ego? But it was clear that this man was treating the sparring match less as a way to help the youth train and more as a way to… well, Liek wasn’t entirely sure what Callion was going for.

After the clash between his Fury Crash and Callion broke the boy had intended to follow through, but the clashing energy threw off the rhythm he was trying to build and he flubbed his move, taking too long and ended up with a hand around his neck. If he’d had other offensive options he may have used them, but as it stood he only had the Fury Crash to work with. More skills where in the works, but he hadn’t quite got them down yet, not enough to use in a spar, at least.

“You think I don’t know all that?” He growled while gripping at Callion’s hands, “You think I’m not aware that I’m weak? I know damn well that even if I had a year I probably couldn’t get strong enough to beat Arctic.” His brow creased and his eyes showed emotion, but it still wasn’t anger, they where the eyes of a child stressed and terrified out of his mind, “And here’s The Guy, the one everyone looks to, Roshi, Opherla, everyone… the guy they all look up to as a hero, the guy they talk about like he’s a freaking Saint…” He choked for air for a moment, until he managed to form a layer of crystal between Callion’s hand and his neck, and asked, “But you know what I see?” His eyes narrowed as tears formed in the corners, and he managed to shout, “I see a damn scumbag bully who abuses their power!” To emphasis his point he went with the cheapest of cheap shots.

A kick between the legs followed immediately by a flurry of kicks and punches, “Where the hell do you get off?! You act all high and mighty, spouting pretentious bullshit from a pedestal!” He kept wailing away at Callion, not even caring if his attacks where even being effective anymore, though the attacks where not wild, each and every motion was was aimed to either strike at a vital area or to deflect any counter attack from Callion. All the while tears ran down the boy’s face, “You’ve got everyone sucked into your Cult of Personality thinking you’re a hero at heart! But you don’t give a damn, do you?! It’s all just one big act to stroke your damn ego, isn’t it?!” The boy didn’t let up his barrage, physical or verbal, “That’s what’s got you the most upset isn’t it?! Arctic’s coming to kick down your whole house of cards and you can’t stand that a bigger fish is in the pond! So here you are, taking it on a kid!!”

---

WC: 540
TWC: 2,823

It wasn’t anger then fuelled Liek’s flurry of blows, or perhaps there was a little laced in there? If there was it was all over shadowed by other emotions, rather then the blaze of fury the main thing coursing through his body was the cold grip of fear. He wasn’t revealing this aggression as a result of a surge of rage, but rather as direct result of his fight or flight reflex factoring in that he didn’t really have anywhere to run to, and lashing out in a desperate hope to survive.

Callion was pushing him for a reason, even though the boy had absolutely no idea this was the case. But Callion was misjudging the situation horribly. He sought to anger the boy and in so doing begin to draw out the dormant hidden power dwelling within his Saiyan genes. And perhaps if Liek had been older, or had more experience dealing with actual enemies, his methods may have worked. But Liek was still an inexperienced child, dealing with forces he’d previously thought merely the territory of fiction and fantasy. Even his closest real world context, Ga-Ravan’s attempted invasion of the Earth, hadn’t involved any intent to outright destroy the planet and everything on it.

But even drowning in terror the boy’s mind processed and considered what he saw as he kept his eyes on Callion, even if his vision did blur from the tears, watching for important details and actions. The way the older man was speaking, the spiteful words that spilled from his lips like venom didn’t feel right, they just seemed to lack the natural flow of what he normally said, they took the faintest hint longer to leave his lips then what Liek had previously seen. And there was something off about the flinch he gave, if Liek had been a normal Saiyan he may have missed it, but the part of him that was naturally deceptive, the demon within, noticed it, there was a delay, by the tiniest fraction. Just slightly too long for the flinch to be from the impact.

For Liek it all came together in a moment of clarity. He was simply too weak. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t catch up, all of his efforts where a waste. It didn’t matter who it was, Arctic, Callion or some other threat. It didn’t matter where that threat came from, it could arrive from the depths of space or from somewhere on the Earth. The suffocating powers he could sense across the world, the ones he didn’t have a name for but Callion would recognise as Liari and Athren. And the familiar, like ABAS and Opherla. It didn’t matter where he cast his senses there where people who could erase him from existence without even noticing he was there.

As all this had been going through the boy’s head his attacks had slowed and lost the weight behind them. But with one final conclusion the last punch could be best described as merely flopping his arm in Callion’s general direction.

The boy hovered in the air, body shaking as tears streamed down his face, softly sobbing.

He knew his limits, as much as the idea of Opherla getting her stung him deeply, he knew if she didn’t stand a chance then any attempt by him was hopeless. “Fine…” The boy sobbed, “What’s the point…” In his mind he was apologising to Opherla over and over for being a useless waste of space who can’t do anything, not even keep a promise, “Go head… not like I could stop you anyway...”

---

WC: 600
TWC: 3,423

The thing with teenage emotions where that they where wild and unpredictable, a grand act could go ignored, the smallest act could mean the world. They could swing from complete jubilation to total devastation so quickly it could give a grown adult physical whiplash. For any other teenager it may have been as simple as finding the right trigger, that one thing that would rile them like no other. But Liek was different from other teenagers, he’d done everything in his power to root out his anger and extinguish it, identifying it as a critical flaw that needed to be exterminated.

So he never did what he had done again.

Even if a part of him wanted to deny it had been him that did it, he couldn’t deny that the blood had been on his hands. That it was his hands that inflicted those wounds, caused that pain and destruction. Took that life. After he’d forced himself to hone up to his role in what happened to himself he’d sought to never allow himself to fall prey to his inner emotions again. A silent promise to never let that side of him hurt anyone else like that again.

So yes, he was serious. He’d rather suffer misery himself then allow others to suffer it by allowing his anger to inflict it.

He wasn’t sure what Opherla could say. He didn’t have enough of an ego to think he could predict such a thing. He didn’t even think he had a gauge on how the girl really felt about him, she’d said she cared and wanted to keep him safe before, but how far did that go? For all he knew she meant as a kid brother. As much as he wanted to hope she meant something more, he didn’t dare set his expectations so high. And even if she disparaged him he would shoulder it with all the other self-doubt and misery, she was free to feel and think whatever she wanted and he had no right to tell her otherwise.

Be a man? What even was a man? He never knew his father, so he was out. The closest he had to an actual role model for what a man was was Roshi. So, that wasn’t exactly high tier. Besides that all he knew where stories of Cay-luum and Rudee, both of whom had passed before he’d come into his grandmother’s care. While they where fine people the fact Liek only knew them by reputation made them more abstract ideas then anything by which define what a man was. By what other was he to measure the definition of a man? Comic book heroes? He wasn’t that delusional. Callion? The guy acting like a complete asshole right now? Never going to happen.

His Grandmother? She never told him what to be or what to do with his life, she had always made sure his life was his to live. There was never any pressure to live up to her legacy, or even to pass on the Furiemshinken. She had always made it clear he could live however he wanted, if he wanted to stay hidden in their home forest forever as a life long hermit, then she was fine with that. If he wanted to never wield his powers again and live a normal, mundane life, that was a choice he was free to make. She had even told him once she would still accept him following the path of a villain if that was the path he chose. He chose to try to become a protector of his own will, and perhaps more then a little bravado, not because of his Grandmother. She would tell him to do as his heart desired…

And then Callion vanished, leaving Liek stunned and confused. Had the man had enough and just left? It seemed unlikely, but not implausible. After all, who would want to waste time on energy on someone so weak?

But before Liek could convince himself of that Callion returned with something, someone in toe that nearly made the boy have a heart attack simply at the sight; his Grandmother Fa Galswith, looking as she had in her prime, her hair dark and full of luster, not the frayed grey he remembered. Her skin smooth and full of life, not wrinkled and blemished. Her body fit and slender, glad in green clothes that conveyed modesty while also allowing free movement, not the gowns or green exercise sweater and pants combo she wore in her senior years. The one part that hadn’t changed where her eyes, the same vibrant yellow filled with gentle caring.

Then Callion’s words hit him like a train. His eyes visibly began to tremble in his sockets as he paled. His limbs trembled as sweat began to visibly form on his forehead. He felt like he was chocking on his own heart as all warmth began to drain from his body. His vision darkened until all he could see was his grandmother, Callion’s hand gripping her.

"...no…"

CRACK!!

Liek grabbed his head and started screaming and howling, his body contorting backwards as he twisted back and forth. Twisting back and forth he ended up curled up facing towards the ground, still screaming so long and loud it could not be good for his lungs or throat, clawing at his own head like he was trying to rip something out… or keep something in.

Fa, Liek’s grandmother just sighed as she looked over at Callion, “I told you this would happen.”

She looked back over at her Grandson who had stopped thrashing and was floating with his arms and legs dangling. Slowly the boy tilted up until the full blooded Saiyan could see his face.

Two crimson eyes stared back.

Two thin crimson lines, looking like tears of blood, ran from the edges of his eyes down his cheeks.

And his lips where twisted into a demented smile.



A moment passed before Liek lunged at Callion. There was no precision in his movements, no more quiet intent like there had been at the start, or even the fierce precision from his earlier outburst. This version of Liek was coming at Callion with a naked intent to kill, not to protect, but purely for the satisfaction of spilling blood.

“All you did was let the Demon out.” Fa explained.

---

WC: 1,062
TWC: 4,485