A full year had passed since Razor first opened his eyes on this strange world — the planet called Sadala. What once felt alien and foreign had now become a battlefield drenched in blood and screams.
For the first month after awakening, Razor had remained in recovery. His body, once shredded to the bone, had finally healed, though scars still ran across his chest and arms like marks of war. Even in those early weeks, he had felt it — that faint pulse of power inside him, echoing from the great ape he saw within his mind, the same beast that had nearly devoured his consciousness.
When the Saiyan guards declared him fit to fight, they didn't throw him into the frontlines — they considered him too weak for that. Instead, they assigned him to a lesser unit, one that handled the wounded and dying. The rescue corps.
His task was simple: locate fallen warriors on the battlefield, retrieve the ones still clinging to life, and bring them back for medical treatment. But in this war, few ever needed rescuing. Most were obliterated instantly by the ruthless foes. The Saiyans didn't leave survivors.
At first, Razor was relieved — his work kept him away from the worst of the bloodshed. But soon, the reality sank in. The number of bodies he found each day grew fewer not because the war was ending, but because fewer Saiyans remained to fight it.
The sky above the wastelands was always dark, filled with the glow of ki blasts and the stench of burnt flesh. Razor had seen planets razed before, but this was different. The very air of Sadala was thick with rage and despair.
And yet, in that single year since he had woken, Razor had seen what all these years could never destroy — the spirit of the Saiyan race, brutal and relentless. Even as they were crushed, they fought back, screaming defiance to the skies.
Still, he could see it — their side was losing. Badly.
The only reason the radical Saiyans hadn't yet wiped them out was simple: boredom.
The enemy's strongest warriors — Cumber and others — rarely appeared in the war anymore. They found no pleasure in fighting weaklings. To them, this was sport, not conquest. The moment they stepped onto the battlefield, the war would end in hours. So they let it drag on, feeding their hunger for destruction slowly, day by day.
That, Razor thought, was the only reason he still drew breath.
He spent every free moment training. When the sun sank and the battlefield fell silent, he vanished into the wilderness — striking at boulders, roaring through exhaustion, channeling his rage into raw, explosive power. His body, already hardened by countless battles in his life, adapted fast and the dense gravity of Sadala helped him. Every night, he pushed himself to the edge of collapse. Every morning, he woke stronger.
And it was working.
In the first few months, Razor had barely survived when caught by patrolling enemies. He remembered one night vividly — a towering Saiyan with blood-red eyes had spotted him while he was retrieving an injured soldier. The enemy's energy burned wildly. Razor barely managed to block a single strike before being sent flying through a cliffside. Luckily the enemy toyed with him long enough for reinforcements to arrive, but that night it became clear weak had no place here.
Now, a year later, Razor no longer ran. He fought. He discovered that his strength has been rising steadily.
He could fight weaker enemies in a one on one fight. Although his crimson-black aura — the same color that had once saved him from annihilation — has disappeared. Sometimes, when he trained, he could feel that same monstrous ki inside him, roaring to be unleashed.
The great-ape vision — equal parts beast and riven memory — had not left him; it lived like a low current behind his thought.
Each day on the field hardened him. Each corpse, each dying scream, chipped away another piece of who he once was. The Razor who once softened when he met 18 — that Razor was fading.
He had learned to bury hesitation, to crush pity before it could form. This war didn't reward kindness. It punished it. Brutally.
Still… sometimes, late at night, he thought of her.
Eighteen. Her cold stare softening when she smiled. Her hand brushing against his face.And their child — growing inside her when he last saw her.
The thought hit him like a knife every time. Somewhere, far beyond this hellish planet, beyond time and space, she was waiting. Or maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was gone. He didn't know.
But that uncertainty fueled him more than any rage could.
One evening, after he had carried a Saiyan warrior with both legs broken across a half-mile of blasted field and handed him to an exhausted healer whose hands were steady though tired, Razor sat on the edge of the city wall and watched Sadala's moon crawl through the dark. The war glowed below like embers. He flexed his fingers under the cloth of his gloves and felt the small moment of quiet, the realm of choice he still possessed.
He looked up — to the black sky, to distant stars he no longer knew, and thought of 18. A fierceness flared in him then, a quiet resolve.
I will live. I will become stronger. I will find a way back to you.