Going Native: Rewritten: Wilds 1.1 (ch. 1) (Patreon)

“How dare you be born with a power level of a pathetic two hundred!? Your brother was born with a power level of ten thousand, making him the strongest child in our recorded history!” King Vegeta raged at me, slamming a fist upon the arm of his throne which shattered under the assault. The air was filled with a palpable pressure that I felt upon my skin with an almost physical force. I looked up at the man from where I knelt, drinking in his visage -- from his spiky hair, to his goatee, to the lean muscle that strained against his skin-tight bodysuit, and finally the white armor with the crest of the Saiyan Royal Family emblazoned over his heart. 

There was a part of me that understood that he was powerful. Not as powerful as the strongest of the setting he was in, not even remotely, but still so outrageously powerful that he wouldn't have any difficulty at all killing me. So powerful that I couldn’t even guess how strong he was, because it would be like an ant trying to eyeball the height of Mt. Everest. 

That part of me was overshadowed by the fact that the guy, my father, was berating what amounted to a newborn infant for not being born swole enough. Like, he wasn't, technically -- I was a grown man who had tripped and fallen into the body of an infant from across the Multiverse, but he didn't know that. From his perspective, I had just been ejected from an incubation pod and marched across the palace before he decided to yell at me because… I guess I didn't get the same winning genetic lottery ticket that Vegeta did? 

“I'll… get stronger?” I tried, not really sure what King Vegeta was looking for. It didn't feel like I should apologize. That felt like it would be showing weakness, and I didn't think he would tolerate any more of that from me. 

“That is no concern of mine, boy,” King Vegeta replied, though he did seem a little mollified by the response. “I will not allow the royal bloodline to be tainted by your pathetic genes. I will not kill you, as you are of my blood, but that is the only mercy you shall receive from me. Begone from my sight -- die in obscurity, or return worthy of your royal heritage.” He made a dramatic gesture before I felt one of my escorts behind me grab me by the tail, causing every muscle I had to go numb. 

Then the guy straight up just flung me through an open window. 

And off a cliff, as it so happened, since the palace was apparently built on one. 

My heart lurched in my chest as I felt the wind whistling by my ears. I shifted to look down at the ground and found that it was rapidly approaching. Instead of panicking, I took a sharp breath and closed my eyes. 

Back in my last life, I’d read the start of a cultivation novel that had a reincarnator gain awareness in the womb of his mother like, three seconds after being conceived. And the first thing the guy did was start training. I never got past the first chapter, but I remember it vividly because it was the most extreme example of the tropes that cultivation novels are accused of, and it was so blatant about it that it was oddly charming. I had never imagined I would find myself in a similar position, but after I had gained awareness in an incubation pod, the only thing I had to do to pass the time was train. 

I couldn't train my body, so I trained something else. 

Ki. 

I don't know if I had ki back as a human, but as a Saiyan, it was impossible not to be aware of it. If I as a human had a drop of ki, then as a Saiyan I had an ocean. The only difficulty there was that it took some effort to get an ocean to heed your calls. But, after months, years even, of endless practice to avoid boredom, it obeyed my commands like a well-trained dog. 

Slowly, I felt my speed bleed off as my momentum slowed until it stopped entirely. Opening my eyes, I saw I was about a foot off the ground, hovering in mid-air. I was flying. Thanks, vague instructions from Gohan. Letting myself fall the last foot to the ground, I looked up at the palace for a moment, mulling over what had happened. 

“What a jerk.” I summarized my thoughts pretty well. I wasn't expecting him to win any father of the year awards or anything, but seriously -- the guy really just tossed a baby out a window and off a cliff. Be acknowledged by the royal family? As if. First chance I get I'm gone, suckers. Have fun getting blown up by Frieza. 

Tearing my gaze away from the palace I had just been ejected from, I saw… a whole lot of nothing in just about every direction. Well, nothing beyond barren reddish stone. However, a skill I’d developed in the incubation pod came in handy there as beneath King Vegeta's overwhelming presence, I could sense the presence of others beyond the palace. 

With nothing else to really do, I started flying over that way. I had some time to come to terms with everything back in the pod -- that I’d died, been reincarnated, and that I was now a Saiyan. I’d thought I had been pretty clever with my training in the pod to avoid Tarble's canon fate, but I really hadn't expected this once I finally got free of the pod. I figured I'd be sent on a mission that I could immediately defect from, head to Earth, and lie low there until Frieza took the Saiyan race out behind the barn. 

From there, I figured I'd go the generic SI route of metagaming with my superior Saiyan genetics, become super outrageously overpowered, and then… I don't know. Go on the run-of-the-mill power fantasy route. Instead, I was tossed out like yesterday's trash with no direction to go in. Which wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though it left my half-baked plans scuttled unless I could get back on track. Maybe I could just… steal a spaceship and be on my way?

“Maybe I shouldn't have bothered training at all?” I wondered, thinking maybe it would have been easier if I had been dismissed from the start. I could already be off to that planet Tarble had been exiled to. You know, provided that King Vegeta didn't kill me outright for being too weak. 

Oh well. No point in crying over spilt milk, especially when there were other opportunities on the horizon. Like the one I was closing in on at high speeds. 

I arrived at a crag in the barren terrain that could have given the Grand Canyon a run for its money, and it was at the bottom of it that I found the ki signatures that I had sensed. There, I saw what I could only describe as Godzilla’s four-legged cousin -- thick rough scales with a row of jagged spines down its back, and a vaguely crocodilian head with a maw filled with sharp teeth that snapped at one of the Saiyans hunting it. 

There were a dozen of them in the valley, darting in and out of the lizard’s range when it swiped at them with claws the size of a minivan or its tail that effortlessly smashed through boulders. All of them wore the same bodysuits that I did, their tails curled around their waists, as they gave the lizard their full attention. Some of them had scars on their faces, telling me that they weren’t exactly fresh out of the tank. 

However, despite that, I could sense that they were weaker than me. If only by a little. If my power level was 200, then theirs was around 100 to 150. 

I also didn’t see a single one of them flying. They dodged and flipped out of the way of the thrashing animal who fought to escape them hemming it into a corner, but they didn’t fly. Nor did they use any ki attacks -- they just darted in, punching and kicking, before they darted out. The attacks were doing damage, the scales were cracking and blood splashed on the stone, but they were killing it by a thousand cuts. 

They didn’t seem to need my help exactly, but it did seem like an excellent opportunity to introduce myself. 

I allowed myself to drop like a stone over the lizard, and since Planet Vegeta had ten times Earth’s gravity, I fell fast. As I did, I channeled my ki to my hands, and in response, beads of jade green light flickered to life. With a flick of my wrist, I threw the first down at the lizard, and its head bounced down as an explosion rattled its head around -- it wasn’t a big one, but it was still like a hand grenade had gone off. 

Naturally, the lizard looked up to see what just hit it, and it was then that I thrusted my hand forward as I closed in. A slit pupil had enough time to narrow as ki erupted from my palm, punching through its eye and directly into the brain. But, to make sure that it was dead, I did a little flip to drive an axe kick into the crown of its skull, and I felt it buckle under my heel as the head slammed into the stone hard enough that a crater formed.

Landing lightly on it, I found the lizard collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. There was a beat of silence as all the other Saiyan kids looked up at me, and my gaze went to the strongest among them. A girl, a mane of spiky hair that went straight up almost, with two large bangs that split to frame her face. She looked up at me with an expression that told me she was ready to fight, so I threw on a smile and waved, “Yo! I’m Tarble. Nice ta’ meetcha.”

“Who the heck are you?!” The girl spat in my direction, making my smile strain just a bit. 

“I… just introduced myself?” I tried, tilting my head. They were wary, I saw, some glancing between themselves. They were gearing up for a fight. 

“By stealing our prey?” The girl questioned before faltering when I shook my head. 

“Nah, you’re welcome to it-” I started, and the rest of the Saiyans pounced on the carcass like a pack of wild animals. They tore at the scales with their hands, carving out chunks of bloody meat that they immediately started shoving into their mouths. If one Saiyan ventured a little too close to another , then a brawl erupted. It was savagery at its height. Even cavemen were better than this.

The only one that didn’t join in was the girl, who I flew over to. Her eyes watched me carefully, her eyes narrowing when she noticed that I was flying. Behind me, the two-ton lizard was rapidly vanishing into the stomachs of a dozen hungry Saiyans. “You… you’re fresh out the tank,” the girl remarked. 

I blinked, “Yeah, I am. How’d you tell?” 

She pointed at me, “Your undersuit is clean. No rips or nothing,” she noted and I glanced down at myself to find that she was right. Glancing at hers and the others revealed that their clothing was in much rougher shape. “So, how come you can fly and use ki already? Did you manage to convince someone to teach you?” 

There was so much suspicion and doubt in her tone that I felt compelled to ask, “Teach me?” I echoed -- she made the thought sound absurd. Like the level of absurdity in thinking that the moon was made of cheese or that the Earth was flat. 

“Yeah! All the warriors just say we’d figure it out if we lived long enough and got strong enough,” The girl said, and I processed that for a moment. From the sounds of it, much like me, the other Saiyan kids has been unleashed into the wilds with nothing resembling guidance. “So, who did you convince to teach you? Scallio?”

“Ah, no. I figured it out,” I admitted, making her eyes widen dramatically. “I can teach you, though? If I knew your name, at least?” I tried and there was no mistaking the hunger in the girl’s eyes. It was something beyond want -- it was more of a need, just as she needed to breathe and eat. She needed to get stronger. 

“Caulifla,” She introduced herself, and I tried not to react to that. I hadn’t expected that, I could admit to myself. Although, looking at her, she did look like the version of her that was in Universe 6. Mostly the hair, really. I guess she had the same general face shape, but it was more girlish than womanly since she was just a kid. “What do you get out of teaching me? S’not like you need any help hunting.”

That was actually a good question -- what exactly was my goal here? Part of me wanted directions to the quickest way off planet, but another part of me… I stole a glance at the Saiyans, who were covered in blood, still scarfing raw meat down their mouths or crunching on bones that were bigger than they were. It was… sad. Like in a visceral way that I didn't know how to handle. 

“I… could use some help myself. I just left the pod and got tossed out a window, so… you're all the first Saiyans that I've met.” I admitted, and now Caulifla seemed intrigued. 

“You weren't part of a batch?” She asked and at my clueless expression, her brow furrowed. “Low-Class like us get made in batches. If we're too weak, we get sent off on infiltration missions. But until we hit our first growth spurt, or until our power level reaches a thousand, we’re stuck in the Wilds. The higher class kids get to go on missions as soon as they’re born!” That… almost sounded like… something. 

They had the framework of an idea to help the children develop, but they didn't actually do anything to help them. The whole infiltration baby thing wasn’t news to me, but it was mildly more disturbing when I realized it was an actual thing being done now instead of a bit of lore about one of my favorite settings. Same for what amounted to sending newborn children on missions to commit genocide as a form of employment. 

Frieza wasn’t a good guy by a long shot, but maybe he was onto something about blowing up the whole Saiyan race. 

“But you were born solo?” Caulifla questioned, crossing her arms. “So, you were the kid of some upper-class warrior or something?” 

“Or something,” I replied. I had no idea how she'd respond if she learned I was King Vegeta's kid, but I knew that King Vegeta would absolutely kill me if he found out I was calling myself his kid. The prick. 

Caulifla shrugged her shoulders, betraying that she wasn’t that interested. “Whatever. If you’re here, it means you weren’t strong enough to acknowledge, so it doesn’t matter.” That stung a little, even if it was true. “Alright. Okay- if you teach me how to fly and shoot ki blasts, I’ll accept you as my underling.” She nodded to herself, and I guess that made a lot of sense to her. 

“... Since I can already fly and shoot ki blasts, shouldn’t that make you my underling?” I felt compelled to point out. A mistake, as it turned out, as Caulifla immediately switched from smug satisfaction at her own cleverness to murderously angry and glaring in my direction. Then she sent a fist that I just barely managed to jerk my head out of the way of. 

“There’s no way I’m going to become the underling of a pipsqueak like you! I’m the strongest, so that means you gotta obey me!” She declared before she started swinging for the fences. Her fists came fast, blurring towards my face and, despite myself, I felt a grin tugging at my lips. 

It felt like a jolt of lightning down my spine and my heart lurched in my chest -- I should be alarmed. Afraid, even. Caulifla fought like a wild animal, and she was attacking me with the intent of beating me into next week. And yet instead of fear, there was a primal excitement that had me curling my fists. It felt a bit like going on a roller coaster -- a little bit of trepidation, but once the ride started going, you didn’t want it to end. 

I didn’t try to persuade her any further. 

Darting in, I slipped beneath a hook to plant one square in her diaphragm. Caulifla gasped, but she barely missed a beat as she threw herself at me again. I was light on my feet, but I was coming to realize that she was probably faster and stronger than me. Her issue was that she fought savagely -- there was no real form to her attacks, just a wild rhythm that only she could follow. 

I was hardly an experienced fighter myself, but even the basics that I had put me three steps ahead of her. It helped that my body seemed so in tune with my mind and instincts. I tucked my hands up, weaving around a handful of punches as I steadily gave ground, and Caulifla pounced on the perceived opening and kicked at my legs. I jumped above the kick, attempting to land one of my own- 

“Caulifla! Incoming!” I heard one of the other Saiyans shout out. Instantly, Caulifla glanced to the side and I got so caught up in the fight I realized I stopped keeping watch with my ki sense. I resumed as I followed her gaze, sensing and seeing six figures racing towards us. One of them was a little stronger than me, but it was hard to believe it when I saw the six of them. They were in rough shape, covered in bruises, and they looked like they were on the verge of starvation. 

Caulifla tsked, “We’ll finish this later! We have to defend our lunch!” With that, she broke into a sprint at the other Saiyans with her own group right behind her. They unleashed war cries as they clashed, and while the smaller group was weakened, they fought with an unnerving desperation. 

It was a matter of life and death for them. And so they fought to kill, so that they could live. 

I'm not sure what I would have done if I didn't see one of the wounded Saiyans going to stomp on the neck of another, determined to kill him. It didn't feel like there was a right side here, but I couldn't just let that happen. So, I threw myself into the fray, my side picked, and fought. 

I knew I shouldn't enjoy it as much as I did, but the taste of blood in my mouth after taking a punch to the jaw was nearly intoxicating. Almost as intoxicating as returning the favor, punching another Saiyan so hard in the mouth that blood sprayed across the canyon floor. The feeling of my knuckles impacting flooded my brain with all the right chemicals and the pain I felt when I was hit back wasn't a deterrent in the slightest. It just spurred me on, fighting harder and harder until, before I knew it, the six Saiyans were defeated. 

They laid on their backs and stomachs, bloodied and bruised, but alive. 

The victors unleashed a war cry, celebrating their victory while I flipped the Saiyan that had been at the head of the pack. He groaned and looked up at me through one eye as the other was swollen shut. My lips thinned. “Why'd you attack us?” 

“Hungry… we… haven't eaten… in days…” the Saiyan groaned. Honestly, he looked like he hadn't eaten in weeks, but I guess Saiyans needed a lot more food than a human. 

My blood stopped feeling so hot in my veins, and the satisfaction of fighting was fleeting. Now I feel bad. I glanced up at Caulifla, and I didn't see an ounce of pity in her eyes. And I knew why, even if no one said it. Everyone here had been in the same position, and no one had offered a helping hand to them, so they weren't going to help either. 

“Alright. Well, we can't share the prey we already have, but I can help you hunt something else,” I decided, earning sounds of surprise from everyone, victors and defeated alike. The idea that I’d just help them was so utterly unfathomable to them that they looked at me like I just sprouted a second head that started speaking in tongues. 

And that was sad. 

“Bwah- wait- you can’t! You’re supposed to teach me how to fly and be my underling!” Caulifla immediately protested as I stood up, offering a hand to the fallen Saiyan. He looked up at it, most of his expression hidden behind swelling, but there was confusion shining in his eye. Tentatively, he accepted the hand and I pulled him up. 

“I will,” I reassured her. “I’m just going to take care of this real quick. It shouldn’t take that long. Plus, you could use something to eat yourself, right?” I said, glancing at her. She was the only other Saiyan who hadn’t rushed to gorge herself on the fallen lizard. 

The offer made her puff up, “I can hunt for-” she started, only for her stomach to growl. Loudly. Loud enough that it echoed in the canyon. “I… fine! Since you're my underling, it only makes sense that you'd get me food.” I'm not even going to address that. 

“You're really going to help us hunt? Why?” He asked with the same disbelief as Caulifla. The same suspicion. Even after the ass kicking, I could see him bracing for the rug getting pulled out from underneath him. And I didn't know what to say to make him believe that while I probably wasn't the best person, I just didn't have it in me to see a bunch of starving feral children and just shrug my shoulders at them. It wasn't my problem, but it wasn't a problem I could just ignore. 

“Because I'm stronger than you, so I get to do what I want, and I want to help you hunt for something.” I said, looking away as I expanded my awareness with my ki sense. I had gotten pretty good at it during my time in the tank -- I obviously wasn't at the level of Goku, who could sense people across the galaxy, but I'm pretty sure my upper limit was around a third of the planet. Meaning that I could sense pretty much everything in our general area, including prey. “You got a name?”

The Saiyan didn't know how to respond at first, even when I tried to explain my mercy in a way he could understand. It took him a moment but his head perked into a nod, “I'm Cabba.” 

Huh.

Yeah, he kinda looked like Cabba -- though, he was way less scrawny. His features were hidden behind the swelling, cuts, and bruises, but he did look like Cabba. 

That was interesting. I'm not particularly sure what it meant that I had run into two equivalents of Saiyans from Universe 6, but it was certainly something. Neither of them were a fraction as strong as their Universe 6 counterparts given their youth, but I suppose everyone had to start somewhere. 

“Well, you lot follow me,” I said as I started walking. Behind me, I knew the others were trading glances. But, given that I heard a bunch of footsteps, I knew that all of them decided to follow. Even if there was an uneasy silence behind me -- at first, I figured it was because they had all just fought, but I'm pretty sure it was because of me. They didn't know what to make of me. 

I wasn't even sure what I was doing. It wasn't like treating them to a meal was going to fix their problems. Even if it was only performative and to soothe my own conscience, I had to do something. So, I ignored their not-so-quiet whispering behind my back as we approached the cliffside. While I floated straight up into the air, the others jumped up the side of the cliffside or climbed it like a bunch of spider monkeys. 

Once we were out of the canyon, though, they started to get a little nervous. Our destination was a forest that started to rise up in the distance -- it was a little ways away, but I sensed that there was a lot more life there than there was in this barren wasteland. Honestly, I’m more surprised that they found something to eat out here at all. 

“We can’t go there,” Cabba blurted behind me, slowing to a stop. He clenched his jaw and his fists, and even Caulifla was looking a bit tense. I glanced between them and the forest for a moment before I felt a bit silly. Of course, they wouldn’t be living out here if there were better spots available to them. “The older Saiyans claimed it as their hunting grounds. We can’t beat them.”

“Yet!” Caulifla corrected with an angry gesture. “We can’t beat them yet! Soon I’m gonna get strong enough to kick their sorry butts out of there and take it over for myself!” She boasted, shanking a fist in their general direction. 

I looked to Cabba for an explanation, and he supplied one easily enough. “We have to survive in the Badlands because all the better spots have been claimed. So, we have to either get strong enough to claim better hunting grounds, or we can move in when a spot opens up because a stronger Saiyan got killed or they got to enter the city.” 

It was Darwinism at its stupidest, I realized. The Saiyan race really just chucked their offspring into the deep end right at the start. Either they would grow strong or they would die as they competed for resources. And given that a dozen Saiyan kids just devoured a two ton lizard all the way down to the marrow in about five minutes flat, I'm guessing food was a constant concern. And the Saiyans put their kids in that position on purpose to weed out the weak. 

‘Fuck Frieza. I might blow up Planet Vegeta,’ I thought to myself, blowing out a sigh as I scratched at the back of my head. I glanced in the direction of the forest, sensing the power levels that dwelled within it -- there were quite a few that were much stronger than us, but all of them paled in comparison to King Vegeta. And given that 1,000PL was evidently the cut off, the strongest Saiyans in this Lord of the Flies hellscape were ‘only’ five times stronger than me at most. 

But it wasn't worth the risk. Not yet, at least. 

“Alright,” I accepted the information with a shrug of my shoulders. Then I turned my attention to a much closer source of food that I’d initially dismissed because… well… I felt a bit bad at the thought of eating them. “In that case, let's go this way -- there's a nest nearby.” 

“Huh? How do you know that?” Caulifla questioned and I just grinned. 

“Ki,” I answered simply, earning a pout from her. And a kick to the shin. I ignored her, though, in favor of having everyone follow me along the canyon until I found that we were roughly near the nest that I sensed. I could tell it was beneath my feet an odd twenty feet, but I couldn't tell where the entrance to the cavern was, even when I checked inside the canyon itself. 

So, with a hand outstretched, I channeled ki to my palm before I let a flurry of ki blasts fly free. The raw power that I had at my disposal was unlike anything I had ever felt before as chunks of solid stone just melted away, blasted to pieces as I tunneled my way down. Then, after about fifteen feet, the ceiling of the cavern gave way. 

I dropped into the nest first, and unsurprisingly the owner of the nest had anticipated our arrival. She roared up at me, cradling the nest of a dozen eggs with her body and tail. She was the same species as the lizard before. Maybe that was her mate? Clenching my jaw, I offered a silent apology to the lizard as I flew forward, bypassing her snapping maw, to deliver a fatal ki blast through her eye and into her brain. With a quick kick, I made sure that the eggs weren't crushed by her body and by the time the others dropped into the hole, the fight was already over. 

The Saiyans immediately lunged for the carcass of the fallen lizard, but they skidded to a halt when I held up a hand. They bristled, and I knew that in their eyes, this was probably the betrayal they had been expecting. So, before they could do something stupid, I spoke, “Hold up. We have to cook the meat and eggs first.” 

“Cook? What's that?” Cabba questioned, and I had to take a breath to calm myself down. The ignorance was appalling. The incubation pods didn't just protect us from Planet Vegeta's gravity until we could handle it. They taught us stuff, too, by beaming information directly into our heads or… something. I wasn't sure how it worked. But that was why I was able to speak the Saiyan language and knew how to operate an Attack Ball. And apparently, those were the only two bits of information that the Saiyans put any value in. 

Heck, I'm not even sure if I could read. 

“Just… do what I say,” I sighed, feeling a headache coming. “Cut off the legs and separate the scales from the meat. Take out the organs, too.” I instructed, fully expecting that some of them would sneak some bites. The cost of cooking with Saiyans, I guess. 

If they were going to argue, they swallowed their protests when I channeled ki around my hand. Reasonable arguments wouldn't work on them, so I had to fall back on might makes right. It'd work for now, but once they started learning how to manipulate their ki… well, hopefully, I'd be long gone by that point. 

The cavern was rough and well lived in, telling me that the lizards had been here for a while. I approached an uneven wall before I slashed my hand at it, carving a deep line in the stone. The others openly watched me as I carved a cooking stone out of the wall, catching it as it fell, and flying it over to the opening that I made in the ceiling. Placing it there, I repeated the process to make a stone bowl. 

I'd prefer proper cooking utensils, but it'd do in a pinch. 

In the meantime, the other Saiyans did what I asked, and I pretended not to notice that most of them had bloody cheeks or that they were still chewing raw meat. I did have a little experience butchering rabbits, and while the lizard was a thousand times bigger, the same principles still applied. I cut along muscle groupings and bone, which would be cut further into cuts of meat. I severed the ribs along the spine and gathered the organs I knew could be digested safely -- heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, and stomach. 

The job was done in a few minutes, rushed because I wasn't sure how long their patience would last for. I tossed the cuts of meat on the cooking stone before I placed a hand on it. Closing my eyes, I tried something a little more complicated than shaping my ki. 

In the end, ki manipulation was simple in an… easy to do but difficult to master kind of way. It was the part of Dragon Ball that I had always loved the most, even if they never did much with it. Techniques like Multi-Form, Evil Containment Wave, Power Ball or the more mystical stuff like the Clothing Beam -- they stood out in comparison to the common variations of ki attacks. There felt like there was a lot that could be done with ki itself, but DBZ was firmly a Shonen manga so unique applications of ki were more for new attacks or transformations. 

What I was doing now was easy but complicated at the same time. I infused my ki into the slab, and used that as a means to heat it up until the cavern became filled with the sound of sizzling meat. When I got a little more confident with the trick I would try flash cooking with ki, but this wasn't bad for a first try. My audience clearly approved because there were sounds of awe when I flipped the steaks over to reveal a nice char. It'd be nice to have some butter, some garlic, and maybe some rosemary, but beggars couldn't be choosers. 

“I can't take it anymore!” One of the Saiyans howled, lunging for a steak and grabbing it with both hands. He took a big bite, tearing off a chunk and he barely chewed before he swallowed. 

The steak didn't have any seasoning to speak of beyond the dust and dirt that was left on the slab, but the Saiyan looked down at the steak like he’d just found the Holy Grail. There were tears in his eyes. “It… It's so good…!” He whispered in a tone reserved for those having a religious experience. Naturally, that set the other Saiyans off and a brawl soon erupted over the cooking meat. I didn't even try to stop it -- I knew to pick my battles, even if there was a part of me that wanted to join in on the fun. 

“Pass me one of those eggs,” I said, and Cabba snapped out of whatever daze he had been in before he did exactly that. The lizard eggs felt like ostrich eggs in the sense that they were kinda soft. Cutting the top of it off, I dumped the egg onto the cooking stone, directly on some of the sizzling grease released from the steaks. The egg whites cooked fast, with the dark orange yolk firming up before I flipped it with my bare hand. We had no plates to speak of, so we were going with an over-hand style. “Catch,” I said, tossing the egg like a frisbee to Cabba. 

He stared blankly at it for a second before he took a massive bite. He breathed in sharply, savoring the taste for all of a second before Caulifla lunged for it, forcing himself to shove the rest into his mouth. There was a tear in the eye that wasn't swollen shut. 

The next round of steaks was already on the grill by the time he was done chewing. “T-teach me your ways!” Cabba half demanded and half begged, throwing himself forward and bowing at the knee. “I've never had anything so delicious before!” 

“Yeah!” Another Saiyan seconded, this one from Caulifla's group. “This is the best food ever! I-I’ll do whatever you say if you make more, boss!” 

That got Caulifla to sputter, “He can't be the boss! I'm the boss! He's my underling! Und-der-ling!” She protested, making Cabba step forward. 

“Don't speak that way to the boss!” He shouted, a fire burning in his eyes. 

“Try to stop me!” Caulifla shouted right back at him, the two wore matching smiles a second before they started to fight. Which just made the rest of them start fighting alongside them -- not for any reason I could think of, but they were Saiyans. They didn't really need a reason. 

Meanwhile, I just cut open another egg for myself as I ignored the conflict around me. I watched the egg sizzle, drinking in the rich scent of cooking protein, and I let out a breath that I had been holding since I woke up in the pod. 

“I'm totally in over my head,” I admitted to myself in that private moment. Completely and utterly. But a Saiyan never backed down from a challenge.

And for better or worse, I was undeniably a Saiyan. 

…

Welcome back to Going Native! I have to say, I have missed this story. It’s never been too far from my thoughts, and I’ve made a number of attempts to come back to it in various forms, but they always petered out because of some decisions I made in the original. Namely being that the OG Tarble’s headspace was extremely depressing to get inside of. But that is the original story, and this is the rewrite. 

The rewrite is going to be substantially different than the original, as a general warning for those who are looking for a refined beat-for-beat rewrite. I knew it would have to be, otherwise the story could go the way most rewrites do, and get dropped because it’s just boring to rehash plot points. What are those changes? That’ll be revealed in time, but I would say the core is that the rewrite is more in the vein of an adventure story, while the original was a gritty war story. 

But change gives me the chance to take some opportunities that I feel like I missed with the original. I’m looking to import more of the DBZ side of things, since a lot of DBZ could pretty seamlessly fit right in with DC Comics. A pink magical being of Chaos sealed away for millennia, getting released by some evil wizard? A mad scientist combining genetic traits into a single creation that he planned on unleashing on his arch nemesis? They’ll be DCified, of course, but I wouldn’t need to change much to fit them into the DC universe. 

On a final note, a bit of reassurance -- there won’t be another 600k words before we reach Earth in the rewrite. There will be a few adventures before we arrive on Earth, but we’ll be interacting with the DC side of things a lot more earlier on. 

And I think that’s it. Hope you enjoyed!