Beerus

King Kai's little planet has exactly one virtue, and it was that it was conveniently located between realms.

Everything else about it is an embarrassment. One tree. One tiny house. A road that loops the whole world in a few strides. A monkey, a cricket, and a blue idiot in sunglasses who tells jokes so bad they might as well qualify as a form of aggression. I don't know why the Grand Kais let him keep it. I don't know why I didn't destroyed it entirely last time… or why I came here either, except that Whis suggested it and the alternative was another afternoon of being bored in my own world.

I arrived without warning, because warnings are for beings who need permission, and I enjoyed terrorizing the lower deities.

"L-L-LORD BEERUS!" He hit the ground so fast and so flat I thought he'd broken something. "Lord Beerus, I—I had no idea, I would have—Bubbles! BUBBLES, tea! No, food! The good food! Bring the emergency stash! LORD BEERUS IS—oh, this is a great honor, a terrible honor, a—what did I do? Whatever it was I'm sorry—"

"Get up. You're embarrassing yourself, you're a deity act like it."

He got up, but he did not stop trembling. His whole round little body was vibrating hard enough to blur at the edges, and behind the sunglasses I could see sweat running in rivers.

I sat down under his one tree.

"I'm not here to destroy anything," I said, and watched him sag with relief. "I'm here to give you notice. Consider it a courtesy, I don't extend many, so pay attention."

"O-of course, Lord Beerus. Anything. Anything at all."

"You're a jailer." I let that sit. His trembling changed pitch. "You and your three siblings. A very long time ago the four of you pooled that meager power of yours and sealed something away, because it was too much for any one of you to kill, and I refused to waste my time killing such a weak being, I wish for you to set him free, I have plans…"

The color drained right out of him.

"You—you mean—Lord Beerus, you can't mean Bojack—"

"That's the one, I had completely forgotten his name."

"No—no no no, Lord Beerus, please, you don't understand, Bojack is—he's a monster, he’s part of Hera-clan, he and his crew nearly burned the galaxy down before we managed to bind them! It took all four of us just to seal him, If he ever got loose he'd—"

"I know what he is," I said. "I know it far better than you do. Which is precisely why I want him."

King Kai's jaw worked without producing sound.

"In a few years," I went on, examining my claws, "I'm going to come back here, and I'm going to ask you to open the north lock and let your prisoner out. And you're going to do it. Not now. He's not ready now—it would be a waste."

"He's—who's not ready? Bojack?"

Wait… this imbecile hasn’t been paying attention to what’s happening in his own sector of the universe. That’s his one and only job… oh well… I suppose not all Gods can be as diligent as me.

"The Saiyan." I said it before I meant to, and felt mildly irritated at myself for it. "Escarot, the King of the Saiyans." I cleared my throat. "The one who killed Frieza, he's growing. Faster than anything I've seen in a long time, and right about now he's about to fight the Cold patriarch, which will push him further still. But a warrior only grows as strong as the things he's forced to fight, and I like to provide my pets with the opportunity to grow, Cold will be dead soon, and then what? He sits on that rock and stagnates? Unacceptable, I won’t allow such thing."

"Oh, right… that saiyan…” He said, murmuring something about a technique being stolen and copyright laws or something. “So you want to—to feed Bojack to him?"

"I want to see how far he can go,” I nodded. "Bojack is a stepping stone to what I have planned for him. In a few years, when the boy has grown into his power, I want to see him face exactly that, and I want to see what he does with it. Either he rises to meet it—" I shrugged "—or he doesn't, and he was never as interesting as I hoped, I’ll be fine with either result."

King Kai stared at me, and gulped. "Lord Beerus, with the greatest possible respect—if you're wrong, if this Saiyan loses, then I will have released the single most dangerous being my siblings and I ever sealed, and there will be nothing to stop him tearing through the mortal realm—"

"Yes, yes, lot’s of deaths, I know..." I closed my eyes and leaned back against the tree. "There's a risk, and that's what makes it worth doing." I cracked one eye open. "And if it goes wrong, I'll simply destroy Bojack myself and have wasted an afternoon. Whereas if it goes right, I'll have watched something genuinely worth watching, don’t get your fat little heart in a twist."

Bubbles arrived, staggering under a tray of food. I took it and it was terrible—Escarot had ruined other food for me—but I ate it anyway, because it’s better than nothing, and because it reminded me of how much better the boy's cooking was.

King Kai

I stayed bowed to the empty air for a full minute after he left, just in case he came back. He tends to do that… just to come out and say: So you don’t respect me? Well, say goodbye to 90% of your planet!

"...Is he gone?" Gregory hovered up next to my head, antennae quivering. "King Kai? Is he really gone?"

"I think so." My voice came out as a squeak. "I think so, yes."

Bubbles crept out from behind the house, where he'd been hiding since roughly the moment Lord Beerus's shadow fell across the planet, after giving him the food, traitorious monkey.

I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that he wants me to release Bojack.

I still remember the day… My siblings and I were young, when that Hera-clan monster and his crew came tearing through the quadrant, whole civilizations, gone. Not conquered. Not enslaved. Erased, for sport, because Bojack thought a screaming galaxy made a fine sort of music, it took everything the four of us had, every scrap of power North, South, East, and West could muster to bind him and his monsters.

And for ages upon ages, the seal has held.

And now the God of Destruction has given me an order, and told me that in a few short years I am to open that door.

For a Saiyan… that stealing little rat, that tried to steal my Kaio-ken!

I mean… I have no proof, but I AM ONTO HIM!

Beyond that, I don't even know this Saiyan! Or why Lord Beerus is doing this?! Is he that bored? I know three things about him—he's a Saiyan, which historically has never once been good news for the universe, he tried to steal my technique… and he killed Frieza, which... all right, that's genuinely impressive, I'll grant him that, nobody expected that. The whole Other World was buzzing about it for weeks, but one thing is Frieza and another is Bojack, those two are separated by a gulf so wide I would get dizzy looking across it.

The worst part is I can't refuse. When Lord Beerus says you'll do a thing, you do the thing, there is no counterargument, there is no appeal. There's just "yes, Lord Beerus," and hoping you live long enough to regret it, instead of being vaporized by his power.

I can't even tell the other Kais… He said tell no one, which means when the day comes, I'll be undoing our greatest work alone, in secret, betraying the pact the four of us swore over that seal, all on the word of a god who's doing it because he's bored and curious and wants to watch a fight.

CAN’T HE JUST BUY A TELEVISION LIKE THE REST OF US?!

Taking a deep breath, I dragged myself upright and looked out at the endless stars, out toward planet Vegeta, looking for Escarot, or as Lord Beerus describes him, the one who cooks. 

I sighed, and set my antennae toward that distant world, and started, against every instinct I had, to watch.

Might as well know how scared to be… maybe Lord Beerus knew something about the kid that I didn’t?

Escarot

After months of waiting, I finally felt his power approaching the planet from the south.

I was in the field, gold flaring around me, training, when a massive wave of power rolled over the horizon and pressed down on the whole planet all at once with a weight that was both cold and vast, settling over everything like the sky itself had gotten heavier. 

I stopped training and turned to the empty sky, reading it.

“Huh…”

Well, that's not what I expected… not even close.

I had expected King Cold to be stronger than Frieza, in some margin, sure… but this? It wasn't even close to what I had expected! It dwarfed Frieza at his absolute peak by a wide margin, hell… compared to what I was feeling, Frieza’s power might as well have been a candle held up next to a fire.

This was completely unexpected… but not unwelcomed.

I grinned as my heart started hammering, not with dread, no. But with a desperate need to fight this opponent. My hands wouldn't stop trembling as my whole body had gone electric, straining toward that terrible power in the sky like a moth to a flame.

So, I waited… until the ship was close enough so I couldn’t miss it, sitting on the field, doing nothing but watching the sky with the intent of making time pass by faster.

And it wasn’t before long until I saw the ship come down through the clouds. A command-class vessel, huge, very similar to Frieza’s own ship but a bit bigger, exactly like the reports said, making its descent slowly, right toward the plain in front of the castle.

Inside, I could feel around… two hundred, maybe more, ki signatures, nothing worth mentioning, but they were certainly warriors.

Cracking my neck from side to side, I looked up at it and smiled, before raising one hand taking aim as I gathered enough ki into my palm to destroy a planet and fired.

The blast crossed the sky in a single golden line and took the ship dead center. There was a moment where the whole vessel just stopped, hanging there, and then it came apart, with a massive explosion as every soldier and officer and attendant aboard was killed in the space of a breath, with the wreckage of their demise raining down over the plain, burning.

Everything inside that ship died.

Everything but one.

It would be disappointing if he died with an attack like that.

He came down out of the fireball unharmed, drifting, slow, like the destruction of his entire command and crew was but a mild inconvenience he'd noticed on his way to more important things. He landed on the scorched plain in front of me, and I got my first look at my opponent.

He was smaller than last time I saw him, not as small as Frieza… but certainly smaller than the form I met him as, around a head or two smaller.

“Hello there,” I greeted, smiling at him.

He looked at me and at the burning remains of his ship scattered across my field, and he did not so much as glance at the dead.

"You've just murdered a great many of my people," he said in a bored tone. "As you murdered my son." That last part actually carried a lot of hate and anger. “Is that all you monkeys know how to do?”

Funny coming from the guy that made his entire empire out of genociding others for profit.

"I take it you saw the video… didn’t you?" I said, cracking my neck once more. "I know, I know… I also didn’t take Frieza to be one for begging, but you never truly know someone, right?"

"No." Cold's gaze settled on me, and it was the flattest, deadest thing I'd ever seen. "You joke about the death of my son… I suppose that is to be expected, after all, that is your filthy nature… But like my son, you will beg, but for a death that won’t come…"

That was surprisingly dark, and if his intention was getting me more excited, he was succeeding.

"Will I?" I rolled my shoulders, as my grin refused to leave. "Is that why you came here?"

"No, that’s just a byproduct of my mission… my true purpose," said King Cold, "Is to avenge my son."

"Then you've come a long way for nothing, Cold," I said, before letting my aura roar as I powered up. "Because on this planet, the only thing you will find is death."