Dragon Ball Z: The Beast Within - CH41

[Escarot POV.]

I was starting to think Whis had ditched me. Just snapped his fingers and dumped me in some godforsaken corner of the universe to die.

Maybe I had pissed him off somehow.

Maybe he had sent me here just to suffer a long, absurd bug-filled existence until I learned… something. What exactly I was supposed to learn wasn’t clear yet, but considering I’ve spent the last month knee-deep in chitin and whatever bugs had instead of blood, I’m guessing it has to do with pain, persistence, or how to punch a cockroach hard enough that it explodes.

It’s been… interesting to say the least.

They’re not clever, these monsters. No techniques. No ki manipulation. Just raw muscle and an endless need to eat or destroy anything that moves. But they make up for their simplicity with numbers and sheer brute force. I’ve fought ants the size of houses. Spiders with legs longer than a boat. Centipedes that move faster than me. And that’s not even counting the ones that spit acid, or the ones that regenerate unless you cook them from the inside out.

Some of them have been stronger than me. I’ll admit it. I had to run more than once. And that part still pisses me off. But it also makes me feel something I hadn’t felt in a while.

Excited.

Don’t get me wrong, I still curse Whis’s name at least three times a day and fantasize about hitting him with his stupid staff. But I’m not lying to myself either. I'm enjoying this. 

And I knew better than to have an impossible to achieve dream like that.

Either way, I was having fun.

The fights? The raw, no-plan, life-or-death fights? Yeah. They’ve been good for me.

It’s the first time in a long while I’ve stopped thinking so much. No predictions. No feints. No strategies. Just fists, claws, and energy blasts. Back to basics. Pure instinct. And I didn’t realize how much I’d missed that until I was drowning in it.

I’d forgotten how much fun it was to just fight.

Still…

“Wouldn’t complain if Whis ever came back though…” I muttered, wiping green goo off my wrist as I kept walking.

The landscape didn’t help my sanity either. Everything here was gray. Gray skies, gray rock formations, gray dead trees that looked like they’d died over from the sheer burden of existing. No color. No sun. No moons. Just a dim, eternal twilight that messed with your sense of time.

The only things that broke up the visual monotony were the bugs. And trust me, after watching a twenty-foot hornet puke acid at you seventy eight times, that novelty wore off real quick.

Food was another issue. Or rather, the lack of it.

This place had nothing edible. No fruits. No roots. No wildlife. Just the bugs. Which meant I had to get real creative with my cooking.

I’m the best chef in the universe, thanks to the wish, I still regret nothing. That however, didn’t mean I enjoyed turning centipede legs and spider fangs into fancy meals. I could make them taste great. I just hated that I had to. It wasn’t about flavor. It was about principle.

The fact that I could now confidently turn a roach thorax into a medium-rare steak with a creamy beetle sauce was… not the flex I thought it’d be when I made that wish.

I sighed again, pausing on a cliff overlooking a dead valley.

“Where are those damn ants…” I muttered, scanning the area. I could feel them. Their energy pulsed in the distance. A colony. Big one.

And yet I didn’t see a single one.

That worried me.

Ants didn’t hide. Not these kinds. When they were close, they swarmed. If I was picking up their energy but not seeing them, it meant one of two things: they were underground. Or they were setting up an ambush.

“Guess we’re going underground,” I said to myself, cracking my neck.

I jumped down the slope, landing with a soft thud and started to feel around. The ground beneath was hollow in parts. Network of tunnels.

I hadn’t fought a colony inside their own turf. 

Perfect for a new challenge.

I smiled a little. Alright. Let’s see what these disgustingly delicious ants are up to.

With a small energy blast, I cracked open the crust, revealing a dark cavern. The heat that came up from below was humid and sticky. The smell of pheromones and decay hit me next. Great. Bug sweat.

I dropped in.

Letting my ki glow faintly, just enough to see in the darkness. The tunnels were massive, easily wide enough to fit a bus or two through. And they were smooth. The deeper I went, the louder the movements of the colony became. 

I slowed my pace, stretching my senses out ahead. Something was down there. Something big.

The worker ants didn’t have that kind of power. The guards didn’t have this level as well… Which meant…

“I haven’t cooked a Queen yet…” I muttered. 

Or maybe it was a king? Was that a thing? Whatever, I would cook the remains either way.

As if on cue, the tunnel ahead shook.

Then a loud clicking sound—something wet and screechy. A rattling growl I had come to recognize as the battle cry of these bugs. So in kind, I powered up fully to meet their resolve.

The tunnel exploded.

A massive wall of chitin and rage barreled out, easily three stories tall, its mandibles snapping open and shut like swords.

I looked at it, and without missing a beat, threw a ki blast. It hit the big bug right on the chest and… did nothing. Instead the big ant screeched and charged.

“Good, it would’ve been boring if it had been that easy!” I laughed, dodging the charge at the last second.

The ant queen was fast. Too fast for her size. Heck, I barely dodged as one of her legs came down where my skull had been.

I rushed forward, ducking under another strike and slammed my elbow into her eye. It cracked—but didn’t break.

Then she screeched again, and a swarm of smaller ants poured out from the walls behind me.

I grinned. “A buffet, just what I needed.”

—------------------------------------------------------------

It took me two hours to fully exterminate the colony.

It’s especially difficult to kill something when you want to cook them. If you get too excited you’ll ruin the ingredients.

“Hakuna Matata,” I muttered, flipping a giant sizzling ant abdomen over a bed of molten rock I’d been using as a makeshift grill. It felt weird saying that. But it also kind of fit. The lion who ate bugs, and now the Saiyan who eats bugs. Parallel evolution of poor dietary choices forced upon us by others.

I paused, thinking for a second. Was Okara Timon or Pumbaa?

Definitely Pumbaa. The loud, slightly insane one. Yeah. No contest.

“They really do taste like extra crispy chicken wings,” I said to no one in particular, taking a bite out of the cooked leg. Sweet heat with a dash of roasted bitterness. Crunchy, fatty in the right places, smoky flavor from the mandible oil I used to grease the pan. Objectively, disgusting.

Subjectively? Five stars. Or as Gordon Ramsey would say: Bloody Delicious!

If someone ever told me I'd be running a gourmet kitchen in the middle of a bug-infested hell, I would’ve punched them in the face and laughed on my way out. But here we are.

Honestly, best wish ever.

My chef skills were basically a cheat code. I could turn anything into a high-class meal. Didn’t mean I liked doing it, but it kept me alive, and most importantly—it gave me something normal to focus on between fights.

I can’t imagine how unbearable this place would be if I didn’t have decent food.

“Maybe this is Whis’ training for me?” I muttered.

Over the past month, I’d been stuck in this place swarming with every oversized, worryingly strong bugs anyone can possibly imagine. And some no one wants to imagine.

I’d definitely grown stronger. That wasn’t up for debate.

If I had to guess I’d say I nearly doubled my power thus far. This place was doing wonders for my training, still…  this wouldn’t hold me much longer. I could feel it.

The ants? No longer a challenge. Even their soldiers couldn’t do more than annoy me. The roaches were basically walking punching bags now. The centipedes put up a good fight until I became faster than them. After that, it was just pest control.

But there were a few bugs still giving me trouble.

The Mantis.

The Hornets.

The Beetles.

Three royal pains in my ass. Each one had a different way of ruining my day.

The Mantis were surgical. Their blades could slice ki, flesh, and anything like butter, and their reaction time was ridiculous. One-on-one, I could handle them. But they always came in pairs or trios, like they coordinated telepathically. Fast, unpredictable, and completely silent in their approach. I lost count of how many times I dodged too late or barely managed to counter.

I respected them. Hated them, but respected them.

The Hornets? Massive, armored assholes with wings. The buzzing sound they made? Drove me insane. There was something about the frequency they emitted that messed with your ki flow. Made it hard to concentrate. Their sting wasn’t a joke either. I’d been stung once. Spent an hour throwing up, shaking and hallucinating I was a dog.

And the Beetles… oh, the Beetles.

They were tanks. Walking walls of reinforced exoskeleton that could tank my strongest ki blast to the face and just keep moving. Their legs could dig trenches, and their charge? I had one slam me through a cliffside and bury me twenty feet underground, breaking a few ribs and one of my arms.

I also learned my cartoons as a kid were right, because I saw stars after that. Literally. I’m pretty sure I saw a constellation in the shape of a middle finger.

Those three? I still couldn’t fully deal with.

And I fucking loved it.

That burn in my gut when I was up against something that could kill me.

It was fanfuckingtastic. 

Fighting for the sake of it. Because I wanted to. Because I needed to.

It also helped that for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t thinking about the next planet, or the next threat, or how long I had before my race went extinct.

I was having fun.

Fighting.

Hunting.

Surviving.

And I was thriving because of it.

I sat back against a wall, chewing the last bit of ant thorax like it was high-end steak, letting the taste fill my mouth. 

“I wonder what the hornets taste like?” I muttered.