01-14-2011, 06:58 AM
Stay calm.
The muscles in his neck tensed, and he caught his breath. The rope curled around his throat, squeezing ever so slightly on him, slowly stifling his access to the air that slipped past his lips. Below him, making up the ravenous members of the crowd, the humanoid extraterrestrials feasted their eyes on his pain, smiled as his face grew more and more red — and he hadn’t even dropped yet.
They were vicious — not just their cheers, but their expressions. Each one gritted his or her teeth in a different way, which sang to the individuality of them, but at the same time, they each had that same glint in their eye. That predatorily glint that refused to let Juno walk out of here alive.
His feet began to tremble as the ‘executioner,’ for that was the closest term Juno could derive for him, stalked cryptically toward the lever. The yellow-suited man — no, not man… the yellow-suited thing shot one last glance at the half-Saiyan, and a smirk crossed his face. It wasn’t sinister, or evil — it was primitive, and raw, as if this thirst for death was all that he and his comrades had ever known. Juno caught the executioner’s glance, but he did not return the alien’s cheerful expression.
Later on, the hybrid might recall these events — if he survived — with some clarity; as it were, he could not distinguish for himself what, exactly, was happening. From this point, he was driven purely by instinct. There was no thought, no calculation; this was an utter breach of character for Juno, a break from form — he followed his guy, and didn’t let himself get distracted.
The guard yanked the lever down, and with it fell the trapdoor beneath the seer, leaving his body dangling in midair, with nowhere to go but down; traditionally, the noose tied tightly around his neck was meant to stop that fall — but Juno was not meant to survive.
The hybrid, however, did not move an inch. He did not descend, and for a few moments, he did not rise, either. He hung there, in mid-air, and with all of the energy he had been able to gather after having it sapped out of him for days on end, he forced himself to fly. He hovered, through use of ki, in the same position, and did not allow that noose to steal his last breaths.
The aliens hadn’t thought about this. They hadn’t foreseen this. The guard’s eyes widened, and Juno watched in his periphery as his would-be executioner pulled a dagger from beneath his yellow robes.
The hybrid sucked in as much air as he could, and lifted up his hand, forming an orb of golden ki. The aliens had neglected to bind his hands, so he tossed the orb high into the air, high above the conglomeration of extraterrestrials, and looked up at it, ignoring all other sights. It flew higher and higher until finally it stopped, hovering idly above Namek’s surface. Juno’s glance could’ve burned a hole in it — instead, it started a fire within him.
Nothing around him was real anymore. Everything seemed decidedly small. The last thing Juno heard before his consciousness was no more was a loud rip. He didn’t bother looking down to watch his clothes be torn off of him by his expanding body mass; he didn’t care to see the brown tufts of hair appearing all over his pale skin; his focus was that ball of ki, that False Moon, that was enabling him to access this power, whatever this was.
His chest heaved — it took more effort to breathe now, whether it was from the expanding mass of his body or from the fact that with the growth of the muscles in his neck, the rope around it seemed to be tightening its hold.
It didn’t take long for that choking feeling to subside, though, as eventually, the girth of his neck forced the rope to rip. The noose unfurled from around Juno’s neck, and his eyes glazed over white as his hefty form fell from its hovering position in the air and slammed into the stage below. The majority of Juno’s mass fell through the hole made by the trapdoor, and what didn’t brought the stage down with it.
From that point, the mind of Juno wasn’t functional anymore. There was simply a beast, continuously growing in mass, tearing through the black fabric that the hybrid wore and unleashing itself upon the aliens’ camp. The giant ape’s yellow eyes looked out at the base — it seemed to be growing smaller. Or maybe he was getting larger.
The latter seemed the most likely, as several of the yellow-suited aliens were backing away, struggling as they frantically attempted to pull their guns from their holsters. The monster that had been awakened within the half-Saiyan growled viciously, and clambered onto its feet, whipping its gargantuan head around to look at the aliens. The executioner still stood on the stage, still holding the dagger he’d meant to use to kill the half-Saiyan when he had been in a smaller, more easily battled form; now, however, he held the dagger in a ready position, trembling with fear — the ape knew he had no chance of killing him with it, not now.
The executioner lunged forward, sinking the dagger into the tough skin of Juno’s knee; the giant ape reached down with a monstrous fist and swept the extraterrestrial aside, as if he was the king in a chess match, and the hybrid had just made checkmate. The yellow-robed alien tumbled off of the stage and into the crowd, and as the hybrid plucked the dagger out of his skin, its tinier opponent could only stare up in horror.
With a lurching battle cry, the yellow-robed man found his own dagger being thrown precisely into his own chest; the first death in what would be a rampage, fulfilled by Juno’s newfound bloodlust. Somehow, though, some of his conscious thoughts must have filtered through as the ape selected its next target — its yellow eyes focused on Boomstick, the tall, muscular red alien who had so quickly flopped sides to join with the enemy. Another roar escaped Juno’s lips, and the ape rushed over to the red-skinned warrior, grasping him tightly in one fist and knocking Rex, the shorter, pudgier, purple-skinned counterpart, away.
“What the fuck?!” Boomstick screamed over the roaring of the ape. The Oozaru’s rampage was personal — and it had all been caused by this pathetic excuse for a warrior. Through the feral agenda that the ape knew, Juno’s thoughts were able to project, thanks to his telepathy.
You’re a fucking idiot, the hybrid projected, attempting, with all his might, to push through the primal instincts of the Oozaru and allow his voice to be heard. Boomstick must’ve heard, because he looked around, a fearful, scared expression on his face, for the hybrid’s voice, wherever it might’ve come from. And you’re a coward, Juno continued, a fucking coward who doesn’t deserve to call himself a warrior.
That was all the Oozaru let Juno get out. There was a crack as Boomstick’s spine felt the ape’s tightening grip, and within seconds, he dropped to the ground, dead.
Boomstick was dead. The alien executioner was dead. Everyone was going to die.
Juno’s eyes popped open, but he wasn’t inside his own body anymore; this wasn’t Namek. Everything around him was pure black, as if he was in darkness. The walls were black, the floor was black. It might’ve been like he was in a room blanketed in darkness — save for the fact that he himself could be clearly seen.
The fact that he couldn’t see anything that was going on in the real world troubled him. He knew — he didn’t know how he knew, but he did — that he was still murdering people, in his Oozaru form, but he couldn’t see it… couldn’t control it…
Was this what it felt like when you lost yourself to Saiyan rage? Did you just withdraw into your mind and let the primal instincts take over? Juno didn’t know why, but that troubled him more than anything else — the fact that he might be mindlessly killing people without even a second thought, and that he could be killing someone who didn’t deserve it, like a prisoner that did nothing wrong, or Rex, who was just confused by his desire for self-preservation.
…wait a second, why the hell did that matter? He was Juno, not some self-righteous bitch, right? Nevertheless, the idea troubled him.
Maybe he was a better person than he’d originally given himself credit for. After all, he had turned down the alien’s offer to join them, when that was obviously the more lucrative choice. He’d almost gotten himself killed over it, but did that mean that the aliens deserved to die for it?
Probably, yeah. But those prisoners — and Rex… that was who he was thinking about now, who he had to consider. Maybe shooting the False Moon into the sky had been a mistake. Maybe he shouldn’t have done that, or gotten himself into this situation in the first place, maybe he should’ve just let the aliens kill him — at least then, he would’ve died for a good cause.
He chuckled at the thought — he really was turning into a self-righteous bitch.
Stop, he told himself, you’ve got to stop.
He didn’t know what he was talking about, though. Stop the rampaging ape that was slaughtering people outside of this mental realm, or stop turning into a good person? Ha, he thought, there’s the big question. He didn’t have much longer to ponder it, though, because almost as quickly as he’d found himself here, the world around him dissolved, and he felt his body falling through empty space, and all too soon, he was back inside himself. But he wasn’t an ape anymore.
Juno wasn’t awake when the soldiers stumbled upon him, but upon hearing the whirring of their hover-bikes as they took him back to Ja City, his eyelids slowly opened. He didn’t let them in on his consciousness, however, because he was much more interested in eavesdropping on their conversations.
He had been slung, stark naked, over the back of one of the two soldiers’ motorbikes. Apparently, they’d found him lying, unconscious and nude, on one of Namek’s many plateaus — which led him to hypothesize that he’d stumbled sufficiently outside the radius of the False Moon, triggering the return to his human form. Unfortunately, he hadn’t anticipated having to transform into an Oozaru — to be honest, it was actually the first time he’d tried it — and he hadn’t brought the stretchy clothes that they tell you about on Vegeta, so he was probably giving the soldiers a great view.
He hoped one of them was female.
“We’re going to have to find another way in, now that Ja City’s under siege,” one of the soldiers mentioned, in a voice that sounded like it was female.
Score.
The muscles in his neck tensed, and he caught his breath. The rope curled around his throat, squeezing ever so slightly on him, slowly stifling his access to the air that slipped past his lips. Below him, making up the ravenous members of the crowd, the humanoid extraterrestrials feasted their eyes on his pain, smiled as his face grew more and more red — and he hadn’t even dropped yet.
They were vicious — not just their cheers, but their expressions. Each one gritted his or her teeth in a different way, which sang to the individuality of them, but at the same time, they each had that same glint in their eye. That predatorily glint that refused to let Juno walk out of here alive.
His feet began to tremble as the ‘executioner,’ for that was the closest term Juno could derive for him, stalked cryptically toward the lever. The yellow-suited man — no, not man… the yellow-suited thing shot one last glance at the half-Saiyan, and a smirk crossed his face. It wasn’t sinister, or evil — it was primitive, and raw, as if this thirst for death was all that he and his comrades had ever known. Juno caught the executioner’s glance, but he did not return the alien’s cheerful expression.
Later on, the hybrid might recall these events — if he survived — with some clarity; as it were, he could not distinguish for himself what, exactly, was happening. From this point, he was driven purely by instinct. There was no thought, no calculation; this was an utter breach of character for Juno, a break from form — he followed his guy, and didn’t let himself get distracted.
The guard yanked the lever down, and with it fell the trapdoor beneath the seer, leaving his body dangling in midair, with nowhere to go but down; traditionally, the noose tied tightly around his neck was meant to stop that fall — but Juno was not meant to survive.
The hybrid, however, did not move an inch. He did not descend, and for a few moments, he did not rise, either. He hung there, in mid-air, and with all of the energy he had been able to gather after having it sapped out of him for days on end, he forced himself to fly. He hovered, through use of ki, in the same position, and did not allow that noose to steal his last breaths.
The aliens hadn’t thought about this. They hadn’t foreseen this. The guard’s eyes widened, and Juno watched in his periphery as his would-be executioner pulled a dagger from beneath his yellow robes.
The hybrid sucked in as much air as he could, and lifted up his hand, forming an orb of golden ki. The aliens had neglected to bind his hands, so he tossed the orb high into the air, high above the conglomeration of extraterrestrials, and looked up at it, ignoring all other sights. It flew higher and higher until finally it stopped, hovering idly above Namek’s surface. Juno’s glance could’ve burned a hole in it — instead, it started a fire within him.
Nothing around him was real anymore. Everything seemed decidedly small. The last thing Juno heard before his consciousness was no more was a loud rip. He didn’t bother looking down to watch his clothes be torn off of him by his expanding body mass; he didn’t care to see the brown tufts of hair appearing all over his pale skin; his focus was that ball of ki, that False Moon, that was enabling him to access this power, whatever this was.
His chest heaved — it took more effort to breathe now, whether it was from the expanding mass of his body or from the fact that with the growth of the muscles in his neck, the rope around it seemed to be tightening its hold.
It didn’t take long for that choking feeling to subside, though, as eventually, the girth of his neck forced the rope to rip. The noose unfurled from around Juno’s neck, and his eyes glazed over white as his hefty form fell from its hovering position in the air and slammed into the stage below. The majority of Juno’s mass fell through the hole made by the trapdoor, and what didn’t brought the stage down with it.
From that point, the mind of Juno wasn’t functional anymore. There was simply a beast, continuously growing in mass, tearing through the black fabric that the hybrid wore and unleashing itself upon the aliens’ camp. The giant ape’s yellow eyes looked out at the base — it seemed to be growing smaller. Or maybe he was getting larger.
The latter seemed the most likely, as several of the yellow-suited aliens were backing away, struggling as they frantically attempted to pull their guns from their holsters. The monster that had been awakened within the half-Saiyan growled viciously, and clambered onto its feet, whipping its gargantuan head around to look at the aliens. The executioner still stood on the stage, still holding the dagger he’d meant to use to kill the half-Saiyan when he had been in a smaller, more easily battled form; now, however, he held the dagger in a ready position, trembling with fear — the ape knew he had no chance of killing him with it, not now.
The executioner lunged forward, sinking the dagger into the tough skin of Juno’s knee; the giant ape reached down with a monstrous fist and swept the extraterrestrial aside, as if he was the king in a chess match, and the hybrid had just made checkmate. The yellow-robed alien tumbled off of the stage and into the crowd, and as the hybrid plucked the dagger out of his skin, its tinier opponent could only stare up in horror.
With a lurching battle cry, the yellow-robed man found his own dagger being thrown precisely into his own chest; the first death in what would be a rampage, fulfilled by Juno’s newfound bloodlust. Somehow, though, some of his conscious thoughts must have filtered through as the ape selected its next target — its yellow eyes focused on Boomstick, the tall, muscular red alien who had so quickly flopped sides to join with the enemy. Another roar escaped Juno’s lips, and the ape rushed over to the red-skinned warrior, grasping him tightly in one fist and knocking Rex, the shorter, pudgier, purple-skinned counterpart, away.
“What the fuck?!” Boomstick screamed over the roaring of the ape. The Oozaru’s rampage was personal — and it had all been caused by this pathetic excuse for a warrior. Through the feral agenda that the ape knew, Juno’s thoughts were able to project, thanks to his telepathy.
You’re a fucking idiot, the hybrid projected, attempting, with all his might, to push through the primal instincts of the Oozaru and allow his voice to be heard. Boomstick must’ve heard, because he looked around, a fearful, scared expression on his face, for the hybrid’s voice, wherever it might’ve come from. And you’re a coward, Juno continued, a fucking coward who doesn’t deserve to call himself a warrior.
That was all the Oozaru let Juno get out. There was a crack as Boomstick’s spine felt the ape’s tightening grip, and within seconds, he dropped to the ground, dead.
~ + ~
Boomstick was dead. The alien executioner was dead. Everyone was going to die.
Juno’s eyes popped open, but he wasn’t inside his own body anymore; this wasn’t Namek. Everything around him was pure black, as if he was in darkness. The walls were black, the floor was black. It might’ve been like he was in a room blanketed in darkness — save for the fact that he himself could be clearly seen.
The fact that he couldn’t see anything that was going on in the real world troubled him. He knew — he didn’t know how he knew, but he did — that he was still murdering people, in his Oozaru form, but he couldn’t see it… couldn’t control it…
Was this what it felt like when you lost yourself to Saiyan rage? Did you just withdraw into your mind and let the primal instincts take over? Juno didn’t know why, but that troubled him more than anything else — the fact that he might be mindlessly killing people without even a second thought, and that he could be killing someone who didn’t deserve it, like a prisoner that did nothing wrong, or Rex, who was just confused by his desire for self-preservation.
…wait a second, why the hell did that matter? He was Juno, not some self-righteous bitch, right? Nevertheless, the idea troubled him.
Maybe he was a better person than he’d originally given himself credit for. After all, he had turned down the alien’s offer to join them, when that was obviously the more lucrative choice. He’d almost gotten himself killed over it, but did that mean that the aliens deserved to die for it?
Probably, yeah. But those prisoners — and Rex… that was who he was thinking about now, who he had to consider. Maybe shooting the False Moon into the sky had been a mistake. Maybe he shouldn’t have done that, or gotten himself into this situation in the first place, maybe he should’ve just let the aliens kill him — at least then, he would’ve died for a good cause.
He chuckled at the thought — he really was turning into a self-righteous bitch.
Stop, he told himself, you’ve got to stop.
He didn’t know what he was talking about, though. Stop the rampaging ape that was slaughtering people outside of this mental realm, or stop turning into a good person? Ha, he thought, there’s the big question. He didn’t have much longer to ponder it, though, because almost as quickly as he’d found himself here, the world around him dissolved, and he felt his body falling through empty space, and all too soon, he was back inside himself. But he wasn’t an ape anymore.
~ + ~
Juno wasn’t awake when the soldiers stumbled upon him, but upon hearing the whirring of their hover-bikes as they took him back to Ja City, his eyelids slowly opened. He didn’t let them in on his consciousness, however, because he was much more interested in eavesdropping on their conversations.
He had been slung, stark naked, over the back of one of the two soldiers’ motorbikes. Apparently, they’d found him lying, unconscious and nude, on one of Namek’s many plateaus — which led him to hypothesize that he’d stumbled sufficiently outside the radius of the False Moon, triggering the return to his human form. Unfortunately, he hadn’t anticipated having to transform into an Oozaru — to be honest, it was actually the first time he’d tried it — and he hadn’t brought the stretchy clothes that they tell you about on Vegeta, so he was probably giving the soldiers a great view.
He hoped one of them was female.
“We’re going to have to find another way in, now that Ja City’s under siege,” one of the soldiers mentioned, in a voice that sounded like it was female.
Score.