Dragon Ball Z: The Beast Within - CH59

[Escarot POV]

I stood on the training arena outside the palace—the one Beerus had pointed at yesterday with casual indifference.

As soon as I arrived, Beerus' eyes landed on me immediately.

“Well,” he said, stretching lazily, “Time to train you for the day.”

“Forever grateful, Lord Beerus,” I replied, bowing.

“I hope you slept well,” he continued. “It’ll be the last comfortable night you have for a while.”

Whis materialized behind him, staff tapping the air once. “Lord Beerus is quite motivated today. You should consider that… dangerous.”

Not helpful.

Beerus rolled his shoulders. “Alright, Escarot. Time to begin. First lesson: fight me.”

“Fight you,” I repeated.

“Did I stutter?” Beerus asked.

No. He didn’t. And asking him to clarify was basically asking to become dust.

I inhaled deeply and brought my full power out. Letting my energy surge outward, tightening around my muscles like molten chains.

Then when there was nothing more to get, I activated Surge.

My aura snapped into place—violent, dense, the air cracking around me.

Beerus raised a brow. “Good. At least you don’t waste my time by holding back.” He stood casually, hands behind his back. “Come. Try to hit me.”

I launched forward.

Full speed.

The wind buckled behind me as I charged and swung at his jaw with everything I had.

Beerus leaned an inch to the left.

My punch hit nothing but air.

He didn’t even blink.

“Do try your best, or I will destroy you,” he said, looking at me.

I didn’t bother replying. I went for a knee to the ribs.

He stepped aside.

A follow-up elbow to his temple.

He tilted his head.

A kick.

He raised a single finger and tapped my shin away like it was made of paper.

It wasn’t a fight.

It was Beerus casually walking through my attempts like I was a hologram glitching around him.

And yet he kept talking the entire time.

“You should be THANKFUL I’m dodging, by the way,” he said, yawning as he dodged another one of my attacks. “If I blocked your attacks, you’d see how truly useless they are. This is me being kind.”

He sidestepped my punch.

“This is me being merciful.”

He bent backward under my kick.

“This is me giving you a chance to learn.”

I swung again—wild, fast, desperate to make him move instead of gloat. Sure, I knew this was an exercise in futility, and my chances of beating him were less than zero, but the Saiyan in me needed to fight this with all I had.

He wasn’t even looking at me anymore.

He was inspecting his claws.

“My, my. Even your full power is so… unrefined. All that energy leaking out. It’s like trying to hold water with a fishing net, and this is after your massive improvement with Whis, I can’t begin to imagine how pathetic you were before.”

I lunged again, cracking the ground beneath me.

Beerus didn’t even shift his stance.

He simply lifted his foot and placed it forward, letting me run past him and skid like an idiot.

Whis hummed politely behind us. “He is correct, Escarot. Your energy expenditure is terribly wasteful at the moment, and even though it has improved considerably, you’re still burning twice what you should for half the output.”

“I see,” I growled through clenched teeth.

Beerus finally looked at me again.

“Good,” he said. “Now try again.”

I did.

I pushed every ounce of power I had into my limbs, aura ripping upward, my muscles screaming at the sudden acceleration. And I aimed a punch at his throat with enough force to tear through a mountain.

Beerus simply lifted his hand and let the punch pass under it.

“And,” he added casually, “you REALLY should stop telegraphing your movements. I can practically hear your intentions screaming before you act.”

I threw a barrage—punches, kicks, feints, bursts of ki—everything I could think of.

Beerus dodged all of it.

Not fast.

Not instant.

I could see all of his moves, clearly.

He was just… effortlessly walking through my attacks. He moved like he was stepping around puddles on a sidewalk.

“Are you done?” he asked as I swung again.

And then—

He attacked.

No warning.

No stance.

Just a blur.

His fist struck my ribs.

I didn’t see him move. I only heard the impact—a deep crack echoing through my body like someone snapping thick branches.

My vision flashed white as all the air inside of my body left, and he wasn’t done yet, because before I could recover, he struck again, a palm to the chest that sent me flying across the ground.

I hit the ground and rolled, coughing up blood so thick it splattered the rocks.

Beerus appeared above me without sound.

“Don’t feel bad,” he said. “That was your strongest blow. And I’m only using the same amount of power you’re outputting.”

That froze me.

He was matching my power?

And I still couldn’t touch him?

Beerus clicked his tongue. “Pathetic, isn’t it? But the only way to train you, I mean… If I used even a fraction of my real strength, there wouldn’t be a body left to bury.”

I tried to rise.

My vision swam. Bones shifted wrong inside me.

Blood dripped from my mouth, thick and warm.

Beerus watched with mild annoyance. “Oh? You’re still conscious. Good. I thought Whis would have to scrape you off the floor already.”

I staggered.

Forced myself upright.

My breath rattled like a broken tool.

But I moved.

And I attacked again.

Beerus smiled, and vanished, reappearing behind me. Then he jumped. On me, driving his entire weight into my spine, slamming me into the ground so hard the ground cracked in a spiderwebbed pattern outward.

My lungs emptied in a wet gasp.

Pain flooded my nerves—sharp, overwhelming, absolute.

Beerus remained perched on my back like I was a stool.

“You will stagnate very soon if you don’t fix that,” he said calmly, as if he weren’t currently using me as a chair. “You waste energy. Too much energy. All that power, constantly leaking, constantly flaring… if you don’t fix that, you’ll never last in a real fight.”

He tapped my head lightly with his foot.

“And you’ll definitely never kill Frieza.”

I tried to move.

My fingers twitched.

That was all I could manage.

Whis floated nearby, leaning on his staff with a thoughtful expression.

“My Lord,” he said gently, “if we don’t treat him soon, he will die.”

Beerus huffed. “He’ll be fine. Probably.”

I couldn’t see anything. I wasn’t sure if my eyes were closed, or I was going into a shock.

“…Right?” he asked, looking at Whis.

Whis tilted his head. “Well, I give him… perhaps forty more seconds before his organs begin to fail.”

Beerus looked down at me.

“See? Plenty of time.”

Forty seconds wasn’t plenty of anything.

I spat blood into the dirt.

Beerus finally hopped off me.

“Whis,” he said, “fix him up enough to continue.”

“Yeih,” I croaked.

“Are you sure, Lord Beerus?” Whis asked.

Beerus nodded cheerfully. “Of course. That was just the warm-up.”

Whis sighed like a tired schoolteacher dealing with a destructive toddler.

He floated over me, tapped my forehead with his staff, and my body jerked as bones realigned and wounds closed—painfully fast.

I gasped for air, the relief hitting like a flood.

Whis gave me a gentle smile.

“Try not to die so early in the session,” he advised. “It makes Lord Beerus impatient.”

Beerus clapped his hands once.

“Alright! Round two.”

I stared at him.

Whis stared at him.

Beerus grinned like the universe’s most dangerous psychopath.

“Come on, Escarot! Try to make me move this time.”

I activated Surge once more—forcing energy through my body—and my aura cracked, breaking the air around me.

Beerus nodded approvingly.

“That’s it,” he said. “Try again. And try not to think about how badly this is going to hurt.”

I thought about it anyway.

And charged.

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

[Chronoa POV]

This shouldn’t be happening.

This REALLY shouldn’t be happening.

I stared down at the Time Scroll floating in front of me, glowing bright pink—the color it only used when something was going terribly, catastrophically wrong, but I couldn’t interfere because it was a natural event.

Escarot.

That Saiyan idiot.

The little crack in history that I thought would fix itself with time… was not fixing itself. At all. It was doing the opposite. It was expanding.

Splitting. Growing. Snowballing into a timeline that looked absolutely nothing like what it was supposed to.

I flicked the scroll again.

The image shifted.

Beerus… training him.

Training.

I rubbed my eyes.

Escarot was still there, dodging—or rather failing to dodge—Beerus’ attacks. Beerus looked like he was having fun. Having FUN.

“Why… is this… happening…” I hissed through clenched teeth.

This anomaly was supposed to be minor. A hiccup. A divergence that would flame out before canonical events were affected.

Instead?

Instead, this creature—this Escarot—had become:

King of the Saiyans.

Personal chef of Beerus.

Beerus’ future student.

A major variable.

A total headache.

He wasn’t supposed to be king.

He wasn’t supposed to meet Beerus.

He wasn’t supposed to SURVIVE meeting Beerus.

He wasn’t supposed to train for DECADES before Goku was even born.

He definitely wasn’t supposed to make pizza good enough that a God of Destruction teleported halfway across the universe like a starving cat. Which to be fair, he was… a cat with a lot of power, but a cat at heart.

“What should I even DO…” I muttered loudly.

“Do nothing,” someone replied from behind me.

I yelped so hard I almost created a temporal rupture.

“WH—!? Whis!? STOP DOING THAT!”

Whis floated calmly behind me, staff in hand, smile way too serene for someone who just made the most beautiful Goddess around, aka me, Supreme Kai of Time jump out of her shoes.

He giggled. Not laughed. Giggled.

The nerve.

“I swear,” I hissed, pressing a hand to my chest, “you angels are going to be the death of me.”

“Oh, I sincerely doubt that,” Whis replied. “You are… quite difficult to kill.”

“That is NOT the point!”

He tilted his head. “Is something wrong, Lady Chronoa?”

I slowly turned the scroll toward him.

Escarot getting pummeled by Beerus.

Beerus smiling.

Escarot still getting up.

Whis blinked once.

“Oh, that,” he said pleasantly. “I was wondering when you’d check in on that.”

“So you KNEW?!” I shrieked.

He chuckled.

WHIS CHUCKLED.

“I had my theories,” he said. “But seeing you here confirms some of them.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Oh really? Enlighten me.”

Whis tapped his chin. “Well—Escarot is clearly not a time traveler, but he knows far more than he lets on, that in itself it's quite the conundrum, but it does point to his soul being older than his body.”

Reincarnation, well… I hadn’t ruled that out, but how could a soul travel from the future to the past?

“Obviously,” I sighed. “In any case, he hasn’t broken any rules, even though his existence created an entirely new branch in time, which means more work for me.”

A naturally occurring branching event was one in a trillion. A naturally occurring headache that would last a long time for me.

I groaned into my hands. “Look at him bulldozing over everything that’s supposed to happen.”

Whis hummed approvingly. “He does have a certain talent for disrupting expectations.”

“He was NEVER meant to exist,” I snapped. “Not this way. Not this strong. Not this… strategic.”

And I would stop at nothing to figure out this mystery.

Whis’ smile widened. He loved chaos way too much for someone supposedly neutral.

Neutral my ass.

My main problem with Escarot was the fact that his existence, although natural, was dangerous for his timeline.

This was decades too early.

If Frieza died too soon, Goku’s entire life trajectory changed.

If Goku never went to Earth… there was no Goku, only Kakarot

That meant the Earth was doomed.

Completely, utterly doomed.

King Piccolo or the Red Ribbon army would bring about the end of the world.

No Goku on earth meant no defense.

No defense meant Earth would either be conquered, destroyed, or collapse under its own unprotected fate.

And from there… everything spiraled.

History.

Causality.

I had to admit though, the scientific side of me was enjoying watching this unfold in real time.