The hill had no name on any map.
It rose out of the eastern territories like a slow exhale — a long, flat-topped ridge of pale rock and dry grass that looked out over three days worth of Celryuu land in every direction. From its crest you could see the territory markers where the plains narrowed toward the Kelbra border in the far east, the dark thread of the Sulrath river cutting south through the lowlands, and behind it all, faint and distant as a rumor, the smudge of the capital against the western sky.
The column had made camp at the base of the hill the night before — forty soldiers, two supply carts, one prince. The scouting mission had been uneventful in the way his father intended it to be uneventful: three weeks moving through the outer territories, talking to settlement elders, walking the border lines, learning the shape of the land he would one day inherit not from a map but from the soles of his feet.
Now they were a day's ride from home.
The soldiers were breaking camp below. The prince was at the top of the hill.
He had been there since before dawn.
His wild brown hair hung loose down his back, freed from the tie he wore on the march, catching what little wind moved across the ridge. His royal armor — obsidian plating with gold trim at the edges, the Celryuu crest pressed into the chest piece — looked slightly incongruous out here against the pale rock and dry grass, like something important left in the wrong room. He did not seem to notice. He stood at the edge of the ridge looking east toward the border markers with his crystal blue eyes and an expression that was too settled for a boy his age.
Then he heard the footsteps behind him and his expression changed.
"Young prince."
Rykuu's voice carried even on an open hillside. It had that quality — not volume, but weight. The kind of voice that arrived before the man did.
"Your test this morning is simple." Rykuu stopped ten meters away and settled into a stance that was not quite combat ready and not quite relaxed — a resting state that could shift in any direction without warning, the posture of someone who had spent decades making stillness dangerous. "Knock me down and you pass."
The prince turned from the border view to face him.
He was small for a prince. That was what visitors always noticed first — before the armor, before the eyes, before the name. But there was nothing small about the way he looked at Rykuu now. The crystal blue eyes fixed on his instructor with an intensity that did not belong on a face that young, measuring, recalibrating, arriving at a conclusion.
"Rykuu." His voice was clear in the morning air. "You may be my instructor and one of my royal guards, but you take me too lightly." He reached back and tied his hair with a single motion, clearing it from his face. "I am a prince, yes."
He dropped into his stance — low, balanced, one fist raised toward the pale sky.
"But I am a Saiyan first."
He moved before Rykuu could answer.
The distance between them collapsed. For a boy his size the acceleration was something — pure Saiyan instinct overriding the body's hesitation, crossing the rocky ground in the space between one breath and the next. He drove a straight punch at Rykuu's jaw with everything he had, committing fully, every kilogram of him behind it.
Rykuu's forearm rose and swallowed the blow without sound.
The impact traveled back through the prince's fist, up his arm, into his shoulder. He felt the difference immediately — not flesh blocking flesh, but something more fundamental, a wall dressed as a person.
"Good," Rykuu said. Not encouragement. Assessment. "Keep it up, Celryuu."
Then he countered.
His fist connected with the side of the prince's face in a single clean motion — measured, deliberate, perhaps a third of what Rykuu was actually capable of, which still snapped the boy's head sideways hard enough to send the horizon tilting. The prince's teeth clacked together. He tasted copper at the edge of his tongue and the morning wind suddenly felt colder against the side of his face where the blow had landed.
He did not stop.
The kick came immediately — lateral and low, driving into Rykuu's abdomen with everything the prince had left. The blow landed. Rykuu's body received it the way a stone cliff receives a wave — present, acknowledged, unmoved.
Before the prince could pull back, Rykuu's hand closed around his throat.
Not crushing. Absolute.
With one motion of his arm he sent the boy skyward. The hill fell away below — the pale rock, the dry grass, the far smear of the capital, all of it dropping as the prince cleared the ridgeline and broke into open air. He had perhaps a second to orient himself before he saw the ki blasts rising beneath him like thrown stones, three of them, perfectly spaced, cutting off the obvious escape angles with the patience of someone who had done this before.
He twisted.
The first blast caught his left side. Instead of fighting the force he let it spin him, using the rotation to carry him wide of the second, pulling his legs tight as the third passed close enough to make the air beside his ear sing. He came out of the rotation levelled off, breathing harder than he wanted to be, looking down at the top of the hill where Rykuu stood waiting with the patient stillness of weather.
From the slope below the ridgeline, where the path up the hill gave a clear view of the fight without getting in the way of it, Nurrek sat on a flat rock with his arms folded and his bald head catching the early sun. He had the particular expression of a man watching something go exactly the way he expected.
"How much do you want to bet," he said, his rasp like gravel in a tin, "that the prince doesn't knock him over?"
Saevyn stood a few feet further up the slope, arms loose at his sides, dark hair moving in the ridge wind. He watched the prince maneuver through the second volley of ki blasts with something in his face that was not quite approval and not quite concern. Something in between, carefully maintained.
"I trust the young prince," he said. "He has been training."
"Training and knocking down Rykuu are different things."
"I am aware of what Rykuu is." Saevyn did not look away from the fight. "That is precisely why I am giving the prince leeway."
Nurrek made a sound that was not quite a word.
Above them, the prince had already repositioned.
He came in at a new angle — lower, faster, switching approach rather than repeating himself. He opened with ki from fifty meters out, not the measured output of a trained fighter but the raw sustained pressure of a boy who understood that precision alone would not move this man. The blasts hit Rykuu in sequence: chest, chest, shoulder, chest, each one landing, each one producing a small bloom of smoke and displaced rock dust that drifted off the edge of the ridge on the morning wind.
Rykuu stood in it.
When the smoke thinned he was in the same position. Same stance. Same expression.
Then the prince came through the smoke.
He had climbed during the barrage, using his own cover to reposition, and now he dropped with gravity behind him and drove his heel into the side of Rykuu's neck. The shockwave rolled outward from the impact — a concussive ring of pressure that flattened the dry grass around them in a perfect circle and sent loose stones skittering off the edge of the ridge. Below on the slope, Nurrek turned his face away from it.
For one half-second, Rykuu's weight shifted.
"You fail, young prince."
The punch came from below, driving upward into the prince's abdomen with a force that did not negotiate. The air left his lungs in a single involuntary exhale. His vision whitened at the edges, then darkened, the two closing inward from opposite directions with a finality he couldn't argue with.
He was unconscious before the ground came up to meet him.
Saevyn was already moving up the slope. He cleared the ridgeline in three long strides and caught the prince before impact — one arm under the boy's back, one under his knees — and lowered him onto the pale rock of the hilltop with a steadiness that came from having been prepared for this outcome regardless of what he'd said to Nurrek.
He looked up at Rykuu.
"You may have gone slightly overboard."
Rykuu looked down at the unconscious boy. The morning light was full now, coming in low and flat across the ridge and catching the Celryuu crest on the prince's chest piece, and for a moment the only sounds were the wind across the hill and the distant activity of the camp below, and the two of them standing over a boy who had thrown everything he had at an immovable thing and not been broken by it, which was perhaps the point.
"Not at all," Rykuu said.
He turned toward the path down the hill.
"He is a Saiyan in the end."
Time passed as the sun made its way across the sky. Soldiers made food and ate more rations that usual as the Capital was less than a days travel away. A companionable atmosphere covered the hill as these men who had fought beside each other conversed away while filling their stomachs.
"Did I lose consciousness." the young prince spoke, his voice down and defeated.
Saevyn sat on a rock beside him as he ate.
"Forget that, eat now my prince and we will begin our travels at noon."
The young prince simply lifted his head and made his way up, his body still weak but he wobbled on determined.
"Where are you off to in such a hurry?" Nurrek asked the young prince who was wobbling his way up the hill.
"Rykuu is still up there isn't he. I will go retake my test."
The prince replied as he carried on.
"Do not be a fool Prince Celryuu. No man respects an unwise king." a voice said, stern and serious. The young prince turned to see one of his soldiers, a war commander instead of a guard.
The old man has long grey hair. His eyes showed the calmness f a man who had seen it all. His demeanor did not fight for recognition, it just earned it. He was the type to command a room the moment he uttered a word. Even in this moment his words halted the young prince.
"You know, I don't much like that name Commander Karryn." the young prince said, his demeanor completely different.
"Don't much like it? That is the name of your house. The name of your forefathers."
"That is why I don't like it. It is my father's name and his father's name and his father and so on and so forth. I want to be known as something distinct. I want to be know to you men as Prince V. Just V." the young prince said, a determination in his eyes.
The soldiers all stood confused, most scared to go along with this treasonous scandal of the prince. Then the tense silence was broken.
"All hail King V, first of his name and the ruler of house Celryuu." Rykuu said as he stood behind the prince, his voice serious and sincere.
What followed were hails from the men as they began chanting away. The young prince could not help but smile as he enjoyed the joyous moment.
Alas a high-pitched sound of an object coming at the men interrupted the beautiful moment. Then in the next moment, DOOM. A crash happened right between the soldiers, Nurrek and Saevyn positioned themselves in front of the prince immediately as Karryn and Rykuu approached the crash.
As the dust settled, a younger saiyan lied in the hole. He wore the armor of the royal guards, just damaged. Blood covered his body as he struggled to get up. Both men were taken aback at the sight.
"What happen to you?" Rykuu said as he rushed to the man's side.
"Commander Rykuu. The king is in trouble."