C A R D O
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Saiyan Commoner: Zenkai, Saiyan Tail ◆ Age 25 ◆ Good
▌ APPEARANCE
Cardo is tall for a Saiyan, six-foot-two and built long rather than wide, with the rangy, corded musculature of someone who has trained for speed and reach rather than brute impact. His frame is athletic and lean, carrying its power in the shoulders, the forearms, and the tight, springloaded lines of his legs. He moves like a fighter who has spent years learning to close distance, an economy of motion that makes him look unhurried even when he's crossing a room faster than most people can track. There is no wasted mass on him. Everything is where it needs to be and nothing is where it doesn't.
His skin is a warm, medium brown, lighter than most Saiyans from the outer districts, suggesting mixed lineage from the settlements closer to the capital where different bloodlines crossed more freely. It's smooth across the planes of his face and neck but rougher across his hands and forearms, where years of training have produced a permanent texture of small scars and calluses that most people wouldn't notice unless they looked closely. A single clean scar runs horizontally across his left cheek, thin as a wire — the kind of mark left by a blade, not a fist.
His face is angular and handsome in a stark, clean-lined way, with high cheekbones, a strong jaw, and a straight nose set beneath dark brows that frame eyes so deep brown they border on black. His features are sharper than the blunt, heavy look typical of low-born Saiyans, and his expression carries a focused intensity that most people read as either discipline or anger depending on how they feel about being looked at directly. It is attention, constant and unselfconscious, paid to whatever is in front of him, as though he has trained himself to never not be watching.
His hair is dark blue-black, long enough to reach his shoulders, and it goes where it wants. Not unkempt exactly, but not managed either. It sweeps back from his forehead and falls loose around his face, catching air when he moves. The effect is more wild than structured, which does not match the rest of him, and he has never appeared to notice the contradiction.
His tail is well-groomed and wrapped firmly around his waist in the disciplined, no-slack style he learned watching soldiers in the settlements near the capital.
He wears clean, fitted training clothes in dark colors, black and deep navy, with minimal armor and boots that are well-maintained and recently resoled. The impression is of someone who takes care of his equipment, takes care of his body, and is prepared, at any given moment, to use both.
His voice is clear and steady, direct without being cold. He looks at you when he talks to you and does not fill silence with noise when silence is doing the job. When he smiles, it's quick and genuine, and it transforms his face from focused to open in a way that catches people off guard. He smiles more than the intensity suggests he should. He asks people to spar with him when he wants to know them, a habit that has produced friendships with roughly half the people who said yes and bruises for both parties in every case.
▌ BACKGROUND
Cardo grew up in one of the mixed settlements on the edge of Vegeta's capital district, not the capital itself, and not the deep frontier, but the ring of working towns where Commoner families served the infrastructure that kept the warrior society running. His father drove supply transports. His mother worked communications equipment at a military relay station. They were decent people in a society that didn't particularly reward decency, and they raised their son with two principles: work hard, and don't make trouble for people who haven't made trouble for you.
Cardo followed the first and broke the second before he was fifteen.
Cardo followed the first and broke the second before he was fifteen.
When Cardo was fourteen, a Changeling mercenary company hit the settlement adjacent to his, a township called Farro. The ostensible reason was debt collection: Farro's administrator had defaulted on a trade obligation to a Changeling merchant guild. The real reason, as everyone in the region understood, was demonstration. The guild wanted the surrounding settlements to see what happened when payments were late.
The mercenaries weren't there to collect. They were there to burn. And they did. Farro was gutted in a single night, homes destroyed, infrastructure wrecked, dozens of Saiyans beaten, several killed. The mercenary company's Power Level was modest by galactic standards but overwhelming against a civilian population. No one from the capital intervened. No Noble officer dispatched a force. The military relay station where Cardo's mother worked received the distress signal, logged it, and forwarded it through channels. No response came.
Cardo wasn't in Farro. He was in his own settlement, three kilometers away, watching the fires from the roof of his parents' building. He could hear the explosions. He could feel the energy signatures spiking and going quiet, one by one.
He was fourteen. He was too weak to do anything about it. He swore that would be the last time.
The mercenaries weren't there to collect. They were there to burn. And they did. Farro was gutted in a single night, homes destroyed, infrastructure wrecked, dozens of Saiyans beaten, several killed. The mercenary company's Power Level was modest by galactic standards but overwhelming against a civilian population. No one from the capital intervened. No Noble officer dispatched a force. The military relay station where Cardo's mother worked received the distress signal, logged it, and forwarded it through channels. No response came.
Cardo wasn't in Farro. He was in his own settlement, three kilometers away, watching the fires from the roof of his parents' building. He could hear the explosions. He could feel the energy signatures spiking and going quiet, one by one.
He was fourteen. He was too weak to do anything about it. He swore that would be the last time.
The Farro raid did not make Cardo angry in the way most people understand anger. It made him clear. The fog of adolescent aimlessness, what to train for, what to be, what a Commoner Saiyan was supposed to do with his life, burned off in a single night, and what was left underneath was a purpose so clean and simple that it has never needed refinement:
Evil exists. It takes specific forms. It has names, faces, and addresses. And someone needs to go to those addresses.
He threw himself into training with a focus that alarmed his parents and impressed the local circuit fighters who sparred with him. He was not a prodigy, there were faster Saiyans, stronger Saiyans, Saiyans with better Ki control and more natural talent. What Cardo had was direction. Every session, every spar, every rep was pointed at the same target: become strong enough that the next time someone burns a settlement, he is standing in front of it.
What he won't say, unless you've earned it, is that the fighting isn't entirely the price he pays for the mission. He loves it. Not just the righteous fights, all of them. By the time he was twenty and stepping into the circuits, he'd already figured out that his moral purpose and his Saiyan blood wanted the same thing, and he has found it more useful to keep them pointed at the same target than to examine what would happen if they weren't.
By twenty, he was strong enough to enter the professional circuits. By twenty-two, he was strong enough to take mercenary contracts. But he didn't take the contracts that paid the most. He took the contracts that put him opposite the people who needed to be stopped: slavers, raiders, enforcers for criminal organizations, the kind of people who made their living through violence directed at those who couldn't fight back. The pay was worse. The danger was worse. The Zenkai was excellent.
By twenty-five, he had a reputation that crossed planetary borders. Not for power, for purpose. The Saiyan Commoner who hunts evil. Who shows up unpaid and unasked when a settlement is under threat. Who pursues mercenary companies and pirate operations the way other bounty hunters pursue individual targets. Who has, on several documented occasions, conquered a planet from an Evil ruler and then governed it with the visible discomfort of a man who is excellent at removing problems and significantly less excellent at what comes after.
There is a cargo broker operating in the commercial district of the Interstellar Market with documented ties to a Changeling merchant guild connected to Crimson Ledger supply operations. The name came from a dock worker in his network three weeks ago. He is here because the trail is here, and the trail has not run out.
Evil exists. It takes specific forms. It has names, faces, and addresses. And someone needs to go to those addresses.
He threw himself into training with a focus that alarmed his parents and impressed the local circuit fighters who sparred with him. He was not a prodigy, there were faster Saiyans, stronger Saiyans, Saiyans with better Ki control and more natural talent. What Cardo had was direction. Every session, every spar, every rep was pointed at the same target: become strong enough that the next time someone burns a settlement, he is standing in front of it.
What he won't say, unless you've earned it, is that the fighting isn't entirely the price he pays for the mission. He loves it. Not just the righteous fights, all of them. By the time he was twenty and stepping into the circuits, he'd already figured out that his moral purpose and his Saiyan blood wanted the same thing, and he has found it more useful to keep them pointed at the same target than to examine what would happen if they weren't.
By twenty, he was strong enough to enter the professional circuits. By twenty-two, he was strong enough to take mercenary contracts. But he didn't take the contracts that paid the most. He took the contracts that put him opposite the people who needed to be stopped: slavers, raiders, enforcers for criminal organizations, the kind of people who made their living through violence directed at those who couldn't fight back. The pay was worse. The danger was worse. The Zenkai was excellent.
By twenty-five, he had a reputation that crossed planetary borders. Not for power, for purpose. The Saiyan Commoner who hunts evil. Who shows up unpaid and unasked when a settlement is under threat. Who pursues mercenary companies and pirate operations the way other bounty hunters pursue individual targets. Who has, on several documented occasions, conquered a planet from an Evil ruler and then governed it with the visible discomfort of a man who is excellent at removing problems and significantly less excellent at what comes after.
There is a cargo broker operating in the commercial district of the Interstellar Market with documented ties to a Changeling merchant guild connected to Crimson Ledger supply operations. The name came from a dock worker in his network three weeks ago. He is here because the trail is here, and the trail has not run out.
Cardo draws a line and he draws it in permanent ink.
He confirms before he acts. He investigates. He makes certain the person on the receiving end of his strength has earned what is about to happen to them. The confirmation is the discipline. A powerful being who punishes the innocent because he thought they were guilty is no different from the people he hunts, and he knows it.
Once the line is confirmed, once he knows with the bone-deep certainty that his gut and his evidence agree on that the person in front of him has burned a settlement, enslaved a population, exploited the powerless, or committed an act of evil that cannot be answered with words, the warmth goes out of his eyes. What shows in his face is resolution. The look of a man who has already decided, and will not be moved.
He is a Saiyan who has chosen, with the full weight of his Saiyan blood, to put that strength between evil and the people it preys on. He thinks Saiyan culture has the right idea about strength. He thinks it has the wrong idea about what strength is for.
He confirms before he acts. He investigates. He makes certain the person on the receiving end of his strength has earned what is about to happen to them. The confirmation is the discipline. A powerful being who punishes the innocent because he thought they were guilty is no different from the people he hunts, and he knows it.
Once the line is confirmed, once he knows with the bone-deep certainty that his gut and his evidence agree on that the person in front of him has burned a settlement, enslaved a population, exploited the powerless, or committed an act of evil that cannot be answered with words, the warmth goes out of his eyes. What shows in his face is resolution. The look of a man who has already decided, and will not be moved.
He is a Saiyan who has chosen, with the full weight of his Saiyan blood, to put that strength between evil and the people it preys on. He thinks Saiyan culture has the right idea about strength. He thinks it has the wrong idea about what strength is for.
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