The Namekian sky was a brilliant, warm blue-green. Dende was still frantically waving from the edge of the mountain's summit when Jordan violently cleared the upper atmosphere.
He abruptly stopped his ascent, stabilizing a few hundred kilometers above the alien surface in low orbit, and looked down.
From the vacuum of space, Planet Namek was a massive green disk edged with a thin halo of white atmosphere. The continuous, three-sun illumination gave it a completely different visual quality than Earth—it was blindingly bright, incredibly evenly lit, completely lacking the deep, creeping shadow zones that Earth's single sun naturally created. He could clearly see the sprawling archipelago structures, the vast, unbroken oceans, and the tight clusters of inhabited agricultural islands.
It looked incredibly small from up here. But from any distance, it was completely irreplaceable.
He gave it a long, respectful moment.
Then, he aggressively turned his attention to the immediate logistical problem.
The original, theoretical flight plan had explicitly included a detour to Planet Yardrat.
The massive hyperspace detour would have absolutely been worth the fuel. Instant Transmission—the legendary, signature technique of the Yardrat people—was a massive, reality-breaking upgrade to his existing teleportation loadout.
Jordan's Herrscher spatial authority was highly architectural: it was surgically precise, apocalyptically powerful, but strictly limited by the hard requirement to have previously mapped a localized geographical coordinate. Instant Transmission, however, required absolutely nothing but a faint ki signature located literally anywhere in the known universe, and cost a completely negligible amount of energy to execute. The tactical difference between 'I can instantly go anywhere I have physically been' and 'I can instantly go anywhere something is currently breathing' was the staggering difference between navigating with a paper road map and owning the open sky.
He had fully intended to make the stop.
But the Saiyan invasion deadline was a fixed, rapidly approaching hard stop. Yardrat was officially going to have to wait for a future road trip.
Which left the immediate, pressing problem of getting back to Earth as quickly as physically possible.
Jordan snapped his fingers.
F-boy materialized silently beside him in the freezing vacuum of deep space. The Stand's tailored purple suit was immaculate, its side-swept hair perfect, and its aloof, CEO expression met the crushing hostility of a zero-oxygen environment with the bored indifference of an entity that had stopped requiring an atmosphere a very long time ago.
F-boy reached casually into its jacket's inner pocket and produced a single card.
Gold-bordered. SSR.
The Stand held it out between two gloved fingers, radiating the specific, smug energy of an employee presenting a brilliant solution that was absolutely going to result in a brief, but highly significant, loss of dignity for their boss.
It was the Dragon God's Power card. The exact one F-boy had aggressively extracted from Shenron during the Earth summoning months ago.
Jordan stared blankly at it.
"You completely knew this was coming," Jordan accused flatly.
F-boy's expression remained flawlessly, professionally neutral.
"Fine." Jordan snatched the gold card. "Oh, Almighty F-boy—please consume the Dragon God's Power to graciously grant me the Yardrat technique of Instant Transmission."
F-boy accepted the sarcastic prayer in absolute silence and triggered the card.
The SSR violently dissolved into blinding golden light. It was that highly specific, warm gold of the Dragon God's absolute authority, radiating the exact same divine quality as when Shenron had personally answered his wish weeks ago. The ambient light rapidly gathered, aggressively narrowed, and violently reconstituted itself.
A deep purple card, glowing the color of a polished amethyst in direct sunlight, materialized and dropped heavily into Jordan's palm.
[Fantasy Card: Yardrat — Instant Transmission] Type: Ability Card • Rarity: SR
Description: One of the many legendary, reality-bending techniques of the Yardrat people—an obscure alien species whose apparent physical simplicity conceals a terrifyingly sophisticated understanding of ki, spatial physics, and dimensional movement.Effect 1 (Ki Lock): Sense and instantly lock onto the unique ki signature of any living being. Initiate instantaneous teleportation directly to their physical location, entirely ignoring all spatial or dimensional distance. Energy cost is completely negligible.Effect 2 (Chain Burst): Instant Transmission can be seamlessly utilized in combination with other brutal combat techniques, enabling high-speed movement and devastating attacks in rapid sequence entirely without transition delay.
Jordan stared down at the glowing purple border.
SR-rank, not SSR. Which was actually highly accurate. The Yardrat people were undoubtedly extraordinary by mortal standards, and the teleportation technique was genuinely, ridiculously broken, but the gacha system aggressively rated even extraordinary mortals below the supernatural, reality-warping divine entities whose abilities officially topped out at SSR. The technique's true terrifying power didn't lie in its raw, destructive output; it lay entirely in its absolute absence of restriction.
Go instantly anywhere anything is currently alive. Zero spatial coordinates required. No prior dimensional mapping necessary. Just ping a signature, and blink.
He absorbed the card into his biology.
The physical integration was completely different from most of his previous pulls. It wasn't a violent surge of searing energy, or a brutal, agonizing structural rewrite of his bones and muscles. It was simply a massive, sudden expansion of a brand-new faculty of attention.
It was the terrifying, god-like ability to aggressively reach outward with his ki-sense and meticulously isolate individual biological signatures hidden within the infinite, roaring background noise of all living things—exactly the way a sound engineer might perfectly tune a radio dial to isolate a single, specific broadcast frequency.
The entire universe suddenly possessed a tactile, vibrating texture it absolutely hadn't had three seconds ago.
He mentally filed the new ability away as fully operational.
The Element Pickup passive cooldown had fully elapsed during training. F-boy had politely mentioned this earlier in the week, in the highly specific way F-boy mentioned things—which was to silently produce the relevant cooldown timer holographic interface, tap it exactly once with a gloved finger, and refuse to elaborate.
The massive SSR Saiyan bloodline extraction from Goku had carried a brutal, ninety-day lockout. Exactly three months had passed.
Which fundamentally meant: the Dragon Ball card that Porunga had generated—the one actively containing Namek's three-wish divine authority—was now fully, legally reproducible by F-boy's ability again, if Jordan ever returned to make physical contact with a Namekian Dragon Ball.
He had made a very careful mental note of this loophole.
He had also firmly decided, after ruthlessly reviewing his remaining Fate Draw count and his active standing inventory, that burning the Dragon God's Power card had been exactly the right tactical move to spend a free wish on.
The cosmic math worked out perfectly.
He pressed two fingers firmly against his forehead.
Goku's unique ki signature was absolutely unmistakable.
Jordan had felt it burning on the beach at Kame House. He had passively traced it across Earth's surface during the chaotic months of the Dragon Ball collection. He had learned its highly specific, blazing quality well enough to instantly recognize it hidden among the infinite, roaring background radiation of the universe's living signatures.
It was warm, blindingly clean, and slightly overwhelming in the specific, terrifying way that genuinely, deeply good people's energy sometimes was. It wasn't actively aggressive or hostile; it was just massively, unavoidably present, the exact same way a burning sun was present in a solar system.
Jordan aggressively reached for it now, following the brand-new Yardrat instinct, and locked onto the frequency almost instantly.
Small planet. Incredibly high localized gravity. Located somewhere deep in the direction of the North Galaxy's divine jurisdiction.
The bizarre little planet King Kai lived on was incredibly small, and terrifyingly dense.
The crushing gravity was immediately noticeable from the very first step. Ten times Earth standard. It was a brutal, punishing figure that Jordan's heavily reinforced biology processed with the mild, passing interest of a man noticing his carry-on luggage was slightly heavier than expected, rather than the agonizing, bone-crushing struggle it would present to an ordinary mortal.
He materialized dead center in an open, grassy area that clearly served as a brutal training ground. The dirt was heavily flattened and violently worn, surrounded by the particular, heavy stillness of a place that had recently hosted a massive amount of extreme physical exertion.
Two familiar figures were mid-exercise.
They froze instantly.
Jordan had deliberately arrived still locked in his Super Saiyan form. He had been aggressively maintaining the mutation for the entire interstellar transit. The Mastered State training absolutely wasn't complete yet, but it was functional enough for extended, low-output use. His spiked hair was blinding gold, his eyes a piercing pale green, and controlled wisps of golden flame danced around his shoulders—flames that no longer required agonizing, conscious suppression effort to keep from accidentally vaporizing the surrounding environment.
From the outside looking in, he immediately understood, this was a violently different entity from the relaxed Jordan who had casually stood on a beach at Kame House several months ago.
His spatial biomagnetic field could successfully contain the vast majority of the apocalyptic power signature. But it absolutely couldn't contain all of it—not operating at this terrifying, 50x multiplier level. What naturally leaked through the shielding was the exact kind of crushing, visceral pressure that Piccolo—a warrior whose entire martial arts career had been built on meticulously reading opponents' energy—would violently register before anything else.
Piccolo instantly dropped into a low, lethal combat stance. It was the only appropriate, professional survival response.
Goku straightened up and stared, his head tilted slightly to the side. He was doing that terrifying thing he did where his Saiyan body's primal instincts ran a full threat assessment a full second before his conscious, human mind actually caught up. Something flickered across his wide-eyed expression. It wasn't a hostile threat response. It was recognition, of a deep, biological kind that entirely bypassed conscious visual identification.
"...Hey," Goku said slowly. He sounded completely confused, yet simultaneously warm and welcoming. It was the exact tone you used when you bumped into a good friend you absolutely hadn't expected to see at the grocery store. "Do I... know you?"
Jordan slowly lowered his two fingers from his forehead and let the golden Super Saiyan form ease down.
The roaring flames faded into mist. His spiked hair smoothly dropped and returned to jet black. His pale green eyes shifted back to a deep, calm blue. The crushing golden aura settled quietly back into his impenetrable biomagnetic field.
"Goku," Jordan smiled warmly. "Piccolo. It's really good to see you both."
Goku's face went through three rapid, hilarious transitions before finally arriving at delighted, screaming surprise.
"Jordan!! You're—wait, what the hell happened to your hair?!" He was already closing the distance, the intense combat wariness that had locked his posture three seconds ago completely vanishing, instantly replaced by the full-body, golden-retriever enthusiasm Goku always brought to seeing people he genuinely liked. "And your eyes were completely different! And you had—"
Before Jordan can answered, a new voice suddenly arrived from somewhere nearby.
It was slightly trembling. Very old. And deeply, profoundly panicked.
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