The energy violently erupted from Piccolo like a steel blast door being blown completely off its hinges.
Goku's thick hair was physically blown horizontal by the gale. He staggered backward half a step—not thrown by the physical kinetic force, but reeling from sheer, unadulterated surprise. His jaw dropped. The roaring aura that had just exploded from Piccolo was absolutely enormous. It was rapidly rising, and it burned clean in the specific, terrifying way of a biological engine that had been built perfectly, and had just been violently granted permission to run at absolute maximum capacity.
The roaring number finally settled into a new plateau. Goku's Saiyan ki-sense automatically ran the brutal tactical comparison.
He is several times stronger than me.
"This—" Piccolo stood completely frozen. His thick green arms were held slightly away from his sides, his eyes wide. He was physically feeling the apocalyptic power surging through his veins the exact same way a man feels a brand-new, terrifyingly sharp weapon in his hands for the first time. His voice came out as a low, heavily controlled rumble, carrying a heavy tremor underneath that he hadn't quite decided whether to classify as shock or euphoria. "Is this truly what the Namekian Grand Elder can do?"
"That is exactly what divine potential guidance unlocks," Jordan said smoothly, casually releasing Piccolo's arm. "And just for the record, the ancient Elder himself is still considerably stronger than you are right now. So."
Piccolo snapped his head up to glare at him.
"Don't get complacent," Jordan added with a sharp, dangerous smile.
"I know that," Piccolo ground out through teeth that were currently clamped together with significantly more physical force than was strictly necessary. The flash of arrogant indignation was incredibly brief. He rapidly processed the tactical insult, filed it away, and immediately returned his absolute focus to the infinitely more interesting question of exactly what he was going to do with this much raw, apocalyptic power.
"Jordan!"
Goku had been standing at the absolute edge of the magical exchange, violently vibrating with the specific, manic energy of a battle-junkie who had just watched something incredible happen to his rival, and desperately needed it to happen to him immediately. His dark eyes were blindingly bright. "My turn! Do me!"
"Come here."
Jordan casually raised his hand. Goku eagerly crossed the distance in a single, blurring step and practically shoved his thick forearm into Jordan's palm with the frantic enthusiasm of a man who had completely dispensed with all unnecessary bureaucratic process.
Contact.
Jordan activated the divine technique and reached deep into Goku's biological potential—and instantly found something vastly, terrifyingly different from Piccolo.
Where Piccolo's internal reserves had been incredibly substantial, regimented, and crystal clear, Goku's reserves were vast in the specific, horrifying way that the deep ocean is vast when you can't see the bottom. It was an entire galaxy of dormant, roaring power. Every single point of light in the darkness was a massive biological reserve that decades of brutal, bone-crushing training had painstakingly accumulated and stored, but had not yet found the physical avenue to express.
Jordan had obviously expected something massive. But this sheer scale was infinitely larger than his baseline expectation.
He meticulously worked his guiding power through the cosmic expanse.
Then, something else entirely happened.
Dead in the absolute center of that roaring biological galaxy—a phantom afterimage flickered.
It was a blazing golden silhouette. It was relatively small, perfectly human-shaped, standing dead center in the endless field of potential with the quiet, absolute patience of a god waiting to be born. The silhouette slowly turned its head. Its eyes met Jordan's. They were a piercing, pale green. Completely, terrifyingly calm.
Oh, Jordan thought, a jolt of pure adrenaline hitting his spine.
He knew exactly what that was.
The Super Saiyan potential. It wasn't the microscopic S-cells this time; it was the sheer concept of the legendary form. It was the apocalyptic possibility made physically visible within the soul, already heavily present and already perfectly oriented toward its eventual trigger. Goku absolutely had it. Jordan had obviously always known he had it. But actually seeing it manifest from inside the potential field, even briefly, before the blazing image smoothly dissolved back into the starry reserve—
Of course, Jordan thought, a slow smirk spreading across his face. Of course that monster is already waiting in there.
He smoothly completed the divine guidance and released Goku's arm.
Goku's aura violently detonated upward.
Piccolo, who had been standing off to one side desperately trying to internally calibrate his own terrifying new power level, physically felt the concussive shockwave from Goku's release wash over him. The Demon King's stoic expression changed entirely involuntarily. The sheer kinetic momentum alone—the raw, screaming, upward vertical surge of it—was more than enough to send a spike of freezing ice straight through the spine of a warrior whose own power had literally just multiplied by ten.
The gap, Piccolo thought, his jaw clenching so hard his teeth audibly ground together, has absolutely not closed. If anything—
"Wow," Goku breathed out.
He was staring down at his own glowing hands with genuine, unfiltered delight. It was the pure, uncomplicated wonder of a martial artist violently discovering a brand-new gear inside their own engine. "I can actually feel it. All of it. I feel—" He abruptly stopped, threw his head back, and grinned like a feral wolf. "This is absolutely incredible!"
Jordan quietly ran his own internal Mind Network assessment. Goku's raw combat power had been sitting at approximately 2,800 when they had reconnected here on King Kai's planet.
With the divine potential guidance fully applied—
Over three hundred thousand.
Jordan let that staggering, apocalyptic number sit quietly in his head for a long moment without attaching too much immediate emotion to it. He calmly thought about Vegeta breaching Earth's atmosphere in the next very short window. He thought about the ruthless, arrogant Vegeta in the original timeline, who had genuinely believed himself to be an unstoppable, invincible god operating at a pitiful 18,000 combat power.
The grotesque, highly predatory smile that spread across Jordan's face was, he freely admitted to himself, completely unavoidable.
Four pairs of confused eyes instantly fell on him.
Goku, Piccolo, King Kai—and Gregory the cricket, who had suddenly appeared from somewhere in the grass, alongside Bubbles the gorilla, who was currently watching Jordan from a highly careful distance. The ape appeared to possess the sharp animal instinct required to instantly recognize when something catastrophic had violently shifted in the apex energy balance of his home planet.
Jordan smoothly wiped the predatory smirk off his face and turned back to King Kai.
"Their baseline combat power has increased incredibly substantially," Jordan reported, utilizing appropriate, dry professionalism. "But the specialized training here is still absolutely essential. Goku needs the Kaioken."
King Kai, whose entire divine composure had been desperately clinging to a cliff edge ever since Jordan's explosive arrival, nodded furiously. Then he coughed into his fist, suddenly looking incredibly uncomfortable as his hidden eyes shifted toward the Namekian. "Yes, well. About that. The advanced curriculum—specifically the Spirit Bomb and the Kaioken—requires a spirit completely free of malice." King Kai adjusted his sunglasses, projecting the nervous energy of an administrator about to deliver a failed report card to an armed student.
"I ran the mandatory background check while you were talking. Piccolo Daimaō... technically does not qualify for enrollment." Piccolo stared at the god. His jaw clenched. He didn't argue, because he knew the bloody history of his own soul perfectly well, but the sheer bureaucratic indignity of being expelled from a divine martial arts academy on a technicality was clearly grating.
"Fine," Piccolo spat. He turned to Jordan, crossing his thick arms. "Take me back to Earth. Gohan still needs to finish his wilderness survival with me instead of the clone." "I'll see you on the battlefield, Goku," Jordan said, placing a hand on Piccolo's tense shoulder and raising two fingers to his forehead. He instantly located Earth's familiar ki signatures, locked onto the frequency, and vanished without a sound.
The time has come…
The Gobi Desert in the dead of winter was freezing, bone-dry, and aggressively stretched out in every single direction toward a flat horizon. The massive, wind-eroded rock formation that had officially become the Z Fighters' designated rendezvous point for the apocalypse rose from the cracked earth in towering columns of pale, jagged stone. Standing at the absolute summit of the tallest geological formation, a tense group of martial artists stood silently looking up at the freezing sky. They were tracking two distinct, burning points of heat in the upper atmosphere.
They were clearly visible as bright, screaming friction-streaks where two spherical drop-vessels were violently punching their way through the planetary entry corridor.
Yamcha stood near the edge, his arms tightly crossed. Tien Shinhan was completely, unnervingly still. Chiaotzu floated silently at his shoulder.
Krillin raised a hand to shield his eyes from the glare, tracking the burning trajectories. "Those are definitely Saiyan orbital landing signatures. We've all seen this exact light show before."
"I'm reading two distinct energies inside those pods," Tien reported, his third eye narrowing.
"Both of them are incredibly substantial." Absolutely nobody in the group looked frightened.
This, Jordan thought with deep satisfaction as he materialized silently behind them, is easily one of the most meaningful, beautiful tactical differences from the original timeline.
He had deliberately teleported to a landing point a short distance away and was currently just watching them. He passively felt the group's collective, humming energy through the Mind Network, meticulously reading the highly specific, sharpened quality of a grueling year's worth of brutal change in every single one of them.
Krillin, whose raw combat speed had become something genuinely, terrifyingly impressive.
Yamcha, whose sloppy timing had been aggressively sharpened into a much harder, lethal edge.
Tien, whose unique three-eyed perception had been massively augmented by six straight months of brutal sparring against an alien opponent who completely understood exactly what it was doing.
Chiaotzu, who had stubbornly been there for absolutely all of it, and whose psychic power had grown exponentially in the crucible.
And Raditz. The Saiyan was standing slightly apart from the main group, awkwardly wearing a bright orange Turtle School uniform. His humiliating glowing collar was completely gone. He was staring up at the burning sky with an incredibly strained expression that was currently doing its absolute, desperate best not to broadcast exactly how terrified he was.
Raditz's current combat power was sitting at just over 2,000. It had been 1,500 when he first crawled out of the crater.
Gohan was standing securely beside Piccolo. The half-Saiyan looked significantly older and harder than when Jordan had left for Namek. The brutal year of wilderness survival training with the Demon King was entirely visible in his rigid posture and the confident way he held his ground.
The bold white "Ma" demon character on the back of his purple uniform was still there. Piccolo had apparently insisted on keeping the branding. "Uncle Piccolo," Gohan asked quietly, his eyes on the sky.
"Has Dad really not come back yet?"
"Jordan explicitly went to pick him up from the afterlife," Piccolo grunted.
"He should be arriving any second now." Piccolo delivered the sit-rep with the highly specific, clipped, irritated quality of a warrior who was still aggressively working through his complicated feelings about having been formally expelled back to Earth early.
He had absolutely not been graceful about the bureaucratic rejection. He was also currently training exactly twice as hard in pure, spiteful response to King Kai, which Jordan privately suspected had been the deity's intended tactical outcome the entire time.
"Your old companions are getting awfully close," Yamcha noted smoothly. He addressed Raditz with the careful, icy neutrality of a man who had shared a brutal training ground with a hostile alien for six months, and still hadn't quite decided exactly what threat category to drop him into. "You seem incredibly tense."
Raditz didn't answer immediately.
He just watched the twin entry streaks resolve in the stratosphere. Two massive, heavy objects violently entering the atmosphere, rapidly deploying airbrakes, the burning friction signature dropping sharply as the vessels finally achieved a stable, controlled descent trajectory.
"Vegeta," Raditz finally whispered. It was just the name.
A heavy, suffocating pause.
"If he asks," Raditz added quickly, speaking to absolutely no one in particular, his voice thick with panic. "I was your heavily tortured prisoner. Please make that incredibly clear to him."
Yamcha looked over at Tien. Tien looked back up at the burning sky.
"We'll happily handle all the formal introductions," Krillin promised. He spoke with the reliable, cold practicality of a martial artist who had decided that today was going to be violently complicated either way, and it was infinitely better to just meet the nightmare head-on.
The spherical vessels descended toward the horizon.
Jordan smoothly stepped out from the rock outcropping and joined the group.
He had covered the short distance from his landing point at a casual walking pace, quietly taking the entire tactical scene in—the stoic, assembled Earth warriors, a significantly grown Gohan, Piccolo standing with his heavy arms folded and his posture perfectly composed, and Raditz quietly, frantically calculating his abysmal survival probabilities. Jordan reached Piccolo's side first.
"He's here," Jordan said quietly, his eyes on the horizon. "You can feel it."