Goku caught Gohan effortlessly out of the air and spun him once, the motion entirely automatic, the booming laugh that accompanied it completely genuine.
"You've grown," Goku said, pulling back to look his son up and down properly. He beamed. "Piccolo trained you well."
"I worked really hard, Dad," Gohan replied. It was a simple, factual statement that carried absolutely no contradiction. His dark eyes were shining.
Goku craned his neck, looking past his son toward the scorched battlefield. "Is that Yamcha fighting out there? Good—I really wanted to see exactly what everyone's been doing this whole time."
Jordan had spotted Raditz's pathetic hiding spot immediately.
His Super Saiyan form was no longer the apocalyptic, blinding visual event it had been three grueling months ago. He had successfully completed the absolute mastery work. His spiked hair sat quietly, a warm, clear gold in the desert sunlight, the color perfectly steady rather than violently burning. There was no crushing aura climbing off his shoulders. No roaring golden flames requiring agonizing, conscious management.
It was the legendary transformation in its absolute, perfectly controlled resting state: hair gold, maximum power instantly available, and absolutely nothing leaking into the atmosphere.
From the outside looking in, it simply looked like Jordan had gotten a flashy bleach job.
Which was exactly the tactical point. A Super Saiyan who couldn't be physically identified as a Super Saiyan just by looking at him was a Super Saiyan who flawlessly controlled exactly what intelligence his enemies received. Every single drop of the fifty-fold multiplier was readily available, and absolutely none of it was actively advertising itself.
He strolled casually over to the pale stone column where Raditz was currently cowering, grabbed the heavy fabric of the Saiyan's bright orange Turtle Hermit uniform, and physically dragged him out into the open.
"What exactly are you doing hiding back here, Raditz?" Jordan asked pleasantly.
Raditz, who was roughly Jordan's height and considerably outmassed him, allowed himself to be effortlessly dragged without offering a single ounce of physical resistance. "I am absolutely not hiding. I am securely observing the evolving tactical situation from a fortified position of—"
"Raditz."
"Yes, Lord Evans, I am hiding." The disgraced Saiyan was trying incredibly hard not to look at the two armored figures standing across the desert floor. "Could we please go back to not being physically visible from that specific direction?"
"You have exactly five more seconds," Jordan smiled, adjusting his grip on the gi, "and then you are going to stand exactly where Vegeta can clearly see you."
A terrified pause.
"He is absolutely going to kill me."
"He's going to try," Jordan corrected smoothly. "There's a massive tactical difference."
He shoved Raditz out into the open desert.
Vegeta had been aggressively running the mental calculus ever since the teleportation arrival, and was midway through violently revising his entire threat assessment of the battlefield when he saw the tall blond man casually drag a highly familiar figure out from behind the rock formation.
The trembling figure possessed a highly distinctive, knee-length hairstyle. The figure also possessed a very specific biometric resonance with a low-class Saiyan warrior that Vegeta had personally deployed to this mudball a year ago.
"Raditz," Vegeta stated.
His cold voice carried the highly specific, dangerous quality of a commander who had just had a foundational piece of tactical intelligence violently corrected.
Nappa, still agonizingly finding his way back to a vertical stance, lifted his bruised head from the general direction of the dirt.
"That—he's actually alive—" Nappa wheezed. His raspy voice carried the fury of a man who had just discovered the accounting was wrong in a direction that made his day significantly worse. "Traitor."
Yamcha, still standing perfectly balanced in the combat field, heard the hostile exchange and casually glanced back at Krillin. Krillin's stoic expression clearly said: Yes, we fully expected this, moving on.
Nappa finally staggered back to his feet.
The giant hadn't actually seen the impossible scouter reading that had accompanied Yamcha's first devastating punch. He had been on the direct receiving end of said punch, which was an entirely different kind of physical information. And apparently, the blunt-force trauma hadn't been an entirely sufficient teacher, because the ugly sneer currently reforming on Nappa's bruised face was the aggressive recalibration of an arrogant brute who had decided the first exchange was purely the result of a lucky surprise, rather than a catastrophic gap in capability.
He absolutely wasn't going to be surprised this time.
The raw energy violently gathered inside Nappa's massive body and roared upward. It was genuine, lethal output this time, not a flashy intimidation posture. His combat power fully released, the desert bedrock violently breaking down around his heavy boots as a searing energy wave rapidly built between his outstretched hands.
With a deafening roar, he fired it point-blank at Yamcha.
The destructive beam was impossibly wide, blindingly fast, and carried the absolute, unhinged force of his 4,000 combat power with absolutely nothing held back in reserve.
Yamcha effortlessly read the kinetic buildup and had already moved.
He didn't dodge sideways or retreat. He dashed straight forward, aggressively closing the distance. The dense ki he had quietly gathered in his own palm during Nappa's arrogant windup was now fully formed. It was a hyper-compact, brilliantly glowing sphere, roughly the size of a basketball, violently spinning with the sheer, crushing concentration of an entire year's worth of 10x gravity training packed inside it.
He threw it.
The two attacks violently collided dead center in the desert.
The raw mathematics of the clash were absolutely not close. Nappa's screaming energy wave was vastly larger by several orders of magnitude in apparent visual size. Yamcha's compact sphere was infinitely smaller by the exact same margin. But the sheer, apocalyptic density of the energy compressed inside Yamcha's sphere was completely different.
The massive beam was effortlessly shredded apart.
Yamcha's sphere violently tore straight through the center of the blast, rapidly growing as it went—the devastating release of the concentrated energy aggressively expanding now that the physical compression was gone.
Nappa only had enough time to catch a fleeting glimpse of the terrified reading on his scouter before the blinding light became far too bright to see anything ever again.
The scouter had done the exact same impossible thing that Vegeta's had done.
Nappa did not survive the next few seconds.
The thick dust settled slowly in the freezing desert wind.
A massive, smoking crater. A digital scouter reading of absolute zero. Yamcha floating calmly above the scorched battlefield, letting out a slow, controlled breath.
Vegeta stared blankly at the crater.
He had never actually expected Nappa to win this engagement. He had fully expected the hulking brute to gather intelligence—to stubbornly absorb two or three heavy exchanges, take brutal damage he could eventually recover from, and actively feed Vegeta hard data on what these Earth warriors were actually capable of. That had been the entire tactical purpose of his 'do whatever you want with him' command.
Instead, Nappa had been completely vaporized in exactly two exchanges.
Vegeta noted this catastrophic loss without a single ounce of regret, but with considerable, cold practical interest.
One hundred thousand plus, Vegeta calculated, referencing the brief, flashing reading he had caught on his own lens right before the detonation. From a miserable Earthling. On a pathetic dirtball that possesses zero known energy-sensing technology and absolutely no apparent combat tradition at this galactic level.
Something fundamental had violently changed on this planet in the past year.
Something had changed it deliberately.
Vegeta slowly shifted his gaze to the tall, blond-haired man, who was currently casually high-fiving Yamcha with the highly specific, annoying satisfaction of a tactician whose trap had worked exactly as designed.
Jordan casually glanced over at the Saiyan Prince and offered him the pleasant, entirely unconcerned expression of a man who had fully expected the violent outcome.
Raditz watched the smoking remnants of Nappa's crater from the absolute edge of the group.
He had brutally trained alongside these humans for six straight months. He had watched Yamcha get terrifyingly faster. He had desperately sparred against Krillin's blinding timing drills, Tien's impossible perception exercises, and Chiaotzu's increasingly alarming psychic precision. He had intimately watched the entire, agonizing trajectory of it, from the weak, pathetic people they had been when he first crash-landed, to the absolute monsters they were right now.
He had fully known exactly how this skirmish was going to go.
But knowing it, and physically watching a high-ranking elite get effortlessly deleted from reality, were two entirely different things.
There was officially one less Saiyan in the known universe.
Raditz quickly did the grim mental count. Himself, Kakarot, Vegeta. Three.
He stood with the crushing weight of his near-extinct species for a long moment.
Then: But Vegeta absolutely would have executed me on the spot without asking a single question, Raditz thought, swallowing hard. And I am currently standing here breathing.
The wave of relief that washed over him was entirely genuine, and he absolutely didn't try to pretend otherwise.
"Don't bother congratulating yourselves just yet," Vegeta said softly.
He had smoothly uncrossed his arms. His face had moved entirely past grim annoyance into something infinitely colder and vastly more deliberate. The ambient energy he was radiating now was absolutely not the flashy, wasteful release Nappa had deployed for cheap intimidation. It was the terrifying, highly controlled output of an elite predator who had finished calculating the math, and had finally arrived at a lethal conclusion.
"All of you," Vegeta commanded, dropping into a loose stance. "Come at me."
Krillin and Tien exchanged a sharp, tactical glance.
The heavily modified scouter Bulma had engineered and given to Krillin had silently fed them their own baseline numbers right before the fight kicked off: Tien was sitting at 15,000. Krillin was at 14,000. Both of them were still wearing their heavy, gravity-weighted suits, completely suppressed.
Stacked up against Vegeta's last known 18,000—and fully acknowledging that number had likely grown given a full year of deep-space travel—the combat math was highly workable if they moved together.
"Group attack?" Krillin asked quietly, shifting his weight.
Tien's three eyes were already aggressively tracking Vegeta's stance, meticulously reading the Saiyan's weight distribution and the lethal angle of his armored shoulders.
"Together," Tien confirmed coldly. "We have the numbers."
"Sounds perfectly right to me," Yamcha agreed, smoothly descending back to ground level to join the formation.