"Let's all rush him at once and take down that Saiyan prince!"
The suggestion hung in the desert air. Chiaotzu perked up visibly, a flash of enthusiasm crossing his round face.
Piccolo, standing slightly apart from the rest, let out a short, dismissive breath through his nose. He said nothing.
Things are different now. Vegeta's combat power wasn't worth remarking on—not to Piccolo. Not anymore. Strength reshapes a person's entire relationship with fear, and Piccolo had long since stopped being afraid of numbers that small. If his own survival weren't bound up in this fight, he wouldn't have dignified the suggestion with a response either way.
Absolutely not would he call what he was doing joining forces. He was simply present. And calculating.
"Goku." Tien folded his arms, his tone settling the matter. "It's your call."
The others all nodded. Even Piccolo, after a beat, didn't object. Vegeta was Goku's kin, in the ancestral sense. And beyond that, Goku was the strongest person standing on this patch of desert sand, setting aside Jordan entirely.
Setting aside Jordan entirely, Piccolo noted privately, is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Jordan visited King Kai's planet often enough that Piccolo had long since stopped trying to benchmark him. Whatever he was now, he was beyond the frame of reference the rest of them were using.
Goku looked at Vegeta across the open ground—the prince's face sharp, cold, every line of his posture radiating contempt. Something moved behind Goku's eyes. Not fear. Something older.
I always felt it, Goku thought. Like this is someone I was supposed to fight with everything I had. Like that was always coming.
"Hey—Jordan." He set Gohan down, took Jordan by the arm, and steered him away from the group with the focused energy of a man who had just thought of something that had clearly been brewing for a while. He gestured for Jordan to lean in.
He started talking.
Jordan's expression shifted through several distinct phases. The first was polite attention. The second was mild surprise. The third—somewhere around the middle of Goku's explanation—was a slow blink and a very deliberate step backward, like a man creating physical distance from an idea before it could attach itself to him.
By the end, he exhaled. Long and controlled. The expression that settled on his face was you are genuinely something else.
Twenty meters away, Piccolo's ear twitched.
"Uncle Piccolo—" Gohan tugged at his sleeve, looking between the two men in the corner and the rest of the group. "What are Dad and Jordan talking about? You heard it, didn't you? Your hearing is way better than everyone else's."
Piccolo frowned. The frown deepened. He clearly intended not to answer.
Then he answered.
"Your father has asked Jordan for a favor." His voice was flat with the specific flatness of someone suppressing a strong reaction. "The plan is: Goku nearly kills Vegeta. Then Jordan heals him. Then Jordan applies the Potential Guidance Technique." He paused to let that settle. "So that Goku can fight him at full strength and call it a fair match."
Silence from the group.
Piccolo's expression completed its journey into open contempt. "A fool's errand for the sake of a thrill. He is a complete idiot."
The words weren't gentle, but Piccolo didn't sound angry. He sounded like a man who had already done the math and found the answer both predictable and, on some level he refused to examine too closely, familiar.
The assembled fighters processed this in their own ways.
Krillin imagined Vegeta's combat power after a Zenkai recovery, after Jordan's Potential Guidance—multiplied, possibly many times over—and felt a cold wave roll down his spine from the base of his skull to the small of his back. His hands had gone slightly cold.
Why is Goku still like this?!
Across the desert floor, Goku stepped back toward Vegeta, light on his feet. His ki was perfectly contained—the scouter would read him at less than a thousand, the same careful suppression everyone had been running since morning.
Vegeta lowered his hand slightly. His gaze moved over Goku with the unhurried precision of someone cataloguing a target, not flinching from it.
"So," Vegeta said. "You're the one they chose to die first."
"I'm not the one dying today," Goku said. The corners of his mouth turned up slightly, easy and calm. "Vegeta."
The prince's eyes narrowed. Something tugged at the edge of his recognition—the bearing, the bone structure, the set of the jaw. "Your appearance. Your eyes." The words came as assessment, not greeting. "You resemble Raditz. You're his brother—the low-level warrior who was sent to this backwater. Kakarot."
"That's who I was born." Goku held his ground, voice unhurried. "But my name is Son Goku."
Vegeta sneered. The sound was dismissive in a way that didn't reach his eyes—his eyes were doing something else, cataloguing still. "Forgotten their own people. What does this planet do to Saiyans?"
He clenched his fist, raised it, and let his thumb swing back to point at his own chest. His posture completed itself into a declaration. "Let me show you what a real Saiyan is."
Thirty meters away, Jordan quietly took out his phone and took a photograph.
Timeless, he thought. Absolutely timeless.
He pocketed it.
Vegeta stretched his neck once, then took a step forward—and stopped.
"Wait."
The advance halted. His gaze had dropped, tracking something.
"Kakarot." Flat. Careful. "Where is your tail?"
Goku blinked. "Cut off when I was a kid."
A beat of silence.
He cut off his own tail. Vegeta absorbed this with the specific expression of someone recalculating an entire strategic model on the fly. The transformation—the Great Ape—he doesn't know. Or knew, once, and lost access to it. Either way…
The corners of Vegeta's mouth curved upward. Cold. Quiet.
If used correctly, this ends everything in one move.
"VEGETA WANTS TO USE HIS TAIL TO TRANSFORM INTO A GREAT APE!"
The shout came from behind Goku—loud, bright, carrying across the desert like a stadium announcement.
Both Goku and Vegeta turned.
Jordan was standing with his hands cupped around his mouth, blond hair bright in the morning sun, projecting his voice across thirty meters with complete serenity. "HIS FIGHTING POWER INCREASES TENFOLD WHEN HE TRANSFORMS! BE VERY CAREFUL!"
A beat.
Did I just—
Vegeta's face cycled through rage toward something that didn't have a name.
Did that man just announce my plan out loud?
Goku waved at Jordan with his free hand, cheerful and entirely unbothered. "Got it! Don't worry, I'll be careful!"
He didn't turn back around. He was still waving.
The prince's eye twitched.
He's ignoring me. He turned his back on me.
The decision made itself. The figure blurred—a Saiyan lunge across ten meters of open ground, instincts refined through years of warfare, no warning, no declaration. Vegeta's strike came in at Goku's spine with everything he had.
"Useless," Vegeta said.
"—What?!"
His fist had connected with nothing.
Or rather—it had connected, and Goku was still standing.
Goku turned around now, rubbing the back of his neck.
"Sorry," he said. "Were you trying to hit me?"
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