"So you're the Saiyan prince, huh?!"
Slam.
Vegeta's face met reinforced desert rock. The ground in this section had been compacted by repeated detonations into something denser than its original material—harder than most things a face should encounter at speed—and the meeting between the two produced a sound that made every Z Fighter within earshot wince in unison.
The Great Ape had no time to recover. His tail drew taut. The world inverted.
Then it re-inverted.
"Why kill so many innocent people on planets that never wronged you?!"
Slam.
"Why come here?! Why invade a planet with people on it who were living their lives?!"
Slam.
"Say something!"
Slam. Slam. Slam.
The impacts were rhythmic. Each one sent concentric rings cracking outward from the point of contact, the reinforced ground losing its argument with the repeated mass of a transformed Saiyan, leaving a series of impression craters arranged like punctuation across the desert floor.
Thirty meters away, Goku and Raditz stood watching.
Both of them no longer had tails. Both of them reached the same instinctive conclusion simultaneously and took the same involuntary physical action: shoulders hunching, knees drawing together slightly, the body's sympathetic response to watching something familiar happen to someone else.
They stood like that in complete silence for three full seconds.
Then—crack—a sound of different quality, clean and final, like a thick branch deciding it was done.
The Great Ape sailed outward in an arc that ended at the nearest mountain, impacting the rock face and sliding, leaving a Vegeta-shaped impression in the stone before coming to rest at the base.
Jordan stood in the desert holding a tail.
It was very large. It had been very large. It was already becoming smaller, the Saiyan biology registering its separation and beginning the cellular process of acknowledging that this was no longer attached to anything that needed it. He looked at it for a moment with the expression of a man holding something he neither wanted nor particularly knew what to do with.
He dropped it.
The transformation reversed in the same way the others had—the mass receding, the fur retreating, the scale of the thing condensing back toward human proportions. What remained, crumpled against the mountain base, was Vegeta.
Just Vegeta. The same prince who had arrived this morning in a spherical spacecraft, arrogant as a declaration, the blood of uncountable alien worlds on his hands. He was now naked—the battle suit had finally given up its last structural integrity somewhere around the third wall-slam—covered in damage old and new, his arms bent in directions Saiyan arms were not designed for, his breathing shallow and specific in the way that meant his lungs were once again having a difficult conversation with his ribs.
He appeared to be reconsidering several life decisions at once.
Two figures came down through the air from the direction of the Z Fighters—one tall and gold-haired, one in a shredded gi looking noticeably healthier than he had any right to be. They landed beside the broken prince with the unhurried ease of two people on a nature walk who have found an interesting thing in the path.
Goku crouched. He found a twig—a dry one, stripped clean by the blast heat of the surrounding battle. He poked Vegeta in the ribs with it.
The crimson eyes opened. Their gaze could have stripped paint.
Goku was undeterred. "Jordan. Is he dying again?"
Jordan took hold of Goku's collar and removed him from the situation with one hand, efficiently, like relocating a pot that's been placed on the wrong burner. "You're the one who asked me to keep him alive. Stop poking him."
He turned to Vegeta.
The prince looked up at him from the ground—both arms broken, every breath a negotiation, three-quarters of his available ki consumed—and said nothing. His eyes, which had contained a lot of things since morning (contempt, rage, disbelief, terror, manic joy, humiliation), were doing something harder to name now. Something that was making a very rapid calculation.
Jordan squatted down to eye level.
"Goku didn't lie to you," he said. "I'm a Super Saiyan. Right now. Have been for a while." He let that settle for one beat. "Do you want that power?"
The silence it produced was the silence of a magnitude-fifteen earthquake happening entirely inside someone's skull.
Vegeta's lips moved. His voice, when it came, had been stripped of its usual register by blood and damage and the fact that he was horizontal. "You." He stopped. Started again. "Evidence."
"Evidence." Jordan appeared to consider this as a reasonable request. He looked at Goku, who was standing just behind him with the specific expression of a man who is being patient about something and finding it educational.
Then he placed his hand on Vegeta's shoulder.
"Watch this," he said.
The memories arrived the way they always did through this particular technique—not like a recollection, but like presence, the vividness of something happening rather than something remembered. Vegeta had no frame for what was being done to him and no ability to resist it in his current condition, so he received it fully.
He saw Namek. He saw Frieza—three transformations, each one a different order of magnitude, the final form so far beyond the Vegeta who had believed himself at the ceiling that the gap between them was almost abstract. He saw himself in those memories. Saw how that ended.
He saw the moment.
The man with gold hair and light green eyes—the aura around him unmistakable, the exact signature he'd been reading all morning at close proximity—roaring into a sky that couldn't contain the energy. The transformation itself. Every detail of it matching the person crouched in front of him with perfect accuracy, right down to the way the hair moved.
The memory ended.
Vegeta stared at Goku.
Goku, who had no idea what had just been shared, became visibly uncomfortable under the intensity of that stare and shifted his weight. "...I beat you up earlier today," he said. "Is it really necessary to be this focused on me about it?"
He doesn't know yet. Vegeta processed this. He doesn't know what he's going to become.
But he will.
"One more thing," Jordan said. He hadn't moved. "Frieza's final form runs around one hundred and twenty million in combat power. And the destruction of Planet Vegeta—" He paused, watching Vegeta's face with the attention of someone who knows what the next sentence is going to do. "—wasn't a meteorite. Frieza destroyed it himself. To eliminate the Saiyan race before it could produce something he couldn't control."
The desert was quiet.
Vegeta did not react the way someone who had never considered this possibility would react. He did not react the way someone hearing it confirmed after long suspicion would react either. He went somewhere very still, very internal, the calm of a person who has received a large amount of information and is deciding—very deliberately—not to perform any emotion about it until they've understood what it means.
Ten seconds passed.
"You're not planning to kill me," he said. "You've told me things you didn't need to tell me. You want something."
Jordan stood up. Dusted his knees. "I'm so much happier dealing with intelligent people," he said, to the desert in general.
He looked down at Vegeta with the expression of a man who has done the calculation and is now presenting the results. "Goku is staying on Earth. He needs someone who can genuinely push him—a real opponent, someone close enough to his level to force growth, not a training dummy. Right now, in this entire universe, that's you." He turned slightly, so the sun was behind him, the light falling around his silhouette in a way that was, possibly, not entirely coincidental. "I'll give you everything I gave him. All of it. Train with him. Fight him. Keep pushing until you're past your current ceiling. Do that, and you'll get where you want to go."
He let it hang in the air for a moment.
"Do you want that power, Vegeta?"
Vegeta's eyes were on him. Both of them knew what the answer was. The prince had traveled across the stars to find something worth fighting, and was lying in a desert crater with broken arms having been shown exactly what that something could look like. There was only one direction this conversation ended.
But he was Vegeta, so it took another moment.
"Hey, Jordan—" Goku's voice arrived at exactly the wrong time. "When did I actually tell you the secret to Super—"
Jordan's hand covered his mouth. The motion was smooth, the grip firm, the expression Jordan turned on Goku absolutely tranquil.
"You told me," Jordan said, quietly and with great conviction. "In detail. I remember it clearly. You were very forthcoming." His eyes communicated something additional: the future of your continued access to interesting fights depends on you agreeing with me right now.
Goku considered this information. He considered Jordan's grip on his face. He considered the fight he'd just had, and the fights Jordan had been suggesting awaited him in the future, and the fact that Jordan had healed him twice today and created the conditions for the most genuinely interesting battle he'd fought since arriving on Earth.
He nodded. Enthusiastically, like a rattle drum.
Jordan released him.
"...I agree."
Vegeta's voice was quiet. Not defeated—decided. He had looked at what was on offer and weighed it against dying in a desert with nothing resolved, and arrived at the conclusion that only one of those options left him with a future.
I, Vegeta, do not stop here. Not here. Not now. Not ever.
Jordan raised his hand.
The three techniques came in sequence—Super Healing first, the Dragon Clan warmth moving through Vegeta's body and reversing the morning's accumulated damage in a matter of seconds; the Dragon Clan Magic shaping material from ambient energy to replace the destroyed battle suit; the force-field collar materializing last, closing around Vegeta's neck with a soft click that he registered but didn't comment on.
Vegeta stood.
The Zenkai had done its quiet, relentless work through the healing process—the near-death passive compounding the two brushes with mortality into banked potential, integrating it smoothly into his restored baseline. His combat power had climbed to within proximity of Goku's own. Not equal. But in the range of interesting.
He looked down at his new clothing.
Turtle Hermit style, orange and dark, built for training and movement. On the chest and across the back, in strokes that managed to be simultaneously calligraphic and somewhat smug: 乔.
Vegeta stared at the character.
Jordan's expression was perfectly pleasant.
Vegeta looked at Goku's uniform. The same style. Looked at Raditz's, still visible at the far edge of the battlefield. Same style.
He looked back at the character on his chest.
He said nothing.
He was, after all, a practical man.