Vegeta tugged at the collar.
It sat against his skin with the mild presence of something that knew it was there—not tight, not restrictive, just present, like a hand resting on a shoulder. He could feel it. The suppressed anger in his face was the anger of a man who has decided something is acceptable and is still annoyed that he's decided it.
"It's a training device," Jordan said, without looking up. "More than a restraint."
He raised one hand, and the collar's outer surface dissolved—the physical material retreating beneath Vegeta's skin, becoming internal, invisible. What remained was its function: a field that would read his body, calibrate against his ki output, and apply precisely calculated gravitational resistance during training. In an environment like Earth's, where conventional weights were too light to mean much to a Saiyan elite, this was considerably more useful than anything else available.
"It suppresses nothing while you're behaving," Jordan continued. "It also accelerates your training response by placing continuous load on your ki output. Think of it as a permanent weighted suit that adjusts in real time."
Vegeta processed this with the expression of a man who refuses to look impressed and is failing slightly.
He snorted. Crossed his arms. Said nothing further on the subject.
When the three of them crossed the desert back toward the spectators—Goku with the cheerful bounce of someone who has recently had an excellent fight, Jordan with the measured stride of someone whose morning was professionally satisfying, and Vegeta with the posture of a man walking into a situation he has decided to tolerate—the Z Fighters received them with an expression that could only be described as collective cognitive dissonance.
Yamcha looked at Vegeta. At the matching Turtle Hermit uniform. At the 乔. on his chest. At Raditz's 乔.. At Goku's.
He looked at Jordan.
Jordan's expression was serenely unhelpful.
Fifteen minutes ago, Yamcha thought, that man was trying to kill all of us. He broke Goku's shoulder. He turned into a giant ape.
Now he's wearing the team uniform.
No one voiced any of this. Jordan and Goku had vouched. There was a precedent—an uncomfortable, orange-uniformed, still-present precedent currently trying to hide behind Tien—and nobody had enough information to argue with Jordan's judgment, so the general consensus settled into a kind of uncertain acceptance.
Which brought everyone's attention to Raditz.
He had been quiet since the artificial moon. Too quiet—the quiet of a man doing rapid threat assessment and not liking his numbers. He was rubbing his hands together in the specific way of someone who has a request and knows the timing is terrible.
He approached Vegeta.
"My lord." He attempted a smile that landed somewhere between placating and desperate. "About my... situation. I want you to understand, I was completely—"
"Get lost."
Two words. Flat, cold, carrying the full weight of a man who has had a long morning and has zero capacity remaining for whatever this is.
Raditz deflated. He stepped back. He found a rock to stand behind and stood behind it.
The battlefield emptied as the afternoon wore on. The Z Fighters departed in groups—Piccolo and Gohan, Krillin and the others, Raditz trailing behind at a safe distance—until the Gobi Desert returned to the impersonal state it preferred: vast, windswept, the silence of a place that existed long before people started fighting in it and intended to exist long after.
Night came.
A gentle wind moved across the churned desert floor, carrying fine sand that caught the moonlight and glinted in ways that sand does not normally glint.
Not all of it was sand.
The glinting particles settled on three specific points: the three severed tails that still lay where they had fallen, the bloodstains that mapped the day's events in dark irregular patches across the hardpan. They were small enough that even a careful observer would have needed excellent eyesight—insect-sized, metallic, their movements too deliberate to be natural. One by one, they extracted what they had come for, samples taken with the precision of instruments built for exactly this purpose.
Then they consolidated. Merged into a single unit—still small, still inconspicuous—and drifted northward with the wind.
The desert was quiet again.
Then it was illuminated by a shimmer of blue light, and quiet again after that too.
One month later.
The training camp had found its rhythm in the way that intense things eventually do—through repetition, competition, and the mutually beneficial annoyance of two Saiyans who were both too proud to be outworked by the other. The weighted suits had been calibrated. The morning sessions began before sunrise. Arguments about sparring parameters were frequent and usually resolved by Jordan suggesting they find out the answer empirically, which settled things faster than discussion.
At midday, Goku and Vegeta were working through a quantity of roasted meat that would have fed a small family for a week.
Jordan watched them from his position flat on his back in the grass—hands behind his head, face tilted toward the sun, the posture of a man who has done what he came to do and is enjoying the remaining time. He had eaten his share an hour ago.
"Hey, Jordan." Goku took an enormous bite and spoke around it without ceremony. "You're leaving again?"
Vegeta's jaw slowed. Only for a moment. He kept eating, but the slight alteration in pace meant he was listening.
"This time it's actually time," Jordan said. He watched a cloud take its time moving across the sky. "I don't have much runway left in this world. Things to finish, and then I'm going back." He paused. "I don't know when the next time is."
"Hm." Goku chewed. Swallowed. The cheerfulness dipped for a moment into something more genuine. "Piccolo went to Namek to train. If you go too, Vegeta's the only one left at my level."
The prince's lips twitched very slightly. He continued to eat with the dignity of a man pretending he hadn't heard that.
"Vegeta's enough for you," Jordan said. "Stop fishing for sympathy."
"I'm not fishing!" Goku pointed his meat at Jordan in protest. "I'm just saying! It's a small group!"
Jordan sighed—the long, contented sigh of a man who has been having this kind of conversation for a year and found it, on balance, worthwhile. "You'll find your way to Super Saiyan. I'm not worried about it."
"I'll be there before Vegeta," Goku said, immediately and with complete confidence.
"You will not," Vegeta said, at exactly the same volume and conviction, without looking up from his meat.
They didn't argue further about it. They didn't need to.
Jordan was quiet for a moment, enjoying the sun.
"Joson." Vegeta's voice had shifted registers—still flat, but with an undertone that Jordan recognized as the prince attempting to ask something without appearing to ask it. "You and that Earth woman went north. The one called Bulma." He paused. "What was that about."
It was not phrased as a question.
Jordan opened one eye and looked at Vegeta sideways.
That tone, he thought. Already.
Goku, who had an excellent instinct for detecting tension and a complete absence of any instinct for understanding its source, looked between the two of them with mild confusion and kept eating.
Jordan closed his eye again. "Research collection," he said. "An old scientist had a facility up there. I dealt with it."
He didn't elaborate on Dr. Gero—on the Red Ribbon Army's legacy, on the sleeping Android 16 in his underground lab, on the seventeen and eighteen currently midway through their biological modifications, on the thing in the growth tank that would have been Cell in three more years. Not Vegeta's problem to know about, not yet. What mattered was that Jordan had located the facility, confirmed the threat inventory, and used the precise surgical application of thermal vision to remove every organic and mechanical element down to the molecular level.
The design blueprints: gone. The bio-android cultivation tanks: gone. The embryonic Cell culture: gone. Android 16's chamber: gone. Seventeen and eighteen, extracted from the facility and relocated before the heat vision touched anything—they were another problem for another day, but not that problem.
Earth's future had enough on its plate.
"It's handled," Jordan said. And left it there.
He spent the next day moving across the planet.
Not rushing—taking time with each stop, finding the people who had built something with him over the past year and saying what needed saying. The Earth warriors received SR Senzu Bean cards with strict accounting instructions and the reminder that they were a finite resource, not a subscription service. Bulma got a final check-in on the ongoing research projects and a reiteration that the Capsule Corp arrangement remained active. Gohan, recovered and back to training with Piccolo, received a pat on the head that he was too proud to admit he appreciated.
By evening, he had the Dragon Balls.
A year had passed. The scatter-reset had completed. All seven were back in his inventory, pulled from their respective coordinates with practiced ease—no radar required when you'd already mapped every frequency. He summoned them in an empty field outside the city, the familiar process of arrangement, the incantation that had started to feel like a habitual phrase rather than a magical formula.
The sky darkened.
The wind shifted.
The Ground Dragon rose from the assembled balls in its customary column of light, beginning its traditional pose—head high, body coiling through the storm clouds, preparing to wait in magnificent silence for a request worthy of its divine authority.
Then it looked down.
Recognized the blond hair. The faint ambient glow. The unhurried stance.
The pose deflated slightly.
Shenron lowered his enormous head with the respect of a dragon who has learned to simply get on with it when this particular mortal calls. "Your Excellency. We meet again." His voice carried through the thunder with ceremonial gravity. "State your wish."
"A simple one this time." Jordan had his hands in his pockets. "I want to experience Frieza's ki. Just experience it—the signature, the feeling of it."
Silence.
Then: "Frieza."
The word sat in the air differently than the others had.
Shenron's crimson eyes were very still. His massive body did not move. He remained in this state for several seconds—processing, evaluating, going somewhere internal that dragons go when they encounter something that occupies a specific category in their understanding of the universe.
Then he nodded. "If it is only to sense it—this wish falls within my authority."
The light came from his eyes, red and focused. Jordan felt it arrive: a ki signature traversing the distance between a summoning circle in an empty Earth field and something that was currently somewhere on the far side of the solar system, separated from this planet by an expanse of space that had no reason to feel small. But it did feel small, because the thing at the other end of it was large enough to make everything else feel proportional.
Oh, Jordan thought.
Not fear. Recognition. The thing he was touching through Shenron's granted wish had the specific character of a power that had been allowed to exist for a very long time without encountering anything that could meaningfully limit it. Not a fighter's ki—not the focused purposeful energy of Goku or Vegeta, which was pointed toward something, shaped by intention. This was a presence. An ambient condition. The ki of something that regarded the universe as a personal property dispute it had already resolved in its own favor.
So that's what that feels like.
Shenron completed the wish and withdrew, the Dragon Balls scattering to their new coordinates across the Earth. The storm cleared in the way it always did—instantly, the sky returning to the comfortable evening blue that preceded a clear night.
Jordan stood in the empty field.
He already had it. The ki signature, locked through Shenron's conduit, cross-referenced against his Energy Detector's baseline and filed. He raised two fingers to his forehead—the familiar contact point, the Instant Transmission's starting gesture—and let his willpower extend outward along that signature.
Across star systems. Through the specific cold of interstellar space that made distance feel less like geography and more like a statement about the size of things.
He found it.
A figure in a hovering chair—compact, purple-skinned, the body language of someone who had been comfortable for so long that comfort had become indistinguishable from their personality. The smile on that small face was the particular smile of a creature who was currently enjoying something at someone else's expense, which appeared to be its default setting.
The signature matched perfectly.
Hello, Frieza.
Jordan's form blurred. The empty field contained no one.