Somewhere in the North Galaxy, a planet was having its last afternoon.
The spherical spacecraft came down in hundreds—thousands—the Frieza Force's standard operating procedure: atmospheric breach, landing, saturation. Those who had seen it before knew exactly what the swarm of descending craft meant. Most of them didn't get to share the knowledge.
On the disc-shaped flagship holding position above the cloud layer, Frieza watched through the observation window with the expression of a man watching a familiar television program. One elbow propped on the armrest of his hovering chair. One hand supporting his cheek. The carnage below, rendered small by altitude, moved with the reliable rhythm of an operation that had been run so many times it had stopped requiring his attention.
"How tedious, Dodoria."
Dodoria—large, red-purple, every surface of him suggesting that evolution had prioritized threat display over aesthetics—stood at appropriate attendance behind the chair. He had learned, over years of service, that this particular statement from his lord was less an observation and more an invitation to be useful. He thought quickly.
"My lord, there was the matter of Vegeta. Lost contact near that northern backwater—you'd mentioned checking on it yourself."
Frieza tilted his head slightly. "Vegeta." He tapped one finger against the chair's armrest in a slow rhythm. "That would be the North Galaxy. An inconvenient distance." The rhythm continued for a moment. "Still. He is a valued subordinate. It would be appropriate to confirm his status personally." The smile arrived—small, pleasant, the smile of someone who finds the concept of checking on a subordinate's death personally quite diverting. "An excellent suggestion, Dodoria. What would I do without you?"
Dodoria lowered his head with the practiced humility of a man who had received this compliment many times and understood exactly what it cost to keep receiving it. "Serving you is the greatest honor of my existence, Lord Frieza."
"Oh ho ho ho ho—"
"Hey hey hey hey—"
The laughter filled the sealed control room—two harmonics of malice, one refined and one earthier, trading back and forth in the way that people laugh when they share a specific understanding of the universe's power dynamics and find them amusing.
Then a breeze moved through the room.
Inside a sealed flagship. In the vacuum of space.
Dodoria stopped laughing.
He had twenty-two thousand units of combat power—a number that placed him among the meaningful fighters in a galaxy full of species that had never produced anything close. His senses were calibrated against that ceiling, which meant that the displacement of air he'd just detected registered as something that should not be possible in this environment, which meant that whatever had caused it needed to be located immediately.
He found it.
The blond figure was simply present—standing near the observation window with the unhurried quality of someone who had arrived at a destination rather than made an entrance. Tall. Gold hair rising in a shape that somehow managed to be both impractical and inevitable. No armor. No weapon. No scouter.
The scouter on Dodoria's face ran its scan automatically.
Then ran it again.
Then displayed five question marks in a row where a number should have been.
Dodoria stared at the readout.
Latest model, he thought, with the specific distress of a man whose most reliable piece of equipment has chosen the worst possible moment to malfunction. Replaced it three months ago.
Frieza, for his part, had gone quite still. The laughter had not resumed. His red eyes tracked across the intruder with the assessment of a creature that had survived a very long time by never misreading the room. The golden hair. The height. The complete absence of any measurable ki—which was not the same as having no ki. A scouter ceiling he knew was twenty thousand. This man's reading was five question marks.
Strange, Frieza thought. I've seen something like that hair before. In a dream, perhaps. Or a prophecy. Or both—those two things were harder to separate than people assumed.
The specific unease that accompanied the thought was very small and arrived very briefly before he suppressed it.
Dodoria stepped forward into the gap between his lord and the intruder, loyalty overriding the part of his brain that was suggesting a different spatial arrangement. "Who are you," he demanded, and the slight catch in the first word was the only concession to the fact that this situation was deeply irregular.
Jordan looked at Frieza.
Close up, the emperor was—interesting. The compact frame that contained a power capable of destroying planets. The natural armor plating across the skull and shoulders, the deep purple skin, the twin tear-streaks of darker purple running from the eyes. The snake tail moving against the chair's surface in a slow, exploratory rhythm. The expression of someone who had been the most dangerous thing in every room he'd ever entered for so long that he'd stopped noticing it.
Ugly-cute, Jordan thought, with the private assessment of someone who has the luxury of forming aesthetic opinions. In a very specific way.
Frieza, for his part, had catalogued Jordan completely and arrived at: this man appeared in my sealed flagship with no transition I detected, he carries no scouter reading, his hair has a quality that is bothering me on a level I'm not going to examine in front of company, and he has not yet said anything, which means either he is very stupid or he is very much not.
Dodoria, visibly torn between his role as loyal guardian and his instinct to stand slightly further away, tried again: "Answer—"
"No need to speculate," Jordan said pleasantly. "Prince Vegeta sends his regards, Your Majesty."
The room did something.
It didn't change—the alloy walls were still there, the observation window, the ambient hum of the flagship's systems—but something about the quality of time in the room became momentarily uncertain, the way water becomes uncertain just before it reaches a temperature change. Frieza's tail stopped moving. Dodoria's demand died somewhere between his chest and his mouth.
Then Jordan was walking toward Frieza.
This was the observable fact. He was walking at normal walking speed. The distance between them was decreasing at the rate that a man walking covers distance.
Dodoria processed: intruder, walking toward Lord Frieza, combat response required—
He swept forward.
Jordan moved past him.
Not around him—past him, through the space Dodoria occupied in the fraction of a second before Dodoria occupied it, the displacement of air arriving after Jordan had already continued forward. Dodoria experienced the brief confusion of a man who has committed to intercepting something and discovered it is no longer where the interception was aimed.
He did not fall. But he did stop, turned, and found that the distance between Jordan and Lord Frieza was now approximately an arm's length.
Frieza looked up.
Jordan had an arm around his shoulder. The grip was companionable, relaxed—the arm of a man sharing a moment with an acquaintance. The smile was sincere. The gold-lit eyes were warm.
The fist came in low.
A deliberate punch, Frieza had time to register. Controlled. This is—
The natural armor that had absorbed the frontal bombardment of a planet-destroying cannon—the carapace that Frieza had never bothered reinforcing because nothing had ever required it to be reinforced—met the fist.
The fist continued.
The baby chair disintegrated. Not broke—disintegrated, the structural integrity of the materials simply ceasing to be relevant in the presence of what was passing through them. Frieza's back rounded outward, the force distributing through a body that was designed to be indestructible and finding the design philosophy somewhat optimistic. His eyes communicated something they had never been required to communicate before.
The purple blood arrived as a spray, following the natural physics of sudden internal pressure redistribution.
In the fraction of a second before it dispersed, Jordan's free hand produced an empty test tube—materialized from nothing, positioned with the precision of something that had been calculated before the punch was thrown. The blood caught the glass on its way past.
F-boy's azure light flickered once. The test tube became a card. The card disappeared.
Jordan set Frieza down. Gently. With the care of someone returning a fragile object to a surface.
He looked at Dodoria, who had not moved—frozen in the specific way of a man whose threat-assessment hierarchy has just been comprehensively restructured—and offered a small, courteous nod.
"His Highness appreciates your lord's understanding," Jordan said. "He wishes you both a pleasant journey."
He raised two fingers to his forehead.
The wind arrived after he left.
The fist that had moved faster than Dodoria's perception could track had moved air in its passage—compressed it, displaced it, set it moving in a wave that had nowhere to go during the action and everywhere to go once the action was complete. It arrived as a gust that hit the alloy walls hard enough to dent them, sent three instrument panels into the air, and rearranged the interior of the Frieza Force's flagship into something that would take an engineering team several hours to explain.
In the resulting debris field, Frieza's body completed its trajectory. The former baby chair—now in many pieces—contributed to the landing zone. His head met the alloy floor with a sound that a solid alloy floor makes when it encounters something heavy and dense but has not, itself, been braced for the impact.
A crater formed in the floor. Small, but architectural. Definitive.
Dodoria stared at the pool of purple blood. At the dented floor. At his lord's current condition, which included a posture that Frieza had never, in all the years Dodoria had served him, adopted voluntarily.
His fighting power was fifty-three, Dodoria thought, with the mechanical persistence of a mind that is refusing to update its model. The scouter said fifty-three. That is Frieza's base power. The highest power reading I have ever seen on this ship is—
Five question marks.
"Cough—"
Frieza's chest moved. Then moved again. The cough that followed had the specific sound of someone discovering that internal organs are capable of having opinions.
His head, which had created the floor crater, tilted upward. His red eyes, still present and still functional, fixed on a point above him as he processed the last thirty seconds.
The golden hair. The smile. The arm around his shoulder. The punch that had—
Even Father, Frieza thought, with the absolute clarity that extreme pain sometimes produces, never hit me like that.
The floor was very cold against his face.
Somewhere in the North Galaxy, a planet finished having its last afternoon.
In the flagship above it, the conqueror of a thousand worlds lay in a small crater of his own making and thought about a man with gold hair who had arrived, collected a blood sample, relayed greetings from a subordinate, and left.
The implications organized themselves in order of importance.
None of them were comforting.