The thick dust had not fully settled over the smoking impact crater in the distance, but Jordan was no longer looking at it.
He was looking down at the farmer.
The man was short and middle-aged. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, a sweat-stained plaid shirt, and heavy denim overalls. He had a hunting shotgun leveled with both hands. His aim was surprisingly steady, but his eyes were wide and panicked. Right behind him, one of those fat, two-legged chickens had already calmed down and resumed pecking at the dry gravel, completely indifferent to the tense situation.
Something about the entire scene felt incredibly familiar to Jordan.
He tilted his head slightly, taking in the details. The terrified farmer. The beat-up pickup truck. The smoking impact crater out in the fields. The quiet, rural emptiness of the landscape. It was the specific, frantic energy of a normal guy pointing a rifle at a stranger who had just casually stepped out of a black hole with his hands shoved in his pockets.
Then it finally clicked.
Oh.
A wide smile worked its way onto Jordan's face before he could stop it.
He was currently standing face-to-face with the most unintentionally famous background character in the entire Dragon Ball franchise. This was the man who had been out working his fields when Raditz first landed on Earth. The man who had stood there, absolutely terrified, while the fate of the entire planet was being decided right next to his truck. The man who had become a meme so thoroughly that Jordan had seen his face plastered on internet reaction images for years before he ever actually sat down to watch a single episode of the show.
The farmer with a shotgun.
Jordan had landed at the exact beginning of Dragon Ball Z.
Well, Jordan thought to himself, he could have landed somewhere a lot worse.
He glanced over his shoulder at the distant, rising dust cloud. Something heavy had just hit the dirt out there at terminal velocity, and he had a very good idea of exactly what it was.
"Pops," Jordan said pleasantly, turning back to the trembling man. "Let's not be so jumpy."
He raised one hand. Before the farmer's brain could even send the signal to pull the trigger, Jordan's fingers gently found the long barrel of the shotgun and bent it upward. He did not do it dramatically, and he used no visible physical effort. It was just a smooth, unhurried redirection, like a person adjusting the angle of a reading lamp. The cold steel deformed with a soft, metallic groan and stayed permanently bent toward the sky.
The farmer stared cross-eyed at his ruined gun. Then he looked up at Jordan. His jaw worked up and down, but no actual sound came out of his throat.
"See?" Jordan loosened his grip and gave the man a light, friendly pat on the shoulder. It was a gesture that was probably not nearly as reassuring as he intended it to be. "Now we can have a proper conversation."
The farmer began to shake violently.
"Speaking of which," Jordan continued, nodding his head toward the smoking crater in the fields. "I probably just saved your life. That thing out there isn't a meteorite." He let the silence stretch for a second to build effect. "It is a bloodthirsty alien. If you had driven over there to take a look, you never would have come back."
The farmer just kept staring blankly at the twisted rifle in his shaking hands.
Jordan could easily guess what the man's internal dialogue sounded like right now. You just walked out of a literal black hole, ruined my favorite shotgun with one bare hand, and now you are telling me that I should be scared of whatever is sitting in that hole?
The farmer definitely had a valid point. Jordan chose not to address it.
A massive sonic boom suddenly split the quiet afternoon sky before he could say anything else anyway.
The heavy shockwave rolled forcefully across the flat plains like a thunderclap. The two-legged chickens scattered in a chaotic burst of alarmed squawking and flying feathers. A split second later, a figure dropped straight out of the sky and landed on the dirt road directly in front of them. He hit the ground with the heavy, casual weight of someone who had been dropping onto foreign planets for years and had never found a single one of them particularly impressive.
Jordan took a step back and looked the newcomer over properly.
He was tall. He wasn't quite as tall as Jordan, but it was close. It was close enough that the Saiyan immediately registered the height difference and clearly did not like it. He had wild, jet-black hair that hung all the way down past his waist. He wore the standard issue Frieza Force combat armor: a dark, flexible bodysuit underneath rounded, segmented shoulder guards and a hard chest plate. The armor was heavily scuffed, molded to a muscular build that had been brutally field-tested across the galaxy. The green glass of the scouter over his left eye caught the bright afternoon sun with a faint glare.
A heavy, oppressive aura clung to his body. It wasn't raw power being actively released, just the ambient, suffocating weight of someone who had spent his entire life doing violence professionally and had never once felt guilty about it.
Raditz.
The notoriously disappointing older brother. The character who had arrived in the very first episode, established the massive, terrifying threat of the Saiyan race, and then immediately lost to a man whose combat power was technically lower than his own. It was an embarrassing outcome that the fandom had been gently mocking for decades.
Still, Jordan reminded himself. This was the very beginning of the timeline. This was before the universe's power scaling had completely collapsed into absurdity. Raditz was the opening act of the entire franchise, and opening acts tended to set the baseline for everything that followed.
Jordan watched quietly as Raditz surveyed the rural scene with poorly concealed disgust.
"There are still people living on this mudball?" Raditz sneered. His cold gaze swept across the dusty farmyard, the rusted pickup truck, and finally settled on the terrified farmer. "What the hell has Kakarot been doing all these years?"
The scouter over his eye chimed with a clean, mechanical beep.
Raditz looked up at the digital readout on the glass lens. His lip curled in pure disdain. "One of them is absolute trash. Combat power of five." He let out a short, dismissive scoff. "What a weak race."
The scouter chimed a second time as it scanned Jordan.
And then it simply failed to provide a reading.
Raditz frowned deeply. He looked up, trying to read the lens. He reached up and tapped the side of the plastic casing with two gloved fingers. He frowned even harder.
"What is this? Why isn't there a value? Is this garbage malfunctioning again?" He smacked the side of the device hard against his palm, looking visibly irritated. "Those absolute idiots down in the technical department. I swear they cut every single corner they possibly can."
The biomagnetic field, Jordan thought, watching the alien struggle with his headset. It scrambles all basic sensor technology. It always has.
Raditz's heavy aura flared outward with his rising annoyance. It created a cold, crackling pressure in the air that made the back of Jordan's throat taste like old copper pennies.
The farmer let out a strangled, pathetic gasp and stumbled a few steps backward, his boots crunching loudly on the gravel.
"He really is just a standard Saiyan," Jordan murmured quietly, speaking more to himself than to anyone else.
He was arrogant. He was highly irritable. He defaulted to violence by pure reflex. He was so thoroughly, deeply convinced that the entire universe was organized strictly by numerical combat power that a simple missing scouter readout was treated as a personal insult rather than a potential threat warning.
In fairness to Raditz, across most of the known cosmos, his people weren't exactly wrong. The Saiyan model of viewing reality had gotten them quite far.
He had just never encountered a passive biomagnetic field before.
Raditz finally gave up on slapping his broken scouter and redirected his full attention forward. He took Jordan in for the first time. He registered the relaxed height, the lean build, and the casual posture. He noticed Jordan's hands hanging loosely at his sides. Most importantly, he noticed the complete and total absence of fear.
Raditz made a slight physical adjustment, realizing he had to tilt his chin up just a fraction of an inch to meet Jordan's dark eyes. It was not much of a difference. But it was enough to bother him.
"You seem quite tall," Raditz said. He used the highly specific, grating tone of a man who considered his own frame to be the natural, universal upper limit of acceptable height, and was personally offended by any biological evidence to the contrary.
Jordan said absolutely nothing.
Raditz smiled. It was a cold, quick baring of teeth. "Then you can be the very first one to die."
He moved.
The sudden punch came with visual afterimages. It was genuinely, terrifyingly fast. It was the kind of explosive physical speed that would have been functionally invisible to the farmer, to most of the planet's human population, and to most of the living things currently residing in this star system. Raditz had thrown this exact same punch to open fights across a dozen different worlds, and it had never once been blocked.
Jordan casually raised his right hand and caught it.
He did not block the strike. He did not deflect the momentum away. He simply caught it. His palm was open, his long fingers closing securely around the Saiyan's armored fist in the very last fraction of a second before impact. The massive kinetic force of the blow was entirely absorbed into Jordan's arm without him shifting his stance by a single millimeter.
The physical sensation traveling up Raditz's arm was immediately and clearly wrong. He processed the impact. He instinctively tried to pull his arm back.
Nothing moved.
It felt exactly as if his fist had just been set deep into wet, rapidly hardening concrete. He pulled harder, engaging his heavy shoulders and his back muscles. He applied his full, lethal Saiyan strength to the single, desperate task of retrieving his own hand.
The tall young man standing in front of him simply looked down with a look of mild, detached interest, as if he were observing a particularly spirited and firm handshake.
"Is this really all the Saiyans have?" Jordan asked, tilting his head slightly. "The so-called strongest fighting race in the universe?"
Jordan increased the physical pressure in his grip. He did it incrementally. Precisely. Just enough to make a point.
The painful, sickening groan of physical strain coming from Raditz's trapped knuckles was loud and audible in the quiet air. A thick bead of cold sweat broke out on the Saiyan's forehead.
"Did you skip breakfast this morning?" Jordan asked pleasantly.
Raditz's facial expression went absolutely rigid.
In his twenty-plus years of constant, brutal interstellar warfare, no one had ever said anything like that to him. Not once. Not on a single conquered planet in the entire known galaxy.
His internal calculations began running frantically. According to the Frieza Legion records, Earth was supposed to be a low-level planet. That was exactly why they sent a low-ranking warrior like him here to check on Kakarot. It was a low-level planet, filled with low-level inhabitants, which meant a straightforward, easy assignment. The intelligence report had confirmed all of this. So why was this happening?
Why does this random native have a grip I cannot break? Raditz thought, panic rising in his chest. Those absolute idiots in the intelligence department...
"Blaming the intelligence department won't help you," Jordan said, his tone still perfectly conversational.
Raditz violently flinched. He stared wide-eyed at the human.
"You..." The cold arrogance had dropped out of his rough voice entirely. Something much rawer and far more desperate replaced it. "You can read thoughts?"
"Only when I want to."
Jordan reached his other hand out and smoothly caught Raditz's left fist. The Saiyan had instinctively swung his free arm the exact moment he processed the terrifying invasion of his mind. It was pure reflex, an automatic, desperate reaction because it was the only real response he had left in his arsenal. Jordan stopped the second punch in exactly the same way as the first. It was the same open hand. The same unhurried, flawless motion.
Jordan held both of the alien's fists securely now, side by side between them. He watched calmly as Raditz mentally wrestled with the impossible geometry of his own situation.
"You think any of this matters?" Raditz shouted, his voice going tight and raspy as pure fury finally won out over his shock. He bared his teeth like a cornered animal. "Having some natural physical strength does not make you a real warrior! You are just a primitive! I am a Saiyan! I was born for battle, shaped by it, defined by it!"
His aura violently detonated.
Blinding, pink-white energy erupted simultaneously from both of Raditz's trapped hands. It was raw, unfiltered ki discharged at absolute point-blank range. It was the kind of massive energy output that routinely carved deep craters into moons and permanently ended conversations by wiping out entire continents. The sudden blast lit up the dusty farmyard like a second sun had just ignited on the ground. The rusted pickup truck rattled violently on its suspension. The loose gravel jumped and sparked.
The farmer's legs finally gave out, and he sat down very suddenly in the dirt.
"Not a bad idea," Jordan's voice echoed through the noise.
The explosion fully hit, creating a massive sphere of smoke and fire.
From deep inside the thick, choking cloud, there was a soft exhale. It sounded almost amused.
The triumphant smile immediately died on Raditz's face.
A blur emerged from the smoke at terrifying speed.
The impact came squarely from the front. It was a single, heavy boot print, perfectly centered, pressing directly into the Saiyan's armored breastplate with incredibly efficient and final force.
Raditz cleared the entire farmyard in a completely flat, horizontal arc. The sound of his violent passage was a sharp, splitting crack that echoed across the open plains. A few seconds later, the distant mountain range answered with the deep, booming thud of something very solid hitting solid rock at the wrong end of a significant velocity.
The rocky summit of the nearest peak simply came apart. A massive plume of gray dust rose slowly into the blue sky.
The resulting silence in the farmyard was absolute and complete.
Jordan stood quietly in the slowly settling smoke, his hands already shoved casually back into his jacket pockets. The burnt ground immediately around his boots was completely undisturbed. The rusted pickup truck was untouched by the blast. The two-legged chickens were slowly reassembling their shattered dignity a few meters away in the grass.
The farmer sat in the dirt and stared blankly at the ruined, distant mountain. Then he slowly turned his head to look at Jordan. Then he looked back at the mountain again.
Jordan glanced toward the distant impact site. Raditz was definitely in there somewhere. He was deeply and comprehensively embedded in the shattered rock face, but he was not dead. The desperate ki output from his hands had confirmed at least that much durability. Jordan could still hear a faint heart rate. He could still sense a jagged aura, flickering weakly at the edges of his perception like a guttering candle in the wind.
He would be fine.
Well, Jordan corrected himself. Fine was a highly relative term.
Jordan turned his attention back to the farmer.
The man had not moved a single inch. He was still sitting exactly where he had collapsed during the blinding explosion. His deformed shotgun rested uselessly across his denim knees, his wire glasses were sitting slightly askew on his sweaty nose, and he was looking up at Jordan with the blank, empty stare of a man whose brain had simply reached its absolute limit and shut down for the day.
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