Jordan's biomagnetic field rolled outward in absolute silence.
There was no visible physical effect. There was no dramatic, crackling arc of blue electricity or glowing, visible aura. It was just a massive, invisible pulse of electromagnetic authority rapidly expanding outward from Jordan's relaxed position. It instantly covered the flat plain, the distant, rocky ridgeline, the smoking impact crater, and the spherical spaceship still half-buried in the earth. Every single piece of active electronic hardware caught within that massive range registered the sudden, overwhelming interference at the exact same moment.
It was a rapid cascade of quiet, permanent electronic deaths, happening one right after the other.
Jordan crouched down beside the deeply unconscious Raditz and casually rolled the heavy alien over onto his back with the toe of his boot.
He ran a quick, precise telekinetic scan directly through the flexible lining of the dark combat suit. He found exactly what he was looking for almost immediately. It was a small remote control that closely resembled a thin, black smartphone, securely tucked away into a hidden interior pocket that most standard physical searches would have completely missed.
F-boy instantly materialized right at Jordan's shoulder.
The invisible Stand extended one large, pale-purple hand and smoothly accepted the alien device without a single word of comment. A few rapid, experimental taps on the unfamiliar, alien interface, and the spacecraft's primary propulsion system ignited in the distance with a low, powerful mechanical thrum.
The spherical capsule ship rose smoothly from the smoking crater in a perfect, clean parabola.
It touched down gently on the dirt road right beside Jordan without disturbing a single blade of the surrounding grass.
"Genuine interstellar-age engineering," Jordan observed quietly, looking the pod over with deep interest. It was round, incredibly compact, and clearly designed for only one occupant. The white hull was heavily dented and scorched from atmospheric re-entry, but the overall structural integrity looked perfectly sound.
He activated his Card Mastery skill.
A soft azure light spread gently from the palm of his hand. The local reality simply folded inward around the two alien objects, the cracked scouter and the massive spacecraft both. Two crisp, white-bordered cards rapidly crystallized from thin air, spinning lazily for a brief moment before settling neatly into F-boy's waiting hands.
[Fantasy Card: Scouter] — N[Fantasy Card: Saiyan Individual Spacecraft] — N
F-boy held both of the new cards securely.
Then, he did not leave.
Jordan glanced sideways. The Stand was just floating there, looking back at him with those familiar, flat, dead-fish eyes. It was the absolute, unnerving stillness of a supernatural being that possessed infinite patience, and currently had zero intention of pretending to have even an ounce more patience than it actually did.
"...Fine. I get it."
Jordan straightened up slowly and spread both of his hands in a wide gesture of magnanimous, forced surrender.
"It is just the one Limiter Break card. Take it. Use it however you want to." He paused, his tone dropping into exaggerated, mocking sorrow. "...Sob sob."
F-boy slowly raised one pale hand. He gave Jordan a single, highly eloquent middle finger.
Then, with his other hand, the Stand smoothly drew the glittering, purple-bordered card from the layered skirt armor at his waist. The intense SR rarity glow perfectly caught the afternoon sunlight. The smug, bald face on the card's artwork grinned up from the glossy surface with its characteristic, irritating dead-fish cheerfulness. The artwork was completely unaware of exactly how much Jordan had wanted to use this specific card himself, or perhaps it was just completely indifferent to that fact.
F-boy met the card's illustrated gaze for one long moment.
Then, he violently drove the purple card directly into his own chest.
The immediate reaction was not subtle.
A massive, blinding wave of blue-white psychic energy detonated outward from F-boy's ethereal form. It was not destructive, and it was not physically violent, but it was incredibly, terrifyingly vast. It filled the entire empty space between the ground and the sky like a sudden, unnatural tide coming in. It pressed heavily against Jordan's enhanced senses, and it pressed heavily against absolutely everything else in the environment.
The white clouds high above the plain seemed to completely pause mid-drift. The tall green weeds stopped rustling in the wind. The distant, ambient birdsong abruptly cut off, as though every single bird in the region had collectively decided that something else required their absolute, undivided attention.
For a long, strange moment, the entire world simply held its breath.
Then, F-boy smoothly dissolved back into Jordan's body. The massive psychic ocean immediately receded right along with him, and the sunny afternoon instantly resumed exactly as though it had never paused at all.
Jordan stood entirely alone on the ruined plain with a bruised, unconscious Saiyan at his feet. He had the quiet, absolute certainty that his Stand had just consumed something incredibly significant, and would definitely not be responsive for quite a while.
He is going to be out cold for hours, Jordan thought, shaking his head with a slight smile. Every single time. He overindulges on the power upgrades, and then he just sleeps it off exactly like a college student after finals week.
He rolled his neck once, popping the joints, and turned his full attention inward to the Mind Network.
His perception expanded outward automatically. It was incredibly familiar and pinpoint precise, far better and more reliable than any alien scouter could ever hope to be. The unique biomagnetic signatures of every single living being within his massive range quickly arranged themselves in his situational awareness like glowing dots on a map. Most of them were small and highly diffuse, just the normal background hum of local animal life and distant, ordinary humans going about their sunny afternoon.
But a few of the signatures registered as unusually sharp and highly defined. They were disciplined. They carried the specific, unmistakable quality of a master martial artist's aura: tightly contained, highly intentional, and dangerously coiled.
The absolute nearest one was currently about thirty kilometers out.
That will do perfectly.
Jordan reached down and casually lifted the massive Raditz with just one hand. The heavily armored Saiyan dangled limply from his grip with all the grace and dignity of a sack of particularly expensive, bloodstained laundry. Jordan let the Herrscher's spatial authority take full hold of the surrounding area.
Space instantly bent. The environment completely changed.
High Above: The Kami Lookout
The elderly, green-skinned Kami had been quietly watching everything ever since the alien spacecraft first made atmospheric entry.
He stood perfectly still at the curved white railing of the heavenly lookout, leaning slightly on his wooden cane. He had observed the entire sequence of chaotic events in perfect order: Raditz's violent landing, the terrified farmer in his truck, the sudden emergence of a tall figure from a spatial distortion, and the brief, entirely one-sided physical exchange that immediately followed.
He had said absolutely nothing the entire time. In his very long, quiet life watching over the Earth, he had finally learned the crucial difference between global events that genuinely warranted his divine intervention, and events that simply warranted close, careful watching.
"You felt it too, didn't you, Mr. Popo?" Kami said quietly, not taking his eyes off the world below. "That sudden aura."
Mr. Popo stood silently right beside him. His dark hands were neatly folded in front of him, and his brow was deeply furrowed. Cold sweat was already visibly beading on his forehead.
"I sensed it clearly, Kami," Popo confirmed, his voice hushed. "The alien was incredibly powerful on his own. But that young man defeated him so quickly and effortlessly that it barely even registered as a proper fight." He paused for a moment, carefully searching for the right framing to describe the impossible. "And then... what just happened down there. That sudden burst of energy. It felt exactly like a massive ocean appearing completely out of nowhere."
The old Kami nodded once, very slowly. His wrinkled grip on his wooden cane tightened by a fraction of an inch.
"They look exactly like ordinary people," Kami said softly. "But they seem to have appeared completely out of nowhere. I cannot determine yet whether their sudden presence here is a great fortune, or a terrible catastrophe for this entire planet."
Mr. Popo considered the heavy question. Then, he spoke very carefully: "He did actively protect that terrified farmer immediately. He did it without any hesitation. He protected him before he did anything else."
The old Kami said nothing in response. His ancient gaze remained firmly locked on the distant, ruined plain far below, where the thick dust from two completely collapsed mountains was still slowly settling against the afternoon sky.
Elsewhere in the Galaxy:
The planet had honestly been quite beautiful once upon a time.
The surface water had been that very particular, vibrant shade of blue that always photographs exceptionally well from high orbit. The massive canopy trees had been round-topped and almost architectural in their strict regularity. They had covered the sprawling coastal plains in something closely approaching a formal, manicured garden built at a true civilizational scale.
Absolutely none of that breathtaking beauty was particularly visible at the moment.
The massive, advanced city that had once occupied the largest coastal shelf was currently on fire. It was not burning dramatically, or all at once. It was just the deep, methodical, unstoppable burn of massive stone structures that had been repeatedly struck by highly concentrated energy blasts and then simply left to proceed without any interruption. Towering, black smoke columns rose into the sky in a loose, brutal grid pattern. Each thick column clearly marked exactly where a towering building had recently been. The panicked screaming had mostly stopped by now. The terrified stragglers still desperately running at the very edges of the fire line were significantly fewer now than they had been an hour ago.
Nappa floated slowly up from the ruined surface. His brown, furry tail was securely wrapped around his thick waist, and his brutal expression was rapidly transitioning from the comfortable, familiar warmth of completed carnage back to appropriate military attentiveness. He leveled out in the smoky air directly beside Vegeta, who had not even bothered to descend to the surface for the fight.
The short Saiyan prince stood suspended in the air high above the burning city. His arms were tightly crossed over his chest plate, and he was currently looking at absolutely nothing in particular, or perhaps he was looking at everything all at once.
"Raditz seems to have completely failed, Lord Vegeta," Nappa grunted.
"I heard," Vegeta replied.
Vegeta's voice was completely flat. He was not surprised in the slightest; he had the live scouter feed playing directly in his ear for the entire, pathetic sequence of events. But the absolute flatness of his tone had a very specific, dangerous texture to it. It was the cold texture of a highly intelligent man rapidly recalibrating his entire worldview.
"He failed before he even managed to find Kakarot," Nappa added helpfully. The underlying implication of his statement was incredibly clear: retrieving Kakarot was supposed to be the absolute simplest, easiest part of this entire assignment.
"Raditz is an absolute disgrace to our race." Vegeta uncrossed one arm just long enough to make a sharp, dismissive gesture toward the stars, then tightly crossed it again. "He always was."
Nappa nodded his bald head with the practiced, easy grace of someone who had been eagerly agreeing with this exact assessment for many years.
"So, do we still go to Earth then? We could just ignore it and move straight on to the next assignment..."
"We go." The interruption was quiet, cold, and absolute. Vegeta's dark gaze finally sharpened, settling intensely on the smoky mid-distance as though something hiding there had suddenly become incredibly interesting to him. "The pathetic lower-class soldier is completely irrelevant now. I want to see this Earthling for myself."
"You mean the one who beat Raditz?" Nappa asked, surprised.
"Something with that kind of massive physical output defeated Raditz in direct, hand-to-hand combat, on a dirtball planet that the Legion's intelligence division explicitly classified as low-level." Vegeta paused for a moment. The massive fire raging below them crackled loudly in the silence. "Either the initial intelligence report was entirely wrong, or something significant has drastically changed on that planet that no one has bothered to report. Either way, I want to know exactly what it is."
Nappa's dark eyes instantly brightened with the very particular, bloodthirsty enthusiasm of a violent man who had just been told that something actually worth hitting was waiting for him.
"Do you think it might actually be a mid-level planet?"
"The total value of a standard mid-level planet is barely enough to justify the long travel time for the two of us," Vegeta said smoothly. He spoke with the arrogant air of someone thinking out loud strictly for the benefit of someone who desperately needed things stated as plainly as possible. "But a planet that can somehow produce an individual of that surprising capability might offer far more interesting prospects for us. There could be valuable resources hidden there that we don't know about yet. And..." Vegeta allowed a slight, cruel pause, "...we can easily deal with Kakarot's failure at the exact same time. Two birds with one stone."
Nappa instantly straightened to full military attention. His transition from somewhat analytical to violently eager was almost instantaneous.
"You have thought this through very carefully, Lord Vegeta!"
He bowed his large body with a physical extravagance that his massive, muscular build made look somewhat absurd and comical.
Vegeta accepted the praise with the bored, practiced tolerance of a man who had been receiving this exact, sycophantic variety of praise from this exact person for the vast majority of his life, and had long since stopped consciously registering it as meaningful.
"Stop wasting my time," Vegeta snapped. "Finish the cleanup down there, and then contact the Legion command for the official handover."
"And then?"
Vegeta was already turning his back on the burning city.
"Earth."
Jordan smoothly reappeared in the center of a quiet, grassy clearing.
All around him were tall, ancient trees and dappled, peaceful afternoon sunlight. It was the specific kind of deep silence that was actually densely layered with ambient insect noise, the soft rustle of wind through the leaves, and the distant, pleasant sound of running water. There were towering mountains visible in the distance, their jagged shapes incredibly familiar to Jordan from a certain legendary training ground he had seen on a television screen in a completely different life.
He pulled the deeply sleeping F-boy fully back into his own body. The Stand was completely dormant, happily digesting its massive meal, and entirely unconcerned with anything happening in the outside world. Jordan could still feel the lingering edges of the massive psychic surge slowly dissipating through his own nervous system. The Limiter Break card had definitely done something highly significant this time. Whatever F-boy was currently evolving into, it was going to be incredibly interesting to see.
In the meantime, he had a delivery to make.
He adjusted his firm grip on Raditz's armor. The Saiyan remained deeply unconscious, and was rapidly beginning to feel slightly less like heavy laundry and significantly more like a very inconveniently-sized piece of physical evidence.
Jordan's biomagnetic field was still actively pulsing. It was a quiet, massive radius of electromagnetic authority seamlessly extending from his physical position. Within that massive field, he could feel the nearest meaningful biological signature with absolute, crystal clarity.
It was highly disciplined. It was dangerously coiled. It was incredibly powerful.
It was a man wearing a white headscarf. He had a green complexion. He possessed a heavy aura that felt exactly like a massive bank of thunderclouds that had suddenly decided to take a humanoid shape.
Jordan took a step forward, fully entering the clearing properly.
Piccolo froze entirely.
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