The green alien scouter was roughly the size of a standard monocle and fit snugly over one eye.
It had been, Bulma reflected as she turned it over in her hands, engineered with a highly deceptive simplicity. It strongly suggested either considerable, elegant genius or considerable, dangerous corner-cutting. And this tiny piece of glass had been actively transmitting absolutely everything they said directly to the far side of the galaxy the entire time.
If someone hadn't caught that signal, she thought, a cold shiver running down her spine, we would have just happily handed over every single strategic detail we know about this planet without even realizing it.
Piccolo, still sitting cross-legged in the sand at the very edge of the gathering, had a brief, highly unwelcome internal observation of his own. The Dragon Balls. The magical wishing orbs he had stupidly let the knowledge of slip during a previous, arrogant encounter. The exact same magical orbs that had subsequently attracted exactly this kind of terrifying attention from exactly this kind of ruthless galactic quarter. They were currently sitting heavy in his own thoughts as damning evidence that fatal information leakage was absolutely not a problem caused exclusively by advanced alien technology.
He prudently said absolutely nothing about this to the group.
"Wait! Bulma, keep it on for a second."
Krillin had suddenly appeared right at her elbow, little Gohan balanced easily on one arm. He possessed the specific, frantic energy of a martial artist who had just remembered that a magical machine capable of perfectly measuring combat power was currently standing right in front of him, and he had not yet been officially measured.
"We should definitely check everyone's readings," Krillin urged. "Before you put it away for good."
Bulma looked down at the cracked scouter. She thought about the internal computer chip that Jordan had warned could potentially violently overload and explode. She made a quick executive decision with the practical pragmatism of an engineer who calculated that she probably wouldn't be pointing it at anything remotely close to twenty thousand ever again today.
"Fine. But I am going to do this quickly." She turned the green lens toward Gohan first. "Okay, one. That seems exactly right for a normal four-year-old kid."
Gohan looked back at the glowing scouter with polite, quiet interest.
"Krillin... two hundred and six."
The physical reaction was immediate. Krillin's dark eyes went completely wide in shock, then instantly bright with pride, then wide again as he processed the math.
"Two hundred and six?" He immediately straightened his posture, seemingly growing several centimeters taller in the sand. "That's... wow. That actually means I am significantly stronger than Master Roshi now. Significantly. Like, by a lot."
Much stronger were the exact, boastful words Krillin had wisely chosen not to say out loud, but he had entirely communicated the arrogant sentiment through his heavy emphasis, his suddenly puffed-out chest, and his gloating tone.
Master Roshi, whose own personal readout had just come in at a highly disappointing one hundred and thirty-nine, experienced a prolonged, agonizing moment of silent, deeply personal suffering. His wrinkled lips moved twice behind his white beard without producing a single sound.
"The alien machine may very well have a slight calibration error," Master Roshi suggested weakly to the wind.
Bulma had already ignored him and moved on to her next target. "Goku... three hundred and thirty-four."
"Really? Wow."
Goku casually scratched the back of his spiky head. It was his automatic, ingrained response to receiving any kind of direct compliment about his own physical strength. But then, the actual, concrete number finally reached the part of his brain that had been frantically doing combat math ever since Raditz woke up. The easy smile slowly faded from his face, replaced by something much colder and more focused.
He looked across the gathering at Raditz. One thousand five hundred at absolute peak. Three hundred and thirty-four. The massive, yawning distance between those two numbers suddenly had terrifying, real dimensions.
My current training is far, far from enough, Goku realized grimly.
Bulma was already sweeping the scouter toward her next target, heavily riding the excited momentum of scientific discovery. She had the intense focus of a researcher who had just found a brand new instrument and fully intended to calibrate absolutely everything within her physical reach. Her feet carried her forward across the sand before her better judgment could successfully weigh in on the extreme danger of her destination.
She came to an abrupt halt directly in front of Piccolo.
The scouter chimed softly.
"Three hundred and twenty-two," Bulma announced loudly. She looked at the glowing green readout and sighed in relief. "Phew. Well, at least it's lower than Goku's—"
The ambient air temperature in their immediate vicinity instantly dropped approximately four degrees.
Piccolo's dark eyes came around very slowly. The specific, terrifying quality of his glare—it wasn't pure anger exactly, but the absolute, freezing zero of someone who had already tolerated a truly remarkable amount of disrespect today—made it extremely clear that he had fully registered both the insulting number and the deeply offensive phew that had preceded it.
Bulma screamed. The high-pitched scream was entirely genuine.
She was hiding safely behind Goku's broad back before the sound even finished echoing across the beach. She had both of her hands clamped tightly on his orange shoulders, actively using his muscular body as a human shield with the total lack of shame of a civilian operating on pure survival reflex.
"I am so, so sorry!" Bulma babbled from behind Goku. "I just got carried away! I wasn't thinking!"
Piccolo slowly turned his green head away in disgust. "Hmph."
The matter was apparently considered closed. Bulma stayed cowering behind Goku for another three long seconds, just to be sure. Then she cautiously straightened up, quickly smoothed her messy blue hair, rapidly assessed the tactical situation on the beach, and made the executive decision that the absolute safest place on this entire island was immediately adjacent to the tall person Piccolo was clearly being incredibly careful around.
She quickly jogged over to Jordan's side.
"Here." She practically shoved the cracked scouter into his hands. "Could you possibly make absolutely sure that—" she nervously angled her blue eyes toward the cross-legged demon king, "—nothing reckless happens here? Given the current circumstances?"
Jordan looked over at Piccolo. Piccolo was currently pretending to examine a completely empty point in the ocean approximately forty meters to the left of everyone present. He was doing it with the intense, strained focus of a man engaged in profound philosophical contemplation.
"Piccolo won't start anything today," Jordan said smoothly. "Not with this many strong people present."
Piccolo's stony expression did not change a single fraction. He also notably did not offer a loud contradiction to the statement.
Good enough, Bulma decided, exhaling a breath she didn't realize she was holding. She had learned how to read dangerous rooms very quickly over the years. What this specific room was currently telling her was that the tall, blue-eyed stranger she had just attached herself to had a massive gravitational effect on everyone else's violent behavior. It was definitely a gravity worth staying very close to.
"In that case—" Jordan raised his hand and activated Card Mastery.
The soft azure light was brief. A massive, spherical object seamlessly materialized from absolutely nothing and descended to the sandy beach with a heavy, solid thud. It was the Saiyan spacecraft, previously compacted into a card, now returned to physical form. It was incredibly real, solidly built, and considerably more impressive up close than the tiny scouter had been. The white hull was heavily dented and scorched from atmospheric re-entry, but it was otherwise completely intact. The perfectly sealed seams where the capsule had once split open for the passenger chamber were clearly visible. So were the subtle, complex geometric patterns of a life support architecture that bore absolutely no relationship to anything Earth engineering had ever produced.
Raditz stared at his ship in horror.
"That one is yours as well," Jordan casually confirmed for Raditz's benefit. He used a flat tone that made it incredibly clear this was just an explanation of facts, rather than an offer of return. He turned to Bulma. "Advanced life support, interstellar propulsion, high-yield power systems. All of it is significantly beyond current Earth technology. There is also a spare set of flexible combat armor stored in the rear compartment. If you want something challenging to work on..."
"I want absolutely all of it."
Bulma was already walking slowly around the massive capsule, her hands moving gently along the scorched hull. She was reading the curved surface with her sensitive fingertips exactly the way a master musician handles a complex, unfamiliar instrument. "The power system alone... if I can just understand how the internal compression works..." She looked up at Jordan, her eyes shining. "You are really giving this to me to study?"
"I am officially lending it to Earth," Jordan smiled. "Just make absolutely sure I get a full copy of the research findings when you are done taking it apart."
"Done. Consider it done. Whatever you could possibly want from Capsule Corporation, I will personally have my father build it for you." She waved a hand with the comfortable, absolute authority of someone for whom that wild sentence was just a straightforward factual statement of immense wealth. "Anything at all. Just say the word."
"I will definitely hold you to that."
Standing to one side, Raditz silently contemplated the business deal currently being cheerfully concluded over his personal spaceship, his communication scouter, and, implicitly, his entire failed mission. He made absolutely no sound.
That is also mine. All of it is my property. I would very much like to register an official objection, Raditz thought miserably.
Absolutely nobody was listening to him.
Jordan straightened his back and looked seriously across the gathering. Goku, Krillin, Piccolo. He directly addressed the three of them with the focused, heavy directness of someone who had delivered this exact kind of grim briefing before, and knew exactly how to calibrate the terrible weight of the news.
"The three of you may very well be the strongest fighters currently on Earth right now." He let that heavy statement land in the silence. "You all heard Raditz earlier. Two more Saiyans are currently in transit. They will arrive here in approximately one year, based on the intelligence I have gathered. If left unchecked, the outcome for this planet is not good."
The group went completely quiet. Even the ambient, crashing noise of the ocean waves seemed to pull back in respect.
Krillin looked up first. There was something desperate in his expression. The massive, terrifying gap between what he now understood intellectually and what his trembling body was telling him about the massive numbers he had just seen on the scouter had not finished resolving yet.
"Jordan... I know this is probably a massive lot to ask of a stranger... but could you... I mean, if you just stayed here and fought..."
"Krillin."
Goku's voice wasn't sharp or angry. It was just absolutely certain. He looked at his oldest friend directly, speaking with the kind of honest, heavy gravity that simply didn't need volume behind it to be heard.
"Earth is our home planet. Jordan can't stay here and fight our battles for us forever. And if we start building that lazy habit right now..." Goku paused, his dark eyes serious. "...what happens the next time something terrible comes? And the time after that?"
Krillin held his best friend's look for a long moment, then slowly closed his eyes, his jaw tight with shame. "You're right." His small fists balled at his sides. "I'm sorry. That was the wrong question to ask."
"You have exactly one year," Jordan said quietly. "I won't always be here to fix things. But a year is real, usable time. The gap in power isn't fixed." He looked directly at Goku. "Is it?"
Goku's fierce expression answered the question well before his words did. The absolute, unbreakable focus behind his dark eyes—the exact same quality that had been there when he had driven his bleeding hand into the sand during training as a child, when he had kept stubbornly standing back up after Raditz's brutal tail choke, when he had looked at every single stronger opponent in his entire life and simply decided to continue fighting anyway—sharpened into something terrifyingly definite.
"No, it's not." Goku turned back to Krillin. "We have one year. Full, non-stop training. We need to reach out to absolutely everyone who can fight. We have to work."
Krillin immediately straightened his posture. The fearful hesitation dissolved completely from his face. "Then let's get everyone together. Everyone. All of them."
"Everyone works," Goku agreed with a firm nod.
"If you idiots are quite finished with this touching display."
Piccolo's harsh voice arrived exactly like a splash of freezing cold water. He had not physically moved from his isolated position. His arms were still tightly folded across his chest. He was looking at the group with the deeply annoyed expression of an elite professional who had just been forced to listen to a terrible amateur motivational speech and found it deeply frustrating.
"Raditz explicitly said his stronger companion is at least ten times his combat level," Piccolo sneered. "Ten times. I don't know exactly what pathetic numbers you are currently picturing in your heads when you say 'train hard,' but I would strongly suggest you perform the relevant, basic arithmetic before you decide exactly how encouraging this little pep talk is."
The heavy silence that followed was the grim silence of people desperately doing terrifying arithmetic in their heads.
"Piccolo."
Goku's voice had suddenly changed again. The heavy gravity was still there, but something new had been added to it. It was a very particular, dangerous quality. It was the sharp edge of a fierce smile that hadn't quite reached the surface of his face yet.
"Does that mean you are just stopping here?"
Piccolo blinked in surprise.
"Because," Goku continued, and now the fierce smile was fully present, quiet, genuine, and completely unintimidated by the odds, "if you decide to just give up at this point, we are going to leave you a very, very long way behind us."
The green fists clenched. Unclenched. The muscular arms crossed even tighter over his chest.
"Stop your pathetic daydreaming," Piccolo said. He bit the harsh words off short, looking away toward the ocean. He wore the furious expression of a proud man who had just been challenged in a way he absolutely refused to acknowledge out loud, and had absolutely begun calculating a new, brutal training regimen anyway.
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