"Here is a thought."
The heavy atmosphere between the Earth warriors had quickly taken on the specific, frustrating tension of smart people who had just been handed a massive problem they couldn't possibly solve yet, and were nervously circling it from different angles. Jordan calmly surveyed the anxious group and decided this line of thinking was not going to be productive.
"Raw combat power numbers are ultimately highly misleading. You would all get a lot more out of experiencing it directly." He looked pointedly at Goku. "There is a perfectly ready-made example sitting right here on the beach, isn't there?"
Goku's dark eyes immediately went to Raditz. They brightened with the terrifying speed of someone whose pure martial arts instincts had just been given explicit permission to do exactly what they had been desperately wanting to do for the past twenty minutes. "You mean... actually fight him?"
"That is the general idea, yes."
Krillin looked down at Raditz. Raditz was currently sitting hunched over in the wet sand with a heavily bruised face, multiple cracked ribs, and the defeated posture of a proud man who had been comprehensively and violently introduced to the concept of consequences. "Can he even physically fight right now? He looks terrible..."
"I can completely heal him," Jordan said casually.
A beat of silence.
"Oh."
Krillin slowly processed this new information. Then, with a sudden sense of dawning horror, he processed exactly what he had just helped set in motion. "Actually, then maybe we really shouldn't do that—"
"Jordan."
Goku reached out and stopped Krillin, placing one firm hand on his friend's arm. His dark eyes were completely steady and burning with excitement. "Please. Heal him."
What is fundamentally wrong with me? Krillin thought with considerable, miserable feeling.
Piccolo, still sitting in his cross-legged position, made absolutely no sound. But his thick green neck rotated once, producing a loud, sharp crack that traveled clearly across the quiet beach. His dark eyes had suddenly developed a dangerous quality they had been completely missing since the afternoon began. They were intensely focused and highly interested. It was the sharp look of a predator who had finally identified something actually worth measuring himself against.
"If that is how it is going to be," Piccolo said, a cruel smirk touching his lips, "things are finally getting interesting."
Raditz had been silently following this entire bizarre exchange with the bewildered, helpless attention of a captive man watching crazy people actively decide his immediate future from several meters away. He suddenly felt the invisible, crushing force take hold right before he saw Jordan even move. Powerful telekinesis effortlessly lifted his heavy body to a standing position and forcefully drew him forward across the sand.
He was just about to loudly object on general principle when a brilliant, soothing green light suddenly bloomed on the palm of Jordan's hand.
The glowing hand settled heavily onto Raditz's armored shoulder.
Mystical Palm Technique.
The medical chakra flowed into him, clean and completely constant. Pure life force began rapidly seeping into his damaged tissue with the unhurried, absolute certainty of water naturally finding its level. Raditz felt the deep, agonizing bruising begin to retreat first. The surface damage literally dissolved away as the rapid cellular repair work completed itself from the outside in. Then it reached his shattered ribs. The cracked bones began painfully knitting themselves back together with a faint, prickling internal warmth that made him feel deeply uncomfortable on a fundamental, philosophical level. He was actively being healed by someone he profoundly disliked and deeply feared.
Goku watched the process with completely unconcealed amazement. "He is recovering right in front of us! I can actually see his bruises fading!"
"It works exactly like a Senzu Bean," Krillin said softly, his eyes wide.
The casual mention of the magical healing item hit Jordan somewhere very tender.
The current Senzu Bean situation at this exact point in the timeline was exactly what it was. Korin Tower's legendary supply had been selfishly eaten down to almost absolutely nothing by a certain heavyset, sword-wielding individual whose basic grasp of long-term resource management could charitably be described as entirely non-existent. There would only be exactly two beans left for all of Earth's surviving warriors to share against the upcoming Saiyan invasion. Gohan and Krillin would end up splitting just one bean between them after the brutal battle, both of them lying half-dead in the dirt. It was a tragic scene that had lodged itself deep in Jordan's memory from his previous life, carrying the immense staying power of something genuinely upsetting.
The absolute next time I see Yajirobe, Jordan firmly decided, I am going to beat him up first. Then I will calmly explain exactly why I did it. And then I am taking all of his remaining beans.
Several hundred kilometers away, currently crouched happily over a blazing firepit with a slow-roasting joint of something enormous and a large bowl of homemade dipping sauce, Yajirobe suddenly paused his careful basting. He looked nervously over his shoulder at the completely empty forest with the highly wary expression of a prey animal that has just subconsciously registered a distant, deadly predator.
"Strange," Yajirobe muttered to himself. He sneezed violently. He looked around the empty woods again, shrugged, and immediately resumed his basting.
"One quick clarification," Jordan said, catching Goku's intense expression. It was the quietly anticipatory look of a dedicated martial artist watching a miraculous healing technique and already frantically calculating exactly what it meant for his own brutal training methodology. "I can instantly close physical injuries. I cannot guarantee actual survival from massive, critical damage. Do not interpret this ability as meaning you have unlimited, free recovery during a live fight to the death."
Goku laughed brightly and scratched the back of his head. "Is that really what it looked like I was thinking?"
Jordan just squinted at him.
Under Jordan's glowing palm, Raditz had been carefully monitoring his own rapid recovery with deep, professional attention. The agonizing bruising was completely gone. His shattered ribs felt perfectly intact and solid again. His massive energy reserves were rapidly returning to their high baseline. He rolled his heavy shoulder experimentally, and felt the complex joint track perfectly clean and smooth without a single twinge of pain.
He smiled.
It was absolutely not a warm or friendly smile.
"You are actually going to fully heal me," Raditz said, his raspy voice dripping with arrogant disbelief, "and then you are going to let them fight me again?" The cruel smile broadened into something dark that had seen the inside of several dozen bloody last stands across the galaxy. "You pathetic Earthlings. You will absolutely regret—"
Jordan's glowing hand left his armored shoulder and came around in a clean, completely unhurried motion. It was not a closed punch. It was the highly specific, light-handed physical knock of an annoyed parent who had done exactly this before in exactly this context. It was a controlled impact delivered with absolute paternal efficiency directly to the top of Raditz's skull.
"Quiet," Jordan said. His tone was the perfectly flat tone of a tired doctor maintaining a difficult medical procedure. "Or I will simply stop right here, beat you up again, and then continue healing you afterward."
Raditz's mouth snapped closed instantly.
He swallowed hard. He quickly made the internal calculation. "...I understand."
Good, elite Saiyans do not take unnecessary, humiliating losses, Raditz told himself firmly. This is just basic tactical wisdom. I am being very wise right now.
The medical healing finally completed.
Jordan smoothly withdrew his hand. Raditz stood up to his full, towering height. His absolute peak physical conditioning had been fully restored. The heavy, suffocating killing aura of a high-ranking Saiyan elite warrior settled comfortably back around his large body like a second layer of armor. Absolutely everything that Jordan had violently knocked out of him had been methodically and perfectly returned.
He looked arrogantly down at the assembled Earth warriors. Goku. Krillin. The Namekian.
And then he looked at Jordan.
For once in his life, Raditz prudently said absolutely nothing. His painful, highly physical lesson on the subject of what exactly happened when he acted on his first violent impulse had been incredibly thorough, and the agonizing memory was not yet fully forgotten.
Piccolo had already stopped waiting around.
He reached up with one green hand and smoothly removed his heavy white turban. He casually tossed it aside.
It hit the wet sand with a deep, unnatural thud. It was a sound that had absolutely no business coming from something that merely looked like folded cloth. It was a dense, incredibly heavy impact, the exact kind of sound that only came from massive, concentrated weight. Then his flowing white cape came off next. Two separate, deep craters instantly appeared in the sand exactly where the garments landed.
The collective, shocked inhale from the rest of the beach was highly audible.
He has been wearing all of that extreme weight this entire time?
As the massive physical weight finally came off his body, Piccolo's dark purple aura immediately rose without any deliberate, conscious effort on his part. His physical body was simply expanding rapidly to fill the energetic space it had previously been heavily denied. It was an instant, massive thirty percent increase in raw power. It was smooth, immediate, and terrifying. It was the exact difference between a deadly weapon being kept under high pressure, and that same weapon finally being fully released at rest.
"Oh," Goku blinked in genuine surprise. Then a massive grin spread across his face: "Oh!"
He immediately looked down at his own heavy, blue undershirt. Then he looked at his sturdy blue boots. He reached eagerly for the hem of his shirt.
The heavy undershirt came off and hit the sand. The dense boots came off next. Two more deep craters instantly appeared in the beach right alongside Piccolo's discarded gear.
Goku jumped.
The ocean air rushed loudly around his body as he launched himself violently upward in a clean, perfect arc. He easily cleared a hundred meters into the sky, experiencing the highly specific, intoxicating joy of a martial artist's body that had been rigidly training under a massive physical load for months, finally being given back its complete, unrestrained range of motion. He landed lightly on his bare feet, bounced happily once in the sand, and grinned up at the blue sky.
"Wow! I haven't felt this completely free in ages!"
His golden aura had instantly risen by nearly the exact same massive measure as Piccolo's. Piccolo looked over at him from the side. It was a quick, measuring glance, exactly the kind of look that didn't intend to be noticed by anyone else. The slight, almost imperceptible movement of his green mouth might have formed two grudging words.
Not bad.
Raditz had been carefully watching the massive aura readings spike without the aid of his broken scouter. He was heavily relying on the pure, ingrained combat instincts that had successfully kept him alive across a long professional career of brutal interplanetary violence. He quickly ran the new numbers in his head.
The massive power increase was entirely real. It was undeniable. Both of the Earth fighters were significantly stronger right now than they had been presenting for the entire afternoon.
And their combined power was still less than half of his own baseline level.
Raditz breathed out a long, slow sigh of relief. His massive Saiyan pride instantly settled right back into its natural, arrogant position at the corners of his mouth.
Insects, he had thought earlier. He mentally revised the low category slightly upward. They are insects that will simply require a bit more deliberate physical effort to crush. But they are still just insects.
At the very edge of the group, Krillin was currently examining his own orange gi and his entirely normal boots. He was wearing entirely standard clothing that contained absolutely no concealed training weights whatsoever. He sighed miserably.
Jordan was already looking past them toward Bulma. She had somehow, in the incredibly short time since the massive spacecraft had materialized on the beach, completely dismantled a substantial portion of its outer white hull. She was currently buried deep in the complex alien internals with both arms, wearing the ecstatic expression of an engineer who had found exactly what they had been desperately hoping to find.
Master Roshi stood patiently right beside her, silently holding various glowing components that she handed backward without even looking at him. He wore the resigned expression of a man who had been forcefully conscripted into a role he definitely hadn't applied for. The sea turtle, having somehow made it all the way back up the beach from the ocean, was currently performing the exact same helpful function on the other side of the ship.
"Miss Bulma. Master Roshi," Jordan called out, gesturing vaguely toward the distant tree line. "We are going to need some serious space here. You might want to step back."
Bulma just waved a dismissive hand at him without even bothering to look up from the sparking wires. "Yes, fine, go ahead, don't worry about us at all—" She violently extracted a glowing blue cylinder that produced a faint, high-pitched whirr of rapidly decompressing alien systems. "—this internal cooling architecture is absolutely incredible! How does it manage to maintain perfect thermal equilibrium without an active—"
Jordan just shook his head and left her to it.