Jordan's calm gaze swept across the sandy beach and finally landed on little Gohan.
The young boy was currently standing quietly right beside Bulma's impromptu, highly chaotic workspace. He was watching her rapidly disassemble advanced alien hardware with the intense, focused attention of a smart child who had firmly decided that quietly understanding exactly what was happening around him was the absolute safest approach to a very confusing, loud afternoon. He already had his father's natural martial posture. His small feet were planted slightly apart, his hands hung loosely at his sides, and he was quietly taking absolutely everything in without making a fuss.
I nearly forgot all about you, Jordan thought, a slow smile touching his lips.
Son Gohan. The absolute future of the timeline, the single greatest source of untapped combat potential on the entire planet, and currently just an adorable four-year-old boy with a very firm, terrifying mother who had incredibly strong, negative opinions about martial arts training.
Jordan quickly made a priority note in the relevant mental file.
Not on my watch, kid, Jordan decided firmly. You are absolutely not growing up to be a soft scholar who constantly needs rescuing from space aliens.
He turned his attention back to Goku. The martial artist had just landed softly from his massive warm-up jumps and was currently still rolling his broad shoulders with the deep, relieved looseness of a man happily reacquainting himself with his own complete physical mobility.
"Goku," Jordan called out over the sound of the surf. "I am going to take everyone to a space much better suited for this kind of fight. Bring Gohan with us."
Goku blinked in surprise. Then, a sudden, complicated emotion crossed his cheerful expression. It was a terrifying flash of his wife Chi-Chi's furious face right before his departure from home. It was the memory of her strict instructions, delivered with the highly specific, terrifying intensity she only reserved for domestic things that were absolutely not negotiable under any circumstances.
The frightening image passed relatively quickly, heavily aided by Goku's well-developed, borderline-pathological capacity for blind optimism.
"Of course," Goku said, nodding with complete, unshakeable conviction. "No problem at all."
Just please come and get me later when she starts yelling, he did not add out loud, but his eyes strongly implied it.
Jordan casually snapped his fingers.
The invisible psychic field immediately gathered tightly around Gohan without any warning. It was a gentle but completely firm telekinetic current that smoothly lifted the small boy completely off the sand before he had even fully registered what was happening to gravity.
His furry brown tail instantly shot straight upright in alarm. He let out a small, surprised yelp, suddenly went entirely weightless, and found himself floating rapidly up and across the beach. He traveled with his head leading slightly forward, carried smoothly and safely right into the protective arc of Jordan's waiting arm.
His dark eyes were wet with unshed tears by the time he safely arrived. They were small, diamond-bright, and blinking very fast. He still had his four-star Dragon Ball hatpin and his personal dignity both completely intact, and he was very carefully, bravely not crying out loud.
"Uncle Jordan?" Gohan's small voice was a concentrated, heroic effort at maintaining his composure.
"You're completely fine, kid," Jordan said warmly. He held the boy securely with the easy, practiced security of someone who had casually moved heavy things with their mind for years. "Just sit still for a second. I am taking you somewhere very good to watch."
The Herrscher's absolute spatial authority smoothly extended outward across the beach.
The Imaginary Space seamlessly arrived around all of them exactly like a heavy theater curtain being drawn shut.
The real, sunny world of the beach went away. It didn't just go dark, it simply ceased to be. What instantly replaced it was the massive, impossible space Jordan had painstakingly built through endless practice, and maintained solely through the Herrscher's ongoing, iron will.
The sky above them was the deep, bloody red of a dying sun that absolutely did not correspond to any known sun in the real world. It cast absolutely everything in a strange light that was physically warm, but felt slightly wrong to the senses. The rocky ground was perfectly solid underfoot, the jagged mountains looming in the far distance were completely real mountains, and the entire impossible space stretched endlessly outward in every single direction to a flat horizon that had never once held a human city, a paved road, or a single trace of civilization.
It looked exactly like a barren world assembled by something that had carefully studied planets from afar, but had never actually lived on one.
The silence of the dimension was absolutely enormous.
"Welcome to the Imaginary Space," Jordan announced, speaking clearly more for the benefit of the terrified first-timers than anyone else. "It is a pocket void that directly overlaps with Earth's reality. Absolutely nothing that happens in here will physically affect anything in the real world outside." He turned his dark gaze directly to Raditz. "So. Here are the rules. If you can actually beat the two of them working together, I promise I won't kill you today."
Raditz just stared at him for a long, heavy moment. He slowly processed the generous offer. He frantically looked around the red dimension for the hidden trap.
He found no obvious one.
"...You said that yourself," Raditz said, his raspy voice incredibly careful.
"I said it out loud. You heard it clearly." Jordan gently set little Gohan down on a flat, elevated shelf of red rock nearby. It was perfectly positioned with a great, safe sightline of the battlefield. "You can begin whenever you are ready."
The three martial artists immediately spread out across the rocky ground.
Goku, Piccolo, and Krillin smoothly took to the air, forming a loose, highly tactical triangle around the alien. It was the pure, instinctive combat geometry of people who had rigorously trained together, violently fought each other, and perfectly understood without speaking exactly how to use their combined positioning. Krillin nervously settled into the rear guard position, his bald forehead already damp with cold sweat. His dark eyes were frantically tracking every tiny, minute shift in Raditz's arrogant stance. He had the intense focus of someone who knew exactly where he currently stood at the absolute bottom of the power hierarchy, but fully intended to be genuinely, stubbornly useful in the fight anyway.
Raditz slowly looked at the three of them, a cruel smirk returning to his face.
Three hundred and thirty-four. Three hundred and twenty-two. Two hundred and six.
Pathetic insects, Raditz thought to himself again, with significantly more restored confidence than the last time he had thought it. These are insects that I can absolutely handle without breaking a sweat.
"How incredibly foolish," Raditz sneered. He let his pure Saiyan scorn come through cleanly in his voice. "Do you pathetic weaklings genuinely think that just surrounding me at these pathetic power levels will actually—"
His dark eyes suddenly found Jordan standing calmly on the sidelines.
Jordan's look was absolutely not physically threatening. It was not visibly angry. It was simply patient. It was patient in the highly specific, terrifying way of a god who had already done the complex math on your life and was just waiting with complete, bored equanimity for your inevitable death to unfold exactly as expected.
Cold sweat arrived on the back of Raditz's neck in a sudden, freezing rush.
"—I won't say anything more," Raditz completely changed course, the abrupt ending of his arrogant sentence rapidly traveling in an entirely different, much safer direction than the beginning had originally intended.
Jordan slowly lowered his half-raised fist back to his side. "That was a very quick adjustment. I'll definitely give you credit for that."
Goku's massive grin arrived fast and incredibly wide. It was the specific, sharp, joyful expression of a martial arts genius who had just set a massive, impossible problem directly in front of himself and was incredibly eager to find out exactly what his body was capable of doing to solve it. Every single muscle in his strong frame physically shifted. His relaxed, easy warmth was instantly replaced by something tightly coiled, intensely focused, and absolutely ready for violence.
"Piccolo. Krillin." Goku's words were brief, the combat signal perfectly clear. "I'm going in."
"We're right on you!" Krillin's hands immediately came up into a guard. "Just be careful!"
"You make so much pointless noise," Piccolo grunted. He spoke with the precise, cold disdain of an assassin who considered loudly announcing your tactical intentions to the enemy to be a fundamental, amateur error.
And then Piccolo rapidly gathered his own purple power and prepared to violently move anyway. He had already identified the perfect attack angle, and he absolutely wasn't going to let Goku establish the first physical advantage in this fight.
Raditz rapidly tracked their three shifting positions, made his final tactical assessment, and confidently let his primary attention settle heavily on Krillin as the absolute weakest physical vector to eliminate first.
Which was exactly when Goku violently moved.
The loud kiai shout came exactly as he launched himself forward. It was a pure, ingrained Saiyan's combat instinct, completely filling his lungs with air, his entire physical body committing fully and brutally to the forward strike. Raditz's gaze instantly snapped back to him in surprise.
From the complete opposite side, Piccolo had already been moving in absolute silence. He was flawlessly using the tiny, fractional window of distraction that Goku's loud charge had opened, rapidly closing the physical distance from the alien's blind angle.
Two incredibly powerful figures violently converging on one target. They were fast. They were genuinely, impressively fast. They were significantly faster than absolutely anything Raditz had ever encountered in the weak outer systems of the galaxy. It still wasn't quite his own elite speed, but it was absolutely not negligible either.
Raditz brutally blocked Goku's first heavy strike with his armored forearm, and then violently turned Piccolo's second, sweeping strike away with his open palm. Goku's knuckles sparked and glanced harmlessly off the hard armor guard, and Piccolo's heavy follow-through kick was effortlessly redirected into empty air. And then, Raditz was suddenly completely inside both of their guards. He threw devastating elbows and blinding counterstrikes in the brutal, close quarters where sheer physical size and massive raw power always counted for significantly more than refined martial technique.
The entire, violent exchange lasted perhaps two full seconds.
Bang. Bang.
Goku was violently launched backward through the red air, spitting a thick wad of blood from his mouth. He managed to find his footing in the sky about twenty meters out, breathing hard.
Piccolo took a devastating, armored elbow directly to the center of his chest and was violently driven back in a completely different direction. He had one green hand pressed tightly to his cracked ribs, his sharp teeth gritted in pure agony.
Both of the Earth warriors managed to stay airborne, but they were clearly hurt.
Raditz slowly lowered his guard, straightened his back proudly, and allowed himself a deep, satisfied breath of the strange air.
"Of course," Raditz sneered. The deep, arrogant satisfaction of a cruel man who had just violently confirmed exactly what he already believed settled heavily into his raspy voice. "Kakarot, you are an absolute, pathetic waste of Saiyan blood. You even let these weaklings permanently remove your tail! The tail is the exact thing that grants us our Great Ape transformation, our absolute greatest cosmic weapon!"
He was rapidly building toward another grand speech, his old, familiar arrogance easily finding its proper shape again in the heat of battle. "It is absolutely no wonder you couldn't even manage to—"
His peripheral vision suddenly caught Jordan's dark look from the sidelines.
The arrogant sentence immediately died in his throat before he could finish it.
Up on his elevated rock shelf, little Gohan had been quietly watching every single second of the brutal fight with the absolute, unbroken focus of a smart child who has firmly decided that understanding this terrible violence was vitally important to his survival. He looked up at Jordan now with the wide, incredibly earnest expression of someone who had just successfully drawn a major logical conclusion.
"Uncle Jordan," Gohan said softly. "You are really incredible."
Jordan glanced down at the small boy in surprise. "Why do you say that, Gohan?"
"Because that scary alien man was saying something very mean, and then he just looked over at you, and he stopped talking entirely." Gohan's furry brown tail swayed slowly and happily behind him. "He was really afraid of your face."
Jordan considered the highly observant four-year-old for a long moment. Then, he gently patted the boy on the head with the approving, heavy gravity of a proud professor who has just received a perfectly correct answer to a very difficult question.
"You are very perceptive, Gohan," Jordan said warmly. "You see things very carefully."
Gohan smiled and sat up slightly straighter on the rock, puffing his small chest out.
"Do you want to be strong enough to always protect your mom and dad?" Jordan asked quietly.
"Yes!" The enthusiastic answer arrived well before Jordan had even finished the question. Then, Gohan's bright expression complicated slightly, a shadow of worry crossing his face. "But... Mom always says I am absolutely not allowed to train in martial arts. She says she wants me to stay inside and study to be a great scholar."
Jordan looked out at the massive Imaginary Space. He looked at Goku and Piccolo slowly, painfully regrouping in the red air. He looked at Raditz confidently rolling his armored shoulders and settling back into his brutal fighting stance. He looked at the bloody, red sky that existed absolutely nowhere in the real world.
"Do you see that grumpy green uncle currently working with your dad over there?" Jordan said, pointing a finger at Piccolo.
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