"Alright, Chi-Chi, don't be upset—" The Ox-King's chuckle was a nervous rumble. He was a giant of a man, but currently, optimism felt like his only remaining shield against his daughter's wrath. "Gohan's only four. Missing one day of school isn't—"
"Dad."
Chi-Chi's palm slammed onto the table, a concussive strike that visibly rattled the porcelain dinnerware. "What exactly do you think you know about how modern society works? Education is the foundation of everything. If you don't establish the habit early, you spend the rest of your life overcompensating—"
The Ox-King sat perfectly rigid, clutching his rice bowl like a lifeline.
"—and he hasn't called once. Once. The entire day. I gave him very clear instructions—"
Goku, the Ox-King thought, broadcasting a silent prayer to his wayward son-in-law on the private communication channel of a man who had done everything humanly possible. You're on your own.
Meanwhile, on Turtle Island, the beach had transformed.
The scattered mechanical wreckage from earlier that afternoon had been swiftly cataloged, capsulized, and pocketed by Bulma.
In its place roared a massive bonfire, casting dancing orange shadows across the white sand and the dark ocean beyond. Master Roshi had relocated dinner outdoors, adapting to the unexpected crowd. What was supposed to be a small meal had organically evolved into a full-blown victory banquet with the natural inevitability of a party that actually had a reason to exist.
Earth's warriors had just defeated an alien. Sure, they'd done it by exploiting a tail-grab, but a win was a win.
The spread was surprisingly lavish. Piles of grilled meat, originally prepped for a smaller group, were being stretched to feed the monstrous appetites present without complaint. Copious amounts of alcohol flowed. Krillin was loudly recounting some exaggerated detail of the day's events. Master Roshi was leaning entirely too close to Bulma, trying to sound suave and being comprehensively ignored.
Goku sat frozen near the fire; Gohan had passed out against his shoulder, and he was terrified of waking him. This effectively trapped him in a seated position where he could only eat whatever was within arm's reach.
Just at the edge of the firelight sat Raditz. The defeated invader clutched a massive roasted bone in both hands, wearing the resigned expression of a man who had aggressively made peace with his bizarre new reality, or at the very least, was trying to.
Jordan chewed the last bite of a skewer, wiped his mouth, and smoothly slid Master Roshi's iconic sunglasses right off the old martial artist's face mid-sentence. He snagged an ice-cold beer from the general supply and strolled to a beach lounger at the perimeter of the group. He collapsed into it with the practiced exhaustion of a man who had been on his feet since dropping into a brand-new universe, and stared up at the moon.
Then, he felt it. A thrumming resonance from his soul.
He waited.
The air beside him warped, and a tall, slender figure stepped out of the phantom void. Jordan nudged the stolen sunglasses up his forehead with one finger and blinked.
The gladiator skirt armor was gone. The imposing, pale-purple musculature that had defined F-boy's aesthetic since its awakening had completely vanished.
Standing beside the beach chair was a figure draped in a perfectly tailored, deep-purple business suit over a crisp V-neck shirt. Polished leather oxfords caught the firelight with a pristine gleam. F-boy's wild, warrior-cut hair had been slicked back into an immaculate, side-swept corporate style that sat exactly where it was supposed to without looking like it was trying.
The suit clung perfectly to the Stand's inverted-triangle physique, communicating a very specific kind of quiet, violent power. But it was the face—a mirrored reflection of Jordan's own facial structure, yet entirely devoid of his usual smirk—that sold it. F-boy stared out at the ocean with the aloof, dead-eyed gaze of a CEO reviewing a merely adequate quarterly earnings report.
Jordan stared.
Who the hell are you? The thought flashed across their mental link before Jordan could even parse the absurdity. Where's my Stand?
He pulled the sunglasses down, looked away, then pushed them back up.
F-boy was still standing there, hands shoved casually into his tailored pockets.
Stop doing that, F-boy projected directly into Jordan's mind, its physical face unmoving.
Jordan swallowed a laugh and recovered his composure. A professional transmigrator didn't let his own Stand out-drip him for more than thirty consecutive seconds.
"The old armor," Jordan murmured under the crash of the waves. "The deck—"
F-boy calmly raised his right hand.
A fan of glowing cards materialized from thin air, spreading between the Stand's fingers with supernatural precision. F-boy executed a flawless, one-handed cut, followed by a cascading shuffle—a sequence of kinetic, controlled motions that the cards obeyed with the eager sentience of objects that knew exactly who their master was. Then, one by one, they vanished back into the void between F-boy's knuckles. Trick complete.
All present. Don't worry about it.
"Right." Jordan settled deeper into the lounger. "Walk me through the panel."
The psychic interface flared to life in Jordan's vision.
Stand: Fantasy Cards
Destructive Power: A
Speed: A
Precision: A
Range: A
Durability: A
Growth Potential: ∞
Jordan scrutinized the stat distribution.
Five A-ranks. Every previous bottleneck had been shattered. His speed, formerly stuck at C, and his destructive power, which had painfully ground its way up from D through his earlier evolutions, were now maxed out at the absolute ceiling of the standard metric system.
But his eyes locked onto the final stat. Growth Potential, which had sat at an A for as long as he could remember, had evolved past standard notation.
The infinity symbol. A literal Möbius strip. Unbounded potential.
He felt like he should be throwing a party, or at least breaking out the good liquor. Objectively, this was a monumental leap in power.
It wasn't easy, he admitted to himself internally, feeling the phantom weight of their past battles. But he' s finally a five-A Stand.
The updated ability list scrolled into view beneath the stats:
First Ability: Card Mastery — Imbue targets with the concept of "cards," forge new Fantasy Cards, and control their innate power.Second Ability: Fate Draw — Generates one random Fantasy Card draw per day. Unused draws accumulate.Third Ability: Element Pickup (Limit Break) — Passively harvest extraordinary element fragments within a 10-meter radius. New: Establish physical contact with a target to directly replicate their extraordinary elements and forge a Fantasy Card.Fourth Ability: Divine Draw — Consume 10 accumulated Destiny Draws to guarantee one random Fantasy Card from a specified franchise pool or archetype.Fifth Ability: Fantasy Moment — Consume 1 Fantasy Card to trigger "Fantasy Time," granting a tenfold combat power multiplier for the duration of the effect.
Jordan zeroed in on the third ability.
He already relied heavily on the passive 10-meter fragment vacuum. But the new clause—contact a target to directly replicate—was an absolute game-changer. It addressed the primary limitation of his combat harvesting: proximity was fine, but relying on random drops was a gamble. Active replication via touch shifted the entire equation. It didn't eliminate the RNG of the card's rarity, but it guaranteed a drop.
He immediately thought of Kakashi Hatake—the man copied a thousand jutsu and still gassed out of chakra. F-boy's mental imprint quickly clarified the catch: the cooldown for direct replication scaled proportionally based on the rarity of the card produced and how many times Jordan had already milked that specific target. A reasonable nerf to stop him from overreaching.
Understood.
Then he read the fifth ability. And read it again, just in case he'd missed a caveat. He hadn't.
Tenfold combat power. Triggered by burning a card. For a limited duration.
Jordan tilted his head, eyeing F-boy, who was still projecting an aura of extreme corporate boredom at the sea.
"This new ability," Jordan said slowly, rolling the cold beer bottle between his palms. "Does it feel... heavily plagiarized to you?"
F-boy shifted its gaze fractionally. Its expression remained an impenetrable mask of apathy.
Jordan gestured broadly at the beach, the bonfire, and the general direction of the Saiyans. "Great Ape transformation. Saiyan biology. A literal tenfold power multiplier." He paused, letting the accusation hang in the salty air. "We've been in this universe for exactly one day."
F-boy processed this. Then turned back toward the ocean.
The gacha pool adapts, it communicated.
"Don't give me that bullshit—" Jordan leaned over the armrest, genuinely peering around the side of the beach chair. "Are you hiding a tail under those trousers?"
F-boy slowly raised both hands, the jacket sleeves riding up slightly to reveal crisp white cuffs, and presented two impeccably polite middle fingers with the elegance of a man who had decided this was the appropriate professional response.
Jordan chuckled, taking that as a solid 'no'.
F-boy beamed the activation parameters for the multiplier into his head next. The duration scaled heavily with the rarity of the sacrificed card:
N-Rank: 0.1 to 10 seconds (variance dependent on the quality of the card's elements against the sheer power threshold of the multiplier).R-Rank: 30 seconds.SR-Rank: 10 minutes.SSR-Rank: 1 hour (effectively permanent for any given battle).
Constraint: One activation per Earth day, regardless of the card tier burned.
Jordan listened to the data and had a lot of feelings about it.
The SSR clause, especially. An entire hour of a 10x multiplier stacked on top of a Stand that was already operating with maxed-out A-rank stats across the board? By any metric, that was an extinction-level event capable of resolving quite literally any problem that needed resolving. Burning an ultra-rare SSR card was a brutal cost, and the daily cooldown forced him to be tactical, but the sheer payload was undeniable.
The fact that he was currently sitting on ninety stockpiled Destiny Draws felt very warm and comforting in the back of his mind.
"Don't worry about the heavy lifting," Jordan said, his tone shifting into the verdict of a commanding officer. "Your only job is to stand there looking incredibly handsome and professionally detached." He took a sip of his beer. "The one-day cooldown on an SSR burn is pretty steep, though. We'll start practicing with N-rank burns once you figure out how to stop time."
F-boy slowly rotated its head toward him.
And raised both middle fingers a second time.
Jordan just grinned, slipping the stolen sunglasses back over his eyes.
Above them, the moon continued its silent, indifferent transit across the starry void. On the beach behind them, Krillin's boisterous laughter rose and fell over the crackling fire. A few yards away, Gohan snored softly against Goku's chest, his furry brown tail curling contentedly in his sleep.
At the edge of the light, Raditz finished his grilled bone and greedily reached for another.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~