"Isn't that Goku?"
The Ox-King sat up straight in the cramped backseat of the hovercar, raising one enormous, tree-trunk of an arm to shade his eyes. He pointed a massive finger at the tiny figure waving frantically from the desert floor.
He still possessed the razor-sharp vision of a former martial arts grandmaster—which he absolutely was, buried underneath the horned helmet, the thick black-rimmed glasses, and the mountainous patience of a man whose entire personality had transitioned into 'doting grandfather.' He could see clearly across several kilometers of heat shimmer. What he saw was his son-in-law: alive, apparently in one piece, and waving with the panicked, manic enthusiasm of a man who knew he was dead meat and was desperately hoping enthusiasm would serve as a meat shield.
"I see him," Chi-Chi said.
Her voice was kept at a perfectly controlled, sub-zero temperature. It was the kind of forced calm that was absolutely not going to last for more than another five seconds.
She slammed the brakes.
The maglev car's rear end violently pitched upward as physics briefly attempted to assert dominance over the vehicle. The Ox-King grabbed the headrests with both hands and braced for impact. The car skidded to a halt approximately two meters from where Goku stood waving. The displaced air violently whipped Goku's hair back.
Chi-Chi was out of the driver's seat before the chassis had even settled. She crossed the distance in three terrifyingly fast steps, grabbed Goku by both lapels of his gi, and yanked him downward.
"Why didn't you call me again?!" The words exploded out of her with the compressed pressure of a woman who had been stockpiling rage since yesterday evening, and had spent the entire drive from Mount Paozu with nothing to do but refine it. "I had to drive all the way out into the wasteland myself! And where the hell is Gohan?!"
"There... there was a lot happening yesterday, I just—" Goku's hand flew to the back of his head, instinctively deploying his trademark sheepish laugh as a defensive countermeasure. "—I completely forgot! And Gohan... well, Piccolo took him this morning. For training."
The silence that followed lasted exactly one second.
"What."
"Piccolo took him to train! It's totally fine, he's—"
"Piccolo." Chi-Chi's voice shifted into a register that barely qualified as human speech. "Piccolo Daimaō."
"Just to train, Chi-Chi! Just to—"
Her eyes completely lost focus. A very specific, catastrophic structural failure cascaded across her expression—the biological equivalent of a system crashing because the incoming data was simply too horrific to process.
Her knees buckled. She folded like a puppet with cut strings.
Goku caught her purely on martial reflex, both arms snapping up to cradle his unconscious wife. He stared down at her with an expression of sheer, unadulterated helplessness.
"Chi-Chi?! Are you—it's just training! He's totally safe!"
Chi-Chi did not respond, having successfully opted out of the conversation.
Jordan, watching the entire exchange from a highly diplomatic distance, pressed his lips together in a thin line to suppress a laugh.
You really, really should have led with something other than the Piccolo part, he noted internally.
The Ox-King extracted himself from the rear seat with the careful, deliberate movements of a giant navigating a clown car. He straightened up to his full, terrifying height, placing one hand on the small of his back, and walked over. He moved with the measured, grounded pace of a man who had learned—across decades of marriage and fatherhood—exactly when a situation required a steady anchor.
"She'll be alright," the Ox-King rumbled gently, looking down at his daughter's face, which had finally found a peaceful neutrality it rarely achieved while conscious. "She was incredibly wound up from the drive. What happened yesterday, Goku?"
Goku gave him the sit-rep. He delivered the full, unvarnished account with his usual, blunt directness.
The Ox-King listened with the intense, focused attention of a man who had once terrorized an entire hemisphere, but had long since redirected that conqueror's energy into being a protective grandfather.
"An alien invasion," the giant sighed heavily when Goku finished. "No wonder."
"Gohan has potential I don't fully understand yet," Goku said, his tone dropping its usual levity. "He's a part of this planet's defense now. He can't be sheltered from what's coming."
The Ox-King nodded once—a slow, deliberate movement from a man who understood the brutal math of survival and had made his peace with it.
He turned. Jordan stepped forward, extending a hand.
"Jordan. You can call me Uncle if you prefer."
The Ox-King bent down and took the hand. His massive grip entirely swallowed Jordan's, but he shook it with the careful, modulated restraint of a man who possessed enough physical strength to crush boulders and had learned to dial it back for polite society.
"Thank you for looking after Goku," the Ox-King said. The gratitude was warm and entirely uncomplicated. "He has a habit of stumbling into... situations."
"He really does," Jordan agreed, smoothly withdrawing his hand. "But we've managed so far."
Jordan glanced at Goku, who was still awkwardly cradling his unconscious wife and looking around as if waiting for an adult to tell him what to do next. "Take care of Chi-Chi first. Whenever you're ready, we'll head back up to the Lookout."
Goku nodded, visibly relieved that someone had provided a concrete next step.
The Ox-King opened his mouth, likely to point out the logistical reality that four people were absolutely not going to fit inside the two-seater maglev car for the return trip.
Jordan snapped his fingers.
Herrscher Authority. Between one blink and the next, the baked tan earth of the Gobi Desert was violently replaced by the smell of salt air, the sound of crashing waves, and the pristine white sand of Turtle Island.
The Ox-King blinked, looking around at the endless blue ocean. Then he looked down at his own boots. Then he stared at the handsome young man who had just casually teleported four people across a continental landmass without breaking a sweat.
"Master Roshi!"
The Ox-King forgot his current train of thought entirely. He charged toward the nearest beach lounger and dropped heavily to both knees. It was the ingrained reflex of a martial artist who had just stumbled across his ancient master, old habits violently reasserting themselves.
Master Roshi, who had been peacefully napping in the sun, cracked an eye open. He looked at the mountain of a man prostrating in the sand, then at Goku holding his unconscious wife, and finally at Jordan. The old master seemed to collectively decide that this morning was simply going beyond his paygrade.
"Not bad form," Roshi muttered, accepting the panicked greetings with the weary dignity of a master who had been robbed of his favorite sunglasses the night before and just wanted to catch some rays.
Goku hurriedly carried Chi-Chi inside the Kame House. Jordan located the old sea turtle resting near the waterline, asked for the precise geographical coordinates of West City, and vanished.
Approximately ninety seconds after the Kame House door clicked shut behind Goku, the tranquil peace of Turtle Island was violently shattered by a scream that flushed every seagull from the surrounding palm trees.
"SON GOKU!! YOU GAVE MY BABY TO PICCOLO?! I'LL KILL YOU—"
The sea turtle quietly slipped beneath the waves.
It took Jordan exactly eleven minutes.
He had already mapped the electromagnetic signatures of the remaining six Dragon Balls. The moment he had touched the four-star ball back on the island, his psychic range had instantly triangulated the unique frequency of all seven artifacts simultaneously. Six distinct signals, scattered across the curvature of the Earth.
He moved through the coordinates in rapid sequence. Thanks to his spatial manipulation, the actual retrieval took less time than the instant transmission.
The final ball was nestled in the crook of an ancient, primeval tree deep within an eastern continent forest. It rested inside an abandoned bird's nest, half-hidden by damp leaves, passively radiating its five-starred orange glow with the quiet indifference of a legendary artifact that had been sitting there for months. Jordan casually plucked it from the canopy with telekinesis.
Card Mastery. He watched the sphere dissolve into azure light, smiling as the SSR-tier Dragon Ball card joined the collection in his spatial inventory.
Fifteen minutes, total, from departure to completion.
He had made a brief pit stop in West City on the way back. He found Bulma elbow-deep in the scorched propulsion manifolds of Raditz's space pod, a task she clearly prioritized over sleep. He quickly requested the specialized food capsules Goku would need to survive the million-kilometer run down Snake Way. She had synthesized them without complaint, pausing only to note that Saiyan caloric requirements were, from a purely thermodynamic perspective, absolutely fascinating.
Now, Jordan stood alone in the primeval forest. The canopy opened just enough to reveal a patch of clear blue sky. He pulled up his system interface and reviewed the inventory.
Seven Dragon Balls. Seven SSR-rank cards. The gacha system clearly possessed strong, uncompromising opinions about the value of reality-warping wish artifacts.
"F-boy."
The immaculately suited Stand materialized beside him, smoothing its purple lapels before its hands became a blur of motion. Six glowing cards fanned out between F-boy's fingers in a flawless spread that caught the dappled forest light. The Stand released them simultaneously. They hovered in a perfect line before telekinetically snapping into Jordan's outstretched palm to join the seventh.
All seven cards levitated into the air.
The moment they aligned, the atmosphere fundamentally changed. It wasn't just a visual effect; the raw electromagnetic signatures Jordan had been tracking converged into a single, unified pulse. The seven distinct frequencies synchronized into a low, resonant, sub-bass hum. It wasn't quite a sound—it was a vibration that rattled the marrow in Jordan's sternum.
The azure borders of the cards flared, shifting into a blinding, incandescent gold. The physical boundaries between the cards blurred and melted away as the ancient, connective force binding the artifacts recognized that the summoning conditions had finally been met.
The sky reacted violently.
Clear blue instantly blackened into a bruised, churning grey. This wasn't a localized weather event; it was a deliberate, planetary-scale atmospheric restructuring. The heavens were forcefully making room for what was coming. Thunder cracked—too deep, too high up to be natural. Arcs of articulate, golden lightning aggressively forked through storm clouds that hadn't existed thirty seconds prior.
The seven glowing cards dissolved entirely. A blinding column of golden light erupted upward, piercing the blackened sky.
Something massive moved within the light.
It didn't simply appear; it arrived in stages, because its sheer scale was too vast for the human eye to process all at once. Emerald scales, each one the size of a blast door, rippled along a serpentine body that coiled endlessly through the stratosphere.
Then, the head descended from the storm clouds.
Crowned with jagged, eastern-style antlers, it carried the terrifying, absolute authority of a divine entity whose sole cosmic purpose was to answer. The Great Dragon Shenron lowered its massive, whiskered snout, regarding Jordan with reptilian eyes the color of fresh blood.
When it spoke, the voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It was a structural vibration that the air simply conducted, and the forest obediently received. Jordan felt the words vibrate in his teeth.
"State your wish. I shall grant any desire within my power—but only one."
Jordan stared up at the impossible scale of the Dragon.
Shenron stared down at Jordan.
Somewhere in the treeline, a small bird that hadn't managed to flee in time let out a single, terrified chirp, and then wisely shut up.
Jordan took a breath.
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