"Nail," the Grand Elder rumbled gently. "Go outside. When our guest arrives from the sky, bring him directly to me."
"With all due respect, Grand Elder." Nail aggressively squared his broad shoulders, his white cape shifting. "He is an unknown, unvetted alien. Wouldn't it be infinitely safer if I received him out on the plains on your behalf, while you—"
"He will want to speak with me specifically. Not with my bodyguard." The Grand Elder's smile was the slow, unhurried kind—the specific, frustrating smile of a deity who had been absolutely certain about how the universe worked for a very, very long time. "I have a profound feeling that his arrival is not going to be a bad thing for our people. Go, my child. Trust an old man's fading instincts."
Nail held his ground for one second longer. It wasn't an act of defiance; it was the heavy, rigid posture of a loyal soldier desperately trying to figure out how to carry a crushing tactical liability.
Then, he bowed deeply.
"Yes, Grand Elder."
He spun on his heel, stalked outside into the warm air, and took his defensive post at the absolute edge of the mesa's broad summit.
The sky above Planet Namek was a brilliant, bruised blue-green, permanently lit by three massive suns that never fully set. Standing completely still, Nail could feel the entire planet humming around him. It was the specific, hyper-tuned biological radar of a Warrior-caste Namekian standing on home soil. He could feel the light, ambient pressure of hundreds of familiar biomagnetic fields distributed across the sprawling surface below—the quiet agricultural villages, the scattered clusters of his peaceful people going about their endless day.
Then, something violently crossed the upper atmosphere.
Nail snapped his head up.
His dynamic, superhuman vision caught it instantly: a streak of blinding white light, sharp, heavy, and incredibly purposeful, cutting a burning descent trajectory directly toward this specific island. It wasn't a meteor. It wasn't space debris. It was a vessel that knew exactly where it was going.
Nail's large green fists slowly clenched.
He planted his boots firmly against the stone, and waited.
Universal Capsule No. 1 — currently on final approach to Planet Namek.
Over the course of the ten-day hyperspace jump, the planet had steadily grown from a distant, blinking dot, to a blue-green disk, into a massive sphere that completely filled the reinforced forward viewport with genuine, terrifying scale.
It was roughly ten times the physical diameter of Earth, locked into a stable gravitational orbit at the exact midpoint of three small stars. The bizarre triple-sun arrangement bathed the entire planetary surface in continuous, soft green light. There was absolutely no night cycle. No dark hemispheres. No shadow zones. It was the kind of perfectly even, omnidirectional illumination that made the surface geography incredibly easy to read from high orbit.
It was mostly ocean. Sprawling archipelagos of varying sizes were carpeted in dense vegetation that possessed a slightly different, bluer chromatic shade than Earth's flora. The atmosphere scanned perfectly clean through the ship's sensors. There were zero industrial smog signatures, zero nuclear radiation, and absolutely zero electromagnetic interference from heavy technology.
Jordan brought the Capsule Corp ship in on a long, graceful, screaming arc, actively sweeping the surface as he rapidly decelerated.
The psychic Mind Network aggressively expanded outward the exact millisecond he breached the upper atmosphere. It reached in every direction simultaneously, the way it always did, violently building its localized map.
What the network found was fundamentally different from Earth.
The biological signals were drastically fewer in number, far more dispersed, and incredibly distinct—the natural byproduct of a tiny, localized population where individual ki signatures were easy to isolate. Jordan mapped a few hundred biomagnetic fields scattered across the entire planet's surface. They clustered tightly into small village concentrations, varying slightly in raw power output the way individual bodies naturally varied.
He successfully isolated the two most massive power signatures almost instantly.
One of them was old. Genuinely, terrifyingly ancient. It radiated the deep, settled, crushing quality of something that had possessed immense power for a very long time, and had eventually just become completely still.
The second signature was located right next to it. It was much younger, burning with the sharp, clean, violent edge of absolute physical conditioning.
Jordan was mentally logging their exact geographical coordinates when something else entirely brushed against his mind.
A knock.
It wasn't a physical knock against the hull. It was something manifesting directly inside the psychic space that the Mind Network currently occupied. A gentle, incredibly deliberate contact at the absolute edge of his awareness. It carried the specific, polite quality of a massive presence gently asking for permission, rather than brutally forcing entry.
It was telepathy. Used with the extreme courtesy of an entity who fundamentally understood that reaching into another sentient mind uninvited was a hostile act of war.
Jordan mentally lowered his shields, extending a small, encrypted thread of permission.
The connection instantly locked into place.
—Hello, friend from afar. I am the Grand Elder of the Namekians.
The psychic communication arrived fully formed. Language, intent, and emotional meaning were delivered simultaneously, the way genuine telepathy effortlessly bypassed the clunky surface mechanics of verbal translation. Jordan responded in kind.
—Hello, esteemed Elder. I'm Jordan. I'm visiting from Earth, and I'm carrying intelligence that I think is going to matter quite a lot to your people.
A pause. Brief, heavy, and deeply thoughtful.
—I am deeply grateful. My physical body no longer moves easily. Please, come find me at the highest peak, and we will speak properly.
—I'm already on my way.
The telepathic link dissolved as gently as it had formed.
Jordan brought the ship down hard on the island's coastal plain, the landing thrusters scorching the blue grass. He popped the main hatch and stepped out into the incredibly clean Namekian air. The atmosphere was chemically similar to Earth's, the gravity was well within a comfortable, negligible range, and the endless three-sun light was warm without being blindingly harsh.
He pressed the red button on the storage capsule. With a concussive blast of white smoke, the massive spaceship violently folded reality and collapsed into a tiny plastic cylinder that dropped neatly into his open palm.
He looked up at the towering stone mesa.
He disappeared.
Nail was intently glaring at the distant coastal plain where the alien ship had just touched down when the air directly in front of his face violently displaced.
A figure was suddenly standing there.
The manifestation was instantaneous. There was no visible approach, no blur of superspeed, no shifting transition. It was just the terrifying, sudden physical presence of a man who absolutely had not been there a millisecond ago.
The sheer shock bypassed Nail's conscious awareness and slammed directly into his combat reflexes. Searing white ki violently surged to his hands—the automatic, lethal response of a master warrior whose sole biological purpose was protecting the most important life on the planet.
He stopped the blast.
Just barely.
The violent energy hissed and dissipated into the air. Nail forced himself to take a slow, controlled breath.
The alien standing casually in front of him was incredibly tall—comparable to a Namekian, which was absolutely not a physiological trait Nail encountered often in off-world visitors. He was built in a dense, heavily muscled way that aggressively communicated extreme lethality without displaying any physical tension. The stranger was looking at Nail's glowing, raised hands with a calm, direct expression, entirely untroubled by the fact that he had just been a millimeter away from being vaporized.
"You must be the guest," Nail said. He utilized the rigidly composed, sub-zero tone he strictly reserved for situations where violent composure was literally the job description. "The Grand Elder is expecting you."
Jordan looked at him.
Something in the human's gaze was piercingly attentive in a way that went slightly beyond ordinary observation—as if he were simultaneously reading a terrifying second layer of biometric data alongside the physical one.
"Thank you, Nail," Jordan said pleasantly.
Nail processed the sentence.
His name. Offered casually on their very first meeting, by a man who had just materialized out of thin air on an unknown planet with absolutely no formal introduction. Nail quickly ran through the tactical explanations: The Grand Elder had clearly foreseen this exact arrival. The Grand Elder had established a telepathic uplink while the ship was in orbit. The Elder had almost certainly mentioned my name to the alien.
He got my name from the Grand Elder, Nail firmly concluded, boxing up the mild paranoia. That is the only logical explanation.
"Please, follow me," Nail commanded sharply, turning on his heel.
The massive stone house on the summit consisted of exactly two levels. There was absolutely no staircase. The second floor was only physically accessible through a wide, circular opening in the ceiling, requiring either active ki flight or biological levitation to breach. Nail smoothly levitated through the opening without ceremony. Jordan effortlessly floated up right behind him.
The upper sanctum was incredibly spare. It featured vaulted ceilings, a massive, polished stone floor, and virtually zero furniture. The endless light from the triple suns poured through the massive bubble-windows, casting clear, warm patches across the masonry.
Sitting dead center in the room, resting heavily in a stone chair that served as a throne for his sheer, impossible scale, was the Grand Elder.
Jordan had stood in the presence of genuine spiritual authority before. Kami possessed it, isolated in his Lookout above Earth. King Yemma absolutely possessed it, anchoring the bureaucratic nightmare of the underworld.
But the Grand Elder possessed something entirely different. It wasn't institutional, bureaucratic authority. It was simply Age, in the purest, most terrifying sense of the word. It was the crushing, accumulated weight of a single life lived at the absolute center of an entire species' biological continuity. It was the kind of localized, gravitational presence that only came from being the most important living entity on a planet for so long that the planet had literally, physically shaped itself around you.
His green skin was lined with massive, deep canyons that had been carved by centuries, not years. His eyes, fully open now, were dark, bottomless, and impossibly patient. The massive, one-star Dragon Ball rested directly behind his massive head, its crimson core faintly luminous.
"Hello, Jordan."
They had already spoken, mind to mind, while the ship was in orbit. But the Grand Elder's ancient expression fundamentally shifted the exact moment Jordan actually crossed the threshold into the room. Something in the ancient alien's face violently opened up, registering a quality of profound, genuine shock.
The Grand Elder had reached far enough through the telepathic ether to verify that Jordan was coming, and to confirm that he possessed absolutely zero hostile intent toward Namek.
Actually standing in the exact same physical room with the human was apparently providing wildly different, terrifying biometric information. The Elder's expression was the exact look of a man who had been politely informed that a river was quite wide, and was now standing on the bank staring at a roaring, bottomless ocean.
The Grand Elder let the heavy silence sit for a long moment, simply staring. Then:
"Nail." His voice was incredibly calm, but the command was absolute. "Leave us."
Nail's head snapped up.
He looked at the Grand Elder in sheer disbelief. Then he looked at Jordan, who was still standing there wearing the exact same pleasant, mildly interested expression as before.
The sheer tactical panic was entirely visible. Nail was his elder's sworn, personal bodyguard. And his elder had just explicitly ordered him to leave the room, effectively abandoning him with an unknown, reality-warping alien whose ambient energy—whatever the hell it actually was—was currently making Nail's combat instincts scream in a way they absolutely never did during peacetime.
But the Grand Elder had given a direct order.
Nail bowed deeply, his jaw clenched tight.
"Yes, Grand Elder."
He slowly levitated back down through the floor opening, his eyes locked on Jordan until he dropped out of sight.
The ancient stone room was dead quiet.