The Grand Elder had finally stopped assuming there was something wrong with his terrifying alien guest, and had started frantically searching for what was biologically wrong with himself.
"The internal process is absolutely identical to what I use to bless the children," the ancient Namekian murmured, speaking half to Jordan and half to the empty stone room. "Activation of the guiding spiritual force. Direct contact established. The dormant potential is located. The biological release is initiated." A heavy, rattling pause. "So why—"
"Grand Elder," Jordan interrupted gently. "You've been extraordinarily generous with both your time and your divine ability today. But I really think we should just move on. There's absolutely no need to exhaust yourself over this."
The Elder slowly looked down at his massive, trembling hand. He looked back up at Jordan. Then he looked at his hand again. He wore the deeply offended expression of a master craftsman whose favorite, reliable tools had suddenly declined to function, and who simply could not identify the technical reason why.
Jordan had, privately, been actively considering the true, horrifying explanation: the potential-unlocking ability fundamentally worked by locating the biological gap between what a warrior currently was, and what they could be. And in Jordan's highly specific, timeline-breaking case, that gap had already been violently slammed shut.
It had been closed by a brutal, compounding process involving multiple physical limiter breaks, a hoarded deck of SSR ability cards stacked across three entirely different multiversal power systems, Hashirama's absolute Sage biology, and a Stand that had literally shattered the mathematical ceiling on the Growth Potential axis to achieve absolute infinity.
There was absolutely no dormant reserve left to release, because the standard, local model of 'reserves and release' had simply ceased to apply to his biology at some point in the last year or so.
He politely decided not to say any of this out loud.
"Perhaps... at your staggering level of power, the traditional method simply loses its efficacy," the Grand Elder finally decided. He arrived at this comfortable conclusion with the quiet dignity of a man who vastly preferred to find the root cause in the external situation, rather than in his own failing technique. "Yes. That must be it."
"That must be it," Jordan agreed warmly, offering a perfectly diplomatic smile. "Shall we collect the Dragon Balls?"
Nail levitated back up through the circular floor opening. He maintained the rigid, careful composure of a royal guard who had just spent the last several hours sweating outside a locked room containing his vulnerable Elder and a terrifying, reality-warping alien, and was now required by protocol to act as though this was just an ordinary Tuesday.
He instantly saw Jordan casually holding the massive, one-star Dragon Ball.
Nail's stony face did not change. His dark eyes flicked once to the Grand Elder, registered the old man's exhausted but settled expression, flicked to Jordan to register his relaxed posture, and immediately snapped back to professional neutrality.
"You summoned me, Grand Elder."
"Jordan has my absolute, full authorization to utilize the Namekian Dragon Balls," the Elder announced, his voice echoing in the sparse room. He settled heavily back into his stone throne, the sheer bulk of him finding its weary rest, his heavy eyelids already beginning to droop shut again. "Take him through the surrounding villages to collect the remaining six. And find little Dende—bring him along with you. He possesses the Dragon Clan talent. Having him personally perform the summoning ceremony will be excellent for his spiritual development."
Nail's mouth opened slightly in shock. Then it clicked shut.
The matter was officially settled. Argument was no longer tactically available.
"Understood," Nail said flatly.
Outside, the Namekian sky was a brilliant, endless expanse of blue-green atmosphere and three burning suns.
Nail launched himself off the mesa without a countdown.
He transitioned from standing perfectly still to supersonic flight in the span of a single, violent motion. His white aura flared blindingly, the displaced air violently cracking like a whip as he tore through it. In three seconds, he was a blazing green streak cutting across the alien sky. In five, he had achieved cruising altitude.
He hovered there, deciding to do the human the professional courtesy of not appearing too visibly impatient. After roughly sixty seconds, he finally turned his head to look back toward the mountain to see how far behind the alien was.
The Grand Elder had explicitly warned him: Stronger than anything you have ever encountered. Nail was intellectually aware that the universe was a very large, very dangerous place. However, he also possessed thirty unbroken years of being the absolute, unambiguous strongest warrior on his entire planet. That kind of localized dominance had a strong psychological tendency to produce a certain baseline assumption about exactly where on the galactic food chain one sat.
Nail turned his head.
Jordan was floating casually right next to him.
He wasn't straining below him, desperately trying to catch up. He wasn't arriving from a different, slower angle. He was simply there. Hovering at his exact altitude, holding his exact geographical position, and perfectly matching his blistering speed with the relaxed, unbothered posture of a man who had gone for a light afternoon stroll and found the local weather highly agreeable.
He was holding a glass bottle.
Nail stared blankly at the bottle.
It was a classic, curved glass contour, containing a dark, bubbling liquid with a plastic straw neatly inserted through the metal cap. Jordan was casually sipping from the straw with the mild, quiet satisfaction of a man enjoying a deeply familiar comfort.
He noticed the Namekian staring at him.
"Want one?" Jordan offered, pulling the straw from his lips. "It's really good."
Nail absolutely did not want one. He also absolutely did not want to be hovering here with cold sweat suddenly beading on his green forehead—sweat which had violently appeared during the sixty seconds of 'waiting' and had absolutely not departed yet.
He snapped his head forward and aggressively accelerated.
Really accelerated, this time. The fiercely competitive portion of his warrior brain violently overrode the diplomatic portion. His white aura spiked massively, leaving a blinding trail of green light burning in his wake as his flight speed climbed into the terrifying, high-mach range where atmospheric pressure became a brutal, physical wall. A deafening sonic boom chased his trajectory across the sky like a thunderclap hunting a lightning strike.
After several agonizing seconds of burning his ki reserves, Nail chanced a glance to his right.
Jordan was still right beside him.
He was matching the exact same blistering speed, but there was absolutely no visible aura output, and zero detectable energy expenditure. He still had his glass bottle.
F-boy had apparently materialized at some point during the supersonic drag race—Nail couldn't physically see the Stand, which was deeply, psychologically disorienting—and had, based on the second frosted bottle now spontaneously materializing in the thin air, smoothly popped the metal cap and inserted a fresh straw with the crisp, professional efficiency of a highly-paid, invisible sommelier.
Jordan casually held the second bottle out over the rushing wind.
Nail took it. He grabbed it purely by ingrained martial reflex, a full second before his conscious decision-making actually caught up with his hands.
He stared down at it. He looked over at Jordan. He looked back at the bubbling dark liquid.
"Just try it," Jordan urged cheerfully over the roaring wind. "I materialized it from Earth ingredients using the Dragon Clan magic. You're legally allowed to enjoy things from other planets, Nail."
The Namekian dietary situation was, Nail knew intimately, incredibly simple by evolutionary design: Water. Water boasting the kind of absolute, crystalline purity that only came from a planet completely devoid of heavy industrial contamination. His people had survived and thrived perfectly well on it for countless generations. Pure water was fine. Pure water was biologically correct. Pure water was—
The dark liquid was freezing cold.
It was cold in the highly specific, shocking way of something that had been artificially chilled significantly below ambient room temperature—which was itself a physical sensation Nail had not experienced very often on a sweltering planet with three permanent suns.
And then the aggressive carbonation hit his tongue. And the overwhelming, syrupy sweetness. And the millions of tiny, freezing explosions of pressurized gas violently releasing against his palate—
Nail drained a third of the glass bottle before his brain even registered that he had started drinking.
A very small, involuntary tremor ran through his thick green arms.
He abruptly stopped. He aggressively composed himself. He held the half-empty glass bottle with rigid, appropriate diplomatic neutrality.
"What," Nail asked carefully, wiping his mouth, "exactly is this?"
"Back on Earth, we casually refer to it as 'Happy Water,'" Jordan replied smoothly.
Nail repeated the phrase silently in his head. Happy Water. He stared down at the glass bottle, which was still mostly full, still aggressively bubbling, and still wonderfully, shockingly cold.
He quickly took another long sip.
"What an incredibly apt name," Nail murmured. He spoke with the iron restraint of a warrior who was currently experiencing a significantly stronger physiological reaction than his stoic voice was ever going to admit.
They flew hard for the rest of the long afternoon.
Namek was massive—roughly ten times Earth's physical diameter—but the massive Dragon Balls distributed across its surface lit up like radioactive flares against the Mind Network's global scan. Jordan had all six remaining geographical locations perfectly mapped before they even reached the airspace of the first agricultural village.
He simply told Nail exactly where to fly. Nail, who possessed deep, established diplomatic relationships with the local village elders, handled all the formal introductions and the necessary explanations.
The Namekians they spoke to were, without a single exception, incredibly gentle people. The Dragon Clan's hereditary, biological disposition toward absolute peace expressed itself in their immediate, welcoming manner, their beautifully decorated stone homes, and their total willingness to hand over artifacts of unfathomable cosmic power to a complete stranger, simply because the Grand Elder had sent telepathic word ahead.
In the third village, they finally located Dende.
He was small in the specific, awkward way that implied he would eventually grow to be quite large. He possessed the lanky proportions of a child who absolutely hadn't finished growing into his limbs, the white markings on his green head clean, bright, and new.
The moment Nail touched down in the village square, Dende had immediately sprinted over and attached himself to Nail's back, wrapping both small arms tightly around the warrior's thick neck. He was currently watching Jordan from this elevated, fortified position with the hyper-cautious attention of a child who had rapidly assessed the tactical situation, and correctly concluded that Nail's back was the absolute safest available location on the entire planet.
"Brother Nail," Dende whispered quietly in native Namekian, speaking directly into the back of Nail's head. "Why exactly are we helping a terrifying alien summon the sacred dragon?"