"I just always feel like things are going to keep getting worse," Bulma said softly, staring up at the darkening sky.
She wasn't wrong.
Jordan mentally filed the bleak instinct under 'Highly Accurate' and decided not to say anything complicated about the upcoming Android or Buu sagas.
"They'll be ready," Jordan said instead, his voice a steady anchor. "One year is a massive amount of time when you're training under that kind of localized pressure."
She accepted the reassurance with the slightly reluctant, exhausted posture of someone who desperately wanted to believe it, and was actively working on it.
Dinner at the Brief estate was a massive production. Somewhere between Jordan's arrival and the spontaneous naming of the spacecraft, Mrs. Brief had unilaterally decided that this was an occasion requiring proper, home-cooked food. It was an event she apparently orchestrated rarely enough that it carried the chaotic, festive quality of a major holiday. The massive dining table was warm, overflowing with high-end dishes, and extremely loud in the specific, chaotic way of a family that constantly talked over each other without anyone ever taking offense.
Jordan had literally eaten twenty people's worth of premium wagyu at noon. He arrived at the dinner table with a newly revised, terrifying understanding of the SSR Saiyan card's practical biological implications. He ate with polite 'restraint' by the extreme standards that now governed his metabolism—which still registered as a genuinely horrifying, bottomless intake by any normal human metric.
Mrs. Brief took his devastating assault on the buffet as a profound, personal compliment to her culinary skills, and spent the entire back half of the meal absolutely glowing.
Dr. Brief asked several more rapid-fire questions about the alien propulsion modifications. Jordan answered them smoothly between bites. The conversation was excellent.
The entire Brief family assembled in the illuminated courtyard to officially see him off.
Jordan pulled the tiny, white Universal Capsule No. 1 from the sleek storage box and casually tossed it onto the manicured lawn. He stepped back.
Poof. The familiar, concussive explosion of white smoke rapidly resolved into a massive, two-story interstellar spacecraft, sitting heavily on the grass as though it had always been parked there.
Mrs. Brief immediately pulled him into a crushing hug. She applied the specific, overwhelming enthusiasm of a woman who had unilaterally decided he was already part of the family, and was absolutely not going to let the extreme brevity of their acquaintance interfere with that narrative.
"Be incredibly careful out there in the dark, Little Jordan!"
"I will," he promised. He hugged her back, which seemed like the tactically correct response, and clearly was.
He stepped back and firmly shook Dr. Brief's hand. The older scientist looked as though he had about fifty more theoretical engineering questions chambered, and was actively restraining himself with visible, painful effort. Finally, Jordan turned to Bulma.
"Remember the deal," she said, her blue eyes entirely serious. "You have to be back before the Saiyans breach the atmosphere."
"Before the Saiyans arrive. That's a cast-iron guarantee."
"And—" she hesitated for a fraction of a second, before flashing a sharp smirk. "—make sure you bring back something interesting."
Jordan smiled. "That's exactly the plan."
He offered a final, casual wave, ducked through the heavy airlock hatch, and the reinforced cabin hissed shut behind him.
The ambient engine note fundamentally shifted as the primary systems came online. It was a deep, resonant, rising sub-bass hum that had absolutely nothing to do with Earth's existing combustion technology, and everything to do with the stolen alien fusion core violently spinning up underneath the Capsule Corp bodywork.
Looking through the reinforced viewport, Jordan watched the sprawling Brief estate shrink into a bright cluster of lights below him. Then it became a single point. Then, nothing.
West City's massive municipal grid spread out in every direction, glowing violently like an exposed circuit board in the dark. Then came the heavy cloud layer. Then the freezing upper atmosphere, rapidly thinning out into the black.
Then, deep space.
The silence of it was immediate, heavy, and absolute.
Jordan had violently torn his way through other dimensions. He had stood calmly at the bureaucratic edge of the underworld. He had operated extensively in the artificial, programmed sky of the Imaginary Space.
This was entirely different. Deep space was genuine, unapologetic vastness. It wasn't simulated. It wasn't artificially bounded by the programmed rules of a created dimension. It simply extended in every single direction without a physical edge.
He raised a hand.
Dragon Clan Magic. A solid oak chair—straight-backed, the kind of comfortable furniture you might put next to a quiet reading table—spontaneously materialized out of thin air with a soft flash of white light. He was still finding the sheer, god-like convenience of material creation deeply satisfying to use. He casually conjured a small wooden side table next to it, manifested an ice-cold beer resting on the surface, and sat down.
The heavy viewport perfectly framed the endless sea of stars.
Right, Jordan thought, cracking the beer open. Navigation.
The psychic Mind Network aggressively expanded outward from the ship the exact millisecond he gave it permission. It was the familiar, rushing sensation of expanding awareness, but he was reaching into a medium with violently different content. There were no civilian electrical grids to ping. No Hero Association dispatch signals to intercept. No Saitama sitting somewhere in the background, projecting a massive, localized biomagnetic signature from a Z-City apartment.
There was only the cold, humming electromagnetic texture of deep space, the thrumming readouts of his own ship's systems, and his own terrifying biological signal burning like a magnesium flare in a very dark, very large room.
He pulled up the digital star map on the primary console.
It was an absolute goldmine.
The software wasn't Dr. Brief's original Capsule Corp navigation interface—that had been excellent, but inherently limited. This was the raw data underlying it: the Frieza Force's active operational map of a massive, heavily contested sector of the universe. It was a staggering logistical database obtained at the cost of countless planetary genocides.
Civilized planets were brutally marked with their current political subjugation status. Uninhabited resource planets were meticulously graded by their raw extraction potential. Active threat zones were highlighted with the cold, clinical precision of an empire that strictly measured 'threat' in terms of local resistance to orbital bombardment.
Earth was on the map.
It was dismissively listed under: Developing Civilization. Backward Technological Level. Extremely Low Priority.
Jordan noted the brutal corporate assessment with the dry, sardonic amusement of a man reading his own HR file and finding it completely accurate.
He locked Earth's exact spatial coordinates into the nav-computer.
Then, he started hunting for Namek.
The planet eventually appeared on the far edge of the map
Estimated Travel Time: Twenty Days at Standard Engine Performance.
Jordan smirked. He mentally activated a specific card in his loadout.
[Fantasy Card: Veteran Driver] Type: Passive • Rarity: R
Effect 2 (Vehicle Enhancement): The mechanical performance, speed, and durability of any vehicle currently piloted by the user is instantly doubled.
The ambient engine note instantly changed again.
It grew significantly sharper, far more aggressive. It was the terrifying, ragged sound that heavy machinery makes when it is violently pushed well above its factory-rated safety parameters, and is genuinely, miraculously alright with that. The blue exhaust plume flaring from the primary thrusters—clearly visible through the rear viewport—thickened into a blinding pillar of plasma. The distant stars outside the glass began to blur and streak past with significantly more violent intention.
Estimated Travel Time to Namek: Ten Days.
Jordan leaned back comfortably in his conjured oak chair and took a sip of his beer, staring at the glowing star map.
His eyes drifted to a second marked destination. It was a tiny, obscure planet listed strictly by its raw numerical coordinates. No species notation. No political classification. He had manually inputted the location himself, working entirely off his encyclopedic meta-knowledge of the DBZ timeline.
Yardrat.
The obscure, backwater planet where Goku would eventually crash-land and learn Instant Transmission—the god-like technique to instantly teleport anywhere in the universe simply by locking onto a target's ki signature.
The Yardratian version of teleportation operated on a fundamentally different physics principle than Jordan's current skillset. His Herrscher spatial authority was entirely architectural: he could violently tear a wormhole to anywhere in a dimension that he had previously mapped, at the massive energy cost of constructing and maintaining that physical tear. The range was functionally unlimited, but the mechanism strictly required a known, fixed geographical coordinate.
Yardrat's technique required absolutely nothing but a faint ki signature to lock onto. Any living, breathing entity anywhere in the universe was a valid, instant destination. The actual energy cost was essentially negligible. The only hard limit was the user's sensory range—which was itself just a function of ki sensitivity, a skill that could be infinitely trained and aggressively expanded.
Jordan was hitting Namek first. Yardrat was absolutely next. The sheer tactical upgrade was more than worth the interstellar detour.
He took a long drink of the cold beer and watched the universe blur past the reinforced glass.
The ship hummed violently around him. The void outside was deep, dark, and full of terrifying, ancient things that hadn't been properly introduced yet.
Fine, Jordan thought, a dangerous smile touching his eyes. I'll just introduce myself.
The surface of Planet Namek was lush, green, and completely peaceful in the specific, quiet way of places that had not been troubled by extreme violence in recent memory.
A massive, jagged stone mesa rose aggressively from the surrounding rolling hills. It clearly wasn't naturally formed; the sheer geometry was far too regular for wind erosion to have produced it. Sitting dead center at the flat summit, shaped exactly like a massive, organic white shell, was a house.
Deep inside the quiet sanctum, an ancient Namekian sat heavily in an ornate stone chair that was very nearly a throne. Resting directly behind him, leaning against the heavy backrest like a massive, glowing ornament, was a single Dragon Ball. It was significantly larger than a human head, its massive, single red star clearly visible through the translucent orange surface.
The Grand Elder's eyes were closed.
The heavy wooden doors creaked open. A young, heavily muscled Namekian ducked inside, his white cape falling smoothly around his broad shoulders. He was incredibly tall, built in a dense, coiled way that aggressively communicated extreme combat capability without needing to announce it. The brutal Piccolo family resemblance was definitely there, if you knew exactly what anatomical markers to look for. But this was Piccolo as he might have been without the crushing burden of decades of homicidal conflict and the violent schism of two souls. He was less worn. But he was still incredibly sharp.
Nail bowed slightly, his hands respectfully at his sides. "Grand Elder. You summoned me."
"Nail." The Grand Elder's voice was a slow, unhurried rumble. It was the voice of an ancient entity that existed entirely outside the concept of time pressure. "I wanted you nearby. I have just had a vision."
Nail's hands instantly clenched into fists. "An enemy approaches?"
"No." The massive elder slowly opened his eyes. They were deep, dark, and patient, carrying the specific, terrifying quality of someone who had lived long enough to read the true shape of a soul, rather than just sensing its raw energy output. "If he were an enemy... ten of you would not be enough to even slow him down."
He raised a heavy, wrinkled hand before Nail could violently object to the tactical assessment.
"But he isn't hostile," the Grand Elder continued softly. "His energy clearly tells me what his immediate intentions do not."
He let the heavy silence settle over the stone room.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~