Nail was scanning the sprawling archipelago below when he finally said it. He spoke in rapid, hushed Namekian, keeping his volume deliberately pitched under the roar of the wind so Jordan wouldn't hear them as they descended toward the flat island.
"He is a good person, Dende."
For a stoic, guarded race whose absolute highest metric of praise was that exact, simple phrase—offered plainly, without any need for flowery elaboration—it carried infinitely more weight than it would have in any other language.
Dende, currently piggybacking on the warrior with both small arms wrapped securely around his thick neck, nodded. It was the slightly-too-rapid, jerky motion of a child eagerly absorbing critical intelligence from a trusted adult and deciding it was absolute fact.
"Oh. Okay!"
Jordan, whose psychic Mind Network flawlessly intercepted and translated linguistic data just as easily as it mapped biomagnetic fields, kept his amusement strictly to himself and smoothly continued his descent.
By the time their boots touched the blue grass, he already had three cold bottles of soda materialized.
He kept one for himself—the familiar, heavy glass bottle, already weeping condensation in the sweltering Namekian heat. He tossed the second to Nail. The warrior snatched it out of the air, aggressively performing the role of a man who considered this a completely routine transaction, deliberately ignoring the fact that his green face visibly brightened at the freezing temperature.
Jordan held the third bottle out toward Dende. The child had climbed down from Nail's back and was currently maintaining a highly careful, mathematically calculated safe distance. He was watching Jordan with the intense, sideways scrutiny of a kid who had just been explicitly told the terrifying alien was trustworthy, but was actively collecting his own empirical evidence.
Their eyes met.
Dende flinched, startling slightly.
The glass bottle appeared in his hands anyway. It didn't actually fly from Jordan's direction; it simply materialized directly into the child's small grip—heavy, freezing cold, the dark liquid violently bubbling with rising spheres of gas.
Dende stared down at it, wide-eyed. He looked up at Nail.
Nail offered a single, microscopic nod of approval.
Dende took a cautious sip from the straw.
The aggressive carbonation hit his palate.
Something absolutely electric happened to his antennae; they snapped completely rigid. He recovered his composure remarkably fast for a child who had just experienced pressurized sugar for the very first time in his life. He took a second, much longer sip with the measured, highly serious deliberation of a scientist confirming a volatile chemical reaction. Then, he looked up at Jordan. His small face rapidly cycled through several profound developmental milestones in the span of about four seconds.
Oh, the expression clearly broadcasted. I completely understand why he's a good person now.
"What exactly is this called?" Dende asked quietly in his native tongue.
"Happy Water," Jordan replied seamlessly in perfect Namekian. The Mind Network's translation matrix ran flawlessly in both directions, actively shaping his vocal cords to produce the alien dialect as naturally as he understood it.
Dende's antennae twitched happily.
"That is a very good name," he declared with solemn, absolute conviction.
Nail had specifically chosen this island.
It sat far completely isolated from any of the six populated agricultural villages. It was incredibly remote, vast, and entirely barren at its center, offering a massive expanse of flat, unbroken blue earth. The island's total square footage was roughly three times the size of Z-City. Whatever apocalyptic event happened here would have plenty of localized room to breathe without accidentally vaporizing anyone who shouldn't be involved.
Back at the Grand Elder's mesa, Jordan had explicitly requested a secluded drop zone. Nail hadn't bothered to ask why. On a massive planet boasting a global population of barely over a hundred individuals, the concept of 'somewhere nobody lives' successfully covered about ninety-nine percent of the surface.
Jordan's reasoning was purely tactical: he was reasonably confident the Namekian Dragon wouldn't violently disrupt the planetary atmosphere the way Earth's Shenron did. Namek was a vastly larger planet, boasting a significantly more robust, ancient magical infrastructure. But reasonable confidence and absolute certainty were two completely different things, and the only sensible operational approach was to build in a massive margin for error.
Also, Porunga was mathematically massive.
Jordan had mentally prepped for the sheer scale. He pulled the seven glowing, orange-bordered SSR cards from his spatial inventory, setting them gently on the grass. He activated them in rapid sequence.
The Dragon Balls violently unfolded from their compressed card-state, expanding into three dimensions and materializing in a perfect, hovering arc above the dirt. The sheer size difference was staggering. Each crystal sphere was the size of a large basketball—infinitely heavier and denser than the fist-sized Earth set Jordan had gathered weeks ago.
They resonated instantly.
A low, complex, terrifying harmonic vibration began to violently hum. It wasn't quite a sound; it was a physical frequency that rattled the marrow in their chests rather than registering in their eardrums. The massive, crimson stars suspended inside the crystal flared, the golden light pulsing in absolute, perfect synchrony.
Dende stared up at the glowing array. He wore the awestruck, terrified expression of a student looking at a mythological concept he had only read about in ancient texts, suddenly violently manifesting in his front yard.
Nail looked at Jordan.
Jordan nodded once. Do it.
Nail crouched down on one knee, resting a heavy, protective green hand on his youngest brother's shoulder. It was the easy, grounding contact of a warrior who had been keeping this specific, fragile person safe for a very long time.
"Go ahead, Dende," Nail murmured quietly. "The summons is officially yours to call."
Dende took a shaky breath and stood up straight.
He was, objectively speaking, incredibly small. The humming Dragon Balls floating in the air above him were literally larger than his entire torso. The endless, bright blue-green sky of Namek, illuminated by three unblinking suns, stretched vastly above everything.
The child clenched his small fists, grounding himself. Then, he threw his arms wide open.
He took a massive breath.
"Come forth, great dragon of our people! Hear our wish and answer!"
The ancient Namekian syllables slammed into the air like a physical shockwave. And the universe immediately answered.
The sky violently shifted.
It wasn't weather. It wasn't a sudden, localized drop in barometric pressure. The atmosphere aggressively rearranged itself, as if the planet had been holding its breath for centuries waiting for a specific password, and had finally received it. The sky, which had never known a single night cycle in its entire existence, instantly plunged into absolute, pitch-black darkness. Boiling, bruised clouds materialized from the void in seconds, violently expanding in unnatural geometric patterns dictated by an ancient magical architecture that entirely ignored the laws of meteorology.
The harmonic resonance radiating from the Dragon Balls spiked—vibrating aggressively against their teeth, violently altering the localized frequency to let every living thing on the planet know that the laws of physics were currently suspended.
The golden light detonated.
It didn't just pour from one ball. All seven massive spheres erupted simultaneously. Blinding beams of pure, incandescent luminance violently converged into a single, roaring column of light that fired straight up, piercing the boiling black clouds and punching a hole directly into the stratosphere. If anyone had been watching from high orbit, they would have seen the dark surface of Namek suddenly sprout a blinding pillar of gold, clearly visible against the planetary curve from thousands of kilometers away.
The roaring column violently widened.
The entity that materialized within the blinding light was absolutely, terrifyingly massive.
It didn't just appear; it aggressively assembled itself from the raw energy, revealing its impossible scale incrementally as it pushed its way through the dimensional threshold. A vast, serpentine lower body uncoiled through the churning black clouds, its sheer mass displacing the air with concussive force. The upper torso was heavily humanoid, completely dwarfing Shenron in raw, muscular bulk. It was armored in heavy, spiked green scales, its staggering musculature specifically designed to project overwhelming, god-like physical power to anything foolish enough to look at it.
The massive, reptilian head was crowned with jagged horns.
The eyes burned with the exact same, impossible, bloody crimson as Earth's dragon. It was the kind of terrifying, ancient light that entirely preceded logical understanding—the kind of light that paralyzed the central nervous system before the brain could even process the source.
Porunga looked down.
The three figures standing in the dirt were microscopic. Jordan calmly tracked the massive, burning red eyes as they swept over Nail, locked onto Dende, and finally shifted to stare directly at him. They lingered.
The Dragon of Dreams' voice did not travel through the air. It manifested directly inside their skulls, utilizing the exact same invasive, telepathic bypass as the Grand Elder, but magnified a thousand times over.
"You who have summoned me—state your wishes. Three shall be granted."
The cosmic voice wasn't loud.
It simply didn't need to be. It was just there, existing with the crushing, inevitable reality of a collapsing star. It was present. It was impossibly patient. It was waiting for the exact syllables that would justify its temporary manifestation in the physical realm.
Beside Jordan, little Dende had completely forgotten how to breathe.
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