Jordan reached up and awkwardly scratched the back of his head.
"I'm really sorry about the island," he said. He hovered over to where Nail and Dende were floating, actively projecting the exhausted, apologetic posture of a man who was acutely aware he had just violently deleted a significant piece of Namek's geography from the map. "That was absolutely not part of the plan."
"Brother Jordan, you're incredible!"
Dende was literally vibrating. He hummed with the specific, manic frequency of a child who had just watched something apocalyptic happen and wasn't entirely sure how to safely process the trauma, but had ultimately landed on 'screaming enthusiasm' as the most appropriate emotional response. His small green fist was pumped high in the air. His dark eyes were blindingly bright.
Nail held the child securely against his chest with one massive arm. The elite warrior looked at Jordan, wearing an expression that had only achieved stoic equanimity through immense, agonizing psychological effort.
"There is absolutely no need to apologize," Nail said stiffly. "You clearly did not intend the structural damage. And... there are many similar islands on Namek." He glanced nervously toward the horizon, where the former island's location was now exclusively marked by a violently churning, mile-wide whirlpool. "Our people rarely travel to this specific sector of the coast. Nothing of value was lost."
Jordan nodded. "Well, that's good," he said, meaning it entirely sincerely.
He politely chose not to mention that right at the absolute peak of the transformation, the crushing gravitational energy he had been outputting had been approximately forty seconds away from violently punching straight through Namek's planetary crust and detonating the mantle.
He still safely held the Dragon God's Power SSR card in his spatial inventory. In the absolute worst-case scenario, he could have theoretically used the divine wish to physically rebuild the shattered planet afterward. But 'I can just fix the planet afterward' was exactly the kind of catastrophic contingency planning that, in retrospect, was infinitely better not to have needed.
Namek had survived the beta test intact.
This was absolutely the preferred outcome.
The boiling ocean was finally beginning to settle.
Nail watched the distant, churning water with the specific, heavy quality of attention that only comes after a near-death experience, his brain still actively running the tactical recalibration. He slowly turned his focus back to Jordan.
"The dragon's wish," Nail murmured. "You explicitly asked for greater power."
"Yes." Jordan kept his eyes locked on the horizon. "Earth, stacked up against what is currently flying toward it in the dark, is entirely too weak. I fully intend to violently change that math." He paused. He turned and placed a heavy, grounding hand on the Namekian's broad shoulder—the deliberate physical gesture of a man making a point he needed to land properly. "Nail. There is a massive tactical difference between possessing absolute power and choosing not to use it... versus simply not having any power at all."
Nail froze, slowly processing the statement.
Jordan could physically see the concept hit him. It was a genuinely, radically new philosophy for the Namekian—the cold framework of absolute power utilized as a deterrent, rather than a weapon of active conquest. True strength built specifically so you had the luxury of choosing not to deploy it.
Nail had spent his entire adult life existing as the absolute strongest entity on a fundamentally peaceful planet. He had been the ultimate, failsafe guarantee that absolutely nobody ever needed to call on. He had never once been forced to think about the desperate, grinding preparation that made such guarantees possible in the first place, because the planetary guarantee had always just been him.
The Namekian's pupils dilated slightly.
Jordan watched the psychological door violently kick open in the warrior's expression, and wisely chose to say absolutely nothing further. Some heavy tactical concepts simply needed quiet space to properly settle.
He turned his attention back to Dende instead.
"You were a massive help today, kid," Jordan smiled warmly. "Thank you."
Dende's small face rapidly cycled through several embarrassed transitions. He grabbed a fistful of Nail's white collar for emotional support and mumbled into the fabric, "I didn't really do much of anything..."
"You literally summoned a magical space dragon," Jordan pointed out dryly. "I'm pretty sure that officially counts as 'doing something.'" He grinned, crossing his arms. "As a personal thank you... I am going to keep you fully supplied with Happy Water. Indefinitely. Literally whenever you want it."
A dead, breathless pause.
Dende stared at him, his jaw hanging open.
Indefinitely.
The expression that slowly bloomed across his green face was the specific, terrified look of a child who had just been offered a bribe that vastly exceeded his available mental framework for good fortune, and was desperately checking the contract for hidden errors.
"Really?!"
"How would I possibly fake that?" Jordan laughed.
Dende's antennae shot straight up into the air.
Three Namekian Months Later.
The violent Super Saiyan transformation had taken an agonizing ten minutes to successfully trigger the first time.
That was just the brutal beta test, Jordan had eventually concluded. It was his human body violently proving the alien mechanism was biologically functional. His cells aggressively demonstrating that the threshold could actually be crossed. His underlying biology frantically executing a mutation that billions of years of brutal Saiyan evolution had specifically designed it to do—completely ignoring the minor logistical fact that the human currently experiencing it had never actually asked for the lethal training arc to be necessary.
He had formally asked the Grand Elder if he could quietly remain on Namek for a short while.
The ancient ruler had agreed instantly, projecting the serene equanimity of a deity who had correctly decided that absolutely anything Jordan needed was probably going to be highly beneficial for the planet's long-term survival.
So, Jordan had done the only tactically reasonable thing available to him: he had trained like an absolute psychopath.
He had stood in various, highly remote sectors of Namek's rocky coastline for an entire Earth-standard month—always operating thousands of miles from the populated villages, always selecting barren locations where the catastrophic collateral impact could be safely absorbed by the ocean—and methodically worked through the brutal mechanics of the golden transformation.
The trigger sequence was a violent science: aggressively build the ki, violently engage the S-cell cellular response, and forcefully locate the specific, cold emotional fuel that his unique psychology would actually burn. He had gotten significantly faster at finding that spark. The piracy memory was highly reliable, but the specific, freezing anger required to ignite the transformation was something he could now smoothly access from multiple psychological angles—the exact same way a master musician learns how to consistently hit a complex note from different approaches.
The sustainable duration steadily climbed.
Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. An hour. Three grueling hours.
Three hours was exactly where his operational limit sat right now. It was the absolute ceiling where the violent transformation could cleanly sustain itself without bleeding out. It was the point where the apocalyptic ki output was tightly controlled enough that he wasn't accidentally ionizing the surrounding atmosphere, and where he was no longer what Nail had once diplomatically referred to as 'highly concerning in terms of planetary geological impact.'
He absolutely hadn't achieved full, 100% mastery yet.
There was still a wild, feral quality to the golden energy while transformed that ran slightly faster than his conscious management of it. It felt like a raging river that was violently flowing at a rate just slightly above what the concrete channel had been engineered to hold. But the tactical trajectory was crystal clear. Achieving flawless mastery was simply a matter of grueling time and brutal repetition.
Super Saiyan, Jordan thought, staring down at his glowing reflection in a pool of completely still seawater after a brutal sparring session. Still actively working on the efficiency. But making massive progress.
The blazing gold hair in the watery reflection looked, objectively speaking, incredibly cool.
He mentally filed that aesthetic win under 'incidental tactical benefit.'
The other major development of the three-month training arc was significantly more sociable.
It had started entirely with little Dende.
Dende possessed genuine, terrifying talent. He held the legendary Dragon Clan gift—the divine, creative magic that even the Grand Elder had explicitly recognized as exceptional among his own ancient people. Jordan had patiently explained the underlying scientific principles behind the Dragon Clan magic he had successfully integrated from Kami's SSR card. Dende had absorbed the complex physics explanation with the laser-focused, terrifying attention of a prodigy who instantly recognized advanced material that was directly relevant to their existing biological skillset.
They had immediately started working on practical applications.
Specifically: the highly targeted, molecular creation of iced cola.
Jordan had provided the complex scientific template: the exact chemical composition of the sugary syrup he had been carrying over from the OPM universe, the required atmospheric pressure for the carbonation mechanic, and the strict thermodynamic temperature requirements. Dende had flawlessly translated that raw data into Dragon Clan magic. The entire process of actively teaching a prodigy child how to violently materialize something out of thin air using the fundamental principles of divine creation was, Jordan found, considerably more satisfying than he had expected.
The very first successful, independent Namekian production run had yielded a small glass bottle. It was slightly under-carbonated, and the internal temperature was hovering a few degrees above the ideal freezing point.
Dende had aggressively chugged it in its entirety, and loudly declared it an absolute masterpiece.
Jordan had politely chosen not to correct the temperature differential.
By the end of the second grueling month, Dende's magical calibration was absolutely flawless. By the end of the third month, the child could casually produce a perfectly frosted, heavy glass bottle at the exact optimal temperature in approximately the exact same time it would take a normal human to retrieve one from a refrigerator. The divine technique rapidly transferred to several of the other young Namekian prodigies in the village who expressed intense dietary interest, though Dende's localized output remained the most chemically consistent.
The scattered agricultural villages, operating collectively through their telepathic network, had quickly reached a planetary consensus about Jordan. It was a reputation Jordan found quietly, deeply gratifying: he was the terrifying warrior who had fallen from Earth, spoken as an equal with the Grand Elder, trained incredibly loudly in the remote badlands for several weeks, and generously provided their people with the divine recipe for Happy Water.