The gap was insurmountable. Goku hadn't even raised his ki.
To Vegeta, who prided himself on speed above all else—whose lightning-fast strikes had carved through battlefields across the galaxy—the experience of watching his own punches land on empty air was deeply, personally offensive.
Goku stepped. Tilted. Shifted his weight a fraction. A flicker of movement, casual as a man avoiding puddles on his morning walk, and Vegeta's elbow scythed through where his ribcage had been a half-second before.
Three steps back. One step to the left.
The prince's knuckle grazed nothing.
Impossible.
Vegeta's jaw tightened. He pressed the assault—a combination, then another, kicks and strikes blurring together, the full technical arsenal of a Saiyan elite. Goku retreated through all of it in unhurried increments, each dodge smaller than the last, as though calibrating exactly how little effort was required.
Cold sweat gathered at Vegeta's temple.
This low-ranking warrior—
Absolutely impossible.
He broke off the exchange and rocketed upward, putting distance between them. His hands were already moving, energy condensing between his palms, crackling and multiplying until the air around him hummed with accumulated power.
"Ha—!" He thrust both arms forward. "Continuous Explosive Blasts!"
The sky turned white.
Energy balls launched from his hands in a sustained torrent—not a single beam but hundreds of them, a machine-gun spread that saturated every angle of approach below him. Each one trailing light, each one carrying enough force to level a building. The barrage screamed downward like a meteor shower with a target.
Twenty meters away from the battlefield, Jordan had found a flat rock.
He set a small folding stool on it, settled himself comfortably, cracked open a can of soda, and produced a bag of sunflower seeds from somewhere.
The Z Fighters stared at him.
"Ah," he said, gesturing toward the sky full of incoming energy bombs with his soda can. "Classic. You know this one—the 'Prince's Opener.'" He paused to crack a seed between his teeth. "Raditz, you agree, right? Classic technique."
Raditz, standing at the far edge of the group, had never heard of any such classification in his entire life. He also recognized that the man commentating was currently looking at him with an expression that had correct answer written clearly across it.
"Yes," Raditz said, with conviction. "Absolutely classic. The Prince always opens with this one."
Jordan gave him an approving look. The kind a teacher gives a student who has finally, finally started paying attention.
Raditz exhaled through his nose and felt his legs go slightly watery with relief.
On the battlefield, Goku let the barrage come.
He didn't move. Didn't dodge. He planted his feet wide in a low stance, centered his weight, and let his fists drop to his sides—then drew a breath so deep his entire torso expanded with it.
The energy blasts were twenty meters out. Then ten. Then five.
He roared.
The sound was not a shout. It was not a kiai in any technical sense. It was something older than technique—a raw tidal force erupting from his chest, shaped into a conical wall of pressure that hit the barrage head-on. The incoming energy balls warped under it, their trajectories twisting, their forms shredding apart, and then they simply ceased, detonating against nothing, dissipating into scattered light before they reached him.
The sound rolled across the desert like a thunderclap. The shockwave stripped the clouds from a thirty-degree arc of sky, leaving blue emptiness in every direction Goku faced.
On Vegeta's scouter, the reading climbed. 10,000. 50,000. 99,999—
The device exploded off his face.
Vegeta caught the falling debris by reflex, fingers closing around the shards. He held them without looking at them. His gaze was fixed on the figure below—black-haired, relaxed, shoulders settling back down from the exertion of the roar.
His real power... The thought arrived and immediately outran the framework Vegeta had been using to hold it. He was suppressing it this entire time. All of them were. The scouters were giving me nothing.
He felt cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.
Below, Goku rolled his neck once. His knuckles cracked in the still air.
"He's still holding back too much," he muttered to himself, not unkindly. "Let's just wrap this up—I don't want to keep Jordan waiting."
Vegeta sensed the shift. Every combat instinct he had fired at once, screaming incoming, but there was no readable approach, no trajectory to track—Goku's face simply appeared in front of him, close enough to see the exact calm in his eyes.
He crossed his arms. Pure reflex, the only thing his body could produce in the half-second available.
The punch landed.
One punch. Not augmented with ki—just the mechanical force of Goku's arm, the mass of his body, the torque of his shoulder. No special technique. No announcement.
The sound the impact made was the sound of structural failure.
Vegeta's guard shattered outward. His arms, crossed to absorb the blow, were simply blasted apart—muscles tearing, bones snapping, the defensive position dismantled in a single beat.
Then the follow-up came.
An elbow drove into his sternum before he could fall backward. A knee caught his midsection as his body doubled forward. A whipping kick struck him across the jaw from below, snapping his head up and to the side with a crack that echoed across the desert floor.
Vegeta couldn't defend against a single hit. He couldn't track the speed. He couldn't find purchase on anything—Goku's combinations moved in, through, and past any position he tried to establish, each blow landing exactly where it would do the most damage, the whole sequence unfolding with the calm efficiency of someone who had done their calculations beforehand and was simply enacting them.
He was briefly aware of being in the air, his body describing an involuntary arc.
Then Goku's hands came together above him—fingers interlaced, a two-handed hammer at full extension—and came down.
The ground accepted the prince with finality.
Dust settled. The crater was rough-edged and two meters deep, Vegeta at the center of it.
His armor was shredded across most of its surface. His arms lay at angles they shouldn't be capable of. His chest moved in shallow, ragged increments, each breath producing a wet sound that didn't belong in a chest cavity. Blood had reached his mouth and was moving past his lips with each exhale.
Kakarot. His vision was darkening at the edges, the sun overhead blurring and swimming. The black-haired silhouette standing at the rim of the crater was almost impossible to focus on. He was—this whole time he was—
Is this my fate?
His eyelids were very heavy.
Goku looked down into the crater and felt the quiet satisfaction of a job done—then immediately felt something else. He crouched at the edge, peering closer at the shallow, bubbling breaths, the blood on the ground, the angle of those arms.
The satisfaction dissolved.
"...Oh no." He straightened up. "Jordan! Jordan, come here—fast! I think I hit him too hard!"
Jordan stood up from his stool. He took one last drink of soda. He had, it should be noted, photographed that whipping kick. The follow-up too.
A man's got to document things.
He crossed to the crater at a measured pace, looked at the figure inside, and absorbed the sight with the expression of a man reviewing an unfavorable quarterly report. He clicked his tongue once.
This is what happens when the curve passes you by.
What a state to end up in.
He moved around Goku with a pointed look that communicated, without words, that large over-enthusiastic people with no throttle control should stand elsewhere, and stepped down into the crater. One knee on the broken ground.
Vegeta, through eyes barely open, registered the blond hair. The gold aura that wasn't quite an aura—something ambient, like heat haze but present regardless of the sun's angle. He registered a hand placed on his shoulder, firm and certain.
"Super Healing."
The glow came first. Not white—something warmer than that, the particular luminescence of Dragon Clan magic moving through a body with authority, each point of damage catalogued and addressed in sequence. Goku had watched Jordan work before and understood what the technique did, but seeing it now—watching Vegeta's shattered arms straighten, the unnatural angles correcting themselves, bone moving back to where bone should be—still sat somewhere between medical procedure and miracle.
The terrible wet sound of Vegeta's breathing smoothed out. The blood on his face dried and began to flake away. Color returned to his skin from the inside out, circulation restored, pressure normalized.
The light faded.
For a moment, nothing moved.
Then Vegeta's eyes opened.
He stared upward at the desert sky, completely uninjured, every system in his body reporting baseline function. His brain, doing what brains do upon regaining consciousness, attempted to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the last thing he remembered—
It presented him with: the crater. The falling. The sound of his own arms.
He lay very still, blinking.
The expression that resulted—confused, disoriented, stripped momentarily of every layer of Saiyan pride—was not an expression anyone in the galaxy had likely witnessed on the face of the Saiyan prince before.
Jordan, crouched beside him, looked at that expression.
...Huh.
Honestly, a little cute.