Jordan's eyes tracked the energy patterns moving through Vegeta's newly restored body. The Mind Network's passive scan—his Energy Detector running in the background like an open tab—assembled the numbers without being asked.
Twenty-eight thousand.
Four thousand higher than the original post-Zenkai baseline. Jordan had expected a jump—Goku had been genuinely thorough—but that was still a meaningful overshoot. He filed it away. When the near-death was severe enough, the Saiyan passive apparently squeezed a little harder.
The prince had barely processed that he was no longer dying before his instincts kicked in. New power registered, threat still present—Vegeta's body translated both inputs into a single output: distance, then reposition. He pushed backward, energy already rising, eyes sharpening toward the next move.
Jordan looked at him.
Just looked.
The green-tinged gaze landed and something in Vegeta's spine recognized it before his conscious mind did. The movement stopped. Not a decision—a cessation, the way a machine stops when its power is cut. His arms were mid-raise and they simply did not continue. His legs, which had been coiling to spring, went still.
He was not physically restrained. He could feel that much. But the weight behind those eyes was not something his body had a framework for—something that pressed on him from beneath the level of muscle and bone, something that seemed to reach down into the structure of him and register its own existence against his.
His back was soaked through in the span of a single breath.
Jordan's palm settled onto his shoulder.
Who— The thought formed and immediately ran out of road. What—
Which—
Which fool marked this planet as low-class?!
The internal roar had nowhere to go. His mouth opened once and produced nothing. He stood completely, humiliatingly, still.
"It's not finished yet," Jordan said. "Don't be in a hurry."
He activated Potential Guidance.
From inside the technique, the world was an ocean.
Not water, exactly—something that moved like water, black and vast and lit from no clear source, wave after wave breaking over itself in a space without horizon. The power stored inside Vegeta was not Goku's sky full of quiet stars. It was this: accumulated through decades of combat against real opponents in real danger, forged in rebellion and survival, sharpened by years in Frieza's service into something that had never once been allowed to fully express itself.
It was substantial. Jordan moved through the assessment quickly.
He's always been talented. The thought arrived with the shape of something he already knew. The gap was never ability. The gap was character.
He searched the black ocean's depths for what he'd found in Goku—the golden shape, the Super Saiyan silhouette already formed and waiting. He searched with patience, as thorough as he could be.
Nothing.
The potential was enormous, deep, impressively structured. But the gold wasn't there.
Of course. He already knew why. The innocence required—the exact quality of spirit that sparked the transformation—wasn't something Vegeta had reached yet. He'd get there. Everyone who knew the story knew he'd get there. But not today.
No wonder he's always second. The thought had no cruelty in it. Just recognition. He's always one thing short.
He finished the process and withdrew.
The aura erupted.
It went up like a column—raw ki venting upward from Vegeta's body as the unlocked potential integrated and expanded outward, the desert air crackling and compressing around him, dust spiraling into orbit at the edges of the field. Sand blasted outward in a ring.
At the spectator line, every Z Fighter took an involuntary half-step back. Piccolo's eyes narrowed. Tien's jaw set. Yamcha and Krillin had been standing with the posture of men who'd just won—loose, confident, the easy bearing of warriors who'd had a good morning—and both of them lost that posture simultaneously.
Floating beside Tien, Chiaotzu pressed closer. "Tien." His voice was small and entirely serious. "I can't breathe."
"Get behind me." Tien stepped in front of him without looking, focused entirely on the numbers his body was telling him. Those numbers were not good. "It's alright, get behind me."
"Is this—" Yamcha started.
"Saiyan talent," Krillin finished. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, the motion of a man recalibrating. "That's what Saiyan talent actually looks like."
They were among the strongest fighters on Earth. Between Jordan's Potential Guidance sessions, the weighted training suits, and a full year of daily discipline, Tien had reached fifteen thousand, Krillin fourteen thousand—numbers that would have been inconceivable fantasy twelve months ago. They had beaten a man the size of a small building without removing their suits.
The aura still dwarfed them.
Within the ki field, Vegeta stood at its center and felt the power moving through him like current through a wire. Every joint, every fiber, every breath drawing deeper than it had a moment before. The sensation was extraordinary—not pain, not quite pleasure, something more total than either.
This power—
His eyes opened.
He searched for Jordan automatically—instinct—and found him already several meters away, watching with the detached attention of someone who had seen this particular expression before. The oppressive weight of that gaze had lifted.
Vegeta did not ask himself why he'd been unable to move. He tucked it into a compartment and sealed it.
"Fools." The smile came without his permission, and he stopped trying to suppress it. He looked at the assembled fighters, at Goku standing relaxed at the edge of the crater, at the blond man who had slipped away while he wasn't watching. "You idiots. You gave me this power—" He threw his head back and laughed, sharp and bright and genuinely unguarded. "You'll regret it! You'll all regret it! Because I—"
He pointed his thumb at himself.
"—am Super Vegeta!"
"No you're not."
The laughter cut off.
Goku's voice was not unkind. It wasn't dismissive either. It had the quality of a correction given by someone who simply knows the answer and sees no reason to dress it up.
Vegeta turned on him. "What did you just—"
"A Super Saiyan." Goku scratched the back of his head, thinking it through. "It's someone specific. The legend's real. But it's not you." He paused. "Not yet."
"What I know," Vegeta said, each word arriving like a struck bell, "is that I am already—"
Two impacts, close together, rang out from the ground.
Vegeta blinked.
Goku's weighted inner shirt was embedded in the desert floor, the compressed training mass having left a small crater on impact. Two weighted boots followed it, kicked loose with practiced efficiency, each one striking the ground hard enough to bounce once.
Goku stretched his arms above his head, fingers interlaced, spine extending in a slow arc. The energy rolling off him in the previous moment's suppression was now moving differently—no longer held back, beginning to breathe.
He pointed. Across thirty meters of open ground, directly at Jordan's unhurried blond silhouette, standing apart from everything with both hands in his pockets.
"Jordan's a real Super Saiyan."
Silence.
Then—
"Impossible."
The word came out of Vegeta like something structural had given way beneath it. His eyes were fixed on the blond figure. The aura around him, which had been radiating triumph, had shifted into something else—something it took him a moment to identify, because he was not accustomed to feeling it.
Excitement.
Not rage. Excitement. The specific electricity of a horizon that had just gotten further away.
Across the battlefield, the Z Fighters felt Goku's ki as it rose through its gears, the suppression coming off in layers, the true scale of what he'd trained to becoming legible in the air itself. The number climbed past anything their senses had reference for.
"Yes!" Yamcha's fist came up, involuntary, the gesture of a man watching something confirm everything he'd hoped. "I knew it. I knew Goku had something to answer that."
Krillin pressed both hands to his face and exhaled a breath he seemed to have been holding since morning. "He does this every time. Every single time—maximum cardiac event, then fine, everything's fine."
"Dad!" Gohan launched himself upward, feet leaving the ground, arms windmilling with the complete uncurated enthusiasm of a child whose father is currently being very impressive. "Take him down! Take down that big bad guy!"
Piccolo said nothing. But his arms unfolded from his chest, and his attention had narrowed to a point.
Now, his expression said, it gets interesting.
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