Goku waved to the group—a cheerful, unhurried wave, the gesture of a man who has somewhere to be and is looking forward to getting there—and let his ki breathe.
The suppression came off in layers. The white aura that rose from him wasn't the volcanic eruption that Vegeta's had been; it was something steadier than that, the way a forge runs hotter than a bonfire. It filled the space around him with a low, constant pressure that the desert air simply accepted, as if recognizing something it had been waiting for.
Vegeta stared across the open ground and, for the first time since arriving on this planet, made no move to speak.
The power he showed before—that wasn't his limit. The realization settled through him with the particular unpleasantness of something that should have been obvious. He was still holding back. And even now—
Even now, he still couldn't read the bottom of it.
"I'm chasing Jordan's level," Goku said, rolling his neck once. His fighting spirit was a visible thing—not aggression, something purer than that, the absolute focus of a person doing exactly what they were built to do. He looked at Vegeta the way a craftsman looks at a problem they find genuinely interesting. "You're the best opponent I've found for it. So—" His grin settled into something that people who didn't know him might mistake for serene. "If you can beat me, I'll show you what a Super Saiyan actually looks like."
The vein at Vegeta's temple twitched.
He'd been standing here thirty seconds ago with his arms wide and his head back, laughing about being Super Vegeta, and he had meant it. The power filling him had felt total, complete, sufficient for anything. It had felt like arrival.
And then Goku had taken off his training weights.
The ground had cracked where the boots landed.
Jordan is— He cut the thought off before it finished. It didn't help him right now. Fight first.
Goku came off the ground and twisted into the kick—fast, no pre-announcement, the opening attack he'd shouted about thirty seconds earlier now simply arriving.
Except he'd shouted about it thirty seconds earlier, so Vegeta's hand was already up, deflecting the force sideways. The impact rang through his forearm.
There it is.
Both of them felt it: the click of two combat intelligences making contact, reading each other, beginning the actual conversation. They traded twice, three times, feeling for weight and timing and the habits buried deep in each other's reflexes.
Then the real fight started.
Piccolo pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead and held it there.
He could track them—barely, with everything he had, his superhuman senses at full stretch—just well enough to make the experience of watching genuinely unpleasant. He'd wanted Goku dead. He'd trained for years partly on the premise of eventually correcting that situation. And now here he was, watching Goku hold his own against a fully-enhanced Saiyan prince, and the thing he wanted to do to this insufferable man who shouted before attacking—
A Special Beam Cannon. Right in the opening exchange. Right when Vegeta was flat-footed and the advantage was real and tactically obvious.
He shouted first. He announced the kick. He shouted and Vegeta had a full two seconds to prepare his guard and—
This family is structurally incapable of learning.
"They're so fast," Yamcha said, half to himself. His eyes tracked the afterimages flashing across the sky—patches of disrupted air where two people had recently been, already somewhere else. "I can't even—I'm watching as hard as I can and I'm catching maybe one in ten movements."
Tien stood with Chiaotzu settled on his shoulder, both of them tracking the same nothing. "If either of us were in there," Tien said, with the calm of a man making a factual assessment of a situation he's accepted, "we'd last one exchange. Maybe."
"It's Goku's fight," Krillin said. His fists were clenched at his sides, not from fear—from the very specific frustration of a warrior who has trained hard and long and is watching a battle that is simply no longer at his altitude. "All we can do is trust him. This one's his."
In the air above the desert, two forearms came together with a sound like a concussion grenade.
The shockwave expanded outward in a perfect ring—compressed air releasing all at once, sand blasting flat in every direction from the point of impact. For a fraction of a second, both figures were visible: Goku and Vegeta locked chest to chest in a pushing contest, every muscle in both bodies engaged, their faces centimeters apart.
Vegeta's expression was cold fury working toward something that wasn't quite cold anymore.
He was losing this exchange. The forced upgrade had been real—he could feel the difference, the unlocked potential integrated into his movement, his output genuinely elevated—and Goku's punches still landed heavier. Still arrived faster. Vegeta absorbed a strike to the cheek and one to the abdomen and kept moving forward, kept searching, because the alternative was to stop moving and he was the Saiyan prince and he did not stop.
But.
He's not as far ahead as before. The conclusion arrived between one exchange and the next. When he was playing around, every hit felt like being struck by a natural disaster. Now his guard costs him something. He has to work.
Goku had a bruise at the corner of his mouth that hadn't been there two minutes ago.
Both of them noticed. Neither said anything.
The battle compressed itself into a rhythm—two heavy punches trading for two heavy punches, bodies separating into blurred motion, meeting again, the continuous chain of detonating air that marked the boundary of their exchange rolling outward across the desert like distant thunder.
They fought with their entire bodies. Fists, elbows, forearms used as shields, shoulders dropped as battering rams, knees driving up, kicks sweeping low. Every limb a weapon, the full vocabulary of two martial intelligences in genuine conversation, neither one holding anything significant in reserve.
The stalemate broke when Goku's head went forward.
A headbutt—unsophisticated, the kind of thing that has no style and considerable structural commitment. It caught Vegeta square in the face and rocked him backward, buying Goku exactly one second of clear space.
Goku immediately grabbed his own forehead and grimaced, tears welling. "Ow—ow—"
"What is wrong with you," Vegeta snarled, shaking his head hard, the world reorganizing itself in his vision. "You grew up on this planet and it made you feral!"
He spread his arms. Energy condensed between his palms—not a focused beam but a spread, two enormous lightning-shaped charges building simultaneously, the distinctive piercing cry of massed ki filling the air around him like ten thousand birds screaming. His hands came together.
The Galick Gun launched.
From thirty meters away, Jordan watched the spiral of interlocking energy go and experienced a very specific feeling.
He covered his face.
I've said it. I have said it out loud. You never stand on the left side when the Sun family opens with beam combat. The geometry does not work in your favor.
Why is nobody listening.
Goku had recovered from the headbutt. His hands came up—no charging stance, no ceremony, just palms pressed together and inner energy detonating outward in a thick blue-white column—
"Kamehameha!"
The two beams met in the space between them with a sound like the air splitting.
For five seconds, the desert went white. The ground beneath the collision point cracked outward in a spiderweb, the force of both attacks grinding into each other, searching for the opening that would let one of them through.
Then Goku felt the Zenkai humming in his blood—the near-death enhancement, every brush with mortality over a lifetime of fighting compounded and compounding, the passive that Vegeta had just triggered at maximum intensity—and pushed.
The Kamehameha moved.
Vegeta's pupils contracted. His own attack—fully charged, everything behind it—was losing. Being pushed back.
The buffs are stacking. He understood it suddenly and completely: the technique had given Vegeta's potential the first push, but the Zenkai had done its own work on top of that, and Goku had been near death before Vegeta had even gotten close. Every fight, every defeat, every brush with an opponent who should have killed him—all of it was in that beam right now, compounding.
Kakarot's charged nothing. He just—
He made the decision in the half-second he had.
He abandoned the beam.
The Galick Gun dissolved—pulled back deliberately, energy redistributed in a single explosive burst that wasn't attack but exit, a shockwave of released ki that gave him the only window available. The Kamehameha tore through the space he'd occupied and punched upward into the open sky, a column of light climbing until it vanished.
Goku's momentum was already forward.
Something's wrong.
The shadow arrived before the thought finished.
Vegeta's afterimage dissolved. He was already somewhere else, already moving, the full weight of his fighting experience concentrated into the one exchange the opening had bought him. The elbow came in from the left—violent, precise, committed—and hit Goku across the cheekbone with enough force to spin him sideways.
Vegeta slid through his own afterimage and reappeared on the other side, leg already in motion, the whip kick catching Goku across the ribs before he'd finished turning.
An uncontrolled energy burst detonated in Goku's hand—the leftover charge from the Kamehameha releasing involuntarily from the impact. The explosion hit him from below, adding force to the blow, and he went tumbling through the air with the specific chaotic momentum of a man who is no longer determining his own trajectory.
Vegeta moved.
Not a powerful man satisfied with damage—a fighter with experience, closing the distance before Goku's body had finished deciding where it was going. He caught Goku's wrist mid-flight. Stopped him. Wrenched the arm, turned Goku's chest toward him, and placed his free hand flat against it—
Energy built in that palm. Bright. Building. Enough.
Convert this. Finish it.
"Goku!" Krillin's voice cracked across the desert.