The transformation reversed itself in seconds.
Raditz and Gohan had been halfway through the process—fur emerging, frames broadening, the Blutz Waves doing their biological work—when Jordan cut the tails, and then the signal simply stopped. The power driving the change had nowhere to come from. Both of them diminished: Raditz first, then Gohan, the borrowed mass shedding away until what remained was just the two of them standing in the desert, one large and one small, both blinking at the world like men returning from somewhere they didn't entirely remember going.
Gohan's legs gave out. The transformation process, even incomplete, had asked more than a boy could answer—Jordan caught him before he hit the ground, the boy already unconscious, gone between one breath and the next.
Raditz dropped to one knee, breathing hard, his hands braced on the desert floor. The Turtle Hermit uniform was split in three places across the shoulders. After a moment he looked up, found Jordan standing over him, and said—with a sincerity that sat somewhat awkwardly on his face but was clearly genuine—"I nearly lost myself in that form. I can't fully hold my mind when it takes me. Thank you, my lord."
"You would've crushed my seating area," Jordan said, passing Gohan to Krillin with the efficiency of someone handing off a parcel. "I have priorities."
Krillin received the unconscious child and immediately looked down at the small, still face with the expression of a man who has just been handed something irreplaceable and is very aware of it.
From behind them, something enormous interrupted any further conversation.
The ground said something. Not a sound exactly—a pressure, a bass frequency that preceded the sound by half a second, registering in the chest before the ears caught up. Then the roar arrived.
Vegeta had completed his transformation.
He stood where the Saiyan prince had been standing—except now he was twelve meters of black-furred mass, crimson eyes burning forty feet above the desert floor, the scale of him simply refusing to fit any existing frame of reference. He filled the sky the way a building fills a street. His voice, when it came, operated at a register that wasn't quite speech.
Goku stared upward and tracked the ki reading without a scouter because he didn't need one. The number was already astronomical and climbing.
This monster—
"Feeling fear, Kakarot?" The Great Ape's deep voice had Vegeta's cadences in it, controlled, still thinking, the rationality of a high-class warrior holding on behind the red-eyed enormity of the form. His arms raised toward the sky and stayed there, the gesture of something announcing itself to the world. "This is the Saiyan race's true power. Not one of you behind him survives. Not one person on this whole planet survives. Every single one of you dies today!"
"Don't get ahead of yourself." Goku's expression had gone somewhere past serious into the specific focused calm of a man who is about to do something that will cost him. The ki in his body was already moving, building in the specific layered way of Kaioken's preparatory charge, energy stacking against energy, the temperature around him rising by measurable degrees. If I push it far enough—even at a hundred times power differential—
A hand settled on his shoulder.
Warm. Unhurried. The touch of someone who had walked up behind him so quietly that even Goku's senses hadn't caught the approach, which said something.
The injuries closed themselves—the dislocated shoulder resetting, the bruising fading from the inside out, the deep exhaustion in his muscles replaced by something clean and replenished. Like eating a Senzu Bean, except it had happened in the space of a breath.
Goku turned.
Jordan's face was level with his, close, the blond hair catching the artificial moonlight. He looked at Goku the way someone looks at a friend who is about to do something they'll technically survive but don't need to.
"You've had your run," Jordan said. "Don't push past it."
"My fight isn't—"
"There'll be more," Jordan said. "The universe is full of people who'll need the same look you just gave that ape. I promise." His tone was easy, the smile genuine if slightly knowing. "And right now, if you go Kaioken at what you'd need to match that the effect it will have to this land, it will destroy it. You know that."
Goku's expression was the expression of a man who knows he's being reasonable and is unhappy about it. His gaze went sideways to the enormous shape of Vegeta, twelve meters of Great Ape fury regarding them both with crimson eyes that had not yet decided what to destroy first.
He scratched the back of his head. "...Fine."
"Gohan got caught by the moonlight too. Go check on him."
The mention of his son's name moved through Goku's expression like a stone through still water, the competitive focus dissolving immediately and entirely. "What—"
The aura erupted, then vanished in the same motion as Goku launched himself backward across the battlefield toward the group—in the time it took Jordan to turn around, Goku was already gone, the displaced air of his passage arriving a half-second after the man himself.
Jordan faced the Great Ape.
Vegeta's crimson eyes tracked downward to the single blond figure standing in the open desert where Goku had been. The scale of the thing—this creature that had been a man thirty seconds ago—registered the substitution and arrived at a response: the massive jaw opened. Inside it, crimson energy gathered, the color of something prior to impact, building rapidly into a density that made the air around the maw bend.
He's doing the energy cannon, Jordan noted. Right away.
The beam launched.
It was, objectively speaking, an impressive piece of destruction—the diameter of a basketball court, crimson and unstable, the edges flickering with lightning that wasn't quite electricity, the front of it moving with the certainty of something that has never failed to destroy what it aimed at. The ground beneath its path ceased to exist in real time, the shockwave ahead of the beam carving a trench that would take geology some time to address.
Jordan sidestepped the leading edge and caught the rest of it.
One hand, palm out, the beam pressing against it like a wall pressing against a wall, the trailing lightning discharging harmlessly across his forearm. He held it there for a moment—the full destructive output of a transformed high-class Saiyan royal pushing against one arm—and it did not progress.
"Earth can't absorb this," he said, as if narrating. The beam continued to not progress. "Too fragile."
He raised his free hand to his forehead—two fingers, the Instant Transmission contact point.
The energy cannon vanished.
Vegeta registered the absence before he registered where it had gone. His own attack, simply not there anymore—the sensation of a massive output suddenly finding no resistance, the feedback of a charged technique meeting nothing. He had half a second to process this, which was half a second less than he needed, because the energy reappeared behind him.
His own Instant Transmission. His own attack, rerouted through a technique he'd never seen, arriving at an angle he couldn't have planned for.
His legs drove into the ground—jump, relocate, the combat reflex of a warrior who has survived long enough to develop them—
Something blond arrived above him faster.
The strike landed on the crown of the Great Ape's massive skull with a sound like a gong deciding to be a thunderclap instead.
"Don't dodge." Jordan's voice was not raised but carried cleanly. He was crouched on the top of a twelve-meter ape's head, which he appeared to find unremarkable. "Where exactly do you think you're going? If you move, it follows you. That's not better for anyone."
Vegeta's vision filled with many copies of a blond man, each one slowly resolving into the image of his father, which was not a thought process the prince could have predicted or would have endorsed.
He stood very still, blinking in the specific pattern of a brain trying to reacquire a coherent picture of the world.
The Great Ape Cannon arrived in sections—the beam traveling the redirected path Jordan had set it on, slamming into the broad expanse of Vegeta's back in successive impacts, each one detonating against the armor and fur with the force it had been built to carry. The battle suit, which had held on through everything else this day had produced, finally gave up. The explosions climbed. The artificial moon that Vegeta had created—still burning in the sky above them—caught the edge of the expanding fireball and came apart.
The shockwave expanded outward in every direction.
It hit Jordan's force field—thin, blue-white, encompassing the entire battlefield radius—and stopped. The Z Fighters felt the pressure land against the barrier and distribute, the same way they'd felt it half a chapter ago with the spread bombs, the ground beneath them vibrating but intact, the air inside the field undisturbed.
Beyond the field's edge, the desert didn't fare as well.
Vegeta burned.
Most of what the battle suit hadn't covered was fur, and most of that fur was now somewhere between charred and absent, the exposed skin beneath it a map of blast damage and deep burns that covered his enormous form in overlapping patches. He was producing sounds that started as roars and arrived as something more like a wounded animal's protest against a world that had stopped behaving itself.
He gathered himself. Began to move. The enormous hands came up—
Something closed around his tail.
Deep blue force field, precise, the grip of it definitive. No leverage point. No give. Vegeta had time to recognize the sensation before it was followed by the experience of being lifted—twelve meters of transformed Great Ape, a body mass that demolished anything it contacted—pulled off the ground by the tail as casually as a man lifts a suitcase.
Jordan turned at the hip.
He swung.
The Great Ape's body described an arc through the desert air—massive, still burning, no longer in control of its trajectory—
And hit the ground.
The impact rewrote the local geography. A crater formed that had not previously existed, the compacted sand at the bottom driven deep, the rim raised and uneven. The shock rolled outward in a ring. Dust climbed.