Dodoria finally moved.
The paralysis broke when Frieza coughed—a wet, pained sound from the floor of the control room, unmistakable in its implication—and then Dodoria was across the debris field in three steps, hauling his lord upright with both hands, the motion of a guard dog that has just remembered what it's supposed to be guarding.
"Lord Frieza—!"
Frieza straightened with the deliberate control of a man refusing to allow his body's current condition to become a statement about his dignity. It was not entirely successful. His armor was cracked along the midsection. His purple blood had made a notable contribution to the floor's decor. His chair was in several pieces.
He breathed. Carefully.
"Dodoria." His voice had recovered its register. The fury in it was the cold variety—the kind that doesn't raise in pitch but drops, becomes precise, becomes a tool. "That man. Do you know anything about him?"
Dodoria's expression communicated that he did not, that this fact was deeply distressing to him, and that he had already mentally composed three different versions of an apology. "I've never seen him before, Lord Frieza. No ki reading. No scouter data. Nothing in any record I—"
"Vegeta." Frieza said the name the way someone sets down a very heavy object. Deliberate. Final. "He sent an assassin. To my flagship. Against me." His eyes, still red, still functional, were doing the specific thing they did when he had identified a problem that required comprehensive resolution. "Issue a maximum-priority arrest warrant. Galaxy-wide. Every Legion under my authority." He straightened fully, the pain rearranged into something he could use. "That Saiyan whelp has made the last mistake he's going to make."
Dodoria was already moving toward the communications array, stepping around the dents in the floor and the scattered instrument panels with the automatic navigation of someone who had learned not to ask questions when the directive was this clear.
Behind him, Frieza stood in his ruined control room, one hand pressed lightly to his midsection, and thought about golden hair.
Western Capital. Capsule Corporation.
The research institute had been assembled with the pragmatic elegance that characterized everything Bulma did when given sufficient resources and a clear problem. The Brief family courtyard had gained a capsule building—discreet, compact from the outside, considerably less compact within—containing a laboratory that was, at its core, Dr. Gero's Red Ribbon Army research facility relocated, repurposed, and stripped of its original signage. The "RR" logos on the equipment had been replaced with Capsule Corporation's mark. The mission parameters had been replaced with Bulma's.
She looked up from the control panel when Jordan came through the door, and the surprise on her face was genuine.
"You said you were going to find something in space." She looked him over. "You just summoned Shenron twenty minutes ago."
"I work efficiently."
Jordan opened his hand. A test tube appeared from the card inventory—the purple blood inside it still catching the light the same way it had when it was collected, perfectly preserved. He set it on the equipment tray beside her.
Bulma picked it up, examined it once, and slotted it into the analysis machine with the practiced motion of someone who had been waiting for exactly this sample. Her fingers moved across the control panel. The machine accepted the tube, and the slow automated process of extraction and integration began—the purple cells being read, mapped, and incorporated into the genetic framework that had been building for months.
"With that, the blueprint's complete," Jordan said. He was looking at the RR-marked equipment around them—the industrial instruments, the analysis arrays, the hibernation pods integrated into the far wall. "The strongest genome in the model is accounted for."
"It really is incredible work," Bulma said, watching the readout climb. Her tone was the tone of a scientist who has separated her professional admiration from her moral opinion and is maintaining both simultaneously. "Building something that strong through pure engineering. It shouldn't be possible, and here it is." She paused. "Dr. Gero was absolutely terrible, but he was genuinely brilliant."
"Technology is neutral," Jordan said. "The application is the problem. You're the application now."
He moved toward the hibernation pods.
Two of them, side by side—the transparent covers showing the occupants within. A young man and a young woman, sleeping with the undisturbed quality of someone who has been sedated for long enough that the body has stopped trying to wake up on its own. Both of them built well, faces composed in the neutral expression of dreamless sleep, the faint mechanical integration visible at the skin's edge if you knew what to look for.
Lapis. Lazuli. The names they'd had before Dr. Gero's project got hold of them.
In the original timeline they would become Android 17 and Android 18, carrying a behavioral core that had one purpose: find Goku, kill him. They would do a great deal of collateral damage in the process of pursuing that purpose.
"The core code," Jordan said, without turning from the pods. "The behavioral matrix. You finished the rewrite?"
"Last night." Bulma's voice carried the particular satisfaction of a programmer who has successfully untangled someone else's architecture. "The original primary directive—I'm not going to say it out loud because it's genuinely unhinged—is gone. The replacement is 'protect the Earth and the people on it.' I also removed the secondary hostility subroutines. The anti-Saiyan bias flags. All of it." She paused. "The amount of hate that man built into the foundational layer. It was architectural. I had to rebuild the whole behavioral scaffold."
"You're not surprised by that."
"Oh, I was surprised. Past tense. Now I'm mostly just impressed that someone could care that much about one specific person's destruction and still produce work this technically sophisticated." She shook her head. "Anyway. They'll wake up as themselves. Whatever that means for two people who've had this done to them."
Jordan looked at the faces in the pods for a moment longer.
Whatever that means. It meant therapy, probably. It meant a long adjustment. It meant Bulma was going to need to be patient, and Jordan had seen enough evidence of what Bulma looked like when she was genuinely committed to something to be reasonably confident about the outcome. Their son, in the original timeline, had grown up to be a person worth meeting. That said something about the parenting.
"Keep working with them when they come out," he said. "They're human. That part doesn't change regardless of the modifications."
"I know." A beat. "I have been taking notes, you know. I've thought about this."
"I know you have." He meant it. He turned back toward her. "That's why I'm leaving it with you."
Bulma stopped typing.
She looked at him—really looked, the way she did when she was recalibrating something. "Leaving it."
"This place." He gestured at the facility around them—the equipment, the pods, the blueprint running its final compilation on the display behind her. "The work here. The androids when they wake up. This is Earth's insurance. Something that doesn't depend on Goku and Vegeta reaching their ceiling in time." He picked up the gene solution bottle that the machine had just finished producing—pale blue, cool in his palm, the distillation of a complete genetic map—and materialized it into the card inventory. "You're capable of finishing this. I trust that."
Bulma held his gaze for a moment, then looked back at her console. Something in her expression had shifted; she wasn't going to say anything about it, but it was there.
"You're really leaving," she said. Not a question.
"I am." He pulled a copy of the android design blueprint from the computer via Mind Network—the data flowing into a card format as F-boy reached forward from the edge of his awareness—and straightened his collar. "There are people in another city who are going to notice I've been gone."
He walked to the door of the institute, stepped outside into the Brief family courtyard, and opened his arms.
The black portal formed in the air in front of him—the dimensional boundary yielding cleanly, the edges precise, the darkness within it absolute in the specific way that absolute things are when they're real.
He looked back once.
Bulma had her chin resting on her hand, watching him with the expression she wore when she was memorizing something.
"See you again someday," Jordan said.
He stepped through.
One Punch Man Wor;d.
"Good morning, Genos"
Saitama shuffled out of his room at the hour that could technically be called morning if you were being generous, wearing the expression of a man whose sleep had been interrupted by nothing and who was still somehow tired. The apartment smelled like bread. Genos was in the kitchen, moving with the quiet efficiency of someone who did not require sleep and had therefore been productive for several hours.
"Good morning, Saitama-sensei." Genos nodded precisely, his optical sensors registering the new data point of Saitama's emergence, filing it, moving on.
"Morning." Saitama aimed himself at the bathroom.
Then something in his peripheral vision caught.
He stopped.
Stepped back.
Tilted his head at the living room.
On the floor mat, in front of the television that was currently showing the morning news at low volume, a tall figure was sprawled in the specific posture of someone who had returned from somewhere, decided the mat was sufficient, and let the television do its thing. Gold hair, bright enough to register as a visual event even in the morning light. Somehow thicker than before. The ambient warmth of someone who had been doing things that involved a great deal of energy.
Saitama leaned closer. Squinted.
"Hey." He moved closer still. "Hey. Who are you? Why are you on my mat?" He leaned in until his face was unreasonably close. "Why does your face look so familiar—"
The recognition arrived all at once.
"Jordan!" His eyes went wide. "You dyed your hair?! When did that—how long have you—"
Jordan grabbed the descending bald head by the forehead and applied gentle but firm rearward pressure. "Personal space."
"When did this happen?!"
"It's hair dye." Jordan sat up, straightening his collar with the other hand. "It's not a notable event."
Saitama pulled back. He stared. The expression on his face went through its gears and arrived at something more serious than Jordan had expected—the flat, focused look that Saitama wore when something had actually landed.
In the kitchen, the sound of Genos processing vegetables stopped.
"You dyed it," Saitama said. "And got the hair done. While I wasn't looking." His tone was entirely level. "Now you're taller than me by a few centimeters."
He said it with the gravity of a man delivering a verdict.
"The hairstyle came with the package," Jordan said. "I didn't ask for it. Bundle deal."
Saitama looked at Jordan's hair. At Jordan's height. At Jordan's hair again.
The silence lasted exactly long enough for it to become its own statement.
Then Saitama turned around and walked back toward the bathroom with the bearing of a man who has decided that he is going to wash his face, have his breakfast, and deal with all of this later, in some other emotional context, possibly never.
From the kitchen, the sound of vegetable chopping resumed.
Jordan looked at the television. The morning news was doing what morning news does—disasters, weather, the Hero Association's weekly incident log. Z-City, visible in establishing shot, looking the way it always looked: mostly intact, occasionally dented, fundamentally itself.
He was back.
He stretched his arms above his head, joints settling, and exhaled the specific breath of someone who has traveled very far and arrived somewhere that was, against all probability, actually home.
Good morning, Z-City.