The Vegeta integration settled into him like a second skeleton.
522,000. That was the new base. He stood still in the system space and took stock of it—the doubled density of the Saiyan bloodline, the Galick Gun sitting heavily in his muscle memory like it had always been there, the Artificial Moon technique coiled and ready to strike.
He hadn't fused the card yet. He absolutely wasn't going to do it on Earth.
The last time he had absorbed a major power spike, he'd had to spend an hour carefully bleeding off the volatile overflow before he even trusted himself inside a building. Going from 22,000 to 522,000 was a different order of magnitude entirely. One unfocused, accidental burst at that power level would cleanly vaporize several city blocks. He needed open ocean, minimum, and preferably somewhere completely devoid of commercial shipping lanes.
He filed the physical logistics away and coldly looked at what the integration actually meant for the board.
Hela was a solved problem now. No Kaioken required. He could casually walk into Asgard at his base power, handle the Goddess of Death, walk back out, and use the massive headroom to test Odin if the All-Father wanted to make things interesting. That particular, apocalyptic concern had been sitting at the back of his strategic planning for two full cycles. He could finally close it.
More practically: with the Artificial Moon technique, the Great Ape transformation was no longer a desperate, moon-dependent contingency. It was a tactical weapon he could effortlessly deploy on a clear Tuesday afternoon. And Vegeta's elite bloodline meant he would keep his rational mind when he used it.
He turned his attention up toward the item lottery.
The massive meteorite had updated. The front rows were practical but entirely unremarkable: a second-generation Frieza Legion battle suit, a third-generation scouter, a Saiyan individual spacecraft, a Namekian vessel, one of Frieza's massive capital ships.
Behind those, the catalog got significantly more interesting:
A Tree of Might saplingThe Power PoleThe Flying NimbusThe Supreme Kai SwordPotara EarringsA Capsule Corp Time Machine
And mixed in among them, two specific entries stopped him dead cold:
Grand Elder's Potential Unlocked — One Session.Old Supreme Kai's Potential Unlocked — One Session.
He stared at them.
The Grand Elder's technique was straightforward in its effect, if not in its staggering scale—it drew out a fighter's latent power, everything they could theoretically become, accessed immediately rather than over decades of grueling training. Gohan and Krillin had both heavily benefited from it on Namek. Smith, currently carrying a fused Saiyan bloodline and a partial Namekian bloodline on top of it, had absolutely no clear ceiling to what that session might produce. He suspected the resulting number would be alarming.
The Old Kai's method was a slower ritual but reached infinitely further. It had taken Super Saiyan 2 Gohan and elevated him past Super Saiyan 3 entirely, producing something the original show called the Ultimate form—not a transformation, just the absolute, permanent expression of what was already resting in his DNA. If Smith went through that cosmic process at his current power, he wasn't certain what came out the other side. He heavily suspected it would allow him to fight at Super Saiyan-adjacent levels without even needing to trigger the golden transformation.
Both prizes were buried deep in the meteorite. He didn't have the raw range to reach them yet.
He grounded his stance, built the Kamehameha, held the blinding blue light at full draw, and released it violently toward the middle rows.
A sphere cracked open in the void.
[Item acquired: Saiyan individual spacecraft.]
He looked at the digital card for a moment. Compact, egg-shaped, single occupant. In the original timeline, these brutalist machines crossed interstellar distances in entirely reasonable timeframes.
It wasn't what he had wanted, but it wasn't completely useless. Bulma could absolutely reverse-engineer the propulsion system. He already possessed the Space Stone for practical, instantaneous transit, but having a physical vessel she could actually take apart, study, and mass-produce was a completely different kind of strategic resource. He handed the disappointment off and moved on.
Partner Draw.
He looked up at the newly refreshed roster. The front row was a mixed bag: the Ox King, the Sea Turtle, Oolong, a nameless scientist who could build combat robots and spacecraft from scratch but couldn't fundamentally improve on anything Bulma was already doing, Dende, the Namekian Elder, and King Yama.
He looked past them, aggressively pushing his vision to the absolute limit.
The deeper figures resolved slowly in the red light: the four Cardinal Kais, Androids 17 and 18, Mai, Pan, the Grand Kai, the Supreme Kai, Kibito, Babidi, Old Kai. And at the furthest, darkest edges, shapes he could barely distinguish—the Dark Dragons, Ultimate Shenron, Zamasu, Whis.
He desperately wanted the Grand Elder. If the Grand Elder came as a summoned partner, the potential development sessions instantly became a renewable, infinite resource for the entire Fraternity.
He locked his targeting and fired the Kamehameha squarely at the Elder's position.
The card that materialized in the flash of light wasn't the Elder's.
[Support-type combat partner acquired: Dende.]
Smith looked at the card floating in his hand. Dende. Namekian prodigy. Master healer. Future guardian of Earth's Dragon Balls.
He was quiet for a long moment. Then, the tactical implications rapidly clicked into place.
The Grand Elder would have undoubtedly been the superior draw for immediate power scaling—there was no argument there. But Dende's magical healing ability was the exact, vital piece that had been missing from his brutal training structure since the very beginning. Senzu Beans were still a heavily limited resource. Near-death training—deliberately letting himself get pushed to the absolute bloody edge and recovering to trigger the Saiyan zenkai boost—had been strictly off the table. Without reliable, infinite healing, one tiny miscalculation simply ended everything.
With Dende, that entire calculation changed overnight.
He could actually run the gauntlet now. Push his body to the absolute limit, recover instantly, and push again. It was the exact, agonizing training method that had historically turned mid-tier Saiyan fighters into universal threats that violently redefined their tier.
He also had another massive question, one he hadn't been able to ask anyone who would actually know the answer: Dende had eventually become the new guardian of Earth and permanently upgraded Shenron in the original timeline. Whether that specific cosmic rule applied here—whether a Namekian prodigy summoned through the system could actively interact with and modify the Dragon Balls the same way—he had absolutely no idea.
But it was definitely going to be worth asking.