"Pops, you should really head home now."
Jordan casually let his invisible force field dissolve. He had kept the thin, protective psychic shell securely wrapped around the terrified farmer during the brief, explosive exchange, just in case a stray ki blast went completely sideways. He glanced down at the man beside him, who had not moved a single inch since collapsing into the gravel. Jordan just shrugged.
"See? I told you so. Dangerous aliens."
The farmer blinked his wide eyes rapidly. The sheer, overwhelming shock was finally beginning to wear off, rapidly replaced by the dawning, frantic awareness that he was miraculously still alive and his legs still functioned.
"Yes! Yes, you are completely right! I... I am leaving right now!!"
He scrambled to his feet with a sudden, frantic burst of speed that bore absolutely no relationship to his short, stocky build. He hauled himself up into the cab of the rusty pickup truck in one fluid motion and violently cranked the ignition. The heavy engine roared to life, and the exhaust pipe immediately spat out a thick, choking cloud of black smoke. The bald tires spun wildly against the loose gravel, searching for traction.
The old truck disappeared down the dirt road at a terrifying velocity that would have deeply impressed anyone who actually knew about his normally cautious driving habits.
A normal man with a recorded combat power of five. And he survived his encounter with a Saiyan.
Jordan watched the truck speed away until it was just a speck of dust on the horizon.
About half a mile away, halfway up the ruined mountain, the smoking rubble began to shift.
"Damn... damn Earthlings," a voice rasped.
There was a heavy, wet cough. Then came the grinding sound of solid rock being forcefully pushed aside with considerable physical effort.
Raditz spat a wad of blood onto the ground and wiped his mouth with the back of his armored gauntlet. His bruised face, as he painfully dragged himself free of the collapsed rock face, was an absolute masterwork of deeply wounded dignity and barely contained, murderous rage.
The standard Frieza Force combat armor had surprisingly held together through the brutal impact. That fact alone said something highly impressive about the alien engineering, Jordan silently acknowledged. The dark, flexible bodysuit underneath hadn't even torn. The hard, segmented chest plate had merely acquired one extremely precise, permanent boot-shaped dent directly in the center.
Good fabric, Jordan noted distantly, his mind already analyzing the technology. It stretches enough to accommodate a massive Great Ape transformation without ripping. That is definitely non-trivial material engineering. He mentally filed the interesting information away right next to a priority note about locating the spherical space pod that had presumably made orbital insertion somewhere nearby. Dr. Kuseno back home would definitely have very strong opinions about both pieces of alien technology.
Up on the smoking mountainside, Raditz finally found his footing on the shattered, unstable slope. He looked down at his own chest plate. He stared at the humiliating boot print.
His long hair visibly bristled. His mustache bristled. Every single follicle on his body that was biologically capable of bristling, bristled with pure, unadulterated outrage.
"How dare you," Raditz snarled. His raspy voice started out low and violently shaking, then suddenly cracked into a deafening roar that scattered flocks of birds from the distant tree line for half a kilometer in every direction. "How dare you injure my noble Saiyan body! I will kill you and wash this horrible shame away with your blood!!"
The shattered mountainside violently disagreed with his explosive departure. The remaining rock face buckled heavily under his boots and collapsed completely in the opposite direction.
Raditz launched himself out of the debris field exactly like a ballistic missile leaving a silo. Blinding pink energy detonated from his muscular body as he moved. It was an intense, genuine release of power, generating a massive thermal output that literally scorched the air around him into a visible, rippling heat shimmer. He became a deadly streak of light tearing across the open plain.
Jordan just stood there, his hands in his pockets, and calmly watched it come.
Raditz was canonically meant to die upon his initial entry into the series. He was a disposable character whose entire narrative purpose was simply to establish the terrifying new threat of space before being violently consumed by it to raise the stakes.
But, Jordan thought, the prelude still had to be respected.
A measured power level of 1,500 was absolutely not nothing, especially when it was attached to a ruthless veteran who had spent years making a professional, bloody practice of being the strongest thing in any given room. Raditz had taken Jordan's straight, serious kick directly to the chest, he had coughed up blood, and then he had immediately gotten right back up to fight. That impressive display of durability was far more than most Dragon-level monsters back in the One Punch Man world would have ever managed.
Different universes meant completely different physical rules. Dragon Ball's underlying reality and physics simply weren't the same as anything Jordan had ever operated in before.
He mentally noted it. He filed it away for later study. Then, he finally took his hands out of his jacket pockets.
The screaming streak of pink light crossed the final remaining distance, and then, just a fraction of a second before the brutal impact, Raditz suddenly checked his momentum. The head-on forward charge stuttered and stopped mid-air. A vicious, triumphant grin split his bruised face.
"You've been tricked!!" Raditz roared.
His hands slammed together in front of him.
Intense, crackling pink ki rapidly condensed between his palms. The sheer, raw power was so dense that the loud, buzzing sound it generated actually vibrated in Jordan's back teeth. The very air between Raditz's glowing hands bent inward and turned a blinding, pure white. The massive, gathered energy detonated violently upward, forming a towering column of dazzling light that threw long, hard shadows across the entire green plain.
It was like a second sun had ignited. It was brief, it was blindingly bright, and it was built entirely from pure, unfiltered intent to kill.
"This is my real attack!" Raditz screamed. "Saturday Crush!"
Jordan simply pulled his right fist back.
And he threw a completely ordinary, straightforward punch.
He used absolutely no Stand power. There was no psychic enhancement flowing through his veins. There was no impenetrable AT Field, no Spider-Time precognition, and no biomagnetic amplification wrapping his knuckles.
It was just the physical arm he had been born with, the dense mass behind it, and the accumulated results of two and a half years of constant, agonizing Limiter Breaks that had completely rebuilt every single cell in his body from the biological frame up.
Flesh met alien energy.
The alien energy instantly lost.
Jordan's fist punched cleanly straight through the massive ki sphere like it was nothing more than warm, harmless smoke. The crackling pink light violently split and dispersed around his bare knuckles, the intense temperature differential not even registering on his reinforced skin. The brutal impact solidly connected with Raditz's arrogant face right at the very back end of the fluid motion.
It was not a flashy, dramatic martial arts technique. It was not a named finishing move accompanied by a massive visual flourish.
It was just a very hard punch.
A massive, invisible shockwave violently radiated outward in a perfect sphere. The gathered, highly condensed ki completely detonated in all directions as the delicate containment field holding it together ceased to exist.
The surrounding plains took the absolute brunt of the destruction. Tall green weeds were instantly flattened in a massive radial pattern. The rich topsoil was violently peeled back, exposing the bedrock. A visible, rippling ring of highly compressed air expanded outward across the landscape at terrifying speed.
Raditz was launched backward exponentially faster than he had come forward.
The deep, smoking black trench his violent trajectory carved across the landscape stretched all the way back to the exact same mountain he had just previously demolished. The resulting secondary impact didn't even explode so much as loudly announce itself to the world. A massive shockwave rolled heavily across the plain as a wall of physical pressure, quickly followed by the slow, highly theatrical rise of a towering mushroom cloud of dust that completely blotted out a respectable portion of the sunny afternoon sky.
Jordan watched the destruction with a mild sigh.
"Seriously," he muttered, shaking his head. "They are really making me destroy the local environment today."
He took a slow, deep breath. His chest visibly swelled. The rapidly expanding dust cloud, the raining debris field, and the still-rolling shockwave were all rapidly approaching him in a massive, choking wall of obscured air.
He exhaled sharply.
The sudden, pressurized breath hit the incoming dust wall like a solid, physical weather front. It completely reversed the momentum, scattering the thick cloud into the upper atmosphere and instantly revealing Raditz lying in the smoking rubble of his second mountain.
The Saiyan's face was horribly swollen. His armor was heavily cracked in multiple places. He had one trembling arm dug deep into the solid rock for leverage as he desperately tried to push himself upright.
"That physical attack just now..." Raditz rasped, blood dripping from his chin. His voice had completely lost its former arrogance. What was left behind was pure, frantic calculation, grudging respect, and furious confusion. "The raw power behind it... it had to be over 1,200. I actually felt my own strength drop after taking a hit like that."
He painfully managed to get one knee underneath himself.
Jordan quietly watched him try to think through the impossible situation. He watched the Saiyan try to process a simple physical punch that had passed straight through a concentrated ki blast like it wasn't even there. He watched Raditz try to understand the casual kick from earlier that had sent him flying into a mountain. Jordan was watching the proud alien's entire foundational worldview undergo a violent, structural renovation in real time.
He doesn't just explode from one serious hit, even when I punched straight through his strongest ki blast, Jordan thought, crossing his arms and mentally calculating alongside his opponent. That level of durability is significantly better than most standard Dragon-level threats back home.
The power scaling in this new universe was definitely going to get very complicated and very interesting, very fast.
Vegeta and Nappa were exactly one year out from arriving on Earth. Frieza, a galactic tyrant with a final form combat power of roughly 120 million, was waiting out there somewhere in the mid-term future. Casual planet-busting destruction had been easily achievable at just a few thousand combat units in this specific setting.
I am definitely going to need to put in some serious work before any of that nonsense becomes relevant, Jordan decided.
In the distant rubble, Raditz had almost managed to drag himself fully to his feet.
Jordan teleported.
The instant, flawless spatial displacement covered the massive distance without any flashy ceremony. He was standing there, and then he was standing here. He appeared directly in front of Raditz well before the heavily injured Saiyan's dulled reflexes could even process the sudden movement.
Raditz violently flinched backward and desperately tried to raise his arms into a defensive guard.
Jordan's hand smoothly descended in a clean, vertical chop. It was not a punch, and it was not an energy blast. It was a highly specific, controlled physical motion that an old martial arts master in a quiet dojo on the complete other side of the multiverse had casually demonstrated to him once with a serene smile. Jordan had mentally filed the technique under 'unexpectedly useful' and never deleted it from his memory.
The hard edge of Jordan's hand connected precisely with the back of Raditz's thick neck.
Raditz's dark eyes went completely wide with shock. Then they went entirely glassy. Then his legs simply stopped working, and his large body folded in half like a broken puppet.
He hit the rocky ground hard. He was completely unconscious before the dust even settled, lying perfectly still in the rubble with an expression of profound, lingering personal offense permanently frozen on his bruised face.
Jordan straightened up.
"Done," he said quietly, casually dusting off his hands.
He crouched down and carefully examined the green scouter still attached to the unconscious alien's ear.
It had finally cracked during the second brutal impact. There was a thin hairline fracture running directly across the glass lens, but the complex internal machinery was very likely still intact. In Jordan's extensive memory of the series, these devices were strictly dual-purpose. They were a combat energy detector, and a live interstellar communication device.
Which meant that absolutely everything, from the exact moment Raditz landed on Earth to this very second, had been actively transmitting into deep space.
Somewhere far out in this galaxy, currently standing on a doomed planet that was being methodically cleared of its native population, a short Saiyan prince with a severe widow's peak and an enormous chip on his shoulder had just watched his subordinate get effortlessly knocked out by an unknown native of a supposed low-level planet.
Jordan slowly turned the cracked scouter over in his hands.
He hadn't bothered to jam the signal. He hadn't destroyed the device outright. He hadn't done a single thing to interfere with the communicator component from the very moment Raditz landed in the farmyard.
He had done that entirely on purpose.
Fresh leeks, Jordan thought, a slow smile spreading across his face. You should never pick them too early. You have to let them grow first.
He stood back up. He looked out across the ruined plain. He took in the flattened weeds, the massive trench, the second demolished mountain, and the thick dust still slowly settling from his casual afternoon restructuring of the local geography.
The two-legged chickens were completely gone now. Smart animals.
He snapped his fingers.