Piccolo had something prepared to say.
It was a genuinely good retort, too. It was sharp, appropriately dismissive, and exactly the kind of biting response that reminded Goku of exactly where they stood relative to each other as bitter enemies. The harsh words were already rising in the back of his green throat.
Then, he caught Jordan in his peripheral vision. The tall man was just standing there, floating casually in the ocean breeze with his hands shoved loosely in his jacket pockets.
The angry words went quietly back down Piccolo's throat.
Goku tilted his head slightly, watching Piccolo start to say one sentence and then abruptly, unnaturally stop himself. The lingering suspicion that had been quietly building in Goku's gut ever since they left the plateau finally solidified into something much more specific.
Piccolo is being incredibly careful around this person, Goku realized.
But the stranger seemed so completely ordinary. He was pleasant, even friendly. He had an open, relaxed face and an easy, non-threatening posture. Absolutely nothing about his calm surface suggested anything that should make the great Demon King Piccolo violently swallow an insult mid-delivery.
Goku turned the strange puzzle over in his mind as the unusual group slowly descended toward the island below.
The front door to Kame House banged open before they were even halfway down to the beach.
Master Roshi came out first, leaning heavily on his wooden cane and squinting upward against the bright afternoon sun. Krillin appeared just a step behind him, followed closely by Bulma, who must have arrived from the city sometime that morning and was clearly annoyed at being the absolute last person to register what was happening in the sky above the island.
Krillin spotted his best friend first. His round face instantly lit up with a massive grin.
"Goku! You're finally—"
He saw the rest of the floating group. The bright joy stuttered and died in his chest.
"—here. Who's..."
His terrified gaze had finally found Piccolo.
The three Earthlings standing on the beach went completely still. The vivid expressions that immediately followed traveled through several distinct, rapid stages—joy, utter confusion, horrifying recognition, and then something considerably less positive—before all three of them arrived at the exact same loud destination simultaneously.
"PICCOLO!!!"
Three panicked voices. One deafening volume.
Down on the wet sand, the old sea turtle considered the developing situation, made a rapid, highly accurate threat assessment, and promptly entered the ocean water at a frantic pace that entirely belied his advanced age. The resulting splash was genuinely impressive.
Getting everyone completely calmed down took about four loud, chaotic minutes. It heavily involved Goku explaining, twice, that he had found the two men already traveling together when he arrived, and he had absolutely not personally arranged this terrifying reunion.
Piccolo, for his part, settled heavily into a cross-legged, floating position at a very deliberate, calculated distance from everyone else. He tightly folded his muscular arms over his chest and made it extremely clear, through aggressive body language alone, that he was strictly there for his own complicated reasons and fully intended to be left out of all subsequent social proceedings.
He was, notably, not starting a fight.
This crucial detail did not go unobserved by the veteran martial artists present.
With the immediate, screaming crisis somewhat defused, Bulma rapidly redirected her boundless energy. She had already visually identified little Gohan as an entity of maximum, undeniable adorableness. She had fully devoted herself to the important project of squatting down in the sand and engaging the shy boy directly at eye level.
"How old are you, sweetie?" she cooed.
Gohan, who had clearly received very strict pre-departure instructions from his mother regarding how to speak to strangers, considered his answer carefully before responding. "I am four years old, ma'am."
Bulma's expression did something highly complicated, and she scooped him up into her arms without any apparent premeditation. She immediately began making the specific, high-pitched sounds of a person encountering something unreasonably cute.
Master Roshi and Krillin both looked at Goku in shock.
"You actually have a son," Master Roshi said, slowly adjusting his sunglasses.
"That's... yeah, yes," Goku agreed, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. "Chi-Chi and I..."
"We are definitely going to talk about this later," Krillin said. He was already looking at Gohan with a complex expression that was exactly half pure delight and half deep, personal betrayal. "You have clearly been very busy. This is a lot of new information to drop on us all at once."
"Well, it has been four whole years since..."
"Cough."
The sound was sharp and deliberate. Master Roshi straightened his hunched back, adjusted his dark sunglasses again, and crossed the sandy distance to where Jordan was standing. He leaned on his cane and looked up. Jordan possessed a significant physical height advantage over the old master, a fact the ancient martial artist absorbed without any particular outward reaction.
"Jordan," Master Roshi said, his tone turning serious. "Would you be willing to tell us exactly what you know about all of this?"
Krillin was already nervously hovering right at his teacher's shoulder. "Yeah, specifically the part about how Goku can possibly be a space alien? That's the part I keep getting really stuck on."
Before Jordan could even begin to answer, Bulma's loud voice cut sharply across the beach from where she was still tightly holding Gohan.
"Hey, look at this!"
Everyone turned to look at her.
She held Gohan up slightly in both hands and pointed directly at his furry brown tail with one finger. Then, she turned and pointed at the massive, unconscious Raditz still floating quietly at the edge of the group, his own thick tail hanging completely limp behind his armor.
"Goku had one of those when he was little. His son clearly has one now. And this giant space guy has one too." She looked around at the assembled, stunned faces. "Doesn't that suggest something fairly obvious to anyone else?"
A long, heavy moment of collective mental recalibration settled over the beach.
"Could they... could they really be from the exact same bloodline?" Krillin whispered.
Even Goku, who was notoriously usually the absolute last person in any given room to arrive at this kind of logical conclusion, was starting to look deeply uncertain about his origins.
"Hey, handsome!"
Bulma had already pivoted her attention again. She settled the confused Gohan securely onto her hip with one arm and pointed directly at Jordan with her free hand. "Where exactly are you from? You subdued someone who clearly makes Goku nervous without apparently breaking a single sweat. You must be a seriously amazing martial artist. How have I never heard of you before?"
The collective attention of the entire group immediately shifted and consolidated on the stranger. Even Piccolo, watching from his isolated position at the edge of the gathering, had angled his green ears slightly toward them to listen.
Jordan looked around calmly at the assembled faces.
"I am from another Earth," he said, speaking with perfect, absolute straightforwardness. "It is a completely different universe, but the same general concept as yours. The only real difference between me and an ordinary person is a small amount of unusual ability."
The silence that followed that impossible statement was the highly specific, resilient silence of people who had already collectively survived a whole lot of weird nonsense, and had, as a direct result, developed a relatively elastic relationship with impossible premises.
Master Roshi was the very first one to nod in slow acceptance. Between Fortuneteller Baba's magic, a shape-shifting pig named Oolong, a floating cat named Puar, the entire Red Ribbon Army's impossible robotics, and the many bizarre, world-ending events of the past several years, the assembled group had developed a fairly robust, practical capacity for simply accepting unusual information at face value and moving on.
"Wait."
Everyone immediately looked at Goku.
He was currently wearing the specific, highly focused expression he only got when something truly mattered to him. He looked directly at Jordan with that intense expression. He was clear-eyed in that unique, piercing way that made people feel either deeply comfortable or inexplicably nervous, depending entirely on their own internal state of mind.
"I have one more question for you," Goku said seriously.
"Go ahead," Jordan said.
"Can you fully release your ki right now? So I can actually sense it."
Jordan blinked in mild surprise. "...My ki?"
"Yeah. Everyone has their own specific ki," Goku explained earnestly. "The actual feel of it is completely different depending on the person. Whether it is good, righteous energy or dark, evil energy... I can always tell." He paused, his dark eyes locked on Jordan's. "It is very important for me to know."
Master Roshi understood his student's concern immediately.
"Goku, Jordan may not be entirely familiar with the specific concept of ki, especially since he mentioned coming from a completely different world." Master Roshi turned back to Jordan, slipping easily into his role as a teacher. "Ki is the hidden, latent energy present inside every single living thing. Through rigorous physical and mental training, martial artists can learn to accumulate it, refine it, and use it to push the human body far beyond its natural biological limits. Or, they can release it externally as a devastating attack. The unique quality of the ki always reflects the person wielding it: righteous ki, dark ki, pure courage, or raw primal force. These are all just different expressions of the exact same underlying energy."
Jordan listened carefully to the explanation.
He nodded twice. "I understand the general concept," he said smoothly. "I don't actually use ki specifically. But I do have comparable, internal energies of my own."
He let both of his arms fall naturally to his sides, his palms open and facing loosely outward toward the ocean.
"If you really want a demonstration," Jordan said, his voice dropping slightly, "I can manage that for you."
The group watched him in tense silence.
The massive, passive shielding he constantly maintained—the quiet, invisible electromagnetic dampening that kept his true, terrifying output completely invisible to all external senses—finally receded. He pulled it back, layer by careful layer, exactly like heavy water draining rapidly from a massive container.
What was hiding underneath that shield had been operating at the sheer, terrifying level of a young star's core running at low function. It was slow, it was enormous, and it had been utterly, perfectly contained.
It abruptly stopped being contained.
The raw energy violently spilled outward in a single, catastrophic wave.
Blinding, pale blue light completely enveloped him. It wasn't quite a traditional martial arts aura, and it certainly wasn't ki. It was something trapped exactly between the two concepts, entirely its own unique, horrifying thing. It was dense enough to physically see with the naked eye, and it was heavy enough to physically feel pressing against the skin. The massively condensed, crushing mass of raw psychic energy, biomagnetic force, and unified physical power that had been steadily accumulating through agonizing Limiter Break after Limiter Break violently pressed outward across the small island in a single, ever-expanding pulse of absolute pressure.
The sandy beach violently shuddered.
It was not a minor tremor. It was a localized geological event. The loose sand instantly compacted under the weight. The solid bedrock underneath the sand forcefully transmitted the crushing force deep into the lower strata of the earth. A terrifying sound traveled up from far below: it was the deep, agonizing crack and groan of solid stone violently adjusting to a massive physical force it had simply not been designed to accommodate. The sound built rapidly into something that violently shook the ground straight through their shoes and rattled the air deep inside their chests.
The ocean immediately reacted to the pressure.
The calm sea surface violently rippled outward from the island's sandy edges in massive, concentric rings. The waves built heavily on each other as they traveled outward, rapidly growing in size rather than diminishing. They rose into towering walls of dark water that climbed and climbed toward the sky, before finally collapsing violently into each other with the deafening roar of something enormous making its absolute displeasure known to the world.
Bulma was already screaming and moving backward before the second, heavier shockwave even hit the beach, clutching the terrified Gohan tightly against her chest with both arms. "Oh no! Help! There's a tsunami coming!"
Krillin had widened his stance, desperately planted his feet in the shifting sand, and was literally vibrating with the sheer physical effort of not immediately turning and running for his life. His panicked voice came out in broken, breathless fragments. "That... that's... the sheer amount... how is that even..."