Raditz had definitely been building toward something big.
The specific, highly arrogant quality of his silence strongly suggested he was carefully preparing to make a very grand point. Possibly several grand points. He was gearing up to deliver a long, dramatic speech about the pride of Saiyans, about inescapable cosmic destiny, about the fundamental, tragic error Goku had clearly made in living his entire life as a human, and about the various ways this completely unacceptable situation could still potentially be salvaged if everyone present would just shut up and listen to superior alien reason.
"That's almost—" Raditz began, taking a deep breath to project his voice.
"You are standing here talking about wiping out all of humanity directly in front of me," Jordan's voice suddenly came from the completely wrong direction entirely. "You are practically begging to get hit again, aren't you?"
Raditz whipped his head around.
Jordan was already standing right there.
The heavy punch landed squarely in Raditz's unarmored abdomen before any of the frantic warning signals from his own nervous system had even finished their transit to his brain. It was absolutely not a light, warning strike. It carried Jordan's full physical weight and his absolute, terrifying commitment, delivered with the casual, brutal economy of someone who had done this professionally for years across multiple different worlds.
The massive force went deep into the alien's gut and simply stayed there. A churning, agonizing wave of pure impact rapidly spread outward through his entire core as his Saiyan body desperately tried to process the impossible information that something devastating had just decided to happen to it at a speed he had not even been able to track.
Raditz's muscular back violently arched. Both of his heavy boots completely left the sandy ground. He instantly found himself bent double over Jordan's extended arm. It was a humiliating, agonizing shape that would later, in a completely different, much calmer context, strongly remind Bulma of a large shrimp being tossed over a hot grill.
Raditz convulsed violently once.
The tall palm trees swaying in the background strongly suggested he had just traveled a significant horizontal distance without actually moving his legs.
Goku and Piccolo, the only two martial artists currently present on the beach whose senses were even remotely fast enough to follow the blur of motion, quickly exchanged a highly significant look. Neither of them spoke immediately. Both of them were currently running the exact same honest, terrifying internal calculation: If that punch had been aimed at me instead...
Master Roshi and Krillin had not actually seen a single thing happen. There had simply been a tall man standing over there, and then, a microsecond later, there had been a heavily armored alien bent double over that same man's arm over here. The intervening moment of travel was simply missing from their visual processing.
Jordan casually carried the gasping Raditz back to the center of the beach with just one hand and unceremoniously deposited him in the sand.
"If you actually want to live through today," Jordan said. He looked down at the violently wheezing Saiyan with the mild, terrifying patience of a teacher explaining a very simple playground rule to a slow child. "You will behave yourself. Do you understand me?"
Raditz's trembling hands were pressed flat against the wet sand. His jaw was working frantically, trying to draw in oxygen. Deep inside his ringing skull, the proud, arrogant part of him that had spent the last twenty years being the absolute most dangerous thing in most rooms was currently generating a comprehensive, highly detailed, and incredibly profane internal monologue. It was a very specific monologue about exactly what he thought of this entire humiliating situation, of Jordan specifically, and of certain bold propositions Jordan had recently made regarding Raditz's complete inability to keep his private thoughts hidden.
Jordan casually reached down and hit him hard in the ribs.
The sharp, sickening crack of the impact was distinct and incredibly clear over the sound of the ocean waves. Raditz let out a high, strained sound he had not made since early childhood and immediately collapsed completely sideways into the dirt. One armored arm wrapped desperately around his shattered side. A thick line of blood leaked from the corner of his mouth, and absolute, genuine shock was wide in his dark eyes. It was the genuine article this time, not just for dramatic effect.
The beach went very, very quiet.
"That's pretty stylish," Krillin whispered softly.
"Incredibly," Bulma immediately agreed, her eyes wide.
They looked at each other in surprise, fully registered that they had just had the exact same impressed reaction to brutal violence, and simultaneously turned their heads away from each other with identically dismissive, defensive expressions.
Hmph.
Raditz looked up at Jordan from the sand. There was something almost plaintive and deeply horrified in the silent question hiding just beneath the physical pain. "Why? I didn't say anything out loud. I was... I was just about to ask..." He swallowed hard, tasting copper. "You really can read my thoughts?"
"Yes, I can."
Jordan reached down and surprisingly helped the alien back into a seated position. He kept a firm hand resting heavily on Raditz's armored shoulder. It was a gesture that was simultaneously somewhat supportive, and a very clear, physical warning not to try anything stupid.
"There is absolutely no reward for guessing correctly. If you would like to keep creatively cursing me internally, you are more than welcome to continue doing so. Just as long as you clearly understand that the privilege comes with a heavy physical service charge."
Raditz, for the very first time since violently landing on planet Earth, said absolutely nothing at all.
Jordan straightened his back and casually raised his open palm.
His Card Mastery skill seamlessly activated. A soft azure light pulsed, there was a brief, localized ripple of reality rapidly adjusting itself, and the cracked green scouter he had sealed away earlier seamlessly materialized from thin air. It spun lazily once before settling perfectly into his waiting hand. Raditz's dark eyes tracked the alien device immediately, then went carefully, terrifyingly neutral.
F-boy is definitely still completely offline, Jordan noted internally.
The invisible Stand was currently dormant somewhere deep in his subconscious, happily digesting the massive power of the SR Limiter Break card, and was entirely unavailable for sarcastic comment. The base Stand ability itself was still perfectly functional; the Card Mastery skill worked independently regardless of F-boy's waking state. It just meant Jordan would be operating today without his usual peanut gallery backup commentary.
He held the green scouter up for the group to see.
"This little device came off the Saiyan over here. It is called an energy detector, or a scouter. It actively reads the raw energy output of any living organisms within its set range and automatically converts that intensity into a numerical combat power value."
"A combat power?" Krillin stepped forward immediately, his martial curiosity piqued. "You mean exactly like a number?"
"Yes. A specific number."
The reaction from the assembled fighters was unanimous and completely instantaneous. Absolutely everyone leaned in closer. They all suddenly possessed the specific, hungry energy of dedicated people who had spent their entire lives desperately trying to manually assess whether or not someone could beat them in a fight, and had just been casually told there was a machine that did the complex math automatically.
Piccolo didn't physically move from his floating, cross-legged position. He was, however, now angled approximately fifteen degrees closer to the ongoing conversation than he had been just a moment ago.
Bulma's direct path to the absolute front of the group was rapid and involved absolutely no polite acknowledgment of any physical obstacles in her way. She smoothly removed the green scouter directly from Jordan's hand with the absolute, unshakeable confidence of a genius who considered all interesting technology to be public community property. She turned the device over twice in her hands, holding the cracked green glass up to the bright sunlight.
"The internal structure of this thing is actually surprisingly simple," she said, her tone carrying the mild, professional disappointment of an engineer expecting significantly more from advanced alien technology. She seamlessly fitted the device over her own left ear and adjusted the green lens over her eye. She immediately turned toward the old turtle hermit. "Okay, you first. Hold still."
Master Roshi cleared his throat and composed himself, striking a dignified martial pose.
"One hundred and thirty-nine," Bulma announced, reading the glowing digital numbers.
A brief, heavy silence fell over the beach.
Master Roshi's hidden expression rapidly shifted through several distinct, embarrassed stages before finally settling on a facade of dignified, complete neutrality.
"There may very well be a slight calibration issue with the alien device," Master Roshi offered smoothly.
Bulma had already ignored him and turned the lens toward the bruised Raditz. "Hm. Okay. His number is currently one thousand, one hundred and ninety." She looked up from the glowing green readout, her eyes widening in shock. "That's... that's nearly ten times higher than yours!"
"My absolute peak physical output is exactly fifteen hundred," Raditz suddenly spoke up, his raspy voice carrying the automatic, ingrained pride of an elite soldier stating his official military credentials. "I am a high-ranking Saiyan war—"
Jordan's fist connected brutally with Raditz's mouth in a physical motion so completely smooth it barely even registered as an interruption to the conversation.
"Could you possibly try to phrase your explanations without all the insufferable arrogance attached?" Jordan asked politely.
Raditz spent a long, painful moment coughing up more blood into his armored hand. When he finally looked back up, his bruised expression had completely abandoned several of the haughty layers it had been stubbornly operating with ever since he woke up. "I... I understand."
Bulma had been carefully watching the scouter readout during the violent exchange. "His numbers actually dropped a little bit right after that punch landed." She curiously turned the green lens directly toward Jordan. "Let's see yours... Yours just says... question mark? It won't give me an actual value."
"My true output is heavily shielded," Jordan said, keeping his tone entirely matter-of-fact. "The alien detector has hard processing limits built into the hardware. Trying to read anything with a power level above twenty thousand can actually physically overload the internal chip."
"Overload?"
Bulma violently yanked the alien scouter away from her eye with the frantic speed of a bomb technician discovering they had just been casually handling an incredibly unstable device. "You mean it can literally explode right on my face?! What kind of garbage alien engineering just—"
"What an absolutely absurd lie!"
Raditz's voice had suddenly recovered some of its former sharp edge, his sheer indignation temporarily cutting right through his physical pain. He pointed a shaking finger at Jordan with the highly specific, deep offense of a religious person whose entire catalog of absolute cosmic truths has just been casually violated. "A power level over twenty thousand?! That is completely impossible. Lord Vegeta himself only registers at a maximum of eighteen thousand! Are you seriously claiming to be stronger than the elite Saiyan Prince?!"
Jordan just looked down at him.
"That's... that's..." Raditz was rapidly working himself up toward another screaming fit.
Jordan's cold, flat look simply continued.
"...none of my business, really," Raditz finished weakly, instantly deflating and rubbing his cracked ribs. "I completely understand."
"Vegeta is the alien prince he just mentioned," Jordan explained, turning his attention back to the curious group. "But there is one more very important thing you should all know. This specific detector does a lot more than just read power levels." He let the heavy statement land for a long moment. "It is also a live, active interstellar communications device."
The horrifying implication of that sentence traveled visibly across the faces of the assembled group.
Bulma's blue eyes immediately went sharp with the specific, focused brightness of a brilliant engineer whose underlying mechanical intuition had just been perfectly confirmed. "Ah, so that is exactly what that secondary signal protocol was for! I saw a complex transmission architecture hidden in the underlying code that absolutely didn't match anything in our current Earth systems." She looked up at Jordan, her eyes wide. "Wait. You completely killed the outgoing signal when you shut down his electronics earlier, didn't you?"
"I killed earlier," Jordan confirmed.
Everyone on the beach slowly turned to look down at Raditz.
Raditz was staring blankly at the sand between his boots. The utterly devastated expression on his bruised face—the tight, desperate crinkling around his dark eyes, and the completely flat, dead quality that had entirely replaced his former Saiyan arrogance—told the entire tragic story without requiring a single word of narration.