Tony Stark's extraction group was already airborne, their transports shrinking against the sky, before the seven Dragon Balls had even finished cooling into dull, gray stone.
Smith Doyle opened a swirling, golden portal for the Fraternity contingent and stepped through last, letting the magic collapse behind him. Back at the hidden base, he immediately gathered the senior staff. He ran through the strict, standard post-wish protocols with clinical efficiency: monitor the global intelligence feeds, log any biological or temporal anomalies associated with the resurrected, and strictly enforce a no-contact order with the New York civilians unless absolutely necessary.
Once the directives were issued, he dismissed everyone and walked into his private office.
Bulma was already there, waiting for the inert stones. He handed the heavy, petrified spheres over without ceremony and securely locked the door behind her.
Smith had been harboring one burning, mechanical question about the Dende-tier upgrade since the exact moment Shenron finished speaking on the platform. Two wishes granted. Did that massive systemic upgrade mean twice the lottery draws?
He sat down heavily in his leather chair, let his eyes drift closed, and stepped seamlessly into the sterile, white expanse of the system space.
The vast lottery chamber was exactly as it had always been. Three directions. Three potential draws. The massive, dormant meteorite hung overhead in the void, utterly unchanged by the cosmic event outside.
He stood there in the silence for a moment, then calmly accepted the reality of it. Two wishes in the physical world, but the exact same reward structure in the system. The miraculous upgrade served Shenron's cosmic capacity, not his own personal progression loop. That was fine—the three established draws were already generous enough that he had absolutely no real basis for complaint. Nobody was forcing him to collect fragments.
He turned his attention away from the meteorite and looked up at the vast, holographic character lottery.
The roster had violently shifted again.
His base combat power had officially crossed the 22,000 threshold since the last draw, and the system had ruthlessly cleared out the low-tier, obsolete entries accordingly. The front rows of floating spheres now showcased genuine, planetary threats: Jeice, Recoome, Burter, the elite Namekian warrior Nail, Captain Ginyu himself, and a few lethal members of Cooler's Armored Squadron—Salza and Neiz.
And there, standing grimly among them: Bardock. This wasn't the mythical, time-traveling version, nor the legendary Super Saiyan. This was the desperate, bloodied man from the final, doomed battle in the upper atmosphere of Planet Vegeta. His green armor was scorched and deeply dented, his combat power sitting like a brick wall right at 220,000.
That specific number fit perfectly. The system had been tracking Smith's growth with mathematical precision. At a 22,000 base, a tenfold multiplier meant the characters directly matched his maximum output tier.
He looked past the heavily armed front rows into the depths of the grid.
Further back, the silhouettes became monstrous. Vegeta standing at 500,000. Frieza's horned first form radiating at 530,000. His towering second form sitting at just over a million. Piccolo, freshly fused with Nail, surging at one and a half million. Frieza's grotesque third form swelling past two million.
And deeper still—shadowy shapes he could barely resolve in the darkness. Final-form Frieza. Goku, veins bulging, pushing Kaioken times twenty. Full-power, 100% Frieza sitting at the absolute end of the Namekian nightmare.
And at the very, absolute edge of his visibility, something caught the ambient light entirely differently from everything around it.
Gold.
He couldn't make out the distinct features of the figure. The digital distance was simply too great. But the blinding, radiant color was unmistakable, and anyone who had ever watched the sky tear open during a transformation sequence knew exactly what that gold meant.
Smith pulled his hungry attention back to the present. Super Saiyan was the distant horizon, not the immediate destination—not yet. The Namek power arc would need to fully close before he could reach up and touch that ceiling. And once he finally hit that legendary threshold, the impending Thanos problem would effortlessly sort itself out, assuming this specific universe ran close enough to the cinematic version that a full-power Super Saiyan could casually dismantle a non-comic-book Mad Titan.
He was reasonably confident it would be a slaughter.
He looked back up at the meteorite.
The Ginyu Force. Cooler's elite squad. No. He wasn't interested in a single one of them.
Chibi avatar Smith grounded his stance. He activated Kaioken times ten.
The red aura violently erupted around him, his internal power compressing and then roaring outward. Chibi avatar Smith cupped his hands at his side, locking the volatile blue energy of the Kamehameha into a single, hyper-focused beam, and aggressively angled his targeting reticule for the back rows. Not the front. Past the doomed Bardock, past the posing Recoome, driving deep into the higher-tier shadows.
He thrust his hands forward.
The beam went exactly where he aimed it, tearing through the void like a comet.
A sphere shattered in the dark with a blinding flash of purple light.
[Congratulations. Character acquired: Vegeta (Namek — post-recovery).]
The heavy, digital card materialized in the air directly in front of him.
Purple background. Vegeta stood arrogant and lethal in a shattered Frieza army battle suit—specifically, the ruthless version of the Prince from Namek immediately following his near-death fight and subsequent zenkai recovery.
Combat Power: 500,000 (Initial).Skills: Galick Gun. Artificial Moon. Great Ape Transformation.Status:Using this card integrates Vegeta's abilities and Elite Saiyan bloodline.
Smith read the glowing entry twice. Then, a slow, incredibly dangerous smile spread across his face.
Vegeta's Saiyan bloodline was fundamentally not Goku's. A low-class warrior lost their mind to the beast when they transformed into the Great Ape—but an elite Prince didn't. Vegeta could trigger the massive, towering transformation with his full, tactical cognition entirely intact.
And the Artificial Moon technique meant the phase of the lunar cycle was entirely irrelevant. He didn't require a full moon. He could trigger the apocalyptic transformation on clear ground, in broad daylight, against anyone, at any conceivable time.
Operating at 440,000 in Great Ape form had already been more than enough to completely reshape Earth's strategic geopolitical picture. With a second, elite Saiyan bloodline successfully integrated and a fully functioning, on-demand transformation trigger in his arsenal, that power ceiling was about to violently move.
Smith looked at the purple card hovering in his hand, feeling the sheer weight of the prince's pride radiating from the digital borders, and quietly thought about exactly what came next.