The raw energy gathered slowly in Smith's outstretched palm. It wasn't wildly building up; it was aggressively condensing down, compressing into a hyper-dense sphere as the ambient atmospheric output around him actually, perceptibly dropped.
Hela watched the unnatural process with visible confusion. The glowing ball of energy was getting blindingly brighter, while his overall, terrifying energy signature was getting eerily quieter.
He thrust his hand upward, throwing the sphere straight up into the dead sky.
"Bloom."
The compressed sphere violently expanded upon contact with the open air high above Netherheim. It flared outward into a massive, pale, luminous disc that filled the gray sky exactly the way a full moon would—not a perfectly identical celestial body, but close enough in its specific, radiated wavelength signature to trigger exactly what needed triggering in his DNA.
Hela shielded her eyes against the sudden glare and looked up at it. "What is that?"
Smith was already changing.
The transformation ran through his biology in a violent, agonizing wave. Bones lengthened and thickened; massive amounts of muscle mass rapidly accumulated out of nowhere. The Uru metal of the Destroyer armor immediately recognized the biological shift—its adaptive, magical structure expanding and shifting seamlessly with him, exactly as Odin's architects had originally designed it to do.
Seconds later, where the human Smith Doyle had stood, a sixty-meter Great Ape stood instead.
Its massive, furred tail moved slowly, deliberately behind it, the golden-spiked Destroyer armor scaled up and perfectly intact across its colossal frame.
Hela stared.
The suffocating energy reading was incredibly familiar. She had just physically felt it minutes ago—the blinding red aura, the Kaioken times ten, sitting at exactly 5.22 million. This towering beast registered at approximately the exact same staggering baseline level. The physical form was entirely, monstrously different. The oppressive power was not.
"How did you—" She stopped, her tactical mind catching up. "The physical size changed entirely. But the underlying energy didn't artificially increase."
The Great Ape didn't answer her in human words. It slowly turned its massive, armored head toward an open stretch of dead ground, unhinged its jaw, and opened its mouth.
The ki blast came out in a blinding, sustained column of pure destruction.
It hit a jagged hill fifty meters away. The hill simply stopped existing. It didn't collapse into rubble; it was instantly erased, millions of tons of ancient rock and soil violently converted into dispersed ambient energy in under a single second. The ground violently shook in a massive radius around the glowing impact crater.
And then, the runes appeared.
They surfaced across the scarred landscape like glowing gold text rising through dark water—Odin All-Father's absolute sealing script, running through every single stone and inch of sealed soil in Netherheim. The apocalyptic damage forcefully pulled itself back together in real-time. The erased hill seamlessly reassembled. The violently cracked ground flattened. The glowing crater filled itself in.
Hela watched the magical restoration with something approaching grim satisfaction. "It doesn't actively suppress you—the dimensional seal was placed exclusively on me, not on my visiting guests. But any structural damage to this realm gets immediately repaired regardless."
Smith tested the colossal form systematically after that.
Brutal, sweeping combat strikes. Sustained, rapid-fire ki barrages. Highly concentrated, microscopic point attacks. Each one landed with catastrophic force, and each one was instantly healed by the All-Father's magic. The sealed land of Netherheim flawlessly absorbed everything the Great Ape threw at it and stubbornly returned to baseline.
Hela stood well clear of the apocalyptic test radius and quietly observed.
How did Odin fundamentally miss finding this one? she thought, her eyes tracking the beast. During her bloody galactic campaigns, Asgard had fielded the mythic Valkyries, the undead Death Legion, the giant Fenrir wolves—an entire army of planetary-level warriors, with herself acting as the lone sub-Celestial vanguard and Odin as the singular Celestial anchor. The rest of their forces had been relatively ordinary by cosmic standards. What Smith Doyle was casually doing right now would have instantly made him a central, terrifying pillar of that conquering force.
He finally stopped. The Great Ape form went perfectly still, its red eyes looking up at the glowing artificial moon overhead.
He had learned exactly what he needed to.
The Oozaru form worked flawlessly. The Destroyer armor adapted perfectly to the mass shift. The raw destructive output was incredibly consistent with the Kaioken equivalent. But he had also practically confirmed the tactical problems: the necessary setup time for the artificial moon, the glaring visibility of the trigger in the sky, and the two incredibly obvious cancellation vectors—destroy the moon, or sever the tail. Against any god-tier opponent who actually understood what they were looking at, those were highly exploitable, fatal gaps.
The Kaioken had only one primary weakness: physical duration. The agonizing body strain under sustained, high-multiplier output. There were no external targets for an enemy to hit, and absolutely no obvious cancellation condition. And with the Namekian healer Dende now officially available in the system, the brutal near-death training that had previously been far too dangerous without reliable healing was suddenly viable. He could aggressively push toward twenty times the multiplier before the next tournament cycle.
The Great Ape had a hard, biological ceiling of ten times. Kaioken didn't have a ceiling he had reached yet.
The Ape raised a massive, armored hand and fired a casual ki blast directly upward. The artificial moon shattered into fading light. The transformation violently reversed—mass rapidly receding, armor smoothly contracting—until he was standing in human form on the magically repaired ground of Netherheim, breathing evenly.
Hela spoke immediately, her tactical assessment ruthless. "The moon is the primary trigger. If a competent opponent destroys it, you revert. And the tail—" She gestured to the appendage now wrapped around his waist. "Also a glaring cancellation point."
"Both correct," Smith agreed, rolling his shoulders.
"You are significantly weaker in that giant form than in the concentrated red state. You are a much more obvious target, infinitely more vulnerable to flanking, yet you possess the exact same power ceiling." She said it without any cruelty, just cold, military assessment. "For someone with your apparent combat history, it seems like the vastly inferior option."
"It is now," Smith said, turning to face her. "It wasn't always. Early on, a tenfold bloodline transformation with absolutely no skill requirement was incredibly valuable. You don't have to rigorously learn it—if you have Saiyan blood and a tail, the form automatically activates. The Kaioken, however, took years of continuous, agonizing training to push from two times up to ten times." He paused, looking at his hands and murmur to himself "I still can't hold twenty times without tearing myself apart. Goku did it going against King Kai's explicit guidance, which I don't have. But I'll get there."
Hela was completely quiet for a long moment, processing the terminology. Then:
"Bloodline," she repeated softly. "Is your specific species large in number?"
"In this universe?" Smith met her eyes. "I'm the only one."
She looked at him with an expression he instantly recognized as massive, geopolitical recalibration—a general rapidly adjusting a foundational assumption against terrifying new intelligence. An entire, universe-breaking combat tradition, a power system of that infinite scope, with only one current living practitioner in the universe.
"The bloodline naturally passes to offspring," Smith added casually, turning back toward the portal. "Any child born with Saiyan heritage can carry the exact same biological capability. That's historically documented."
Hela considered this for a moment longer than the passing information strictly required.
Smith noticed the look. He didn't comment on it.