Smith opened a portal with the Space Stone and stepped through with Dende at his side — out of Earth's atmosphere entirely, depositing them on the barren expanse of Netherheim, on the far side of the rune boundary from Hela's sealed land.
The terrain here was dead rock and silence. No atmosphere worth mentioning. No population to worry about.
"Dende." Smith turned to him. "When I go down, move in fast and heal me. Don't wait."
"Yes, Mr. Smith."
Smith flew him out to a position behind a large rock formation — far enough to be out of the direct blast radius, close enough to reach him in seconds. Dende's healing was useless if the healer was also dead, and Smith's casual full output was more than sufficient to vaporize anything within range if it caught the wrong angle. He didn't know yet whether a partner materialized through the system could be wished back if they died. He had no intention of finding out.
Dende tucked himself behind the rock and peered around the edge.
Smith walked out into the open ground, planted his feet, and released his power.
The aura detonated outward — a visible pressure wave that cracked the rock face on either side of him and threw dust into the airless sky. Dende felt it through the stone he was hiding behind. His knuckles whitened.
Nail would be dead in one exchange, he thought. Without question.
Smith didn't open with a Kamehameha. He started small — a single ki blast fired outward, and then, using the Space Stone, blinked himself directly into its path.
The impact kicked up a column of dust and threw rubble in every direction. The shockwave hit Dende's rock hard enough to shake loose a shower of pebbles.
When the dust settled, Smith stood in the middle of the impact zone. Clothes intact. No visible damage.
He frowned at his hands, running an internal assessment.
Not enough.
He fired a long sequence this time — a rapid chain of blasts arcing out across the flat terrain, spread wide, each one carrying the kind of output that would level a city block. Then the Space Stone again, a jump that dropped him directly into the center of the formation.
The detonations overlapped in a single continuous roar. The mountain ridge behind the impact site turned to powder. A thermal gale tore outward in every direction, and Dende — despite the rock cover — was picked up and rolled a full twenty meters before he could arrest himself.
He clawed upright, spitting dust, and stared at the clearing.
Smith stood in a shallow crater, shirt destroyed, blood running from the corner of his mouth. He was upright but his breathing had a careful quality to it — measured, deliberate, the breathing of someone managing real damage.
He wiped the blood with the back of his hand and assessed himself.
"Still not enough. The injuries aren't deep enough to trigger the response."
He turned and raised his hands. The energy built in his palms — genuine full-output Kamehameha charge, the blue-white radiance building to a point where the light from it was the only illumination on the entire plain.
"Kamehameha!"
He released it straight ahead. Then, before the wave had traveled fifty meters, he threw his arms around in a sharp pivot.
The beam curved.
It came back at him from behind.
The impact erased the crater entirely. A mushroom cloud climbed into the airless sky, the shockwave propagating outward in a perfect ring that stripped the surface of loose material for half a kilometer in every direction. Dende, already in motion, was thrown again — end over end, tumbling, before he caught himself in mid-air and pushed back against the blast wind.
He found the new crater.
Smith was at the bottom. Flat on his back. Armor shredded. Barely breathing.
Dende descended fast and pressed both hands against Smith's chest. The green light came immediately, steady and clean, pouring into the damage faster than any medical pod could manage. Ribs realigned. Internal bleeding sealed. The cellular cascade of Zenkai adaptation — the Saiyan biology's specific response to genuine near-death stress, rebuilding each compromised system fractionally stronger than it had been — ran its course under Dende's hands.
Smith's eyes opened. He pulled in a full breath. Sat up.
"That," he said, "was too much."
Dende sat back on his heels and looked at him with the expression of someone who had just performed triage on a man who had done this to himself voluntarily.
"Mr. Smith. Your training method is terrifying."
Smith stood, running an internal read on his own power. The numbers were different. Not subtly — sharply, the way Saiyan biology worked when it actually triggered. He could feel the baseline sitting higher than it had before the session.
"First session puts us just over a million," he said, more to himself than to Dende. "As expected."
He looked at Dende. "Get back to your safe position. I'm not done. I'll call you when I need you."
Dende did not argue. He retreated significantly further this time and made a specific note of which direction the shockwaves would come from.
The training continued for several hours.
Each session followed the same pattern — near-lethal self-inflicted damage, Dende's healing pulling Smith back from the edge, the Saiyan baseline resetting marginally higher with each recovery. The increments shrank as the sessions accumulated. The first recovery had produced a clean doubling. The second, less. The third, less again.
Inside the sealed land, Hela felt it. The runes on the boundary vibrated with each shockwave, activating and repairing in cycles that had never been meant to run this frequently. She stood at the interior wall and pressed one hand against the stone, feeling the tremors propagate through the rock.
She couldn't see what was happening. The seal was complete in both directions. Whatever was occurring outside was entirely outside her awareness.
This irritated her considerably.
The final session ended with Smith sitting in a shallow depression, Dende's hands resting on his shoulders, the green light fading as the last of the damage closed.
Smith let the internal assessment settle.
30 million.
The Zenkai response had stopped — not because the training had ended, but because the biology had given everything it could at this stage. The incremental returns had dropped to near zero across the last several sessions, the margin of improvement so small as to be functionally nothing. The mechanism had hit its ceiling for the current power bracket. More near-death training from this point would produce diminishing results until some other threshold was crossed.
He stood.
"We're done for today."
Dende lowered his hands and exhaled slowly, the specific exhale of someone who had been holding it together through sustained professional focus. "Mr. Smith." He paused. "What are you?"
Smith flicked his tail — it had been wrapped around his waist throughout the session, and it uncoiled now as he relaxed. "Saiyan. Mostly." He rolled his shoulder, feeling the new baseline settle into place. "Near-death recovery is one of our methods for pushing past ceilings. It doesn't work indefinitely. There's always a point where the biology stops responding."
Dende stared at the tail for a full three seconds.
"Sai—" He stopped. Then: "Saiyans actually exist."
"They do," Smith said.