The smoke began to clear, carried away by ocean breezes that swept across the tournament grounds. Gradually, Thena's form became visible through the dissipating haze.
She stood wreathed in black smoke from the explosions, her spear dissolved into cosmic motes. In its place, she'd manifested a massive two-handed shield—rectangular, thick as a castle door, glowing with internal golden light.
Tony's HUD analyzed the damage assessment. The micro-missiles had struck her directly—he'd watched the explosions blossom across her position. But she'd tanked the blasts with her body, only manifesting the shield in the crucial instant when his unibeam charged. The cosmic construct had absorbed the particle beam's full force, protecting her from what should have been a devastating strike.
The spectators murmured among themselves, impressed despite the anti-climax. Thena looked disheveled, her armor scorched and smoking, but she showed no signs of serious injury. Worthy of being mistaken for Athena herself—even military-grade explosive ordnance couldn't inflict meaningful damage.
Thena dissolved her shield, cosmic energy reforming into new weapons. A longsword materialized in her right hand, sleek and deadly. A single-bladed axe appeared in her left, its edge gleaming with barely visible power.
She took one step forward, preparing to close the distance.
A panel on Tony's back opened with mechanical precision.
The rotary cannon deployed, rising from its housing with servos whining. Six barrels began spinning, accelerating to operational speed. The weapon's magazine held ten thousand rounds of armor-piercing ammunition, and JARVIS had calculated optimal firing solutions.
The gun opened fire.
The sound was apocalyptic. Not individual gunshots, but a continuous roar like a chainsaw made of thunder. Ten thousand rounds per minute created a metal storm that turned the air itself into a wall of death.
Thena's charge stopped instantly. Her eyes widened as she processed the sheer volume of incoming fire—hundreds of bullets per second, creating a cone of devastation that would shred anything in its path.
No time to manifest a shield. No time to dodge. She dropped both weapons, letting the cosmic constructs dissolve, and crossed her arms in front of her face in an X-formation.
DING-DING-DING-DING-DING-
The individual impacts merged into a sustained metallic scream. Bullets struck Thena's armor and exposed skin in a continuous barrage, each round flattening on contact with her cosmic-enhanced physiology. Sparks erupted in cascades, bright enough to compete with the afternoon sun. Deformed projectiles fell around her feet like lethal rain, forming piles of spent brass and flattened lead.
Her body was strong enough to withstand it. Her armor provided additional protection. But the kinetic energy was cumulative and overwhelming.
Thena's boots began scraping backward across the gold-titanium surface, each step forced by the sheer momentum transfer of thousands of bullets hammering against her defensive posture.
Some rounds flew wide of their primary target—the weapon's cone of fire too broad to contain perfectly. Stray bullets streaked toward the spectator sections at lethal velocities.
Eddie Brock appeared in a black blur, Venom's mass expanding instantly. The symbiote formed a wall of living darkness, intercepting every errant projectile before it could reach the crowd. Bullets vanished into Venom's body, absorbed and rendered harmless.
On the arena floor, Thena continued her forced retreat. Five meters. Ten. Fifteen. The metal storm drove her inexorably backward, and her crossed arms trembled from the sustained punishment.
Tony's arc reactor pulsed as it diverted power to multiple systems simultaneously. The rotary cannon drew massive energy to maintain its firing rate. And beneath the armored housing of his chest mount, the unibeam capacitors were charging.
Thirty seconds of sustained fire. JARVIS monitored ammunition expenditure, barrel temperature, structural stress on the deployment mechanism. Everything nominal. The weapon performed flawlessly.
And the unibeam reached full charge.
Thena's crossed arms blocked her vision—necessary to protect her face from the metal storm, but creating a critical blind spot. She couldn't see Tony's chest reactor glowing white-hot, couldn't register the telltale build-up that preceded his most powerful attack.
By the time she sensed the energy spike, it was already too late.
The unibeam fired at sixty percent total power reserves.
The particle beam lanced through the continuing metal storm, a column of white-hot fury that struck Thena dead center. The impact lifted her from her feet despite her supernatural durability, and she flew backward in a tumbling arc.
The rotary cannon continued firing for another thirty seconds before finally spinning down. Ten thousand rounds expended. The weapon's barrels glowed cherry-red from the sustained thermal stress.
JARVIS initiated emergency jettison protocols. The entire cannon assembly detached from Tony's back and fell to the arena floor with a heavy clang, too damaged from heat stress to retract into the armor's housing. Better to abandon it than risk an internal malfunction.
Thena crashed to the ground mere inches from the arena's boundary. Smoke rose from her scorched armor, and her arms—which had blocked the unibeam's full force—showed visible damage. The cosmic material had cracked in several places, golden energy seeping through like blood from wounds.
Tony's systems registered the damage to his own armor. The Mark 42's structural integrity had dropped to critical levels—twenty-three percent in the chest section, eighteen percent in the torso plating. Much more punishment and the secondary adamantium would fail catastrophically.
He'd hoped the combination assault would knock Thena clear of the boundary. Launch her beyond the arena entirely for an immediate victory. But she remained stubbornly in bounds, her feet still touching the platform's edge.
"Durable," Tony muttered inside his helmet. "I'll give her that."
Thena pushed herself upright with visible effort. Her movements were slower, more deliberate. Pain showed in the tightness around her eyes, the careful way she held her damaged arms.
She looked down at the cracks in her forearm guards, genuine surprise flickering across her features. Five thousand years of combat, and she'd never been injured by purely technological weapons. Human engineering had hurt her. The realization was almost incomprehensible.
Her golden eyes lifted to meet Tony's faceplate. "You are an ordinary human," she said, and respect colored her tone despite the circumstances. "To injure me this severely—you should take pride in that accomplishment."
Tony's lips curved into a smirk inside his helmet. He prepared a response about Eternals and Norse gods bleeding red just like everyone else, about how anything that bled could be killed.
But Thena's mouth remained open, her sentence unfinished.
"But that's all—"
Her voice cut off mid-word. Her eyes rolled back, showing only whites. Her entire body went rigid, arms locked at her sides, posture frozen in an unnatural stillness.
Tony's smirk faded. "Uh... JARVIS? What just happened?"
"Unknown, sir. Subject appears to have ceased all voluntary movement. Vital signs remain active but neurological activity shows abnormal patterns."
In the Eternals' section, recognition dawned across ten immortal faces simultaneously.
"No," Gilgamesh breathed, his massive hands gripping his armrest hard enough to crack the material. "Not now. Thena's Mahd Wy'ry is activating."
Kingo leaned forward, conflict written across his features. "She only has one Dragon Ball coin remaining. If she loses this match, she'll have to wait again."
Ikaris's jaw set, his eyes beginning to glow with barely suppressed cosmic energy. "Should I intervene? Request a timeout? Or simply—"
"Don't." Sersi's hand caught his arm, her grip surprisingly firm. "If you interfere, they'll disqualify her permanently. You'd destroy her chance forever."
Ikaris's eyes dimmed, but frustration radiated from every line of his body. He crossed his arms and forced himself to remain seated, watching his teammate suffer through paralysis while unable to help.
On the arena floor, Tony had no context for what he was witnessing. Thena stood frozen like a statue, unresponsive to his words or movements. Some kind of seizure? Neural disruption? Psychic attack?
An idea formed.
Tony raised his right palm and fired a repulsor blast at empty air three meters to Thena's left. The golden beam struck nothing but arena floor, scorching the surface.
Thena didn't react. Didn't flinch. Didn't even track the attack with her eyes.
"JARVIS," Tony said slowly, pieces clicking together in his mind, "I think she's completely unresponsive to external stimuli. Run a threat assessment calculation for me."
"Sir?"
"Calculate the energy required to destroy the arena platform directly beneath her feet without the blast radius reaching her body. Then determine if the resulting explosion would generate enough kinetic force to knock her outside the boundary."
JARVIS processed the request, sensors scanning the gold-titanium alloy composition, measuring distances, modeling blast physics with precision no human could match.
"Solution found, sir. A chest-mounted unibeam strike at this specific coordinate—" A targeting reticle appeared on Tony's HUD, highlighting a point two feet in front of Thena's position. "—will fracture the platform's structural integrity. The subsequent collapse and explosive force should displace the subject approximately three point seven meters. Probability of success: seventy-eight percent."
Tony's remaining power reserves hovered at forty percent. The attack JARVIS proposed would consume thirty percent, leaving him barely functional if it failed.
But if he didn't take this shot, if he waited for Thena to recover from whatever was affecting her, he'd be fighting a five-thousand-year-old warrior goddess with damaged armor and depleted energy reserves.
No contest. The tactical calculus was obvious.
"Do it," Tony commanded.
The unibeam capacitors charged one final time, drawing power from every available system. Life support dropped to minimum sustainable levels. Repulsors went offline. Even HUD brightness dimmed to conserve energy.
The targeting reticle burned bright on Tony's display. JARVIS maintained lock with machine precision, compensating for micro-movements, accounting for wind resistance, modeling the explosion's propagation.
The beam fired.
White-hot particle energy struck the arena floor directly in front of Thena's frozen form. The gold-titanium alloy resisted for perhaps a tenth of a second before catastrophic structural failure propagated outward from the impact point.
The corner section of the arena platform exploded.
Debris flew in all directions. The shockwave rippled outward in a visible compression wave. And the kinetic force struck Thena's immobile body like an invisible giant's hand.
She tumbled backward, arms still locked at her sides, body rigid as a mannequin. Her boots left the platform. Crossed the boundary line. Continued into empty air.
Thena landed three meters beyond the arena's edge, her back striking the ground with enough force to crack the concrete. She lay motionless, eyes still showing only whites, completely unaware she'd been moved.
Silence held the arena in its grip.
The spectators stared in collective confusion. What had they just witnessed? Thena had been dominating the early exchanges, tanking explosions and surviving sustained machine gun fire. Then she'd simply... stopped. Frozen mid-sentence. And Tony had blown up the floor beneath her feet.
Xu Xialing's brow furrowed as she leaned toward her father. "What just happened? Did Thena give up intentionally? Or did they reach some kind of arrangement off-stage?"
Her tone carried the cynicism of someone who'd run underground fighting rings. She knew all the tricks—fixed matches, paid dives, predetermined outcomes designed to manipulate betting pools.
Xu Wenwu considered the question carefully, his millennium of experience reading combat situations. Finally, he shook his head. "Something went wrong with Thena's body. A medical condition. Otherwise Tony would never have won that way."
His eyes tracked to where Thena lay motionless beyond the boundary. "But the next match will be between Tony Stark and myself. One more victory, and I'll see you again, Ying Li."
Throughout the spectator sections, conversations erupted. Confusion dominated every discussion. Some speculated about secret deals. Others wondered if Thena had suffered a stroke or heart attack mid-battle. A few voices rose above the murmur, openly accusing the tournament organizers of match-fixing.
Smith Doyle had watched the entire sequence with his ki sense extended, reading Thena's energy signature as it flickered and destabilized. Mahd Wy'ry. The Eternals' programming corruption. He'd expected it might interfere, but not quite so dramatically.
Still, rules were rules. Thena had fallen outside the boundary. The match was decided.
Smith materialized beside Tony on the damaged arena floor, raised the armored Avenger's arm high, and his voice carried across the venue with absolute authority.
"The winner is Tony Stark!"
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