The cell in Asgard's lower prison was not what Lorelei had expected the Allfather to visit.
She had been down here long enough to lose count of the seasons. The barrier magic that surrounded her was a constant low hum against her skin, and the all-female guard rotation beyond the outer gate had never once given her anything useful to work with. She had been patient. She had read every book they'd brought her and thought carefully about every question she didn't ask out loud.
When the door opened and Odin stepped through, she understood immediately that patience had paid off.
She laughed—not from nerves, but from the genuine, startled absurdity of it. "I never imagined I'd see the Allfather himself come down here to find me."
The charm radiated off her the way warmth radiated off a hearthstone. She couldn't stop it. That was the other reason she was in this cell—not just what she had done with the ability, but the fact that she had no off switch.
Odin's brow tightened slightly as he registered it. "Do you believe that works on me?"
"Your Majesty knows I can't control it," she said, the humor fading to something quieter. "I can amplify it. I can deepen it. I cannot turn it off."
He nodded, accepting that without argument. He had known it before he came. That was why he'd come alone.
"I have a proposal," he said. "One that involves leaving this cell."
Her eyes sharpened. She kept her voice even. "It would be my honor to be of service."
Odin laid out his terms without preamble. If she accomplished what he needed, her crimes would be pardoned. She would be permitted to live on Midgard, free of Asgardian oversight, free to go where she chose. Asgard would not pursue her.
"What do you need?" she asked.
He told her everything—the Dragon Balls, the tournament, the wish that Asgard required. He also told her, without softening it, that he would place rune-bindings on her before she left. If she won the championship and did not grant the wish as specified, the bindings would kill her. He was not offering trust. He was offering an arrangement.
Lorelei listened to all of it. The Dragon Balls were not something she had ever encountered—a treasure of that scope, hidden on Midgard of all places, capable of granting any wish to whoever could claim them. She turned the information over in her mind and found it more interesting with every pass.
"I will win the championship for you, Your Majesty," she said. "You have my word."
"I need your best effort," Odin said. "Not a guarantee. If a competitor emerges who is beyond your reach, I will not hold the outcome against you."
He was being precise, which told her he had already assessed the field. She filed that detail away.
The arrangement was reached. Odin brought Heimdall into the matter, and the Rainbow Bridge delivered Lorelei to Earth within the day. Her first task, once she found solid ground beneath her feet on Midgard, was to build something useful from what was available. She had done it before in Asgard with considerably less freedom of movement.
She went to work.
Tony had been awake for seventy-two hours, which he only knew because JARVIS had mentioned it twice and DUM-E had taken to following him at a three-foot distance with what he could only interpret as a robotic expression of concern.
DUM-E was also wearing a hat. Someone in the lab—he suspected himself, at some point between hour forty and hour fifty—had taped a small paper cone to the top of the arm's casing with the word IDIOT written on it in marker. DUM-E had not removed it. Tony wasn't sure DUM-E knew it was there.
"Master," JARVIS said from the ceiling speakers, "I've completed the calibration sequence. With approximately four additional hours—"
"Skip it." Tony pulled a cotton swab across the inside of his forearm where the new sensor array was subcutaneously anchored. The area was red. He'd clean it properly later.
"I've also prepared a safety briefing."
"Also skip it."
"As anticipated," JARVIS said, with the particular dry affect that Tony had never actually programmed into him and had long since stopped trying to remove. "Shall I log that under the standard exemption?"
"Log it wherever you want." Tony stood, rolled his sleeve down, and crossed the lab toward the target dummy mounted near the far wall. He threw three test punches at different angles, feeling how the sensor array read and transmitted the motion. Clean data. Good range. The new system translated physical gesture into remote armor command with better latency than anything he'd built before the Battle of New York.
He turned back to DUM-E, who had not moved from its corner.
"Why are you still hiding over there?" Tony pointed at the scorched section of flooring from the earlier test run. "You know what happened. Go clean up the blood."
DUM-E's arm rotated toward him and held position for a moment.
"Master," JARVIS said, "please allow me to remind you that you have not slept in seventy-two hours."
"Noted. Logging it under the standard exemption." Tony moved to the center of the lab and stood in the deployment position—feet at shoulder width, left arm raised. The armor rack along the far wall held a full lineup, each suit a generation beyond the last. He looked at them the way a conductor looked at an orchestra before a performance.
"Attention, ladies and gentlemen," he said. "Good evening, and welcome. I'm pleased to announce you have a new little brother joining the family."
He turned to DUM-E. "Get a close-up first. Then pan wide. Timestamp it."
"Mark 42 adaptive deployment sequence," JARVIS announced. "Testing commences."
The sensor array on Tony's arm lit up. He triggered the remote sequence and watched the Mark 42's components lift from their housing and begin the autonomous flight path toward him.
The first several pieces landed perfectly. Chest plate, solid. Legs, locked. Then the sequencing hiccupped—a left gauntlet overcorrected on approach, clipped the shoulder mount, and the cascade failure that followed was both immediate and comprehensive. The hip section arrived at approximately forty miles per hour and caught him squarely on the side, launching him across the lab. He bounced once off the floor and came to rest against the base of the armor rack.
The components clattered down around him.
"As always, sir," JARVIS said. "Always a pleasure to observe your process."
Tony lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling. "Three days without sleep might actually be too long," he conceded. "I'm tentatively revising my position."
He sat up, checked the sensor array—intact—and decided the Mark 42 could wait.
The Dragon Balls were awake again. He'd felt the news the same way he always registered anything this significant: as a problem to solve and an opportunity to position correctly. His warehouse scanning arrays had been running continuously since the previous tournament concluded. Over the past year, he'd collected stones in bulk—every smooth, round specimen his automated systems could flag. Eight hundred thousand-plus acquisitions, catalogued and held under JARVIS surveillance.
He'd also built the scanning array better this time. Faster. More sensitive to the specific optical signature of active Dragon Ball energy.
"JARVIS, run the warehouse scan. Full inventory check—anything that's transform."
The response came back in under a minute.
"I'm sorry, sir. No conversions detected in the current inventory."
Tony's jaw shifted. He got up, brushed a piece of armor panel off his shoulder, and accepted the result with the silence of someone who had already prepared himself for it.
"All right," he said. "Different approach. Track Dragon Ball-related searches across every accessible network, active immediately. And list the Dragon Balls on the acquisition market—all major platforms, all relevant channels. Opening offer, three million. Willing to negotiate on confirmation of authenticity."
"Tracking authorized," JARVIS said. "Acquisition listings are live. I hope the market performs better for you this cycle than it did last time, sir."
He picked up the remote and dropped onto the couch at the edge of the lab. What he needed was four hours of unconsciousness and a functioning Mark 42, in that order. He clicked on the television.
The regular broadcast signal wasn't there. What filled the screen instead was a prepared video—cleanly produced, deliberately stylized, the kind of thing that took resources and intent to put together. A masked figure spoke directly to camera in the tone of someone who had already decided they were inevitable.
The Mandarin. The Ten Rings.
The video ran to its end, and the regular channel signal resumed as if nothing had happened.
Tony stared at the screen for a long moment. The Ten Rings had spent the better part of a decade as a known but manageable problem. He know now that before Xu Wenwu join Smith, he was the head of the Ten Rings which theoretically meant the organization's upper command was accounted for, and if not him then the other probability it was passed to the daughter Xu Xialing since Shang Chi join Paragons. But this broadcast wasn't coming from Xu Wenwu or his children. The Mandarin were not any of them.
"JARVIS, find me everything current on this Mandarin."
"Already compiling, sir."
Tony set down the remote and began working through the implications. This was a conversation that needed to happen in person. He reached for his phone and call Smith.