The massive, triangular shadow of the Domo swallowed the adamantium platform, plunging them into sudden, unnatural twilight.
Bulma went absolutely still. Her bright eyes darted across the monolithic hull, her mind racing through a frantic, high-speed threat assessment. The vessel was of unknown origin. There had been no prior contact, no atmospheric entry burn, no radar ping. It had simply materialized directly above the most heavily fortified competition venue on Earth. Until she had a mathematically sound reason to believe otherwise, she catalogued the flying mountain as a catastrophic threat.
Smith, however, had already assessed the board differently. He felt the ship's interior through the cosmic tether of his awareness.
One person. Just one. If the Eternals were making a coordinated, tactical move on the Dragon Balls, they wouldn't send a solitary scout.
A seamless hatch on the underside of the vessel irised open. A synthetic, flawlessly modulated electronic voice drifted down through the ocean air.
"Please come in, Mr. Smith. No hostile intent."
Smith didn't bend his knees. He didn't brace himself. He simply defied gravity, drifting smoothly upward from the platform and into the belly of the alien ship without a microsecond of hesitation. The ancient, celestial interior of the Domo wasn't going to contain him, and if the Eternals wanted to test that assumption, they were more than welcome to try and fail.
Makkari was waiting for him in the vast, dimly lit observation deck, a translucent tablet clutched tightly in her hands.
Smith took in the Eternal. He recognized her from the deep-cover S.H.I.E.L.D. files and his own observations—the speedster Pietro had encountered during his glacier run. She possessed a kinetic, vibrating energy, even when standing perfectly still. She couldn't speak, but her cosmic physiology allowed her to hear the microscopic shifts in his breathing.
Her fingers flew across the glass surface of the tablet in a blur. The synthesizer mounted to the console read her words aloud in that same, polite monotone:
"No ill intentions. I apologize for the positioning. I wanted to observe when the tournament would begin."
Smith crossed his arms, his dark coat sweeping around his ankles. He let the silence hang, letting the sheer, crushing weight of his divine authority fill the cavernous room. He waited while her fingers blurred over the screen again.
"We haven't found any Dragon Balls this cycle," the synthesizer recited, lacking the raw, desperate frustration evident in Makkari's eyes. "We weren't certain whether we'd missed our window. My plan was to watch from here—if the other Eternals located a ball in time, I would stay. If the tournament had already started and we had nothing, I would leave quietly."
A long pause stretched between them. Makkari looked at him, her brow furrowing in genuine, centuries-old bewilderment. She typed one final thought.
"I didn't expect your perception range to extend to a cloaked ship. In thousands of years of flying, no one has ever detected us."
Smith didn't offer a smile. He had located her by feel, not by a technological scan. Whatever god-tier celestial cloaking technology the ship utilized to bend light and defeat conventional radar, it did absolutely nothing to mask the soul of the Eternal inside it. To Smith's cosmic perception, her life-force burning inside the cold void of the stealth field had been as subtle as a lighthouse on a moonless night.
"The tournament starts today," Smith said, his voice echoing off the golden, geometric walls. "All contestants are en route. No Eternal has a place in this cycle."
He stepped closer, holding her gaze steadily. The air between them grew heavy, the temperature dropping. "Move the ship off the island. If it appears in this airspace again without prior authorization, I will treat it as a declaration of intent, and I will act accordingly."
Makkari swallowed hard. She nodded repeatedly, the frantic energy returning to her limbs, and typed a rapid sequence.
"Understood. Leaving now. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. It won't happen again."
Smith turned and dropped backward through the open hatch, free-falling toward the dark gray platform below.
The Domo was already moving before his boots even touched the secondary adamantium. It didn't accelerate like a conventional aircraft; it simply slid sideways through the sky, defying inertia, and vanished back into the thin air.
Bulma stood near the edge of the ring, her hands on her hips, watching the empty sky where the ship had been.
"The Eternals," Smith said smoothly, answering the question before it could fully form on her lips. "Their speedster. She was waiting to see if they'd miraculously found any balls before the tournament locked. They didn't."
He walked over to a supply crate and picked up his heavy, fur-lined coat. He pulled it on, the leather groaning as he adjusted his collar. "I need to go get Kaecilius. You have this?"
"Everything's ready," Bulma said, her eyes finally pulling away from the clouds. "Just bring everyone home."
Smith reached into his pocket. He didn't draw a sling ring. Instead, he channeled the raw, foundational power of the Cosmic Cube.
The air in front of him didn't spark with the familiar orange embers of Kamar-Taj magic. Instead, reality itself seemed to fracture like a shattered mirror. A jagged, blindingly blue tear ripped through the fabric of space, howling with the sheer, untamed energy of the Tesseract. Smith stepped casually through the cosmic wound, and the rift snapped shut behind him.
The transition was violent. One second, Smith was standing in the salty, humid breeze of the Pacific Ocean. The next, the biting, oxygen-starved cold of the high Himalayas slammed into his lungs.
The central courtyard of Kamar-Taj was steeped in the scent of burning sandalwood, ozone, and ancient stone. But the serene, meditative atmosphere had shattered the exact instant Smith emerged.
The wormhole's geometry—a brutal, tearing blue singularity—was so fundamentally alien and jarring compared to the structured, geometric elegance of Kamar-Taj portal magic that every single sorcerer in the courtyard registered it as a hostile, foreign invasion.
Instantly, the square lit up. Dozens of glowing, intricate orange mandalas sparked to life. Novices and masters alike dropped into taut, heavily practiced combat stances, the freezing mountain air humming with the sudden surge of eldritch energy. Someone shouted, sprinting inside the sanctuary to raise the alarm.
Smith stood perfectly still in the center of the frost-covered flagstones. He looked calmly at the circle of lethal, glowing magic trained directly on his chest.
"Please don't," Smith said softly. The words carried effortlessly over the howling mountain wind, heavy with the unspoken promise that if they threw a spell, the mountain would likely be missing a courtyard in the aftermath.
The heavy wooden doors of the main sanctum groaned open.
Karl Mordo stepped out into the freezing air. He moved at a measured, deliberate pace, his green robes sweeping over the frost. He clocked Smith standing in the center of the kill box, his jaw tightening so hard the muscles jumped beneath his skin. He kept his expression carefully, rigidly neutral, but the zealous tension radiating from him was palpable.
"Mr. Smith," Mordo said, his voice a tight, controlled baritone. "This is a surprise."
Mordo turned his head slightly, addressing the ring of tense sorcerers. "Stand down. He's not an enemy."
The glowing shields flickered and died, though the posture of the sorcerers remained stiff and untrusting. Mordo turned his dark eyes back to Smith.
"I didn't realize you could open a portal directly into Kamar-Taj," Mordo said, his hands clasped firmly behind his back to hide his white-knuckled grip. "Forgive the reception." His polite tone masterfully communicated that forgiveness was not an emotion he was currently entertaining.
Smith looked at him, feeling the simmering hostility. In another life, another timeline, Karl Mordo had spent years working through his rigid, unyielding grievances by systematically hunting down and murdering every rogue sorcerer he could find. Right now, he was playing the diplomat, suffering the presence of a cosmic anomaly with the specific, painful stiffness of a man swallowing broken glass instead of speaking his mind.
"I'm here for Kaecilius," Smith said, cutting through the pleasantries and letting the cold reality of the day settle over the ancient stones. "The Dragon Ball Tournament begins today."
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