Steve Rogers stood up from the spectator bench, the worn leather straps of his shield familiar and grounding against his forearm. He swung the polished vibranium disc onto his back with a practiced, heavy motion and began the long walk down the aisle toward the secondary adamantium ring. He didn't look at the crowd. He looked only at the arena.
Wanda was already airborne.
She didn't jump or climb the steps. Thick, undulating waves of scarlet energy poured from her hands, warping the air pressure around her as she simply rose from her seat and drifted over the barricades. The magic crackled with a sound like tearing silk, smelling faintly of ozone and static. She touched down in the center of the ring with a terrifying, feather-light grace.
A low, uneasy murmur immediately moved through the civilian crowd.
"She can fly?" someone whispered in the rows behind the Avengers.
"I thought she'd have a flying carpet or something," another muttered, entirely failing to grasp the scale of what they were witnessing.
In the Kamar-Taj block, Kaecilius sat perfectly still, his sharp eyes tracking the crimson mist fading around Wanda's boots. He noted the difference instantly. This wasn't the disciplined, geometric sorcery of Kamar-Taj. There were no structured mandalas, no precise incantations, no dimensional folding. It was raw, unchanneled, and entirely its own—a wild, bleeding thing poured directly from her mind into reality.
Harley leaned over the armrest, tugging insistently on Tony's sleeve. "Don't wizards need wands?"
"Kid," Tony said, his eyes fixed grimly on the stage, "not one wizard I've ever met uses a wand. Those are storybook props."
Harley blinked, his youthful excitement sobering into a tense frown as he filed that terrifying reality away with appropriate gravity.
Around the perimeter of the arena, S.H.I.E.L.D. agents were already frantically at work. Clipboards snapped. Encrypted tablets glowed. Several tactical operatives reached into specialized cases, pulling out sleek, second-generation Scouters and fitting the green glass lenses over their eyes. The soft electronic hum of the devices powering up was audible in the VIP section. The Fraternity tournament staff standing in the shadows clocked the espionage, exchanged a single glance, and deliberately let it go. Let the spies measure the hurricane.
Smith Doyle stepped fluidly into the center of the vast, indestructible platform, placing himself directly between the super-soldier and the witch.
"First match, third Dragon Ball Tournament," Smith's voice boomed, unamplified but echoing with absolute, crushing authority across the Pacific wind. "Begin."
He cleared the platform immediately. Without bending his knees, Smith rose on the Air Dance Technique, floating to a stationary position thirty feet above the edge of the ring—close enough to intervene in a fraction of a second.
Looking down, Smith knew exactly who in the ring might actually need that life-saving intervention, and it was not Wanda Maximoff. The Fraternity had not left her raw potential unchecked. She had endured brutal, grinding months of live sparring against elite operatives who could actually push her to the breaking point. She had been subjected to psychological illusions, disorientation tactics, and unrelenting physical assaults, all of it pressure-tested in the blood and dirt of the training grounds. That was on top of her punishing mental conditioning under the Cat Sage.
The woman standing on the adamantium floor was not the terrified, grieving girl from the Ultron conflict. She was centered, lethal, and meaningfully stronger.
On the platform, the Pacific wind howled between them. Neither of them spoke.
Steve unslung his shield, bringing the iconic star-spangled metal up to cover his chest. He bent his knees, dropping his center of gravity, and moved toward her with measured, deliberate, microscopic steps. He didn't know nearly enough about the physics or limitations of her chaos magic to risk a blind rush.
Wanda watched the tactical crawl. A slow, knowing smile touched her lips, completely devoid of warmth.
"Let me test that shield."
The scarlet energy didn't just glow; it violently condensed in the palm of her right hand, compressing into a dense, screaming sphere of kinetic chaos. She snapped her wrist forward.
The magic bullet fired with the speed of a railgun. It slammed into the vibranium faceplate with a deafening, metallic THUD. The red energy flattened against the metal and violently dispersed in a shockwave that ruffled Steve's hair.
No crack. No give. The vibranium simply swallowed the vibration.
Wanda's brow tightened, the smile fading. That single shot had carried more focused kinetic force than a military-grade fragmentation grenade.
She raised both hands. She fired again. And again.
The air turned into a strobe light of blinding crimson. Each round was darker, denser, and exponentially larger than the last, swelling rapidly from the size of a fist to the size of a cannonball, howling as they tore across the ring.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Floating above the chaos, Smith crossed his arms and frowned. Why was she committing entirely to a frontal assault against the most indestructible object on the planet? He analyzed Steve's posture. Was it the shield itself? Was there something about Rogers' grounded stance, his immovable grip, or his center of gravity that was subconsciously pulling her targeting reticule directly toward the metal? It was a magnet for aggression.
In the VIP seats, Harley was grinning, his knuckles white as he gripped the armrests. "It's not doing anything to him!"
Tony didn't smile. His dark eyes stayed rigidly locked on the vibrating disc. "My father made that," Tony murmured, his voice tight with a complex knot of resentment and absolute engineering awe. "Special material. A one-of-a-kind run. Even he couldn't reproduce it." He swallowed hard, watching the god-tier magic shatter against the paint. "I don't even know the composite ratios."
He didn't. And because there had never been a genuine, lethal collision between the three heaviest hitters—Tony, Thor, and Steve—none of them had ever definitively confirmed the terrifying S.H.I.E.L.D. rumor that the shield had once absorbed a full-strength, overhead hammer strike from Mjolnir without suffering a single microscopic scratch.
A few seats away, a S.H.I.E.L.D. analyst tapped his Scouter, speaking frantically into an encrypted lapel recorder. "Wanda's combat output is climbing fast—the power ratio over Steve's baseline is holding above 1.3 and is still rising exponentially. Still absolutely no structural effect on the shield."
The agent blinked, his voice dropping an octave. "Doubled now—"
Down on the platform, the unrelenting bombardment was finally doing something. The vibranium absorbed the direct kinetic impact, but the sheer, violent concussive force of the exploding air around it was bleeding through. Each detonation shoved Steve's heavy boots backward across the friction-less adamantium floor.
The shriek of his soles scraping the metal was loud. He was losing ground significantly faster than he was taking it. Steve gritted his teeth, his muscles burning with lactic acid as he violently planted his back foot, working every microsecond gap between the scarlet volleys to surge forward, only to get brutally shoved back again when the next massive round detonated against his forearm.
Wanda was frowning too, the red light casting harsh shadows across her face. She had escalated her output well past the threshold that should have pulverized a normal human's skeleton through sheer blunt force trauma. The shield was genuinely worth studying. Her mind immediately pivoted; she found herself thinking it would make magnificent source material for Pietro—a combat dagger forged from something with this impossible density and kinetic absorption profile.
"Steve," she called out, her voice cutting clearly through the concussive roar, firing yet another massive sphere as she asked it, "what's that shield made of?"
Steve was already moving. He angled the rim of the shield perfectly over his head to deflect a glancing blow, his muscles coiled tight.
"Howard built it," Steve grunted, his breath visible in the air. "I never asked."
The distance closed with terrifying speed. Steve abandoned the defensive crawl. He came in hard, a dead sprint, the edge of the shield driving forward like a battering ram. No hesitation. Pure, super-soldier momentum.
Wanda didn't flinch. She sidestepped smoothly, pivoting on her heel with the liquid grace of a dancer.
She had already read the entire approach. She had mapped his kinetic chain through his footwork during the barrage—the subtle angling of his shoulders, the microscopic weight shifts in his hips, the small, deeply ingrained military preparations he telegraphed each time he coiled his muscles to sprint.
When Steve turned his momentum to follow her rotation, he found her already waiting. Her hands were up, her palms open, the chaotic red energy burning like a dying star between her fingers.