Smith Doyle stepped into the dead center of the ring, the wind whipping his dark coat. He delivered the absolute loss conditions with the clinical detachment of a god presiding over mortals, and in the next blink, he simply vanished, displacing the air with a sharp crack.
Tony didn't wait for the echo to fade.
Inside the Mark armor, the HUD flashed a violent, tactical crimson. His shoulder-mount missile racks snapped open with a heavy mechanical clatter. The targeting algorithms had already locked onto Wanda's biometric signature the second she touched down.
But Wanda didn't wait, either.
She didn't raise her hands to defend herself. Instead, she dropped to a crouch and drove both of her palms violently into the adamantium surface.
Dark, arterial-red chaos energy didn't just radiate from her—it detonated outward. It poured from her hands and feet like a ruptured dam, a creeping wave of localized reality distortion that flooded across the entire platform in a fraction of a second. It moved faster than Tony's optics could process, faster than his repulsors could redirect his momentum.
The missiles had already launched. The pre-loaded firing orders were already executing. Nearly thirty micro-munitions screamed across the ring, leaving thick trails of white exhaust in their wake.
Wanda didn't flinch. She elegantly swept one hand upward, throwing a thick, undulating barrier of scarlet light between herself and the volley.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The shield held perfectly. The missiles detonated against the magic in a deafening, overlapping roar of fire and shrapnel, scattering harmlessly into the ocean wind. Behind the smoke, Wanda stood completely untouched.
Tony, hovering at the absolute edge of the ring, looked down.
The dark red mist was already washing across the adamantium floor, swirling thickly around his metal boots. He felt a sudden, profound wrongness—a cold, sickening drop in his stomach—a split second before his brilliant mind understood what it actually was. This wasn't a kinetic attack. This wasn't the blunt-force bombardment she had used to push Steve Rogers across the ring. The energy spreading over the floor had an entirely different, terrifying function.
He looked up.
The Pacific arena was gone.
The sharp smell of the ocean was violently replaced by the choking stench of burning asphalt, pulverized concrete, and copper. Tony was standing in the middle of a shattered, apocalyptic battlefield.
He tilted his head back. Above him, the sky was torn open. A massive, jagged blue wormhole yawned over the Manhattan skyline, and the Chitauri were pouring through it in endless, screeching columns that literally blotted out the sun. Leviathans swam through the smoke like nightmare whales.
Tony looked down at the ruined street, the servos of his suit whining as he moved. He found the Avengers.
They were broken. Steve Rogers lay sprawled against a crushed yellow taxi, his iconic vibranium shield cracked perfectly in half in the rubble beside him. A few yards away, Thor, the God of Thunder, lay face-down and unmoving in a crater of shattered asphalt.
Tony's breath hitched in his throat. He turned in a frantic, full circle, the armor's targeting systems desperately scanning the ruins, looking for one specific face. He didn't find it.
The absence of that face told him something profound, and he wasn't entirely sure if it was a mercy or a fate worse than the alternative.
He dropped heavily to his knees beside Steve. The metallic clank of his armor sounded hollow in the ruined city.
Suddenly, Steve's bloodied hand shot out, his fingers weakly but desperately gripping Tony's armored wrist.
"You could have stopped him." Steve's voice was a wet, ragged rasp, barely audible over the roaring alien armada above them. "Why didn't you stop him?"
Tony froze, his arc reactor pulsing rapidly. "Stop who?"
"Smith Doyle." Steve's grip tightened, his blue eyes glassy and terrified. "He left Earth. And then they came."
The hand went completely slack. The arm dropped back onto the broken pavement.
Tony Stark stood up slowly in the ruins of New York, the shadows of the Chitauri army passing over his faceplate. He turned Steve's dying words over in his head, feeling the icy, existential dread settle into his bones.
If Smith Doyle left—if he truly left, packing up his cosmic syndicate and going interstellar with no return timeline—what was Earth without that terrifying margin of safety? What was a suit of armor against a universe full of gods and monsters? What would any of his billions, his preparation, or his genius actually be worth against the boundless dark?
He couldn't stop Smith. That wasn't something Tony Stark would even attempt, even if he possessed the power to do so. But he could build. He had to build. More suits. Better suits. A mechanized force that didn't depend on any single, unpredictable variable—including the strongest being on Earth simply deciding to stay.
Tony filed the suffocating terror away. He locked it in a dark box in his mind and ruthlessly refused to let it take root.
Outside the illusion, on the sun-drenched adamantium platform, Wanda stood perfectly still. Her eyes glowed with chaotic red light as she watched the raw, unfiltered nightmares surfacing in the billionaire's mind.
Her assessment of the man shifted, just slightly.
There was no romantic melodrama playing out in his head. No bruised vanity. No egocentric terror of losing his wealth or his status. What Tony Stark fundamentally feared was a future where he simply hadn't done enough—an alien sky choking a dead city, and the people he had fought beside already gone. That, and the specific, crushing guilt of a catastrophe he believed he might have prevented.
Less annoying than she'd expected, Wanda concluded coldly.
But she had already won. The billionaire was paralyzed, entirely trapped in his own head. She didn't need to unnecessarily extend his suffering. A single, compressed magic missile would cleanly finish the job.
The chaotic energy rapidly gathered in her right palm—a much darker, bruised red than before. It was smaller than her earlier explosive shots, but infinitely denser, humming with compressed kinetic force.
She locked her eyes on the frozen Iron Man suit. She thrust her hand forward.
In the ring, the triple-adamantium suit stood perfectly motionless, staring blindly at nothing.
"Sir, should I activate Sentry Mode?" JARVIS's crisp voice demanded, the internal HUD flashing frantic yellow warning diagnostics.
No response.
"Sir, should I take over motor functions and engage?" Tony had given the AI incredibly specific, unbreakable conditions for the Lorelei match. He had said absolutely nothing about autonomous intervention against the witch. JARVIS, a masterpiece of binary logic, rapidly ran the decision tree and found absolutely no authorized protocol covering the current, unprecedented neurological hijack.
The AI obeyed its creator. It did nothing.
The dense magic missile crossed the ring in a blur and slammed directly into the suit's center mass.
The concussive force was devastating. Tony Stark, already hovering dangerously close to the far edge of the platform, was violently lifted off his feet and thrown backward over the side.
The illusion instantly dissolved the exact millisecond his armor cleared the vertical boundary of the ring.
Tony hit the grassy ground outside the arena with a heavy, ungraceful thud. He lay there on his back for a long moment, staring up at the painfully clear, blue Pacific sky. The horrific dream was still running like phantom static behind his eyes. Steve's dead face. The cleanly broken vibranium shield. The endless, yawning portal.
He wasn't shaken—not exactly. But as he slowly pushed himself up onto his elbows, he was filing the cosmic threat level significantly more seriously than he had been an hour ago.
He had just lost a Dragon Ball. He still had two in reserve. The tournament wasn't over yet.
"Tony Stark has fallen from the ring!" The host's booming voice carried across the bewildered arena, snapping the crowd out of its stupor. "Wanda Maximoff wins the match! Let's hear it for Wanda!"
High on the massive digital screen, the glowing Dragon Ball icon detached from Tony's portrait and slid seamlessly over to Wanda's.
Three. In the Fraternity stands, Pietro didn't even bother hiding his sharp, vindictive smile. Down on the platform, Wanda let the red mist fade from her hands and allowed herself a small, satisfied smile of her own. She had won the fight. She had finally settled a bleeding, bitter debt she had been carrying in her soul since the rubble of Sokovia, and the great Tony Stark hadn't even consciously known he was paying it.
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