Inside the suffocating, pitch-black silence of the Mark armor, Tony Stark kept his eyes squeezed shut.
He had severed the external audio feeds. He had locked out his own motor controls. But Lorelei's voice still moved through the physical layers of secondary adamantium anyway. The intoxicating, narcotic sound of her words vibrated through the metal, and her impossibly perfect image began violently assembling itself behind his closed eyelids without his permission.
She was good at what she did. Tony would give her that. Even blind and deaf, his biology was desperately trying to betray him.
Outside, Lorelei walked toward the silent suit slowly, talking the entire way. Every single swaying step was deliberate and measured. She had done this exact dance before, thousands of times, against gods and warlords considerably harder to crack than a mortal billionaire with highly documented, deeply exploitable weaknesses.
The silver suit didn't move a millimeter.
In the VIP stands, Pepper Potts was suddenly on her feet, her hands gripping the barricade. She shouted Tony's name. She shouted it again, her voice cracking with raw panic. The Iron Man armor stood completely, terrifyingly motionless on the indestructible ring while the Asgardian slowly closed the distance to arm's length. Pepper's desperate voice made absolutely no difference to any of it.
Jessica Jones slouched in her seat, watching the pantomime, and slowly shook her head. "He's gone," she muttered to Nick Fury. "The Avengers are getting wiped out."
She ran the grim, inescapable math. Three Avengers had entered this tournament. Steve was already out. She was out. Tony had just been humiliatingly dismantled by Wanda. If Lorelei took this match without throwing a single punch, Tony would be down to a single Dragon Ball with two lethal opponents left in the round-robin, having lost to both of them consecutively. Jessica didn't see a viable tactical path back from that kind of deficit.
Her eyes moved across the tiered stands, locking onto Wanda Maximoff. The finals, at least, would be interesting to watch.
Around the arena, several women in the crowd had quietly lowered their expectations for the legendary Iron Man. Xialing sat with her arms crossed, looking at the paralyzed, silent suit, and arrived at the exact same, disappointing conclusion. The man had folded.
Lorelei finally stopped, exactly one meter away from the silver faceplate.
"Tony," she murmured warmly, her voice dripping with ancient, practiced devotion. "Let me see the face behind that mask."
A heavy, mechanical whine echoed across the quiet platform. The suit's right arm slowly raised, the palm facing her chest.
Lorelei read the mechanical movement as absolute submission. He was disengaging his weapons. He was opening the armor for her. She let her guard drop slightly, the triumphant, predatory smile already composing itself on her face for the moment the billionaire's helpless eyes met hers.
BOOM.
The palm cannon fired point-blank.
A blinding, concentrated beam of white-hot repulsor energy slammed directly into her center mass. The concussive kinetic force launched the Asgardian backward across the ring like a ragdoll. She hit the secondary adamantium surface violently, bounced once with a sickening crack, and skidded to a dead stop.
The entire arena went dead quiet.
And then, thousands of people started shouting at exactly the same time.
Xialing was instantly out of her seat, her eyes wide. "He wasn't controlled at all!"
Pepper Potts collapsed back into her chair, a long, trembling exhale rushing from her lungs. "He said he had something worked out," she gasped, pressing a hand to her chest. "I didn't actually think—" She stopped, her eyes darting to the crumpled figure on the floor. "Can she still fight?"
Jessica Jones sat up perfectly straight, quietly recalculating the entire board. Maybe not a complete wipeout.
On the platform, Lorelei slowly stood up.
She looked down at the charred, smoking scorch mark on her emerald dress, and then looked back up at the unmoving silver suit. There was no actual, biological injury. The dense Asgardian physique had effortlessly absorbed a point-blank, high-yield repulsor strike that would have put a super-soldier into a permanent coma.
Around the arena, that terrifying observation rippled through the crowd in hushed, nervous exchanges.
"Surprising," Lorelei said.
The manufactured, narcotic warmth in her voice was entirely gone. It had been replaced by something infinitely more dangerous—genuine, lethal interest. "You've earned my full attention, Mr. Stark."
She crossed her arms sharply over her chest. The gesture triggered an ancient spell. Her torn civilian clothes dissolved into golden light and violently reformed as a sleek, heavily armored Valkyrie-pattern battle suit. A vicious, gleaming short sword materialized in her grip. Odin All-Father had sent her to Earth fully prepared for contingencies.
She charged.
Inside the armor, JARVIS ruthlessly tracked her rapid approach. The AI didn't feel fear. It didn't feel the Asgardian charm. It simply executed the protocol.
The suit opened up entirely. Repulsors whined. Shoulder-mounted micro-missiles launched in a staggering swarm. Full, omnidirectional mobility engaged as the suit hovered and strafed.
Lorelei moved through the apocalyptic crossfire like water finding the gaps in a dam. She was terrifyingly fast—faster than Steve Rogers at a dead, desperate sprint. She utilized every micro-evasion not to retreat, but to violently close the distance.
But JARVIS's targeting algorithms were flawless. Micro-missiles found her anyway. The explosions ripped through the air, detonating against her armor, but she burst through the thick gray smoke still moving, her sword raised high, cutting a lethal arc directly toward the suit's vulnerable torso.
The heavy triangular chest piece of the Mark armor flared with blinding light.
The Unibeam fired.
At the last possible microsecond, Lorelei violently twisted her wrists, bringing the flat of the short sword horizontal in front of her chest. The massive beam of pure energy slammed into the blade. The sheer, overwhelming kinetic force blew her off her feet, sending her rocketing across the ring a second time.
Odin's mythic equipment held—but barely. A standard Earth-forged blade would have been instantly vaporized into atoms. She had seen what that exact weapon had done to a vibranium-grade mechanical arm in another context. The memory was suddenly, painfully useful.
JARVIS didn't pause to let her recover. The AI calculated her trajectory and launched a medium-yield rocket from the suit's left forearm—a palm-sized, building-rated bunker buster.
BOOM. The detonation threw a catastrophic, concussive shockwave outward, sending a blinding pillar of orange flame thirty feet into the Pacific sky. The indestructible secondary adamantium ring effortlessly absorbed the structural damage, but the massive pressure wave washed over the audience, rattling the spectator stands.
When the thick, choking smoke finally thinned, Lorelei was still standing.
But the god was bleeding.
A bright ribbon of crimson blood ran from her split lower lip. Her sword arm was badly lacerated, heavy drops of Asgardian blood falling from the gleaming tip of the blade to sizzle on the hot metal of the arena floor. Her chest heaved. She was breathing significantly harder than she had been a minute ago.
She wasn't a primary warrior. Her physique was exceptional, sitting comfortably well above a super-soldier baseline, but she had been biologically and magically built for a completely different kind of combat. Violently absorbing Tony Stark's direct, heavy ordnance was not something her body was designed to do on a sustained, physical basis.
JARVIS registered absolutely none of that context as a valid reason to stop.
The objective was to win. The silver suit smoothly, silently raised both of its heavily armed gauntlets again, the repulsors whining back up to lethal capacity.
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