Lorelei met Wanda's glowing eyes across the thirty feet of indestructible metal, her jaw set in a hard, uncompromising line. She had already lost the Dragon Balls she had so easily stripped from Kaecilius. One more loss, and her tournament was entirely, catastrophically done.
"I am an Asgardian banshee, Wanda," Lorelei called out, her voice stripped of its usual narcotic warmth, echoing sharp and clear across the Pacific wind. "Your little witch tricks do not work on me."
It wasn't empty, desperate confidence. Her ancient bloodline carried a genuine, biological resistance to illusion magic—not absolute immunity, but more than enough to have earned her the terrifying title across the Nine Realms. It was enough to have shattered sorcery that would have held lesser gods indefinitely.
Wanda's cold, detached expression didn't change a fraction of an inch. "I hope you're still that confident in a moment."
The chaos energy didn't just radiate; it violently detonated across the secondary adamantium surface before Lorelei's brain could even finish processing the words.
Lorelei jumped—pure, ancient combat instinct firing faster than thought—but the thick scarlet energy was already everywhere. It swallowed the ground, the sky, and the air. There was absolutely nowhere left to jump to.
The Pacific arena vanished.
Lorelei's boots hit cold, polished gold. She was standing in the cavernous, echoing expanse of the throne room of Asgard.
Female warriors in heavy armor ringed the hall, their spears perfectly aligned. Lady Sif stood at their head, fully armed, her expression an unreadable mask of absolute contempt. High above them on the golden throne, Odin All-Father held the mythic spear Gungnir. He brought the butt of the weapon down against the floor with a deafening CRACK that silenced the very air in the room.
"Lorelei."
Odin's voice carried absolutely no warmth. It was the sound of a closing tomb. "You failed. You did not win the championship." The All-Father looked down at her not with anger, but with the chilling, absolute apathy of a man looking at a broken tool he was entirely finished with. "You are not worthy to leave your prison. You will remain in the dark until the end of your days."
The sheer, existential cold of the decree hit her like a physical blow. Prison she could endure in the abstract—she had been enduring the damp, freezing stone for centuries. But she had tasted Midgard now. She had tasted the open sky, the roaring crowds, the intoxicating freedom of movement and choice. The thought of going back into that suffocating black box made her chest violently seize.
She opened her mouth to scream, to beg, but Sif was already there. The warrior woman stepped forward, ruthlessly fitting the heavy, iron muzzle device over Lorelei's jaw—the exact device that completely severed her charm and sealed her voice into something pathetic and powerless.
Sif gripped her arm with bruising force and began dragging her toward the subterranean cells.
Outside the nightmare, in the brutal reality of the ring, Lorelei had jumped and come straight back down. She hit the adamantium surface, dropping to her knees, and simply didn't move. Her eyes were blown wide, completely glassed over in absolute terror.
Wanda stood over her. In the span of a single second, the witch had already seen everything she needed to see—the jagged shape of the Asgardian's deepest fear, and the massive, geopolitical detail that genuinely surprised her: Odin himself had sent this woman. The god-king of Asgard was coveting the Dragon Balls from a cosmic distance, operating through a disposable proxy because he either couldn't or wouldn't risk coming himself. Wanda filed that terrifying revelation away and coldly returned her attention to the match at hand.
The host moved cautiously toward the edge of the platform, raising his microphone to begin the ten-count.
Wanda didn't wait. She casually wrapped a thick thread of scarlet chaos energy around Lorelei's paralyzed, motionless body and unceremoniously threw the goddess completely out of the ring.
"Wanda Maximoff wins the third match of round two!"
The applause that rolled through the arena was noticeably uneven. It was mostly driven by the women in the stands. The men, their minds still quietly fighting the lingering, narcotic withdrawal of Lorelei's charm, looked at the crumpled Asgardian on the grass outside the ring with expressions of misplaced sympathy that Pepper Potts found deeply, viscerally irritating. Wanda's dominant victory announcement received only polite noise, a stark contrast to the roaring standing ovation Tony had received.
The exact moment the physical boundary was broken, the illusion violently dissolved.
Lorelei gasped, coming back to herself on the grass outside the boundary line. She heard the host's booming announcement, and she felt hot, humiliating tears fill her eyes. The suffocating fear from inside the throne room hadn't fully faded from her nervous system yet. She was already frantically calculating what came next, what Odin would say, whether the fragile promise of her freedom had just become permanently void—
Heimdall's resonant voice suddenly arrived in her mind, quiet and direct, bypassing the physical world entirely.
Lorelei. His Majesty says your defeat was not your fault. The opponent carries chaos magic. You are not to blame.
Lorelei let out a ragged, trembling breath. The agonizing constriction in her chest instantly loosened.
Observe the remaining contestants carefully, Heimdall continued, the psychic connection fading. His Majesty may require your knowledge in the next cycle.
She wiped her face with the back of a trembling, blood-stained hand, stood up with whatever dignity she had left, and walked quietly back to her seat.
In the S.H.I.E.L.D. VIP section, Tony watched Wanda step gracefully off the platform. He turned the tactical problem over in his mind. "She neutralized a mythic Asgardian the exact same way she neutralized everyone else. The illusion doesn't care what you are. It doesn't care about your biology."
Pepper's voice was tight and perfectly even beside him. "Tony. Your next three matches are all against Wanda. This is your last chance."
A few seats over, Xialing frowned at the specific phrasing. Last chance seemed highly excessive for a tournament that presumably ran on an annual, predictable cycle. But Xu Wenwu, who knew the full, apocalyptic picture of the impending universal reset, sat like a carved statue and said absolutely nothing to clarify the stakes for his daughter.
Tony smirked, the familiar, arrogant spark returning to his eyes.
"You're forgetting exactly how I won the last match, Pep."
Pepper blinked, and then her mind caught up with the brutal, automated logic of it. JARVIS. The orbital suits overhead. The anesthetic canister. Wanda's reality-warping illusions operated strictly on the human consciousness—not on millions of lines of binary code running a heavily armed secondary adamantium suit while the fragile human slept safely, medically unconscious inside it.
"Go win it, Tony," Pepper said, the relief washing over her face.
Harley and Happy immediately added their enthusiastic voices. Tony nodded once, profoundly satisfied with his own genius.
The host's announcement carried across the wind-swept arena. "Round two is officially complete! Only two contestants remain on the board—Tony Stark, holding three Dragon Balls, and Wanda Maximoff, holding four. We will take a thirty-minute break before the final round begins!"
From the edge of the ring, Wanda's voice drifted down to the VIP stands before Tony had even moved to prep his armor.
"Tony."
He looked up.
"You have three, I have four," Wanda said, her voice magically amplified just enough to cut through the crowd noise. "Fighting three separate, drawn-out rounds is a complete waste of time for both of us." She kept her tone deceptively light, but her eyes were cold fire. "Let's put all balls on one match. You win, you're the champion. I win, same result. Winner takes all."
Tony considered the challenge for exactly long enough to look like he was taking the dramatic proposal seriously. He tapped his chin, then offered a lazy, dismissive shake of his head.
"Sorry, kid. We play by the established rules," Tony called back. "One ball per match."
Wanda simply shrugged. She hadn't actually expected the arrogant billionaire to agree to a sudden death round.
If she simply kept running the exact same Chitauri fear illusion she had used on him the first time, it would rapidly stop being a brutal combat match and start being a predictable, boring meditation retreat. He would adapt. She would need to vary the nightmares—something profoundly different each time, something that violently twisted the knife and didn't give his genius mind the chance to build a callous over the psychological wound she had already opened.
Three matches. Wanda smiled to herself as she walked back to the Fraternity block. That was plenty of room to work.