The scarlet shield was gone, shattered into fading red sparks.
Wanda didn't bother to rebuild it. Instead, she aggressively threw a blistering volley of dense magic missiles, and they met Tony's rapid-fire palm strikes dead in the empty space between them.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The brutal exchanges perfectly canceled each other out—raw kinetic energy violently neutralizing repulsor tech, with absolutely nothing landing on either side. But the hyper-compressed shot Wanda had been meticulously loading in her right hand had bled off in the catastrophic backlash from her shattered shield. Wasted.
Wanda instantly changed her approach. She swung both of her hands toward Tony in a vicious, sweeping arc.
Dark red chaos energy didn't strike him; it closed entirely around the Iron Man suit like a massive, glowing fist, enveloping the silver armor completely. With a sharp tug of her wrists, she began physically pulling the hovering suit directly toward the ring's perilous edge.
Taking the suit apart by hand wasn't a realistic tactical option—the secondary adamantium simply didn't care how magically strong she had gotten. Moving the billionaire forcibly out of bounds, however, was beautifully simple.
Tony fired his palm cannons directly into the interior of the energy shell suffocating him. Nothing happened. The psychic cage she had wrapped around him was constructed of the exact same reality-warping energy that had just absorbed a sustained, building-level bombardment. It wasn't going to break from the inside with the depleted arsenal he had left.
"JARVIS," Tony grunted, fighting the artificial gravity of the spell. "Air support. Now."
High in the blinding blue sky directly above the arena, the orbital Mark suits that had been holding silent, sub-orbital position finally acquired their locked targets.
Multiple chest cannons discharged simultaneously. Blinding pillars of white-hot repulsor energy drove straight down from the heavens like divine judgment.
Wanda had absolutely no magical coverage established above her head. She had never fought a three-dimensional battle that required it before.
The concentrated blasts hit her squarely from overhead. She went down incredibly hard, driven straight into the adamantium floor by the sheer kinetic weight of the strikes, knocked completely cold before her body even had the chance to clear the ring boundary.
The suffocating energy shell wrapped around Tony instantly dissolved the exact millisecond her consciousness faded. He fired his thrusters, wildly finding his footing, and flew back to the safety of the center platform.
Pietro was already there.
Or rather, he was suddenly just there, crouching tensely beside his sister on the indestructible floor, two fingers pressed frantically against her pulse point. Absolutely no one in the arena had seen him actually cross the distance. One frame he was sitting in the Fraternity VIP stands; the very next microsecond, a blur of silver-blue static parted the air, and he was on the ground with Wanda cradled in his arms.
He looked up, his jaw set, locking eyes with the bewildered host. "I'm taking her backstage for treatment."
And then, with a sharp crack of displaced air, he was gone.
The host stood at the edge of the ring, his microphone lowered, processing the blinding sequence of events at his own, mortal pace. He cleared his throat.
"Tony Stark wins! The second match of the round will begin in thirty minutes."
The stadium crowd violently erupted in two distinctly different directions at once.
"Cheating!" a chorus of furious voices roared from the civilian and martial arts sections.
"He literally did this exact same trick in the second tournament! Disqualify him!"
The host remained perfectly calm. He raised a hand and simply pointed toward the massive digital screen without raising his voice. On the high-definition display, the hovering fleet of Mark suits was clearly visible, holding their menacing altitude directly above the arena—a tactical sword of Damocles visible to absolutely anyone who had bothered to simply look up at any point in the last hour.
"Mr. Stark's armors are officially classified as his personal equipment," the host explained, his voice booming with unyielding authority. "Their position above the arena is entirely within the established rules. Remote weapons are not prohibited."
The loudest objections reluctantly quieted down into a low, resentful grumble.
In the S.H.I.E.L.D. section, Nick Fury leaned in close to Jessica Jones, his single eye narrowed to a razor-sharp slit. "The man who just moved. Did you track him?"
"No," Jessica replied, rubbing her temples. "He was just—next to her. And then gone." She paused, her voice grave. "Speed-type."
"Brother and sister. Both Transcended. Both from Sokovia." Fury rapidly filed the terrifying variables away in his mind. "Send a dedicated extraction team. Tonight."
Sitting calmly beside him, Alexander Pierce was running the exact same geopolitical calculation from a completely different, parasitic direction. Two assets that capable, their origin entirely unknown to most global organizations—the intelligence S.H.I.E.L.D. managed to gather first was absolutely worth hijacking. Pierce decided he would patiently see what Fury's agents managed to turn up in the rubble of Sokovia before aggressively deciding whether HYDRA needed to move.
A few rows ahead, Steve Rogers had been brooding quietly for a long moment. He finally shook his head. "Tony's cheating."
Coulson immediately started to answer, but Steve cut him off.
"Phil, if I magically called in a S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier for long-range orbital fire support during a fistfight, would that be any different?"
"The Helicarrier requires a crew of hundreds to operate," Coulson answered, his bureaucratic tone perfectly diplomatic. "Tony's suits are fully automated; they don't involve anyone else. Also—" Coulson paused, picking his words carefully, "—air-to-ground ordnance detonating that close to the ring would heavily affect you just as much as your opponent. Your vibranium shield absorbs a great deal of kinetic shock, Captain, but it does not absorb a full, indiscriminate bunker-buster strike. You'd be collateral damage to your own support."
Steve grimaced, but he reluctantly accepted the tactical logic.
From his hovering vantage point high above the commotion, Smith Doyle watched the mental replay of the fight and arrived at a conclusion he found genuinely, deeply satisfying.
The Wanda Maximoff in this specific timeline had been fighting and bleeding for two brutal years before her MCU counterpart had even fully developed her reality-warping powers. The power gap between the two versions was already staggeringly significant, and it was growing exponentially.
After Wanda woke up, reviewed the telemetry of this match, and clinically identified exactly what she had missed—the unprotected overhead angle, the distributed, hive-mind suit network, the lethal implications of fighting a billionaire who could casually call multi-billion-dollar assets from outside the ring—she would ruthlessly close that tactical hole. She would never, ever leave her vertical flank open again.
Smith smiled into the wind. He was greatly looking forward to seeing what kind of monster she would come back as next year.
Tony Stark landed heavily in the VIP stands and immediately flagged down one of the hovering airborne suits.
With mechanical precision, he seamlessly swapped the severely depleted, scorched armor for a fresh, pristine silver shell. He didn't waste anything; he aggressively stripped the glowing triangular chest reactor from the spent suit and slotted it into his new one—running at 47% capacity was absolutely unacceptable going into a high-stakes finals round against magic.
He slammed the older, nearly dead reactor into the discarded suit's empty housing and sent it back up into the holding pattern anyway. Even operating on a fraction of power, an automated suit capable of dropping bombs and deploying chaff was still a viable tactical asset.
Pepper Potts watched him work, her arms crossed. "They'll be aggressively watching the sky now, Tony. That blind-spot angle is entirely gone."
Tony locked the new chest piece into place. He felt the familiar, resonant hum of the power readings jump back to a beautiful, blinding 100%.
"That's perfectly fine, Pep." Tony smiled, the faceplate snapping shut with a lethal, metallic CLANG. "Next time, I won't need to hide it."