Wanda was out of the Fraternity's medical treatment pod in exactly twenty-five minutes. It took ten for her consciousness to surface from the regenerative gel, and fifteen more to patiently let her body finish knitting the microscopic tissue damage before she hit the release, opened the panel, and stepped out into the cool air.
Pietro was waiting, and he already had the tactical intelligence ready.
"Tony has suits holding altitude directly above the ring," Pietro reported, his voice low. "Standing air support, available whenever he calls it." He paused, his expression darkening. "The Fraternity seniors say he ran a crude version of this in the last tournament. He went in with an empty suit and piloted it remotely from the air. This orbital strike network is apparently restrained by comparison."
Wanda offered a small, dangerous smile, appreciating the effort he'd put into gathering the reconnaissance. "I'll be ready for it." She turned the variables over in her mind. "His primary suit is running extremely low on ammunition. And those airborne suits—they can't all be secondary adamantium."
"Some of them won't be," Pietro agreed.
"Gold-titanium alloy tears. Secondary adamantium doesn't. Not yet." She left the yet exactly where it was. "The other suits aren't a problem."
Pietro studied her face for a long moment, the protective older brother surfacing. "If it gets dangerous, concede. We are not in a rush, Wanda. Our future has already changed—we don't need to force the god-tier wish today."
Wanda nodded. On the surface.
Inwardly, she had already made her absolute decision. She and Pietro had debriefed Wenwu extensively about the bloodbaths of the previous cycles. This year's field was significantly softer than the last—no Eternals, no immortal warlords, no God of Thunder swinging a magic hammer. A geopolitical window like this did not simply reopen on a predictable schedule. She was taking it today.
The host's amplified voice reached the backstage corridors. "Tony Stark and Wanda Maximoff—the second match of the final round!"
They stepped out of the tunnel and onto the blindingly bright ring.
Tony spoke through external speakers before Smith Doyle had even finished his teleportation sequence between them. "Wanda. That proposal you made earlier—three Dragon Balls wagered on one sudden-death match. I've reconsidered."
Wanda stopped, her red jacket snapping in the Pacific wind. She looked at the silver armor. "You want to accept it now."
"That's right."
Up in the S.H.I.E.L.D. VIP stands, Jessica Jones didn't bother lowering her raspy voice. "Now he wants the deal. Unbelievable."
Nick Fury and Alexander Pierce said absolutely nothing. They were both smiling the exact same, cold smile.
Wanda ran the tactical arithmetic rapidly in her head. The medical pod had flawlessly closed her physical injuries, but it hadn't refilled her cosmic reserves.
The Asymmetry: Magic wasn't a piece of hardware; she couldn't simply hot-swap a battery to get it back.The Attrition: Tony had cleanly swapped arc reactors. He had swapped entire suits. He was sitting at maximum operational capacity, while she was bleeding fumes from two previous, reality-warping matches.The Verdict: If they dragged this out across four separate rounds, the power gap would widen exponentially every time. One brutal match to decide everything was actually heavily favorable to her right now, not him.
He knew that, too. That was exactly why he was accepting.
"Fine," Wanda said, her voice carrying over the wind. "One match. Three Dragon Balls."
Tony turned the armored faceplate toward the edge of the platform. "Host. We've formally agreed. This match covers three Dragon Balls."
The host hesitated, gripping his microphone. This was a massive deviation from the standard, round-robin format, and he was merely the announcer, not the tournament's architect.
Smith Doyle stepped into the dead center of the ring. "Agreed," the Inspector General rumbled, his voice finalizing the contract. "This match decides three Dragon Balls." He looked at the witch and the machine. "Prepare yourselves."
Smith vanished. The host quickly scrambled down the stairs to safety.
Tony didn't wait for the echo of the bell to fade.
"JARVIS. Defensive mode. All ranged suits—full bomb drop. Three minutes of continuous coverage."
The Mark armor violently reconfigured around him in a microsecond. Heavy adamantium plates shifted and locked; arm gauntlets folded out into reinforced blast shields; the back assembly expanded and anchored into the floor, locking Tony into a compact, impenetrable fortress configuration. The sheer geometric density of it reminded several S.H.I.E.L.D. analysts of the Hulkbuster containment protocol, scaled down and purpose-built strictly for survival.
High above the ring, the sky tore open. The bombs began to fall.
Wanda snapped her head up. She instantly counted six distinct Iron Man suits breaking the cloud cover on the aerial perimeter. All secondary adamantium, she realized with a sickening jolt. The rest of the sprawling Mark inventory was gold-titanium alloy, but Tony had kept his absolute highest-tier armored ceiling in reserve and deployed it quietly while everyone was distracted by the ring.
She swore viciously under her breath and threw both hands toward the sky, erecting a massive scarlet dome.
Before the very first orbital explosion could land, she ruthlessly pushed a spike of chaos energy directly through the ring surface and yanked Tony's mind back into the illusion.
This wasn't a single, traumatic deep dive into his worst fears like the Chitauri nightmare. It was a rapid-fire sequence. Layered, confusing constructs cycling endlessly one into the next—a maze of shifting geometry and disjointed memories. No direct confrontation. Just an unbroken, psychic chain designed to completely paralyze him without requiring her active, conscious attention to maintain.
Then, she gave her physical shield absolutely everything she had left.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The first wave of bunker-busters turned the entire adamantium ring into a solid wall of blinding, white-hot fire.
The blasts did not discriminate. The catastrophic flames covered every square inch of the platform, completely engulfing Tony's locked-down fortress in the center. The six orbital suits above ruthlessly cycled their payload drops in a staggered rotation, ensuring fresh detonations landed and exploded before the previous ones even finished burning. The arena ceased to be a fighting stage; it became a localized, continuous extinction event.
The stadium crowd violently threw themselves backward in their seats. Even rows near the front could feel the blistering, skin-scorching heat radiating from the platform.
In the Kamar-Taj section, Kaecilius watched Wanda's desperately trembling scarlet shield hold against the apocalypse. He shook his head slowly, recognizing the fatal flaw in her raw power.
A Mirror Dimension redirect. A simple, well-placed portal to the bottom of the ocean. Either fundamental mystic technique would have made this overwhelming kinetic attack completely irrelevant. Chaos magic was undisputedly extraordinary, but it possessed glaring, brutal gaps that formal, disciplined training usually filled. He sincerely hoped the young woman would find her way to the Kamar-Taj Library, provided she survived the next three minutes.
Phil Coulson calmly reached out, touching Steve Rogers' arm, and nodded toward the roaring inferno on the ring.
"That is the other reason calling in a S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier wouldn't work for you, Captain," Coulson noted, his voice remarkably steady over the deafening explosions. "You'd be standing right in the middle of the blast radius."
Steve watched the fire completely consume the platform, the heat reflecting in his blue eyes, and said nothing.
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