The road to the church wound through a landscape that looked like it had been practicing looking ancient for several centuries and had gotten very good at it. Green hills, stone walls, grey sky. Ward sat in the passenger seat watching it go by.
"The effect," he said. "It fades?"
Randolph was in the back between Donnie Gill and Simmons, dressed in the same clothes he'd been arrested in and apparently unbothered by the full context of his situation. "The strength will go first. You'll feel it tapering over the next few days, and then a period of fatigue while your body resets." He paused. "The emotional component takes longer."
"How much longer."
"For an Asgardian? A few weeks. For a human—" Randolph tilted his head. "Some decades. The physiological processing runs slower."
Ward turned to look at him from the front seat.
"Decades."
"It diminishes steadily. It doesn't stay at this intensity."
Ward turned back to the road. He was thirty-one years old. Decades put him somewhere between his late fifties and his late seventies, if things went normally. He thought about what things going normally had looked like for the past thirty-one years and decided not to complete that calculation.
He picked up his bag from the footwell and settled it on his lap and didn't say anything else.
Donnie Gill watched him for a moment, then looked at Coulson. "Is he cleared for the field?"
"He's cleared," Coulson said.
"He's a bit—"
"He knows he's cleared. Drop it."
Donnie Gill dropped it.
After a moment he shifted his weight in the seat and said, at a slightly different register, "Sir. The staff — if we recover all three sections, that's a significant 084 item. Enhanced strength, indefinite duration. That's a different category than most of what we document." A pause. "If it goes into the inventory against our team's record, I'd want that to count toward something."
Coulson looked at the road ahead. "You're asking about the serum program."
"Chen's numbers have improved considerably. I've heard things from people who've been on operations with him." Donnie kept his voice professional. "The field is changing. The people we're working against aren't ordinary anymore."
"I know," Coulson said. "I'll put it to Fury directly. I can't promise the outcome."
Donnie nodded and went quiet.
In the back, Randolph was looking out the window at a stretch of coast that had probably looked roughly like this when he'd last been here, which was some time ago.
The church had been rebuilt and rededicated several times over the centuries and had retained, through all of it, the specific atmosphere of a place that considered itself on good terms with permanence. The doors opened without protest and the interior smelled of candles and old wood.
Randolph walked the nave with the ease of someone navigating a space they knew well in an earlier configuration, paused at a side table, and laughed — short, genuine.
The book was open. The page showed a painted figure in the style of a medieval saint's portrait — serene, formally posed, the nose rendered with more aspiration than accuracy.
"They really committed to it," he said.
Coulson looked at the portrait. "Is that you?"
"They were very kind people. Very credulous." He looked at the painted face. "The nose is wrong. I've always had a better nose than that."
"Where's the section?" Ward said.
Randolph pointed toward the upper level. "Upstairs. Behind the secondary altar. The monks who were here when I placed it swore a vow of silence about it."
"You trusted a vow of silence for a thousand years?" Donnie said.
"The institution persisted. The commitment transferred." He was already moving toward the stairs. "The kind of people who take vows in places like this tend to mean them."
He got to the top of the stairs, moved to the niche beside the secondary altar, and stopped.
The space was empty.
The stone recess where the section had rested for several hundred years held nothing but dust and the ghost of an impression in the old mortar.
"Well," Randolph said.
A door behind them opened.
Jacob stepped through it with the assembled staff in his hands — all three sections joined, the complete weapon running from one end to the other, the red-white energy cycling through it in continuous slow pulses. He looked calm in the way that the staff's influence produced calm: the anger was there but it had been metabolized into something focused and cold.
"If you want a secret kept," he said, "you shouldn't trust people who can be made to talk."
He crossed the floor in three steps and drove the end of the staff into Randolph's chest.
The sound it made was wrong in the specific way that impacts involving Asgardian physiology and Asgardian metal are wrong — too solid, too resonant, the body absorbing the strike and responding as bodies do when something has gone through them.
Randolph went down.
Donnie's hands came up and the cold front left them in a horizontal sheet, catching Jacob across the body and sending him backward. He went over the railing and dropped to the ground floor, the crash below arriving half a second after the visual. Donnie vaulted the railing and followed him down.
Ward was already at Randolph's side. The staff section Jacob had driven into him was still in the wound — the piece that had separated at the moment of impact, lodged deep, the red light pulsing from the entry point in a rhythm that matched nothing biological.
Ward gripped it.
The light hit him immediately — not the slow creep of the first contact, but a full-immersion surge, the same well and the same voice and the same cold weight of standing still while his brother called for help from the dark below. He'd been eleven. He'd stood still.
He roared through it and pulled.
The section came out. Ward dropped it on the floor and stepped away from it, breathing hard, and did not look at it again.
"Medic," he said, to the room.
Simmons was already there. She pressed her hands against the wound and assessed what she was working with, and her expression communicated that working with it was going to require improvisation.
"I don't know his internal anatomy," she said.
"He's not from Earth," Ward said. "I know that. Figure it out."
Fitz crouched on the other side. "Coulson said their power runs through the heart. That's where it goes."
Simmons looked at the wound. She looked at Randolph's face — greying out, the vitality draining at a rate that indicated something central had been compromised. She reached in.
The cardiac massage was precise and committed and looked, to anyone watching, like something that should not have worked.
Randolph opened his eyes.
"That," he said, after a moment, "is deeply strange."
Coulson let out a breath. "Obviously not ineffective."
Fitz sat back on his heels and stared at the ceiling. "Several thousand years of accumulated existence and it comes down to a human squeezing his heart back into function. The universe is genuinely difficult to predict."
Below, the church's ground floor had a new demographic.
Jacob had come with backup. Twenty of them filed through the main doors — men and women who had each spent time in contact with the staff sections, each carrying the enhanced output that prolonged exposure produced. They moved with the particular confidence of people who had recently discovered they were considerably stronger than everyone they'd previously known and had not yet encountered a meaningful correction.
Jacob had pulled himself off the floor. He had cracked ribs and a contemptuous expression.
Donnie Gill stood in the center of the nave holding the third section.
The rage came in the moment he touched it — his own buried inventory of things he'd sealed and moved past and chosen not to revisit. It arrived with the force of a filing cabinet being upended. He felt it move through him, and he felt the particular response his specific physiology had to that kind of intrusion.
His temperature dropped.
"All right," he said, to Jacob's followers, without any particular heat. "You want to know what the staff can do. Let me show you something different."
Both palms went to the floor.
The ice spread from the center of the nave in an expanding ring — not the targeted bursts he usually deployed, but a sustained field release, the floor crystallizing outward toward the walls, climbing the bases of the pews, finding every foot and freezing it in place. The temperature in the church dropped fifteen degrees in four seconds. The breath of twenty people turned to visible cloud simultaneously.
Then stopped, as the people producing it were no longer producing much of anything.
Twenty ice sculptures stood in the ground floor of a church in rural Ireland.
Donnie Gill stood up, let the staff section rest at his side, and breathed.
He looked at Jacob, frozen mid-step with one fist raised.
"Not your day," he said.
The World Martial Arts Tournament logo went live on a Tuesday.
A blue dragon in profile, coiled around a single orange sphere with five stars, rendered cleanly enough to work at any scale. Underneath it, in text that could be read from across a room: WORLD MARTIAL ARTS TOURNAMENT — INAUGURAL EDITION — NEW YORK.
The three corporate backing entities — Universal Capsule, Red Ribbon, Vanko Industries — pushed it simultaneously across every channel available to three organizations that had between them, at this point, saturated most of the planet's significant media surfaces. The tournament's qualification criteria, prize structure, and registration information ran beneath every version of the announcement.
The people who didn't follow enhanced-individual news looked at the logo and thought: interesting.
The people who did follow enhanced-individual news looked at the logo — specifically at the orange sphere in the dragon's claws, specifically at the five stars — and thought: oh.
Tony Stark called Smith seventeen minutes after the announcement went live.
"The logo," Tony said.
"Yes."
"The prize."
"Yes."
"The Dragon Ball competition is genuinely done."
"It is."
A pause. "I cleared out six warehouses of round stones after the last tournament. Sold them all back at a significant markup because I knew what was coming and everyone else was still hoping for another cycle." His voice carried the specific warmth of someone who has executed a trade correctly. "The people who bought them are going to be extremely annoyed in approximately the next twenty minutes."
"That's between them and their investment thesis," Smith said.
"I told Pepper to liquidate the last of our stone holdings the morning after the tournament concluded. She thought I was being impulsive." Tony sounded genuinely pleased with himself. "I was not being impulsive."
"You were not."
"Thank you for running a competition that rewards actually being strong instead of rewarding rock collecting." A beat. "I'll be registering. Obviously."
"Obviously."
Trident Tower's upper conference suite had a view that Fury had never once looked at for its aesthetic qualities and Pierce had also never looked at, which made it a very expensive window that existed entirely for other people.
Pierce was looking at the tournament announcement on the wall screen. Specifically at the logo. Specifically at the orange sphere.
"The wish," he said.
"Is exactly what it looks like," Fury said. He had his phone out. "I'm calling the Inspector General."
The call lasted four minutes. Most of it was Smith answering questions in the affirmative.
Fury set the phone down.
"Dragon Ball competition is closed permanently," he said. "The only path to a wish is winning the tournament. Open entry, full field, every enhanced individual on the planet with a qualifying power reading." He looked at the screen. "The good news is that anyone can enter."
Pierce nodded.
"The bad news," Fury said, "is that everyone who can enter is your competition." He turned from the screen with the expression of a man recalibrating several parallel calculations. "I have to make some calls. We've been holding a position in round stone futures that has just become significantly less defensible."
Pierce watched him leave and stayed at the window for a moment, looking at the dragon and the sphere, thinking about what it meant to have the wish available again and what it meant that the field to claim it now included every enhanced person currently living on Earth.
He pulled out his own phone.
He had several calls to make as well.
Thanos received reports the way he received most things — sitting, unhurried, the audience chamber at full gravity, the visitor's comfort not particularly considered.
Ronan the Accuser stood before the throne with the bearing of a man who had come a long distance and was going to continue suppressing the reaction he always had to being called brat in a public setting.
"You've managed to irritate Gamora again," Thanos said. "This is becoming a pattern. The consistency would be almost admirable if the results weren't so tedious."
Ronan said nothing. Beside the throne, Nebula finished reconnecting a mechanical component in her left arm and stood, the completed repair producing a small click of finality.
"I have something for you," Thanos said. "Something less likely to produce the same result as your last assignment." He leaned forward slightly. "There is a planet. Third from a yellow sun, outer spiral arm. In the past several years it has produced events that my intelligence cannot fully explain. A set of artifacts called Dragon Balls. Seven items, collectively capable of granting wishes of genuine scope." He studied Ronan. "I want them brought to me."
Ronan's expression was controlled. "Earth."
"The same planet that defeated Loki," Thanos said, watching him. "The same planet where two Infinity Stones have now been identified. The same planet that just destroyed a Dark Elf fleet and killed Malekith during the Nine Realms convergence." He settled back. "I want to understand what is actually present there. You will go and find out. The Dragon Balls are the task. The real question you're answering for me is what kind of water you're swimming in."
Ronan absorbed this.
Nebula picked up her equipment and walked toward the door. "The Power Stone," she said, by way of explanation to no one in particular. "I'll go find it."
She left without ceremony.
Thanos watched the door close behind her, then looked back at Ronan. "Return empty-handed and the outcome of that conversation will be considerably less pleasant than this one." A pause, the silence that followed carrying its own specific weight. "Understood?"
"Understood," Ronan said.
The Red Ribbon Group's conference room had all of the Paragons present, plus a few of the senior Boys members, everyone oriented toward the wall screen showing the tournament announcement.
T'Challa leaned forward slightly. "Captain. Can we enter?"
Selene looked around the room — at Wesley, at Alexei, at Chen Haoran, at Shang-Chi sitting with his arms folded in the quiet way he had of listening before he spoke. "Anyone can enter if they want to. The Red Ribbon Group is a co-organizer, which means we know exactly how the bracket works and what the field is going to look like." She paused. "What it also means is that if any of you sign up and wash out in the qualifier, you're doing it in front of everyone, with the Red Ribbon logo on the promotional material."
The room considered this.
Chen Haoran swallowed once. "The champion's wish. That's the Dragon Balls."
"Read the prize structure," Selene said. "Draw your own conclusion."
He drew it.
Wesley and Alexei exchanged a look across the table. Both of them had a fairly accurate sense of where their numbers currently sat. Both of them had also just watched the Dark Elf arc play out from the perimeter of Greenwich and updated certain estimates accordingly. Getting into the top eight of an open-entry world tournament, with the full field of enhanced individuals that announcement was going to produce — that was a different calculation than it had been two years ago.
Alexei uncrossed his arms and crossed them again the other way, which was his version of an uncertain pause.
"Regional qualifier first," Wesley said.
"Regional qualifier first," Selene confirmed. "Get through that without embarrassing yourselves and we can talk about what comes after."