The host raised the microphone and let the crowd settle.
"After Agatha gave us a match that defied explanation, it's time for something different — a collision between raw power and advanced technology."
"Gilgamesh of the Eternals. Tony Stark, the Iron Man."
"I couldn't tell you how this one ends. Please welcome both competitors to the stage."
Tony stepped onto the repaired canvas first, the suit's systems running a quiet diagnostic on the damage carried over from the Vanko fight. Gilgamesh was already at his end of the ring, arms at his sides, wearing the straightforward expression of someone who had been walking into fights for several thousand years and found the ritual of it comfortable.
The crowd's reaction was immediate and layered. Iron Man produced one kind of noise. The opponent he was facing produced something more uncertain — louder in some sections, quieter in others.
Someone in the stands said, "Gilgamesh — isn't that the name of the fifth king of Uruk? Pre-Christian Mesopotamia? A demigod, according to the source material."
The person next to them: "It can't actually be the same man. Not every name in mythology maps to a real person the way Thor does."
"He was extraordinary in the qualifiers though. Nobody survived a single palm strike."
"Slap Man," someone further along the row offered, with the tone of someone who had been workshopping the nickname.
From behind the group, a different voice, quieter: "I heard the combat power reader exploded when they tested him at registration."
A beat.
"Maybe check your assumptions about him being fictional."
In the Eternals' box, Thena had her arms crossed and was staring at the bracket board with the focused displeasure of someone replaying a series of decisions they'd like to revisit.
"Terrible luck," she said. "Gilgamesh draws Tony Stark in the quarterfinals and I'm the one sitting here."
Sprite glanced over. "Is this about the last Dragon Ball tournament?"
"If I hadn't had an episode at the worst possible moment, I wouldn't have lost," Thena said. "If I'd known Gilgamesh was going to draw Tony, I wouldn't have stepped aside from my match."
Sersi was watching the arena floor. "Does Gilgamesh have a real shot at the championship?"
Ajak considered it. "Unknown. Wong advancing complicates things. Agatha is unpredictable. The ring format makes brute strength partially unreliable — you don't have to injure someone, you just have to move them past a line."
Around the room, everyone turned that over. The format was working against the straightforward calculus of power. Blonsky had been the clearest example — technically unharmed, technically eliminated. Being the strongest thing in the ring wasn't the same as winning.
"Begin!"
Tony's shoulder rigs deployed immediately — twin satellite launch systems rising from the suit's dorsal frame.
The salvo was fast and dense, a spread of compact missiles across Gilgamesh's position.
The detonations filled the ring end in smoke and sound.
When it thinned, Gilgamesh was standing exactly where he'd started. One arm raised in front of him, a golden construct shimmering around his forearm like a bracer of solid light. The suit's optical feed showed zero displacement.
The host said, with genuine excitement in his voice: "There it is. A physical body capable of standing through Iron Man's opening salvo."
Tony's expression, behind the faceplate, shifted from assessment to something more cautious.
He'd sparred with Thena. That had ended in a technical result that could go either way depending on your interpretation. This was a different member of the same team, and his pre-fight intel was limited. What he could see was that micro-missiles at point-blank range had produced no practical effect.
The suit he'd chosen for this tournament was the same one he'd carried through the Vanko match. Not his best material — he'd made a conscious decision on fairness grounds, since the secondary adamantium frame represented a resource advantage that wasn't available to his opponents. He was beginning to reassess that calculus.
Gilgamesh crossed the ring.
The palm strike came in fast — Gilgamesh moved with the deceptive ease of something very strong that wasn't trying very hard. Tony raised his forearms to block. The impact fired him backward six feet, both boots dragging against the canvas before he arrested the slide. The suit's arm plating had taken the hit, and he felt it through the frame.
"Suit integrity at ninety percent, sir."
Tony angled up and away, getting airspace.
A beam of orange-gold light came up from below and caught him square in the chest.
He dropped. Not a controlled descent — struck, destabilized, and down.
"Suit integrity at seventy percent."
Tony lay on the canvas for the brief moment it took to understand what had just happened.
Eye lasers.
He can do that too. Smith ran the reference quickly — the comics version of Gilgamesh, the actual mythology-adjacent warrior, had been operating at a level that put him in the same conversation as Thanos in a straight physical contest. The only thing that had ever worked against him consistently was his own nature. Too direct. Too willing to stand and trade. Too uncomplicated in a world full of complications.
Kindness as a vulnerability. Unusual weakness for a demigod.
"Suit integrity at seventy percent, sir."
Tony came upright and fired the chest cannon at point-blank range.
The beam hit Gilgamesh and moved him — not off his feet, but back a step, and that was something. The Eternal looked down at the scorch mark on his chest with what appeared to be mild interest, then back at Tony.
"You chose the wrong suit for this fight," Gilgamesh said. Not unkindly. "The outcome here is mine."
He covered the ground between them at a speed that shouldn't have been possible for his build — present at distance, then simply present in Tony's space with no visible transition. The punch landed on Tony's center mass, and Tony hit the canvas hard enough to crater it.
Before the suit could complete its recovery sequence, Gilgamesh reached down, found the back frame of the armor, and pulled.
The world inverted briefly for Tony. The suit's grip-lock protested, then the structural integrity of the connection points failed under forces they hadn't been rated for, and the next sensation was the canvas coming up at him again — this time without armor between them.
He lay there for a moment.
The Iron Man suit was in pieces around him. Gilgamesh had the reactor housing in one hand, crushed flat, the rest of the frame scattered across the ring in sections.
He'd done it unhurriedly, the way someone might disassemble something they wanted to understand.
The audience had gone completely quiet at some point during that process. The silence held for a beat after Gilgamesh set down the reactor.
Then someone in the upper tiers said, at full volume, "HE TORE IT APART WITH HIS HANDS."
The crowd found its voice all at once.
Tony pushed himself upright. The super-soldier serum had kept him conscious and functional through impacts that would have put a regular person in a hospital. He stood, looked at what had been his suit, and completed the mathematics.
No armor. No ranged capability. No realistic path to moving Gilgamesh across the boundary line in hand-to-hand combat against an Eternal who could tank his entire opening salvo and shoot back with eye lasers.
He looked at the host below the ring and said, "Yeah. I'm done."
The host raised the microphone: "Mr. Stark confirms — Tony Stark concedes. Gilgamesh advances to the semifinals!"
The crowd's reaction was enormous and immediate.
"He tore the suit apart — with his bare hands—"
"Iron Man just lost in the quarterfinals—"
"I want to see Gilgamesh fight Smith Doyle so badly I can't stand it—"
In the Eternals' box, nobody said anything for a moment. Sersi was smiling. Sprite had the expression of someone composing their recap for later. Thena was watching the ring with her arms still crossed.
She said, "He could have done that in the first thirty seconds."
"He was being measured," Ajak said.
"I know," Thena said. "That's what I mean."