"Congratulations to Gilgamesh on winning the first World Martial Arts Tournament!"
The host let the crowd settle, then raised his voice again.
"Now — the special bonus that everyone has been waiting for. Our champion will spar with the man known as the pinnacle of human physical achievement." He paused for effect. "Smith Doyle!G…O…D…."
The arena found a new volume ceiling.
In the Eternals' box, Ajak looked at Gilgamesh across the room.
The championship. The wish. The piece of the problem she'd been carrying alone for thousands of years, finally within reach.
When the Celestial Tiamut completed its gestation inside this planet's core, the Earth would be destroyed. That was the design she'd been sent to facilitate. The design she'd chosen, slowly and then all at once, to work against instead. Every Dragon Ball tournament, every calculation, every year of watching humans build their civilization from primitive agriculture to fusion reactors — she'd been running the same numbers over and over.
One wish. One question to the dragon. Can you save this world without destroying it when the time comes?
She crossed to Gilgamesh and pressed both hands against his chest. The golden healing light moved through him, and she felt the damage from the championship match reverse itself — the muscular strain, the energy expenditure, the accumulated bruising from Agatha's magic. His vital signs normalized under her hands.
"Thank you," she said, and meant considerably more than the word contained.
Gilgamesh looked at her. He understood enough to understand he didn't understand everything. But he knew what this moment meant to her. "This is what I'm here for," he said. "That's always been what I'm here for."
He rolled his shoulders. The sparring session was starting to occupy more of his attention.
"That man out there. He's the one who's been running the Dragon Ball tournament. The one who held the Greenwich battle together when the Nine Realms aligned."
Thena said, with genuine regret: "It should have been me."
Ikaris said, "He can fly."
Gilgamesh looked at him. "I know you can fly. You decided not to enter."
Ikaris said nothing.
Kingo made a gun with both hands and let the energy flicker at his fingertips. "If you win this one, I'm recommending you for team leader permanently."
"That's not how it works," Gilgamesh said.
"It could be."
Ajak said, "Fight at full capacity. I'll be here — you won't stay injured. And the rules still apply: this is a sparring match, not a deathmatch."
Gilgamesh nodded. He'd already run the math on what the rules meant in this context and what they didn't mean.
"He's hosted several Dragon Ball tournament and managed all of them without incident," he said. "His durability isn't a question. I'm not going to pull my punches worrying about it."
In the stands, the debate had been running for thirty minutes without resolution.
"Gilgamesh tore Iron Man's suit apart with his bare hands."
"Smith Doyle held the Greenwich line against a full Dark Elf invasion. Alone."
"Gilgamesh is from the mythology. Pre-civilization."
"Smith Doyle is acknowledged by Thor. Thor doesn't acknowledge many people."
Coulson's team had stopped pretending to be above it.
Ward said, "I don't have a read on either of them."
Donnie Gill said, "Smith Doyle. He's Inspector General. He's one of ours."
Fitz said, "He's one of ours and also apparently one of the strongest beings on the planet."
Simmons said, "I vote Smith Doyle on the basis that he's human and it would be good for human morale."
Coulson said, "What if the Eternals are technically Earth natives by this point? Tens of thousands of years of residency."
Donnie Gill said, "Smith Doyle. Final answer. He's our Inspector General."
In the adjacent VIP box, Tony Stark had a champagne glass in one hand and the absolute confidence of someone who had made up his mind long before the question was posed.
Harley said, "Can he actually win?"
Tony said, "I've never seen him lose a fight that mattered. Not once. This one matters." He set the glass down. "Gilgamesh is the real deal. But Smith Doyle has something I've never been able to account for. He always has more than what you see."
In the Asgardian box, Lorelei watched the ring with focused curiosity.
She'd read the Greenwich reports. But the center of the Nine Realms' convergence had been in London, and the most significant power displays had been recorded at a distance. The Dragon Ball tournament she knew about secondhand. What she knew most clearly was the New York battle — and what that had established about the ceiling.
Let me see what you actually are.
One hour after the championship ended, the ring had been fully rebuilt for the third time.
Smith Doyle walked out of the VIP box and crossed to the ring.
The noise that met him was different from any previous entrance in the tournament. Not the excited recognition that came with Iron Man or the awed uncertainty that had greeted Gilgamesh. This was something more personal — eighty-five thousand people who had watched this man's public record and formed a relationship with it. The Chitauri invasion. Greenwich. Every press conference and media appearance and moment where the existence of someone like him had made the world feel more navigable.
He stepped through the ropes without ceremony.
The host raised the microphone. "Mr. Smith — any words for the audience?"
Smith took the mic. "Thank you for coming. Thank you to everyone who competed. The first tournament succeeded because of all of you." He handed the mic back. "I'm looking forward to this match."
The applause was extended and genuine. Somewhere in the front rows, a woman threw something toward the ring and shouted something that the broadcast chose to briefly mute.
The host, recovering, turned to Gilgamesh. "Our champion — do you feel confident?"
Gilgamesh said, "I'm grateful for this entire event. It gave me matches I've been looking for since before most countries existed." He looked at Smith across the ring. "As for winning — he's been called the strongest on Earth. I won't find out if that's accurate by holding back."
"Bold," the host said. "The most honest answer we've heard all day."
He stepped back and looked between them.
"Let's begin!"
He exited the ring at a pace that could reasonably be called flight.
Neither of them moved.
The audience waited. Five seconds. Ten. The arena had gone very quiet — the particular silence of eighty-five thousand people collectively holding their breath.
Then they were gone.
The ring was empty. The air where they'd been standing compressed and cracked as two bodies accelerated through it faster than the camera operators had been briefed for. The slow-motion algorithms on the broadcast feed triggered automatically, downshifting the playback to find a speed the human eye could process.
2x. Not enough. 5x. Still blur. 10x. Shapes, maybe. 20x. Two figures, motion between them. 50x. There.
On the giant screens around the arena, at fifty times slower than real time, the audience saw what was happening.
Two figures moving through the ring in constantly shifting patterns — attack, deflect, create distance, close it again. The choreography at this scale looked almost deliberate, almost like a conversation in motion. At real speed, the sound it was generating was a continuous percussion, impacts overlapping each other, the ring surface cracking under load whenever one of them hit it moving downward.
Gilgamesh was working at his genuine ceiling. He knew it and accepted it — the frame he'd built over several thousand years, the Eternal physiology fully engaged, the golden construct on his forearm absorbing and redirecting. His speed was extraordinary. Every time he pushed it higher, the man across from him adjusted.
He threw a right hand that should have been unanswerable.
Smith's body displaced to the left by a margin that was measurable in centimeters. The fist passed through the space where his face had been, and a whip kick came back from the right, catching Gilgamesh's forearm before the Eternal construct fully activated.
Gilgamesh felt it. He let out a short sound — not pain exactly, more the acknowledgment that the impact had been registered — and appeared behind Smith in the next exchange.
The punch landed in Smith's back and sent him sliding forward.
Before the forward momentum had resolved, Smith was already turning, and an elbow came back along the path that Gilgamesh had taken, moving at a speed that didn't allow for the half-second he'd expected.
It connected with Gilgamesh's jaw and sent him sideways.
The exchange continued. Both of them landing real hits. Both absorbing them and continuing.
The host, watching the slow-motion feed and running his commentary with the awareness that he was narrating something historic: "These two are operating at a level where our instruments can barely track them. What we're seeing on the slow-motion feed is already delayed. The actual fight finished that exchange several seconds ago."
The ring didn't survive several minutes of this. It came apart under accumulated impact, the tiles that had been rebuilt three times today finally surrendering, the whole surface fracturing and then separating into floating pieces as the energy moving through the exchanges found nowhere else to go.
The floating debris continued to rise.
Then it turned to powder.
Smith stepped back from the clinch they'd worked into and let out a controlled breath. The white ki aura that rose from his body was visible even on the real-time feed — not subtle, not managed, the genuine output of his base power coming to the surface.
Gilgamesh looked at the aura and made a decision.
He activated his domain.
The space around Smith shifted — not physically, but dimensionally. The air pressure changed. The rules of the environment bent toward Gilgamesh's absolute authority within this field. Inside his domain, his own output amplified and his opponent's options narrowed.
Smith felt the edges of it settle around him.
A domain. So the comics version is accurate after all.
He'd known this was a theoretical capability. He'd read the reference material. In the comic, Gilgamesh had defeated Thanos this way — pulled him inside a bounded space where the Eternal's authority was total, and dismantled him there.
The question was what Smith's own internal architecture did inside someone else's bounded space.
The two of them vanished from the visible ring. The audience, expecting a continuation at their previous speed, watched the space where they'd been and found it empty.
On the screens, the slow-motion feed showed nothing. They weren't moving. They were somewhere else entirely.
The host looked at the camera operator. The camera operator looked back.
From the Eternals' box, Ajak said quietly, "He used it."
Inside the domain.
The geometry was different here. Gilgamesh's authority was real and Smith could feel it — a ceiling on certain energy outputs, a resistance that hadn't been present in the open ring. Not a complete suppression. A dampening. The difference between a room with good acoustics and a room built to absorb sound.
Gilgamesh appeared in front of him and threw a cross that Smith caught on his forearm. The force behind it was heavier inside the domain than it had been outside — that was the point of the construct.
Smith let the impact travel through the forearm and used the direction of it to rotate, coming around with a body kick that caught Gilgamesh in the ribs.
Gilgamesh bent at the impact, absorbed it, came back straight.
"You're still standing," Gilgamesh said.
"So are you," Smith said.
They continued.