Inside the domain.
Gilgamesh pushed the field to its absolute ceiling — gravity multiplied, Smith's force vectors subtly bent, the landscape inside the bounded space restructuring itself to amplify the Eternal's advantages at every point.
He'd used every modifier available to him.
Smith felt the pressure and felt the aura behind it rising. He let out a breath, looked at his hands, and made a decision.
"Ten times Kaioken."
The red aura erupted outward. The landscape inside the domain shook with the output shift — 300 M, a surge that hit the air around him like a physical wall and kept building.
Gilgamesh, who had been pressing forward, stopped.
Smith looked at him across the changed air and said, with something that might have been genuine appreciation: "Your combat power actually surprised me. That doesn't happen often." He settled into his stance. "You made me activate the Kaioken. I'm hoping you can keep that pressure going."
He meant it. At 300 M, the threshold for Super Saiyan was right there at the edge of reach — a barrier he'd been pressing against through training without finding the specific trigger. Genuine high-stakes combat against an opponent who could push him was the closest thing to the right conditions he'd found yet.
Gilgamesh's expression was measured. He could feel the gap that had just opened between them. But the domain was still active, and the Eternal body had been running since before recorded history.
"The rules here mean we can go all out without collateral damage," he said. "So let's not waste it."
They closed the distance at the same moment.
The exchange inside the domain was different from what had come before — heavier, each impact carrying the full weight of what both of them were actually capable of. The terrain inside the bounded space collapsed outward from their contact points, trees shearing at the trunk, ground cratering, the domain's internal landscape becoming the aftermath of the fight in real time.
Smith found an opening in the sequence of Gilgamesh's rapid double-fist combination — a shoulder that rotated two degrees past the stable point — and drove a full-force punch through it.
Gilgamesh's arm came up. The block was solid.
He still left the ground like something fired from a launcher, traveling backward through the trees at the domain's edge and breaking through three of them before his mass and the friction of the undergrowth brought him to a stop.
He stood. His arm armor had come within a few degrees of shattering on that one. He shook the impact out and looked at his forearms.
That's going to bruise.
He came back at a dead sprint, both fists working, the fastest combination he had — the rhythm he'd developed over several thousand years of putting it to opponents who deserved it.
Smith blocked the first three with his forearms and said, almost pleasantly, "Faster. More force."
It wasn't a taunt. It was a request.
Gilgamesh activated the domain's enhancement to its absolute maximum — every modifier stacked simultaneously. Increased gravity. Force reduction on the opponent. Self-amplification running at full output through every available channel.
The gravity shift hit Smith, and — nothing. His training in the gravity chamber had indexed him to multiples of Earth's standard gravity as a baseline. Tenfold increase was Tuesday.
The force reduction worked, fractionally. It was real. It just wasn't enough.
Gilgamesh condensed everything he had into his right fist. Every year of physical development. The full Eternal construct. The domain's amplification at its peak.
"Strongest punch."
It landed in Smith's abdomen and drove him upward, off the ground and into the domain's interior sky, the force carrying him through three full rotations before he arrested the momentum with flight.
He hung in the air above Gilgamesh, looked down, and clasped his hands in front of him.
The Galick Gun formed between his palms — dense, compressed, the output of 300 M concentrated into a directed beam angled straight down.
It hit Gilgamesh in a wave of consecutive detonations, each one feeding into the next, the crater building under the impact until Gilgamesh was standing in a pit deep enough that the rim was level with his chest.
He was breathing hard. His reserves were nearly empty.
He looked up at Smith floating above him and considered the question of whether to continue.
Smith's hands came together again. The white light built between them, a concentrated sphere that grew past the point of containment.
Gilgamesh recognized the shape of it and understood this was the end of the match.
"Kamehameha!"
The beam hit the domain.
The domain shattered.
Glass-mirror fracture — the entire bounded space breaking across every geometric surface simultaneously — and then the outside world returned, and the debris of what had been the internal landscape scattered into empty air above the arena.
Gilgamesh came down out of that air in the condition he'd earned, trailing smoke, his armor scoring showing the history of the last several minutes in considerable detail.
He hit the ground.
Smith descended beside him and landed without drama, the red Kaioken aura fading as the combat power settled back to base.
The host ran to Gilgamesh's side. His voice was shaking slightly in a way that professionalism was doing its best to contain.
He counted to ten.
Gilgamesh didn't move.
"Gilgamesh has been defeated! Smith Doyle remains the undisputed pinnacle of human strength!"
The Eternals' box was quiet for several seconds.
Ajak said, "The domain shattered."
Kingo said nothing. He was looking at the ring with the expression of someone recalibrating a category.
Thena watched Smith land and thought about the match she hadn't competed in, and what the outcome would have been.
Ikaris said nothing at all.
In the audience, Coulson said, "Our Inspector General is still the better fighter." He watched the medical staff move toward Gilgamesh on the arena floor. "It's a genuine pity we didn't see the full exchange."
Ward said, "Based on what Gilgamesh looks like right now, I don't think we missed a quiet match."
Donnie Gill looked at the battered Eternal and said nothing, but his calculation of where he himself sat in the ranking of things had shifted again, in the downward direction.
At the Triskelion, Fury looked at his screen and let out a long, slow breath.
Smith Doyle had just defeated the strongest member of a race that had been operating on this planet since before the first human civilization. On a global broadcast. In a sparring match he'd agreed to as a tournament prize.
The Eternals were no longer an unknown quantity. And Smith Doyle had just demonstrated, in front of every intelligence service watching the broadcast, that he sat above them in the power structure.
That should help with the Eternals being manageable. Relatively speaking.
How many other things are out there that I don't have a file on yet?
The arena completed the awards ceremony in three stages.
Eight finalists came to the stage. Tournament staff carried oversized checks — the prop version, for photographs — and the host read each name. Wong came back through a portal rather than the conventional entrance. The crowd greeted it the same way they had the first time.
Each top-eight finalist received fifty million dollars.
"The runner-up prize — Ms. Agatha Harkness!"
The check for five hundred million was carried up by two staff members who were working harder than the check's size technically required. Agatha accepted it with a smile that reached her eyes approximately halfway and posed for the photograph with the precision of someone who had decided to be gracious in defeat.
Privately, she was already thinking about the next tournament. The Dragon Ball wish was the interesting part of this exercise, and she hadn't gotten there. She filed the loss against Wong's memory — she'd seen enough of Kamar-Taj through his memories to know where the ceiling of that tradition was — and filed the loss against Gilgamesh's domain as a separate problem to solve.
Next time, she thought, maintaining the smile for the camera.
"The champion — Gilgamesh!"
Ajax had used her healing ability on Gilgamesh between the knockout and the ceremony. He walked up to the stage under his own power, the scoring on his armor the only visible record of what the last hour had contained.
The check for one billion dollars was carried by four staff members. Gilgamesh looked at it, thanked the host, and posed for the photograph with the relaxed ease of someone for whom the money was genuinely irrelevant. The Eternals' accumulated resources across several thousand years of existence included rare metals, cultural artifacts of incalculable value, and Sersi's ability to convert any base material into precious metals at will. This was a large number on paper.
Phastos could make vibranium for breakfast.
The host closed the ceremony.
"Thank you to every participant, every spectator, and everyone watching around the world. The first World Martial Arts Tournament has been everything we hoped it would be. Take care getting home — and we'll see you at the next one."
Smith led the Eternals through a wormhole.
The arrival point was the Pacific island that had hosted the Dragon Ball cycles — the same mountain summit, the arena surface still carrying the residue of past tournaments. The ocean was visible in every direction.
Smith looked at Gilgamesh. "What's your wish?"
Gilgamesh looked at Ajak. "I'd like to transfer the wish right to our leader. If that's acceptable."
Smith nodded. He looked at Ajak.
During Gilgamesh's recovery time after the championship, the Eternals' room had been quiet in the way that rooms get quiet when people are waiting for an explanation they've been patient about for a very long time.
Gilgamesh had said: "Thena's condition is cured. What are we actually here for?"
Everyone had looked at Ajak.
She'd considered the full truth, the shape of it, the weight of what it would do to the people in front of her. She'd considered it and set it aside.
"I received guidance," she said carefully, "that Earth will face a catastrophic event in the future. A collapse of the planet itself. I needed this wish as preparation against that outcome."
The room had processed this. Several sharp intakes of breath. Thena had said how is that possible and Kingo had echoed it immediately.
"It's insurance," Ajak said. "For the living things on this planet. For the humans."
For you, she didn't add. For all of you, if the truth ever surfaces and the collapse comes from inside rather than outside.
Ajak stepped forward on the island.
"My wish," she said, "is that when Earth faces a collapse — a destruction of the planet itself — Shenron will be able to restore it to its original state."
Smith looked at her.
Exactly as I expected.
He'd run the probabilities on Ajak's wish since the Eternals had entered the tournament. The Tiamut Emergence was the only scenario that fit. A Celestial completing its gestation inside a planet's core and destroying the planet in the process of being born — that was the category of event that justified a wish this specific. Ajak had known about it for as long as they'd been on Earth, and she'd been carrying the weight of it silently the entire time.
He pulled the seven Dragon Balls from his storage and set them in the arrangement on the island surface.
"Shenron," he said. "Come out."
The golden light rose from all seven simultaneously. The sky overhead darkened — not the local sky, not just the visible sky above the island. The darkness spread outward, moving at a speed that had nothing to do with weather or atmosphere, covering the Pacific, then the continent beyond it, then the planet, then past the edge of the atmosphere and continuing.
It covered the moon.
It covered Mars.
It reached the outer planets and stopped there, at the edge of the solar system, the entire volume of planetary space within it plunged into dark.
In his ship approaching from outside the solar system, Ronan the Accuser looked out of the bridge viewport and found every star he'd been navigating by absent. His navigators looked at each other with the uncertainty of people whose instruments had just agreed on something impossible.
On Earth, the people who had been through this before glanced up, noted the familiar phenomenon, and returned to what they'd been doing. There had been alien invasions and a Nine Realms convergence. A temporary solar system eclipse was a Tuesday.
Those who knew what the darkness meant murmured it to each other in rooms and offices and living rooms around the planet:
The Eternals are making their wish.
The green dragon rose from the golden light.
In his office at the Triskelion, Fury looked at the darkened sky through the window.
He said, to no one in particular, "Whatever you're asking for — I hope it's something this planet can afford."