On the return flight from the venue, Coulson stood at the window of the aircraft and watched the sky go dark.
"The celestial canopy again," he said. "Gilgamesh is making his wish."
Donnie Gill shook his head. "I can't imagine what someone like that asks for. What does an Eternal need?"
Ward said, "With the Inspector General overseeing it, at least we know it's not going to be something catastrophic."
Coulson nodded. That was the most accurate thing anyone could say about it.
Across the cabin, Steve Rogers was looking at the same sky. He was thinking about Peggy Carter. He'd been thinking about Peggy Carter since he woke up, and the Dragon Ball wish was the closest thing to a realistic path he'd found to changing what time had taken from her.
He missed his opportunity. Again.
He said, quietly, "Is there still a shot? Next tournament?"
Jessica Jones looked at him. She thought about the honest answer before she gave it. "The format is harder now, not easier. More participants, more tiers. The Eternals entered this one. Asgard sent Sif. The magical traditions are watching." She paused. "We'd need a significant improvement to be genuine contenders."
Steve looked at the dark sky.
"Then that's what we work toward," he said.
At the top of the Triskelion, Alexander Pierce stood at the window and watched the darkness settle over the city.
He'd watched the entire tournament. Every match. Every reveal. The Eternals' history made public. Two magical traditions he had almost no intelligence on. Gilgamesh taking apart the Iron Man suit with his bare hands. Smith Doyle ending the match in a fight that most of the audience hadn't been able to see.
HYDRA's current assets were substantial. Years of careful work inside S.H.I.E.L.D., a network of controlled personnel, financial infrastructure, some enhanced operatives. On the scale of the ordinary world, it was a considerable power base.
On the scale of what he'd watched today, it was nothing.
The tournament's top eight, plus the participants who hadn't entered, plus the factions watching from outside the bracket — any single one of them could dismantle everything HYDRA had built by deciding to spend an afternoon on it.
The Dragon Ball wish was a theoretical avenue he'd considered and set aside. Getting the wish require Smith Doyle permission.
Project Insight, he thought. That's the direction. More infrastructure. Wider reach. The kind of control that doesn't require individual physical superiority because it operates at the systemic level.
He turned the idea over. He'd been moving Fury toward it incrementally for months. Today had accelerated the urgency considerably.
He turned away from the window and picked up his phone.
The island was quiet. The Pacific moved around it in long swells. The Eternals stood in a rough semicircle and looked at the sky.
The Dragon emerged.
Thena said, softly, "The legends in Kunlun mention something like this. I always wondered."
Ajak looked at Shenron and thought about Shou-Lao, the sacred dragon of Ta Lo, and the different traditions that had grown around creatures like this across the planet's history. The comparison was interesting and unanswerable.
Ikaris was doing the private calculation he always did when confronted with a power he couldn't immediately classify.
Shenron's voice came down from the expanded sky: "State your wish."
Ajak looked at Smith, who nodded.
She stepped forward.
"Great dragon," she said, with the measured weight of someone who had been carrying a sentence for several thousand years and was finally saying it out loud. "The Earth will face a catastrophe in the future — a shattering of the planet itself. When that moment comes, I wish for you to restore it to its original state."
Shenron's eyes turned red. A pause.
"This wish regarding a future event is within scope. It is recorded."
A membrane of gold light descended into the ground, a quiet thing, barely visible at the edge of perception — but Ajak felt it settle into the planet below her feet, and something she'd been holding for millennia released its grip.
"State your second wish."
Smith stepped forward.
He'd been thinking about this since before the tournament. The Earth was going to be a battlefield — it had already been a battlefield, and the scale was trending upward. Making the planet itself more resilient was the most efficient single investment he could make with a wish that didn't have a personal target.
"Shenron — reinforce the Earth's structural integrity without affecting the life on it."
Shenron was quiet for a moment.
"This wish contains a conflict. A planet made more resistant to destruction becomes uniformly more resistant — underground resources become harder to extract, foundations become harder to lay, roots become harder to extend through harder soil. The structural reinforcement and the protection of life on the surface are mutually exclusive at the physical level. This wish cannot be granted as stated."
Smith absorbed this.
He thought about it. The logic was correct — a harder planet was a harder planet at every layer, including the ones humans needed to dig through for buildings and agriculture and the planting of trees. You couldn't selectively reinforce the parts that got hit by invasions while leaving soft the parts that humans had to work with. It was the same material.
He thought about whether there was a reformulation.
He didn't find one that didn't create a different version of the same problem.
"In that case," he said, "I release the second wish."
"Understood. Farewell."
Shenron's form began to dissolve back into light. Seven Dragon Balls started their scatter — the usual pattern, launching outward into the upper atmosphere, preparing to distribute across the planet.
Smith raised one hand. The balls stopped. They settled, one by one, back to the ground in front of him and went still, the energy fading out of them as they returned to inert stone.
He looked at them for a moment, then put them away.
Ronan's ship sat at the edge of the solar system with every external light source absent.
His navigators had been working the problem for several minutes. The instruments showed the solar system's planets in their expected positions. Everything that should be there was there. Nothing had been removed or added. But the light was simply absent — not blocked, not scattered. Gone, as if a switch had been thrown on the entire volume of space inside the outer planets' orbits.
Then, over approximately five minutes, the light returned. Star by star, planet by planet, the sky outside the viewport normalized.
Ronan watched the process complete itself and said nothing.
He filed it, and ordered the ship to continue its approach.
The Triskelion.
Fury was looking at the daylight sky when he heard the knock.
Pierce walked in.
"You didn't have to come down in person."
"Dragon Ball granted another wish," Pierce said.
"Evidently."
Pierce sat. He said, "Once per year is a significant frequency for this kind of event. It creates instability. And S.H.I.E.L.D. has never held the championship."
Fury said, "Smith's the Inspector General. He runs the tournament fairly. He's not going to weight it toward us. Honestly, turning the Dragon Ball into an open tournament was already a concession — it gave the enhanced community something legitimate to compete in rather than having freelancers running around collecting those things on their own."
Pierce nodded, and let a beat pass. "The enhanced population is expanding. More individuals, more factions, more corporate recruitment. The picture is getting more complex."
"I'm aware."
"The original framework is already theoretical. What you need is infrastructure that can operate at scale. Something that doesn't depend on individual superiority." He paused. "I've been giving more thought to the Insight framework."
Fury was quiet for a moment. He was already thinking about it. The tournament had made several things clear about the gap between what S.H.I.E.L.D. could do person-to-person and what the enhanced community was capable of. The gap was widening.
"Walk me through the current iteration," Fury said.
They were still talking when Hill patched through on the priority line.
"Director. We have an unidentified spacecraft inbound. Outer solar system, trajectory consistent with Earth approach. We've already contacted Universal Capsule — it's not theirs."
Fury and Pierce looked at each other.
"Asgard's been our only friendly contact so far," Pierce said.
"I know." Fury said to the line: "Put us on tracking. Full monitoring package. And get me whatever we have on recent deep-space anomalies."
"Yes sir."
Fury set the phone down.
Aliens, he thought. Again.
Kamar-Taj.
Wong came through the library door with the prize check under his arm and nearly walked into Wanda in the corridor.
She looked at him. "Congratulations on top four. Genuinely."
Wong said, "You watched it?"
"Everyone watched it." She held up her phone. The follower count on his Facebook page had not stopped moving since the interview. "You have quite an audience now."
Wong laughed, the sound of someone who had done something slightly embarrassing on a global platform and was still working out how to file it. "Losing to a dark practitioner in front of the entire planet is not a result Kamar-Taj is likely to let me forget."
"You made it to the semifinals. That's not nothing."
"She absorbed my energy," he said flatly. "I was halfway to a husk. The only reason I'm standing here is that the competition rules prohibited fatalities."
Wanda was quiet for a moment. "Why didn't you compete?" he asked. "You were in the Dragon Ball tournament before."
"There are still too many things in this library I haven't finished," Wanda said. "When I enter the next tournament, I want to be confident I can actually win it." A pause. "I think that's closer than you'd expect."
Wong looked at her. She'd been in the library for weeks now, moving through material that senior Kamar-Taj practitioners spent years on. He believed her.
"I'll hold you to that," he said.
In his room at the base, Smith tap into the system.
The sixth lottery. He looked at the draw interface with the focused attention of someone who had been waiting for this specific moment since before the tournament brackets were announced.
Three directions. One draw each. The number of available pulls hadn't changed with the abandoned second wish — exactly as he'd expected.
He went to the character lottery first.
The meteorite surface had changed significantly since the last draw. The mid-tier entries — the Ginyu Force, early Frieza Saga characters, the Namek-period roster — were gone entirely. Replaced.
He scanned the surface.
Krillin, Cell Saga. Yamcha, Cell Saga. Tien Shinhan, Cell Saga. Piccolo at 1.5 million. Then Goku and Vegeta, both sitting at 3 million — baseline power matching his own, the threshold versions of both characters, the ones that had trained to the floor of Super Saiyan before actually crossing it.
He looked deeper into the meteorite.
The power levels began to climb. Slug at 60 million. Frieza at 60 million. King Cold at 100 million. Frieza at full power, 120 million. Super Saiyan Goku, 150 million. Super Saiyan Trunks, 160 million. Goku post-training, returned from the Time Chamber, 210 million.Smith ran the math.
Any character from the deeper tier would add base power that stacked above his current ceiling.
And if he pulled one of the Super Saiyan transformations, and integrated the template—
He felt the anticipation working in his chest and didn't try to settle it.
He reached for the draw.