After the conversation with Dende about Dragon Ball materials, Smith took him up to the Lookout.
"This is your place now," Smith said. "You and Popo run it jointly. Anyone who passes Korin's test comes up here. Popo handles their training."
Dende looked around the space — the reflecting pool, the tile work, the corridor leading toward the Time Chamber door — and nodded with the quiet satisfaction of someone who recognized where they belonged.
Smith said, "I'll bring the scepter up shortly. See if it works as Dragon Ball material."
He jumped off the Lookout's edge and flew down.
Bulma met him at the lab door.
"Smith!"
He let her take his arm and patted the top of her head. "How's the floating temple project?"
"Still in preparation. I've been buried."
"Scratch it. The real Lookout is up there now."
Bulma looked up at the sky where nothing was visible and said, with genuine relief, "Thank goodness. I'll tell Fox to stand down the construction team."
Smith said, "Loki's scepter — where does your research stand?"
Bulma pulled up her notes on the workbench tablet. "Mostly wrapped up. The gem inside it has a fascinating internal structure — the information architecture is unlike anything I've seen. If someone wanted to use it as a template for artificial intelligence, it would cut the development time dramatically." She paused. "I'm not going to do that. I don't know what's in that information at the foundational level, and I'm not interested in finding out the hard way. But the layout gave me quite a bit of inspiration for improving JARVIS's architecture."
Smith wasn't surprised. The Mind Stone's core function was cognition and influence — of course it organized information like a neural substrate. That was what it was.
"Dende thinks the gem material might work for Dragon Ball fabrication," he said.
Bulma stared at him. "It can do that too?"
"He wants to examine it." Smith picked up the scepter. "You're done with it?"
"Take it."
He carried it up to the Lookout.
Dende turned the scepter over in his hands with the particular attention of someone whose assessment was coming from somewhere other than the visual surface.
After a minute he said, "Yes. The material is viable. If this gem were used as the core of a Dragon Ball, the resulting dragon would be considerably more powerful than what I can produce through conventional means."
Smith said, "How much more powerful?"
"Substantially. The energy density inside this stone is — it's not comparable to anything I've encountered before."
Smith thought about it. The Mind Stone was one of six. Six Infinity Stones, each one a compressed fragment of a universal law. If each one became a Dragon Ball, and if Dende could produce six sets of balls — it would be more powerful than Porunga, more powerful than any Dragon Ball system he was aware of short of the Super Dragon Balls themselves.
"These stones are unique," he said. "There are only six in this universe, and I haven't collected all of them. Using any one of them for this would be permanent."
He also thought about the storage vault he knew about — the alternate-timeline Infinity Stones that had been collected by the Time Bureau, now inert, no longer functional in this universe's causal structure. Dende might be able to use those. But that was a separate investigation.
"Keep looking for other materials," he said. "The conventional approach."
Dende accepted this without argument. "I'll search further. My expectation is that it will take considerable time."
"We're not in a hurry. I have one working set." Smith took the scepter back. "The existing Dragon Balls handle everything I need for now."
He pocketed the scepter, left the Lookout, and opened a wormhole to a coordinate he'd marked during his return trip from Netherheim.
The planet was dead.
It had been dying when he'd first catalogued it — a rocky body at the terminal stage of its lifespan, no atmosphere to speak of, no liquid water, geological activity essentially ceased. Not the kind of place anyone had ever arrived at intentionally. He'd noted it specifically because it had no value and no inhabitants, which made it appropriate for what he was about to do.
He landed on the surface and stood in the low gravity for a moment, running a final assessment of available space.
Then he pulled up the character card.
Confirm fusion: Super Saiyan Son Goku (Namek, combat power 150 million). Proceed?
Yes.
The card dissolved. The starlight moved through him. Goku's techniques arrived in his memory with the completeness of personal experience rather than instruction — the muscle memory of ten thousand repetitions, the internal sensation of the Spirit Bomb gathering, and something else: the exact internal state from the moment of transformation on Namek. The specific configuration of pushed-past-breaking that had triggered it. The rage and grief and absolute refusal that had produced the golden light for the first time.
He felt his base power begin to climb.
It stopped at 60 million.
He stood there absorbing the new equilibrium.
The card had added 30 million. Not 150 million directly to base — the card's 150 million was its Super Saiyan output, which meant the addition to base was 150 million divided by the 50x multiplier, landing at 30 million. His base had doubled.
60 million base. 20x Kaioken: 1.2 billion. Comparable to Frieza at full power. The scale of what the Cosmic Emperor had thrown at the universe for a century, and it was now his walking-around number.
He activated 20x Kaioken.
The planet shook under the output. The surface cracked in expanding rings from his position, the rock yielding under the pressure differential between the aura and the surrounding vacuum. The tidal force on the planet's remaining geological structure was enough that he could feel it shifting under his feet.
He released the Kaioken before the planet gave out prematurely.
If I put a ki blast into that planet at this output, it goes. He considered that for a moment. I should be careful about where I train.
He thought about whether the Kaioken had contributed to Goku's heart disease in the source material. The cellular strain was real and he could feel it — the 20x wasn't indefinitely sustainable, and overuse at maximum multiplier was probably accumulative damage that the Saiyan physiology could handle in short windows but not continuously over years. He filed it as something to watch.
He deactivated the Kaioken and began the process for the Super Saiyan transformation.
He gathered energy. The golden flames built around him, starting at his extremities and working inward, his hair color beginning to shift from the ground up. He stopped trying to control it and let the transformation find its own trigger — not a technical process but an emotional state, the specific configuration that Goku's memory had given him.
He didn't have the grief. He didn't have the specific trigger. But he had the memory of what the state felt like from the inside, and he used that as a template and pushed through to the other side of it.
The transformation erupted.
Golden energy expanded outward from his body without restraint, not directed at anything, simply released — and the planet registered the release at its geological level. The rock fractured. The surface split along fault lines that had been dormant for geological ages. The atmospheric remnants, what little existed, were stripped away instantly.
The planet began to come apart.
Smith floated upward, watching the process from above. He hadn't struck it, hadn't aimed anything at it. He'd simply released his aura, and the planet — already at end-of-life — had reached its end.
His combat power in Super Saiyan 1: 3 billion.
Sub-Celestial Father tier. Confirmed. The threshold where planetary destruction became a consequence of operating without restraint rather than a deliberate act.
He thought about the power tier framework Hela had laid out for him. Sub-Celestial Father was the range from planetary destruction up to approximately the output ceiling of someone like Hela at her peak. 3 billion put him solidly in that tier, not at its edge. Which meant there was room above him before the next threshold — before the point where destroying a solar system became the consequence of releasing your aura, the point where the gap to single-universe level entities stopped being theoretical.
Single-universe level. Hulk's final form. Galactus in his standard operating state. The upper tier of Marvel's cosmic hierarchy in most versions. He was nowhere near that ceiling.
But he was moving toward it in a direction and at a pace that, six months ago, he wouldn't have projected.
He watched the planet fragment into a new debris belt, a ring of dead rock spreading outward through the local space.
He tried to activate the Kaioken while holding the Super Saiyan transformation.
His body said no. Not in the way that pain said no — in the way that a structural impossibility said no, the two systems refusing to coexist, the Super Saiyan transformation and the Kaioken multiplier operating on the same underlying resource and competing for it. He could hold one or he could hold the other. Not both, not yet.
He'd known this was likely. The canonical example was Super Saiyan 4, where Goku had managed a brief Kaioken overlay on one specific Kamehameha, and immediately dropped the Kaioken because the combination wasn't sustainable. That was a significantly more advanced form than where he was standing right now.
Full-power Super Saiyan.
Then Super Saiyan 2.
Long road before Kaioken stacking becomes viable.
He felt the distance to that horizon clearly and without discouragement. He'd gotten further in the last several months than most paths through this power system allowed. The next stages were defined and reachable.
He deactivated the transformation and turned toward a planet he could see from here — a larger one, uninhabited, geologically stable enough to survive some rigorous contact. He'd need somewhere to practice the Super Saiyan trigger until it was instant-access rather than a process.
He flew toward it.
In a space that existed adjacent to observable reality without belonging to it, a figure sat at a small desk.
The observer — his designation in whatever administrative structure assigned him this watch — made notes with the methodical attention of someone cataloguing events for a record that would outlast the events themselves.
He wrote:
Smith Doyle, Earth, has crossed the threshold from Sub-Celestial Father to confirmed Sub-Celestial Father tier — upper range. Mechanism: Saiyan bloodline integration and external character synthesis, a path without precedent in existing classification records. Current output in transformed state: approximately 3 billion. Projected trajectory: accelerating. Growth rate in the period since initial registration exceeds all comparable cases on file.
Whether this individual continues toward single-universe tier — and at what pace — remains to be observed.
He set down his pen and watched Smith's energy signature moving through the dead solar system's new debris field, steady and purposeful, already looking for the next training ground.
Elsewhere in the solar system, Ronan's ship completed its jump.
The approach vector had been recalculated three times after the inexplicable darkness event had wiped their navigation references for six minutes. His navigators had recovered the coordinates, confirmed the target planet's position, and brought them in on the corrected heading.
Earth was visible through the forward viewport.
S.H.I.E.L.D.'s deep-space monitoring array had tracked them on the inbound approach. It had not tracked them through the jump. The ship had simply appeared inside the inner solar system without a detectable transit.
Nick Fury received the report and looked at the screen.
"Tell me we have a contact protocol for this."
He already knew the answer.