Seoul, South Korea.
The flight had been long and the tournament had been longer. Two passengers settled into the back of the car that had been sent to collect them from the airport, heading back toward the base. The city moved past the windows.
Jung Da-eun said, with the measured resignation of someone who had replayed the bracket draw several dozen times since it happened, "We were genuinely unlucky. You drew Thena, I drew Gilgamesh. Two Eternals in the same bracket section, and we both ended up in it."
The young nobleman beside her shook his head. "It wouldn't have mattered. Even if we'd made the top eight, first place was out of reach."
He glanced at the business cards she was holding — the stack they'd accumulated from the various organizations that had sent representatives to the venue. S.H.I.E.L.D., the CIA, the FBI, military liaison offices, a dozen corporate interests.
"We have our own affiliation," he said. "Those are just noise."
Jung Da-eun rolled the window down and released the cards into the slipstream. They scattered across the highway behind the car. "Agreed. Although I'll note that Captain America seemed like he might be a challenge for you."
The young nobleman started to smile and began a response.
The laser hit the car from above.
The vehicle went sideways, flipped twice, and came to rest at an angle across the road. Both doors on one side had caved in. The other two kicked open from inside, and they came out in a bad state, the driver behind them not coming out at all.
The young nobleman looked up.
The spacecraft overhead wasn't anything local. The shape was wrong — the geometry designed for something other than atmospheric flight, the weapons hardpoints visible on the hull, the design language of something that had come from considerably further away than the nearest airfield.
"What kind of junk is this?" he said.
Jung Da-eun wiped blood from the corner of her mouth. "The Capsule Corporation spaceship doesn't look like that."
Two green beams came down.
The young nobleman moved. Jung Da-eun was a fraction of a second too slow on the read — she caught both beams directly, and then she was not there anymore in the way that she had been.
The young nobleman stood on the highway with blood on his face and a very specific kind of quiet anger working through him.
He crossed the distance to the nearest car door in one movement, picked it up, and threw it upward at the spacecraft with everything he had.
A beam vaporized it before it arrived.
The third beam came immediately after. He was already somewhere else — the crater it left in the road was deep enough to be impressive — and he was running.
The highway offered nothing. No cover, no structures, open ground in every direction, the base still miles away. His speed was exceptional by human standards and irrelevant to the targeting system tracking him from above.
The Kree pilot watched the lock indicators on his panel and said, to no one, "Two."
Three beams fired in succession.
The young nobleman didn't have time to make it to cover that didn't exist.
The pilot logged both names on his target list with the appropriate markers and moved to the next address.
He wasn't the only one working.
Across the city and well beyond it, dozens of individual Kree spacecraft had broken from the Dark Aster and dispersed across the planet. They weren't hiding. The individual craft didn't have the Dark Aster's stealth capability, and Ronan hadn't instructed them to operate covertly. The objective was the list, and the list had a hundred and thirty-seven names on it.
The first thing most targets knew about it was the sound of something that wasn't any aircraft they recognized, and then whether they were fast enough to matter.
Some were.
At the Avengers base, the alert came without warning because the craft that triggered it had already fired before any perimeter system registered its approach.
The first laser hit Steve Rogers' shield at an angle that scattered the discharge harmlessly into the lawn. The impact was enough to knock him off his feet, and it was enough to reach Bruce Banner — who had been walking beside him, mid-sentence — in a way that his body decided was a threat worth answering.
Banner's sentence ended.
The Hulk's sentence started with a roar that rattled the base's upper windows.
He took the second craft's beam across his back without stopping. By the time his forward momentum had carried him to the craft's altitude, his arms were already coming down. The spacecraft went to pieces. The Hulk landed, looked at what was on the grass around him, roared at the sky on general principle, and waited to see if anything else arrived.
Nothing did, from this direction.
Jessica Jones had taken her own attack at the same moment. The Kree pilot had gone for the cockpit approach, trying for a clear shot on her position. She'd read the incoming craft's vector, made the call faster than any tactical calculation should have allowed, and let the Lasher symbiote surface.
The tentacles went through the cockpit plating.
The craft went sideways, lost power, and hit the ground in a controlled crash that she assisted with a kick on the way down. She deactivated the symbiote and looked at what was left.
Clint Barton came out of the base at a jog with his weapon already drawn, scanning the damage. "What did I miss?"
Steve said, "Two aircraft. Both down." He looked at the craters. "Unknown origin."
Jessica said, "The pilot I killed was blue. Blue skin, blue blood." She looked at Barton. "Not a human, not any enhanced human I've seen. Alien."
Barton looked at the sky.
"Again," he said.
Triskelion.
The board in front of Fury was still filling in. The reports were coming in faster than his analysts could organize them — incidents across Seoul, London, Sydney, Lagos, New York, Mumbai, São Paulo. The pattern was assembling itself in real time.
"What are we looking at?" he said.
Hill said, "The majority of confirmed targets are tournament participants. The preliminary analysis shows names from the top hundred and thirty-seven across all regions. There are also several incidents at locations associated with Dragon Ball production and sale — the counterfeit manufacturers, and a few individuals who had posted publicly about possessing round stones."
Fury said, "Who got hit?"
"Multiple casualties confirmed. Several enhanced individuals successfully defended themselves." She pulled up the incident at the Avengers base. "Captain Rogers and Jessica Jones survived. The Hulk intervened. Confirmed Avengers are accounted for."
Fury said, "What's the early warning look like?"
Hill said, "It doesn't."
Fury turned.
"Our radar showed nothing," she said. "No approach vectors, no altitude signatures, no transponder data. The aircraft appeared at attack range with zero prior detection. We don't know how many are in the air."
Fury looked at the tactical display. Incidents were still being added.
"Origin?"
"Unknown. The pilot descriptions from Jessica Jones and several other witnesses are consistent — blue-skinned humanoids, uniform design unlike anything in our database."
Fury stood at the window and looked at New York's skyline. Somewhere above it, at an altitude his instruments couldn't see, something was running a list.
"Get me Smith Doyle," he said.
Hill said, "He's currently off-grid. The Brotherhood's last confirmed contact was post-tournament."
Fury looked at the board.
Aliens, he thought. Again. Different aliens this time.
"Get me whoever answers at the Brotherhood. And get me Tony Stark." A pause. "And wake up anyone on the Avengers roster who isn't already awake."