"Big talk is free. Anybody can do it." Xu Wenwu's remaining seven rings continued their slow orbit, gold-bronze catching the light. "And Dragon Balls are none of your business — certainly not business for alien scum who show up uninvited."
Ronan's eyes moved to him and stayed there. He tilted his head slightly. "You know about Dragon Balls. Good."
He didn't get to finish the thought.
The Hulk came back through the building he'd gone into at speed, trailing dust and twisted steel, and hit Ronan from behind with a shoulder charge that moved both of them fifteen feet across the broken street. Ronan absorbed the momentum and turned, throwing a punch at the same moment the Hulk threw one, and the two fists collided in the middle. The sonic crack was sharp and total — a compression wave that knocked loose debris in every direction and rattled windows two blocks away.
Xu Wenwu used the opening. Four rings launched in a tight cluster, hit Ronan across the ribs and shoulder, and forced him sideways. The Hulk was already pressing forward, throwing combinations, driving Ronan back with raw accumulated force. Ronan's footwork was deliberate — he was being moved but he wasn't being hurt.
He activated the energy shield.
It expanded from his body like a bubble of hard light, and the Hulk drove both fists down onto the surface at once, grabbing the Universal Weapon from Ronan's hand with one enormous fist and hammering the shield with it. The dome pulsed. Cracks propagated across the outer layer. Ronan could feel the geometry buckling under sustained input.
Then Xu Wenwu moved.
The ten rings all converged on his right arm in a single second — a weighted coil of supernatural metal that turned the limb into something closer to a siege engine. He stepped through the Hulk's guard and drove a concentrated strike into the shield's surface.
The shield didn't crack. It ceased to exist.
Before Ronan had recalculated, the Hulk had both hands around his left thigh and was already swinging. Ronan left the ground, describing a wide arc through the air, and the pavement came up at him from a bad angle.
He found the ground hard.
For the first time in this engagement, something settled behind his eyes that was close to respect. These two were not negligible. He revised his operational calculus in two seconds and spoke.
"Fire coverage."
Aboard the Dark Aster, the order reached Zain at his station without delay. He did not hesitate.
The hull plates along the ship's ventral surface peeled back in sequence, revealing the energy cannon array — row after row of weapons, charging green in the low light of the firing deck. The targeting systems swept down to the battlefield below.
Zain ordered full-spread fire.
The first volley came down in curtains.
Green beams swept the length of the battlefield, continuous and overlapping, reshaping the terrain beneath them. A S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier that had arrived and was in the middle of engaging multiple undead ships — along with the squadron of Quinjet fighters that had just launched from its deck and were cutting through the undead fleet — was caught in the first wave of fire. The Quinjets came apart immediately. The Helicarrier absorbed hit after hit on its port side, its engines igniting one by one, and then the fuel detonated and the carrier broke apart in the air and fell in pieces.
On the ground, the enhanced fighters scattered.
Phastos moved without a word. An energy construct bloomed outward from his hands — not a weapon but a barrier, geometric and dense, expanding just fast enough to close around the Eternals as the beam sweep reached their position. The structure held. The impacts drummed against the exterior like hail on a roof.
The Fraternity fighters — the vampire squads and werewolf units that had been working the flanks — had no such cover. The first pass reduced them. Not all of them. But enough that the ones still standing had blood in their mouths and weren't moving right.
Pietro had been finishing something three blocks over when the Dark Aster opened up. He looked up, registered the entire scope of it in about half a second, and ran.
The first pass caught the end of his transit. He came out of the beam's reach with two werewolf soldiers over his shoulders, gasping, every system in his body running past the limit. He set them down. Looked back. Went in again.
He made four runs. By the fourth, his legs were shaking and he was breathing through his teeth, but he had the remaining Brotherhood fighters out of the kill zone.
He stopped. Put his hands on his knees. Let himself process the fact that he was still alive.
In the shop where Selene had left them, Jessica Jones heard the cannon fire coming and was already moving. Steve Rogers was still down. She triggered Lasher's transformation — the symbiote expanding and reshaping around her, limbs multiplying, the structure of it thick and load-bearing — and wrapped herself around Rogers before the first beam found the building. Her free tendrils caught his shield and braced it outward. The impacts hit the shield first and distributed. They both survived it.
Across the street, Tony watched from the air as the beam sweep finished its traverse. His remaining suits were gone — not just damaged, gone, the secondary adamantium the only thing that had preserved his own armor enough to keep him airborne. He couldn't stop this. He had nothing left that scaled to what he was looking at.
Ivan Vanko had less. The Blue Dynamo suit caught the tail end of the volley directly. The outer frame took the initial impacts and the auxiliary robots around him absorbed the collapse, but the war machine was finished — it came apart in a controlled pile rather than an uncontrolled explosion, and that distinction was the only reason Ivan was alive at the bottom of it.
The Dark Aster's cannons went through their reload cycle with mechanical patience.
When the charge light went green again on the firing deck, Makkari was already working.
She moved through the blast zone at the edge of perception — a blur that resolved into a person only when she stopped, and she never stopped for more than a fraction of a second. Every living Brotherhood fighter still within cannon range was relocated. She didn't communicate while she worked. She didn't need to. She just read the ground and the bodies and moved until there was no one left to move.
Then she stopped at the edge of the safe zone and felt the ground vibrating differently.
Everyone still standing felt it at roughly the same moment.
It wasn't the cannon recharge. It wasn't another ship. It was something in the atmosphere itself — a pressure that pushed inward from above, a displacement of air and energy that turned the sky over New York into something you could feel in your back teeth.
People looked up.
The figure in the air was distant and then not distant. The golden aura made him visible from blocks away — a sustained luminous field that didn't flicker, that radiated heat and pressure and an undertone of energy that the enhanced individuals on the ground recognized instinctively as something categorically different from what they had been fighting.
Smith Doyle's hair had gone gold. The aura had gone gold. He was in Super Saiyan form and he had come back from wherever he'd been and he was looking down at what had been done to his city.
Tony's shoulders came down by about three inches. He didn't say anything for a second.
"He's back," he said.
Nick Fury, in what was left of his command configuration, looked at the Helicarrier debris field with an expression that didn't move. He was filing the loss internally and doing the math on what it would take to replace it. If Smith had been here twenty minutes earlier, the Helicarrier would still be operational. But Smith was here now, and Fury knew what happened next, and he made himself put the carrier away and focus on that.
He noticed Smith's appearance. He noticed the condition of it. He filed that separately, for later.
The Dark Aster's firing deck completed its reload cycle.
The targeting system read the incoming energy signature and pivoted every available cannon upward. Forty-six muzzles reoriented toward the figure descending in the golden aura.
They fired.
Smith raised his hands. The blue-white light built between his palms in about one second — not a charged accumulation but something that was already at full capacity the moment he started moving. His hands came apart. The Ki blast discharged at full output.
The stream met the cannon fire at the midpoint and the cannon fire stopped being cannon fire. Every beam along the path was absorbed, folded, pulled into the Ki blast momentum without breaking its geometry. The technique continued through the point of contact and hit the Dark Aster.
The ship was large. It absorbed the first instant of contact and then it was gone. Not burning, not falling — gone, enveloped and then erased by the output behind the wave, and the sound that came from it was a single bass detonation that the whole city felt simultaneously.
The sky above New York opened up.
Smith looked at what remained. The necromancer ships were still operating across the airspace, the Kree ground forces were still active across multiple city blocks. He could sense all of them. He'd had time in transit to think about what he was going to do when he arrived and he had a clean, precise read on every hostile energy signature in range.
He raised his right hand, palm up, eyes closed.
The ki gathered upward from him in a column, then inverted — not downward in a single strike but dispersed, a branching structure that spread across the entire airspace over New York in something that looked almost decorative from a distance, light spreading outward in a constellation pattern.
Then every node discharged.
The strikes were precise and simultaneous. Sixty-three seconds. Every necromancer ship in New York airspace. Every Kree soldier on the ground. Each target hit once, with exactly the amount of force required. Smith maintained the output and tracked the confirmation on each one, adjusting as needed, not stopping until the battlefield read clean.
One signature remained. Ronan, standing in the wreckage of the street where the fight had been.
Smith lowered his hand.
Inside Phastos's barrier construct, the Eternals had watched the whole sequence.
Ajax stood very still. Her eyes moved through the aftermath — the cleared airspace, the precision of it, the economy of the targeting. "Is that his actual strength?" she said. Not a rhetorical question. She genuinely hadn't had an answer before this moment.
Gilgamesh made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. He folded his arms and looked at the space where the Dark Aster used to be. "I sparred with that man. He used enough to make it interesting." He shook his head once, slowly. "Not once did it feel like a ceiling."
Ikaris hadn't moved. His expression hadn't changed since Smith had appeared in the sky. He could feel something he hadn't felt at the tournament, hadn't felt at any point in his five-thousand-year existence — a genuine signal from whatever register processed threat at his level of existence. The tournament Smith had been overwhelming. This Smith carried something different in the output. Something that reached past combat strength into a deeper register.
He recognized what it was.
He was feeling his own mortality.
Thena stood apart from the others, head tilted upward. The curiosity on her face was open and unguarded — not the wariness of a tactician reading danger but something closer to a scholar encountering a phenomenon they hadn't seen classified.
Ronan stood alone in the rubble and looked up at the figure that had just cleared the battlefield in sixty-three seconds without apparent effort.
He had encountered Carol Danvers twice.
What he felt standing beneath Smith Doyle was stronger.
Considerably stronger.