The last time Ronan had been in a situation like this, he'd had the Dark Aster behind him. The ship's teleportation relays could move him off a battlefield in under a second — it had kept him alive against Carol Danvers when nothing else would have.
There was no Dark Aster anymore. There was nothing in the sky at all except smoke and settling debris.
He understood the problem. Earth had traded one overwhelming threat for another, and this one didn't come with a warning.
Smith descended.
He appeared in front of Ronan and threw a hook at his midsection. It wasn't a complicated strike. It didn't need to be. The punch connected and Ronan's body bent around the contact point, his spine curling involuntarily, every air molecule driven out of his lungs simultaneously. Blue blood came up. His armor — which had survived Kree military testing, which had withstood glancing blows from Danvers — fractured across the chestplate and fell away in sections.
Ronan staggered backward. He registered the force with the part of his brain that did threat assessment and that part returned a number he didn't have a frame of reference for.
He swung the Universal Weapon. Not a tactical choice — reflex, buying a fraction of a second.
Smith raised his left hand and punched the weapon's head straight on.
The impact traveled up the shaft and the hammerhead gave. The metal fractured at the neck joint and the weighted end hit the ground in pieces. Ronan was left holding a staff.
He looked at it.
The Universal Weapon was a divine artifact. It had been forged for the Kree Accuser Corps by craftsmen who understood metallurgy at a level that most civilizations never reached. It had never broken. He had used it for decades. It was, by any reasonable measure in the universe he operated in, indestructible.
He was holding the broken half of it.
Before the thought completed, Smith's leg came up in a straight kick that caught Ronan under the chin with full extension behind it. The impact lifted him off the pavement and sent him vertical, tumbling upward.
Smith watched him go. Brought his hands together at his side, palms forward. The energy built immediately — white-dense, compressed to a point before he released it.
The beam tracked Ronan through the air and found him.
The light was brief and total. When it passed, there was nothing where Ronan had been.
The street was quiet.
The fighters still standing — those who could stand — looked up at the figure floating in the wreckage-fogged air above the intersection. The golden aura was still up, the transformed hair still sharp against the smoke-diffused light, the eyes still that cold blue-green that didn't belong to any human spectrum. The pressure coming off him wasn't malicious. It was simply present, the way a nearby reactor is present, filling the space around it with the fact of itself.
Nobody moved toward him.
After a moment, Smith let the Super Saiyan state go.
The aura dissipated. The hair settled back to black. The pressure receded. The man floating thirty feet above the street became recognizable again — the familiar face, the unremarkable build that gave nothing away.
I've only just stabilized the transformation, he noted to himself. Can't yet suppress the aura internally. It bleeds outward until I drop the form entirely. He filed it. Something to work on.
He came down to street level.
Tony was already on his way over, boot jets limping — one leg actuator locked, one arm assembly dragging, the suit's outer panels dented and scraped down to secondary adamantium in several places. He flipped the visor up.
"Good timing," Tony said. "Another five minutes and I was out of contingencies."
Pietro materialized from somewhere to Smith's left, chest heaving, hands on his knees. "Boss." He looked up. "All civilians are out of the combat zone. Every block."
Jessica Jones emerged from the damaged pharmacy with Steve Rogers' arm over her shoulder. Rogers was moving under his own power but he was doing it slowly.
The Fraternity's main hall had a long history of hosting people who were dangerous, professionally competent, and preferred to eat without making conversation about it. Tonight it was hosting all of that at scale. The Avengers at one table. The Paragons at another. The Eternals at a third. Whatever other survivors had found their way here after the battlefield cleared, arranged around the margins.
Smith ate a piece of steak and looked around the room.
"Someone walk me through it."
Natasha set down her utensils. "Ronan the Accuser — commander of the Kree Accuser Legion. He arrived with a full deployment and pulled the World Martial Arts Tournament participant list to run targeted elimination operations. Every enhanced individual on that list got visited. At the same time, they hit the Dragon Ball counterfeit manufacturers and anyone holding public stone inventory."
She paused. "A lot of the lower-tier competitors from other countries didn't make it. Coulson's team located the mothership in the air, but they couldn't hold it and lost their aircraft — no casualties on Coulson's end. The attack pushed to New York because that's where the concentration of high-tier fighters was. Ronan's forces kept taking losses, so he brought the Dark Aster directly over the city."
"You've seen the rest. The damage here is worse than the Chitauri incursion. Pietro and the Baymax units cleared the civilian areas — that held the body count down. But the Helicarrier is gone, and everyone aboard it."
The room absorbed that for a second.
Smith said: "Dragon Balls were always going to pull attention from outside this planet. That's a reality that isn't going away."
Steve Rogers looked across the table. "That's not Dragon Ball's fault. Any enemy that comes looking for trouble on this Earth is going to pay for it."
Bruce Banner leaned forward. "Which leads to the obvious question — is this over, or is the Kree Empire going to treat Ronan's death as provocation?"
"It won't," Smith said. "The Accuser Corps broke from the Kree Empire's command structure years ago. Ronan was running a personal operation. As far as the Kree Empire's official position is concerned, their military isn't at war with Earth. Ronan kept trying to restart a conflict with the Nova Empire that the Kree government had officially ended. His death is their problem to process, not their casus belli."
He took a drink. "And if the Kree Empire develops any different ideas about Earth, I'll take those ideas apart at the source."
Jessica Jones looked at him across the table. "You could take on one of the three major empires in the universe?"
Smith considered the framing. "The three empires are formidable as institutional structures. Fleets, armies, occupied systems, logistics chains — all of that. But raw individual strength is a different question. There are people and entities in this universe who could shatter any of them without much difficulty. I'm not at the top of that range. I'm in the middle of it, by my own estimate." He paused. "But yes, if I needed to."
The table was quiet for a moment.
Tony said: "This also raises a practical problem, which is that you're going to be off-planet again at some point, and next time it might not be Ronan with a message relay. We need a way to reach you across deep space."
"Bulma left a message through the network," Smith said. "That's how I got back when I did. But you're right — a dedicated long-range communication system would be better. I'll have her build something that handles comms without combat-power detection. The detection hardware is the part that explodes when the readings get too high."
Tony managed something close to a smile. "Practical."
Natasha had been holding back the next item and now set it on the table. "Fury asked me to pass on his question. The people who died in this battle — is there a path to bringing them back?"
Smith's expression didn't change. "One-year recharge period. Nothing can be done before that. If the next tournament champion wants to make resurrection the wish, that's their chouce."
Steve Rogers set down his fork. "Smith. What if we went into the next tournament with a deliberate plan — specifically to get that wish for the people who died today? Sacrifice the competitive round."
"No."
Steve held his gaze. "They died defending this planet."
"They did." Smith's voice didn't shift. "And people die defending their cities in conflicts all over this planet, every year. Should we use the Dragon Balls to bring back every soldier from every war? Every accidental death? Every person who died because they were somewhere dangerous when something went wrong?"
"That's not—"
"World War II. World War I. Soldiers who died six months ago in conflicts that nobody at this table is paying attention to. Where does that principle end, Steve? Because if it doesn't end anywhere, the Dragon Balls stop being a competitive prize and become a standing obligation to undo every death that someone with access to the wish decides was unjust." He looked around the table. "I'm not managing that."
Steve Rogers didn't answer.
Tony glanced sideways at him and said nothing.
Jessica Jones stepped in. "Smith. Steve didn't mean it that way. We'll follow your structure. Whoever wins the next tournament will make their own call." She looked at Steve briefly. "That person will take into account what happened today."
Smith pushed his chair back. "I have things to deal with. Excuse me."
At the Eternals' table, the food had been good enough to hold attention for a while. Now that it wasn't, the conversation had found its natural subject.
Druig folded his hands on the table. "I'm glad he refused. If that door ever opens — the infrastructure of obligation it creates—" He shook his head. "Unmanageable."
Kingo swirled his glass. "You'd have the population numbers alone as a problem. Infinite resurrection plus standing armies equals people who treat dying as a tactical option." A beat. "There's also the real estate situation."
Ikaris said nothing for a moment. Then: "We've spent five thousand years guiding human civilization. Even we have to win a championship and pay a price to access the Dragon Balls. That man at that table just asked for it outright on the basis that his side had losses." He wasn't angry. He was simply noting the math.
Sersi said quietly: "Human desire scales to access. Give someone the assumption of infinite reversal, and the question becomes who controls the reversal — which means who controls outcomes." She looked at the door Smith had walked through. "People in positions of power would test his limits constantly. Even at his current strength, the pressure would be continuous."
Thena had been watching the table where the enhanced fighters were still sitting. She glanced toward where Steve Rogers had gone quiet. "He was spending someone else's political capital," she said, without particular heat. "If Smith had said yes, the generosity would have been credited to Rogers. That's what makes it easy to ask." A pause. "The last time a large number of people died in New York, Smith made the wish himself. Without being asked. He remembered that."
T'Challa, two tables over, had caught every word. The Heart-Shaped Herb had made certain acoustic ranges inconvenient in group settings.
"Smith Doyle is right," he said, to no one in particular. "The wish is a gift to whoever wins the right to make it. Using it as a correction mechanism for every casualty in every conflict — that path ends somewhere we should not want to be."
Shang-Chi nodded. Chen Haoran nodded.
Tony caught up to Smith in the corridor outside the hall.
"I'm not here as Steve's proxy," he said, getting it out of the way first. "I trust your call on the Dragon Ball question. Full stop."
Smith stopped walking. "Then what?"
"Loki's scepter." Tony kept his tone straightforward. "I want to examine it. Bulma told me last time I needed your authorization. I'm asking directly this time." He laid it out without decoration: he wanted to build a defense infrastructure that didn't depend on any one person being available. A robot force. Autonomous, globally distributed, capable of handling at least the lower tier of threats without human coordination.
Smith listened to all of it.
He thought, privately, about Ultron. About the specific shape that project had taken in other versions of this world's history. About what Ultron became once it decided its assessment of the problem was more accurate than its creators'. About the vibranium body that turned a manageable disaster into a genuinely difficult one.
He also thought about the Helicarrier and the hole in the sky above New York.
"Bulma's already run analysis on the scepter's core," he said. "The architecture embedded in the Mind Stone is functional but she flagged it as high-risk — the code is too complete to build on incrementally. It would need to be isolated, not adapted."
Tony nodded. "I heard that feedback. I work better from a hard constraint than from an open field anyway."
"Don't build Skynet."
Tony looked at him. "Skynet's processing power was roughly equivalent to a decent laptop by current standards. Give me some credit."
Smith almost laughed. He went to his office, and a moment later Loki's scepter was in his hands. He held it for a second, looking at the Mind Stone's blue gleam at the tip.
Then he handed it over.
Tony took it with both hands, handling it with the specific care of an engineer who knows exactly how much he doesn't know about what he's holding.
Privately, Smith tracked his own decision. If Ultron came out of this — if the project went sideways in the direction it had gone before — he wasn't worried about a direct confrontation. At his current level, a standard Ultron iteration couldn't survive his first strike. The only version that gave him pause was a vibranium-body iteration, and that required Wakandan cooperation that wasn't going to be straightforward to obtain.
He'd watch the project. He'd stay close enough to redirect it if it drifted.
The banquet wound down. The fighters filtered out into the New York night, back to wherever they'd left cars or aircraft or other arrangements. Tony tucked the scepter under his arm with the ease of a man carrying a golf bag and headed for his own exit.
The Mind Stone left the Fraternity headquarters for the first time since Smith had taken custody of it.