Carol Danvers had been back on Earth for two weeks. She was still recalibrating.
She had left a planet defined by public buses and payphones. She returned to a world of Universal Capsule gravity vehicles, Baymax medical units in standard hospitals, and flying cars queued in dedicated aerial lanes above San Francisco. At the tournament registration desk, the Combat Capability Detector booth had sparked an entertaining six-minute technical problem the moment she stepped in front of it.
The reading spiked instantly. It pegged at the instrument ceiling and continued straining upward. The technician checked the display, looked at her, checked the display again, and typed "ERROR — LIMIT EXCEEDED" into the manual override field. They issued her a registration number without a formal power rating.
She thought of Nick Fury. Standing in that space station, fixing her with his one eye and his direct, unvarnished manner, outlining the tournament and the reality of the prize. She had been ready to leave. He told her there was someone worth winning for. He offered no elaboration. She stayed, partly because she trusted him, and partly because she wanted to know exactly who he meant.
If it turns out he was lying, she thought, watching the other contestants collect their draw slips, I'll take it up with him directly.
She drew her number. She located her zone, sat down, and studied the staging area.
Wanda opened her slip. Zone 3. She turned to Pietro.
He held his up. Zone 1.
"No early round between us," she said.
"We'd have to meet in the finals." Pietro twirled a colored pencil between his fingers. A habit, not a display of nerves. "I just need to avoid drawing anyone genuinely dangerous in the early brackets. As long as the draw is reasonably kind, making the final should be straightforward."
He looked past Wanda's shoulder. "Steve. What did you get?"
Steve Rogers stood nearby, studying the Zone 2 bracket display. He had the focused look of a man who had been running a complex calculation for a year, finally arriving at the moment to test the math.
"Zone 2. Number forty-five."
Jessica Jones appeared beside him. "Zone 2. Guess we're not fighting each other before the final rounds."
Wanda looked at her. "I didn't know you were entering."
"Seemed like the right time." Jessica scanned the staging area. "Hulk is gone and Thor left after Sokovia. The whole field is thinner at the top than it looks."
"I hope we get to meet in the finals," Wanda said.
"I'd prefer we didn't," Jessica replied.
Wanda smiled. Pietro laughed. "Same sentiment, different tone."
At the far end of the staging area, Scott and Hope stood close, keeping their voices low.
"Two hundred and seventy-four registered," Scott said. He had run the numbers several times on the ferry ride over. "Sixteen spots. Eight zones. Two advance per zone. The bracket gets tight very fast."
"Which is why we run conservative in the prelims," Hope said. "Serum enhancement gives us a baseline that puts us ahead of maybe seventy percent of this field without reaching for anything special. We establish a profile, we don't reveal the suit's full capability range, and we stay out of the early speculation."
"Keep the trump cards."
"Keep the trump cards. If a situation develops where we absolutely need them, we use them. But there is no strategic advantage in showing our ceiling to people who will be in the final with us."
Scott nodded. Across the room, a man cracked his knuckles, projecting the serene confidence of someone who had decided he was going to win before he even walked in. Scott had carried that same confidence into certain jobs before. It had occasionally worked out.
"What if we end up in the same zone as each other?"
"Then we handle it when it comes." Hope checked her slip again. "We're not in the same zone. I already looked."
In the main VIP box suspended above the arena floor, Smith sat flanked by Bulma and Fox. The box offered an unobstructed sightline across all eight preliminary zones and the surrounding audience tiers.
Smith ran a quiet ki sense across the contestant pool. He cataloged the signatures. Familiar profiles from the previous tournament. Recognized individuals from past operational encounters. Several newcomers possessing interesting, though unremarkable, readings.
Then something caught his attention.
It was not loud. It was not aggressive. It was a power signature that sat above the measurable range, the way a blinding light overwhelms a photographic sensor. It was undetectable by the instrument itself, registering only through the instrument's struggle to process it.
He traced the source.
Captain Marvel stood reading the Zone assignment board. Her arms were folded, her expression focused and entirely neutral.
"Huh," Smith said.
Bulma looked up from her tablet. "What?"
"Carol Danvers."
Fox pulled up the registration file instantly. The power rating field read: INSTRUMENT LIMIT EXCEEDED — NO READING OBTAINED. He looked at Smith. "Is this a problem?"
"Not a problem." Smith watched her. In every timeline he possessed data for, Carol Danvers returned to Earth only following a catastrophic trigger. Thanos. The Blip. The collapse of half the universe's population. Yet here she was, a decade early, attending a martial arts tournament on an island in the Pacific, because Nick Fury paged her and proved persuasive.
"Things are getting considerably more interesting," Smith said.
Bulma focused on Carol. "How strong is she? What's her background?"
"She's an Earthling."
Bulma blinked. "From Earth? She registered the same way as that woman. Exceeds all limits?"
"Same category, yes." He paused. "Which makes the Ikaris match-up much less predictable than I thought it was going to be."
He evaluated the field. Ikaris. The strongest warrior among the Eternals. Consistent output, deeply experienced. Carol. Cosmic energy absorption and projection. Binary mode capacity. No practical ceiling recognizable by Earth-based instrumentation. Wanda. Chaos magic. A highly volatile power curve with theoretically no ceiling, but heavily dependent on emotional state. Quill. He had tapped his Ego bloodline during the Guardians' first Earth encounter in ways still undergoing assessment.
Everyone else…he slotted several tiers below those four.
His gaze shifted to one other contestant. A young man in a custom full-coverage suit, running through pre-match stretches. He carried the nervous, focused energy of someone anticipating an event for months, only to find himself slightly overwhelmed by its actual scale. The suit was blue-gray. Clearly self-designed, lacking any commercial polish.
Peter Parker. Tony's young protégé. Spider-Man, in the other timelines, though no one here used that name yet. The mask covering his face ensured no one in the stadium would connect him to Tony Stark unless they already knew.
Smith considered what Peter's presence meant for the larger trajectory. In the timelines he knew, the Civil War among the Avengers stemmed, in part, from Baron Zemo and the Winter Soldier. In this version, the Winter Soldier had been removed from the board during the Potomac engagement. Sokovia resolved without civilian casualties, preempting the political pressure that generated the Accords. Zemo lacked a lever to pull.
Whether Peter would forge the same close connection with Tony under these altered circumstances remained a genuinely open question.
He filed the thought and returned his attention to the stadium floor.
In a separate VIP box, Thaddeus Ross rolled an unlit cigar between his fingers. He watched the preliminary zones take shape. Betty sat beside him, her spine straight. Her eyes swept the contestant area, executing a systematic search for a specific face.
"Nothing," she said. "No trace anywhere. The Avengers can't find him."
"There isn't a trace to find," Ross replied. "Every time Banner disappeared before, he left some kind of trail. A shelter, a medical record, a sighting. This time, nothing." He examined the cigar. "Which is consistent with what Smith told you."
"He left Earth," Betty said. Her tone was flat, resisting acceptance.
"That's what the man said. I have no reason to doubt his intelligence on this." Ross looked down at the arena. "Banner is alive. He will come back. Until then..." He shrugged. "We trust the director."
Betty stared at the empty zone in front of her. The space where Bruce would be, if the world were arranged correctly. She said nothing.
The Eternals occupied a private box on the eastern tier, set back from the main viewing angle. The position suited individuals who preferred observing without being observed.
Thena sat with her legs crossed, her chin resting on one hand. She watched Ikaris's registration number flash on the Zone 7 display. Ajak stood behind her. Gilgamesh, having polished off two servings from the catering tray, was starting on his third.
"He told us not to register," Thena noted. Not a complaint. An observation. "Last tournament, he argued against the whole thing."
"He wanted to fight Smith," Ajak said. "He has been recalibrating since the Kree battle. Watching someone destroy a city with a single output changes the math."
Kingo leaned over the railing. "If he wins the championship, what does he wish for? He's never said."
Gilgamesh set his fork down. "He doesn't have a wish. He just wants the sparring session."
The assessment settled over the group.
"He doesn't want anything," Druig said from the corner of the box. "He just wants to know where the ceiling is." He looked at the Zone 7 display. "I don't think anyone in this tournament is going to lose to him."
"The last champion was Gilgamesh," Ajak pointed out.
Gilgamesh looked down at his plate.
"Ikaris is stronger than I am," Gilgamesh said. "That is not a qualification. It is just true. But the field this cycle isn't the same field. Last time, the gap between the top and the rest was significant. This time..." He nodded toward the staging area. "There is at least one person down there whose output I genuinely cannot estimate."
Sersi, who had watched the staging area in quiet concentration, spoke up. "The woman who caused the equipment failure at the registration desk."
"We will see," Ajak said.
Makkari sat at the far end of the box. Her focus lay elsewhere. Her eyes tracked Pietro the moment he entered the staging area. She raised one hand and signed. I know him. From the Sokovia evacuation. He was fast. He moves like someone who has never had to be careful.
She paused.
He is not as fast as me.
Everyone in the box nodded. No one disagreed.
Across the stadium, intelligence agencies claimed the general seating rows closest to the preliminary rings. S.H.I.E.L.D., SWORD, the CIA, Interpol, and four national intelligence services from three continents. Every agent held a tablet or a handheld recorder. All logged the exact same data points. Combat approach. Power application. Stress response. Identifiable weakness. The first tournament yielded three successful recruitment outcomes. This cycle promised more candidates.
In a private box two tiers above the SWORD position, Jiaying sat with a small contingent from Afterlife. Raina, Gordon, and two others who had not seen the outside world in several years. They absorbed the stadium's scale with a mixture of wonder and tactical assessment. Jiaying watched the staging area. She maintained the focused quiet of a woman conducting an evaluation she had long prepared for.
Skye had not registered this cycle. She was working. That was acceptable. Jiaying was here to observe the field and understand the tournament from the inside.
She located the Zone 3 display. She found the number assigned to the young woman in the red combat jacket.
She watched her for a long time.
The host's voice boomed through the stadium address system. The delivery carried the practiced energy of a professional who knew exactly when to let a moment breathe.
"Zone 1, opening match. Contestants thirty-nine and forty, please approach."
In the Zone 1 waiting area, Pietro checked his slip, looked at the ring, and smiled. The smile of a man completely devoid of anxiety.
Wanda sat in the front row of the audience section beside Jessica Jones. "Don't embarrass yourself."
"I won't embarrass myself," Pietro said, slipping the colored pencils into his jacket pocket. "I can't promise my opponent won't be embarrassed."
He stepped into the ring.
His opponent was massive. He carried the build and posture of a man who had been the strongest person in every room he had entered for the last fifteen years. He evaluated Pietro. Pietro was not large. He was not conventionally intimidating. He stood in a relaxed stance with his hands tucked in his pockets. The large man made his assessment.
"Kid," the man said, his accent thick Volgograd. "I won't hold back. If it gets too much, tap out."
Pietro tilted his head. "You don't know who I am?"
"Should I?"
At the edge of the ring, Xu Wenwu stood with his hands clasped behind his back. He radiated the focused stillness of a man who had seen enough matches that surprise was no longer a variable.
"Zone 1, match one. Thirty minutes maximum. Begin."
The final syllable had barely cleared Xu Wenwu's lips when Pietro moved.
The large man felt a brief brush against his cheek. Barely perceptible. A quick, light contact. Pietro stood in exactly the same spot, hands in his pockets, his expression unchanged.
The audience began to laugh.
The large man furrowed his brow. He touched his cheek. His hand came away smeared with black. He stared at his palm.
Above the ring, the massive event screen displayed a tight close-up of his face. Rendered in careful detail with a black colored pencil, right on his cheek, sat a small turtle.
The large man stared at Pietro.
His arm stretched.
It elongated like rubber. Six feet. Eight feet. Snapping across the ring with the speed of a released spring. The crowd noise instantly shifted from laughter to intense, focused attention.
Pietro watched the fist arrive exactly where he had just been standing.
"You're slow," he said from behind the man's left shoulder.
He drove his shoulder forward. Not hard enough to cause injury. Exactly hard enough to achieve the desired result. The large man flew across the ring boundary at an angle, slammed into the padding on the far side, and dropped. Stunned. Not hurt. Definitely out of bounds.
Xu Wenwu checked the position. He looked at the man. He looked at Pietro.
"Winner, number forty."
Zone 1 fell quiet. The specific silence of a group simultaneously recalculating their estimates. Several contestants leaned in, murmuring in various languages. The translations all amounted to the same question. How fast was that?
The stadium screens ran the replay. Fifty times slow motion. Full trajectory tracking. The colored pencil contact rendered in frame-by-frame detail. At fifty times slow motion, Pietro's form became visible. Clear enough to track. Fast enough that every Zone 1 contestant watching understood exactly what the opening of their bracket entailed.
One fighter rubbed his eyes.
Another muttered, "I didn't catch it even in slow motion."
"That's because fifty times slow isn't slow enough," the first one said. "Did you see the Zone 6 ring? That woman over there who lit up the detector—"
They looked at each other and turned their attention back to their own upcoming matches.
In the SWORD box, Nick Fury watched the replay complete its cycle.
"Pietro Maximoff," Hill noted. "Quicksilver. That is the designation he received at Sokovia. He and Wanda both participated in the rescue and the fight."
"I know who he is." Fury watched the officials prep Zone 1 for the second match. "Both twins signed up this year. They are genuine threats to the final bracket."
"You aren't concerned?"
"I am not concerned." Fury looked toward the staging area, where Carol Danvers waited in the Zone 5 section for her number to be called. "Pietro is fast. He is very fast. He is probably the fastest person in the preliminary field."
He paused.
"Carol is faster."