Fifty yards of beach disappeared between one heartbeat and the next. Pietro came in loose and playful, a light jab aimed at the soft spot under Arthur's ribs, the kind of tap that said gotcha rather than harm.
Arthur casually leaned two inches to the left.
The fist found nothing. Pietro's own momentum spun him half around, feet skating in the sand, and by the time he caught his balance Arthur stood exactly where he had been. Still facing the sea. Hands still in his pockets, as though nothing had happened at all.
Pietro stared blankly at the back of the wizard's head. Then he backed up and went again, properly this time. Right, then left, then high, then low, a flurry thrown faster than any eye could follow, each strike from a fresh angle.
Arthur simply swayed.
He tipped his head a fraction and a hook passed his ear. He rolled one shoulder and a straight punch slid by his jaw with an inch to spare. He stepped off a leg sweep as if it had not occurred to him to mind. He did all of it with the mild boredom of a man stepping around puddles in the road.
Pietro skidded to a stop in a cloud of white sand. He was breathing now. Not from effort. From sheer affront.
"How," he demanded, stabbing a finger at him. "You are not even looking at me. I am moving faster than sound. There is no possible way you can see me coming."
Arthur tapped the side of his own head, one finger.
"I don't need to see you, Pietro," he said softly. "I know exactly where you are. I always know where you are."
Pietro did not believe him. He was too fast for radar, too fast for human eyes. It had to be a fluke.
So he went to settle it.
He backed away down the beach. Kept going. Past the training ground, past Wanda, past the long shadows of the palms, until the family were small bright shapes behind him and Arthur was a single dark line drawn against the bright water. A clear mile of empty sand lay between them.
He dropped into a sprinter's crouch and pushed his fingers into the sand. He poured all of his buzzing power into his legs.
The world changed gears.
Sound went first. The crash of the surf stretched, and deepened, and stopped. The waves froze mid-break into solid sculptures of green glass. A seagull hung overhead with its wings spread wide, nailed to the sky. The wind died into nothing.
To Pietro it was a level, easy run. To everything else he was a line of light that physics had given up arguing with.
He ate the distance. The dark figure grew from a line to a shape to a man. Fifty yards. Twenty. Ten. Arthur stood with his back turned, watching a frozen ocean, the most relaxed man in a stopped world. Pietro drew his fist back. He would halt it an inch from the wizard's nose and let him feel the wind of it, and repay all at once every bruise and every loss from years of training under a man who never once went easy.
This one was his.
Five yards.
And then the impossible happened.
Arthur moved.
In a world where the sea had turned to glass and a bird could not finish a wingbeat, where time itself had pulled to the side of the road to let Pietro pass, the man turned his head.
Slowly. Easily. As though there were all the time in the world. Because for him, there was.
Blue eyes found Pietro's across the last few feet.
And Arthur smiled. A warm smile. Fond, almost. The smile of a man who had been waiting, with great patience, for exactly this.
Pietro's mind, fast as it had become, had no shelf to put this on. Nobody moved in the frozen world. That was the entire point of the frozen world. It belonged to him, and to him alone.
He did not get to finish the thought.
Arthur's fist came up to meet him, unhurried and perfectly placed, and Pietro ran into it at a speed that cracked the sky.
Time snapped back.
The roar of the ocean returned all at once. The seagull flapped, alarmed. And Pietro left his feet entirely, sailing backward down the beach in a long, graceless arc before a sand dune caught the whole of him and took him out of the air.
"Dad pulled it," Tristan observed, abandoning his sandcastle and rising to his feet with the calm of a boy commenting on the weather. "He could have hit much harder."
"DO IT AGAIN," Elena howled, both arms over her head.
—
Pietro lay in the wreckage of the dune and looked up at the sky. When Arthur's face arrived over him with a hand held out, he was still hunting for words.
"You moved," he managed to gasp out. "I was at full speed. The world was stopped. Everything was stopped. And you looked right at me."
"I did." Arthur pulled him up by the wrist as though he weighed nothing.
"How."
"You are fast, Pietro. But you are not the only one who is." He brushed the sand off the boy's shoulder. "I will never beat you in a race. You would lap me before I reached the trees. But a fight is not a race. A fight is reflexes, and mine are more than enough for a superhuman. Even a very fast one."
"That still does not tell me how you found me."
"Chi." Arthur touched two fingers to his own chest. "Your life force. It burns like a flare, and you drag it the whole way in. I feel where you are every instant you exist. I feel where you are going before you have finished deciding to go there." A faint smile. "I put my fist where your face was about to be. Then I waited for the rest of you to arrive."
Pietro stared at him, the arrogant bravado entirely gone, replaced by a deep, grudging respect. He wiped the sand and salt off his mouth and looked back over his shoulder.
Wanda had risen from her meditation. She stood with her arms folded and a knowing smirk playing at her lips.
"Wanda," Pietro called, rubbing his bruised jaw. "A little help here."
She laughed and stepped out onto the open sand, scarlet light flaring around both hands, her eyes catching the same colour for a moment before letting it go. "I thought you were the fastest man alive, brother. Surely you do not need me."
"He cheats. He has a magic radar."
"Then we will just have to overwhelm the radar." Wanda settled into a combat stance.
On the sidelines, the children lost their minds.
"GET HIM, WANDA," Elena screamed, both arms windmilling.
"KICK DAD'S BUTT, PIETRO!" Tristan echoed, clapping his sandy hands together.
Eileen just chuckled, leaning back in her lounger to enjoy the show.
Arthur rolled his neck once and dropped into a loose stance. Gold light traced the edges of his hands.
"Come on, then," he invited. "Show me what the Stone really gave the two of you."
—
They attacked perfectly together.
Pietro vanished, coming in low from the right flank at supersonic speed. At the exact same moment, Wanda threw a massive wave of scarlet chaos energy straight down the middle.
Arthur did not retreat. He dropped beneath the chaos wave, close enough that it lifted the hair off his head and roared past into the sea, and without looking he swept his trailing leg back. The timing was flawless. He caught Pietro across the ankles at the exact moment the boy flashed by, and the fastest man alive went cartwheeling into the surf with a tremendous splash.
Wanda did not let up. She threw both hands skyward and three full palm trees ripped out of the ground by their roots and flew at Arthur like thrown spears.
Arthur went up to meet them, twisting his body to avoid the first trunk. He punched the second one, shattering it into harmless splinters with a burst of chi. He landed gracefully on the third flying tree trunk, riding it toward the ground before jumping off lightly onto the sand.
From the shade, Eileen watched three palm trees become weapons and sighed into her drink. "I liked those trees."
Pietro came out of the water like a torpedo, and this time he had learned. He did not throw another punch into empty air. He ran instead, tight and dizzying, a shrinking circle around Arthur, three hundred miles an hour of silver blur, hunting for the half-second when the wizard's attention would land in the wrong place.
It never did.
Arthur turned with him. Not as fast, never as fast, but always to the right spot, always a fraction early. His palm met Pietro's shoulder on the second pass and shoved him off his line, so that he stumbled wide into the shallows. On the third pass Arthur was already half-turned toward where the boy would be, and a flat, chi-charged strike caught Pietro in the chest and folded him backward into the sand.
"He is reading you," Wanda called. "Stop running straight."
"I am not running straight," Pietro snapped, picking himself up.
"You are running in a circle. A circle is just a long straight line that lies about it."
Pietro skidded up beside her, breathing hard now, sand in his silver hair. The twins traded one look. Then they tried something cleverer.
Pietro ran, not at Arthur this time but around him, hauling up a roaring wall of white sand until the wizard stood blind in the eye of a small, screaming storm.
"Now, Wanda," he shouted from somewhere inside it.
A thread of scarlet slid through the spinning grit, thin and quiet, aimed straight at Arthur's mind. A flicker of confusion. Half a second of disorientation. One clean opening for Pietro to land a hit.
Arthur felt it the instant it touched him.
His Occlumency shields were absolute diamond. Wanda's first true attempt at slipping into his mind did not come within sight of anything that mattered. He caught the intruding thread, turned it around with great gentleness, and sent something cheerful straight back down the line.
Inside the sandstorm, Wanda shrieked.
Her whole vision flooded, top to bottom, with rubber ducks. Hundreds of them. Bright yellow, beady-eyed, bobbing and quacking in a relentless, cheerful tide.
She swatted wildly at the empty air, and her concentration came apart.
Arthur used the distraction. He burst out of the sandstorm with blinding, chi enhanced speed. He caught Pietro by the back of his shirt mid stride, lifting the boy completely off his feet and tossing him gently into a nearby hammock. Then he closed the last few feet to Wanda before she had shaken the ducks, set two fingers lightly against her shoulder, and sent a precise pulse of chi down her arm that locked the muscles just long enough to take the fight out of it. The scarlet light guttered and went out.
The beach went quiet, save for the crashing ocean waves and the hysterical laughter of the two children on the sidelines.
Arthur stood in the center of the ruined beach, entirely unbreathed.
"Not bad for your first battle," Arthur smiled, releasing the chi-lock on Wanda. "You both have incredible power. But power is nothing without discipline and coordination. We will keep practicing."
Pietro groaned and rolled out of the hammock, dripping and sandy, his pride somewhere under the beach. His eyes, though, were incredibly bright.
Then Pietro got to his feet, brushed himself down, and squared his shoulders.
"I am ready," he announced.
"Ready for what?" Wanda asked, rubbing her arm.
"Asgard."
Arthur did not even need to ask why.
He had stood in the golden halls of Asgard and watched the boy lose. Spar after spar to warriors who had trained for a thousand years before Pietro was born. He had lost every single time, and grinned through every loss, and came back the next morning to lose a fraction less badly than the day before. Not once had he asked to stop.
But that was before the Mind Stone.
Arthur looked at the eager gleam in Pietro's eyes. He looked at the speed humming visibly under the boy's skin.
He smiled.
"Tomorrow," he said.