Pietro's suit was not standard issue.
After Smith had helped Pietro develop his abilities, he'd sat him down and been very direct about the equipment situation. The Fraternity's logistics division, drawing from the material science work that had originally come out of the Continental Hotel's armoring operations, had produced something that split the difference between protection and mobility — a bulletproof underlayer built into clothing that could actually keep up with him. Lighter than anything in the original Continental inventory, with enough flex to accommodate speeds that would have shredded conventional fabrics at the seams. The style options were unrestricted. Pietro had taken full advantage of that.
He was wearing a blue track jacket now, which seemed appropriate.
Wanda looked at him across the living room couch, genuinely happy in the uncomplicated way that she usually reserved for things that mattered.
"Ten times," she said again, tasting the number. "Smith doesn't do anything halfway, does he."
Pietro's expression went somewhere between pride and open hero worship, which was a combination he'd long since stopped being embarrassed about. "This is literally the second most valuable thing he put in that tower, after the Senzu Bean. He gave it to me because I hung Christmas lights. I decorated a building and he gave me this." He held up the empty bottle, then set it down. "I want to test it properly."
"How?"
"Full circuit of the Earth. Starting from the base's outer lawn. You time it."
Wanda looked at him for a moment, head tilted. "You have the stamina for that?"
"I think so." He flexed his hands, feeling the new baseline sitting under his skin like a different gear he hadn't known was there. "Before today, maybe not. Now — I genuinely don't know where the ceiling is. That's the point of testing."
She was already standing up.
They took it out to the main lawn behind the residential wing — a wide open rectangle of grass that gave Pietro a clear run to the perimeter gate and the open ground beyond. Wanda borrowed a precision timer from the equipment room and held it loosely in one hand, a small condensed sphere of chaos magic in the other.
They hadn't sent any announcement. But the Fraternity was rarely entirely empty.
Xu Wenwu and Ying Li came around the corner of the building on an evening walk, the kind of unhurried circuit of the grounds they'd been taking most evenings since Ying Li had arrived. She saw the timer and the way Pietro was stretching his shoulders and said, "What are they testing?" with the easy curiosity of someone who had decided, several weeks ago, that the Fraternity would continuously surprise her and she might as well enjoy it.
Wenwu had no objection to watching. They came over.
Pietro explained without preamble: he was going to run the full circumference of the Earth and see how long it took.
Wenwu's initial expression was politely neutral — the expression of someone whose power had been measured in the hundreds and who had seen a great deal. Then Pietro mentioned the super divine water, and Wenwu recalibrated quietly. He'd taken super divine water himself. He knew what it did.
Ying Li covered the distance in a shorter time. The Dragon Heart was her own power, bone-deep, not dependent on external artifacts. But even she found herself reassessing the young man standing on the lawn.
A voice came from behind them. "Looks like someone put that water to good use."
Smith walked across the grass toward the small group with the unhurried pace of a man who had been watching from a window and decided the entertainment was worth coming outside for. He'd finished the conversation with Maya Hansen, done a round of administrative work, and noticed Pietro's initial test lap around the residential level with the particular peripheral awareness he maintained of the base's movement patterns.
Pietro went visibly straighter when Smith arrived. The fanboy instinct was genuine and had never fully resolved itself into anything more dignified, despite two years of proximity.
"It would be an honor, boss," Pietro managed.
Smith nodded at Wanda. "Whenever you're ready."
Wanda rolled the sphere of chaos energy between her fingers, compressed it to the size of a marble, and threw it straight up. At the top of its arc, it detonated — a sharp, clear crack, like a starting pistol made out of something older than gunpowder.
Pietro went.
Ying Li had been watching the space where he'd been standing. One moment there was a person, and then there was a streak of blue at the perimeter gate, and then there was nothing except the sound of the gate mechanisms registering a pass-through at a speed they had not been designed to measure.
Wenwu's face was no longer neutral. He stood very still, running the arithmetic. His power came from the Ten Rings, which meant it existed outside his body until he called it — there was an activation interval, however brief. Against that speed, the interval would be enough. He wouldn't get the shield up in time. The realization landed without drama, just as information.
Ying Li's Dragon Heart was her own strength. She had no activation delay. But Pietro's attack vector, at that velocity, would reach her before her nervous system could route a response. She watched the gate and thought about this with the calm assessment of someone who had survived a great deal and was not particularly frightened by the fact that the world contained things faster than her.
Smith stood with his arms at his sides and watched.
He could see Pietro. Not the blur that everyone else was tracking — the actual figure, each footfall, which leg led at the gate, how many strides from the starting mark to the perimeter. Pietro's speed was real and substantial and represented a genuine step-change from where he'd been three hours ago.
And it wasn't his ceiling. The super divine water unlocked what was already there — it didn't create new capacity. It released suppressed capacity. Which meant that with further training, further development, Pietro had room to grow from this new baseline in the same way he'd grown from his original one.
Smith narrowed his eyes slightly and thought about the Flash. About what that archetype meant, fully realized. About whether the right combination of training structure and time could bring Pietro to something approaching that level in this universe.
It was worth finding out.
The timer in Wanda's hand was still running. She watched the numbers and said nothing. Wenwu stood beside her and watched the sky, as if Pietro might reappear from an unexpected direction.
The gate registered a return pass.
Pietro came back across the lawn and slowed to a stop on the grass, breathing hard but not ragged — working, not spent. He looked at the timer in Wanda's hand.
She turned it to show him.
His eyebrows went up.
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