Pietro stood on the glacier and breathed.
The fatigue was real. He'd burned through his reserves harder than he'd expected — running at full output for the first sustained push since the upgrade, and the gap between having power and knowing how to distribute it was making itself known. His legs were fine. His lungs were fine. It was something deeper, the energy substrate that the speed ran on, and it was depleted in a way that a few minutes of rest would address but not eliminate.
He sat down on the ice and tipped his face toward the horizon. The sun was coming up somewhere ahead of the terminator line, painting the glacier in long orange bands.
One of those bands caught something that didn't belong.
He looked twice, making sure it wasn't a surface refraction or a trick of the light angle. Then he stood up and walked toward it.
The orange glow was coming from inside the glacier itself — buried in the ice a meter down, faint but unmistakable. He crouched and looked at it through the translucent surface. Spherical. The same orange tone as the color of sunrise. Four small five-pointed stars arranged across its face.
He thought, for a moment, that it might be a gemstone — something carried down from higher elevation by glacial movement, compressed and polished over centuries into that perfect shape. He almost talked himself into leaving it.
Then he thought about whether Wanda might like it, and that settled the question.
He placed his palm flat on the glacier surface and ran a high-frequency vibration through his hand — a technique Selene had shown him during one of the training sessions, useful for situations where brute force would create too much collateral damage. The ice fractured along clean structural lines, the lattice separating without shattering, and the sphere came free.
The moment his fingers closed around it, the information arrived.
He sat back on his heels and read what had just been placed in his mind, and spent the next thirty seconds very still on a glacier in the middle of nowhere.
Across thousands of kilometers Smith Doyle received the same notification and looked up from his desk.
He reached out through the connection, found the perspective, and saw Pietro sitting on the broken ice with the Dragon Ball in his hand, looking at it with the expression of someone whose understanding of the world had just been restructured.
Smith leaned back and allowed himself a quiet moment of surprise. He'd been planning to retrieve this one personally if no expedition team reached it before the tournament invitations went out. He hadn't anticipated that the wildcard on the glacier would be his own speedster.
"Pietro," he said, to no one in the room. "Well done."
Back on the Fraternity's lawn, Wanda was watching the timer. Wenwu had his arms crossed. Ying Li was listening to the faint sound of the city at distance, which was the most interesting thing available while waiting for a person to run around the planet.
Smith was looking at nothing visible.
Wanda noticed. "What is it?"
"Dragon Ball," Smith said. "Pietro found the last one."
Wenwu turned his head. "The last one?"
"All seven are now accounted for." Smith looked at Wanda. "I'll call a meeting when he's back. You should both attend — you'll get the full picture there."
Wanda processed this. She looked at the careful expression on Wenwu's face and at the way Ying Li had gone slightly still, and understood that she was watching people who recognized the weight of what had just been said, even if she didn't yet have the context to match it.
Whatever Dragon Balls were, they mattered. Whatever the meeting would contain, it was something significant enough that Smith was inviting them directly.
She turned back toward the gate and waited.
Pietro returned at a reduced pace — still fast by any conventional standard, but visibly below his earlier output. He crossed the lawn and slowed to a stop in front of the group, breathing harder than his first departure had suggested he would be.
Wanda turned the timer around to show him.
"Eleven minutes, thirty-two seconds," she said. "Fifty-seven-point-nine kilometers per second, average."
Wenwu looked at him. "I've had a thousand years to encounter things I couldn't explain. You have just joined that list."
Pietro stretched his arms above his head and rolled his shoulders. He was burning to say something about the break on the glacier and the Dragon Ball and the entire situation, but he landed first on the other piece of news, the one that was still living rent-free in his chest.
"My speed is nothing," he said. "On the way through the rainforest — there was another speedster. A woman. Golden energy trail. I hit my limit chasing her and she pulled away anyway. She was gone before I could close any gap at all."
Wanda stared at him. "You're serious."
"I just ran around the Earth in eleven minutes and she made me feel like I was standing still."
Wenwu shook his head slowly. "A thousand years," he said again, quieter this time. "Not once."
"Makkari," Smith said. "One of the Eternals. Speed is her specific ability — she's been running at those levels for five thousand years. You couldn't catch her today." He looked at Pietro without judgment, just information. "That's a benchmark, not a ceiling."
Pietro absorbed this. The competitive instinct was already doing its work — not despair, but calculation. A target with a number attached. Something to train toward.
Wenwu glanced at Smith. He'd met the Eternals. The memory of standing in the same room as Ikaris, the quiet assessment that had passed between fighters of different centuries — he hadn't known at the time which Eternal was the fastest. Now he had that piece of information.
"Which one was Makkari among the group?" he asked.
"You haven't met her," Smith said. "She doesn't do the social occasions."
Pietro reached into his jacket pocket and held out the four-star Dragon Ball to Smith without preamble.
"I think this is yours."
Smith looked at it. Then at Pietro.
Pietro shrugged, a little self-conscious about the fanboy logic but not enough to take it back. "You organized this whole thing. You should have it. Use it for whatever you need."
Smith took the Dragon Ball. He turned it once in his hand, feeling the familiar weight of it, and said, "Thank you."
Then he smiled — not the public expression he used for meetings and announcements, but the small, genuine one that Pietro had seen maybe a dozen times in two years.
"That meeting," Smith said, tossing back the ball to Pietro. "Tonight, after dinner. Everyone should hear this together."