Pietro held up a hand before Wanda could say anything else.
"I need to tell you something first."
She waited.
"Smith and Bulma and Fox," he said carefully. "That situation is — it's not straightforward. I figured it out at Christmas. A few of the longer-serving people here confirmed it when I asked." He watched her face. "I'm saying this as your brother."
Wanda looked at the floor. Just for a second — a brief, controlled moment — and then looked back up with an expression that gave nothing away.
"How about," she said, "you tell me what you're planning to do with the Dragon Ball?"
Pietro recognized the redirect for what it was and let it stand. He wasn't going to push. She was his sister and she was twenty-four years old and capable of making her own decisions, and the most he could do was make sure she had the information. He'd done that.
What he privately thought was that if Wanda was going to develop feelings for anyone, it could be significantly worse than Smith Doyle. But that was not a thought he intended to say out loud, and he moved on.
"It's yours," he said, and pushed the Dragon Ball across the table toward her. "I picked it up thinking it might be something you'd like, before I knew what it was. That doesn't change."
Wanda looked at the four-star ball. "Pietro."
"You're more suited for that competition than I am. My ability is speed — I hit things fast, but I don't hit them with much beyond momentum. Your chaos magic has actual destructive potential. And—" He grimaced. "I ran with a weapon during the test and it burned up. The force field protects my clothes and my body but it doesn't extend outward far enough to cover anything I'm carrying."
Wanda turned the Dragon Ball over in her hands. "You're going to need weapons made from something that can handle the heat transfer at your velocity."
"I know. Gold-titanium burns off now. I don't know what the threshold material would be." He shrugged. "But that's a logistics problem. The Dragon Ball is yours."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"Thank you," she said. Which, from Wanda, was equivalent to a considerable speech.
She set the ball in her lap and tilted her head. "Wenwu was at the last tournament. He won it."
"I know. I want to hear the whole thing — both tournaments, from someone who was actually there."
Wanda stood up. "Then let's go find out what we're actually dealing with."
In a secure facility accessible only through a specific sequence of after-hours protocols, Alexander Pierce looked at six virtual projections arranged in a loose semicircle and felt the specific frustration of a man whose organization had theoretical global reach and practically no useful assets for the problem in front of him.
"The Dragon Ball collection window has closed," he said. "We need to discuss tournament strategy."
Madame Viper spoke first. "Is there no avenue to acquire Selene's ball? The Paragons have it now."
"No. I sent five Winter Soldiers. She put them all down in two seconds and walked away. The gap in capability is not something we bridge with the assets currently available to this organization." Pierce kept his voice level. "I want that on the record so we don't waste time revisiting it."
Baron Strucker leaned forward in his projection. "Direct confrontation is off the table. What about removal? The Winter Soldier program was built for that function."
"Same answer. The gap is too large. If the five-man team couldn't restrain her in open combat, a single operative doesn't change the math."
Gideon Malick had been quiet. He spoke now with the measured tone of a man who was used to being the most patient person in any room. "If we cannot collect the balls and cannot take them by force, the question becomes whether we participate at all." A pause. "My family's position know that a Dragon Ball wish represents a generational opportunity. If that opportunity cannot be ours, denying it to others has its own strategic value."
Several people around the projection array went still in the way that indicated they knew exactly what Malick was suggesting and were calculating how they felt about it.
Madame Viper said, "I object. One failed attempt doesn't mean the next one is also out of reach. Destroying the balls forfeits the future."
Strucker nodded. "Zola's network gave us better mapping this cycle than we've had for any previous operation. If we begin twelve months early on the next cycle, the collection window is achievable." He glanced at Pierce. "And the tournament itself is intelligence. Watching how these competitors perform against each other tells us things we can't get any other way."
The third figure — Strucker, who had been quiet since the second exchange — said flatly, "My branch has no enhanced individuals above baseline. We're observers at best. But I'd like time to study the Dragon Balls themselves before we commit to any course of action. There may be properties we haven't identified."
Pierce looked at the projection array and did the accounting. Malick wanted to burn it down if they couldn't win. Viper wanted to preserve future access. Strucker wanted intelligence. Nobody had useful assets to offer. The Extremis formula was in HYDRA's network via Zola's copy, but turning that into a combat-capable force took time they didn't have before the tournament opened.
He'd started this meeting hoping to build a coordinated strategy. What he had instead was a fragmented organization where each branch was managing its own calculation and calling it collective planning.
"Malick's proposal stays on the table as a last resort," Pierce said. "If we reach a point where the tournament is clearly unwinnable and the winning wish would cause us direct damage, we discuss it then. Not before." He looked around the array. "Until that point, we participate, we observe, and we use every asset we actually have. If anyone develops something useful between now and the invitations, I want to hear about it immediately."
He cut the connection without waiting for responses.
The projections vanished. The room was quiet.
Pierce sat in the dark for a moment, thinking about the five Winter Soldiers on the Rose Manor courtyard and Selene walking through them like they were standing in place. Then he stood up, straightened his jacket, and started thinking about what twelve months of preparation actually looked like if you were willing to be thorough about it.