Fury kept most of what he was thinking off his face.
He'd thought about Peggy Carter and her decades in a care facility and the young man sitting across from him who looked twenty-seven years old and carried seventy years of missed time in his eyes, and he understood precisely why that was the wish Steve Rogers would choose. He also understood that saying anything about the objective odds would accomplish nothing useful.
Steve wasn't asking for Fury's assessment of his chances. He was asking for information and for the space to make his own decision.
Fury respected that. He'd let Steve handle it.
"I have someone who can brief you properly," he said. "Clint Barton — Hawkeye. He's at the Avengers base. He knows the Dragon Ball file better than anyone on my active roster."
Steve nodded. "I'll go see him."
"The competitor slot comes with a spectator allocation," Fury said, keeping his voice even. "I'd like the list."
Steve thought about it for a moment. "Give one spot to Jessica. You can fill the rest however you need."
Fury noted this. Practical. Minimal attachment to the allocation. He filed it.
"One more question," Fury said. "How exactly did you end up with it?"
Steve paused. Something in his expression suggested he'd been considering how to frame this, and had decided that the truth was simpler. "The lawn at Peggy's care facility. I stepped on it in the wet grass and nearly went down."
Fury looked at him.
"Sitting in that lawn," Steve added, "apparently uncollected, for however long it's been sitting there."
The silence in the office had a particular quality.
Fury had been tracking Dragon Ball intelligence for months. He had S.H.I.E.L.D.'s full resource apparatus pointed at the collection problem. Tony Stark had found one And Steve Rogers had stumbled over one in a garden path while going to visit an old woman.
"That's remarkable luck," Fury said.
"Or unremarkable," Steve said. "Depends on how you look at it." He stood up. "I'll contact Barton."
Fury watched him leave and sat back in his chair.
The accounting in his head ran quickly. Three confirmed Dragon Balls in his intelligence picture: the two with Tony Stark, now confirmed, and the six-star ball that had just walked out of his office in Steve Rogers' jacket pocket. The five operatives who'd appeared at Rose Manor had been moving toward a Dragon Ball. Unknown holders for the remaining balls. The tournament window was approaching and S.H.I.E.L.D. had, until approximately four minutes ago, zero competitor slots.
He didn't have good options for winning the championship. Carol Danvers was off-world, operating on a scale that made Earth's problems feel small, and asking her to come back for this would require either a genuine extinction-level case or a personal ask that he wasn't certain she'd prioritize over whatever she was doing. Even if she came back, her wish — if she made one — would almost certainly go toward some cosmic refugee situation rather than anything Fury could predict or shape.
Steve Rogers at least had a clear, comprehensible wish. And he'd fight hard for it.
Let Steve worry about Tony Stark, Fury thought. That's the first wall.
His phone rang. He looked at the screen.
Pierce.
"What can I do for you, sir?"
Pierce's voice was pleasant and direct in the way it always was. "Come up when you have a moment. Nothing urgent, just something I wanted to hand off in person."
Fury stood and straightened his jacket.
Pierce's office occupied a corner of the Triskelion's executive floor — high ceilings, clean lines, the kind of space that said authority without announcing it. He was standing at his desk when Fury came in, and there was a briefcase open on the surface.
"Ever since I handed you the directorship," Pierce said, with the easy warmth of old institutional friendship, "you've never come up here unless someone sent for you."
"That means the building is running right," Fury said. "What's on your mind, sir?"
Pierce gestured at the briefcase.
Fury crossed to the desk and looked inside.
He kept his face neutral through a considerable amount of internal commentary. Two Dragon Balls in one afternoon. The universe apparently had opinions about his schedule.
The ball in Pierce's case was different from Steve's.
"Dragon Ball," Fury said.
"Dragon Ball," Pierce confirmed. "I found it on a beach walk. Once I understood what it was, I decided the right move was to bring it here." He closed the case and moved it toward Fury's side of the desk. "You're better positioned to handle it than I am. The Avengers, the enhanced individual framework — that's all S.H.I.E.L.D., which means it's yours."
Fury looked at him. "You don't have a wish you want to see fulfilled?"
Pierce smiled, and it reached his eyes with the practiced ease of a man who had been generating sincere-looking expressions in boardrooms for thirty years. "World peace. An Earth that doesn't have to worry about what's coming from space." He shrugged. "I'm a bureaucrat. These things are better left to people who can actually put them into practice."
"I'll remember a spectator spot for you."
"That's all I ask."
Fury picked up the briefcase. He didn't ask about the beach. He didn't ask how a senior Security Council official had happened to find a Dragon Ball on a casual walk when S.H.I.E.L.D.'s full intelligence apparatus had been working the problem for months. He understood, with the bone-deep fluency of a man who had spent decades in rooms where people said one true thing and meant several others, that the answer to those questions would be whatever Pierce had already decided it would be.
What mattered was the ball. S.H.I.E.L.D. now had two competitor slots and two Dragon Balls, and the tournament hadn't even opened yet.