"More superheroes is genuinely good for us," Smith said. "More coverage, more response capacity, less that falls on a single point of failure." He set down the Afterlife file. "The other side of that is equally predictable — the more enhanced individuals there are in the open, the more that some of them end up on the wrong side of it. Supervillains are just superheroes with different motivations."
Fox nodded. "We've been building contingency frameworks for exactly that. Right now the social environment is favorable — enhanced individuals are treated well, the incentive structure pushes toward legitimate work. The ones who turn are mostly people who were already criminals before the abilities showed up."
"Keep an eye on Afterlife specifically," Smith said. "Jiaying runs a tight community, but tight communities have pressure. And the Terrigen process produces materials that are lethal to non-Inhumans — that's a liability that doesn't stay contained forever."
He glanced around. "Where's Bulma?"
"Studying your spacecraft. She hasn't come up for air since you brought it back."
Smith decided not to interrupt. Whatever Bulma extracted from the Saiyan propulsion architecture would be useful eventually. She'd surface when she had something to report.
"Get Ajak in here."
At the Triskelion, Fury sat with the information for a long time before he did anything with it.
Hill had given him the corrected account: Tony's wish had been his parents. Both of them, alive. Howard Stark and Maria Stark had materialized on the tournament platform and gone home with their son. The Battle of New York resurrection — all of it, everyone who had died in the invasion — that had been Smith's second wish.
Two wishes
Fury had spent months operating under the assumption that the Dragon Ball granted one wish per cycle, full stop. That assumption was now demonstrably wrong, and everything he'd built on top of it needed to be revised.
The Howard Stark problem alone was going to be complicated. Howard wasn't just a name from the past — he was a founder. His fingerprints were on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s original architecture. People who had known him, worked with him, built careers in the organization he'd helped create — some of them were still operational. The moment his resurrection became public knowledge, Fury could already project the cascade of complications that would follow.
He filed it under manage carefully and moved on.
The next cycle. Tournament competitor assessment. He'd run the analysis before, but the field had changed since then. He thought briefly about Ghost — Ava Starr, quantum phasing, effectively untouchable in her default state. The problem was that being untouchable and being capable of winning were different things. Her offensive output hadn't been enhanced by the quantum instability, only her defensive profile. Given the confirmed combat ratings of the likely field, she'd be a hard counter to conventional opponents and largely irrelevant against anyone genuinely powerful.
He ruled her out and pulled the pager from the desk drawer.
Carol. Captain Marvel. Off-world, unavailable, operating somewhere in a different part of the galaxy on problems that weren't Earth's problems. He'd sent one page, years ago, in an emergency. She'd come. The question was whether he could get her back in time for a tournament cycle that didn't yet have a confirmed date.
He'd start the process early.
The stone market had gone strange within days.
S.H.I.E.L.D. had standing orders to collect perfectly spherical natural stones wherever they appeared. HYDRA's senior leadership, having watched an entire population of New York dead return to life, had reached the obvious conclusion and issued the same order through their own channels. The Eternals had been running collection operations for months. Wakanda's intelligence service had flagged the pattern and started their own sweep.
Four major organizations simultaneously buying up round stones from every geological survey, auction house, private collector, and geological supply company on the planet.
The price movement was immediate. Speculators noticed the buying pressure before anyone identified the source, and counterfeiters followed within forty-eight hours — polished spheres of every common mineral, artificially rounded, flooded into a market that had no reliable way to distinguish genuine candidates from manufactured knockoffs at scale.
Skye, from her rooftop position in Manhattan, watched a Rising Tide alert flag three separate large-scale stone purchases in the tri-state area over a single weekend and added it to her growing file on the spherical stone phenomenon. The prices on the dark web listing she'd found had doubled since she'd first noticed it.
Something was happening. She didn't have the full picture yet.
Fox brought Ajak and Sersi up personally.
Ajak carried herself with the specific quality of someone who had been doing this for thousands of years — not arrogance, exactly, but a deep settled patience that made the room feel slightly smaller. Sersi was warmer, more present, her attention genuinely curious as she took in the office.
"Mr. Smith." Ajak inclined her head. "It's good to finally meet properly."
"Likewise." Smith gestured toward the chairs. "What brings you to New York?"
"Before we discuss that—" Ajak turned slightly. "I'd like to introduce Sersi. Her ability is the direct transformation of matter at the atomic level. Any substance, any form, given sufficient energy."
Sersi didn't wait for prompting. She raised one hand, drew moisture from the air in a thin stream, and shaped it. Thirty seconds later, a gold dagger rested in her palm. Clean edges. Correct weight, by the look of it.
Smith studied it. "Useful. For the Eternals, I imagine material wealth is a fairly minor concern."
Ajak didn't argue the point. "It is. But Sersi's ability has other applications." She set her hands on the table. "Mr. Smith. Thena has been suffering from Mahd Wy'ry for centuries and there is no known treatment among our kind." A pause. "I would like to ask you to use the Dragon Ball to wish for a cure. In exchange, Sersi can manufacture whatever materials you need."
Smith leaned back. He'd expected this — had expected it since Ajak's first visit, when she'd been testing the water around Shenron's capabilities. He gave the offer the consideration it deserved.
"The trade doesn't work," he said. "If I need materials, I ask the dragon. Shenron can produce an entire planet's worth of any substance I specify — no intermediary, no energy cost to anyone else, no ceiling on quantity." He looked at Sersi directly. "I don't say that to diminish what you can do. I'm saying the offer doesn't give me anything I couldn't get more efficiently another way."
Sersi's expression shifted — not offended, more the particular honesty of someone hearing an accurate assessment. "He's right. I can't scale to a planetary level. Not alone."
Ajak absorbed this without visible frustration. "Is there another path? Something outside the Dragon Ball?"
Smith turned it over. Mahd Wy'ry was a memory problem — the Celestials had erased the Eternals' accumulated recollections between deployments, and the condition emerged when that suppression broke down and the memories flooded back in without a framework to contain them. It was psychological damage with a specific cause.
The Ancient One dealt with minds, with the architecture of consciousness, with problems that existed at the intersection of physical reality and the structures underneath it. And he'd been meaning to take Wanda to Kamar-Taj for some time — her abilities had been developing faster than her theoretical grounding, and the Ancient One's library was the best resource on Earth for that kind of work.
Two purposes, one trip.
"There may be another approach," Smith said. "I'll look into it. Don't consider this a promise, but I'll ask around."