The sprawling subterranean operations center of the Fraternity base was bathed in the low, cold hum of absolute efficiency. All six delivery teams had returned. The footfalls of assassins and immortals had faded into the perimeter, leaving only a heavy, expectant silence in the central command room.
At the head of the massive obsidian table, Smith Doyle sat in the semi-darkness, illuminated only by the pale light of the compiled wish list displayed on his terminal. He didn't just read the words; he absorbed the desperate, raw humanity behind them. In this room, he wasn't just the Inspector General. He was the architect of their miracles, radiating a dense, oppressive gravity that made the very air feel thick and uncompromising.
He scrolled to the first entry.
Tony Stark:Resurrect his parents.
Smith's expression didn't change. Expected. The futurist was still dragging the anchor of his past, trying to buy back the ghosts he couldn't invent a machine to save.
Steve Rogers:Restore Peggy Carter's youth.
Smith let his finger hover over the screen, a quiet, profound respect settling in his chest. The popular assumption—the narrative peddled by S.H.I.E.L.D. and the press—was that a paragon like Captain America would use a god-tier wish on something massive and civic. World peace, an end to hunger, the eradication of disease. The usual, sweeping abstractions people assigned to men they had forcibly turned into marble symbols.
But Smith knew better. Steve Rogers was not a symbol. He was a man who had plunged his aircraft into the freezing Atlantic mid-sentence, leaving behind a woman he had promised a dance. The world could wait. The dance came first.
Jessica Jones:A new continent, resource-rich, positioned in the Atlantic Ocean near New York.
A cold, sharp smile touched the corner of Smith's mouth. He leaned back in his chair. This wasn't a private investigator from Hell's Kitchen. This was Nick Fury wearing a contestant's face. The wish was dressed up in the polite, bureaucratic language of global humanitarianism, but the exact geography gave the game away entirely. Not "increase Earth's resources." Not "a new landmass." Specifically near the United States, in the Atlantic Ocean.
Smith read the geopolitical land-grab for exactly what it was: a test of his own restraint. If Fury's team actually pulled this off, if they managed to sneak an off-the-books American superpower territory through the dragon, the next wish S.H.I.E.L.D. requested would be cataclysmic. That was simply how the intelligence instinct worked—give them an inch, and they would try to steal the board.
Lorelei:Odin's wish, routed through an Asgardian banshee. Expand the Allfather's capacity to hold his own power without dying from it, or—if too complex—restore him to youth.
Smith stopped scrolling. He turned the jagged puzzle piece over in his mind. The Odinforce accumulation problem was real. The power of a god was literally burning the Allfather from the inside out, turning his own divinity into a ticking clock. But the fact that Odin hadn't entered the tournament himself, resorting instead to a proxy?
The only credible reason was external constraint. And the only entity on Earth who possessed the sheer, terrifying mystical weight to draw a line in the sand and threaten Odin Allfather was the Ancient One. The Sorcerer Supreme was holding the Asgardian king at bay. That was the shape of the board.
Wanda:A chance for Pietro to survive what should kill him.
Smith sighed, a heavy, weary sound that echoed in the quiet room. He rubbed his temples. She had needed Bulma's prompting to produce a wish at all, terrified to speak her nightmares aloud. But Smith knew where this came from. His own offhand, careless comment about Pietro's original fate in the source timeline had lodged in her mind like a poisoned splinter.
Wanda had converted that bleeding anxiety into a wish with desperate, structural cleverness. If there is any chance he can still die, this covers it. Smith had seen Pietro's blinding speed during the glacier run. Bullets were no longer the threat they had once been. But Wanda didn't know that for certain, and to a sister who had lost everything else, absolute certainty was worth spending a miracle on.
Smith tapped the screen. He approved all six without requesting a single alteration.
From the deep shadows near the armory doors, Wesley stepped forward. He had been perfectly still through the entire review, the symbiote beneath his collar perfectly quiet.
"Boss," Wesley said, his gravelly voice cutting the silence. "Jessica Jones's wish. You're sure that's within bounds?"
"The wish itself is clean," Smith answered, his voice carrying absolute authority. "It doesn't violate any rules we set. The problem is execution, not eligibility."
He looked at Wesley, outlining the cosmic mechanics. "That many specific requirements stacked into a single wish cannot be fulfilled as one. Shenron is a dragon, not a genie granting a compound sentence. He would need, at minimum, two separate grants to satisfy all those conditions. So even if she wins, the outcome won't match Fury's intention. Something gets left out."
Smith let the cold reality of that settle over the room, before adding the final, crushing truth. "And she's not going to win the championship."
He looked around the room, making eye contact with the lethal operatives standing in the shadows. "This is the last tournament in its current form. Let them try."
Wenwu, standing by the far wall, was the first to react. The immortal warlord offered a single, slow nod, his ancient eyes dark with understanding. He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to. Of everyone present, Xu Wenwu understood better than most what it meant to carry the crushing weight of an old wish, and exactly how it felt to watch a window of opportunity permanently slide shut.
Smith turned his attention back to the monitor. "Odin's wish—the accumulation problem. If Shenron can resolve that, we are looking at an Allfather who no longer has a ticking clock inside his chest. He would have centuries to develop in ways he currently can't. His family's inherent physiological ability is continuous strengthening through combat and activity. Odin has been operating under a terrifying ceiling his entire life without knowing how to safely remove it."
Smith's eyes narrowed. "Compared to S.H.I.E.L.D. trying to drop another continent off the American coast... that is the wish with actual, universe-altering weight."
The room went completely, profoundly quiet. The scale of what they were orchestrating hung over them like a suspended blade.
"Wishes approved," Smith commanded, his tone signaling the absolute end of the discussion. "Everyone rest. The day after Universal Capsule's product launch, we move personnel to collect the contestants and transport them to the island. The fourth Dragon Ball Tournament begins."
"Yes, sir," Wesley and Wenwu echoed in unison.
The tournament itself remained perfectly contained. It was a cosmic storm trapped in a bottle, known only to the lethal few in Smith's command room and the handful of terrified, hopeful contestants who had been briefed.
The wider world was looking the other way.
The globe had something else commanding its attention entirely. Universal Capsule Company's impending product announcement had utterly dominated the news cycle, drawing breathless, around-the-clock coverage from every major media outlet on the planet. Deep within the Trident Building, S.H.I.E.L.D. had three senior analysts locked in a secure room, drowning in empty coffee cups, dedicated solely to predicting the launch.
The previous Capsule releases hadn't just moved markets; they had fundamentally rearranged human assumptions about the laws of physics and what civilian technology could achieve. No one in any serious intelligence organization was treating this unveiling as routine.
While gods, assassins, and monsters quietly prepared for a war that would reshape reality, the rest of the world stared blankly at their screens, waiting for a press conference.