Natasha was patched up in the carrier's medical bay before the debrief was called. Three grazes, nothing structural, the serum doing what it was supposed to do — she was sitting in a chair rather than on a gurney when Sharon Carter came to get her.
She'd tried to reach the Hulk in the meantime.
The video call had connected. He'd been sitting in the cockpit of the quinjet, the controls in front of him, the stealth systems running — he'd turned them on himself, which was a level of operational awareness that still caught people off guard when they weren't expecting it. She'd told him they'd won. She'd told him Betty was waiting at the base.
He'd looked at her for a long moment, and she'd watched something work through his expression that she didn't have a clean name for. Then the call had ended.
She sat with that for a moment, then let it sit on its own. Some things resolved themselves.
Inside the carrier's main briefing room, the overhead lights were running on emergency power, one of the panels dark from a systems interruption during the battle. Nobody had fixed it yet because nobody had had time to care. Smith sat at the head of the table, Sharon on his right, Coulson down the line with May and Fitz flanking him. The Avengers filled the remaining seats, along with Bulma, Wanda, and Tony, who had his faceplate up and the suit running at standby.
"Casualties," Smith said.
Sharon had the report ready. She'd been composing it since the moment the carriers stabilized. "Civilian count is still coming in. Initial estimates suggest some deaths — falls during the city's ascent, structural collapses before the evacuation completed, individuals who didn't receive the warning or couldn't move quickly enough. The specific figure isn't final."
"SHIELD Sokovia branch?" Smith said.
"Thirteen dead during the evacuation operation. Forty-six injured." She kept her voice level. "The agents in question were protecting the civilian corridors when the Ultron army activated. They were doing their jobs."
The room was quiet for a moment.
Smith looked at Tony.
Tony looked back at him. "I know what you're going to say."
"The Stark Relief Fund handles the civilian compensation. The rebuilding commitment you made is on record from the comm channel — everyone here heard it."
"I meant it," Tony said. "Sokovia gets rebuilt. On the original site. I'll stand the construction and cover whatever the Relief Fund doesn't reach on the civilian side." He paused. "The SHIELD agents—"
"SHIELD handles its own," Smith said. "Compensation for the fallen, full treatment for the injured, wax bath access for anyone who needs recovery time." He looked at Sharon. "Make sure the families are contacted personally."
Sharon wrote it. "Yes, sir."
"The losses this time have a specific cause," Smith said. "The Mind Stone was lent to Tony for research. That research created Ultron. I'm not going to sit here and assign blame cleanly, because the chain of decisions was longer than one person, and some of it runs through me." He looked around the table. "But the rebuilding is Tony's project. That's his accountability, and he's accepted it."
Steve had been watching the table. He chose not to say what was behind his expression, which was the right choice for the room.
"One more item," Smith said. "The second World Martial Arts Tournament will be announced shortly. The champion's prize will be a wish."
Tony leaned forward slightly. "About that." He looked at his hands, then at Smith. "If the wish can cover the people who died in Sokovia — I want to use it for that. The city I'll rebuild with money. The people—" he stopped. "The city can be replaced. The people can't."
The table took that in.
"The logistics on that wish," Sharon said carefully. "We're talking about establishing victim count, verifying identities—"
"Smith said that the Dragob doesn't need us to hand him a list," Tony said. "The wish can be structured to cover everyone who died in Sokovia as a direct consequence of Ultron's operation. If the mechanics support that framing—"
"They do," Smith said.
Tony nodded. He sat back. He'd done the math on this already and had already arrived at the same answer, which was that the city was the problem his money could solve and the people were the problem only this could solve.
"Then that's the wish," he said. "The city is Stark Industries. The people are the Dragon Balls."
"The tournament will be announced through standard channels," Smith said. "Prepare for the usual response." He looked around the table one more time. "That's all. Get everyone back to base."
The news cycle had been running for eighteen hours by the time Smith landed at the Brotherhood headquarters.
He'd watched fragments of it from the carrier, the coverage building in the predictable way — initial shock, then narrative, then analysis, then the human-interest turn where individual stories emerged from the aggregate.
A man in a resettlement tent talking about the Baymax unit that had walked his family to safety and taken a direct hit from an Ultron soldier doing it. A woman showing reporters the message she'd gotten on her phone from the evacuation alert system, four minutes before the army activated. A teenager describing watching the city rise into the sky from the hillside where her school's evacuation had taken her.
The dominant narrative that settled was the one Smith had seeded at the press conference: HYDRA's final operation, Zola's last act, the AI crisis as the death throes of an organization that had already been destroyed. Ultron's origin as a Stark technology gone wrong was visible in the coverage but soft-pedaled — the more interesting story was Zola's ghost, and most outlets ran with that. Tony's rebuilding commitment generated its own news cycle, one that turned the framing from "billionaire's creation causes catastrophe" toward something more complicated and more accurate.
The Baymax story was the one that ran everywhere.
"Good AI vs. bad AI" made for a natural organizing principle, and the testimonies from Sokovia were too specific and numerous to dismiss. Capsule Corporation's product placement in the middle of a genuine emergency, producing genuine results, was worth more in terms of public confidence than any marketing spend could have achieved. Smith noted this with a certain satisfaction — it was the correct outcome and it would sell a great many second-generation Baymax units at the expo.
He went to Kami Lookout.
Dende was waiting.
The Namekian boy had grown incrementally— not in height, not dramatically, but in his posture and the set of him, something accumulated in the months of doing work that mattered. He was standing beside a surface-mounted display unit, and on the display was a schematic of the second Dragon Ball set — seven spheres, each one documented at the component level.
The core was keel material. Dragon bone, recovered from the Hand's underground reserves when Smith had destroyed that organization. The material had been in Fraternity storage since then, catalogued and held as a resource with uncertain application.
Dende had found the application.
The outer shell of each ball was primary adamantium, polished to a precise tolerance and then inscribed with the star-count markings by Dende's own hand. The result sat in a containment unit on the table beside the display: seven spheres, each one dark metal that caught light differently than the original orange-and-gold Dragon Balls, the stars etched in a gold alloy inlay that Dende had spent three weeks getting right.
"The Dragon Ball situation," Smith said. "Walk me through it."
Dende stood up straight, which was his version of professional bearing. "Complete. Activatable on your instruction." He held up one of the spheres — the one-star ball — and turned it so the inlay caught the light. "The dragon I've created can grant between two and three wishes per summoning."
"Variable?" Smith said.
"Based on prior relationship with the summoner. First summon: two wishes. Subsequent summons: three, because the dragon becomes familiar with the one calling it and responds with expanded capacity." He set the sphere down carefully. "There is no limit on the number of people who can be resurrected in a single wish. Multiple individuals, multiple resurrections — the dragon's capacity covers it."
Smith absorbed this. He thought about the Sokovia dead. He thought about the next tournament, the champion's wish, the specific structure Tony had outlined.
"Drawbacks," he said.
Dende's expression shifted — not guilt, but something careful in the pause before he spoke. "The materials I used introduce a negative energy accumulation problem." He paused. "Dragon bone carries residual energy from the creatures it came from. When wishes are granted, that energy isn't fully dissipated — it collects in the Dragon Ball between uses. If the balls are used too frequently, the accumulated negative energy reaches a critical density and—"
"Produces an evil dragon," Smith said.
Dende looked at him. "Yes. You knew about this?"
"I know some info. It's a similar principle — the Dragon grants wish, each wish leaves behind a dark energy remnant in the Dragon Ball, eventually enough accumulates to create a Shadow Dragon." He looked at the set on the table. "How long between uses is safe?"
"I'm not certain. The dragon bone introduces unpredictability. My estimate is that a minimum rest period of six months between full summons keeps the accumulation manageable. More than once a year should be treated as a significant risk."
"Twice a year is manageable for us," Smith said. "Shenron handles the regular tournament cycle. This set stays here and handles emergencies." He looked at the containment unit.
Dende nodded, relieved that the logic had landed without requiring more argument.
"One more question," Smith said. "What materials exactly?"
"Keel material for the core — the dragon bone from the Hand reserves. The outer housing is primary adamantium, polished and inscribed." Dende held up the one-star sphere again. "The combination surprised me. I wasn't certain the keel material would respond to the inscription work, but it integrates cleanly. The adamantium gives the sphere structural integrity, and the bone provides the wish-granting."
Smith turned this over. Dragon bones from an organization he'd destroyed, repurposed into a mechanism that could undo death. There was something almost logical about it — the Hand had built its entire operation around the dragon bones' alleged power to return life, and had never actually achieved it, and here was Dende making the functional version out of the same raw material.
"Activate it," Smith said.
Dende placed both hands on the containment unit. His expression went quiet and inward — the specific focus of a Dragon Clan Namekian accessing the part of their biology that made Dragon Balls possible — and then a warm golden light moved through the set, each sphere receiving it in sequence, the activation running from the one-star to the seven-star in a smooth wave.
The light faded.
The spheres sat on the table, active now, the stars in their inlay glowing with a faint internal luminescence.
Smith looked at them for a moment.
"Good work, Dende."
For a moment, the Namekian boy's face went unguarded. He nodded once and then turned back to the display, because there were maintenance logs to run and documentation to complete, and that was work that mattered.
Smith picked up the one-star sphere, felt its weight, set it back.
The second set of Dragon Balls was operational.