Mr. Popo carried the mat out from the storage alcove without haste, each step placed, his movements unhurried and deliberate. Seven Dragon Balls sat on the red surface, arranged in the pattern Dende had specified — a configuration that matched the harmonic resonance requirements he'd spent weeks calculating.
"These are ready," Dende said. He looked at Smith. "On your instruction."
Smith looked at the seven spheres. They sat differently than Shenron's Dragon Balls — darker, the primary adamantium catching the temple's light in a cooler register, the star inlays warm against that. A second set. A second option.
He nodded.
Popo set the mat on the ground at the temple's center, straightened it at the corners with the care he brought to all physical arrangements, and stepped back. He clasped his hands and spoke the incantation in a voice that carried the weight of tradition even applied to something new.
"Come out, Shenron."
The Dragon Balls responded immediately — golden light erupting upward from each sphere in simultaneous columns, the seven columns converging overhead and then spreading outward through the temple roof and into the sky above. The temple's interior went bright. Outside, the clear afternoon sky over the Brotherhood compound went dark in the span of three seconds, the darkness spreading outward from the light source in a ring that moved across the horizon at visible speed.
The dragon emerged from the light.
It looked like Shenron. Not identical — the coloring was slightly different, the head geometry showing Dende's own aesthetic preferences rather than pure replication — but the family resemblance was unmistakable. A vast green-blue serpentine form resolved itself from the golden column, head lowering toward the temple, scales catching the ambient light of its own summoning glow.
Smith looked at it. Good work, Dende.
Across the planet, people looked up.
In New York, in Seoul, in London and Lagos and São Paulo, the sky changed. The day side went dark. The night side stayed dark but differently — the quality of the darkness shifted, the stars obscuring behind something vast and invisible that blocked their light from below.
The people of Earth had been through multiple alien invasions, a HYDRA coup attempt, the Sokovia incident, and a decade of escalating exposure to things that defied previous categories. The sky going dark over the past several years, a recognizable phenomenon.
Most people looked up, registered what they were seeing, and continued with what they were doing.
Inside Avengers Tower, Tony stood at the penthouse window with his coffee and looked at the darkened sky over New York. He'd been working through the Sokovia rebuild procurement list — materials, contractors, the timeline for breaking ground on the new construction — and the darkness pulled him out of that for a moment.
He's using the Dragon Balls.
Tony knew the history. The Kree invasion — no Dragon Balls. The HYDRA coup, the Project Insight crisis — no Dragon Balls. Ultron, with a lower casualty count than either of those, and Smith was calling the dragon.
He turned it over. Smith had said at the briefing that some of the responsibility for Ultron ran through him. Tony had rejected that framing at the time, still rejected it factually — the decision to lend the scepter had been Smith's, but the decision to use it as a neural architecture substrate had been Tony's, and the outcome had been Tony's creation. Smith taking any share of that was generous to the point of being inaccurate.
Unless Smith was accounting for something else. Something about how far he'd let Ultron develop before stepping in.
Tony filed the thought without resolving it and watched the dark sky.
Steve Rogers watched it from the SHIELD training facility roof, his hands in his jacket pockets, the city spread out below him in the new darkness.
He'd assumed Smith would wait. Wait for the tournament, wait for a champion to earn the wish through competition, keep the Dragon Balls as a controlled variable in a system designed to distribute their power responsibly. That was the repetition. That was the logic Smith operated on.
He was using them now anyway. Which meant something about this situation was different enough to justify the exception.
Steve thought about Peggy Carter, who had aged and died while he was frozen and was gone now in a way that Dragon Balls could reach. He thought about Bucky, whose fate was still unconfirmed — the last anyone had solid information on was a chest cannon hit at helicarrier altitude over the Potomac. Steve had asked. SHIELD's search had found nothing. Tony had not volunteered information.
The sky stayed dark.
Steve stood on the roof and did what he was good at, which was waiting.
In the SWORD orbital station — still being fitted out, the pressurization systems running at partial capacity, the external array not yet fully deployed — Nick Fury looked down at Earth through the observation port and recognized the pattern immediately.
"He's using them," he said, more to himself than to Hill, who was at the adjacent station reviewing the sensor calibration logs.
Hill looked up. "Dragon Balls?"
"The sky pattern." He'd seen it twice before from ground level. From orbit, the darkness looked different — a shadow without a source, expanding outward from a point in central Europe and covering the visible hemisphere of the planet in seconds. "He doesn't use them lightly. Something about Ultron specifically."
Hill went back to her logs. She had opinions about Smith Doyle's decision-making and had learned to keep them organized rather than voiced.
Fury looked at the comm panel beside him. The Captain Marvel pager sat in a secured drawer below it. He'd activated it. The signal had gone. Whether it had reached its destination, and what the transit time looked like from wherever Carol Danvers currently was, were questions that had no reliable answer.
"You're getting back slower than I hoped," he said to the planet below.
At the Eternal's apartment in New York — a floor of a Chelsea building that Kingo had acquired and the group used as their primary gathering point when they weren't individually distributed — Kingo stood at the window and watched the sky change.
"The Dragon Balls are genuinely convenient," he said. "As a practical tool for solving large-scale problems, nothing on Earth approaches them."
Ajax sat on the couch with her legs tucked under her, looking at her hands. She had been thinking about the Tiamut Emergence — the knowledge she carried that none of the others had been told fully, the timeline that ran on its own schedule regardless of what happened at the surface. The Dragon Balls were not part of that calculus in a way that helped or hurt.
"He didn't use them for the Kree invasion," Kingo continued. "The casualties there were significantly higher. So why now?"
"You're asking the wrong question," Ajax said. "The right one is what's different about this situation from his perspective."
Druig spoke from across the room without looking up from his book. "He thinks he's partially responsible. Someone with Smith Doyle's power standards doesn't call the dragon for a civilian casualty count he could solve with money. He's calling it because he decided this was his error to fix at every level."
The room went quiet.
Makkari, seated at the kitchen counter, looked at Druig's profile and then at the sky outside the window, her fingers moving in the brief sign for interesting assessment. Druig gave no indication he'd seen it, which meant he had.
Ikaris stood at the window with his arms crossed and said nothing. He'd been doing more of that since Sokovia — standing at windows, saying nothing, recalibrating things he didn't discuss.
The dragon's cold voice filled the temple.
"Human who summoned me — state your wishes. I can grant you three."
Dende stood to Smith's left, very still, his hands at his sides, his eyes on the dragon.
Smith looked up at the vast shape above him and spoke clearly. "Resurrect all humans who died as a direct result of Ultron's operations."
The dragon's eyes went red — the visual marker of the wish being processed, the mechanics running their audit of what had happened and who had been lost, the scope of the request measured against the dragon's capacity.
"Your wish is granted."
It happened without fanfare. No visible effect in the temple. No surge of light, no dramatic release. Somewhere across the planet, in the ruins of Sokovia and in the facilities Ultron had raided and in the locations where his soldiers had operated, people who had been dead for the span of hours or days simply weren't dead anymore. They appeared where they had fallen, whole, breathing, disoriented in the way of people who have been somewhere else and returned.
In Sokovia's resettlement camps, the effect was immediately visible. People who had been counted in the casualty tallies stood up from the ground where they had been an instant before. The people around them stepped back, and then forward, and then everyone was making sounds that didn't resolve cleanly into words.
The dragon spoke again. "Two wishes remain."
Smith looked at the vast shape above the temple for a moment. He thought about Tony's suggestion from the briefing — use the wishes for the people, let the money handle the city. He'd already done that. The remaining two wishes were available.
He thought about what negative energy meant, and about Dende's estimate of years to clear the current accumulation from a single wish, and about what the Shadow Dragon mechanics looked like when they activated.
Even Super Saiyan 4 had trouble with those, he remembered. Not a problem I want to create for myself.
"I have no further wishes," he said.
The dragon held the silence longer than it had held the granted wishes. "Farewell."
The form dissolved. The seven Dragon Balls separated from the mat and began their scatter trajectory — and Dende extended his hands, and the scatter stopped, and all seven spheres settled back to the mat's surface and converted to inert stone.
Smith looked at them.
"How much negative energy accumulated from that single wish?" he said.
Dende ran the assessment with his hands over the stones, the Dragon Clan ability reading the charge state of each sphere in sequence. When he looked up, his expression was careful.
"At minimum, ten years to full dissipation. Probably longer."
"Meaning these stay locked until then."
"Using them during the accumulation period compounds the dark energy. Significantly." Dende paused. "If the accumulation reaches critical density—"
"Shadow Dragons," Smith said. "One through seven stars. I know the mechanic."
Dende nodded. He didn't ask how Smith knew. He'd stopped asking how Smith knew things.
"These go into secured storage," Smith said. "Off the operational list entirely. We use My Shenron for the tournament cycle. These are for genuine emergencies, and even then, we think twice." He looked at Dende. "The design problem — the negative energy accumulation — keep working on it. I'm not dismissing the possibility you find a solution."
Dende looked at the stones on the mat and then at Smith. "You think I won't."
"I think the problem is hard," Smith said. "I also think you built a functional second Dragon Ball set using materials nobody would have looked at for the purpose, and you did it correctly. So I'm not discounting your odds." He paused. "Keep going."
Dende looked at the stones. Nodded once, to himself more than to Smith.
The sky lightened.
In New York, in Seoul, in London and Lagos and São Paulo, the darkness retreated in the same ring pattern it had arrived in, moving back toward its source point and then gone.
In Sokovia's resettlement camps, the chaos had resolved into something else — still loud, still overwhelming, but with a different quality. The SHIELD agents on scene had begun counting, confirming, running their own inventory against the casualty reports. Early assessment: the count matched. Everyone accounted for in the initial Ultron death toll was alive.
Sharon Carter filed the preliminary confirmation from the field and marked the compensation approval process as closed — cause of death reversed, formal payout cancelled, merit recognition maintained for the agents who had faced lethal situations and survived them, because the act of facing the situation deserved recognition regardless of how it ended.
She noted in the margin that the resurrection did not change the fact that thirteen agents had made decisions under fire that cost them their lives. The Dragon Balls had answered the cost. The decision to take that risk in the first place was still theirs, and it still meant something.
Tony read Jarvis's summary of the field reports in the car on his way to the Chinese Theatre.
He sat with it for a moment. Nobody dead. The city gone but rebuildable. His money against concrete and steel, Smith's wish against mortality.
He thought about how it had felt to be the person who created Ultron, and how it felt now, and decided that the second feeling was better than the first and he was going to hold onto it.
The Chinese Theatre had been booked for a week.
The Capsule Corporation had converted it — the forecourt, the lobby, the main hall, the adjoining structure — into an exposition space that managed to simultaneously communicate serious technological ambition and the specific aesthetic of a company that had been founded by a sixteen-year-old genius who still approached product design like a personal challenge. The signage was clean and confident. The stage setup in the main hall was designed to accommodate a live demonstration format rather than a conventional presentation. The Baymax units doing choreographed routines in the lobby were, Tony had to admit, more charming than he wanted to give them credit for.
He arrived with Pepper and Happy and made it through the forecourt entrance in under four minutes, which was faster than the press situation had suggested was possible. Happy had already read the press lines before Tony got there and worked them accordingly.
Inside, the attendance was the specific mixture that came with an event where the guest list combined genuine consumers, government procurement officials, competitive intelligence operators, and people who were there because Smith Doyle's company was having a public event and Smith Doyle's events had a history of being significant.
Tony recognized most of the familiar faces in the first sweep. Rhodes in his Air Force dress uniform, talking to someone from the DOD procurement office. Coulson in the kind of suit that communicated civilian without quite losing the operational geometry underneath it. Hill, with the SWORD badge rather than the SHIELD one — the organization still being stood up but already using its insignia. Secretary Ross at a product display station with Betty beside him.
Betty saw Tony before Ross did. She crossed the floor in a straight line.
"Still nothing?" Tony said before she could ask.
"A month." She kept her voice level. "Not a word. Not a sighting. Nothing on any radar."
"He's in a stealth aircraft. Which means he turned the stealth on himself, which means he's operational enough to do that. And the Hulk doesn't — he doesn't lose himself completely unless someone pushes him that direction. The Mind Stone made him lose it. That's gone now."
Betty processed this. She was a scientist; she ran the chain of logic and found it sound.
"You think he's choosing to stay away," she said.
Tony made a noncommittal gesture that meant yes. "I think there's something going on with him that he needs to work through on his own terms, and I think the Hulk's current status — what he is when he's in that aircraft, what he thinks he's doing — I think it's complicated. More complicated than it was before Sokovia."
Betty looked at the lobby Baymax units performing their routine, then back at Tony. "You could have just said you don't know."
"I don't know," Tony said. "But the version where something happened to him — I ran the numbers on that and they don't work. The Hulk is too hard to kill accidentally, and if someone had done it on purpose, we'd have heard something."
"Maybe he'll just show up one day," Betty said.
"Maybe he's planning a surprise." Tony kept his voice even. "He's allowed to have things he does on his own schedule."
Betty looked at him for a moment. Then she nodded once and returned to where Ross was standing, which was its own kind of answer.
Tony watched her go and then turned toward the main hall entrance, where the product demonstration was scheduled to begin in twenty minutes, and where Bulma had designed a stage setup that was going to make every government procurement official in the room very uncomfortable about the gap between what they had and what was being shown to them.
He was looking forward to it.