Tony watched T'Challa and four Paragons members break across the courtyard at a hard sprint and muttered under his breath, "Another wave."
"Tony." Xialing's voice was flat. "Our arrangement stands. Whether you get the Dragon Ball or not, you owe me four billion."
Tony made a vague OK gesture without looking at her. He wasn't arguing the point.
As for Killian making it out of this alive — Xialing had stopped worrying about that. There were four separate forces converging on one man in the middle of an open courtyard. Whatever else happened tonight, Killian's options had run out.
Killian seemed to reach the same conclusion at roughly the same moment. He exhaled another column of fire to push Bucky and the taller Winter Soldier back a few steps, and then he paused — actually paused, in the middle of everything — and looked at the people closing in from every direction. The Winter Soldiers. The Paragons. Tony Stark in his battered armor. The Ten Rings operatives beyond the perimeter.
Then the remaining three Winter Soldiers who had been pressing Tony abandoned that engagement and moved to rejoin the others. Five operatives, fully converging.
Killian watched them come. His skin was still running hot, the courtyard tiles blackening in a spreading ring around his feet. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out the Dragon Ball.
"Interesting situation," he said. "One Dragon Ball, four groups of people. So — who gets it?"
He held it up between two fingers, letting it catch the light. "Simple solution: whoever kills Tony Stark gets the ball. Free of charge."
Wesley, standing at the edge of the Paragons formation, didn't even bother to look impressed. "Even if we killed you right now, we'd still walk away with it."
Killian's expression didn't shift. He closed his fist around the Dragon Ball. The hand began to glow — not the dull orange of thermal regulation, but the brighter, focused red of concentrated output. The air above his palm shimmered.
"Come any closer and I burn it."
The courtyard went still.
The five Winter Soldiers stopped. Their mission parameters were specific: retrieve the Dragon Ball intact. Killian's personal heat output was high enough to liquefy steel — they'd watched it happen. Whether it could damage the Dragon Ball was a question none of them had the data to answer, and their orders didn't include finding out the hard way.
Killian felt the shift and exhaled slowly. There it was. Leverage.
The Paragons kept walking.
T'Challa slowed but didn't stop. Shang-Chi moved up on his left. Wesley rolled his shoulders. None of them looked particularly concerned.
Because they weren't. Anyone who had spent real time around Dragon Balls knew what they were made of — not any alloy or compound that existed on Earth, not anything that could be reduced by temperature or pressure or any force a human body could generate. If Killian actually managed to superheat the thing to its melting point, it would be the most impressive physical feat in recorded history. He would also have to survive the process, which, given the energy required, he would not.
Tony supplied the logic out loud. "Go ahead and try. Push it as hot as you can and see if it scratches. You could blow yourself up on the spot and it still wouldn't leave a mark."
Killian's jaw tightened. "Nothing in the world is indestructible. You just don't want me to test it."
"Sure," Tony said. "That's definitely what's happening here."
"As for wanting you dead —" Killian's voice shifted, something colder moving under the anger. "That started a long time ago. Christmas Eve. A specific night I haven't forgotten even if you have."
Tony was quiet for a beat. "I didn't realize we had history."
"No," Killian said. "You wouldn't." A short, humorless curve of the mouth. "Big shots rarely keep track of the people they dismiss on their way out the door."
Tony didn't have a response to that. Not a useful one.
Killian scanned the assembled faces and made a decision. "One Dragon Ball might not be enough to make your move. So here's something extra, no charge." He looked directly at the Winter Soldiers, then at the others. "Tony Stark is also carrying a Dragon Ball. My people confirmed it when they hit him last night. He's been walking around this whole engagement holding two of them."
The silence that followed had a different quality.
Every set of eyes in the courtyard shifted toward Tony Stark. The five Winter Soldiers went still in a way that was distinct from their earlier pause — less tactical assessment, more recalibration.
Shang-Chi came up beside Xialing and lowered his voice. "Stark really did pick up another ball." He shook his head once, somewhere between disbelief and admiration. "Help me get the one off Killian. After."
"No."
Shang-Chi looked at her. "Xialing—"
"I made a deal with Stark. I'm not interfering, and I'm not helping you take from him." She met his eyes, and her voice carried something that wasn't quite anger but was close to it. "Dad said the same thing, by the way. If you want it, earn it yourself."
"Dad said that?"
"Directly. His words: if you have the ability, compete on your own."
Shang-Chi went quiet. He'd been counting on Wenwu as a fallback, and having that option closed off in two sentences by his own sister landed harder than he expected. He stood there a moment, working through it, and then something settled in his expression — not resignation. Resolution.
Fine. Then he'd fight for it.
The Paragons members within earshot had processed Killian's news about Tony's Dragon Ball and were cycling through the implications. T'Challa, tracking the math, allowed himself a private thought: Stark's name had come up in every cycle of this competition. He was either extraordinarily lucky or extraordinarily good at positioning himself, and at this point the distinction barely mattered.
Then the sound came — a sustained rush of displaced air from somewhere above the cloud cover, building fast.
Everyone looked up.
Suits. Dozens of them, descending in a loose formation through the overcast sky — different configurations, different marks, every one of them unmistakably Stark hardware. They spread out above the courtyard in a wide arc, thrusters holding altitude, and boxed the entire engagement zone.
Tony's voice brightened for the first time all night. "Killian. My backup just arrived."
Killian looked up at the suits. Then back down. His grip on the Dragon Ball tightened.
He never got the chance to use it.
Something hit him from the left at a speed that didn't leave room to react. A hand closed around the wrist holding the Dragon Ball, twisted it into a lock, and the ball dropped. A palm strike followed — controlled, economical, precisely placed — and Killian went airborne, tumbling across the courtyard.
Selene straightened up, the Dragon Ball in her hand. She'd finished copying the lab data, swept the USB drive, and arrived at the courtyard in time to read the entire situation in under two seconds. The intervention had taken marginally longer.
Tony was already moving. He pointed at one of the suits overhead and it broke formation, diving toward Killian's landing point. The panels disassembled mid-flight, wrapping around the still-tumbling Killian before he could orient himself, locking him inside with a mechanical finality.
"JARVIS — fireworks."
The suit carrying Killian ignited. It climbed twenty meters in a single thruster burst and then detonated, a sharp concussive crack followed by a bloom of fire and shrapnel that lit the courtyard in yellow and white.
It happened fast. Most of the people on the ground were still processing the first half when the second half was already over.
What was left of the suit rained down in fragments. Killian came with it, falling the full distance, trailing smoke, and hit the courtyard stone hard.
He lay there. The Extremis was still running — faint heat shimmer rising from the impact point, the beginning of the regeneration cycle engaging through the shock. But he didn't move.
The Winter Soldiers were already moving again. Not toward Killian.
Toward Selene.
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