The golden sparks of the portal had barely faded into the cool air of Kamar-Taj before the Ancient One sat alone in the silence, asking herself the brutal, honest version of the question.
Was it worth it? Actively blocking the All-Father's political play, deliberately absorbing whatever long-term diplomatic friction that intervention created with Asgard, and doing it all to protect a boy who had absolutely no idea the cosmic interference was even happening on his behalf?
The absolute answer arrived quickly. Yes.
She had spent considerable, agonizing time projecting her consciousness through the sprawling, infinite fractal branches of the multiverse—not every single branch, because infinity was impossible to map, but enough. More than enough to establish a definitive, terrifying pattern.
Every sufficiently powerful being she had ever encountered, every single name that fundamentally mattered across the cosmic roster, had alternate counterparts. Odin had counterparts. The dread lord Dormammu had counterparts. Even she had counterparts—some of them comfortingly identical, some of them deeply cautionary tales of dark magic corruption. The five primordial entities of creation—Eternity, Death, Annihilation, Infinity, and Galactus—were the only known exceptions, standing as truly singular, foundational pillars across all branches she had ever accessed.
Smith Doyle appeared in absolutely none of them.
There was no alternate version of him. No cosmic trace of the Dragon Balls, no mythological record of Shenron, in any universe she had ever looked into. She had rigorously considered the distinct possibility that she simply hadn't searched far or deep enough. She still considered it. But the deafening absence was mathematically consistent enough to constitute hard, undeniable data.
If he was exactly what she suspected—genuinely unique, a living singularity without a multiversal counterpart—then his violent growth trajectory was no longer just a local, Earth-bound concern. It was a multiverse-level concern.
He was brushing the edge of the sub-Celestial tier in a matter of a few short years, starting from absolutely nothing, utilizing a biological power system that had zero precedent in any mystical or cosmic catalog she possessed. Ki. A wish-granting dragon of apparently exponentially expanding capability. Both of them were entirely new additions to this specific universe's foundational framework.
She had tethered and aligned herself with Eternity as her primary cosmic contingency. That remained true. But a mortal man who might, someday very soon, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the five primordial entities was not a relationship a Sorcerer Supreme managed carelessly.
She wanted to see exactly where he went.
Grow up quickly, the Ancient One thought, looking out toward the Pacific. I want to see what you become.
Every single warning alarm in the S.H.I.E.L.D. Trident Building's deep-underground energy monitoring room went off at the exact same time.
The intelligence staff on duty had been through this exhausting drill before—the localized Dragon Ball events, the apocalyptic tournament, the occasional, controlled ki discharge from the Fraternity's inner circle.
But this was fundamentally different in character. The previous radar readings had been massive, but rolling. This one was blindingly sharp, hyper-directional, and completely gone almost before the bleeding-edge instruments could even finish registering the spike.
Up in the sterile, glass-walled lobby, Ajak abruptly stopped walking.
Beside her, Sersi went very, very still, the breath catching in her throat as the invisible pressure rolled over her skin.
The two Eternals had come to Washington to quietly arrange a meeting with Smith Doyle regarding the next tournament cycle. Ajak, acting as the Prime, had wanted to establish early, diplomatic contact and begin the delicate process of negotiation before the global competitive field aggressively organized itself.
Feeling the sheer, crushing weight of that sudden anomaly, she was rapidly reconsidering her timing.
"That was him," Sersi whispered quietly, her eyes wide.
Ajak nodded slowly. She was looking out the massive windows toward the Fraternity's distant island, even though there was absolutely nothing to see but sky. "He has been growing since the tournament concluded. But that rate of acceleration... that is not what I expected."
"Are we still ready for this meeting?" Sersi asked, the hesitation clear.
Ajak was quiet for a long moment, calculating the risk. "We proceed. But we proceed carefully."
High above the clouds on Korin Tower, the immortal Cat Sage had been in deep meditation when the pressure hit the atmosphere.
He had lived for several thousand years and possessed a flawlessly reliable, instinctual sense of what various god-tier power levels felt like when they disturbed the atmosphere. He wiped a drop of cold sweat off his furry brow with the back of one paw, looked down at the ancient stone beneath his feet, and was suddenly, profoundly grateful he had decided against lounging on the roof of the Fraternity's main building this week.
Smith Doyle, meanwhile, had already torn open a golden portal.
He absolutely couldn't test his new power ceiling on Earth. The involuntary aura spike had demonstrated that grim reality clearly enough—unfocused, raw output at this elite level would vaporize significant portions of New York City before he got the suppression tightly locked down. He needed uninhabited, indestructible space. And the most obvious candidate was already keyed into the system.
He stepped through the portal directly into the bleak, twilight wasteland of Netherheim.
Hela, the Goddess of Death, turned sharply at the crackle of his arrival. The bored expression on her pale face instantly shifted into something that wasn't quite readable. Surprise, mostly. She had last seen him months ago, and whatever terrifying, suffocating energy he was carelessly bleeding into her realm right now was absolutely not what she remembered.
"You look different," Hela noted, her eyes narrowing.
"Stronger," Smith agreed casually.
"I can tell." She studied him the specific, calculating way experienced, lethal fighters studied each other—looking right past the surface bravado, aggressively reading the biological and energetic structure underneath. "The last time you were here, I thought we might have an interesting conversation someday. I am rapidly revising that estimate upward."
"Last time I was here, I beat you," Smith pointed out.
Hela's expression went dead flat. "You beat a starved version of me that had been sealed in a box for thousands of years, was running on almost zero ambient energy, and hadn't been physically connected to Asgard's power source in longer than most of your mortal civilizations have even existed." She let a cold, sharp pause land between them. "That was not a fight, boy."
She didn't raise a hand. She simply released her power.
The dark, sickly-green death energy didn't explode; it rolled out of her in a clean, suffocating wave. There was no theatrical performance, no gradual escalation—just the terrifying, full output of Odin's firstborn laid completely bare.
Smith's system read it automatically, processing the data the exact same way his brain had been reading raw power levels since the scouter days.
She was not far behind his new Vegeta-integrated base. In a few specific, lethal dimensions of magical output, she might actually be slightly ahead.
He thought back to the brutal fight he had decisively won months ago and instantly found a terrifying new frame for it.
"The Senzu Bean," Smith said, realization dawning.
"It restored me completely," Hela confirmed, letting the massive aura recede back into her skin. "As far as my physical sealing goes, I was instantly put back to my baseline. Which, as I just said, is significantly less than one percent of my actual, unbound capacity."
Smith went quiet, ruthlessly doing the cosmic math in his head.
If this current baseline Hela—suppressed, dimensionally isolated, and magically sealed—was sitting comfortably near his new 522,000 power level, then Hela fully restored to the throne of Asgard, permanently connected to its infinite, localized energy source over the course of her immortal life, was something else entirely.
That was the absolute ceiling of the sub-Celestial Father level. It was the razor edge of something directly above that.
Whether that terrifying edge firmly crossed over into Super Saiyan territory was a grim, apocalyptic question he was going to have to keep very closely in mind.