Smith decided not to argue the point about their last fight. She wasn't wrong. She had been starved and sealed, fighting at a fraction of a fraction of her true capacity. There was absolutely nothing to gain from debating the semantics of a hollow victory.
"I came here to test my maximum output," Smith said, his voice flat, completely ignoring her unspoken threat. "You've got a vast, cosmic range of experience. Give me your honest read on this afterward."
He didn't wait for her agreement. He grounded his stance, clenched his fists, and activated Kaioken times ten.
The sealed, dead landscape of Netherheim violently lurched.
The permanent, suffocating overcast that hung over the realm—that flat, colorless, oppressive ceiling that hadn't shifted a single inch in thousands of years—suddenly tore wide open. The barren ground violently cracked in a massive, expanding spiderweb ring around his boots. Jagged, crimson lightning walked across the distant ridgelines in every direction, grounding out with deafening cracks. The dark red aura came up hard, clean, and impossibly heavy.
The raw numerical weight behind that blinding crimson light was a staggering 5.22 million.
Hela went completely, terrifyingly still.
She had confidently pegged him at the absolute floor of the sub-Celestial tier when he had last visited—back when she was weakened, sealed, and running on nothing but localized reserves and a miraculous Senzu Bean. She had physically felt the gap between them then and begrudgingly accepted it.
But what she was reading off him right now was absolutely not a gap. It was a completely different, apocalyptic category of problem entirely.
"Friendly spar?" Smith asked, his voice echoing with a strange, dual-layered resonance from inside the blinding red column of light.
Hela cleared her throat, her pale face illuminated by the harsh crimson glare. "I think I will take a rain check. Preferably when I am fully restored and back on the throne in Asgard."
Smith dropped the Kaioken.
The violent red aura collapsed inward, evaporating into the stale air. The suffocating pressure lifted from the realm, but the sky didn't entirely recover—a jagged, bruising tear remained in the gray clouds overhead.
He felt no real disappointment. She was actively reading far below him at this maximum output, and fighting someone drastically below your own ceiling in a completely uncontrolled environment wasn't combat; it was just mindless demolition. He had wanted an even match, or at least something durable enough to push back. He filed the Hela combat question under later and smoothly pivoted to the tactical inquiry that had actually brought him here.
"Where exactly does this put me?" Smith asked, brushing the dust from his shoulder. "In terms of the wider universe's power tiers."
Hela considered him for a long, quiet moment. She was looking past the physical muscle, reading the lingering, violent energy residue on his skin the way a seasoned doctor reads a terminal chart.
"There are three primary tiers," she finally said, her voice regaining its aristocratic edge. "Planetary. Sub-Celestial Father. And Celestial Father. The power gaps between them are not gradual inclines. They are massive, categorical leaps." She settled into the sweeping explanation with the effortless ease of someone who had learned the bloody architecture of the cosmos very young and had never possessed a reason to forget it.
"The Planetary tier covers the vast majority of the range—from a common, elite foot soldier, to the elite Asgardian warriors, to the mythic Valkyries, to most of what you would loosely categorize as 'enhanced' individuals down on Midgard. Also Fenrir, if you are curious. My wolf is a pinnacle planetary-level creature."
"I know what Fenrir is," Smith said evenly.
"The absolute threshold to cross into Sub-Celestial Father," Hela continued, pacing slowly, "is the naked, physical ability to destroy a planet. A planet no smaller than Midgard, operating entirely under your own innate power without external tools. Once you possess the capacity to do that, the universe organically categorizes you accordingly."
Smith frowned, crossing his arms. "My previous base was only 22,000. Even at half that output, I could have effortlessly destroyed a planet back then. By that logic, I should have already been considered sub-Celestial."
"In terms of raw, blunt-force destructive output? Possibly," Hela conceded, tilting her head. "But your unique energy system has a highly specific, volatile character to it. It is entirely oriented toward pure destruction. It is infinitely more efficient at unmaking matter than most magics I have encountered."
She stopped, offering him a sharp, knowing look. "That ruthless efficiency has structural costs elsewhere, however. Your life level, for instance."
Smith went still.
"You are naturally longer-lived than a baseline Midgardian," Hela noted clinically, "but not by the vast, immortal margin your destructive power would suggest."
That cold truth landed quietly in the dead air.
She wasn't wrong. He had known it in the abstract—ki was a martial life force, but it didn't inherently extend lifespan indefinitely. Super Saiyan 3, Super Saiyan 4—all of it ultimately ran on the exact same, ticking mortal clock. The newly integrated Namekian bloodline added something to his longevity, but not nearly enough to rival a true god.
True, conceptual life extension required elevating the essential nature of the soul itself. It required becoming something genuinely, undeniably divine. Super Saiyan God or Super Saiyan Blue territory. It wasn't just about possessing a massive energy signature; it was the fundamental, alchemical transformation of what you were at the cellular and spiritual level. God Ki.
He wasn't there yet.
He ruthlessly set the existential dread aside. Problem for later.
"What is the absolute upper limit of sub-Celestial Father?" he asked, keeping his tone clinical. "Where does the ceiling sit?"
Hela thought about it, her dark eyes tracking the lingering static electricity in the air. "In terms of raw, unadulterated power... approximately twenty times what you were just putting out at your blinding maximum."
Smith rapidly ran the terrifying numbers in his head.
Twenty times 5.22 million put the absolute ceiling somewhere hovering around 100 million plus. In pure Dragon Ball Z terms, that scaling was surprisingly consistent—the sub-Celestial range running from the low millions all the way up to somewhere near the ten-billion mark before the physics of the universe required the next, massive categorical shift.
"And the Celestial Father level?" Smith prompted.
"My absolute peak was sitting on the jagged upper edge of the sub-Celestial Father tier," Hela said quietly, a flicker of ancient, bitter resentment crossing her features. "I was infinitely close to the true Father level, but I never quite crossed it." She let out a slow breath. "My understanding of what truly exists above that ceiling comes almost entirely from Odin. Not from personal experience."