Smith Doyle was fast asleep in the spacecraft's single, cramped seat when the automated Frieza-tech autopilot smoothly crossed the freezing outer edge of the solar system. Ten more days to Earth, give or take a few hours.
He was absolutely not rushing.
Lorelei had received Odin's cryptic message through Heimdall's telepathy and had spent approximately thirty breathless seconds being profoundly, weepily relieved before ruthlessly moving on to the geopolitical task itself.
No jail. Her freedom was officially maintained. She had a specific, monumental assignment: formally establish a permanent point of contact between Asgard and Earth—something legally equivalent to a diplomatic consulate—through whatever mortal channels made the most strategic sense.
She had gone directly to S.H.I.E.L.D. rather than approaching the United States government. The cold, immortal reasoning was entirely sound—S.H.I.E.L.D. actually handled this bizarre, extraterrestrial category of thing, and going over their heads to clueless politicians would create unnecessary, bureaucratic friction she simply didn't need.
It was now Nick Fury's massive headache, and Nick Fury was rapidly discovering that a lethal Asgardian succubus requesting official, sovereign diplomatic premises in the middle of Manhattan was absolutely not a problem with a clean, legal solution.
He had already spent two exhausting days explicitly not solving it, and grimly expected to spend several more.
Hidden high in the Himalayas in the sanctuary called Afterlife, Jiaying sat quietly with the latest global intelligence reports spread across the low table in front of her. She was desperately trying to decide exactly what the shifting world meant for her people.
The mass proliferation of the Capsule Corporation's scouters had changed her survival significantly.
Four years ago, she could carefully move her Inhumans through the human world with relative confidence and anonymity. Now, any Inhuman casually displaying even slightly unusual physical capability within a five-mile radius of one of those mass-produced devices would instantly generate a high combat reading. High readings reliably generated intense, global attention. And attention generated the specific, bloody category of outcomes she had spent decades trying to aggressively prevent.
Gordon stood quietly by the window, sensing her tension. "The global treatment of enhanced individuals has fundamentally changed, Jiaying. The Avengers, the Paragons—they operate entirely openly. They are celebrated. The world has adjusted to power."
"They are not Inhumans," Jiaying replied, her voice cold.
"The biological distinction isn't visible from the outside."
Jiaying absently touched the jagged, horrific scarring that ran down her face. She didn't do it consciously—it was an old, bitter habit, the way some traumatized people trace a scar when they are deep in thought.
"The people who did what they did to us haven't magically disappeared, Gordon. They have just gone quieter. The exact same brutal institutions are still operating in the shadows. They have simply had to adapt their violent methods to the new era."
Gordon was quiet.
"The family that ran," she said softly. "Do you remember?"
He remembered. A terrified mother and her young daughter, desperately trying to manage the agonizing Terrigen awakening outside of Afterlife's protective structure. S.H.I.E.L.D. had found them. The lethal outcome had been completely final, and Gordon had arrived exactly two minutes too late to prevent it.
"The children who have been outside recently," Gordon said carefully, choosing his words. "They came back with impossible information. The world they are eagerly describing isn't the hostile, terrified world we rigidly prepared them to expect. People who want to go out and proudly use what they are—there are legitimate, legal paths for that now. And after the mass New York resurrection..." He paused, his blind face tightening. "Some of the younger ones are openly saying that dying in the field doesn't even mean permanent loss anymore."
Jiaying said absolutely nothing, but the hard line of her mouth tightened.
She deeply understood the impossible problem. If she rigidly held the isolationist position completely, she would inevitably lose her people anyway—the young ones would simply leave without her sanction, without her training, and without her protection. The world outside had genuinely, permanently changed. She couldn't violently pretend otherwise without eventually becoming someone her own people simply stopped listening to.
"I will do a selection," Jiaying said finally, conceding the ground. "Combat-capable. Highly disciplined. Able to flawlessly handle public exposure. A small, elite team. We will carefully test how the outside world actually responds to us."
Gordon straightened, relief washing over him. "I will tell them. They will be very excited."
After he teleported away, Jiaying sat entirely alone and looked at her scarred reflection in the dark glass of the window.
The monster responsible for what had been brutally done to her was still somewhere deeply entrenched in the human institutional structure. She had never stopped knowing that. For years, she had forcefully suppressed the blinding anger into something cold and manageable, because the geopolitical timing was wrong, the power balance was heavily skewed, and the risk to her fragile people was simply too high.
Smith Doyle had made those timing calculations infinitely more complicated in both directions. The world was undeniably safer for enhanced individuals because of his massive, stabilizing presence. But it was also heavily populated by a god she had absolutely no framework for confronting, which meant the bloody revenge she had spent years meticulously planning had to be held even more carefully than before.
She looked at the jagged scar.
She had not forgotten.
The exhausted man sitting in the corner of the cheap Los Angeles coffee shop turned the newspaper's job listings to the next page. He picked up a red pen and drew a harsh line through a warehouse position that required mandatory night shifts. His son faithfully went to bed at eight. That immediately ruled out nights.
The mounted television above the counter was loudly running the exact same chaotic footage it had been running on a loop for two solid hours.
It was a shaky, vertical phone video, barely twenty seconds long, of a massive figure in a dark hood violently descending four stories from a burning building with a terrified woman securely in his arms, and landing on the concrete without stumbling. The breathless anchors had already given him a catchy name: The Hooded Hero. The station's graphic department had already slapped a slick lower-third banner for it across the screen.
The rescued woman was currently being interviewed in the footage's second half. She was perfectly fine. She kept hysterically repeating it to the cameras.
The man sighed and turned another page of the paper.
The explicit, bloody deal he had made with the shadow people who had done the excruciating surgery was highly specific: Don't surface. Don't officially register on any public channel. Absolutely do not present yourself for a Fraternity combat power reading.
In exchange for his total anonymity, they left him and Ace completely alone. He deeply understood what the deal actually meant—it meant that they fully owned the asset, and the lethal asset was him, and his silent cooperation was the only volatile variable they were carefully managing. But they hadn't moved against him or his son in a very long while, and Ace was safe. That was the only calculation he lived inside.
He folded the newspaper precisely and finished his lukewarm coffee.
Outside the shop window, a young woman with a laptop and a massive, professional long-lens camera was parked aggressively across the street in a beat-up van, and had been for the last forty minutes.
He had noticed her the exact second he sat down.