The host raised the microphone.
"Ms. Agatha — what are your chances?"
Agatha glanced at Gilgamesh standing beside her and said, "I can't put a number on it before we've started. What I can tell you is that I intend to win."
The host said, with the practiced warmth of someone making a moment, "Direct. Honest. The kind of attitude that got you here." He turned. "And Mr. Gilgamesh — do you have a strategy?"
Gilgamesh made a fist.
"I'll punch through whatever's in front of me."
The host laughed, slightly uncomfortably. "Simple. Effective." He stepped back. "The champion of the first World Martial Arts Tournament will receive a billion-dollar prize, and the fulfillment of one reasonable wish and they will also earn a personal sparring session with Smith Doyle."
He gestured to the ring.
"Let's begin."
Ajak had spoken to Gilgamesh before the match. Win this. He'd nodded.
Agatha had read Wong's memories. The Dragon Balls, the wish mechanics, the shape of what was actually on offer here. She'd nodded at nothing in particular and set her intentions accordingly.
The moment the starting signal came, she opened with a full-force magic missile — not a probe, a genuine opening strike, large enough that the host below the ring instinctively took a step back when it formed.
Gilgamesh punched it.
The missile detonated against his fist and the explosion washed over him without effect. He was already walking forward through the dissipating energy.
She fired four more in sequence.
He destroyed all four the same way — each one meeting his fist before it could land, each detonation rolling off him. His expression was attentive. Not unconcerned — attentive. He was learning her output as he walked.
The host, recovering his professional composure: "An ancient being with a body that can shatter magic projectiles bare-handed. We haven't seen that method before in this competition."
Agatha created distance, keeping her magic continuous. Two purple whips erupted from the ring surface and wrapped around Gilgamesh's wrists, trying to pin his arms laterally.
Gilgamesh looked at the bindings. The veins on his forearms rose.
The whips snapped.
In the instant he cleared the restraints, four images of Agatha appeared at the cardinal points around him — identical, simultaneous, each one holding the same posture.
Gilgamesh chose one and struck.
His fist passed through empty air and the image dissolved. Agatha's voice came from directly behind him. "Wrong one."
Her hands pressed flat against his back.
A deep purple containment shell assembled around him — solid, multi-layered, her full output behind the construction. The shell began moving immediately, sliding laterally across the ring toward the boundary, Agatha directing it from outside.
Inside, Gilgamesh felt the walls. He felt the magical construction, the energy density, the architecture of it. He formed his Eternal construct on his right arm, the golden light building along his forearm and fist.
He hit the shell from inside.
A dull impact. Cracks spidered across the interior surface.
Agatha pushed more into the movement — two meters to the boundary, maybe less. She needed it out of the ring before he—
The shell shattered.
She stepped back.
His eye beams came immediately — two lines of energy cutting across the ring at her position. Agatha raised a red diamond-shaped barrier. The beams hit it and the barrier absorbed the strike cleanly, the geometry of the construct distributing the force.
Then Gilgamesh crossed the distance in a single acceleration.
He brought his palm around in a full-force strike against the barrier. The structure rang like something had hit a bell made of compressed light.
The barrier held.
He read the resistance through his palm and understood the ceiling. He closed his fist.
The second hit shattered it.
The host below the ring: "It's gone — Gilgamesh has broken through her barrier again!"
The red fragments didn't dissipate.
They shifted, and divided, and became dozens of small shards moving through the air — and then they were butterflies, deep red against the arena light, rising around Gilgamesh in a slow column.
He looked at them.
The arena blurred.
From outside, both competitors stopped moving simultaneously. They stood in the center of the ring as though someone had pressed pause, completely still, nothing visibly happening between them.
The audience looked at each other.
The host said, with careful uncertainty, "Something is... occurring."
Inside the illusion, Gilgamesh was somewhere else entirely.
He was standing in a landscape he recognized. The smell of it. The particular quality of the light. The sound of something enormous moving in the distance that you learned to orient around rather than toward.
The early period. When the Deviants were still the primary problem on this planet.
He stood in Gilgamesh's memory — which was to say, he stood in his own memory — and he watched.
Agatha moved through it beside him, not yet aware that he was fully present. She was cataloguing: Ajak's healing, the particulars of Thena's combat style, Ikaris at full output over an early Bronze Age city, Makkari as a blur at the horizon. The Deviant corpses arranged in the aftermath of a successful operation. Phastos already building what would eventually become irrigation. Druig at the edge of the settlement, watching. Sprite constructing a narrative of it in real time that would become myth within three generations.
Kingo performing for a crowd that didn't know they were watching something that would remember this moment for five thousand years.
She wanted to know what we are, Gilgamesh thought. She's thorough.
He watched her absorb the fall of Babylon, Thena's first episode, the long dispersal. She was professional about it — no reaction, pure information gathering.
He decided that was long enough.
He let the domain surface.
His construct expanded outward through the illusion, geometric and structured where her magic was fluid, and the landscape she'd built around his memories stopped being her construct and became his.
Agatha felt the shift and understood it immediately.
"You let me in deliberately."
"I wanted to see what you were looking for," Gilgamesh said. "I didn't expect it to be our history."
"Was it accurate?"
"Mostly. The Babylon period is usually depicted more heroically than it was." He paused. "You've seen what you came to see. It's time to end this."
"You've had this ability the entire fight."
"I had no reason to use it until now."
Inside the domain, Agatha's full toolkit stopped working. The energy sources she drew from — the dimensional reservoirs, the dark power channels she'd cultivated over centuries — found no purchase in the space Gilgamesh had built. She pushed against the walls of it and found them absolute.
His fist connected with the side of her head.
Clean. Complete. Professional.
In the arena, Agatha's body went limp where she stood and she folded to the canvas without drama. Gilgamesh stepped back.
He looked down at the host.
"Are you going to count?"
The host startled. He climbed the ring steps, stood over Agatha, and started the count.
At ten, she hadn't moved.
"Gilgamesh wins the World Martial Arts Tournament!"
The crowd took a moment to process all of it — what they'd seen, what they hadn't, and the gap between the two — and then the noise arrived.
The host turned to Gilgamesh. "Can you explain what happened? From where we were watching, neither of you moved."
Gilgamesh said, "She shattered the shield and turned the pieces into an illusion trigger. We were both inside it — she was reading my memories, I was watching her do it. When she'd seen enough, I pulled her into my own domain and knocked her out." He looked at Agatha on the canvas. "She'll wake up fine. She's not badly hurt."
The arena digested this.
Someone said: "They fought an entire second battle inside their heads while standing still."
Someone else: "Magic is completely unfair and I want to learn it immediately."
In the stands, Steve Rogers said, "I did not see that coming. Breaking someone's illusion from the inside is one thing. Setting up a domain to end the fight — that's a different level entirely."
Jessica said, "I keep thinking about Wanda. Her illusion work versus whatever Agatha is doing. Would love to see that match someday." She took a long pull of her Coke. "Speaking of which — why didn't she compete? An event this size, global broadcast, Dragon Ball wish on the line?"
In the Asgardian box, Lorelei watched the medical team approach Agatha on the canvas, and Sif standing beside her with the contained expression of someone processing a difficult outcome.
Sif said, "When did Earth develop practitioners of this caliber? We had no intelligence on either of them."
Lorelei said, "Kamar-Taj has been operating in Nepal for a long time. The strongest practitioner there holds the title of Sorcerer Supreme. Wong is relatively junior by that institution's standards." She brushed a strand of hair back. "Agatha is separate from that tradition entirely."
Sif's expression shifted. "What you're describing is a significant magical infrastructure that Asgard has no current assessment of."
"Earth surprises people."
A pause. Then Lorelei said, with the light, unhurried cruelty of someone who had been bored for the last twenty minutes and had found something useful to do with it: "Did you know Thor has settled into a relationship with an ordinary Earth woman?"
Sif was quiet for exactly two seconds.
"That's not new information," she said. "Thor's relationships with Earth women follow a pattern. They're mortal. The gap in lifespan resolves itself."
Her tone was precise and she didn't touch the topic again. Lorelei found the response less entertaining than she'd hoped and returned her attention to the ring.
Nick Fury had watched the entire tournament from his office.
He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a long moment.
Eternals. Sent to this planet before recorded history, operating on their own agenda.
Individuals with several thousand years of operational experience, now confirmed to be present on Earth and apparently done with the concealment arrangement that had kept them out of his intelligence picture.
And Agatha Harkness — no institutional affiliation, no digital footprint in any database his team had access to, a practitioner of dark magic who had nearly drained a Kamar-Taj sorcerer to a husk and stopped only because a tournament rule told her to.
He said, quietly, to no one: "How many things are on this planet that I don't have a file on?"
The host stepped back to center stage.
"Gilgamesh is the champion of the first World Martial Arts Tournament — the strongest competitor on this stage today!"
He let the crowd run for a moment, then raised the microphone again.
"And now — the moment everyone has been waiting for." He turned toward the VIP box. "By the terms of the championship, our winner will face Smith Doyle in a personal sparring session."
The arena noise hit a new register entirely.