The Security Council representatives had spent the last twenty years of their careers learning to read the silences of men who were paid to be unreadable. Nick Fury's silence, just now, had told them everything.
The British representative's voice was careful and flat. "Director Fury. You're asking us to believe that the Kree Empire — one of the three recognized superpowers in this galaxy — dispatched a fleet commander and a full Accuser Legion to recover what amounts to an internal S.H.I.E.L.D. recruitment prop."
"I'm telling you what I know," Fury said.
"You're telling us what you want us to know." The British representative didn't raise his voice. "If it were a useless item, this would not be happening."
Fury spread his hands slightly. "I want to know why they're interested just as badly as you do. Probably more. I'm the one with a Kree fleet over my city." He let that sit for a second. "I'm genuinely curious how they even learned the Dragon Balls existed. That's a gap in our intelligence that I intend to close."
The French representative came back in. "Then we investigate. We need to understand what the Dragon Balls actually are, what they can do, and why a cosmic-level military force considers them worth a military operation."
"Agreed," Fury said. "Once this incident is resolved, you'll have a full accounting from this office."
The French representative looked at him steadily. "We'll hold you to that."
Fury ended the session. He had a war to manage and he'd given them all he could afford to give.
Far from Earth, on a vessel that drifted through deep space without haste, Thanos sat on his throne and looked at the orb his daughter had placed at his feet.
"You haven't disappointed me," he said.
Nebula stood in front of him, and for just a moment the composure she'd built over years of being measured against Gamora cracked open. Her face did something she hadn't let it do in a long time. It was a small thing — a tightening around the eyes, a barely perceptible shift in her posture. But Thanos's praise had reached somewhere that years of defeat hadn't managed to reach.
He reached down and opened the containment orb.
The Power Stone rose out of it. Purple-violet. Dense with potential that made the air around it feel pressurized.
Thanos closed his right hand around it.
The energy pushed back against him immediately — not a gentle resistance but the focused, cellular aggression of a force that had destroyed planets. It tried to move through his palm, up his arm, into his body. He compressed it. The resistance intensified. He compressed it further. The Stone's energy folded inward against his grip like a tide hitting a seawall, and the seawall didn't move.
He turned his fist over and looked at the purple light pulsing between his fingers.
"A fine instrument."
The most destructive of the six, by raw output. A single uncontrolled discharge could render a planet's surface uninhabitable. He had held it for fifteen seconds without structural damage to his hand. He noted this with the satisfaction of a craftsman checking tolerances.
Then he frowned.
The problem wasn't holding it. The problem was using it — using any of them in combination. Six stones required a vessel built for six stones. His bladed weapon was a powerful artifact, already at its structural limit; forcing additional stone settings into it would shatter the blade before the first engagement. He needed something purpose-built.
He lowered the Power Stone back into the orb and sealed it.
The Infinity Gauntlet. The forging needed to be moved up the priority list.
He catalogued what he had and what he didn't. The Power Stone was in his hands. The Mind Stone was also secured. The Space Stone, Time Stone, and Reality Stone were all last confirmed on Earth — which meant they had either stayed there or been moved recently, and given what he was hearing from Ronan, "recently" was a significant caveat. The Soul Stone's location remained unknown.
Two things needed to happen before he could commit to a full campaign against Earth: find the Soul Stone, and deal with the two individuals who predated his current operations and could complicate them. That problem required its own handling.
And then there were the Dragon Balls. Ronan was supposed to be bringing him answers there. Separately, he'd dispatched Supergiant to gather intelligence through other channels. Supergiant's abilities — telepathy, deep mind-reading, mental control at a distance — made her the most efficient intelligence asset in his service. What she could pull from a cooperative or uncooperative mind in an hour would take a field team months to assemble.
He would see what she brought back.
Selene came back through the intersection at speed and found the situation exactly as bad as she'd expected.
The aftermath of Tony's push was visible in the wreckage around Ronan's perimeter — three Iron Man suits stripped down to frames and scattered across the street like discarded machinery. A fourth was still airborne, executing tighter and tighter evasion arcs as Tony burned through his options. His chest cannons were cycling. He'd been trying sustained combined fire.
She watched Ronan spin his Universal Weapon through the incoming laser barrage. The beams hit the rotating head and were absorbed — drawn in rather than deflected — and then the weapon swung back out and the absorbed energy came off it in a directed burst that caught Tony full in the chest.
Tony went backward through the air and didn't come back in clean.
"Stubborn planet." Ronan looked around the street at the smoke and the craters and the scattered wreckage of the suits. His voice was the same register it had been since he arrived — neither angry nor satisfied, just resolved. "Not one of you willing to answer a simple question."
His gaze landed on Selene.
The half-second before he moved, she was already in motion.
He appeared in front of her anyway. Faster than she'd calculated. "The one who carried the ants away." His head tilted slightly. "I didn't think you'd come back."
She was already inside his guard when he finished the sentence, moving at the ceiling of what her vampire-enhanced speed could produce. Her shoulder drove into his ribcage and she hit him hard enough to lift him off his feet.
Ronan went backward.
Selene blinked — one stride, two, the geometry closing — and materialized behind him with a longsword drawn, blade angled for the gap between his neck plate and pauldron.
Ronan rotated in mid-air.
He wasn't trying to dodge. He turned into the blade.
The sword hit his neck and the impact ran back up the steel. The metal didn't find purchase — it found something harder than itself, and it found it all at once. The blade sheared off at the hilt.
Selene was still holding the grip when his fist connected.
The punch had no technique in it. It didn't need any. It was Ronan's mass and Ronan's strength moving in one direction, and when it hit her she left the ground immediately. She came down sixty feet away and plowed a trench through the asphalt before the friction stopped her.
She was up before the dust cleared. Nothing broken. The impact had been extraordinary and the damage was real, but Selene had been taking punishment for centuries and her body knew what to do with it. She assessed herself in about a second: functional, not serious.
Three explosions detonated around Ronan in rapid succession. Tony had used the opening — bombs on a tight spread, close enough to force a reaction.
Tony dropped altitude, angled toward her, and grabbed her by the arm. His boot jets fired and they cleared the blast radius together.
"You good?" His voice through the helmet was steady, but there was a tightness underneath it.
"Nothing serious." She was already checking sight lines. Ronan's position. Tony's remaining suit status.
The smoke dissolved and Ronan walked out of it unmarked.
He raised his Universal Weapon and pointed it at the two of them. A single focused beam discharged, dense and straight.
They split in opposite directions. The beam hit the ground between them and blew a crater eight feet across into the street.
And then the wall of a building behind Ronan came down.
Not because of an explosion. Because something had hit it from the outside.
The Hulk came through the gap in the debris, already swinging. The first punch hit Ronan across the jaw. The second caught his shoulder. The third drove directly into his sternum and the force of it drove Ronan down — both feet leaving the ground, his body compressing into the pavement until the street cracked under him and he sank six inches into a crater of his own.
Ronan snarled.
An energy field expanded from his body — not a weapon, a defense — and the crackling perimeter lifted him out of the crater while the Hulk's next strike hammered down into the shield and didn't penetrate. Ronan found his feet inside the bubble. He brought the Universal Weapon down in a single overhead arc.
The blow hit the Hulk like a demolition charge. He left the ground at an angle, flew the length of the block, went through the face of the building at the far end, and the structural noise of floors collapsing followed him in.
The street was quiet for a second.
"Who can tell me what I want to know." Ronan drove the base of his weapon into the pavement. The impact propagated outward in a radial crack that split the asphalt in every direction for thirty meters.
Then the Ten Rings came in.
Three of them first — gold-bronze rings the size of hubcaps, moving at impact velocity, hitting Ronan across the chest and left arm in a tight spread. The hits weren't absorbed. They pushed. Ronan was forced back two steps, then three, his boots dragging through the cracked concrete.
He stopped. He looked up.
Xu Wenwu stood at the far end of the street, the remaining seven rings orbiting his forearms in slow, steady rotation.
The expression on his face was exactly the expression of a man who had decided the conversation was going to go his way.
"Big talk is free," Xu Wenwu said. "Anybody can do it."