Xu Shang-Chi had a thousand things he could have said. He said absolutely none of them.
He had no title here. He hadn't fought. He hadn't bled on the adamantium. Standing there to lecture Tony Stark on the immense moral weight of a cosmic wish he hadn't personally earned would be exactly the kind of arrogant shamelessness Shang-Chi simply couldn't stomach. The grieving families who had lost people in the Battle of New York would have to wait another year.
He'd make sure of it himself, next time. Smith turned his attention to Tony. "Let's make the wish."
Tony nodded. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and nodded again. He had spent his entire adult life frantically building things—engines, weapons, armor, companies—specifically so he wouldn't have to sit quietly with heavy, crushing feelings like this one. And right now, standing on the indestructible platform, there was absolutely nothing left to build.
Smith gathered all seven glowing Dragon Balls, setting them carefully in a cluster on the center of the ring. He took a deliberate step back.
The wind died. The stadium crowd went completely still.
"Come out, Shenron!"
The glass orbs ignited. Seven massive, blinding columns of pure gold punched straight up into the Pacific sky, and the afternoon instantly died.
Absolute, suffocating darkness swallowed the arena. It swallowed the island. It rolled across the horizon in every direction, devouring the sun.
Smith Doyle had grown exponentially stronger since the last summoning, and Shenron had grown with him. The shadow didn't just stop at the Earth's atmosphere this time. It violently rolled outward past the clouds, past the freezing thermosphere, expanding into the void until the Moon itself went completely dark.
It stopped there. Venus and Mars caught the absolute edge of the cosmic shadow and no more.
Smith observed the astronomical boundary and filed the data away without comment. He already knew the Super Dragon Balls cast a shadow that covered hundreds of galaxies. The power gap between his current level and there remained staggeringly considerable.
High above the arena, the seven columns of gold violently converged. They twisted and solidified, rapidly knitting together into massive, undulating green scales over five hundred meters long.
On the other half of the planet, bright, bustling day became pitch-black night in under a second.
Millions of people stopped in the streets and looked up. A few screamed in sheer terror. Most, fully adapted to the modern era, simply reached into their pockets for their phones. This sudden, global eclipse was practically routine by comparison.
The media experts were already frantically typing. Their patented "once-in-a-century natural meteorological phenomenon" explanation was on its third desperate outing now, and the internet comment sections were definitively starting to notice the pattern.
The S.H.I.E.L.D. evacuation transport was currently somewhere high over the Atlantic Ocean, and Phil Coulson was standing quietly, watching the cabin window go completely black.
"It happen again," Coulson noted, his voice perfectly even. "Has to be the dragon."
Beside him, Steve Rogers was staring blankly at the same unnatural darkness. The super-soldier's mind was elsewhere—specifically, anchored on a heavy conversation he had almost initiated with Peggy Carter before wisely thinking better of it. Looking at the black sky, he was profoundly glad he had kept his mouth shut. A woman in her fragile state didn't need another agonizing round of impossible hope followed by absolutely nothing.
"Any idea what he wished for?" Steve asked quietly.
"If I had to make an educated guess?" Coulson turned away from the darkened glass, adjusting his suit jacket. "His parents."
Steve looked at him, surprised. "Howard and Maria?"
"The car accident was a very long time ago, Captain. It made the international news briefly, and then it didn't. But Tony's never stopped carrying the weight of it."
Steve was quiet for a long moment. He had simply assumed, the way a man naturally assumes things when he has been buried in ice for seventy years, that Howard Stark had simply gotten old and passed away in his sleep. A lot of the brave people he had known were already gone. Peggy was still here, but barely. He had stopped being surprised by the grim math of time.
"If Howard comes back," Steve said, a faint, genuine smile touching his lips, "I'll actually have someone to catch up with."
Coulson didn't remotely share the nostalgic optimism. Howard Stark wasn't just Tony's eccentric father. He was one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s original, foundational architects. A living, breathing founding member returning to the modern world complicated about thirty years of deeply entrenched institutional decisions. That was Nick Fury's massive headache to solve, not his.
What kept Coulson's sharp mind turning was the infinitely broader, sociological question—the one absolutely nobody had thought through yet. If word definitively spread to the global public that the dead could be brought back, the people with enough money and power to do something reckless about it would start doing reckless, terrible things almost immediately.
He pressed his thumb against the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes, and listened to the hum of the jet engines in the dark.
On a completely separate, heavily classified aircraft, Alexander Pierce stood rigidly at the window with his hands casually clasped behind his back. Nick Fury stood right beside him, his single eye staring into the void.
"The dragon again," Fury rumbled. "Looks like Stark is getting what he wanted."
Pierce smiled warmly at his own reflection in the glass. "Sounds like we're getting an old friend back, Nick."
"Pity none of us got to see it in person," Fury muttered, annoyed by the operational blind spot. He paused. "Nothing from the orbital satellite feeds?"
"Blocked completely. Whatever they're doing with that localized coverage field, we can't get a single signal through it." Fury crossed his arms over his leather coat. "Never a good sign when the lights inexplicably go out. In every story I've ever read, that's exactly when the monsters show up."
"You'd prefer the mythic dragon announce itself with a church choir?" Pierce chuckled, shaking his head. "At least it's consistent."
Pierce kept his voice entirely easy. His face stayed a mask of pleasant, bureaucratic anticipation. But underneath the veneer, his calculating mind had already violently run the sequence twice.
Howard Stark was about to be alive again.
Pierce had been the active Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. when he personally arranged the brutal ambush on that dark, wooded road. The Winter Soldier had been thoroughly briefed on Howard's usual driving route. The clandestine operation had been clinically clean—a staged collision to force the car off the road, the experimental serum recovered from the trunk, the battered bodies left behind to look like a tragic, high-speed accident. The super-soldier serum had been absolutely worth the blood. HYDRA's entire modern soldier program had expanded exponentially because of it.
But Howard would come back asking questions. He always asked questions—it was the exact, relentless trait about the genius that made him so incredibly useful, and made him so lethally dangerous in equal measure.
But the trail is cold, Pierce reminded himself, his heart beating a fraction faster. It had been stone cold for years. Every single digital and physical record that could have pointed anywhere remotely useful had long since been systematically sanitized, shredded, and burned.
Alexander Pierce watched his own calm reflection in the dark glass as the plane flew blindly through the night.
It would be fine. It had to be.