Skye watched the stretcher carry Donnie Gill off the floor and said quietly, "The Paragons really are something. Even with everything he had, he still lost."
She paused. "If Shang-Chi had been my draw, I'd be on that stretcher."
In the Inhumans' box, Jiaying shook her head. "What a waste. That kind of talent, and he's not one of ours."
Gordon said, "A lot of these enhanced individuals could pass for Inhumans. I've caught myself thinking it more than once."
"There's nothing to be done about it," Jiaying said. "Though I'm relieved — I haven't seen a single malignant mutation among them. That's something, at least."
The brackets rolled forward.
Zone Two brought Steve Rogers to the ring against a bald, powerfully built man who took one look at him and broke into an unexpectedly warm expression.
"Captain America. I never thought I'd be matched with you." He straightened up, already resigned to his fate but clearly pleased about it. "My mother is your biggest fan. Any chance of an autograph after?"
Steve blinked, then nodded. "Sure."
The next second, he launched off the canvas and drove a flying kick squarely into his opponent's chest. The man went airborne, hit the floor outside the ring, and didn't get up.
Steve landed, stood still for a moment, and said to no one in particular, "I think I overestimated him."
His opponent's combat reading had come in around ten. Steve had gone all out by reflex.
The referee announced: "Contestant number fifteen wins!"
No one in the audience reacted with surprise. He was Captain America.
The seeded fighters moved through the early rounds without friction.
Gilgamesh, stripped of any pretense of holding back, worked through his zone with open-palm strikes that sent opponents tumbling off the ring before they'd completed their first attack. He looked almost bored, and somehow that made it worse to watch.
Thena dispatched her opponents with the practiced ease of someone who had refined her combat technique over several thousand years and found the current opposition mildly educational at best.
Tony Stark's Zone One opponent spent ninety seconds trying to find a gap in the Iron Man armor before concluding, correctly, that there wasn't one and surrendering before a single repulsor had been fired.
Wong and Agatha Harkness both advanced through their brackets on the back of magic, neither encountering anyone capable of matching what they were working with.
"Zone Two finals — contestants number fifteen and forty-five, please take the stage."
Steve Rogers stepped through the ropes and found T'Challa already waiting.
From the stands, Jessica Jones cupped her hands around her mouth. "Don't you dare lose, Captain!"
Across the waiting area, Shang-Chi called out, "Let's go, T'Challa!"
Steve shifted his grip on the shield and did not let himself relax. Not even slightly. T'Challa in a vibranium suit was a different category of problem than most of what he'd faced in this bracket.
T'Challa settled into his fighting stance and said, "Let's see what you've got, Avenger."
He moved immediately.
The gap between them closed in under a second, and at the last moment T'Challa launched into a spinning sequence — three kicks in rapid succession, each one precisely angled to find a different point on the shield.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
Steve absorbed all three, shield arm burning with the vibration, feet grinding backward with each hit. The moment T'Challa landed, ten vibranium claws extended from his fingers and raked forward in both directions simultaneously.
Steve pulled the shield across his body — fast enough to stop the claws from finding his torso, not fast enough to stop them entirely. They caught the shield's face and dragged across it, leaving deep parallel furrows in the surface. The paint was gone. The metal beneath it was scored.
Steve pivoted left and pushed the shield out as a barrier, buying a half-second. T'Challa used it to set his feet, then drove both kicks into the shield's surface in a single explosive motion. The impact knocked Steve off his balance entirely, feet losing purchase, sliding back three meters before he caught himself.
In the stands, the Black audience members erupted. The noise was different from the rest — sharper, louder, with something personal in it.
In the VIP box, Shuri grabbed the armrest and said, "He's running circles around him! Brother's got this!"
King T'Chaka kept his expression composed. "T'Challa has the suit's advantage."
"Steve has the shield."
"A vibranium suit's defense doesn't have a ceiling that Steve's strength can reach," T'Chaka said. "Even standing still, T'Challa is functionally unhittable."
As if to demonstrate the point, Steve sent the shield spinning across the ring in a flat arc. It connected with T'Challa's chest — and bounced. T'Challa took a half-step back to absorb the kinetic energy, but showed no sign of damage.
T'Challa pressed forward. Steve was at the ring's edge now, nowhere to back up to.
"Yield, Captain. You can't damage the suit."
Steve caught the returning shield without looking at it. "That word isn't in my vocabulary."
He pivoted on his back foot and threw everything into a side kick — his full super-soldier output, aimed at T'Challa's center of mass.
T'Challa went down to one knee. The force was real and it had staggered him — for about half a second.
He came back up immediately, vibranium suit having absorbed every joule of it, completely unharmed.
Steve threw the shield again, looking to keep him back. T'Challa caught it with both fists and slammed it into the ring surface, driving it into the canvas and pinning it there.
For one breath, Steve Rogers was without his shield.
T'Challa crossed the distance and punched him in the chest.
Several tons of force redirected through a vibranium suit hit Steve's braced forearms. He got them up in time to partially block it, but the impact sent him off the edge of the ring and onto the floor below.
The arena noise crested.
People who hadn't expected it stared. Several of them stared for a long time.
Agent May looked at Coulson and said, "Your idol just lost."
Coulson watched Steve get to his feet on the floor below, expression matter-of-fact. "The suit is the problem. None of Steve's attacks can actually damage it. But every hit T'Challa lands goes directly through Steve's defense."
Ward said, "That's a rough equation for anyone without gear. Iron Man and Blue Dynamo are the same story — you can't really fight them unless you can breach the armor."
The referee's voice carried through the arena. "Contestant number forty-five wins and advances to the finals of the World Martial Arts Tournament!"
Shang-Chi met T'Challa at the ring steps and clapped him on the shoulder. "Finals. Congratulations."
T'Challa allowed himself a small smile. "I got lucky with the draw. If my bracket had looked different, I wouldn't be nearly as confident." He glanced at Shang-Chi. "At least now Selene won't have anything to say to me."
Shang-Chi laughed. "She'll find something. She always does." A beat. "Your turn's coming. Don't embarrass the team."
"Zone Three finals — contestants number seventy and eighty-two, please take the stage."
Skye heard her number and let out a slow breath. Already.
She stepped through the ropes and found her opponent waiting.
Number eighty-two was Sif of Asgard, standing in full battle armor, a round shield on her left arm and a short sword in her right hand. Her posture was the posture of someone who had been fighting since before most countries had names.
Skye took one look at the armor, recalled Sif's previous rounds, and thought: This is going to be difficult.
"Begin!"
Skye didn't hesitate — she raised her arm and launched a vibration wave immediately.
Sif had already moved.
She'd been watching Skye's earlier matches. She'd clocked the hand movement. The moment Skye's arm came up, Sif had shifted her position, and the wave passed through empty air.
The dodge had closed half the distance between them.
Skye raised both arms and doubled the output.
The intention was right. The execution was readable. Sif read it and stepped around the second wave the same way she'd avoided the first, and now she was right there, inside Skye's range.
Skye's eyes went wide. "—"
She stamped her foot into the ring surface.
The entire platform shuddered — a seismic pulse radiating outward through the canvas, the ring rippling like the surface of disturbed water. Sif lost her footing and went down to one knee.
Skye drove both palms forward while she had the angle.
Sif got the shield up.
The vibration wave hit the shield face and distributed across it rather than landing clean. Sif absorbed it, planted a foot, and swept Skye's legs from under her in a single motion. Skye hit the canvas, and before she'd registered what happened, a boot connected with her stomach and sent her airborne.
She crossed the ring boundary and hit the floor outside.
The referee said: "Contestant number eighty-two wins and advances to the finals."
In the VIP box, Smith watched without surprise.
Skye had only awakened recently. The fact that she'd made it to the Zone finals at all was a genuine result — she'd adapted fast and she'd used what she had intelligently. Against Sif, who had several centuries of combat experience, a pattern-readable ability set, and battle armor, the outcome was always going to be the same.
Sif makes the top eight. She doesn't go much further than that.
In the Inhumans' section, Jiaying settled back in her seat. Reaching the Zone final with a recent awakening was already more than she'd expected. Now it was simply time to watch.
"Contestants number ninety-four and ninety-seven, please take the stage."
T'Challa looked at Shang-Chi beside him. "Go. And don't lose."
Shang-Chi nodded once and stepped through the ropes.
Blonsky was already in the ring.
He took one look at Shang-Chi, ran the Paragons file in his head, and activated his transformation without waiting to see if it was necessary.
The change was fast and violent — bones cracking outward, muscle mass tripling, the green-grey skin of the Abomination expanding across the ring like something geological. When it was done, Blonsky stood ten feet tall and looked at Shang-Chi across a considerable height difference.
The audience that hadn't seen Blonsky before reacted with a unified intake of breath.
In the Inhumans' section, Jiaying said quietly, "Not every enhanced evolution resolves cleanly."
Shang-Chi looked up at the Abomination, thought involuntarily of the Hulk, and swallowed.
"Begin!"
The Abomination threw a punch first.
Shang-Chi dove sideways, the fist passing close enough that the wind from it nearly knocked him over anyway. The impact against the ring surface cracked the canvas and sent a shockwave through the floor.
That would have ended me.
He scrambled upright and barely had time to register that the follow-through arm swing was already coming — Blonsky using his momentum to arc the same arm laterally across the ring.
Shang-Chi got his forearms up into the block.
The force picked him up and drove him sideways several steps before he could anchor his feet again. His arms were ringing.
"That's terrifying."
Blonsky looked at him with what might have been satisfaction. He brought both hands together and clapped them toward Shang-Chi.
The air between them compressed and released in a directed shockwave — a wall of moving air that hit Shang-Chi in the chest.
He pulled Dragon Heart immediately. Golden light wrapped around him and he redirected the wave through a circular Tai Chi motion, sending it back toward Blonsky.
Blonsky stood in it. The hurricane bent around him, his sheer mass shrugging off the redirect, and he clapped again. Then again. Then a third time in rapid succession.
Three separate wind walls converged on Shang-Chi from different angles.
He countered the first with Dragon Heart redirection — the second hit him while he was still moving, throwing his balance — the third landed before he'd recovered and took him off the ring entirely, slamming him into the far wall hard enough to crater it.
Shang-Chi dropped from the wall to the floor, completely uninjured. But he was outside the ring.
The Abomination reverted to Blonsky, who smoothed his jacket and looked around the arena with the satisfaction of a man who had done exactly what he came to do.
"Contestant number ninety-seven advances to the finals!"
Shang-Chi stared at the crater his impact had left in the wall for a long moment. He hadn't taken physical damage. He hadn't been defeated in any meaningful combat sense. He'd simply been moved, efficiently and decisively, outside a line on the floor.
His expression was not happy.
Xu Xialing watched from the stands with wide eyes. "He lost that fast?"
Xu Wenwu said, without particular drama, "He was outmaneuvered. Offense that can't be absorbed or redirected. He got caught chasing instead of controlling."
In the government box, Ross leaned back and let himself smile for the first time all day. Blonsky had delivered. The quarterfinal spot was secured, exactly as requested.
Betty said, "He remembered the technique from—"
Banner nodded. "He was there when I used it. He remembered." He watched Blonsky walk off the ring. "Apparently it's more useful as a human than I gave it credit for."
"Zone One finals — contestants number two and twelve, please take the stage."
Ivan Vanko looked at Tony Stark.
"Finally," he said. "I've been waiting."
Tony said, "Let's see what you've built since the last time."
They walked toward the ring together.