Earth. Fraternity Headquarters.
Smith brought Wanda to the Fraternity before sending her back to Kamar-Taj. She'd earned a few hours somewhere that wasn't an underground rock chamber or a training courtyard, and he wanted to finish the conversation they'd started on Ego's planet.
"Your portal work," he said. "How's it coming? I didn't see a sling ring on you."
"The Ancient One suggested I approach it differently." Wanda sat down and let herself settle into the familiar surroundings. "Instead of borrowing dimensional energy the way standard Kamar-Taj technique does, she wants me to power the spells with my own internal energy. Understand the mechanism first, then drive it myself."
"Slower to learn that way."
"Much slower. For the portal specifically, I still need the sling ring. But in everything else—" She shrugged. "The other students are not keeping up with me. So it evens out."
Smith nodded. "It's the right approach. A technique you understand is worth ten you can perform by rote." He paused. "As for the portal — practice the form itself, not just the result. You'll reach a point where the ring is optional."
Wanda looked at him. "Without a sling ring? That's possible?"
"For you? Yes."
She absorbed that for a moment. "Then I'll practice until I get there." The smile that followed was the particular kind that meant she'd already decided and was simply agreeing with the timeline out loud. "I believe you."
Planet Ego. Outer orbit.
The raiders who'd come to watch hadn't stayed long after the fight ended. The recording clips had already been distributed across a dozen private channels before the dust below settled, and once the ground went quiet, there was no reason to linger in the orbital space of a planet that had just hosted that.
Most of them jumped out within the hour. A few sent Yondu a brief message first — acknowledgment, gratitude for the tip — then were gone.
Yondu's fleet held position. He stood at the viewport looking at the planet's surface, the terrain down there visibly rearranged from what the approach scans had shown.
"Boss." His first mate came up beside him. "Battle's done. The man's gone. What's our move?"
"We wait for Quill." Yondu didn't look away from the viewport. "Send word down — tell him and the others we're up here."
"Are we going down?"
"No." He said it without hesitation. "Send the message and hold position."
The first mate left. Yondu kept watching the planet.
He'd watched the man dismantle Ego's construct — repeatedly, systematically, with an ease that made the scale of what Ego was doing irrelevant. He'd watched the fight from a ship in orbit and felt the shockwaves as physical pressure through the hull at distance.
Ego had been the reason he'd originally changed course toward this system. The reason he'd spent thirty years keeping Peter Quill away from a planet that would have killed him. The reason for all of it.
And that man had handled Ego like a training exercise.
He swallowed and turned away from the viewport.
Inside the planet. Surface.
Rocket looked at the communicator and then at the group. "Yondu's outside. He wants to know if we're coming up."
"He's here?" Quill blinked. "How long has he been here?"
"Long enough to watch the whole fight and record most of it." Rocket pocketed the communicator. "He didn't come down because he didn't want to get caught in the crossfire. Which, given what the crossfire looked like, was a reasonable call."
Quill was quiet for a second. Something was working through his expression that he wasn't quite ready to put words to.
"He came all the way out here," he said.
"He came all the way out here," Rocket confirmed.
Mantis was looking at the landscape around them — the flattened terrain, the craters, the places where Ego's divine power had been pouring out of the ground and now simply wasn't. She was the only one who'd lived here. The only one for whom this place had been home, in whatever way a planet run by a Celestial could be called that.
"I'll come with you," she said, before anyone asked. "I don't know what I'd stay for."
They boarded the Milano and broke atmosphere.
Yondu's ship.
Quill came down the boarding ramp and Yondu was already there. He crossed the distance and pulled Quill into a hug that lasted about two seconds longer than anything Yondu would have allowed anyone to witness under normal circumstances.
"Knew you'd come back in one piece," he said, stepping back.
"You came out here for us."
"Don't make it weird." Yondu looked past him at the others filing off the Milano. His eyes moved across Rocket, Groot, Gamora, Drax, and stopped on Mantis with a brief flicker of recognition. "The man who fought Ego — who is he?"
"Smith Doyle," Quill said. "He's from Earth."
Yondu looked at him.
"An Earthling."
"Yes."
Yondu's expression went through several things in rapid succession. "I'd believe you if you told me he was a god. Or a Celestial. An Earthling—"
"He also killed Ronan," Drax said.
That landed. Yondu blinked. The same man who had ended the Accuser was the same man who'd just spent an afternoon dismantling Ego.
"The gap between Earthlings," he said finally, shaking his head. "It's remarkable."
Quill's lips twitched. "Yeah." He looked at the group. "On the subject of the Dragon Balls — let it go. All of you. It belongs to Smith Doyle. Anyone who tries to take it or work around him won't be around long enough to regret it."
Yondu waved a hand. "When a man can do what we just watched him do, the smart move is to find something else to pursue. I've already let it go." He paused. "The battle recording, on the other hand — that has significant value. Two top-tier powers going at each other in full? The universe pays well for footage like that."
No one argued with him.
After a meal and an hour of low-key conversation that served mostly to let everyone decompress, the group dispersed to their respective quarters. Quill waited until the corridors were quiet, then made his way to the captain's cabin.
Yondu looked up when he came in. "Something on your mind."
"Yeah." Quill leaned against the doorframe. "Why didn't you hand me over to Ego?"
Yondu was quiet for two seconds. "When he first hired me, I thought it was a straightforward job. Father wants his kid back. Not unusual." He leaned back in his chair. "Later, I found out what happened to the others he'd hired me to bring before you."
"The cave," Quill said.
Yondu nodded once. "So how was I going to hand you over after that?"
Quill looked at the floor. Then at Yondu. "You told me you were going to eat me. I believed that for twenty-three years."
"I needed you scared enough to stay in line." Yondu's expression was aggressively neutral. "It worked."
"I thought you were going to eat me," Quill said again, slower. "For twenty-three years."
Yondu pointed at the door. "Out. I need to sleep."
Quill pushed off the doorframe and walked out. At the threshold he stopped, his back to the room, and said quietly: "Thank you."
He let a beat pass.
"Also — I have power now." He held up one hand. The blue light came up through his palm, bright and steady, not borrowed this time. "Just so you know."
He walked out before Yondu could respond.
In the captain's cabin, Yondu stared at the space where the blue light had been, said nothing at all for a long moment, and then slowly shook his head.
Earth. Missouri.
The blue mass that had been spreading through Sterling was already dying before Coulson's field team arrived. Whatever mechanism had been driving it outward had cut off completely when the source went dormant. The slick blue substance that had swallowed a gas station and a stretch of Route 76 sat inert, contracting, its edges pulling back and going dark as the divine power that had animated it dissipated.
By the time the team walked the perimeter with their scanners, it was dissolving on its own.
Coulson crouched near the retreating edge and watched it happen. "Energy source has been severed. Whatever this is, it's not spreading anymore." He stood and looked at the damage behind them — the structures it had reached, the terrain it had altered. "Get this flagged for continued observation. I want another team on-site by morning."
He pulled out his tablet. A new mission notification was already waiting.
"We have somewhere to be. Let's move."
En route. Colorado.
The Airbus leveled off over the Rockies and May's voice came through the intercom, flat and professional: "S.H.I.E.L.D. Order 616. Northern Colorado airport. ETA forty minutes."
In the command area, Coulson brought up the mission file on his tablet and turned it so the team could see.
"Four minutes ago, a SHIELD convoy escorting a red-priority protected individual was attacked on Highway 76 outside Sterling, Colorado." He looked around the cabin. "Red priority means maximum security measures were in place. Either someone penetrated that protocol, or someone on the inside gave up the route."
Skye looked up. "Red priority — what does that mean? Like on a scale of—"
"It means the person inside that convoy is someone we cannot afford to lose." Coulson swiped to the file photo. "Dr. Franklin Hall. Canadian physicist. One of the top researchers in his field. SHIELD has been moving him between protected locations for months."
Simmons made a sound like someone had stepped on her foot. Fitz looked at the screen and went still.
"He was our Chemical kinetics instructor," Simmons said. "Second year. He was — he's brilliant, and he actually cared whether students understood what he was teaching, which is not as common as it should be."
Fitz was already reading through the file. "We have to get him back."
"That's why we're on the plane," Coulson said.
Donnie Gill, who had been quiet throughout, looked over from his seat. "Do we know who hit the convoy?"
Coulson closed the tablet. "That's what we're going to find out."
Highway 76. Sterling, Colorado.
The attack site was a stretch of two-lane highway in flat agricultural country, the kind of landscape that offered no cover and perfect sight lines in every direction. Three vehicles. Two compromised. One agent still on scene, bandaged, waiting.
Coulson crossed to him. "Agent Mike. Coulson. Walk me through it."
"They knew our route, sir. They were already in position when we arrived. No contact from the flanks, nothing overhead — Agent May checked the air and I had eyes on both sides of the road the whole approach."
"Inside information," May said.
"Has to be."
Coulson frowned. The Hydra cleanout had been thorough — blood memory extraction had pulled a significant number of embedded operatives out of the organization over the past year. He'd been confident the Bureau's operational security on protected individuals had been restored.
He turned to Skye. "You spoke to your mother?"
Skye had already put the call away. "Nobody from Afterlife. No Inhuman with stealth capability has left the base in this period. Mom confirmed it directly."
Coulson and May both registered this without showing it — the brief exhale of a possibility ruled out.
"Fitz." Simmons had crouched near the centerline of the road, pointing at a patch of air approximately three feet off the ground that didn't look like anything. "Come here. Look at this."
Fitz jogged over and stopped. He tilted his head. "I can't see anything. My full-spectrum goggles are on the ship."
"Watch." Simmons scooped up a handful of fine dust from the road's shoulder and tossed it into the area she was pointing at.
The dust didn't fall.
It hung in the air and moved — not randomly, not with any visible wind current, but in small, tight, irregular orbits, as if it were being routed around something. Something invisible. Something generating its own field.
Skye took two steps backward. "What is that?"
Coulson was already moving. "Can we disable it?"
"I think—" Fitz was at the instrument case, pulling a handheld scanner. "Yes — there's an electrostatic field running. It activated when Simmons got close. If I can—"
The readings on the scanner climbed past the top of the scale, pinned there for a full second, and then the field collapsed. The dust fell to the road in a normal, uniform drift.
Simmons reached into the area with a pair of tweezers. She came back with a small object — dense, metallic, shaped roughly like a gyroscope, about the size of a marble.
She held it up to the light.
"This is what was generating it," she said.