Steve Rogers watched the indestructible ring burn. "Those are just conventional bombs," he noted grimly. "Surface-to-surface missiles would be worse."
Coulson nodded, his eyes reflecting the blinding orange light. "Most superhumans below a certain threshold can't operate effectively under sustained artillery coverage. The problem, strategically, is deploying it anywhere near a populated area."
The exceptions to that rule were obvious—portal users who could effortlessly redirect anything dropped on them, and the absolute highest tier of beings who were strong enough that the question was entirely moot. Whether that upper echelon could simply absorb a tactical nuclear strike was a question nobody had tested, and nobody in their right mind was rushing to answer.
Steve sat with that heavy realization for a moment. It explained exactly why the sudden, terrifying emergence of superhumans hadn't completely destabilized the existing global power structures yet. The conventional military advantage still held. For now.
A few rows back, Xialing leaned toward her brother, pitching her voice over the rolling thunder of the explosions. "Can her shield last through this?"
Shang-Chi watched the relentless firelight dancing across the platform and thought about it honestly. "One or two bombs? I'd back my own durability. But this has been running for over a minute without stopping. I don't know what that total explosive yield adds up to, and I haven't tested myself against anything even close to it."
In the Fraternity stands, Pietro's eyes hadn't left the ring for a single microsecond. Through the thick, choking black smoke and blinding fire, the dark red outline of Wanda's shield was still visible—flickering violently, heavily compressed under the weight of the barrage, but holding. She hadn't taken any of the S.H.I.E.L.D. enhancement compounds. He didn't actually know her upper physical ceiling here, and not knowing made his jaw lock tight.
Inside the trembling scarlet dome, Wanda was half-crouched, her arms shaking as both hands fed raw chaos energy into the barrier in a continuous, desperate stream. The previous chest cannon had knocked her completely unconscious. If this bombardment broke through, the heat and kinetic shock wouldn't outright kill her—but she would go down hard, and she wouldn't get back up.
She gritted her teeth and kept feeding it.
Inside the illusion, Tony Stark had already died twice.
The Afghanistan missile hit him first—his own brilliant, lethal ordnance, his own name stamped proudly on the casing. He saw Obadiah Stane stepping into a vacant Stark Industries boardroom and coldly closing the door behind him. Tony recognized the traumatic illusion immediately, his mind bracing, and waited for it to end.
It didn't end. The scene simply shifted.
A dark, dripping cave. Armed captors. The brutal demand for weapons. Except this time, Smith Doyle was simply, conspicuously absent from everything that followed. No divine intervention. No Capsule Corporation rising to change the world. It was a timeline that had developed entirely without that cosmic variable, and Tony was forced to watch it violently play out from inside his own paralyzed body—the Chitauri Battle of New York without the Fraternity's massive margin of safety, the cold, mathematical calculation that there was no other option, carrying the nuclear bomb through the portal, the freezing void of space.
Then Afghanistan again, a different fractured branch. A black man desperately pulling him clear of the convoy before the devastating detonation.
The psychic illusions cycled relentlessly without repeating. Tony's consciousness moved through branching, terrifying versions of his own life like someone frantically flipping television channels. Each one was perfectly coherent. Each one was tragically different. And none of them released him into the next. He fully understood what was happening to him.
Understanding it didn't help the terror.
High above the roaring ring, the six secondary adamantium suits finally finished their lethal bomb runs.
Thirty more Iron Man armors descended from the upper stratosphere to instantly take their place. It was practically his entire remaining inventory—every gold-titanium model, their bomb bays ratcheting open, mechanically cycling into perfectly spaced formations for a devastating second wave.
JARVIS had Tony's final instruction stored in its memory core verbatim: Three minutes of continuous coverage. Not one second less.
The stadium crowd stared up at the massive, hovering armada and went completely, terrified silent for a long moment.
Inside her flickering shield, Wanda registered the new arrivals blotting out the sun. Through the exhaustion burning in her veins, something cold and sharp suddenly clarified in her chest.
Not all secondary adamantium.
Wanda stopped feeding the shield.
The protective dome collapsed instantly. The massive reservoir of chaos energy she had been parceling out in a tightly controlled stream violently reversed direction. She drew it all back in, compressed it into a microscopic, screaming singularity of power, and released it directly upward in a single, catastrophic wave.
The blinding, dark red light swept across all thirty suits simultaneously.
Arc reactor cores were violently crushed. Gold-titanium frames crumpled like wet paper, twisting and folding in on themselves mid-air under the reality-warping pressure.
They came down all at once.
CLANG. CRASH. SCREECH.
Suit after suit hit the indestructible ring and the grass around it like a localized meteor shower. Some bounced wildly, tearing deep gouges into the earth outside the boundary; others shattered completely apart on impact, billions of dollars of bleeding-edge components scattering across the platform and beyond the safety line. The deafening, metallic sound of the destruction went on significantly longer than anyone expected.
And then, absolute silence.
Wanda's legs gave out. She hit the adamantium surface like a cut string and didn't move.
The arena was completely quiet for a full, paralyzed second before anyone in the stands fully reacted to what they had just witnessed.
Thirty Iron Man suits. Destroyed in a single, god-tier move. But the woman who had just shattered a global superpower's automated military was completely unconscious on the platform, which meant she had burned absolutely everything she had left to do it.
Six suits remained airborne—the original secondary adamantium models, entirely untouched by the chaos wave, still coldly circling the smoke-filled sky. Wanda's desperate attack had broken against their indestructible shells without effect.
JARVIS smoothly descended one of the pristine silver suits to the platform and set it down with a heavy thud directly in front of her motionless body.