Thena stepped out of the house into the afternoon sunlight, her expression calm and welcoming. "Guests," she said simply. "Welcome."
Her gaze swept over them—first Smith Doyle, assessing him with the casual evaluation of someone who'd fought for millennia. Then her eyes settled on Fox.
And the world stopped.
It was like looking into a mirror. Every line of Fox's face matched her own. The same bone structure. The same eyes. The same everything. For five thousand years, Thena had walked among humans, never once seeing her own reflection in another living being.
Until now.
The recognition hit like a physical blow. Memories surged—fractured, corrupted, impossible memories that shouldn't exist. Images of Fox's face twisted with other faces, other times, other lives bleeding together into a chaotic mass that her Eternal mind couldn't process.
Thena's pupils turned pure white.
Gilgamesh saw it happening and cursed under his breath. "No. Not now."
Mahd Wy'ry—the madness that plagued Eternals whose memories had accumulated beyond their programming's capacity to contain them. When it struck, the afflicted Eternal became an indiscriminate killing machine, attacking anything that moved with five thousand years of combat mastery driving every strike.
Golden energy materialized in Thena's hands, forming into a spear with a blade sharp enough to cut through steel like paper.
She lunged.
Fox froze, her mind still processing the impossible resemblance. Is this my twin sister? Separated at birth? How is this possible? The questions paralyzed her for a fatal half-second.
The spear's tip filled her vision, gleaming golden death rushing toward her face at superhuman speed.
Smith Doyle moved.
He grabbed Fox around the waist and threw himself backward, ki propelling them away in a burst of speed that left afterimages. The spear tip passed through the space where Fox's head had been a microsecond earlier.
"Damn it!" Gilgamesh's massive fist swung toward Thena's shoulder, attempting to knock her off balance and create an opening to subdue her.
But Thena was already moving. Without conscious thought, five thousand years of muscle memory guided her defense. The spear in her right hand deflected Gilgamesh's strike while her left hand materialized a golden shield that caught his follow-up attack.
Metal rang against energy construct with a sound like a bell being struck.
Smith set Fox on her feet twenty feet away, his eyes never leaving the combatants. Fox pulled her pistol immediately, training overriding shock.
"Put it away," Smith said quietly. "Bullets won't help here."
Fox stared at the weapon in her hand, then at the battle unfolding before them. Gilgamesh's strikes were hitting with enough force to crater concrete, and Thena was blocking every single one. The golden weapons in her hands shifted and flowed like liquid, becoming whatever she needed in the moment—axe, sword, spear, shield.
Fox holstered the pistol. Curve the bullets all she wanted, they wouldn't penetrate that defense.
"Stay here," Smith commanded. "I'm going in."
Ki exploded around him in a visible aura.
Gilgamesh saw Smith blur into motion and shouted a warning. "Careful! She's in full Mahd Wy'ry! She'll attack anything that moves!"
I know, Smith thought, ducking under a horizontal spear sweep that would have decapitated him. He'd seen this in his previous life's memories—Thena's episodes, the violence, the unconscious mastery of combat that made her nearly unstoppable even in madness.
The spear reversed direction mid-swing, the blade arcing down toward his skull. Smith twisted, the edge missing by millimeters, and drove his shoulder into Thena's exposed midsection.
The impact hit like a freight train collision.
Thena flew backward, crashing through the mud-brick wall of the house. The structure collapsed around her in an explosion of dust and debris. Their "Kiss the Chef" restaurant, Gilgamesh's pride and joy, disintegrated in an instant.
Gilgamesh stared at the ruins, then gave Smith a genuine thumbs-up. "First person I've ever seen knock her on her ass!" he called out, impressed despite the destruction.
The appreciation lasted exactly one second.
Thena erupted from the rubble like a golden meteor, twin axes materializing in her hands mid-flight. Dust and broken bricks scattered in her wake as she closed the distance to Smith in a heartbeat.
The right axe came down in an overhead chop. Smith dodged left, the blade burying itself in the ground where he'd stood. The left axe swept horizontally before he could counter, forcing him to leap backward.
Fast, Smith analyzed, his combat instincts cataloguing every movement. Faster than most enhanced humans. And those weapons—materialized energy with physical mass. Fascinating.
The axes dissolved, replaced by a longsword in one hand and a short blade in the other. Thena pressed forward, her attacks flowing like water, each strike setting up the next in an endless chain of death.
Smith gave ground, dodging and weaving, not yet committing to a full counterattack. He needed to understand her patterns, her—
The longsword thrust at his chest. He twisted sideways. The short blade came from his blind spot, aimed at his kidney.
Only his enhanced reflexes saved him.
"Thena!" Gilgamesh charged back into the fight, golden gauntlets materializing around his massive fists. "Your opponent is me!"
He swung a haymaker that could have leveled a building. Thena's longsword came up to parry, the impact sending shockwaves through the ground. She spun with the momentum, her short blade becoming a shield that caught Gilgamesh's follow-up strike.
Smith saw his opening.
He shot upward, ki propelling him into the air above the combatants. His eyes began to glow red as energy gathered.
"Eye beams!"
Twin crimson lasers erupted from his eyes, striking Thena center mass. The force blasted her backward, her golden weapons flickering as she tumbled across the red earth.
Gilgamesh didn't waste the opportunity. He appeared behind her in a burst of speed surprising for his size, his gauntleted fist raised high.
Sorry, old friend, he thought, and brought the hammer down on the back of her head with carefully measured force.
Thena crumpled, unconscious before she hit the ground.
The sudden silence was deafening. No more ringing metal. No more impacts that shook the earth. Just wind whistling across the Outback and their heavy breathing.
Gilgamesh knelt beside Thena, checking her pulse with gentle fingers that belied his brutal strength. Still alive. Still breathing. The episode had passed.
He looked up at Smith, still hovering in mid-air, and reassessed everything he thought he knew about humanity's current state.
When did Earth produce someone like this? The power, the speed, the energy projection—it reminded him of Ikaris, his fellow Eternal. But this was a human. Supposedly.
Smith descended slowly, touching down near Fox. His eyes swept over Thena's unconscious form, noting with professional interest that his attacks had left no visible damage. The shoulder strike that sent her through a building. The eye beams that hit with enough force to crater stone.
Nothing. Not even bruises forming.
The Eternals are tougher than the movies suggested, he mused. Good to know.
Gilgamesh lifted Thena carefully, cradling her against his chest despite her being nearly his size. He carried her to the one surviving table in what used to be their yard, laying her down with the tenderness of someone who'd done this many times before.
"The crisis is over," he said, gesturing for them to approach. "You can come closer now."
Smith and Fox walked over. Fox stared down at Thena's unconscious face—her own face, essentially—with an expression mixing fascination and unease.
"What just happened to her?" Fox demanded. "Why did she attack me?"
The encounter had shaken her more than she wanted to admit. This woman who shared her face possessed strength that made Fox's assassin skills seem quaint by comparison. And she'd tried to kill her within seconds of laying eyes on her.
Gilgamesh ran a hand through his hair, looking apologetic and weary. "I'm sorry. I should have warned you before Thena came out." He gestured at her unconscious form. "She suffers from Mahd Wy'ry. It's... complicated. A condition unique to our kind."
"Your kind?" Fox asked.
"Eternals," Smith supplied quietly. "Immortal beings created by the Celestials to protect emerging civilizations from predators called Deviants."
Gilgamesh's eyes widened. "You know about us?"
"I know many things," Smith said simply. He nodded toward Thena. "Mahd Wy'ry is a tragic, incurable psychological affliction. The mind fractures. They become violent, attacking indiscriminately based purely on combat instinct."
Smith decided not to revealed the truth that Mahd Wy'ry is actually a malfunction caused by incomplete memory wipes. When Thena suffers from it, she is actually remembering past missions and the destruction of other planets during previous Emergences.
The truth that the Eternal are synthetic beings.
"That's... remarkably accurate," Gilgamesh admitted, surprised. "Most humans have never even heard of Eternals, much less our afflictions."
Fox was still processing. "So she's immortal? Five thousand years old? And she just... snapped because she saw my face?"
"The resemblance likely triggered something in her," Smith explained. "Her mind tried to reconcile seeing a face identical to her own—something that shouldn't be possible for an Eternal. The cognitive dissonance caused an episode."
Gilgamesh nodded slowly. "That... would make sense. She's never seen another person who looks like her. Not in five millennia." He looked at Fox with new understanding. "You must have triggered something deep in her."
Fox touched her own face reflexively, as if checking that it was still there. "Great. So I'm a walking trigger."
"Speaking of which," Gilgamesh said, finally remembering social niceties despite the destroyed house and unconscious friend, "who are you two? You clearly know about us, you can fight on an Eternal's level—" he nodded at Smith, "—and you're here for a reason."
"I'm Smith Doyle," Smith said. "This is Fox."
Fox stepped forward, falling back on professional protocol because it gave her something familiar to anchor to. "We're staff from the Dragon Ball tournament. We're here to verify the Dragon Ball holder's status and confirm participation in the competition."
Recognition sparked in Gilgamesh's eyes. "Finally! I've been wondering when you'd show up." He glanced down at Thena, then back at them with a rueful smile. "But the Dragon Ball holder is Thena. We'll need to wait for her to wake up before we can proceed."
Smith nodded, already settling into a comfortable stance to wait. He had patience. And besides, he was curious to see how Thena would react to Fox once she regained consciousness.
This encounter had already exceeded his expectations.
Fox stood nearby, arms crossed, still staring at her unconscious twin with a mixture of emotions she couldn't quite name.
In the distance, the ancient tree swayed in the hot wind, indifferent to the violence that had erupted beneath its branches, indifferent to the cosmic coincidence that had brought two identical faces together across impossible odds.