“You’re not the guy to make the sacrifice play. To lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you.” – Steven Grant Rogers
ANTHONY EDWARD STARK
IRON MAN
MIDTOWN AIRSPACE, MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY
The last Hornet missile split into four submunitions over Lexington Avenue and turned a Chitauri skiff into a debris cloud that rained down across three city blocks.
Tony didn’t wait to watch the fireworks.
He was already banking hard around the Chrysler Building, cutting it close enough that his reflection kept pace with him in the glass.
Manhattan was glowing green.
It was a resonant, purposeful emerald pulse rolling across the island every few seconds like light moving through water.
Wherever it passed, the numbers changed.
Alien formations that had been holding ground were suddenly breaking.
Civilians who had been pinned down were weaponizing garbage cans and fighting back.
New York wasn’t just holding the line, it was moving it forward.
Tony looked up at the barrier above the tower.
Honestly, it was a lot to process.
He wouldn’t even know where to begin modeling a theory on this.
The hardlight constructs spreading across the city right now made a weird kind of structural sense to him.
He could map the geometry.
But the execution was impossible.
Each construct seemed to know exactly what the situation needed.
They were structurally coherent, physically real, and responding to individual human needs in real-time.
Thought becoming matter.
He had been designing weapons systems for decades.
As an engineer, he understood the massive, exhausting gap between an idea and a physical object better than anyone.
That gap was where engineering lived.
That was his entire career.
Whatever was happening above that tower had skipped the middleman entirely.
“JARVIS, tell me you’re logging this.”
“The emission profile continues to resist classification, sir. The photonic coherence is stable but the power draw curve is steepening.”
“Give me a clock. How long before our boy redlines?”
“Difficult to say with certainty. The Richards model suggested minutes.”
“Yeah, well, Richards said that several minutes ago.”
“Yes sir. He did.”
Tony kept his eyes on the barrier and the kid still holding it closed.
For some reason, his mind went back to that ridiculous oath that had somehow echoed across the entire city and rewritten the laws of physics.
He had questions.
Lots of them.
He filed them under deal with this if we survive and pushed the suit northeast along the East River.
He kept the island’s edge on his left and his sensors locked on the sky, making sure nothing with extra teeth or an eviction notice was making it off Manhattan.
TESSERACT-MATCH EMISSION DETECTED.
SOURCE ACQUIRED.
Then the scepter pinged.
He almost missed it because the signal was incredibly faint.
The tracking program Richards had sent him was still struggling against the interference the portal was throwing off, but the match was there.
A clean emission spike lit up the tactical overlay in the upper right of his heads-up display.
Tony frowned inside the helmet.
The signal was moving, tearing through midtown at a pace that meant the target was airborne.
“That’s strange…” He opened the full tactical map.
Loki’s trajectory appeared as a glowing blue line.
The guy wasn’t wandering.
He was moving in a dead straight line.
When Tony let the predictive algorithm run forward, the trajectory didn’t curve toward the streets, or the river, or any logical escape route.
It was headed straight for Stark Tower.
It didn’t make a lick of sense.
Why would Loki head back to the crime scene when he had the only object they needed to stop this whole party?
Why wouldn’t he just play keep-away with the cosmic macguffin while the timer ran down?
Unless.
He isn’t heading for the tower.
He’s heading for the portal.
He’s hunting Green Lantern.
The Chitauri couldn’t break the shield from the outside, so Loki was going to personally assassinate the generator.
“JARVIS, open the team channel.” Tony was already pivoting, throwing the suit into a hard northeast bank and running the intercept in his head.
“All units, I’ve got a bead on Reindeer Games and the sceptre. He is tracking toward Green Lantern. Repeat, Loki is gunning for Glowstick.” He tried opening a direct frequency to the tower’s peak, but he the kid wasn’t responding.
“Can’t him on comms. I’m guessing his current workload has him a little occupied.”
He rolled the suit hard, pushed the repulsors to absolute maximum, and kept the team channel open.
Rogers’ voice came through immediately, breathless but steady.
“We’ve only got one other man in the sky, Stark, and he doesn’t have any comms.” Tony’s eyes involuntarily tracked the massive lightning bolts ripping through the clouds.
He found Thor’s position, watching the hammer violently disassemble a wave of skiffs still trying to get at Green Lantern.
“How soon can you get there?” Rogers asked.
Tony looked at the closing distance on his display.
The suit was already at maximum thrust. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
The Mark VII had hard engineering limits and he knew every single one of them intimately.
The distance between his current position and the tower was simply too wide to close in time, not at any speed the suit could currently generate.
He needed another thirty percent juice.
Forty would be safer.
What he really needed was that auxiliary booster package he’d been sketching in his head for the last eight months the one he kept putting off because primary systems always needed his attention.
He needed the twin engine pods at the calves, the additional maneuvering thrusters across the back configured to vector thrust without melting his main repulsor exhaust.
He needed the micro-fins on the forearms for attitude control at high speeds.
“Not soon enou—”
The green light hit the suit so fast he nearly jerked out of his flight path.
The contact was immediate and total.
The suit’s haptic systems registered the energy across every single external surface simultaneously.
His immediate instinct was threat assessment, waiting for a systems hack, but the telemetry coming back wasn’t a threat.
It was a fabrication report.
The internal sensors were reporting manufacturing activity across multiple structural attachment points in real-time.
He looked down at his legs.
The engine pods were actively forming at his calves.
It was the exact configuration he’d been visualizing.
The precise angles he’d calculated for optimal thrust vectoring.
The exact housing geometry he’d been refining in the back of his brain for eight months without ever putting a single pen to paper.
The extra thrusters bloomed across his back in perfect, seamless symmetry.
The micro-fins extended along his forearms at the exact angle he would have drafted them.
JARVIS broke through the stunned silence in the cockpit.
“Sir. I am detecting an approximately three hundred and forty percent increase in available thrust.”
Tony stared at the bright green construct additions for exactly half a second.
“He read my mind,” Tony said.
“The ring appears to have scanned your suit’s architecture and extrapolated your design intent, sir.”
“No, JARVIS, you’re missing the point. I’m telling you he literally read my mind and then built a schematic I’ve been putting off for months, it’s not like he hacked me, I haven’t even put the idea to paper.”
“I am entirely unsure as to how that is scientifically possible, sir.”
Tony locked his eyes onto Stark Tower, his brain already crunching the distance and the trajectory that had been a statistical failure thirty seconds ago.
He ran the numbers again.
The math checked out.
“All right, kid,” Tony said, bracing his neck.
“Let’s see what you think I can do.”
He punched the throttle.
The construct engines ignited in tandem with his main repulsors.
The combined output hit him like a freight train, feeling like a second armor system coming online from the inside out.
Manhattan turned into a total blur beneath him as he rocketed toward the tower on a twin line of gold and green fire, shattering every remaining window in his wake.