“Come on, Ethan. Come on.”
Tony walked ahead cautiously, and only after clearing out the enemies and making sure there was no danger did he wave for Ethan to come over.
“Ethan, come here. It’s safe now. Ethan?”
When he received no response, Tony turned back in confusion.
Ethan was standing completely motionless at the corner of the passageway.
Tony sighed and walked over, saying softly, “Ethan, we have to go.”
“Tony… something has grabbed my foot…” Ethan said stiffly.
Tony looked down.
A blood-soaked hand was clutching Ethan’s ankle.
Tony gave Ethan a look, and Ethan carefully turned his body slightly to the side.
A figure covered from head to toe in blood was lying on the ground, its hand tightly gripping Ethan’s foot.
Tony crouched down, intending to push the figure away, but suddenly, it raised its head, a horrifying smile spreading across its face.
It was A-Dan.
A-Dan was smiling at him… through that blood-soaked beard covering his face!
Tony instantly felt that he could no longer restrain the primordial rage surging inside him.
A-Dan… don’t blame me.
If there’s anyone to blame, blame yourself for why you had to come back from the dead!
Terrified on instinct, Tony immediately raised his right hand, ready to fire a rocket from the launcher mounted on his arm.
“Don’t… don’t… it’s me!” A-Dan rasped.
The moment Ethan heard A-Dan’s voice, he hurriedly turned around.
A-Dan was still alive!
He really was still alive!
Tony stood there rigidly, staring at A-Dan.
After a long while, Tony smiled.
But he was crying, too.
That bastard!
“I was lying there dead for ages… but somehow I didn’t actually die… Then I remembered… remembered that you two still owe me money, so I thought I’d better put off dying until another day.”
As A-Dan spoke, a smile of relief appeared on his face—the smile of someone who had narrowly escaped death.
Tony didn’t know what to say in response.
But as long as A-Dan was alive, that was all that mattered.
He sniffed, calming himself down, and held back his tears as he said to Ethan, “Ethan, help him up. We’re going home!”
“Right. Home!”
Ethan smiled happily, tears streaming uncontrollably down his face as he hurriedly helped A-Dan to his feet and followed Tony toward the cave entrance.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat~
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh~
Biu-biu-biu~
Sosososososo~
Fire in the hole!
And Tony didn’t, like in the movie, simply rely on the flamethrower built into the Iron Armor to fight the enemies.
Instead, he had somehow gotten himself a Gatling gun that spewed blue flames and went rat-a-tat-tat when he fired it.
Amid a series of explosions and the flames pouring into the cave, Tony charged back inside through the fire.
“Ethan, let’s go! Help A-Dan up and follow me!”
Tony, still wearing the Iron Armor, awkwardly gestured with his hands.
Ethan hurriedly helped A-Dan up and followed him outside.
But outside the cave, everything was already engulfed in flames.
Although Tony had tried his best not to attack the weapons and equipment in the open area outside the cave, stray bullets still detonated some of the explosives, triggering a chain reaction of explosions.
“Follow me!”
Tony knocked aside a burning wooden crate.
A-Dan and Ethan stared at the sea of fire before them…
“Tony, you go first. I know that armor of yours can launch you into the air. Get out of here first.”
“No!”
Tony rejected him immediately.
“If I leave, what happens to you two? We finally managed to escape together. We have to make it out alive together.”
Tony put all his strength into clearing away the obstacles in front of them.
But when he encountered one ammunition crate after another that could explode at any moment, an explosion blasted him backward, sending him crashing heavily onto the ground.
“Tony! Tony, listen to A-Dan. Go first. Otherwise, none of us will make it out alive. Calm down, Tony!”
Ethan stopped Tony as he tried to get back up and charge into the sea of flames again.
“No! I can clear a path for you. Trust me. Just give me a little more time!”
Even as Tony spoke, another series of explosions erupted, detonating rows of missiles along the hillside.
“No, Tony. Trust me. You should trust me!”
A-Dan looked directly into Tony’s eyes.
“You go first. I’ll take Ethan and get out of here. The two of us… we’ll make it out alive!”
The eyes of the two men met.
“I trust you, A-Dan. You have to make it out alive… I’ll come back for you. I will.”
Tony took a deep look at the two of them.
He wanted to engrave their faces into the depths of his heart.
To carve them into that tiny world belonging solely to Tony Stark—a world containing only a handful of people.
Tony pulled open a mechanism on his arm, revealing a red button.
“I’ll come back for you…”
Under A-Dan and Ethan’s watchful gazes, Tony pressed the red button.
A powerful stream of air blasted from beneath his feet, and Tony shot into the sky…
“Come visit us when you get the chance!”
A-Dan stood amid the flames, waving his hand.
” A-Dan, what are you talking about?!”
Ethan patted him on the shoulder. Get faster updates on g.com.
“Oh. Maybe we forgot to ask Tony for his phone number. Whatever. Let me think about how we’re going to get out of here.”
A-Dan turned back to look at Ethan.
“A-Dan, do you really have a way out? Also… you look really scary like this.”
Ethan stared at the blood covering A-Dan’s face and that extremely thick “fur” of a beard, speaking hesitantly.
“Of course!”
A-Dan pushed Ethan aside.
The injuries he had suffered earlier had already healed for the most part.
A-Dan turned his head toward Ethan and gave him a slight nod.
“Ethan, I’ll take you out of here.”
A-Dan spread his arms, raised his head toward the sky, and began chanting loudly:
“O spirits drifting in the wind, in the name of Jinalais, by the command of the God of Elements, heed my call! Let your power be mine, let your bodies be under my command, let us~ run freely with the wind as our direction, chasing the power of thunder and lightning~ Let the vast ocean fill my chest! Even the smallest sail can voyage far~ Fly with the wind, with dreams as our wings, dare to love, dare to act, dare to charge ahead~ Even if we encounter the greatest dangers and the mightiest waves, there will always be that unspoken understanding in our eyes!”
Ethan stared dumbfounded at A-Dan, who was holding a concert in the middle of the sea of flames…
This is the method you were talking about?
This is what we’re relying on to get out of here alive?
Are you using your singing to move these flames?
And then making them cry tears that will put themselves out?!
Of course not!
A-Dan was merely chanting a spell.
But why did A-Dan’s spell sound so ridiculously flamboyant?!
That was because a so-called spell was really only meant to help the caster focus their attention, allowing their magical power to move with every word, continuously increasing their strength and drawing ever closer to the energy drifting freely between heaven and earth.
In fact, even without chanting a spell, a mage could still cast magic.
It would simply take longer, and once their concentration was broken, the spell could fail.
Only powerful mages or those with extraordinary talent could cast spells without chanting.
If, from childhood, you were taught that fire was water, that fire was water, then even if you loudly chanted a water spell, you could still release a fire spell.
When the final word… the final lyric… left A-Dan’s mouth, a gentle breeze swept past, and his hair fluttered in the wind…
“Oh my god, Ethan, give me a hand! I can’t see! I’m blind!”
A-Dan’s vision was completely blocked by the thick beard covering his face.
But Ethan had no time to bother with him.
He was staring ahead in shock, pointing toward the path in front of them.
“A road, A-Dan! A road!”
Amid the sea of flames, directly before the two of them, a path had appeared.
Whenever the flames surged toward it, they seemed to slam into an invisible wall of wind and were instantly extinguished.
Ethan hurriedly grabbed A-Dan by the arm and ran with him toward the outside!
“We survived! We survived!”
“We’re alive! We finally made it out alive!”
Meanwhile, in the desert on the other side, Tony finally struggled to pull himself out of the sand.
He was going to find the rescue team…