The sky over the coast had closed overnight into a solid grey lid, and the drizzle that came with it was the kind that seemed less like rain than like the air having given up on being dry.
From the Stark estate’s lower windows, it pocked the sea surface in thousands of overlapping rings, each one there and gone before the next arrived.
Underground garage.
Leon in a testing rig.
The suit was tight — sensor-grade material, calibrated motion capture across every major muscle group — with disc-shaped iron plates secured at the shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees, each one trailing a bundled induction wire that ran back to a machine the size of a commercial refrigerator.
It looked, overall, like someone had tried to attach a small electrical grid to a human being and had achieved approximately that.
“You’re confident this records strength,” Leon said, moving his wrist through the range of motion.
“Why do you ask questions when you’re already stating skepticism?” Tony was at the computer desk, which he’d positioned near the far wall of the garage.
He gestured toward the test device fixed to the wall facing the sea: a circular iron panel, roughly 3 meters across, set flush in a reinforced steel housing.
The panel was matte black and gave nothing away about its composition except density.
“That tester is tungsten alloy — my own synthesis, higher density and wear resistance than anything commercially available.
You could stack 1,000,000 tons of static load on it without deformation.
You could hit it with 10,000+ tons of continuous force and it won’t take damage.” He turned back to his display.
“I built it while you were in space, because I had a feeling this day was coming.”
“Your feelings were wrong last time,” Leon said.
“The armor competition was a different—” Tony stopped.
“It’s not the same situation.
You stand in front of the panel, you punch it with everything you have, the sensors measure the output, I record the data.
That’s all.”
“Put on your armor.”
Tony blinked.
“I’m 12 meters away.”
“Put on your armor.”
“When did you become so concerned for my safety?
12 meters.
I’m barely in the same—”
“Tony.”
Tony raised his hands.
“Fine.
If it makes you feel better.” He looked at his wrists.
The bracelets lit red.
The capsule came in from the garage entrance 30 seconds later — red and gold this time, the color scheme Tony had apparently decided on after reconsidering the merits of unpainted titanium in adequate lighting conditions — and the assembly sequence completed around him in approximately 4 seconds.
The Mark III fit differently than the Mark II had; the geometry was more considered, the profile more fluid, the motion tracking tighter at every joint.
He’d built it by working directly from Leon’s design data, which he acknowledged internally and not aloud.
The result was something that functioned closer to what Tony would have eventually produced years further along his own development curve — repulsor systems, autonomous flight capability, full JARVIS integration, environmental adaptability.
He had specifically and deliberately not included the liquid filtration function, which he would someday be proven wrong about.
“There,” Tony said, visor up, looking at Leon from across the garage.
“Our little princess can now feel at ease.”
“I hope the tester is as tough as your mouth.”
Leon turned to face the panel. Read this novel at novelping.com for the best experience.
He exhaled once, steadily, through his nose.
And then the air in the underground garage began to move.
Not a draft.
Not the ventilation system cycling.
The air moved — accelerating toward Leon from every direction simultaneously, as though the space itself were inhaling, loose paper from Tony’s desk lifting and spiraling inward, a coffee cup rattling against its saucer before sliding off the edge entirely.
Tony’s display screens flickered.
A tool rack near the far wall shed 3 wrenches onto the floor.
Something is wrong, Tony thought, and then immediately recognized the feeling as the same one he’d had about 0.5 seconds before the ceiling.
He saw Leon drop into a half-squat.
Every line of the posture was coiled force in arrested motion — the back flat, the shoulders squared, the near arm drawn back in a position that made the forearm corded and the bicep stand in sharp relief against the testing suit.
It didn’t look like a person preparing to punch.
It looked like something structural.
“Maybe—” Tony started.
Leon growled and his arm moved.
What followed was not describable as a sound so much as a total environmental event.
The concussive wave from the impact hit the far wall of the garage simultaneously with what felt like the entire space trying to change its relationship with the surrounding structure.
The roar was absolute — the kind of volume that doesn’t register as a sound anymore because it occupies too much of the available sensory bandwidth.
Tony was physically lifted off the floor, the armor’s thrusters firing the moment JARVIS recognized the direction, and even so he hit the back wall at a speed that would have been concerning without the suit.
Tables went past him.
Both car lifts went past him.
Something that might have been a coffee maker went past him.
JARVIS kept the thrusters firing.
Tony stayed approximately in place while the contents of the underground garage explored their new aerodynamic freedom.
After roughly 15 seconds, the ambient energy level dropped.
Leon exhaled again — controlled this time, directed — and the secondary wind cleared the suspended dust and debris outward through the garage entrance in a single organized gust.
The garage was visible again.
Tony landed, staggered, caught himself on nothing because there was nothing left to catch himself on, and looked around.
The underground garage had been a reasonably well-appointed space: floor covering, climate control, 2 car lifts, a full tool installation, a computer workstation, a charging station for 12 limited-edition sports cars.
The sports cars had been the most significant individual investments in the room.
There was now a hole in the far wall.
It was approximately circular, about 2 meters across, and through it the Pacific Ocean was visible — grey and rain-pocked and entirely unconcerned with what had just happened in the garage.
The tester’s mounting hardware was still in the wall around the edges of the hole.
The tester itself was not.
The floor was rubble.
The ceiling had partially redistributed itself.
“Cough,” Tony said, approximately.
“What happened.”
Leon was standing in the middle of it, looking at the hole.
“About 40% of my strength,” he said.
By afternoon, they’d relocated to a meadow on the estate’s inland side, where the drizzle continued without particular apology and the ground was soft enough to absorb things without objecting too much.
Leon was in his shirt, sleeves rolled, working on a large circular iron disc.
The disc was the tester.
It had, at some point during its journey through the wall and into the Pacific, acquired a pronounced outward curve — from flat to distinctly convex — that was now being addressed by Leon punching it back into shape with systematic precision.
“You told me this tester could withstand my strength,” Leon said, hitting it.
“I used less than half of what I have and it stopped being flat.”
“Then went into the ocean,” Tony noted, from 50 meters away, in full armor, operating a calibration console he’d set up at what he’d assessed was a reasonable buffer distance.
“Then I had to dive and retrieve it from the bottom.” Leon hit the disc again.
“The sea floor is genuinely unpleasant.”
“For the record,” Tony said, via radio, “I want to be clear that this outcome was not anticipated by my predictive models.”
Leon stopped hitting the disc.
“How bad were the models?”
“When your bloodline activated, your baseline was 30 tons,” Tony said “Based on the 3 months before your space trip — 90 days of standard atmospheric sunlight — we recorded an increase of approximately 400 tons of force.
JARVIS and I modeled the 6 months of orbital exposure assuming a proportional but not exponential increase.
We projected your return strength somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 tons, with maximum speed not exceeding Mach 5.”
“Those seem like confident numbers.”
“They were, in retrospect, confidently wrong.” A pause.
“Although for what it’s worth, Clark Kent couldn’t fly until the final season of Smallville, and he’s been absorbing yellow sun for his entire life.
My model was not entirely unreasonable given available reference data.”
Leon looked up.
“You watch Smallville?”
“I watch everything.
It’s research.”
“It’s a good show.
The early seasons especially — it’s a genuine examination of what it would feel like to grow up with those abilities and not know what to do with them.” Leon considered the disc, judged it sufficiently flat, and set it upright.
“You probably didn’t finish it, though.”
“I watched most of it.”
“The later seasons get considerably more dramatic.”
“They didn’t make him as strong as you.”
“I’m a special case.” Leon rolled his neck, looking at the disc.
“Maybe it’s that I came to the powers as an adult, with a fully developed body.
Maybe it’s that space orbit is more efficient absorption than atmospheric sunlight.
Maybe both.” He picked up the disc and set it in its new test position.
“The point is — your models need adjusting.
Significantly.”