Obadiah reacted instantly to the silver streak rushing toward him, raising a massive mechanical hand to swat Tony’s incoming head clean out of the air.
But he was fighting against a suit guided by a highly advanced predictive AI.
Jarvis had already mapped out the giant machine’s trajectory well in advance.
At the critical split second, the power output to Tony’s left hand repulsor suddenly dropped.
With that deliberate imbalance, the Mark 2 tilted sharply to the left, easily dodging the sweeping arc of the massive iron hand.
Utilizing the tight momentum, Tony twisted his body, stopped on a dime right in front of the Iron Monger’s upper chassis, and before Obadiah could even begin to pull his arm back, Tony funneled every single watt of energy he could muster into his chest cavity.
Without an ounce of hesitation, he overloaded the scrap arc reactor and fired a brilliant chest Unibeam directly at Obadiah’s head.
Boom.
The blinding flash of concentrated energy illuminated the dark highway.
The sheer kinetic recoil embedded Tony backward into the thick concrete of the street, leaving him lying in a shallow crater.
Tony expected the blast to have completely vaporized Obadiah’s entire head, leaving nothing but a headless mechanical corpse standing there as a monument to his victory.
But as the thick smoke slowly cleared, the massive suit remained standing, completely motionless and entirely intact.
Tony blinked heavily inside his helmet, staring through his cracked display.
“Jarvis…
tell me that wasn’t a hallucination.
I really did hit him right in the face, didn’t I?”
“Yes, Boss,” Jarvis’s mechanical voice sounded through the comms without a single trace of hesitation.
“Your Unibeam has hit the target’s head with one hundred percent accuracy.”
“Then why,” Tony groaned, his voice turning incredibly dry as he stared at the Iron Monger’s faceplate, “is his head completely unscratched and looking as shiny as ever?”
“I do not know, Sir.
According to my structural calculations, even if the strongest known titanium alloy was used to construct that chassis, it should have been melted straight through by that specific thermal output.”
Tony frowned, trying to sit up against the rubble.
“Is it vibranium?
Like Captain America’s shield?”
“Negative, Sir.
According to global intelligence records, there is not nearly enough vibranium circulating on the entire global black market to construct a mechanical suit of this volume.
Furthermore, vibranium possesses a highly unique kinetic absorption and refraction effect that is completely different from what we just witnessed.
This appears to be a completely different metal, entirely unknown to this world, Sir.”
“Wtf,” Tony muttered, his mind reeling.
It was surprising enough that this bald old bastard had managed to construct a working giant mech behind his back, but now Jarvis was telling him that Obadiah was casually using a brand-new, undiscovered super-metal that Tony himself didn’t even know existed?
The world was truly changing way too fast for his liking.
His eyes drifted down to the bottom corner of his holographic display, and his stomach dropped.
A flashing red warning indicator showed his power levels sitting at a miserable ten percent.
He felt a profound sense of helplessness wash over him.
He had literally just been revived from actual clinical death a little over an hour ago by Eric’s strange magic, and now he was right back on the verge of hanging up his coat once again?
This had to be some kind of sick cosmic joke.
“It is highly recommended that you run away now.
If you eject from the suit and utilize the surrounding civilian chaos, there is still a slight statistical chance of survival.”
“How can that be?” Tony huffed, his pride flaring up even in the face of absolute annihilation.
“I am the great Tony Stark.
There is no such word as ‘running away’ anywhere in my personal dictionary.”
“Then, Boss, wherever you purchased this dictionary, it is clearly a faulty product,” Jarvis replied in a perfectly flat, plain voice.
Tony’s mouth twitched behind his visor.
He wanted to argue with his AI, but before he could utter another syllable, the massive iron suit in front of him moved again.
Instead of raising its heavy miniguns to finish him off, the Iron Monger simply started to walk slowly toward him.
The heavy metal boots thudded heavily against the cracked asphalt until the machine stood directly over Tony’s embedded form.
Then, with a sharp mechanical hiss, the heavy face visor directly slid open, revealing the familiar, smug face of Obadiah Stane.
Obadiah looked down at him, a mixture of twisted pity and deep malice swirling in his eyes.
“Tony…
when you somehow survived that terrorist cave, why didn’t you just stay down?
Why did you have to come all the way here just to die all over again?”
Tony let out a weak, raspy chuckle through his external speakers.
“I don’t know, Obie.
Maybe I’ve just fallen in love with Lady Death.
She’s a pretty compelling woman.”
Obadiah shook his head, a dark grin spreading across his face.
“Tony, oh Tony.
Still joking even while staring directly down the barrel of death.
I really do envy your absolute courage.
You know, if you had just died quietly in that desert like you were supposed to, we wouldn’t have had to come to this.
You could have had a dignified, tragic death.
A legendary legacy.”
“Why?” Tony asked, his voice dropping its sarcastic edge, replaced by a genuine note of profound pain.
“Why did you have to go this far, Obie?
I think I never treated you badly, right?
I gave you everything.”
It was perfectly fine as long as Tony kept his mouth shut, but the exact moment those words left his lips, Obadiah’s face became completely distorted with absolute rage.
His eyes turned bloodshot, and the veins bulged violently on his bald head.
“You bastard!” Obadiah roared, leaning his upper body forward so his face was inches away from Tony’s visor.
“Treating me well?!
You mean treating me like your personal executive servant?!
Do you have any idea what it’s like to spend decades cleaning up your narcissistic, childish messes?
I am the one who built this company brick by brick!
And what does the media praise?
It’s always you, the great genius Tony Stark!
You, a man who probably wouldn’t even be able to tell me the name of the current general manager of his own company!”
Obadiah spat on the ground, his chest heaving as he stared into Tony’s unmoving metallic eyes.
“You arrogant motherfucker, talking about treating me well…”
After ranting at the top of his lungs for a solid minute, the manic fury in Obadiah’s eyes slowly hardened into a cold, ruthless resolve.
He reached out with one massive iron hand, positioning it directly over Tony’s chest plate.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore.
Go to hell, Tony, and spend your eternity repenting there.”
“Yo,” Tony muttered, an unusual, dangerously sharp smile suddenly appearing on his face beneath the helmet.
“The Lord of Hell himself literally just told me a few minutes ago that he doesn’t want me down there.
But hey…
maybe if I bring your stinking, treacherous soul along as a housewarming gift, it might be a completely different matter.”
Obadiah’s instincts flared, and he suddenly felt something was profoundly wrong.
The casual, defeated compliance Tony had been showing was entirely a ruse.
“Close!
Close!” Obadiah barked frantically, his mind instantly commanding the suit’s computer to slam the protective facial visor shut.
But Tony, who had been lying completely motionless like a dying dog, suddenly exploded into motion.
Using the absolute last reserves of his physical strength, his armored hand shot upward like a striking viper, thrusting his metal fingers directly into the open gap of the facial visor before it could seal.
Clang!
The heavy metal plate slammed shut right against Tony’s armored wrist.
Obadiah reacted instantly, grabbing Tony’s forearm with the suit’s massive iron fingers, trying to forcibly rip the obstruction out.
But it was already too late.
Although the mysterious metal of the suit’s exterior was completely indestructible, the standard hydraulic machinery driving the visor simply wasn’t strong enough to crush a reinforced titanium-alloy gauntlet.
Tony’s hand remained firmly stuck between the visor, completely jamming the mechanism and leaving Obadiah’s face wide open and exposed.
“Jarvis,” Tony gasped, his vision blurring as the suit’s power alarms screamed in a deafening chorus.
“What the hell are you waiting for?
Start the fireworks.”
Obadiah’s eyes widened in sheer terror as he looked down.
Through the narrow gap, he saw the scrap arc reactor embedded in Tony’s chest suddenly flare up, glowing with a volatile, blinding white light that signaled an imminent, catastrophic overload.
“You crazy bastard!
Stop!
Stop it!” Obadiah screamed, frantically yanking at Tony’s arm with everything the Iron Monger had, but the automated safety overrides of the jammed visor were causing the suit’s arms to glitch and stutter.
Realizing he couldn’t break the grip in time, and seeing the blinding white light reflecting off his own face, Obadiah’s expression warped into pure desperation.
Instead of looking down at Tony, he suddenly turned his head toward the thin, smoking air surrounding the highway and shouted at the top of his lungs.
“You bastard!
Will you only take action after my actual death?!”
The bizarre, frantic scream echoed loudly across the shattered concrete, completely startling Tony mid-overload.