“Bastard, even if God himself came down from the heavens right now, he couldn’t save you!” Tony shouted through his external speakers, his voice a mix of manic triumph and absolute, unhinged adrenaline.
He was practically laughing like a mad scientist.
He had jammed the giant mech’s visor, his gauntlet was locked in place, and the scrap arc reactor in his chest was a single second away from triggering a glorious, blinding overload that would take them both straight to the afterlife.
Unfortunately for Tony, his grand villain-killing monologue was cut violently short.
The very next moment, the insane laughter died instantly in his throat.
From the periphery of his limited vision, a massive, grotesque, green-gray shadow fell over him.
Before his brain could even process the sudden shift in light, a colossal, mutated hand—thick with pulsing veins and protruding, jagged bone spurs—slammed downward.
The monstrous hand didn’t aim for Tony’s head; instead, it clamped directly over the glowing, volatile arc reactor embedded in the center of the Mark 2’s chest.
With a sickening, screeching tear of structural metal, the hand pulled back with terrifying, unnatural force.
The prototype arc reactor was violently ripped straight out of its housing, wires snapping and throwing violent blue sparks into the air as it was torn from Tony’s sternum.
“What the—?!” Tony gasped, the sudden loss of systemic power sending a violent jolt through the armor’s remaining dampeners.
But there was no time to process the shock.
Before he could even draw a breath, a second massive fist was already hurtling through the air, aimed squarely at his helmeted head like a falling meteor.
Relying purely on a lifetime of finely tuned survival instincts, Tony let go of his grip on Obadiah’s jammed visor and threw his weight backward.
He disengaged entirely, letting his body drop heavily toward the asphalt below.
The monstrous fist whistled through the empty air, missing his faceplate by a fraction of an inch.
The sheer kinetic wind pressure from the missed punch alone was enough to crack the outer layer of his reinforced glass visor.
Tony slammed hard against the solid concrete of the street, rolling a few feet before coming to a dead stop.
He tried to push himself up, to regroup, to find a weapon, but his limbs refused to cooperate.
The moment the arc reactor had been ripped from his chest, the bright, glowing holographic HUD inside his helmet had flickered violently before going entirely pitch black.
The terrifying reality of his situation immediately set in.
Without a functioning power source to run the internal repulsor assist motors, the Mark 2 armor was no longer a high-tech marvel of modern engineering.
It had instantly reverted into a multi-hundred-pound shell of dead, solid, heavy-duty titanium alloy.
Tony was trapped inside a literal metal coffin.
He couldn’t move a single finger.
He couldn’t even tilt his head to get a better look at his surroundings.
He was completely at the mercy of the battlefield.
Struggling against the suffocating darkness of his deactivated helmet, Tony strained his eyes to look through the narrow, unpowered eye-slits.
He finally got a clear, unobstructed look at the new figure who had completely ruined his foolproof kamikaze plan.
It was fine as long as he didn’t see it, but the moment his eyes registered the creature’s features, Tony mentally recoiled.
Holy mother of science, Tony thought, a collective shiver running down his spine.
That is one ugly bastard.
A super-duper ugly bastard that is actively burning my retinas.
The creature stood well over nine feet tall, a towering mountain of grotesque, mutated muscle and sickly green-gray flesh.
Its spine protruded outwards in sharp, calcified ridges, and its face was a distorted, skeletal mask of pure malice.
It looked like an evolutionary mistake that had been dragged kicking and screaming out of a nightmare.
Obadiah Stane, finally free from Tony’s death grip, didn’t take any unnecessary risks this time.
He didn’t waste a single second gloating or launching into another corporate villain monologue.
Realizing that Tony was completely immobilized on the ground, the giant Iron Monger suit immediately activated its thrusters, backing off to a safe distance of several yards.
With a heavy, mechanical click, a localized missile pod flipped upward from the Iron Monger’s right shoulder housing, locking its targeting crosshairs directly onto the motionless silver suit lying in the crater.
Tony stared through his eye-slits at the dark, hollow tip of the rocket pointing straight at his nose.
He didn’t even think about trying to dodge this time.
More accurately, he physically couldn’t move a millimeter even if he wanted to.
As the digital locking tone of Obadiah’s weapon echoed faintly through the quiet air, a singular, deeply annoyed thought remained prominent in Tony’s genius brain: Why the hell do I have to look at this horrifying monster’s face right before I die?
Honestly, I really should have just died back in that Afghan cave.
I am way too rich to be dealing with this absolute nonsense.
Whishhhhhhh!
With a sharp, deafening hiss of igniting rocket fuel, the tactical missile left Obadiah’s shoulder pod, leaving a thick trail of white smoke in its wake as it traveled in a perfectly straight line toward Tony’s face.
Tony squeezed his eyes shut, tensing his muscles as he prepared for the inevitable sensation of his physical body being blown into a million microscopic pieces.
One second passed.
Two seconds passed.
The expected blinding flash of light and searing pain never came.
The street remained oddly quiet, save for the distant sound of car alarms fading into the background.
Inside his dark helmet, Tony’s internal monologue took a distinctly sarcastic turn.
What the hell?
Did that bald snake seriously outsource his emergency munitions to Hammer Tech?
Why is this missile taking a business week to arrive?
After failing to feel the expected sensation of sudden mortality, Tony slowly, hesitantly opened one eye, peering through the narrow slit of his visor.
What he saw made his breath catch in his throat.
“Ah…” Tony choked out, his eyes widening in sheer, unadulterated bewilderment.
Something was fundamentally wrong with the laws of physics.
The tactical missile hadn’t exploded.
In fact, it hadn’t even hit him.
It was currently hovering in mid-air, the deadly, metallic tip of the explosive literally touching the very tip of his nose armor.
It wasn’t moving.
It wasn’t spinning.
Completely ignoring the fact that Sir Isaac Newton ever existed, the rocket simply hung there in the open air, perfectly static and frozen in time, looking exactly like a modern art showpiece on display in a museum.
Wtf, Tony thought, his billionaire ego instantly flaring up amidst the confusion.
Did I…
did I just awaken some kind of latent, life-or-death protagonist superpower?
Like that mysterious little guy from before?
Yes!
That has to be it!
There’s absolutely no way the great Tony Stark could just be an ordinary human.
I must be a mutant.
A god.
A—
“Hey, you old fart.
Exactly how many times do you need to be saved in a single afternoon?”
A deeply amused, incredibly annoying, and highly sarcastic voice suddenly echoed from the empty air right behind Tony’s head, instantly shattering his brief delusion of grandeur.
“Seriously, Stark,” the voice continued, dripping with casual mockery.
“Do you secretly view yourself as some kind of tragic princess in distress, and you’ve cast me as your handsome prince?
Because let me tell you something—although I mathematically am a prince in the grand scheme of things, you definitely do not have the face or the attitude to pull off the princess aesthetic.”
Hearing the familiar, unbothered banter, the ridiculous mystery of the frozen missile was instantly solved.
The absolute absurdity of his internal theory vanished, replaced by a mixture of relief and mild irritation.
He had been saved by this annoying brat.
Again.
will a little bit of plastic surgery do the trick, or am I completely disqualified from the royal court?”
“Not even a miracle from a high-tier healer could fix that ego of yours,” Eric replied casually.
Standing a few feet away with a dark, heavy hood pulled tightly over his head to obscure his features, Eric lazily clenched his right hand into a loose fist.
The moment his fingers locked together, the tactical missile that had been hovering inches from Tony’s nose suddenly detonated.
Boom!
The explosive charge fired, but the resulting concussive blast never expanded.
Before a single spark or fragment of shrapnel could land on Tony’s armor, an invisible, absolute spatial force clamped down around the explosion.
The expanding fire and smoke were instantly trapped inside a perfectly spherical, invisible barrier.
With a sharp twist of Eric’s wrist, the spatial pocket violently compressed inward, shrinking the entire explosion down to the size of a marble before it completely vanished into thin air, leaving behind nothing but the faint scent of ozone.
“Now then,” Eric muttered, turning his gaze away from the grounded billionaire and walking slowly toward the two towering entities blocking the highway.
“You ugly ass monsters clearly need a god to step in and teach you some manners.”
As he walked, a ripple of dense, chilly energy flowed down his right arm.
Within a fraction of a second, a sleek, pitch-black steel sword materialized directly into his palm, its dark blade humming with a quiet, abyssal power that seemed to swallow the ambient light of the street.
Eric stopped, tilting his head slightly as his eyes locked onto the massive, green-gray mutant.
“Hey.
You ugly bastard.
Your name is Emil Blonsky, right?”
Across the shattered asphalt, both Obadiah Stane and the Abomination paused, shifting their focus entirely toward the mysterious new arrival.
The casual, physics-defying display of spatial manipulation had forced even the mindless, rage-filled mutant to proceed with a modicum of caution.
But the exact moment Eric called out his true name, the Abomination’s massive shoulders visibly stiffened.
The creature was directly startled.
How does this human know who I am?
Blonsky’s chaotic, gamma-fried mind raced.
There should be absolutely no one in this entire world who knew about his secret transformation.
After that mysterious man had approached him in the dark and handed him this immense, ungodly power, this chaotic highway brawl was supposed to be his official, terrifying debut to the unsuspecting world.
But in the grand scheme of things, Blonsky decided it didn’t matter.
His primal instincts, overwritten by the serum, quickly drowned out his confusion.
His current directive was simple: kill Tony Stark, eliminate any witnesses, and secure his ultimate freedom from that mysterious man.
And this newly arrived, hooded insect was standing directly in front of his target.
“Graaaaaah!”
With a deafening, concrete-shattering roar that shook the glass windows of the surrounding skyscrapers, the Abomination lowered his massive head and charged straight toward Eric like a runaway freight train, his heavy footsteps leaving deep craters in the highway.
Eric didn’t even bother to raise his sword into a defensive guard.
He simply stood there, watching the mountain of muscle close the distance at a blistering speed.
The next second, just as the Abomination’s massive claws were about to rip through his hooded figure, Eric completely vanished from the monster’s line of sight.
It wasn’t standard speed; it was a total, instantaneous erasure from space.
The Abomination’s massive swing struck nothing but empty air, the sheer kinetic force of his missed punch creating a massive shockwave that tore up the asphalt for yards behind him.
The beast stumbled forward, blinking its yellow eyes in utter confusion as it looked around the empty street.
“Hey, chrome dome,” a casual, mocking voice echoed from directly above.
“Your alloy mix is looking a little cheap.
What did you do, buy this chassis from a scrap yard?”
Obadiah’s breath hitched inside his cockpit.
At some point during the chaotic split second of Blonsky’s charge, the hooded man had completely bypassed the Abomination.
He was now standing perfectly balanced on the very top of the giant Iron Monger’s massive metal shoulder, his dark boots resting lightly against the indestructible plating as he casually observed the intricate mechanical joints of the suit with an expert, critical eye.