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"Decryption in progress..."
A sleek, holographic progress bar materialized in the center of the room, casting a rhythmic pulse of blue light across Tony's face.
"Sir, estimated time required to fully breach the target firewalls is forty minutes."
The second the command had left Tony's mouth, Jarvis had launched his attack. Under any normal circumstances, trying to break into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s main database would have been considered a suicide mission for a hacker. The organization possessed one of the most terrifyingly advanced intelligence networks on the planet, protected by layers upon layers of military-grade encryption, adaptive firewalls, and cybersecurity protocols designed by the world's top tech minds.
Unfortunately for S.H.I.E.L.D., Jarvis wasn't normal.
He was a technological monster. Jarvis was an artificial intelligence so far ahead of contemporary computing standards that most Silicon Valley experts wouldn't even comprehend his source code. Against Jarvis, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s legendary digital defenses weren't a question of if they would fall, but simply a matter of when.
Honestly, the fact that the system could delay the AI for forty minutes was impressive on its own. During Jarvis's early development days, Tony had watched him infiltrate the Pentagon's most classified servers in less than five minutes. Compared to that, S.H.I.E.L.D. was actually putting up a respectable fight.
"Forty minutes, huh?" Tony murmured, leaning back heavily in his chair. His voice was dangerously low, cold, and quiet. It was the kind of calm that signaled an oncoming storm.
"Notify me the exact second the breach is complete," Tony ordered.
"Understood, sir," Jarvis replied, and the massive laboratory fell into a heavy silence once more.
Originally, Tony had planned to spend the waiting period productively. He figured he would review his latest weapon designs, look over his armor upgrades, or tinker with some blueprints. Normally, burying himself in complex engineering work was his ultimate therapy. It was the only thing capable of silencing the loud distractions in his head.
But not tonight.
The second he tried to focus on a wiring schematic, his attention shattered into a million pieces. No matter how hard he tried to force his brain to think about arc reactors or flight stabilizers, every single train of thought led straight back to the exact same place.
Howard Stark and Maria Stark.
The suffocating possibility that their deaths had been a cold-blooded murder instead of a tragic accident pressed down on his chest like a massive block of solid concrete. Part of him still desperately wanted to dismiss Simon Boren's entire story as a wild lie. The guy was a mercenary, after all. He was a businessman who dealt in secrets, a complete stranger who had ambushed him in a casino.
Yet the more Tony sat there analyzing the data, the harder it became to ignore. Because the twisted logic of the story actually made sense. That was the real problem. It made too much sense.
Slowly, methodically, Tony began to pull up everything he could remember about the night his parents died. He reviewed every police report, every official conclusion, and every tiny detail buried in his own mind. And the deeper he dug into those old memories, the more uncomfortable he became.
The first major red flag appeared almost immediately, hitting him like a physical blow. The traffic cameras.
The specific stretch of road where Howard and Maria Stark had supposedly lost control of their vehicle was remote, but it wasn't completely off the grid. It was still a monitored zone. Yet, according to the old files, every traffic camera covering that exact area had conveniently malfunctioned during the exact timeframe of the crash. There was no footage. No visual evidence. Absolutely nothing.
Tony's jaw tightened until his teeth ached. 'What a beautiful, convenient coincidence.' The thought tasted bitter in his mouth. It was way too much of a coincidence.
Back then, he had never even thought to question it. Why would he? Howard Stark wasn't just an ordinary citizen; he was one of the most powerful scientists, inventors, and defense contractors in the world. After his death, a massive, multi-agency investigation had crawled all over the case. The FBI had looked into it. The CIA had run a trace. State authorities had combed the wreckage. Every available government resource had been thrown at the crash site.
Following standard company protocol, all of their official findings had eventually been compiled and delivered directly to Pepper Potts and Stark Industries' executive legal teams for a final review. The conclusion across the board had been completely unanimous. It was a tragic accident caused by a sudden mechanical failure, a blown tire at high speed. Nothing more. There were no signs of an assassination, no traces of foul play, and zero evidence of a conspiracy. It was just an awful stroke of bad luck.
At the time, Tony was younger, wilder, and completely broken by a sudden wave of grief. Because the final reports came from massive institutions he had been taught to trust, he had accepted their answers without a fight. He had never imagined that entire global intelligence agencies could be completely wrong or worse, that someone with infinite power in the shadows might have intentionally forced them to reach the wrong conclusion.
But Simon Boren hadn't just told a wild story. He had planted a venomous seed of doubt inside Tony's head, and that seed was growing at an absolutely terrifying speed.
The more Tony sat there in the quiet lab, turning the details over in his mind, the more the entire official government investigation began to look incredibly fishy. If Hydra were truly the puppet master behind the curtain, then the clean, reassuring conclusions of federal agencies would mean absolutely nothing.
Hydra wasn't some outside army marching on Washington. It was a cancer, a deep-cover parasite that had spent decades quietly embedding itself inside the very security institutions responsible for protecting the nation. If high-ranking Hydra agents were sitting in the rooms where reports were finalized, faking a tragic accident would have been laughably simple.
They could delete key evidence with a keystroke, rewrite forensic data, mismatch autopsy files, and make sensitive surveillance tapes vanish into thin air. Those weren't impossible, god-tier tasks. For an organization like Hydra, that was just standard Monday morning cleanup protocol.
Suddenly, that mysterious traffic camera malfunction from December 1991 no longer felt like a fluke. It felt entirely manufactured. The statistical odds of a synchronized system crash at the exact moment a high-profile defense contractor drove past were simply too ridiculous to accept.
Tony's entire expression went completely dark. The more pieces of the puzzle he pulled out and examined under the light, the less he liked the horrific picture they were forming.
"Sir, decryption is complete."
Jarvis's smooth voice suddenly cut through the heavy silence of the lab, instantly snapping Tony out of his spiraling thoughts.
"I am beginning a targeted search across S.H.I.E.L.D.'s primary classified archives," the AI continued, a faint digital chime echoing in the room. A brief, agonizing pause stretched out over the server racks. Then, Jarvis spoke again. "File successfully located, sir."
Every single muscle in Tony's body went completely rigid. His eyes locked onto the massive central display screen in the middle of his workspace.
"Show me," Tony said, his voice entirely devoid of hesitation. "Give me the full, unrestricted output."
For the very first time since Tony had booted him up, Jarvis actually hesitated.
"Sir," the AI said carefully, his usually mechanical tone sounding almost heavy with caution. "Before I proceed with the playback, I strongly recommend preparing yourself psychologically for what you are about to see."
The warning hit Tony harder than any verbal confirmation ever could have. He felt his stomach completely drop out, a heavy, sick feeling settling deep in his chest. Jarvis wasn't programmed for theatrical drama or emotional exaggeration. If the AI was literally telling him to steel his mind, it meant the contents of this file were exactly as horrific as Simon Boren had claimed.
Maybe even worse.
A freezing, numbing chill crawled slowly down Tony's spine. The very last shred of desperate hope that this was all just an elaborate, multi-layered scam entirely vanished. Simon wasn't a con man trying to steal a billion dollars. He was just a messenger delivering a nightmare.
"I'm fine," Tony lied, his voice sounding hollow and papery even to his own ears. "Display the file, Jarvis."
"Understood, sir."
With a soft, electronic *shing!*, a massive holographic viewport unfolded into existence directly above the workshop floor. A wash of cold, harsh blue light flooded across the dark room, making Tony's pale face look almost ghostly beneath the glow.
Then, the video began to play.
The footage was old, painfully old. The image quality was heavily grainy, the edges of the frame blurry, and the colors washed out by decades of age and outdated recording tech. Even so, Tony recognized the exact geometry of the scene in a heartbeat.
It was an isolated country road in upstate New York. There were no bright streetlights, no nearby houses, and no signs of regular traffic. Just dense, dark forests lining both sides of the lonely route. And driving down that empty stretch of asphalt, its headlights cutting through the pitch-black night, was a very familiar luxury sedan.
It was Howard Stark's car.
Tony's heart nearly stopped beating entirely. His hands slowly reached out and curled around the metal edge of his heavy workstation, his grip tightening until the reinforced steel began to groan and creak under the sheer pressure of his strength. This wasn't a typed police report. This wasn't a hearsay witness statement or a conspiracy theorist's theory. This was raw, unedited video footage. These were the literal final moments of his parents' lives playing out right in front of him.
His eyes never left the screen, not even for a single millisecond.
Camera malfunction? The official explanation he had accepted for twenty years suddenly felt like a sick, twisted joke. A pathetic, bureaucratic cover story wrapped in premium government paperwork to keep a grieving son quiet. A violent wave of pure, toxic anger started to churn in his chest.
A few seconds into the playback, the luxury vehicle abruptly and violently swerved. The movement was sharp, sudden, and completely wrong. The sedan veered off its straight path, tires losing traction, before it slammed into a massive concrete utility pole on the side of the road.
The impact's brutal force crushed the vehicle's front end instantly, folding the metal like paper. Thick columns of white steam and smoke began to erupt from the destroyed engine compartment as the wrecked vehicle finally rolled to a dead stop.
Tony's breathing became shallow, his chest hitching. The footage continued to play in complete, deafening silence.
Because the recording was captured by an old, closed-circuit security camera system dating back to the early nineties, there was no audio track attached to the file. There were no terrified screams, no screeching of burning rubber, and no horrific crunch of breaking glass. There were only the images. Cold, silent, and merciless images.
To an ordinary investigator unfamiliar with the deep shadows of the world, the scene on the monitor still looked like a textbook, tragic traffic accident. A sudden mechanical failure, a blown tire, or a patch of ice. The exact cause of the driver losing control wasn't obvious from the camera's wide-angle, low-res perspective. At a quick glance, it appeared perfectly consistent with the final reports delivered by the police.
But then, the quiet graininess of the video shattered.
A sleek motorcycle slowly rolled right into the camera's wide frame. The rider leaned forward, casually killing the headlights before the bike coasted to a smooth stop directly in front of the smoking, crumpled sedan.
For a terrifying, drawn-out moment, the figure was nothing more than an unreadable silhouette wrapped in shadows. Then, he kicked his kickstand down and stepped squarely into the dim, flickering light spilling from the car's broken dashboard.
Tony completely froze, his lungs seizing.
The man on the screen had dark hair that hung loosely down to his shoulders. And his left arm, his entire left arm, was made completely of metal. It was a polished, hyper-articulated cybernetic prosthetic, catching the faint amber glow of the hazard lights. It was unmistakable.
The rider walked toward the crushed driver's side door with a slow, agonizingly steady stride. There was no hesitation in his steps, no rush, and absolutely no human emotion. It was pure, terrifying, robotic efficiency.
Because the structural frame of the sedan had already been shattered from the impact with the utility pole, the door offered zero resistance. The assassin reached into the smoking wreckage with his right hand, gripped Howard Stark by his bloodied collar, and dragged him out onto the cold asphalt like a sack of dead weight.
Howard was still alive. Barely. Dark blood completely covered his face, and his right arm twitched weakly against the ground.
Then, the killer's heavy metal arm rose into the air. And it came crashing down. Again. And again. And again.
Each crushing strike was perfectly precise, brutal, and methodical. There was no visible rage behind the violence. There was no cruelty, no twisted pleasure, and no personal malice. It was just a cold execution. It was a machine completing a task.
Tony couldn't move. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't even force his eyelids to blink or look away from the holographic screen.
The horrific footage kept playing as Howard Stark's body finally went completely limp against the dark pavement. The second the life left the man, the assassin immediately released his grip, discarding him as if he were nothing more than a completed checklist item. He hauled the corpse back up and roughly shoved it back into the ruined driver's seat, carefully positioning the arms and legs. He was staging the scene, manually transforming a cold-blooded murder into a clean, believable traffic accident.
Tony's stomach twisted into a violent, sickening knot.
On the screen, the killer calmly walked around the front of the mangled car, his boots crunching over shattered glass as he approached the passenger side. Maria Stark. She was still conscious, trapped behind the crumpled dashboard.
The assassin didn't even hesitate. He reached his gleaming metal hand straight through the broken window, his heavy cybernetic fingers closing tightly around her throat. And he squeezed.
She struggled against the grip. It was a brief, desperate, heartbreaking fight for oxygen. But against the terrifying hydraulic strength of that metal arm, it was completely futile. Within seconds, her frantic movements slowed down. They stopped entirely. And the last bit of life left her wide, panicked eyes.
The entire double execution had taken less than a single minute. Less than sixty seconds was all it took for a phantom to completely destroy Tony Stark's family and rewrite his entire universe.
"Haaah..."
A broken, ragged gasp finally escaped Tony's throat, followed by another sharp, desperate breath. He staggered backward a few steps, his hand blindly gripping the cold edge of his metal workstation just to keep his knees from buckling beneath him. His chest rose and fell in uneven, violent jerks.
His vision began to blur as a wave of pure, unadulterated red flooded the outer edges of his sight. The sheer, concentrated hatred he felt in that exact moment was so intense it felt physical, like a poison rushing through his veins. His jaw clenched hard enough to make his teeth crackle. Without even realizing it, his fingernails dug so deeply into his own palms that dark beads of blood began to seep from the crescent-shaped wounds.
This wasn't a theory anymore. It wasn't just a suspicious hunch or a conspiracy board covered in messy red strings. It was an undeniable, hard reality. His parents hadn't died because of bad luck or a slick highway. They had been hunted down, executed, and discarded like their lives meant absolutely nothing to the world.
The old recording neared its final seconds. The assassin stepped back from the vehicle, his mission officially completed. For a brief beat, he stood perfectly still in the quiet night air.
Then, something happened that made the blood in Tony's veins turn completely to ice.
The man slowly, deliberately turned his head toward the camera, staring directly at the hidden surveillance system that had been recording his every move, as if he had known it was there the entire time. He smoothly raised a black handgun, pointed the barrel directly at the glass lens, and squeezed the trigger.
The massive holographic screen instantly erupted into a wall of loud, buzzing white static.
But in the tiny fraction of a second before the video feed died, the bright headlight of the motorcycle had illuminated the assassin's face completely. Jarvis's system automatically paused the frame on that exact millisecond. The image was frozen in mid-air.
"...Bucky Barnes," the name scraped out of Tony's throat like broken glass, tasting like ash.
Every single shred of lingering doubt was instantly vaporized. He knew that face. The entire world knew that face. Bucky Barnes wasn't some anonymous, low-level operative buried in a dusty, forgotten government basement. He was an American icon. He was a founding member of the legendary Howling Commandos, a highly decorated war hero, and Captain America's absolute best friend.
An entire generation of kids, including Tony himself, had grown up seeing his face plastered across history museums, textbooks, and patriotic documentaries. And now, Tony was staring at cold, hard proof that the great American golden boy was the monster who had choked the life out of his mother.
Simon Boren had been right about everything. Every single impossible, terrifying word.
The massive workshop fell into a dead, suffocating silence, with only the sound of Tony's ragged, uneven breathing cutting through the dark. Then, a single, sharp thought sliced through the chaotic noise in his brain. It was clear, ice-cold, and absolute.
'James Buchanan Barnes must die.'
Nothing else in the universe mattered anymore. Not the complicated political explanations, not the historical excuses, and definitely not the tragic circumstances. Tony didn't give a damn about Hydra's secret brainwashing programs. He didn't care about their advanced psychological conditioning, their verbal trigger words, or their stolen free will.
Maybe Bucky Barnes had been a victim once. Maybe he hadn't been in control of his own muscles. Maybe none of it had been his choice.
But at this exact moment, Tony couldn't bring himself to care even a little bit. The brutal facts were permanently carved into his brain now: those metal fingers had wrapped around Maria Stark's throat, and that metal fist had crushed Howard Stark's skull. No amount of historical context was going to erase that imagery. No psychological justification was ever going to bring his parents back from the dirt.
Some debts could only be paid in blood.
"Jarvis," Tony said, his voice coming out terrifyingly calm. It was the absolute, eerie quiet that arrived right before a devastating natural disaster wiped a city off the map.
"Yes, sir?" the AI responded, his digital subroutines humming.
"Find him."
The system paused for a fraction of a second. "Sir?"
"I want everything, Jarvis," Tony whispered, his eyes never leaving the frozen, glowing image of Bucky's face on the screen. "Every past mission, every reported sighting, every classified piece of satellite data. Track his movements across the globe. Give me his exact coordinates. Right now."
A massive, glowing holographic globe instantly materialized above the main workstation as millions of active data streams began flooding across the screens in a blur of code. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s deepest logistical databases were actively spilling their secrets, and somewhere out there in the world, completely unaware of the absolute storm racing toward his position, the Winter Soldier had just become Tony Stark's number one target.
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Next Chapter: Iron Man Storms the S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Black Site
Next Next Chapter: Iron Man VS The Winter Soldier
Next Next Next Chapter: Arms-Arms VS. Tremor-Tremor
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