The tail came down.
Violet light split the air, the whole pier tilting under it. My flames had gone to embers. My legs weren't answering right. Jessica hung from that thing's fist. Gwen was thirty feet out of reach. Peter's web caught nothing but smoke.
I braced for it anyway.
Then a line of white cut the sky in half.
A repulsor blast slammed into the fusion's charge thirty feet up, and the two forces met in a flash that bleached the whole pier white for a second. The shockwave flattened what was left of the debris field and threw a wall of river spray across us. The fusion's tail snapped back, its charge unraveling into nothing.
Tony hung above the water, armor glowing rough around the edges, his left arm dead at his side and the plating on his shoulder scorched black. But the hand still smoking from the shot was steady, and his faceplate hadn't cracked.
He didn't say anything clever. He just dropped lower, put himself between the fusion and the rest of us, and let his stance do the talking.
My chest unclenched enough to breathe again.
The fusion took a step back. Not a retreat, more like it was recalculating, the violet light in its chest dimming while it worked out what had just hit it. Vanko's face flickered in the socket, mouth moving on words none of us could hear.
I hit the ground and stayed there a second, my legs done arguing with me. Gatomon pressed a paw to my knee.
"Easy."
"I'm fine."
"You're upright. Different thing."
She wasn't wrong, but I got up anyway. BlackGatomon dropped onto a chunk of rubble beside us, tail flicking. "The tin man saved us. I will never let him live that down."
"Get in line," I said.
Peter swung down and landed in a crouch, mask torn at the temple, a thin line of blood tracking down his jaw. "Everybody still got all their limbs?"
"Define everybody," Gwen said, already thumbing through her Digivice.
Jessica hadn't moved. Still in the creature's grip, feet a foot off the ground, and she wasn't struggling. She was watching the thing's face the way Gwen watched a crashing screen.
I started toward her before I'd decided to.
"Jess—"
"Don't." Flat, immediate. "It wants that."
She was right. The fusion's attention had already swung toward me, the light in its chest ticking up a notch, hungrier. I stopped where I was.
Gwen grabbed my sleeve. "The gap. I tried to tell you before the drone went off."
"Tell me now."
"Vanko gives the order, and the thing waits a beat before it moves. Not much. Half a second, maybe less. But it's there every time."
"You're sure."
"I've been counting it since the first hit."
I thought back to the arm. The seam at the shoulder that didn't match the rest of the plating, like something bolted on that didn't belong.
"The socket," I said. "On the left arm. It's not just armor."
Her eyes went sharp. "A weak point."
"Maybe."
"So." Peter dropped in beside us, still holding his arm. "We stop punching the part that eats punches and go for the joint instead."
"During the gap," Gwen said.
"During the gap," I agreed.
BlackGatomon's ears came up. "You want us to land a hit in a window that's less than a second wide, on a target the size of a bus, while it's trying to kill us."
"Basically."
"Just checking."
Jessica's voice cut in from where she hung, ragged but steady. "And if we miss?"
I looked at her. "We don't."
The fusion moved first. It planted a foot hard enough to crack the asphalt, and Vanko's voice rolled out of the chest cavity, thick with static.
"You think one blast changes anything."
The words landed. The arm didn't move yet.
There it was. The half-second where the machine hadn't caught up to what it had already been told to do.
"There," I said, and I was already moving.
Taomon's brush cut a gold seal into the air between the creature's feet, and its head twitched toward the light. Peter's line snapped around its wrist and yanked, just enough to throw the balance off by a fraction.
I closed the distance with fire climbing up my arms again, and I didn't go for the chest or the head. I went for the socket.
"Kill them—"
The arm started to rise. Too slow. I was already there.
My fist hit the seam with everything I had left.
This time it didn't just absorb the hit and shrug it off. Something cracked, sharp and wrong, like metal giving way to something underneath it. The arm went slack. The clawed hand sprang open, venting violet energy in a hiss.
Jessica dropped and hit the ground rolling. I got to her before she'd finished scrambling upright, hauling her back by the arm toward the others. Her face had no color left in it, but she was moving under her own power.
Behind us, the fusion staggered. Its steps went ragged, the dead arm hanging useless, sparking. It listed sideways like something taking on water.
Then, underneath the roar of the machine, something else came through. Small and separate. A single, human sound, cut off before it turned into words.
Vanko.
Nobody said anything. We'd all heard it.
The fusion didn't fall. It stopped instead — the light in its chest guttering low, its one good arm dropping to its side. Its head turned, slow, and it started backing away, dragging the dead arm, aiming for open ground and the water beyond it.
"It's running," Peter said.
"Not this time." I was already moving.
Angewomon hit it first, driving down out of the smoke and slamming into its shoulder hard enough to knock the stagger into a full stumble. LadyDevimon followed, wrapping around the good arm before it could swing free, digging her claws in and hauling back with everything she had.
"A little help," she said, teeth gritted, "would be appreciated."
Taomon's seal flared again, this time pinning the creature's feet to the asphalt in a lattice of gold light. It roared and tried to tear free, and for a second the whole thing rocked, but the seal held long enough.
I hit the chest plate running, driving my shoulder into the cracked housing where Vanko's face still flickered behind the glass. The metal gave a little. Not enough.
"Gwen!"
She was already there, her brush moving fast, painting a second seal directly onto the housing itself. "This isn't going to hold long. Whatever you're doing, do it now."
I got both hands into the crack and pulled. The plating groaned, resisted, then split with a shriek of tearing metal. Sparks poured out. The creature convulsed, its roar breaking into something higher, thinner, almost a scream.
Peter grabbed the other side and hauled with me. "On three doesn't apply here, right? We're just doing this."
"We're just doing this."
The housing tore open.
Vanko spilled out of it, half-conscious, wires and cabling still fused into his skin at the shoulder and neck, his body shaking with the effort of just breathing on its own. The rest of the fusion shuddered around him, the dinosaur half of it losing shape, plating sagging like it had forgotten what it was supposed to be.
I caught him before he hit the ground. He weighed nothing, like the machine had been carrying more of him than his own body could.
His eyes cracked open, found mine, then slid past me toward the wreckage of his own suit.
"Stark," he spat, and something else in Russian that didn't need translating.
Then his eyes rolled back and he went limp in my arms.
Behind us, what was left of MetalTyrannomon's shell folded in on itself, the violet light collapsing inward until there was nothing left standing at all.
Nobody spoke for a moment. Then sirens, finally close, cut through the quiet.
***
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