Tony Stark certainly knew that Alfred wasn't an ordinary artificial intelligence.
An ordinary AI wouldn't have spent over an hour engaged in a heart-to-heart deep dive with Jarvis, trying to talk him into submission when Tony last visited Bat Island and had Jarvis attempt to hack the Batcave.
Tony was in no mood for idle chatter right now, or at least he had zero desire to sit around chatting with Alfred. No matter how you looked at it, he and the old butler weren't close.
"Thanks for the kind offer, but I'll pass for next time." Tony shook his head and made to leave.
Yet he couldn't walk away. With a gentle wave of Alfred's palm, the surrounding, unfinished Parker Estate underwent a dizzying spatial reversal.
Projections materialized from out of nowhere, transforming Tony Stark's location within a mere second or two into a space closely resembling a study.
"Please sit down, Master Stark," Alfred gestured with an inviting hand.
Tony turned his head to look, noticing that a projected chair had appeared precisely where an unbuilt wall was supposed to be.
"Conditions are crude; apologies for not being able to pour you a cup of coffee," Alfred offered apologetically.
"Jarvis?" Tony's gaze flashed.
Jarvis gave no response.
"Jarvis!" Tony raised his voice.
"My apologies, Master Stark," Alfred said. "Your communication link with Jarvis has been completely severed here. Aside from you and me, no one else can know the contents of our conversation."
Tony Stark flipped up his metal faceplate, staring at Alfred with a gaze already tinged with a trace of anger:
"What are you trying to pull? Is this behavior carried out under Peter's instructions?"
Tony was already suspecting whether something akin to the "machine uprising" from the movies had materialized.
"Master Stark, there's no need to be so tense," a smile remained fixed on Alfred's face. "I simply wish to have a chat with you. If you're unwilling, you are free to fly away at any moment."
Alfred gestured toward the surrounding projections:
"After all, this is merely a projected, illusory environment. While it blocks Jarvis out, I certainly don't have the capability to physically interfere with your Mark VIII armor."
Tony Stark's eyes flickered. Instead of choosing to fly away, he walked over to the spot Alfred had indicated and sat down.
"What is it you want to talk about?" Tony asked.
"That depends on what you wish to hear," Alfred said. "If you have sufficient time, allow me to tell you a story about Batman."
Inside the luxury villa in Queens.
Batman was still visiting the sibling pair, Wanda and Pietro, in his guise as Peter Parker.
"I figured you two might have noticed what makes this villa unique, but you haven't," Batman said, leading the Wanda siblings into the study.
"Huh?" Pietro scratched his head, while Wanda turned to shoot her younger brother a glance.
Batman smiled faintly at them, walking over to the study's piano and pressing a few keys.
As a pleasant melody rang out, the bookshelf at the back of the study emitted the sound of gears grinding into motion.
Creak, creak...
The bookshelf slowly slid aside, revealing a concealed door.
Wanda and Pietro exchanged a glance, and Pietro scratched his head once more.
Yet Wanda didn't blame Pietro; after all, the environment they grew up in severely limited their exposure to such technological marvels.
Sokovia itself was hardly a developed nation; it was a backward, minor country, and being secretly occupied by Hydra made it all the more impossible for its technological level to integrate with the international stage.
Even Wanda herself—unless she used Chaos Magic to rip the entire villa apart—would never have guessed that a door was hidden behind the bookshelf.
As that door slowly swung open, it revealed a space less than three square meters inside—well, Wanda and Pietro recognized that this was an elevator.
They weren't so sheltered that they had never even seen an elevator.
The elevator interior was densely packed with over a dozen buttons, making Wanda's scalp tingle slightly:
"There are a dozen floors of underground architecture hidden beneath this villa?"
Batman casually pressed one of the buttons. As the elevator descended smoothly, he looked toward Wanda:
"No, actually only two of the buttons are functional; pressing any of the others will simply trigger an alert for me."
"You clearly aren't just an ordinary entrepreneur," Wanda remarked.
"Ordinary entrepreneurs don't haul you out of Sokovia," Batman said.
The elevator halted its descent after seven or eight seconds. Wanda estimated they had dropped thirty to fifty meters below ground level.
As the elevator doors slowly parted once more, a massive, brightly illuminated subterranean space materialized before the siblings.
It was completely empty, a vast and vacant expanse.
"I need to reassess your abilities so I know the extent of what you can accomplish," Batman said. "Go all out; this place is built to withstand the force of a magnitude-ten earthquake."
Wanda and Pietro looked around, hesitating.
Though the space was entirely barren, the air still carried lingering traces of soil and construction odors—scents that subconsciously made Wanda's mind reject the notion that the place was sturdy.
Yet since Peter Parker had explicitly said so, Wanda had no intention of arguing.
At worst, if she collapsed the place, she would just use her Chaos Magic to haul all three of them back up to the surface.
Besides, with Pietro around, Wanda believed that no matter how fast the cave-in, it couldn't possibly outpace his speed.
And so, with Batman giving a nod of permission, crimson magic began swirling around Wanda's fingertips. Her body even began to levitate slowly off the ground, the crimson radiance rapidly spreading across her entire form.
"Toward that direction," Batman reached out to point far into the distance.
Following the sweep of Batman's finger, a thick, heavy metal wall slowly rose from the floor.
Without a second word, Wanda concentrated the crimson glow into a spherical orb at her fingertips and flicked it forward. Light as a wisp of willow catkin, it made contact with the metal wall.
Light it was indeed, but the microsecond the two touched, a deafening explosion erupted, sounding as though a heavy bomb had detonated right beside their ears.
That thick metal wall was blasted by Wanda's single crimson magic orb, leaving a gaping crater over two meters in diameter that punched straight through the nearly ten-centimeter-thick plating.
"Quite an astonishing destructive output," Batman praised.
Seeing the crimson glow fade from Wanda's body as she dropped back to the ground, he walked straight up to the metal wall, reaching out to stroke the jagged edges of the massive crater.
"What kind of ability is this? It looks like magic?" Batman asked.
"Chaos Magic," Wanda said. "I can actually be even stronger, but this place really isn't suited to showcase it further."
Wanda didn't want Peter Parker viewing her as a monster once she unleashed her full strength; her current state was already heavily reined in.
"Aside from destruction, what else can you do?" Batman inquired further.
Wanda didn't reply verbally; instead, Chaos Magic once again swirled around her fingertips.
This time, she directly hoisted the metal wall—weighing upwards of thirty tons—straight up off the floor.
--
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