Night fell on Manhattan, and the sky opened up.
Rain came down in sheets — the kind of biblical downpour that turned the streets into rivers and made the skyscrapers look like they were dissolving into the clouds. Thunder rolled across the city in long, shuddering waves, rattling windows and drowning out everything below the volume of a scream.
On the top floor of Stark Tower, the storm was doing an excellent job of masking the soft ding of the elevator doors sliding open.
Obadiah Stane stepped out.
He was holding a small device in one hand — compact, sleek, and utterly unremarkable. The kind of thing you could mistake for a TV remote if you didn't know it was a sonic paralysis emitter capable of shutting down a human nervous system in under three seconds. In his other hand, he held nothing. His smile held everything.
The day's encounter with Jake had rattled him — he wasn't too proud to admit that. A sixteen-year-old kid whispering the details of his most classified project in a crowded lobby was the kind of development that made lesser men panic.
But Obadiah Stane was not a lesser man. He was a man who had spent thirty years building an empire out of other people's genius, and a few well-placed words from a teenager weren't going to stop him. If anything, the accelerated timeline made things simpler. No more waiting. No more planning. Tonight, he'd take what he needed and eliminate everyone who could talk.
The miniaturized arc reactor in Tony's chest was the last piece of the puzzle. Once the Iron Monger had a perpetual power source, nothing on Earth could stop him.
"Tony? Working late?"
Obadiah walked toward the figure sitting on the sofa with his back turned, his voice warm and avuncular — the voice of a trusted mentor checking on his protégé. His thumb found the activation switch on the paralysis device and pressed it.
Zzzzzz—
A high-frequency sound wave — pitched at a frequency the human ear couldn't consciously register but the human brain absolutely could — spread through the room like an invisible tide. It hit the central nervous system like a sledgehammer wrapped in silk: instant paralysis, total muscle lockdown, and within minutes, catastrophic hemorrhaging in the inner ear.
Tony didn't move.
Obadiah's smile widened into something genuine. Something ugly.
"Don't blame me, Tony." He pulled a specialized mechanical extraction tool from his jacket pocket — custom-built for removing an arc reactor from a human chest cavity — and strode across the room. "You forced my hand. You were the golden goose, and for years, you laid beautifully. But then you decided to stop laying, and when the goose won't cooperate..." He shrugged. "You crack it open and take what's inside."
He reached out and grabbed Tony's shoulder, ready to spin him around and tear the reactor from his chest.
"This was supposed to be my masterpiece. A shame you had to—"
SNAP.
A cold, metallic hand shot backward and clamped around Obadiah's wrist like a hydraulic vice.
"Are those your last words, Uncle Stane?"
Tony turned around slowly.
There was no pain on his face. No paralysis. No bleeding. Instead, there was a pair of sleek blue-glowing earplugs — custom-made, frequency-canceling, designed specifically to block sonic weapons. And on his right hand, humming faintly with charged energy, was the gauntlet of a Mark armor suit.
"Jake warned me you'd try something underhanded." Tony's voice was flat. Arctic. The kind of cold that burned. "JARVIS blocked your little lullaby frequency sixty seconds before you walked through that door."
"Wh— what?"
The blood drained from Obadiah's face. He wrenched at his trapped arm, throwing his full weight backward, but the armored gauntlet held him as effortlessly as a man holding a child's hand. Hydraulic strength versus human muscle was not a contest.
"Since you're so obsessed with this reactor—" Tony raised his palm until the repulsor was six inches from Obadiah's chest. The emitter glowed white-hot. "—take a good look."
BOOM!
The point-blank repulsor blast launched Obadiah across the room like he'd been hit by a car. He smashed through the glass coffee table — a forty-thousand-dollar Roche Bobois piece that Pepper was going to be very upset about — and slammed into the wall-mounted wine cabinet hard enough to shatter every bottle and embed himself in the drywall. Glass shards and expensive Bordeaux rained down on him in equal measure.
"Cough... cough..."
Obadiah spat blood onto the marble floor. But he didn't beg. Didn't plead. Instead, a grin spread across his bloody face — wide, feral, and utterly unhinged.
"Good. Very good, Tony." He laughed, spraying red. "You've grown up. Finally learned to play dirty. Your father would be so proud."
His hand reached inside his shredded jacket and came out holding a crude, heavy-duty remote control — the kind of thing that looked like it had been built in a hurry by someone who cared more about function than form.
He slammed his thumb down on the button.
"I wanted to install the reactor before activating it. But since you won't give it to me—" His grin turned manic. "—I'll just use the backup battery to send you off first!"
RRRUMMMBLE—!!
The floor shook.
Not the building-sway of a strong wind or a passing subway. Something underneath them was moving. Something enormous, something mechanical, and something that was coming up through the floor whether the floor wanted it to or not.
The office floor exploded.
A massive, crude, gray metal fist punched through the reinforced concrete from the concealed sublevel below, showering the room in debris. It found Tony — still without his full suit, just the single gauntlet — and closed around him like a mechanical claw game from hell, then smashed through the floor-to-ceiling windows and burst onto the rain-soaked rooftop terrace.
The Iron Monger had arrived.
It was a monster. Over ten feet tall, built like a walking bunker, every surface bristling with heavy weapons and armored plating so thick it made the suit look like it had been designed by committee — one half Soviet tank factory, one half angry mechanic with access to too much steel. Where Tony's armor was sleek and elegant, this thing was brutal and utilitarian. A War machine in the most literal, ugliest sense of the word.
The back-mounted battery pack hummed with stored energy — not an arc reactor, not perpetual power, just fifteen minutes of high-output juice from conventional cells. But fifteen minutes in a walking weapons platform this size was more than enough to level a city block.
More than enough to kill one man.
"HAHAHAHA!"
Obadiah staggered onto the terrace through the shattered office, bleeding from a dozen cuts, and the Iron Monger's cockpit yawned open to receive him. He climbed inside with the practiced ease of a man who'd been rehearsing this moment for months. Hydraulic locks engaged, armor plates sealed, and the machine's eyes ignited — twin points of crimson glowing through the rain like a demon waking up.
"Tony!" The voice that boomed from the Iron Monger's speakers was barely recognizable as human. "You think your little toy can beat this?"
The Iron Monger's massive arm swung in a brutal backhand, catching Tony — still scrambling out of the debris with just his gauntlet — and swatting him across the terrace like a fly. Tony hit the edge of the helipad railing with a sickening crunch and went down hard.
"Your technology is too delicate!" Obadiah bellowed, the Iron Monger stomping forward, each step cracking the terrace concrete. "In front of a real war machine, your pretty little suit is nothing but a toy!"
The shoulder-mounted Gatling gun spun up with a rising whine, barrels rotating, muzzle tracking the downed, helmetless figure of Tony Stark.
"Goodbye, nephew."
And then, from somewhere behind the curtain of rain, cutting through the storm like a blade through silk:
"Hey. Baldy."
Obadiah swiveled the Iron Monger's massive head.
Jake Rivers was leaning against the terrace railing twenty feet away, holding a black umbrella in one hand and casually tossing the sonic paralysis device — the one he'd apparently lifted from Obadiah at some point during the chaos — up and down in the other. His suit was immaculate. His posture was relaxed. He looked like a man waiting for a bus.
"The consultant kid?" Obadiah's speakers crackled with disdain. "Perfect. I'll send you both off together. Two for one."
The Iron Monger's right arm swiveled upward, and an anti-tank missile locked onto Jake with a targeting chirp.
"In your next life, kid, remember not to pick fights you can't win."
"Is that right?"
Jake tossed the umbrella away.
The rain hit him instantly — drenching his suit, plastering his hair to his forehead, running down his face in rivulets. But his eyes, catching the lightning that split the sky behind him, burned brighter than any storm.
"Obadiah." Jake's voice was calm. Almost gentle. "You think your mech is big? You think it's strong?"
He raised his left hand. His fingers found the Omnitrix dial and turned it to an icon that had never been selected before — a silhouette so massive the holographic display could barely contain it.
"Then let me show you what big actually means."
[System: Mission target confirmed.]
[Safety restrictions — lifted.]
[To'kustar DNA — loaded.]
Jake slammed the dial.
This time, there was no green flash.
What erupted instead was a pillar of red and white energy — a storm of cosmic power that didn't come from the ground but seemed to descend from somewhere far above, as if the universe itself was reaching down to reshape reality on this rooftop.
BOOOOOM—!!!
A pressure wave detonated outward from Jake's position with the force of a localized hurricane. The rain didn't just scatter — it vaporized, blown away in every direction, leaving a perfect sphere of dry air centered on the terrace that lasted for exactly one second before the storm collapsed back in.
Obadiah felt the Iron Monger rock backward on its feet from the shockwave alone.
Then something blocked out the sky.
He looked up.
He looked up more.
He tilted the Iron Monger's head back as far as the hydraulics would allow, the neck servos grinding at maximum extension.
And what he saw wasn't the sky anymore.
It was a leg.
A leg — red and white, armored in cosmic-grade plating that gleamed wetly in the rain, and so incomprehensibly massive that the word "big" simply broke down and stopped applying. It was like looking at a building that could move.
His eyes traveled upward. Past the knee — which was level with the top of Stark Tower. Past the torso — broad as a city block, covered in sleek red-and-white armor that looked like it had been forged in the heart of a star. Past the chest — where a massive crest jutted upward like the fin of some cosmic predator.
All the way up to the head — a hundred meters above the Manhattan skyline, wreathed in storm clouds, two eyes like yellow searchlights piercing down through the rain.
Way Big.
To'kustar. Over three hundred feet of cosmic-armored, star-forged titan, standing in the heart of Manhattan with one foot resting — gently — on the Stark Tower terrace.
Even that feather-light placement made the building groan. The steel superstructure of the top floor twisted and creaked like a ship in heavy seas, stress fractures racing through support beams that had never been designed to bear the casual weight of a god.
And at Way Big's feet — ankle-height, barely visible, dwarfed so completely that the word "comparison" felt generous — stood the Iron Monger.
Ten feet tall. Three tons of steel and weapons and fury.
It looked like an action figure someone had accidentally left on a landing pad.
Way Big looked down.
Two searchlight eyes cut through the clouds, through the rain, through the darkness, and fixed on the tiny metal shape below with a gaze that carried the weight of something genuinely cosmic.
When Jake spoke, his voice was no longer human. It was the sound of thunder given words — a resonance so deep and vast that it rolled across the entire borough, rattling windows in Brooklyn, turning heads in Queens, and making every dog in a five-mile radius lose its mind.
"Who did you just say... was a toy?"
Inside the Iron Monger's cockpit, Obadiah Stane was shaking.
Not from cold. Not from pain. From something older and more primal than either — the pure, biological terror of a small creature looking up at something so far beyond its scale that the concept of fighting back became physically absurd.
The anti-tank missile in his launcher suddenly felt like a toothpick.
The Gatling gun felt like a water pistol.
The ten-foot iron shell he'd been so proud of felt like a tin can.
"Mon... monster..."
His finger found the trigger anyway. Not because he thought it would work. Because panic had dissolved every other option.
The Gatling gun screamed to life. Bullets hammered Way Big's ankle armor in a continuous stream of muzzle flash and ricocheting sparks.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
They didn't even leave a mark. Each round bounced off the cosmic plating like pebbles thrown at a mountainside — not scratching the surface, not denting the finish, not doing anything except making very small, very sad sounds.
The anti-tank missile launched with a shriek, spiraling upward, trailing smoke —
It hit Way Big's shin and exploded.
The detonation, which could have gutted a main battle tank, produced a small flash of orange light against the titan's armor. Like a firecracker going off next to a skyscraper. It didn't even scorch the paint.
Jake sighed.
A hundred meters above, the sound came out as a gust of warm wind that swept across the rooftop and ruffled Tony's hair where he lay propped against the railing, watching the scene with an expression that was equal parts awe,terror, and I need to build something that does that.
This was too far beneath Way Big's pay grade. It wasn't even worth charging a cosmic ray for.
Jake simply raised his foot — a foot large enough to cast a shadow over the entire helipad, large enough to blot out the sky for everything standing beneath it.
"Tony," Way Big's voice rumbled from above, carrying a note of dry amusement even at world-shaking volume, "deduct the repair costs for this floor from my salary."
And then he stepped down.
"NOOOO—!!!"
Obadiah's scream was swallowed by the sound of impact.
CRUNCH.
One step. That was all it took.
The Iron Monger — Obadiah Stane's masterpiece, his endgame, the machine that was supposed to make him the most powerful man on the planet — compressed from three dimensions into approximately two. Ten feet of heavy armor, weapons systems, and megalomaniacal ambition flattened into the reinforced concrete of Stark Tower's rooftop like a steel pancake pressed into a waffle iron.
The impact shook the building to its foundations. Car alarms went off for six blocks in every direction. A crack ran down the side of the tower that would keep structural engineers employed for months.
And then... silence.
Just the rain. The distant thunder. And the quiet, settling groans of a building trying to figure out if it was still structurally sound.
Way Big stood over the remains of the Iron Monger — a vaguely suit-shaped indentation in the concrete, steaming gently in the rain — and the searchlight eyes dimmed slightly.
Quest complete.
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