The transformation took three seconds.
Carl stood against the villa's exterior wall, ran through the hand seals with the fluid economy of someone who'd performed them enough times that the sequence had stopped requiring thought, and felt the familiar displacement of the Transformation Technique settle over him — weight redistributing, height adjusting, the particular heaviness of a larger frame.
He looked down at his hands.
Obadiah Stane's hands. Broad, thick-fingered, the hands of a man who'd spent decades shaking other men's hands while deciding whether they were useful to him.
Carl walked out of the shadow and across the grounds toward the villa's main entrance.
A patrolling bodyguard rounded the east corner and stopped.
Carl kept walking. Same pace. The unhurried movement of a man on his own property at an unusual hour — the specific body language of insomnia rather than intent.
The bodyguard relaxed. Nodded once. Continued his route.
Of course, Carl thought. Why would anyone question Obadiah Stane walking around his own home at midnight?
The smart lock read the face without hesitation. The door opened.
---
The bedroom was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor lined with the kind of art that communicated wealth without revealing taste. Stane was asleep on his back — the deep, motionless sleep of a man with a sufficiently clear conscience, or a sufficiently selective memory. The room smelled of expensive whiskey and the particular staleness of air that had been filtered and conditioned rather than allowed to move naturally.
Carl stood over him for a moment.
In the original timeline, this man had ripped an arc reactor out of Tony Stark's chest while Stark was still conscious. Had looked at the man he'd claimed to love like a son and decided that twenty years of partnership was worth less than complete control of a weapons empire.
Carl took out the anesthetic spray and applied it efficiently.
Stane's breathing deepened. His hands, which had been loosely curled on the sheet, went completely slack.
Carl wrapped him in the sheet with the practical efficiency of someone solving a logistics problem, carried him downstairs over one shoulder, and propped him against the wall beside the front door. Then he stepped outside and waved at the nearest patrolling bodyguard.
"Bring a car around. The black SUV."
The bodyguard looked at him — at Stane, as far as he knew — with the brief confusion of a man whose mental model of his employer's nighttime habits was being updated. Then he nodded and jogged toward the garage.
Carl waited.
The SUV pulled up in under three minutes. He thanked the bodyguard, let him return to his patrol, loaded Stane into the back seat with the unhurried ease of someone who'd done this before, and drove to the gate.
The guard saw Stane's face behind the wheel and opened the gate immediately.
"Going out for a few days," Carl said, through the lowered window. "If anyone comes by, tell them to wait."
He pulled onto the Upper East Side street and headed toward Queens.
Behind him, the villa's lights continued their normal overnight pattern — security rotation unchanged, cameras sweeping their standard arcs, every visible indicator suggesting that Obadiah Stane was exactly where he always was.
---
The morning was clear and cold, the particular sharp quality of a New York October that hadn't yet decided whether it was autumn or the beginning of something harder. Carl and Wanda ran the park loop at the pace they'd settled into over the past two weeks — not competitive, not leisurely, the sustainable rhythm of two people who ran because they liked the particular quality of thinking it produced.
Wanda ran with the focused ease of someone who'd been athletic her whole life and had stopped needing to perform it. She talked when she felt like talking and went quiet when she didn't, and Carl had learned the difference between the two silences early enough that the runs had become genuinely companionable rather than merely parallel.
They were three blocks from the community entrance when Sasha appeared.
He was wearing running clothes — a concession to the cover that Carl appreciated — and fell into step beside them with the naturalness of a neighbor who'd spotted familiar faces.
"Mr. Hudson. Good morning." Then, at a volume that didn't reach Wanda, who was a half-step ahead: "Our guest explained everything. Contact information for the Ten Rings leadership. Coordinates, communication protocols, the full transaction history with Stark Industries."
"Did he know why you were asking?"
"We told him we had our own grievance with the organization. Nothing about Stark."
Carl nodded slightly. "And his condition?"
"Cooperative," Sasha said, with the flat understatement of a man choosing his words carefully in a public space. "Completely."
"I'll come by after breakfast."
Wanda glanced back. "What was that about?"
"Parking regulations," Carl said. "Apparently there's a new system for visitor spaces."
She looked at him with the expression she used when she'd decided that the explanation she'd been given was almost certainly incomplete and had chosen, for reasons of her own, to accept it anyway. Then she turned back to the path and increased her pace slightly.
Carl kept up.
---
The interrogation room looked different in the morning.
Harsher, somehow — the overhead light doing less work against the daylight leaking under the door, the concrete floor less abstract and more concrete. Stane sat blindfolded in the chair with the particular stillness of a man who had been thoroughly persuaded that stillness was his best available option.
Carl looked at him for a moment.
Then he turned to the operative at the laptop.
"Contact Raza. Use Stane's channel, Stane's protocol. Tell him that Stane wants a meeting. That the arrangement needs to be renegotiated in person." He paused, working through the framing. "Tell him the price has increased. That Stane is willing to pay five times the original amount — and that he can provide ongoing access to Stark Industries' most advanced missile systems."
The operative typed. The response came back in under four minutes.
"He agrees. Tomorrow morning. Outside Baghlan Province."
Carl absorbed this.
Baghlan Province. Northwestern Afghanistan, roughly two hundred kilometers from Kabul. The kind of geography that made sense for a Ten Rings operation — remote enough to be defensible, connected enough to move people and materials when needed.
And somewhere within range of that province, in a cave that no satellite had flagged and no intelligence service had prioritized, Ho Yinsen was keeping Tony Stark alive with salvaged components and the quiet determination of a man who'd decided that his own death was acceptable if the alternative was worth it.
Not this time, Carl thought.
"Tell him confirmed," he said. "And find me a flight."
He was turning to leave when the System chimed.
╔══════════════════════════════════════╗
║ NEW SIDE QUEST ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════╣
║ ║
║ Cut the Root ║
║ ║
║ Objective: Eliminate Raza and destroy his base of operations in the Afghan desert ║
║ ║
║ Reward: +2 Months Small World Time ║
║ ║
║ Status: Active ║
║ ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════╝
Carl read it twice.
Two months. On top of whatever time remained from the New York quest completion. That was a substantial window — enough to push his ninjutsu training into territory that would represent a genuine qualitative shift rather than incremental improvement.
He dismissed the notification and stood still for a moment, running the revised operational logic.
The original plan had been clean: meet Raza posing as Stane, use the meeting to identify the cave's location, transform into Raza, enter the base, extract Stark and Yinsen quietly, disappear. Minimum exposure. No bodies that would require explanation.
Killing Raza complicated the extraction sequence but simplified everything that came after. A living Raza was a thread — someone who knew Stane had contacted him, who had met a man claiming to be Stane, who might eventually connect those facts to a cave that had been emptied and two captives who had escaped. A dead Raza, and a destroyed base, was a closed chapter.
Cut the root, the System had named it. Accurate.
Carl thought about the sequencing. Meet Raza. Establish the location of the cave. Extract Yinsen — and Stark, though Stark was secondary, Stark would have found his own way out eventually. Then return to the base and finish it.
Messier than the original plan. More exposure. More variables.
Also more permanent.
"Continue his sedation until I'm back," Carl told Sasha, nodding toward Stane. "Don't let him wake up, and make sure he's not left alone. He's more valuable intact than otherwise — for now."
Sasha nodded.
Carl left the interrogation room and went upstairs to tell Wanda he had a business trip.
---
She was at the kitchen counter when he found her, flour on her hands, a bowl that smelled promisingly of something sweet. Mrs. Martha had apparently expanded her curriculum beyond cookies.
"Scones," Wanda said, before he could ask. "She says they're simple. I have my doubts."
"They smell good already."
"They're raw. You can't smell raw scones and draw conclusions." She looked at him over her shoulder. "You have that face."
"What face?"
"The one where you've already decided something and you're figuring out how to tell me." She turned back to the bowl. "How long?"
Carl sat at the kitchen table. "A week. Maybe less. Business in Afghanistan — preliminary conversations about a potential distribution partnership in Central Asia."
Wanda was quiet for a moment. Her hands kept moving in the bowl, the rhythm of someone who found physical work useful for thinking.
"Afghanistan," she said.
"It's a developing market."
"You said that before. About Afghanistan." She still didn't turn around. "And I said it was a war zone."
"It is," Carl said. "I'll be careful."
Another silence. The scone dough was taking shape under her hands.
"Come back," she said finally. Not dramatically. Just — directly, the way Wanda said the things that mattered most, without ceremony, because ceremony would have made them smaller.
"Always," Carl said.
She turned around, looked at him for a moment with the specific quality of assessment that she deployed when she was deciding how much she believed something, and then held out the bowl.
"Taste this. Tell me if it needs more butter."
Carl tasted it.
"More butter," he said.
She nodded, satisfied, and turned back to the counter.
He watched her work and thought about Kunar Province, and a man in a cave who didn't know yet that someone was coming.
---
[END CHAPITRE 22]
---