Chapter 121: Ethan Picks Peter's Opponent
Tony wasn't interested in watching teenagers spar.
He was interested in the object on the shelf in Ethan's room, which had been passively generating energy this entire time, and he had been exercising significant restraint by not asking about it more than twice since dinner started.
He moved to Ethan's side while Peter was still scanning the room.
"The Tesseract," he said, keeping his voice down. "Two days. Five million a day."
Ethan considered this.
He looked at Peter, who had systematically worked through every person in the room and was still running eliminations with the focused anxiety of someone who knew he needed to choose before someone else took his second option.
"Free," Ethan said. "But you have to fight him."
Tony blinked. He looked at Peter Parker — a teenager in a borrowed shirt who had spider powers and approximately seventeen years of life experience. He looked back at Ethan.
"That's your condition."
"That's my condition."
"You keep saying you don't have apprentices."
"I don't," Ethan said. "I'm also not stopping you from seeing what happens."
Tony thought about this. Five million dollars was not money he would notice losing. Free was still better. And fighting a kid seemed straightforward enough that the Tesseract rental was clearly the better deal in this exchange.
"Fine," he said. "But I'm not going easy."
"Please don't," Ethan said.
Tony walked over to Peter and put a hand on his shoulder.
"Kid," he said. "Your teacher decided I'm your opponent."
Peter looked at Tony Stark — the suit not currently deployed, just a man in expensive clothes, but a man whose combat specs Peter had been quietly briefed on during the Raimi arc. His spider-sense wasn't alarming. His brain was running several calculations simultaneously.
He thought: Ethan wouldn't set me up to fail.
He thought: But Ethan also does this thing where the lesson is the failing.
He thought: Both of those can be true at the same time.
"Ready," Peter said.
The wall that wasn't a wall opened.
Ethan had spent two hundred and thirty Friend Points over the previous ten minutes, which produced a training space roughly a hundred meters square — smooth walls, inert, capable of absorbing the kind of forces that the assembled collection of enhanced individuals could reasonably be expected to generate.
He didn't explain where the Friend Points came from. He attributed it to the Space Stone, which was doing a lot of explanatory work this evening.
The room's reaction was gratifying. Wade immediately started testing the walls with his swords. Tony was running a material analysis on the floor. Doc Ock had the expression of someone reorganizing a significant amount of conceptual architecture.
Ethan watched the money evaporate from his balance and decided it was worth it.
The first match was Harry versus Pietro.
They faced each other in the center of the space — Harry with his Lost Driver in hand, Pietro with his goggles on and the relaxed posture of a man whose power had always made him the fastest person in any room and had done so consistently enough that he'd stopped being surprised by it.
Jessica Jones stood at the edge with a stopwatch, having been appointed timekeeper with the particular lack of choice that characterized most of Ethan's administrative decisions.
"Do you want me to take it easy?" Pietro asked.
Harry put the Driver on his belt.
"Full speed," he said.
Pietro shrugged.
Ethan looked at Wade.
"Want to call the bet?" Ethan said. "No judgment."
"Absolutely not," Wade said. "I believe in my student. The kid has skills I personally developed and—"
"It's over," Ethan said.
"—a whole suite of techniques that are completely—"
"Wade."
Wade turned around.
Harry was on the floor, thoroughly and efficiently zip-tied with rope that had appeared from somewhere in Pietro's vicinity between one moment and the next. The Lost Driver was in Pietro's hand. Harry was looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone who had just experienced the distance between knowing someone is fast and experiencing someone who is fast.
The whole interaction had taken slightly under two seconds.
Jessica was still looking at the stopwatch with an expression that suggested she wasn't entirely sure when to have started it.
Wade looked at the scene for a long moment.
"Pietro," he said, walking over. "He's a kid. You couldn't let him have one thing?"
"He said full speed," Pietro said reasonably, giving the Lost Driver back.
"I know he said full speed, I'm saying—" Wade looked at Harry. "How do you feel."
"I learned something," Harry said, from the floor.
"That's what I told you would happen."
"You didn't tell me it would happen that fast."
"I was managing expectations," Wade said. "Not calibrating them precisely."
Harry accepted this. He let Pietro untie him, sat up, and looked at the Lost Driver in his hands with the expression of someone recalibrating what training meant.
From the edge of the room, Ethan watched. The Accel Memory was a genuine power. Harry was genuinely learning to use it. What he'd encountered was simply a ceiling he hadn't previously known existed — and the fastest way to understand where the ceiling was, was to hit it.
Good, Ethan thought. That's useful information.
Now the room turned to Peter.
Tony had his suit deployed — not fully, just the configuration that made him a reasonable threat without going to extremes — and was looking at Peter with the professional interest of someone who had been told not to go easy and was taking that instruction at face value.
Peter stood across from him, calm in the way that came not from certainty but from having made a decision about what he was doing here.
Jessica raised the stopwatch.
"Ready?"
"Ready," Tony said.
Peter didn't answer. He'd already moved.
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