The air smelled of ozone, blood, and pulverized concrete. Tony looked at the last remaining door—the one leading to Nick Fury. He simply willed the atoms of the locking mechanism to vibrate until they shattered.
His Super Soldier physiology hummed with a focused heat. His High-Speed Regeneration meant that the few stray scratches he took closed before the blood could even bead. He was a perpetual motion machine of vengeance.
The heavy blast doors groaned and then shriveled, pulled outward by an invisible hand. Tony stepped into the command center. Smoke rose from his cooling thrusters.
Nick Fury stood at the center, his one eye wide, his hands raised in a gesture of peace that looked pathetic against the backdrop of the carnage Tony had left behind. Maria Hill and a dozen agents had their guns drawn, but their hands were shaking. They had seen the feed. They knew they were aiming toys at a hurricane.
"Tony, stop!" Fury shouted, "We can talk about this! We're purging the compromised cells as we speak! Stand down before you cross a line you can't come back from!"
Tony retracted the faceplate. His eyes were bloodshot, glowing with the remnants of his Boy Eye activation.
"Talk?" Tony's voice was a jagged blade. "You want to talk now, Nick? After the blood has dried for eighteen years?"
"I didn't know the extent of it, Tony! I knew there were anomalies, but I was trying to fix it from the inside—"
"Liar!" Tony roared, the sound amplified by the suit's external speakers, shaking the glass walls. He blurred across the room—Bullet Time making him a literal streak of light—and grabbed Fury by the throat with a metal gauntlet. He slammed the Director against the viewscreen, the glass spiderwebbing behind his head.
"You knew my parents were murdered," Tony hissed, his face inches from Fury's. "You knew they were founders of this 'organization,' and you knew they were hunted down by the very shadow this place was built to house. Howard Stark built the cradle you sleep in, and you let the snakes breed in the blankets!"
"Tony... listen..." Fury's face turned purple.
"No, you listen! This organization is so rotten to the core that it devoured its own creator in the middle of a public road, and you—the great Spy King—didn't even bother to investigate? Or maybe you did. Maybe you looked at the file, saw the Hydra sigil, and decided that maintaining the status quo was more important than justice for the man who gave you your job!"
Tony dropped him. Fury slumped to the floor, coughing.
"Look at the screens, Nick," Tony said, gesturing to the chaos outside. "Aryan did what you were too cowardly or too compromised to do. He showed the world the truth. Your 'Shield' is 70% poison. The police, the Pentagon, the Council—they're all screaming Hydra. And you sat at the top of the pile, playing chess with a board that was already on fire."
"I was protecting the world, Stark! If I had burned it all down then, there would have been a vacuum!" Fury yelled back, struggling to his feet.
"There's a vacuum now," Tony replied, his voice dropping to a terrifying register. "And I'm filling it with the ashes of everyone who touched that file and stayed silent. You kept my father's death as a 'strategic asset.' You treated my mother's murder like a classified footnote."
Tony's Technopathy flared one last time. Every screen in the Triskelion began scrolling the images of Howard and Maria Stark.
"I'm not a member of your 'team,' Fury. I'm not a hero. I'm the consequence."
Tony turned to Maria Hill and the remaining agents. "If you aren't on the list, leave. Now. If you stay, you're choosing to die for a tomb."
The agents looked at Fury, then at the man-god in the gold armor, and then they ran. They scrambled for the stairs, the elevators, and the parachutes.
Tony looked back at Fury. "I'm leaving you alive, Nick. Not because I forgive you. But because I want you to watch. I want you to stand on the sidewalk and watch while the 'greatest intelligence agency in history' collapses under the weight of its own lies. You're done. S.H.I.E.L.D. is dead. And if I ever see your face again, I won't use a suit. I'll use my bare hands."
Tony's Magnetism reached out, seizing the structural supports of the bridge. The floor began to tilt. The glass began to shatter outward.
"JARVIS, initiate the 'Icarus' virus. Wipe every S.H.I.E.L.D. server on the planet."
"With pleasure, Sir."
Tony ignited his boots. He crashed through the ceiling, ascending into the sunlight, leaving Nick Fury standing alone in the ruins of his empire.
Below him, the Triskelion began to groan—a dying beast of concrete and steel—as Tony's magnetic wake literally started pulling the building apart.
The digital purge initiated by the Red Queen had stripped away every veil. As the Triskelion groaned under the weight of Tony's magnetic fury, his Technopathy pinpointed a massive energy spike beneath the Potomac—a deep-underground bunker, shielded by lead and vibranium-reinforced concrete.
"There you are," Tony hissed.
He positioned himself over the central hub of the building and flared his Magnetism to its absolute Alpha-limit. The structural steel beneath his boots liquefied into a hyper-dense needle. Tony plummeted, punching through forty floors of reinforced concrete in a single second.
He slammed into the sub-basement with the force of a tactical nuke. The dust cleared to reveal a cathedral-like bunker. At the far end stood Alexander Pierce, the World Security Council member and the secret architect of the Hydra resurgence. Surrounded by three hundred elite Hydra "Shadow Guards" in high-tech exo-suits, Pierce looked like a cornered rat.
"Stark! You're out of your mind!" Pierce shouted, his voice echoing over the hum of three hundred assault rifles. "You're destroying the only thing keeping the world from chaos!"
Tony answered with Bullet Time.
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