To the Hydra soldiers, the Iron Man was a blur. To Tony, the world froze. He could see the firing pins of their rifles beginning to move. Using his Cognitive Multitasking, he divided his mind into a four distinct streams of thought.
* Stream 1: Calculated the trajectory of every incoming round.
* Stream 2: Identified the structural weak points in the soldiers' exo-suits.
* Stream 3: Manipulated the magnetic field of the entire room.
* Stream 4: Monitored his own High-Speed Regeneration and suit integrity.
The soldiers opened fire. Thousands of rounds filled the air.
He moved with the grace of a kinetic god, his Super Soldier reflexes allowing him to weave through the storm of lead. As he moved, his Magnetism caught the spent shells falling from the soldiers' rifles. He kept them suspended, spinning them at ten thousand RPMs until they became a shimmering, golden saw-blade of brass orbiting his body.
With a mental flick, he sent the "orbitals" flying. The spent shells became lethal shrapnel, guided by his Technopathy to find the gaps in the Hydra armor—neck joints, eye-slits, and power couplings.
In the first ten seconds, fifty men fell, their throats opened by their own discarded brass.
Tony's rage was a calculated thing. He reached out with his hands, and the heavy metal crates scattered around the bunker tore open. Millions of micro-filaments—industrial-grade steel cable—unspooled at his command.
He moved like a conductor. His Magnetism turned the cables into whips that moved faster than the speed of sound, creating sonic booms that shattered the soldiers' eardrums. The cables bisected. He was a whirlwind of wire and wrath. He used the bunker's own ventilation fans, ripping them from the ceiling and spinning them into lethal discs that he launched with a thought, decapitating the front line of the Shadow Guard.
"Is this all you have?" Tony's voice boomed through the bunker, his Boy Eye glowing a terrifying blue. "I expected a god, Pierce. All I find is a grave."
The remaining two hundred soldiers closed in, desperate. They fired shoulder-mounted mini-missiles. He used his Technopathy to seize the missiles mid-air, rewrote their targeting code in a heartbeat, and sent them spiraling back into the Hydra ranks.
The explosion was a wall of fire, but Tony walked through it, his High-Speed Regeneration instantly repairing the micro-tears in his lungs from the heat. He was a juggernaut. He grabbed a Hydra soldier by the helmet, his Super Soldier strength crushing the reinforced titanium like a soda can, and then used the man's magnetized body as a flail to clear the next dozen enemies.
As the last of the Shadow Guard fell, a heavy blast door at the rear of the bunker hissed open. A man stepped out. Long hair. A mask covering the lower half of his face. And a Soviet-starred metallic arm.
The air in the room dropped ten degrees. This was the man who had wrapped his fingers around Maria Stark's throat. This was the weapon that had extinguished the light of Tony's world.
Pierce backed away, a smirk returning to his face. "You might be a god in that suit, Stark. But he's the man who killed the legend. He doesn't feel pain. He doesn't feel remorse. He just finishes the job."
Tony's faceplate retracted. His eyes were wide, fixed on the metal arm. His Boy Eye saw the mechanical wear on the Soldier's shoulder—the same model that had been used in 1991. The same unblinking stare.
"You," Tony whispered.
The Winter Soldier didn't speak. He blurred forward with a speed that rivaled Tony's own Super Soldier enhancements. He threw a punch with his cybernetic arm that carried enough force to flip a tank.
Tony caught it.
The sound of the impact sent a shockwave through the room, cracking the floor beneath them. Tony's Magnetism flared, trying to rip the arm from the Soldier's shoulder, but the Winter Soldier was prepared. The arm was made of a non-magnetic alloy—Siberian-treated titanium and carbon fiber.
"Smart," Tony growled, his High-Speed Regeneration healing the bruising in his hand as he held the Soldier back. "But not smart enough."
Tony's Cognitive Multitasking kicked in. While he engaged in a brutal, hand-to-hand struggle with the Winter Soldier—each blow breaking ribs that Tony's body healed in seconds—his Technopathy was silently dismantling the bunker's core reactor.
The Winter Soldier was a masterpiece of combat, a ghost of the Cold War. He used a combat knife to find the seams in Tony's armor, his movements perfected by decades of assassinations. But Tony had Bullet Time. He saw the knife moving in slow motion. He tilted his head a fraction of an inch, the blade whistling past his ear, and then slammed his forehead into the Soldier's face.
The Soldier's mask shattered. James Buchanan Barnes looked at him with eyes that were hollow, wiped clean by a century of brainwashing.
"You don't even remember them, do you?" Tony asked, his voice breaking with a agonizing grief. "You killed the best people I ever knew, and you don't even have a name for them."
The Soldier lunged again, but Tony was done playing. He used his Magnetism to seize the iron in the Soldier's own blood and surrounding metal—to paralyze him. The Soldier froze, his muscles locking as Tony manipulated the trace metals in his veins.
Tony turned his gaze to Alexander Pierce, who was frantically trying to open an escape hatch.
"Pierce," Tony said, his voice echoing with the finality of a death sentence. "The digital world knows your name. The physical world knows your crimes. And now... you're going to know me."
Tony's Magnetism ripped the entire wall out. He walked toward Pierce, the Winter Soldier frozen like a statue behind him.
"I'm not going to kill you yet," Tony said, his Technopathy broadcasting his face to every screen on the planet. "I want you to watch while I dismantle everything you've built. I want you to see Hydra burn until there isn't even an ash left to bury."
Neutralizing the Winter Soldier was a tactical victory, but the hole in his heart required a different kind of closure. He stood in the center of the ruined bunker, the air thick with the smell of ozone and the copper tang of blood.
Using his Magnetism, Tony kept the Winter Soldier—Bucky Barnes—suspended in mid-air, the iron in the man's blood acting like invisible shackles. Bucky's cybernetic arm sparked, trying to override the magnetic interference, but it was like a candle trying to flicker in a hurricane.
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