Luke immediately caught the Iron Man armor as it came blasting toward him, repulsors firing at full power, and tore it apart with his bare hands, metal shrieking as it split like nothing more than foil.
"Do you mind not doing that?" Tony said, watching the pieces fall. "Tearing my suits apart in front of me."
"You didn't make these," Luke said, already reaching for another one coming in from the left.
"I know that," Tony said, tracking the falling debris with visible pain in his eyes. "But it's still the most powerful thing I ever built being torn apart like paper and I have to watch it happen in real time so yes, I mind."
Luke looked at him for half a second then tore another one apart.
Tony closed his eyes briefly.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. That's fine. That's completely fine."
Spider-Man jumped from a suit and landed on the platform, eyes landing on Daniel with the particular focus of something that had already decided what it wanted.
"That was quite some punch you're packing," he said, tilting his head. "Since I already took your punch how about I take a chunk of your arm instead?"
"Ummmm, no," Daniel said simply.
The Mark of Nexus on his left hand pulsed and every suit in the sky lurched simultaneously, yanked toward Spider-Man like gravity had personally decided he was the center of the universe, crushing inward from every direction and sandwiching him inside a cocoon of mangled Iron Man armor before he could web his way clear.
Only his head remained visible above the crush of metal.
"Not cool man," Spider-Man said, entirely too calm for someone currently compressed inside several tons of Stark technology.
"I thought you wanted a fair fight. Hand to hand. You said hand to hand so let me out and we do this properly." He paused. "And after the hand to hand, maybe mouth to hand."
Daniel looked at the head sticking out of the metal heap.
"You just asked me to let you out so you can bite me," Daniel said flatly.
"Then here's a foot shake," Daniel said, and kicked him clean off the platform, the entire chunk of crushed armor and all, sending the whole package spinning downward through the clouds below.
"I'll come back!" Spider-Man's voice faded as he dropped.
"Sure you will," Daniel said, watching him disappear beneath the cloud line with the detached expression of someone who genuinely didn't doubt it and also genuinely didn't care.
Luke drove his hand through a suit's chest cavity, felt something that wasn't metal, and removed the helmet.
Zombie Tony Stark looked back at him. Half his face was gone, jaw exposed on one side, the skin that remained pulled tight and wrong over the bone beneath it, but the eyes were still sharp and intelligent and completely focused on the meal in front of him.
"Tony," Luke said, looking at him with genuine consideration, "you look handsome. You should try this look," he called back to the regular Tony.
"No." Tony said immediately without turning around.
"Yeah," Zombie Tony said, his working jaw moving with surprising ease given the state of the rest of him.
"I am handsome now. When I was human I was narcissistic about my face every single day, checking every angle, worrying about every detail." He paused, something almost wistful crossing what remained of his expression.
"But after turning into this I learned something important."
"What's that?" Luke said.
"Only hunger matters," Zombie Tony said simply. "Hunger is the only great thing. Everything else was noise."
The regular Tony finally turned around and looked at his zombie variant for a long moment.
"I was never that narcissistic," Tony said.
Nobody on the platform agreed with that, including his own variant, which Tony noticed and chose not to address.
"Just accept it Tony," Luke said. "You and narcissism are like brothers. Inseparable."
Zombie Tony smiled at that, and while Luke was talking his hand moved behind his back, and a missile launched straight into Luke's face at point blank range, the explosion swallowing his entire head in fire and smoke.
Zombie Tony watched the smoke with satisfied eyes.
The smoke cleared.
Luke stood exactly where he had been, expression unchanged, not a single scratch on his face, looking at Zombie Tony with the patient expression of someone waiting for a point to be made.
The armored zombie had no follow up for that.
Then the suit began to compress. Not from outside force, not from an explosion, just inward, methodically, the Iron Man armor folding in on itself from every direction simultaneously, shrinking smaller and smaller, metal groaning and then screaming and then going silent as it was reduced into a perfect small cube that Luke plucked from the air cleanly.
He turned and placed it in Tony's hands.
"Here," he said. "Take it as a souvenir."
Tony looked down at the cube. At what had once been the most advanced armor his variant had ever built, now the size of a paperweight.
He didn't know how to feel about that.
Then the entire platform shook, violently, the whole construct lurching sideways like something enormous had hit it from below with everything it had.
"Nephew," Luke said, already turning toward the edge, "take care of everything up here. I'll go deal with the green guy."
He didn't wait for a response.
He stepped off the edge and fell back into the clouds below, dropping toward whatever was underneath them with his hands in his pockets, disappearing into the grey within seconds like he was taking a casual elevator ride downward.
Daniel watched him go then turned back to the chaos still very much happening on the platform around them.
"Sure," he said to nobody. "I'll handle everything up here. No problem."
*****
A/N: If you'd like to read ahead of the Webnovel release schedule, you can join my Patreon!
The Patreon version is 50 chapters ahead.
👉 patreon.com/Universal_Peace