The ground started vibrating like a drumline gone rogue. Boom—boom—boom.
Ryuuto looked up. A thunderous silhouette barrelled in: the Hulk, all raw muscle and righteous anger, smashing drone after drone like a kid breaking toy robots. One seizing hug, one hilarious dismantle, then another frantic leap to shred the next mechanical suit. The swarm fractured instantly.
Good. Entertainment had arrived.
From the other side, Arlo (Storm), Cyclops Scott, Natasha Romanoff and Susan came sprinting. Ryuuto let them. Let the team he'd cobbled together show what they could do. He had a habit of enjoying good chaos from a safe vantage.
Lightning ripped. Arlo controlled the sky—bolts stitched into the swarm, each impact frying a mech or shorting its systems. Cyclops angled his optic blast; one beam sliced a drone clean in half, the other burned through another like butter. Susan popped force fields with precise timing and tore two armors to scrap with a violent rip. The battlefield pulsed with staccato explosions and blue-white flashes.
Katie Dee didn't have a proper attack yet, but she was invaluable. She darted around, touching people, anchoring them when stray energy beams tracked wrong. When a drone tried to ambush Natasha from the flank, Katie welded her to Natasha's side and absorbed the hit—both came through intact. Natasha grinned and dove back into the fight, pistols and focus, while Katie stayed the walking shield.
From the wrecked armor where Tony had crashed, a weary voice called up, "Ryuuto—aren't you going to help?"
Ryuuto gave a slow shrug. "They've got this. Better to let them fight and get stronger."
"Figure it out, captain," Tony wheezed, still lying like a broken man-machine. "Anyway—help me with this solar absorber on my back. The energy panel's fried. Pull it off, replace the shorted bit."
Ryuuto hopped over and peered at the tech. Tony's drones were not just AI—they'd been built on Tony's systems, but corrupted, weaponized. The mag-locks on the panel hummed stubbornly.
"You want a screwdriver?" Ryuuto asked.
Tony's voice went thin. "Magnetic locks. They won't unclip. Use…anything."
Ryuuto let out a single, theatrical sigh, rolled his shoulders, and gathered chakra like someone winding up a grin. Tony's eyes widened. "Don't—don't use that! Banner can rip it off, he—"
Ryuuto smiled that ridiculous, half-apologetic smile he favored. "Don't worry. If I accidentally make a hole in you, I'll fake the autopsy report and spin it into a heroic mystery. Captain image preserved. Promise."
He compressed chakra into a spinning Rasengan so tight it hummed. The sphere cut along the mag-seam with surgical precision—ten seconds, careful edges. Ryuuto eased the panel free and slid out the singed converter. Ten seconds later he'd soldered a fresh link and snapped the absorber back into place.
Tony convulsed into laughter, equal parts delirious and relieved. "You beautiful idiot. I'm—powered again."
J.A.R.V.I.S whined background telemetry: dozens of mechs were converging, but the biggest threat coalesced into a single, terrifying thing. Drones converged their beams into one enormous energy column. It sliced the sky like a sunlight spear, and the ground under it whitened as if reality itself flinched.
"That blast will vaporize everything in a three-hundred-meter radius," Tony said, voice suddenly small. "We're toast."
Ryuuto clenched his hands. He didn't feel small. He felt hungry.
He snapped his fingers and a white-transparent cube popped between them—Ryuuto's tech-tinted variant of a containment: Dust Shield — Prime Realm Stripping Technique. The cube swallowed the energy column whole. Sparks and a monstrous concussion shrieked, but the blast detonated inside the cube and did not tear the campus apart. When the cube winked away, dozens of drones were spiraling down, their formation broken.
Tony—bright-eyed and theatrically furious—pointed at the Ministry of Defense. "They stole my core tech! Those idiots thought they could weaponize it. If I live, I'm going to—" He waved, breathless. "—blow their whole procurement to hell."
Ryuuto grinned and tilted his head. "Try not to. Would mess up my plans. Let them train more; they'll get stronger. I'm the captain—gotta cultivate talent."
Tony snorted. "You call that 'cultivating'?"
"Yep. Make them bleed now, so they don't next time."
The squad reformed. The drones regrouped, stubborn and lethal, but the team held. Ryuuto's smirk settled into focus—the show had only just begun.