Inside the cave, the makeshift workshop glowed with the raw energy of the newly activated Arc Reactor. Tony Stark was sealed within his Mark I Iron Man armor, a hulking, crude assemblage of steel and necessity. The heat inside the suit was immediately intense, but the fury in his heart burned hotter.
"Ethan, stay right here," Stark commanded, his voice muffled by the helmet but resonating with absolute determination. "I'm going to introduce the concept of 'consequence' to those bastards. It's time they understood the meaning of Iron Man."
The name felt right, even in this rudimentary form. The armor, though built from salvaged parts, represented the pinnacle of his genius under extreme duress—a physical manifestation of his refusal to break.
Stark lumbered toward the mouth of the tunnel. Suddenly, a violent tremor shook the ground, sending a cascade of dust and loose rock down the passage. The massive metal boots slipped momentarily.
"What in the hell was that?" Stark grumbled, recovering his balance. "Are they trying to collapse the mountain? The audacity of these low-rent thugs!"
He reached the end of the passage and found the exit partially blocked by a massive pile of rubble—the aftermath of the initial bomb Su Yi had used to open the gate and eliminate the sentries. He had to use the brute force of the armor to shove the heaviest pieces aside.
Finally, he burst out of the cave entrance, his voice booming with 86 days of pent-up rage.
"Eighty-six days! Do you know how I spent those eighty-six days? Thinking about this moment! Now, it's my turn to make you pay—"
Stark froze. His roaring challenge died on his lips.
The scene before him was silent, desolate, and utterly anticlimactic. Where he expected a small army of terrorists waiting to be vanquished by his magnificent creation, he found only bodies. Dozens of them. Scattered across the ground, neutralized with terrifying efficiency. No survivors, just wreckage.
"Where... where are they?" Stark stammered, the adrenaline draining away. He turned the helmet's gaze left, then right. "Did that guy... did Spider Bully wipe them all out?"
The full weight of the realization hit him, and the armor seemed to slump with disappointment. "I spent two months meticulously welding this thing together—the heat, the burns, the begging for supplies—and the fight was over before the activation sequence finished?"
Stark lifted his clunky armored hands and stared at them. "What do I need this tin can for now? What was the point of this spectacular entrance?"
He felt cheated, robbed of his glorious escape and his dramatic debut. The Mark I, a symbol of liberation, felt suddenly like an expensive, useless prop. He needed to find Su Yi—the source of this infuriating, total success.
Meanwhile, Su Yi was chasing the fleeing remnants of the Ten Rings deeper into the mountains. His Level 4 Speed made the pursuit trivial. He had cornered the bald commander and his last few cronies near a massive, concealed cache of weapons and explosives.
The bald man was frantic, emptying his clip at the black silhouette, the bullets merely thudding harmlessly against the Symbiote Suit.
"Grenades! Missiles! You're not afraid of bullets, but you can't survive this!" the commander shrieked, his voice cracking with hysteria. He pulled the pin on a fragmentation grenade and hurled it wildly.
Su Yi easily dodged the slow-moving projectile. The grenade landed not on the ground, but squarely among a pile of unstable, Soviet-era ordnance.
"Wang Defa!" Su Yi cursed under his breath, understanding the critical danger. If that cache detonated, the ensuing chain reaction would turn this entire section of the mountainside into an inferno.
He didn't waste another second on the lesser targets. He surged forward, grabbing the petrified bald man by the throat.
"You detonated a bomb on your own people, and you endangered a whole mountainside of civilians!" Su Yi snarled, his voice a cold, lethal whisper through the Symbiote. "Your end is non-negotiable."
With a sudden, powerful thrust, Su Yi threw the bald commander directly into the newly sparked flames spreading near the weapon pile. The commander's screams were cut short as the fire engulfed him.
"Bald guy handled. The explosion is about to escalate. Time to go."
Su Yi sprinted back toward the cave entrance. He arrived just as Stark emerged, still encased in the massive, smoking armor. Stark was still cursing the lack of a proper fight, but his attention snapped to the plumes of smoke and the rapidly expanding flames in the distance.
"Tony! No time to be dramatic!" Su Yi yelled, his voice urgent. "That bald idiot detonated a warhead cache. This entire valley is about to become a very large explosion. You need to fly now! I'll get Yinsen."
Stark was momentarily stunned that Su Yi knew his armor could fly, but the imminent danger overrode his scientific curiosity. "What about you?"
"I'm fast enough. Go! Get out of the blast radius!"
Stark, seeing Su Yi re-enter the smoke-filled tunnel, finally engaged the armor's propulsion systems. "Okay, you'd better be right about your speed!"
He unleashed a massive burst of flame from his hands—not to fly, but to immolate the remaining scattered weapons on the immediate ground, ensuring no local farmer would stumble upon them later.
Stark's decision was immediate and final: "These weapons were made to kill my enemies, not to be used against innocents." The flames roared, triggering a chain of smaller explosions.
Meanwhile, Su Yi found Yinsen, who was still waiting nervously.
"Ethan! Let's move! Tony's about to take off." Su Yi bound Yinsen gently but securely using segments of the Symbiote Suit. "Don't resist. I'm going to pull you out."
They scrambled out of the tunnel just as the first major detonation rocked the area. Stark was already rising, the crude armor fighting for lift.
"Hey Tony, time to go!" Su Yi shouted up.
Stark glanced down at the growing inferno. "And you, you'd better run faster, Spider Bully!"
The Mark I, never designed for sustained flight, sputtered and strained. The armor was built for a single, powerful burst, not a transatlantic escape. After a few hundred meters, and a terrifying loss of altitude, the thrusters failed catastrophically.
Stark's scream was faint but unmistakable: "Su, save me! I'm falling!"
Yinsen watched in horror as the heavy metal armor tumbled toward the jagged rocks below. "Su! He's going to be killed! You have to—"
"I know," Su Yi interrupted calmly. He had already calculated the precise landing coordinates. He sprinted toward the projected impact zone, Level 4 Speed eating up the distance.
Just before the Mark I could become a high-velocity pile of junk, Su Yi launched himself onto a rock outcropping. The Symbiote Suit instantly deployed multiple ropes, thick and elastic, catching the massive armor. The flexible alien material absorbed the impact, dissipating the kinetic energy until Stark landed with a relatively soft thud.
Stark clambered out of the smoking armor, collapsing onto the sand, his face streaked with soot, a maniacal grin splitting his face. "Hahaha! I survived! I actually survived! That was the single dumbest, most terrifyingly amazing thing I've ever done!"
He looked up at Su Yi, who was retracting the black tendrils. "Thank you, Su. And now, the science! Your suit! What material is it? Is that an evolved shape-memory alloy? Nanotechnology at this scale is theoretically impossible!"
Su Yi finally delivered the truth, the ultimate distraction. "It's not nanotechnology, Tony. It's a Symbiote. A creature from space."
Stark went quiet, his mind racing. "An alien life form? And you're wearing it? Are you certain it's safe? It won't… take over your mind? Cause global chaos?"
"I guarantee it's safer than the missile technology you sell," Su Yi retorted smoothly. "At least it won't end up funding the guys who just kidnapped you."
Having completed the mission, Su Yi had to initiate the extraction. He bound Yinsen's precious food package, water, and his own contact details into Yinsen's arms.
"Your friend will be here soon, Tony. I know his flight path. He'll find you. Yinsen has food and water, enough to last until then." Su Yi stared Stark down.
"Now, listen. You did not see me. You did not see this suit. You did not see any 'Spider Bully'. Your story is: you and Yinsen escaped using the armor, and the terrorists killed each other off in a mad scramble to stop you. Got it?"
Stark, clutching the food, his eyes burning with genius and a thousand new questions, nodded reluctantly. "How will I explain the bodies? The utter lack of survivors?"
"You're a genius, Tony. Invent a better story. But if you value your future, and if you want to know secrets that will make you a billionaire three times over—contact me the first night you get back to the States. Don't miss this opportunity."
Su Yi gave one final, dismissive wave. He activated the Teleportation sequence, vanishing in a silent shimmer of displaced air, leaving two astonished men in the desolate landscape.
Tony Stark and Yinsen looked at each other, then down at the piece of high-quality, dense Chinese bun in Yinsen's hand.
"Well," Stark grumbled, taking a bite. "I don't know who he is, but this is the first decent food I've had in three months. I finally feel alive again."