With Daisy's "basin-sized" arc reactor in his hands, Obadiah had no reason to move against Stark—and so things had played out a little differently at this point.
Perhaps inspired by Saving Private Ryan, perhaps wanting to finally close the door on his old life—Stark had been considerably more proactive this time around. He had no small talent for hacking, and with JARVIS's help, he hadn't needed Pepper to do it. Tony had drawn Obadiah away himself, then cracked open his computer and found the Ten Rings kidnapping footage. The partnership ended on the spot.
Obadiah, seeing his position collapse, made an immediate decision: he grabbed Pepper as a hostage.
Coulson had moved to intercept with a team, but Obadiah had numbers on his side and knew Stark Industries' layout. SHIELD's agents were unfamiliar with the terrain, and when the explosives went off, they'd ended up buried.
That was what had happened before Daisy arrived.
"So what's the situation now?" she asked Coulson.
"Obadiah is heading northeast with Pepper as a hostage. He's not just running—he's threatening to exchange her for Tony's stake in Stark Industries." Coulson's expression was grim. After Daisy's mission and Victoria Hand's mission had both fallen apart, he was starting to feel like his luck had simply run out.
A routine liaison job had turned into this. He was out of ideas.
"When in doubt, call the Director." Daisy offered the suggestion plainly. Coulson had no better option. He stepped aside to make the call.
Obadiah is an idiot, Daisy thought, staring into the darkness. Why leave that Ten Rings footage sitting on your computer? Wasn't the standard practice to watch it and delete it? Instead he'd kept it around to revisit whenever he had nothing better to do. He'd practically handed them the knife.
Her bigger concern was whether this would interfere with the supercomputer installation. But the two men had already gone to war. There was no rewind button. She could only think forward.
"Director says to observe. Don't engage." Coulson came back and relayed the order, then added with some curiosity: "He also asked if you could get me there for a closer look."
More and more people knew about her abilities now, and as her power had grown, others had naturally become less cautious around her. She nodded.
She took Coulson with her and teleported. They materialized on the rooftop of a nearby building.
"Hell of an ability," Coulson said, clearly satisfied. The teleportation experience wasn't exactly comfortable—like being snapped by a giant rubber band—but the scene playing out in the near distance made it entirely worth it.
Because what was happening below them was spectacular.
"That big thing—that's Obadiah?" Daisy pointed at the massive suit not far off: three meters tall (roughly ten feet), weight probably measured in tons. "The Iron Monger in the film wasn't this big."
"Based on data recovered from Stark Industries, that's the latest iteration of the Iron Tyrant armor," Coulson said, eyes already tracking the combatants.
Daisy stared at him. Iron Tyrant?
Her vision was sharper than Coulson's by a significant margin. She studied the suit carefully and found several things that didn't match what she'd anticipated.
Bizarre name aside, this machine was genuinely more capable than the Iron Monger she'd expected.
The Iron Monger had been rough and exposed—transmission components jutting out in the open, no aesthetic consideration whatsoever. Essentially an oversized, bloated upgrade of the cave-built Mark I.
The Iron Tyrant followed the same design lineage but pushed the "bigger and tougher" philosophy much further. The previously exposed drive shafts were now encased in heavier plating. And the reactor—which on the original had been front and center on the chest, practically labeled aim here—had been relocated to the back.
The firepower was a considerable step up as well. Gone was the single minigun that had fired for five minutes without hitting anything. This suit had missiles launching from both arms and both shoulders. The battlefield looked like Stark Industries' greatest hits: rockets, explosive shells, laser-guided missiles, incendiary charges, concussive warheads—all going off at once.
When they arrived, the Iron Tyrant had just used palm-mounted repulsor blasts to send Iron Man tumbling.
Heavy firepower, thick armor—those were the advantages, Daisy noted. The design philosophy even had faint echoes of a future War Machine. But it was slow.
Where Iron Man darted and weaved—simultaneously fighting the big suit, saving civilians, and tracking a moving vehicle—the Iron Tyrant was a lumbering fortress.
By Daisy's rough estimate, Stark's reactor needed roughly 2.5% output for sustained flight, with speed scaling from there. The Iron Tyrant's reactor was weaker to begin with, and the armor was vastly heavier with far worse aerodynamics. To fly freely, it would need at least 10% output—meaning it was at a structural disadvantage in the air from the start.
"Are we getting involved?" Daisy watched the chaos below and asked Coulson. If they were, she needed to go change. This pencil skirt and these heels were not designed for combat.
It turned out SHIELD agents in the field weren't particularly sentimental about bystanders. Later, running his mobile team, Coulson would walk around like he was afraid to step on ants. But right now he was simply an agent doing a job. The civilians could look out for themselves.
He also glanced at Daisy's outfit and reached the obvious conclusion: if she wasn't jumping in, charging over himself—weapon still buried in that rubble, currently holding absolutely nothing—and only a piece of concrete to throw would accomplish exactly nothing.
"The Director's order is to observe. We observe." He delivered it with a completely straight face.
"Works for me," Daisy agreed.
They settled in to watch.
The fight intensified below.
Obadiah had spent years running Stark Industries. Backed by one of the world's foremost weapons manufacturers, his connections ran deep—and his budget ran deeper. He'd hired elite mercenaries for his personal operations. In the movie, a handful of them had handled dozens of Ten Rings fighters without breaking a sweat. They looked like background extras, but they were about as capable as an unaugmented human could get.
Their marksmanship was sharp and their gear was solid—but against Iron Man in pursuit, the best they could manage was lobbing a few rocket-propelled grenades to slow him down. Nothing more effective than that.
The mercs were in a truck—running and shooting back at the same time. Stark couldn't risk attacking the vehicle directly with Pepper inside. That ruled out most of his heavier weapons. He was juggling a hostage rescue, protecting bystanders, and fending off the Iron Tyrant simultaneously.
He was very busy.