Doom had broken through mid-combat and grasped a fragment of the mystic truth—the harmony of heaven and man, the flourishing of all things…
To verify his theory, he needed a test subject. Ideally, his "good friend" Mr. Richards.
Mister Fantastic could stretch his body at will and was immune to electricity, and he might still be holding out hope that he could talk his old rival into surrender. That combination kept him on the front line, closest to Doom.
The sudden shift caught Reed flat-footed. A whip of electricity shot through with black vapor lanced through his abdomen like a spear. The wound was blackened at the edges, and a faint stench of rot came off it. He poured everything he had into healing it, but barely anything took. For the short term, he was out of the fight.
Mister Fantastic wasn't a heavy hitter. He was a lot like the Batman in the next universe over—given time to prepare, he could kill a god. Caught off guard, though? He had to pray for mercy.
Susan rushed to his side to shield him. Thing and Torch pivoted to all-out assault, hoping to draw Doom's focus.
Doom used his newly awakened magic to swat Torch out of the sky, then coordinated energy and sorcery in a brutal barrage that left Thing flat on the ground.
His tone was almost melancholy. "How funny. The real power was always right beside me, and I never once looked at it. Thank you for opening my eyes to it, Susan."
He turned to the Invisible Woman. The metal mask hid his face; all that showed were two black pools where his eyes should be.
His gaze hadn't changed. When he looked at Susan, there was admiration in it, reverence, and something harder to name—a longing for what had been, or maybe for what might still be. He wasn't sure himself.
"I don't want to hurt you, Susan. Leave." Doom raised his right hand. Magic wound through the electricity, and he aimed it at Susan and at Reed Richards writhing in pain behind her.
Just as the Fantastic Four teetered on the edge and Daisy was about to step in, a dark silhouette streaked across the sky, thrusters driving it fast into the combat zone.
Colonel Rhodes, in War Machine. He'd been on his way to Hammer Industries' weapons demonstration, but once word reached him about this, he'd diverted to help.
"Sir, drop your weapon. I'm operating under Department of Defense authorization. Stand down immediately and surrender!" The Colonel knew Doom wouldn't surrender, but he ran the protocol anyway.
Like hell Doom was surrendering. He answered with a blinding bolt of lightning.
Rhodes had spent a solid week drilling in this suit specifically so he could showcase it in front of the generals. The armor's onboard targeting system calculated the arc's strike zone and flagged an evasion path; he followed the prompt and dodged clean.
After two more warnings met with nothing but attack, Rhodes kicked the suit into combat mode. Weapon mounts popped open across the armor.
First to light up was the Gatling gun. Daisy had objected to mounting a Gatling on a powered suit more than once, but DoD leadership loved the look, and Rhodes loved it too.
He loved the roar of the barrels spinning up. It spiked his adrenaline, sharpened his focus, shortened his reaction time.
A metal storm of bullets came down on Doom like a torrential rain.
A large portion of Doom's skin and bones had been replaced with some unidentified metal, but not all of him. There was still a lot of flesh in there. Even with his new grasp of magic, he wasn't about to tank a sustained stream of live rounds.
Lucky for him, this was a city—cover everywhere. He rolled sideways just before Rhodes opened fire and ducked into a fast-food joint, using the walls to work angles on the Colonel.
As a soldier, Rhodes didn't carry the same restraint as a capital-H hero. Wrecking a storefront, collapsing a building—not his problem.
Whoosh. A Hammer "Ex-Wife" missile punched into the fast-food restaurant. A second later it detonated.
The missile was spec'd to crack reinforced bunkers. The little diner might as well have been paper. Fire blossomed; the whole structure crumbled into rubble amid the blast.
"Come out!" Rhodes kept his palm repulsors primed. Thermal imaging couldn't pick up any life signs in the debris, but Doom was coated in enough metal that thermal wouldn't catch him either. Rhodes's gut said the guy wasn't dead.
Doom wasn't, of course. He was fine—better than fine. The metal shell had absorbed most of the blast, and having seen Susan's force field earlier, he figured he could replicate it. So he did. He came charging out of the rubble behind a shield of electricity laced with magic. Target: Reed Richards.
"Hold it right there!" Being ignored got under Rhodes's skin. His shoulder missile pods flipped open—three left, three right, six missiles arcing out in a coordinated spread.
Incendiary, armor-piercing—none of it mattered. Doom's shield ate all of it.
The Colonel had never seen anything this unnatural. He froze for a full two seconds.
Daisy decided she couldn't keep watching. In a short span of time, Doom had gone from version 0.1 to version 1.0, and now he apparently had magic. She stepped out from cover with twenty towering Hammer Drones at her back. It was genuinely a hell of an entrance.
To establish she was operating by the book, she called out loud and clear: "Victor von Doom, the National Security Agency designated you a terrorist five minutes ago. If you continue to resist, Hammer Industries is authorized to use lethal force. Stand down. You can't win this."
Doom almost snorted. A handful of machines and she thinks she can bring me in? Did she not realize he'd just cracked a great mystery of the universe?
The retort was on his tongue. He swallowed it. Instinct told him not to get cocky.
So he didn't take the bait. Daisy clicked her tongue. Her plan had been to draw an attack, have the drones trade a few blows to let DoD see what they could do, then pop flash-bangs and jammers and, in the chaos, drop an Atomic Cutter through his skull to send him down to Hell to keep her mother company.
But he was being careful. Watching, not charging. So it was on to Plan B: overwhelming force.
"Prepare to fire." As she spoke, the drones' cannons swung onto Doom as one.
"Colonel Rhodes. He's not that impressive. We stack our fire together—energy is conserved, we just keep piling on and see how long he can hold."
The drones advanced in lockstep, their synchronized tread rumbling through the pavement. Ammunition feeds began to load. Daisy and Black Widow hung back at distance. Doom started drawing on every scrap of magic and residual electricity he had left. Both sides were one breath from contact.
Then Daisy felt a tremor in space itself. She turned her head sharply to the left.
Zzt—zzt—zzt. Three soft reports in quick succession. Three gold lines appeared in midair, as if a welding torch were slicing through the metal of the world itself. Sparks scattered. The light was dazzling.