Stark was wearing the redesigned Mark VI. The reactor in his chest was now triangular, pushing out more power, and the suit moved more nimbly than ever. Even standing on the shoulders of a giant, Tony Stark had surpassed Howard Stark.
He clearly thought Rhodes and Daisy's approach was clunky. He clicked his tongue. "Look at you two. Take me out of the picture and you can't get anything done. Don't you know that to crack an eggshell, you focus all your force on one point?"
A red light kindled at his wrist gauntlet. Even on a battlefield full of gunfire and smoke, that blood-red laser was blinding.
Doom's shield was already paper-thin. High-concentration energy hit it, stalled for a fraction of a second, and cut through clean. Stark didn't want to kill him, though. He angled the beam past Doom's body and drove it through the shield instead.
"Doom, give it up. You can't win."
Stark shot Daisy a sidelong glance. The woman was a combatant and they both knew it, and here she was playing the civilian. He had no patience for people who faked passivity in a fight.
Daisy wasn't going to bicker with him in public. She just turned and shut off the drones' recording function.
Stark knew Doom, of course. Not well, but he knew him.
"You still have a chance to start over. Let it go." His voice was genuinely sincere.
Holding that magical shield up for this long had drained Doom mentally. Even without Stark's last cut, he wouldn't have lasted much longer.
"Iron armor? Nice work. I'll build one when I have the time." Doom glanced over Stark's and Rhodes's suits. Daisy's drones, he dismissed automatically.
With War Machine and Iron Man in the fight, the Fantastic Four had recovered most of their footing. Six heroes plus Daisy's drones now had Doom ringed in the middle—the kind of situation where you didn't worry about honor codes. You just dogpiled the dark sorcerer.
Doom looked like a cornered lion. His eyes swept across each face. Stark and Reed both genuinely regretted the loss of his talent. Susan couldn't meet his gaze, her expression colored with shame. Torch, Thing, and Rhodes might as well have been strangers. And Daisy? Who is this woman—Doom didn't even register her.
"Fine. I surrender…" The word bought him exactly what he wanted: a fraction of a second where the heroes relaxed. In that window, he lashed out with an electric whip, trying to snare some bystander as a hostage.
The bystander he went for was Daisy. Who was deeply unamused. She'd positioned herself well back from the action, and this asshole apparently thought she was the softest target on the field.
A dozen calculations ran through her head. Credit where it was due—Doom wasn't wrong. Grabbing her would give him control of the drones, and from there he could turn the tide or simply escape.
He was even being considerate about it. He'd dialed down the whip's output so he wouldn't accidentally kill her…
Daisy sighed, then hopped aside.
Doom did a double take. He didn't have the dynamic vision to track her precisely, but he absolutely caught the casual ease of her movement.
Before his brain could finish processing the implications, Stark's repulsor caught him across the face. He ducked. The whip recoiled and, on the rebound, coiled around Stark.
In this timeline, Stark hadn't had much contact with Ivan Vanko. He didn't dodge in time. The current surged through his armor and started frying his systems.
Moments later, under combined pressure from the Fantastic Four and Rhodes, Doom managed to wrap a second whip around Rhodes too.
Both suits were now partially neutralized. But with War Machine and Iron Man flanking him on either side, Doom was pinned in place as well.
"Rhodey. I've got an idea." Stark raised his right hand.
Rhodes was a beat slower on the uptake. Only after the Fantastic Four had backed well clear did he realize what Stark was planning.
Two repulsor beams, identical in power and tuning, slammed into each other at a shared point in space. The detonation shook the sky and swallowed Doom whole.
Daisy saw her opening. She raised her right hand. The face of the Atomic Cutter ring aligned with Doom. A thought—and a hair-thin silver line shot out.
Between heart and brain—both fatal—she chose the brain. In a world with this much super-science floating around, a bad heart wasn't always a death sentence. Case in point: Stark still had shrapnel lodged next to his and was running around perfectly fine. The brain, on the other hand, was almost impossible to fix. And even if you did fix it, the person who came out the other side probably wouldn't be Doom anymore.
At the center of the explosion, Doom felt a spike of cold dread. Every sense he had was screaming warnings. A massive, crushing pressure bore down on his heart, like a mountain had settled on his chest.
From Latveria to Manhattan, he'd always trusted his gut. The one time he hadn't—this recent stunt with Reed—had been because the sight of Susan had shoved the warning aside. The urge to flex in front of his rival had won.
Now there was a warning far worse.
Killing intent, bone-deep, undisguised. He could feel himself about to die.
His memory began flashing, as though he were running through his entire life at speed. Faster than he'd ever thought before.
He started from the beginning. His childhood. His mother had been a Romani witch—not one of the con artists, a real one, with actual magic, who'd signed a contract with demons of Hell in exchange for knowledge and power.
That infernal magic had marked Doom from infancy. His memory didn't begin at age three like everyone else's. It reached back into the womb. He remembered every single thing that had happened to him since the moment of his birth.
His mother had thought he wouldn't remember. She didn't know that every ritual, every gesture, every incantation had been imprinted in his mind as she performed them. He simply hadn't been able to cast them—he'd had no demon to channel power from, and his body was too young.
Infancy had been torture. His mind was fully conscious, but his body wouldn't keep up. All he could do was wait for it to grow.
His mother died when he was four. The cold, loving arms had left the world. The adults all said the witch had died, but Doom knew the truth was different.
As an adult, he'd left Latveria and enrolled at the State University of New York. There he'd met Reed Richards. Remembering things since birth had been a point of pride for him his whole life—until reality dumped a bucket of cold water on his head. Reed had beaten him at every turn. The man seemed born to nullify him. Whatever Doom excelled at, Reed was just… better.
Forced to improvise, Doom had made his name a different way. He'd made it in New York, where he proved he could at least out-earn Reed. He'd loved watching Reed carefully phrase pitches, asking him to invest. He'd loved holding Reed's beloved Susan in his arms. It had been intoxicating.
And now it was all ruined.
Doom looked inward. He still had things to do. He couldn't die here.
He forced his potential to its limits. He bartered his flesh, his soul, his faith, his hope, and everything else he had for power. He followed his mother's pattern. He reached out across dimensions and drew force from somewhere else, trying to claw his way out of a death he could already feel settling on him.