The villa was still falling when the next rocket hit.
Pepper had barely cleared the outer wall with Maya when the entire building lurched—a deep structural groan, then the rapid percussion of collapsing floors, one after another. She spun around, Maya's weight still against her shoulder, and watched the cliff-side facade crack open.
"Oh God." She stepped forward instinctively. "Tony!"
The three helicopters hadn't moved. They held their positions over the water, methodical, still firing. Another salvo struck what remained of the upper structure, and the building stopped resisting. The whole mass began to tilt, sliding toward the edge of the cliff in pieces—glass, steel, concrete, all of it going over into the Pacific below.
Inside, Tony had grabbed an exposed iron beam near the window frame and held on as the floor fell away beneath him. JARVIS's voice cut through the noise with flat precision.
"Sir. Miss Potts is clear of the building."
Tony exhaled once, then looked out at the three helicopters and sent the recall command.
The Mark 42 began pulling itself free of Pepper the moment she was on solid ground, the plates detaching and converging back toward the villa in sections. The helicopter gunners clocked the movement and opened up with their rotary cannons—six thousand rounds per minute, raking across what was left of the structure. Tony moved through the debris and the noise, dodging and assembling simultaneously, the suit locking around him piece by piece.
He ran a systems check the moment the helmet sealed.
"JARVIS, where are my thrusters?"
"Still configuring, sir. The Mark 42 is a prototype. Power distribution requires additional time."
"Of course it does." Tony raised his palm toward the nearest helicopter. Without the full weapons array online, his options were limited. He grabbed the ruined Steinway from the corner of the collapsed living room, charged the palm repulsor, and launched it like a three-hundred-pound projectile at the lead aircraft. It connected. The helicopter spun sideways and began losing altitude.
The other two kept firing.
Tony dodged the next salvo, but the building had nothing left. The rockets hit the foundation. The remaining structure sheared off the cliff and took him with it, and he hit the water still tangled in the cabling from the entertainment system, the weight dragging him down before he could stabilize.
The helicopters held their positions. Iron Man didn't surface. After a long moment, they banked and left.
Below the surface, JARVIS finished the propulsion configuration. The suit's thrusters fired, pulling Tony free of the cable and carrying him up through the dark water. He broke the surface somewhere off the coast, the suit already calculating the fastest route to Tennessee based on the flight plan he'd filed before the attack.
He was airborne and gone before anyone on the cliff spotted him.
On the ground above the collapsed foundation, Pepper stood at the edge and looked down at the water. The wreckage was spreading on the surface—floating debris, foam, twisted metal catching the last of the afternoon light. No red and gold.
She stood there for a long time. Long enough for the first police unit to arrive, then the news vans, then the rescue divers. Long enough for reporters to start using words like confirmed dead in their earpieces.
She didn't believe it. But she also couldn't see him.
She took out her phone and called Smith Doyle.
Fraternity Headquarters, New York
The Christmas decorations had come down from Korin Tower, and the compound had returned to its usual operational tempo—purposeful, quiet in the way that large organizations are quiet when everyone is doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. Bulma's team at Universal Capsule was deep in product launch preparation. Fox had begun circulating the initial planning documents for Cycle 4 tournament logistics. Smith himself had been working through the question of Dragon Ball locations—who currently held what, where the gaps were, and how to structure the invitation process when the time came.
His phone rang. He looked at the screen.
Pepper Potts.
He frowned slightly. Tony had left hours ago. Whatever this was, it wasn't a social call.
He answered. "What's wrong?"
"Mr. Smith." Her voice was steady, but carefully so. "Tony was attacked at the villa. He's missing. I believe he's alright, but he's not responding, and the media are saying—" She paused. "They're saying he's dead. That without the suit he couldn't have survived."
Smith absorbed this and said nothing for a moment. He already knew Tony's home address had been broadcast publicly—he'd clocked the recklessness of it when Tony made the statement outside the hospital. And he'd seen the Ten Rings denial video circulate through every major outlet since noon. Xu Xialing had moved fast and made it count.
Which meant Killian had watched the same coverage, understood the noose tightening, and decided to hit Tony anyway. Not Xu Xialing—because Killian didn't know where the Ten Rings operated out of. Tony had handed him a gift-wrapped address and a motive.
"Tell me what happened," Smith said.
Pepper walked him through it—the three helicopters, the Mark 42 going onto her instead of Tony, the building going into the water. She'd seen the suit come back to Tony before the structure fell. She just hadn't seen him come back up.
"I'll come to the scene," Smith said. "Stay where you are."
"Thank you." She meant it. "Please."
When Pepper ended the call, Maya Hansen was watching her from a few feet away, arms crossed against the chill off the water.
"Who was that?" Maya asked.
Pepper slid her phone into her pocket. The anxiety was still there, but underneath it, something had settled slightly—the particular steadiness that came from having made the right call. "Smith Doyle. Tony's closest friend. If anyone can find him, it's him."
Maya blinked. "You're serious." She'd read the coverage, the profiles, the speculation about how a man like Tony Stark had ended up in a genuine friendship with the head of the Fraternity. She'd always assumed it was exaggerated. "People actually say they're best friends. I didn't think that was real."
"It's real," Pepper said simply.
Maya said nothing. She was thinking about AIM. About Killian. About the helicopters that had just leveled a man's home, and the fact that she knew exactly why, and exactly where it had come from, and exactly what it meant that she was standing at the scene of it.
She was thinking about whether any of that needed to change.
Pepper was still watching the water. She hadn't noticed the color leaving Maya's face.