Tony had made worse mistakes in his life, but most of them had involved laboratory equipment, not a private military compound full of people who could run their hands through steel and survive point-blank explosions.
He assessed the situation in the three seconds he had before the operatives closed the distance: two Extremis soldiers in front of him, both recovered, both approaching without urgency because they'd run the same calculation he had and arrived at the same conclusion. His nail launcher was empty. His backup charge packets had a delay fuse he couldn't use at this range without catching himself in the yield. He had a stun unit that would, at best, slow an Extremis subject for two seconds.
He reached into the backpack and pulled out one of the improvised ball charges—a compact chemical incendiary packed into a repurposed tennis ball casing—and dropped it at the feet of the two approaching soldiers.
It detonated cleanly. The blast radius was narrow by design, but the fragmentation was aggressive, and both operatives took the glass and metal spread across their torsos and faces. They went down.
Then the red light started moving under their skin, and the glass began working its way back out of the wounds as the tissue reconstruction pushed it to the surface, and they started getting back up.
Tony turned and ran.
He triggered the Mark 42 recall as he moved—the signal going out through the positioning device in his forearm, reaching for the armor across the distance between Miami and wherever Harley's warehouse currently was in relation to him. The armor wouldn't be there immediately. The armor was going to be very much not there for a while. But it was coming.
In the meantime, he had what he'd built, and what he'd built was running low.
Behind him, the sounds of pursuit multiplied. The compound's interior radio network had been broadcasting his position since the first guard spotted him, and the Extremis units that hadn't been assigned to the initial interception were converging from the manor's flanks.
He came around the east face of the main building and ran directly into a wall of open ground with nowhere obvious to go, and that was when five people dropped out of the pre-dawn sky.
Not from the sky, technically—from the top of the perimeter wall, using a rope line he hadn't noticed on his entry survey. Five figures, heavily armed, moving in the tight coordinated formation of soldiers who'd drilled the same entry sequence until it was reflex. They hit the ground and immediately opened fire, and the Extremis soldiers pursuing Tony took the rounds in the chest and skull and went down.
Tony stopped running and looked at them.
The weapons were wrong. The cadence was wrong. American special forces moved a specific way, carried specific hardware, and whatever these five were carrying wasn't NATO standard. The armor they wore was operational rather than institutional—no insignia, no unit markings, the kind of kit assembled for deniability.
"Which agency are you?" he called out. "S.H.I.E.L.D.? Xu Xialing's people?"
None of them answered. They were already advancing deeper into the compound, stepping around the downed Extremis operatives, still firing in controlled bursts.
"Hey. I'm talking to you."
The one at the rear of the formation—left arm a dull silver prosthetic from the shoulder down, wearing a tactical mask that covered most of his face—turned. The turn was faster than it should have been, the kind of speed that came from enhancement rather than training alone. He raised his weapon.
Tony dove behind a stone garden feature as the round cracked into the rockery where his head had been. The impact left a crater in the stone that a standard sidearm round wouldn't have managed.
He stayed low.
The five operatives moved on without looking back. Tony watched from behind the rockery as they engaged the Extremis units ahead—assault rifles cycling through their magazines with methodical accuracy, every shot placed at center mass or the skull. The Extremis soldiers were absorbing rounds and recovering, but the recovery time gave the five-man team the space to advance.
Tony kept his voice low. "Not S.H.I.E.L.D. Not Ten Rings. Russian hardware. Enhanced operatives. Not disclosed to any registry I have access to." He worked through it quickly. "Either way—whoever you are—the targets you're shooting can self-destruct at body temperature, and you are currently very close to them."
The five operatives didn't react to this information, which suggested either they'd been briefed, or they had the specific kind of confidence that came from being told they were the most dangerous thing in any room they entered.
Then one of the Extremis soldiers, a retired serviceman who'd taken eleven rifle rounds and was running on adrenaline and desperation and thermal instability, launched himself at the closest Winter Soldier and was met with a kick from the silver arm that sent him airborne.
The detonation was approximately equivalent to a shaped charge in a confined space.
The Winter Soldier with the prosthetic went sideways through a hedge. The other four were thrown in different directions, some catching the edge of the blast radius, one of them hitting the manor's east wall hard enough to crack the stone. Tony had been behind the rockery, which absorbed the compression wave. The rockery was now substantially shorter than it had been.
He stood up and looked at the debris field.
The silver-armed operative was already getting up. The body-check from an explosive detonation had left visible damage to his gear and, apparently, not much else. He pulled himself upright, assessed his team—four of them recovering at various speeds, all functional—and turned to face the renewed Extremis surge coming from the manor's lower entrance.
Tony looked at the manor, then back at the five operatives now forming a new defensive line, then at the approaching Extremis units coming from an angle that wasn't covered by the five-man formation.
They were angling toward him.
Killian's team had done the math: the five unknown operatives were a more dangerous problem than one unarmored engineer with improvised weapons, but Tony had the Dragon Ball. The Extremis units pushing around the flank weren't trying to break through the Winter Soldiers' line—they were trying to get around it and reach Tony specifically.
He backed up and found something solid to put between himself and the flanking movement, watching both engagements simultaneously and doing the calculation on how long the Mark 42 had left to travel.
It needed to get here faster.
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