Tony was running out of options and buying time with his mouth, which was not a new situation but was rarely this specific about the ratio.
Eric Seven and Ellen Brandt had come around the east wing of the manor and were closing the angle from two directions, which meant Tony's remaining field of movement was roughly the width of a stone garden path and a decorative fountain. Brandt was still showing some scorching from the bar's gas explosion, but her skin was already returning to its normal tone. Seven looked like he'd slept well and eaten breakfast.
"You didn't die," Tony said.
"We're going to enjoy this," Brandt said.
Tony glanced at his watch. Not the girl's cartoon watch—he'd switched that to his other wrist to keep it safe—but the functional timer he'd set before leaving the warehouse. The Mark 42's charge window, the distance to Miami, the intercept trajectory JARVIS had calculated before he left the car.
Margin was tight. He needed two more minutes.
"Before we do this," he said, "I want to point out that S.H.I.E.L.D. is already inside your perimeter. You and your boss are both looking at federal charges, and the building is going to get significantly more crowded in the next—"
He triggered the recall.
The parts didn't come.
Seven watched Tony's arm movement—the specific gesture that anyone who'd studied Iron Man footage would recognize as the summoning motion—and laughed. "Surrender time?"
Tony kept his expression neutral and started talking faster. Seven operatives from five different unknowns were somewhere behind him working through Killian's Extremis units, and whatever Harley's door situation was, it needed to resolve itself in the next ninety seconds.
In Rose Hill, Harley had heard the components hitting the inside of the warehouse door at exactly the same moment he'd woken up from a dream about candy. He was at the chain lock in fifteen seconds.
The gate opened.
The Mark 42 left in pieces.
Tony saw Seven's eyes track something behind him—the specific involuntary reaction of someone clocking incoming fast-moving objects—and ducked. The first component hit the Extremis operative flanking from Tony's left and sent him sprawling. The second and third attached to Tony's arm and shoulder respectively. He was already moving into position as the rest of the sequence arrived, the suit assembling around him in the lurching, component-by-component fashion that made it both impressive and clearly not ideal.
Seven and Brandt tried to close the distance during the assembly window. The palm cannon on Tony's right arm, the first functional system to come online, fired twice. Both of them went back.
The last components locked. Tony stood in the Mark 42 and ran a status check. Primary systems: functional. Weapons: partial. Structural integrity: already compromised before this morning. Thrusters: operational but flagged.
He flexed both hands, felt the servos respond, and said: "Now it's your turn."
The Extremis operatives were capable of generating temperatures that the Mark 42's damaged plating wasn't designed to handle at length. Tony kept moving, kept the engagement kinetic rather than static, and worked through Seven's team with the specific efficiency of someone who'd been building armor since his early twenties and understood exactly which compromises he'd made in each iteration and how to fight around them.
The suit took damage. It always did. He finished the engagement and looked at the five-man team that had pushed through the manor's east entrance ahead of him, now visible through the broken doors.
"JARVIS—house party protocol. Everything in the underground garage, plus whatever the satellite has ready. Bring them here."
"Robot House Party initiated, sir." A pause that had become characteristic of JARVIS processing something it found slightly absurd. "Shall I also prepare the Seraph satellite deployment?"
"Yes. And don't editorialize."
He fired the thrusters to reach the manor's second-floor entry point and came down harder than intended when the right thruster cut out on the approach. He caught himself on the window frame, landed sideways, and made a note to have Ivan look at the thruster tolerances before he flew anything serious.
Inside, a partial view through the ground floor windows showed Xu Xialing's people coming over the manor wall—not quietly, not slowly, the Ten Rings' elite contingent moving with the confidence of an organization that had stopped apologizing for being well-armed approximately nine centuries ago. They'd spotted the Mark 42 components flying in on approach and adjusted their timeline accordingly.
Above the manor, a Paragons aircraft banked into position and rappel lines dropped from the cargo bay. Seven black-robed figures descended with the particular coordinated smoothness of people who'd been training together long enough to move like a unit.
Killian was watching all of this on his surveillance feeds. Tony could infer as much from what he found when he slipped inside the manor through the upper hall: the internal security had pulled toward the exterior engagements. The corridors were quiet.
He moved through them carefully, following the only sound in the building—a woman's voice, somewhere on the ground floor, with the particular slurring quality of someone who'd been drinking since long before sunrise.
He found her in a sitting room off the main corridor: a dancer, horizontal on the sofa, watching the ceiling with the philosophical acceptance of someone who'd decided the explosions outside were someone else's problem. A guard occupied the chair across from her, apparently asleep.
The guard wasn't asleep. Tony's palm cannon confirmed the distinction quietly.
The dancer watched this happen with the mild interest of someone watching a card trick. She made a finger-gun gesture at him. He put a finger to his lips. She nodded sagely and went back to watching the ceiling.
He pushed through the interior door and found Killian's production room.
It was precisely what Tony had suspected but hadn't fully visualized until now: broadcast equipment, editing terminals, the Ten Rings logo stacked in wall-sized prints, and a constructed backdrop that matched every Mandarin video down to the chair angle and the ambient lighting. The computer still had four active editing sessions open.
He stood in the Mandarin's staging area, in a building surrounded by three converging forces plus a HYDRA team that he still hadn't fully classified, and thought about the gap between what the world believed and what was actually true.
The corridors behind him remained quiet. The sound of the ongoing engagement outside was constant—thermal detonations, weapons fire, the particular sharp cracks of the Winter Soldiers working through their targets with maximum violence—but in here it felt distant.
Killian was already moving. Tony had enough operational experience to know that a man who'd built this operation didn't sit still when the walls started closing. He'd be heading for whatever exit he'd prepared—and he'd be taking the Dragon Ball with him.
Tony checked the structural readout of the Mark 42's sensors, found the staircase that led downward, and followed it.