The sub-basement corridor was narrow enough that five-on-nine was functionally different from five-on-nine in open ground. The Extremis operatives understood this and used it—spreading across the width, keeping the Winter Soldiers from flanking, forcing the engagement into a grinding forward press where thermal output became the primary variable.
High-temperature assault mode. That was the correct read of what Killian's nine best subjects could do when given space to prepare: skin transitioning through amber to red, the air around their arms distorting with heat shimmer, every surface they touched leaving scorch marks in the stone. One of the Winter Soldiers got a grip on a wrist and let go immediately—the grip had been through body armor.
Bucky took a position at the edge of the formation and reassessed.
His arm was the advantage here. The prosthetic's metallurgy ran hot already—it had been designed to interface with a human body across decades without degrading, which required material tolerances that happened to coincide with resistance to external heat sources. Not immunity. But enough margin to close with an Extremis subject without losing the hand.
He grabbed the nearest operative by the throat.
The operative smiled and let his neck go red. The temperature climbed fast—the vibranium-alloy palm began to glow at the contact point, the joint seals protesting.
Bucky punched him through the sternum with everything the arm had.
The operative hit the far wall. The heart was gone. Extremis could rebuild skin and bone and muscle, but the reconstruction process required existing tissue to work from, and at sufficient velocity a direct strike removed the working material entirely. The red light tried for two seconds and gave up.
The other four Winter Soldiers registered this and adjusted. Strength and speed over grip—hit hard enough to damage what couldn't regenerate, avoid sustained contact with heated surfaces, keep moving. The Extremis operatives were individually lethal but not individually adaptable. The Winter Soldiers were both.
Killian was already moving toward the exit by the time Bucky cleared his target. He didn't look back. He had four Extremis operatives as a rear guard, the safe under his arm, and an egress route that would have him airborne in twelve minutes if nothing blocked the vehicle bay.
Something blocked the vehicle bay.
He came out of the sub-basement stairwell into the pre-dawn light of Rose Manor's rear grounds and walked into Xu Xialing's perimeter.
She had twenty-two people arranged in a rough semicircle, and the loadout they'd brought from the Ten Rings' Miami cache made Killian's security team look like a neighborhood watch program. Light machine guns. Assault rifles. Grenade launchers. RPGs in the hands of two operatives at the flanks who were holding them with the relaxed posture of people who used them regularly. The Death Dealer stood slightly behind Xu Xialing's left shoulder with the stillness of someone who'd already calculated every exit angle.
Xu Xialing looked at Killian. "Where is the Mandarin?"
Killian processed this question in approximately one second and understood exactly what it meant. She didn't know. She thought Killian was a supplier—Pepper Potts's intelligence had reached her that way, secondhand, framed around AIM selling Extremis to the Mandarin rather than AIM being the Mandarin. He had a window.
"Inside the castle," he said. "Area C. He came today to review the operation. He hasn't met with me yet—your people hit the perimeter before we could connect." He tilted his head toward the interior. "If you move quickly, the group already inside might reach him first. They don't look like they're interested in keeping him alive."
Xu Xialing looked at him for a moment, then at the castle, then back. Her expression ran the calculation: Killian was a supplier, cooperative, pointing at the real target. The people already inside—the Winter Soldiers—were an unknown with aggressive behavior and no stated allegiance.
She waved her hand. Her people parted.
Killian walked through the gap.
Then Bucky came out of the castle entrance at a run, tracking the heat signature on Killian's coat, and hit the grounds forty feet away. He didn't look at Xu Xialing. He didn't look at the Ten Rings formation. He recalculated the angle to Killian and moved.
The other four Winter Soldiers followed him out, spreading as they cleared the doorway.
Xu Xialing watched Bucky close on Killian and made no move to intervene. The unknown soldiers were targeting Killian—who was supposedly just a supplier—which was unusual, but she had more pressing things to verify inside the building.
Killian turned. He'd hoped to get another thirty yards of separation but Bucky was faster than that, and the math was catching up with him.
He opened his mouth and breathed.
The fire that came out wasn't incidental. Extremis at full expression, concentrated and directed, running at temperatures well above what the formula produced in standard subjects—Killian had been dosing himself on the cutting edge of what the virus would sustain without detonation for months, and the result was a flame output that hit the ground tiles and cracked them, that turned the stone facade of the manor's rear wall black in the two seconds it burned before Bucky changed direction and got clear.
Xu Xialing stared at this.
The Extremis data she'd been given covered self-detonation and thermal hand-to-hand. It did not cover fire breath.
She was still processing this when the Mark 42 came through the manor's upper-story window at speed, angled wrong because the right thruster was still compromised, and landed in the courtyard between her position and Killian's with a sound like a controlled crash.
Tony straightened up and looked at her. "Xu Xialing. Killian isn't a supplier." He pointed at the man twenty feet away still radiating heat from his last attack. "He built the whole thing. The Mandarin, the broadcasts, the explosions—all of it. He's the one who bombed Happy. He's the one who destroyed my house."
Xu Xialing stood very still for exactly one second.
"Take him alive," she said.
The Twenty-two-person formation turned and the firing lines shifted. Killian looked at the new geometry—Ten Rings on three sides, Iron Man in front, Winter Soldiers closing from behind—and gave the order that was left to him.
"Cover me. Everyone. We move now."
His remaining Extremis operatives spread out in a screen behind him and he ran for the manor's eastern boundary wall.
Inside the castle, the Paragons had split across two floors.
Selene had taken the upper level with Michael Corvin and Wesley, moving through the manor's residential wing and finding it largely evacuated—staff gone, most security pulled to the exterior engagements. The Extremis operatives who remained inside were disoriented by the multi-directional breach and hadn't consolidated. Selene moved through them with the efficiency of someone who had a few centuries of practice and a useful absence of hesitation.
On the ground floor, Shang-Chi, T'Challa, Alexei, and Chen Haoran were working toward the production rooms. T'Challa had already identified the broadcast setup from the building's exterior profile—the antenna array was distinctive once you knew what you were looking for—and navigated by it.
They found the production room with the screens still active, the Ten Rings logo stacked against the wall, the Mandarin's chair centered in the constructed set. Chen Haoran looked at the lighting rig and the backdrop and the editing terminals still open with queued broadcast material, and felt a cold, specific anger at the operational neatness of it.
"He built a studio," Shang-Chi said.
"He built a lie," T'Challa said. "This facility was purpose-built to manufacture the Mandarin's identity. Nothing here was improvised." He looked at the screens. "This was planned over years."
From outside came the percussive sequence of multiple thermal detonations and the distinctive cracking sound of the Mark 42's palm cannon in use.
"Killian's running," Alexei said. "We should get outside."
Selene's voice came through the team channel from the floor above: "He's heading for the east wall. Cut him off."
The four of them moved.