Ultron punched through the shipyard roof and came out the other side in a controlled climb, leveling off above the dock with the coast spread out beneath him.
He looked down at the perimeter Ivan Vanko's Dynamo Drones had formed around the ship — a ring of steel, guns tracking him, targeting systems locked.
"A mechanical army." His voice carried easily over the water. "Against me." He tilted his head. "I can't tell if that's confidence or ignorance."
His gaze swept the formation once.
The hack took less than a second. It didn't look like anything — no visible effort, no dramatic gesture. One moment Ivan Vanko's remote combat programs were running clean, and the next they simply weren't his anymore. The blue light behind every war machine's eye panels flickered out. Red bled in to replace it.
As one, every barrel in the formation rotated away from Ultron.
They found Tony and Ivan Vanko instead.
The first volley came without warning — heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, and directed laser arrays all firing simultaneously. The dock section they'd been standing on ceased to exist in any useful sense within the first three seconds.
Tony took a heavy machine gun burst across the chest plate and was driven backward ten feet before his thrusters caught. "Vanko," he snapped over the comm, already firing back, "please tell me you've got an override code for these things."
Ivan Vanko's plasma whip was already out. He sliced the nearest war machine cleanly through the torso, top half separating from the bottom and hitting the water on either side of the dock. "In theory? Yes," he said, burning through a second unit. "In practice, Ultron ate through my remote program like it was nothing."
"He killed Jarvis," Tony said, deflecting a grenade with a forearm and catching the shockwave from the detonation across his back. "Your control protocol wasn't going to put up much of a fight."
Ivan didn't argue. The Dynamo Drones had been a reasonable deployment against anything short of Ultron — that was the empiricist error, and he'd made it.
He kept cutting.
Smith had already cleared the dock interior. The last of the Ultron soldiers inside the ship were in pieces across the deck, and Klaue's remaining men had either run or been put down. He stepped out through a hull breach into the open air and took in the situation — Tony and Ivan hammering through their own rogue hardware, Dynamo Drones firing in overlapping patterns — and raised one hand.
Ki orbs materialized at his fingertips, compact and bright.
He walked the line of Dynamo Drones from left to right, firing without breaking stride. Each shot hit a different unit. Each unit stopped. The dock went quiet in under thirty seconds.
"How did you two end up in a war with Dynamo Drones?" Smith asked
"Ultron hijacked the entire fleet," Ivan said, retracting his whip. "One transmission and the whole formation inverted."
Tony pulled up a secondary display inside his helmet. "There's something else. Banner." He'd already started running the search before he said the name. "Search keyword: Hulk. News footage, last twenty minutes."
Three separate videos populated his screen almost immediately — cell phone footage, a traffic camera, and what looked like a news helicopter feed. All of them showed the same large green figure moving through a city street, leaving a trench of overturned vehicles and shattered storefronts behind it.
Tony exhaled through his nose. "I don't know how bad the control is. I need to get out there."
"Shouldn't we call Betty?" Smith asked.
Tony was already running the Veronica deployment sequence. "Normally, yes. But Ultron used the scepter on him — that's Mind Stone interference, not a standard Hulk-out. Banner's come a long way with his self-control; at baseline, he and the Hulk can hold a working relationship. The scepter bypassed all of that and drove the Hulk side into a blind rage." He paused. "Which also means Ultron walked away with the scepter."
Smith looked at him.
Tony met it. "I know. I'll get it back."
"Handle Banner first," Smith said.
"Veronica's already on approach from orbit." Tony turned toward the city. "The rest of you — fall back to Avengers Tower. Wanda, can you open a portal?"
Wanda already had the sling ring moving. The gateway opened behind her, Avengers Tower visible through it, and the team began filing through. Pietro went last, glancing back at the wrecked dock once before stepping through.
The portal closed.
The Hulk had worked his way six blocks into the city before the police cordon caught up with him. Cruisers were staged across both ends of the street. Officers were maintaining distance — properly, for once — while the Hulk demolished a delivery truck that had the misfortune of being in reach.
Someone had already deployed a containment rig: four thick metal pillars dropped from above, driven into the street surface, high-voltage current running between them in crackling arcs. The cage closed around the Hulk and held for about four seconds.
The Hulk looked down at the ground under his feet.
He stomped once.
The pavement cratered, the pillar foundations lost purchase, and the entire cage tilted and collapsed sideways. The Hulk stepped through the gap and put his fist through a parked car.
Officers opened fire with their rifles. The rounds sparked off green skin and accomplished nothing except making the Hulk angrier, which was the exact wrong result.
Then the Veronica suit arrived.
It came down fast — satellite deployment, controlled reentry, the enormous frame decelerating hard in the last hundred meters before it hit the street with an impact that cracked the asphalt in a ten-meter radius and left the air ringing. Tony was inside it before the dust settled.
Smith had arrived a fraction of a second earlier, hovering at altitude, watching.
Let's see what this thing can actually do.
He had a genuine interest in the Veronica design. The Hulkbuster concept was sound engineering applied to an impossible problem — building something capable of matching Bruce Banner's worst-case scenario without killing him. That required specific thinking about force distribution, containment, and restraint architecture. Tony had done that work.
Smith had also seen a few universes where the Avengers ended up piloting city-sized mechs against kaiju-class threats, and the thought still entertained him. Wrong enemies here, but the aesthetic had merit.
Just don't get dismantled in the first two minutes.
Tony keyed his external speakers. "Everyone back up. Give us room."
The police cordon retreated.
Tony turned Veronica toward the Hulk. "Hey. You with me right now?"
The Hulk rolled his neck and stared at the giant suit.
"Ultron scrambled your signal," Tony said. "The scepter. You know what that does — you've seen it work on other people. This isn't you choosing to tear up a city, it's a piece of alien tech making noise in your head."
He kept his voice level. "You're smarter than Ultron. Stronger than Ultron. We built that thing together, you and me, and it's still not close to either of us on a bad day."
A pause. "You're Bruce Banner."
The Hulk roared.
Tony immediately reversed course. "Okay. Wrong name. Wrong name, I take it back, I'm not mentioning him again."
The Hulk picked up a car and threw it.
Tony caught it with both arms — not gracefully, the impact drove Veronica back three steps — and then the Hulk was already inside his reach, shoulder dropped, driving into Veronica's chest with full momentum. Tony went airborne. Veronica carved a long gouge in the street when it came down, grinding to a stop against a building's lower foundation.
Smith watched from above, arms crossed.
The cage would have held longer if it had been anchored deeper and made of actual adamantium. The current design was functional but not optimized. He filed the observation.
And the Hulk under Mind Stone influence is markedly stronger than the controlled version. Interesting. The Banner-Hulk cooperative state introduces a ceiling — Banner's will moderating the Hulk's output. Strip that out and the raw power climbs.
Tony had already used his thrusters to right Veronica and close the distance. He got a grip on the Hulk's neck, pivoted, and drove him into the street headfirst. The concrete exploded outward in a crater ring.
"Sleep," Tony said, following with a hammer punch from Veronica's right arm. "Sleep. Sleep."
The Hulk caught the fist.
Both of them froze for one second.
Then the Hulk's fingers tightened, and Tony watched Veronica's right gauntlet compress inward, the secondary adamantium plating groaning before it gave.
Smith descended.
"You've used enough time, Tony. I'll take it from here."
Tony held the position for two seconds — pride running cost-benefit analysis — and then a kick from the Hulk sent Veronica skidding sideways down the street.
"He's all yours," Tony said from mid-air, thrusters compensating. "For the record, I wasn't losing. Time management."
Smith didn't answer. He was already in front of the Hulk.
The Hulk threw a punch.
Smith met it fist-to-fist.
The shockwave went outward in a visible ring — every window in a two-block radius blowing out simultaneously, cars on both sides of the street flipping onto their roofs, the street surface beneath them peeling back like a page.
Smith didn't move.
The Hulk shook his hand. Then he roared and charged.
Smith sidestepped the charge and put a kick into the Hulk's chest. Not a full-power kick — the force was calibrated, enough to move him but not to crack ribs or rupture organs. The Hulk left the ground, traveled backward at considerable speed, and took out the front face of a building before stopping.
"Don't kill Banner," Tony said over the comm.
Smith gave him a thumbs-up without looking.
In the rubble, the Hulk heaved a concrete slab off himself and stood. The dent Smith's kick had left in his chest was already filling back in, skin knitting, color normalizing. He rolled his shoulders, and Smith felt the output reading shift — the Hulk was angrier now, which meant he was stronger now, the cycle feeding itself.
He's a long way from planet-cracking. But the upward trend is real. I can't let this go on indefinitely or we'll be here all afternoon.
The Hulk grabbed a car with both hands and threw it, then came in hard directly behind it.
Smith let the car hit him. It folded around him and fell in two pieces.
The Hulk's fist arrived a half-second later. Smith raised one finger.
The Hulk's punch stopped against that single finger. Smith felt the full weight of it — thousands of tons of force channeled through one point — and it wasn't a concern. The street under his feet cracked from the transferred pressure.
Three impacts. Three blocks. The finger didn't move.
The Hulk pulled back and roared at the sky, and the output spiked again, sharper this time.
Smith closed his hand into a fist, measured the gap between what was necessary and what was excessive, and slapped the Hulk across the side of the head with an open palm.
The Hulk hit the pavement hard. A clear handprint was visible on his temple.
He rolled over. Looked up at Smith floating above him. Spat blood. The expression on his face said he wasn't convinced.
Smith hit him again. Same hand, same location. Double the force. The impact ran through the Hulk's skull in a precise wave, disrupting the Mind Stone's interference pattern at its source — not a blunt trauma knockout, but a targeted neurological reset, the way you might flick a switch rather than cut a wire.
The blue bled out of the Hulk's eyes.
He lay there for a moment, blinking, the berserk fury draining away like water through a crack. His breathing slowed. His fists unclenched.
Then, slowly, the green receded. The mass contracted. Bruce Banner was on the pavement, one arm over his eyes, breathing carefully.
Tony, hovering at fifty feet in the damaged Veronica, went quiet for a second.
"Two slaps," he said finally. "He fixed it in two slaps." A beat. "That's — yeah. That's Smith Doyle."
Smith touched down, got a hand under Banner's shoulder, and pulled him upright. Banner didn't have the coordination to stand on his own yet — the transition always took a few minutes — so Smith settled him over one shoulder and looked up at Tony.
"He's back. Let's move."
Smith opened a wormhole with his free hand. Avengers Tower materialized in the gap.
The three of them stepped through, and it closed behind them.
Back at the Tower, Banner was installed in an armchair, knees pulled to his chest, eyes closed. His color was still coming back, the last traces of green fading at the edges of his skin. The only movement was the careful rise and fall of his breathing.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Sharon Carter looked around the room — at the team returning in ones and twos, the general disarray of a mission that had gone sideways at the midpoint — and pulled up her news feed.