This was also the first time Obadiah had met Raza, the warlord who led the Ten Rings, since the incident. The man's face was a grotesque testament to his failure: half of his head was scarred, slick with residual burns that had cauterized the flesh in an uneven, hateful pattern.
"This… this mess, the fire, the shame… it's a gift from Tony Stark to me," Raza hissed, his functional eye twitching with suppressed violence.
Obadiah, ever the picture of tailored sophistication in the middle of a war zone, surveyed the ruined valley. He remained unnervingly calm, his familiar, faint smile barely touching his lips. "A gift you accepted, then. If you had simply executed him when you had the chance, instead of waiting to negotiate a higher price for his expertise, you wouldn't be standing here looking like a melted action figure."
He didn't wait for a response. Obadiah held these petty warlords in contempt; they were merely tools for distribution, not thinkers.
"Everyone has a price, Stane, and the money you offered for that armored monstrosity wasn't nearly enough to justify the blood it's cost me now," Raza grumbled, still trying to play the tough negotiator over the smoking ruin of his reputation.
Obadiah's smile finally vanished, replaced by an expression of sharp, predatory focus. He was no longer willing to waste time arguing over sunk costs. "Cut the posturing. I'm here for my property. Show me what you salvaged."
"You come in alone. The hired muscle stays outside," the bald boss demanded, gesturing towards the entrance of the largest remaining tent.
Obadiah gave a silent, almost imperceptible hand signal. His seven or eight heavily built bodyguards, dressed in matching, anonymous black tactical gear, stopped instantly and stood quietly behind him, appearing perfectly obedient. Fools always cling to outdated concepts of strength, Obadiah thought, stepping inside.
The first thing that greeted him, illuminated by a harsh work lamp in the center of the tent, was the Mark I armor.
It had been painstakingly reassembled by Raza's engineers from the pieces Tony had left behind in the cave. Clunky, rivet-covered, and bearing the scars of its violent escape, it stood as a monument to genius under duress.
Obadiah walked over and circled the crude prototype, running a gloved hand over the thick plating. He knew this was the original framework, the two-month, prison-yard masterpiece that had started the whole unbelievable saga.
The bald leader continued, his voice heavy with implied threat. "We have rebuilt it. We have the technical schematics and the rough blueprints. I am willing to trade this armor and all our knowledge for a much larger shipment of advanced weapons—or better yet, a whole group of your own steel soldiers."
Obadiah chuckled, a dry, humorless sound. He placed his left hand on Raza's shoulder, a gesture of faux camaraderie. With a gentle, precise push of his fingers, he activated a tiny, specialized sonic paralysis device integrated into his heavy signet ring.
The device instantly flooded the warlord's brainstem with tailored, high-frequency sound waves. These waves were tuned perfectly to disrupt the central nervous system. Countless black blood vessels instantly swelled and bulged on the side of the bald boss's head. Raza couldn't move a single muscle; he couldn't blink, he couldn't speak, and only his shallow breathing continued, a meager anchor to life.
"Technology, Raza," Obadiah stated simply, his voice devoid of emotion as he plucked two small, glowing, hacked earpieces from the warlord's ears. "It will always be your fatal weakness."
The bald leader's eyes were bloodshot, pupils wide with a terrifying cocktail of anger, hatred, and utterly paralyzing fear. He could only stare at the smiling Obadiah.
"Don't worry, the paralysis only lasts fifteen minutes. You can worry about the bigger troubles later," Obadiah dismissed him, already striding out of the tent.
In the ensuing moments, as Obadiah stepped back into the sunlight, his bodyguards, far from being just muscle, executed their orders with brutal, synchronized efficiency. The guards, who had been standing silently, moved in a swift, coordinated sweep, forcing the remaining dozen or so armed Ten Rings soldiers onto their knees at gunpoint. It was the overwhelming, silent power of prepared technology against disorganized, overconfident brute force.
"Secure the armor inside and load it for transport. That's enough cleanup. Clear the area entirely," Obadiah commanded, his voice cold.
The crisp sound of countless gunshots rang out, instantly killing all the remaining kneeling soldiers. Obadiah didn't care about their lives; they were witnesses and loose ends.
He got back into his armored SUV, which was idling nearby, and immediately made a phone call to his most trusted, non-disposable confidant back in the States.
"Listen closely. Immediately establish the Sixteenth Zone under the main arc oscillation reactor in the factory. Build it with reinforced shielding. Staff it in secret, using only the best engineers and materials scientists—the ones who ask no questions. I need them to begin construction on a prototype for me immediately. It must be built around the Mark I's core structure but vastly improved. I'll send the schematics from the plane."
Obadiah hung up. He looked out the window at the smoking, bloody valley, a dark sense of triumph washing over him. Tony had designed the Mark I to escape. Obadiah would redesign it to conquer. The game was finally beginning, and he intended to rewrite the rules.
That night, Leo was deep into his work.
He had finished an entire box of high-calorie rations, fueling his mental reserves. He sat cross-legged on the floor of his room, the small Arc Reactor Tony had given him resting in his hand. Two huge, shimmering plates of gold-titanium alloy surrounded him, arranged like metallic solar panels to maximize absorption.
Leo closed his eyes and exerted his maximum mental control.
Countless dazzling golden points of light, visible only to his advanced senses, emanated from the surrounding gold-titanium alloy. This raw, metallic essence merged together and surged into Leo's body, continuously strengthening the energy meridians that ran invisibly beneath his skin, as well as the fine, golden silk threads that lay dormant and coiled within his very core.
The silk threads gradually became more solid, thicker, and simultaneously seemed to be expanding outward from the main core, extending fine, intricate, fractal patterns—a strange and beautiful internal sight, a map of his nascent power.
The mental energy stored in his brain was being consumed rapidly. Faced with such high-quality, dense gold-titanium alloy, the pale gray energy derived from his food was being used up exponentially faster than normal.
In just one hour, one-third of the one-ton gold-titanium alloy had been consumed and rendered into a dull, unusable metal slag. However, the mental energy that would normally allow him to cultivate for six hours against ordinary alloys had already been completely exhausted.
Leo should have stopped training at this point. Continuing without energy was an action his body instinctively resisted, risking mental backlash and physical exhaustion.
He stared intensely at the small, glowing reactor core in his hand, focusing his thoughts like a powerful laser beam onto the device.
The once-calm Arc Reactor, designed for steady, contained power output, began to glow brighter and brighter. The vast, contained fusion energy within it started to become restless, leaking powerful electrical energy to the outside world through the small contacts below.
A raw, exposed arc of pale blue energy, vibrating at an impossible frequency, jumped from the reactor. It passed through Leo's arm and was immediately pulled in by a powerful, mental suction force.
A pale blue, almost cyan energy surged into his mind. Unlike the pale gray energy from the food, this energy seemed to be of a much higher, purer energy level—the boundless power of fusion.
This energy was exponentially faster and more efficient for cultivation.
The remaining gold-titanium alloy around him began to decompose rapidly, and the golden light surged even more violently into Leo's body, driven by the Arc Reactor's power.
This time, the golden light did not just strengthen the energy meridians; it aggressively reinforced the flesh, the skin, and even the deep layers of his internal organs. He could feel it saturating every cell. Some of the intense golden light began to seep into his very bones, the final frontier of his current physical evolution.
Leo closed his eyes, his mouth twitching into a wider and wider smile as the pain of the process was overwhelmed by the sensation of pure power washing over him. At this moment, the raw electrical current flowing from the reactor had already completely covered his arms, wrapping them in an ethereal blue shimmer.
His pajama sleeves, already worn, were burned instantly to ashes, yet the arms beneath the destructive electric light remained completely unharmed, radiating only a faint, protective golden glow.
Time stretched slowly in the stillness of the room, marked only by the furious, silent consumption of energy. The formidable barrier in front of Leo, the one that separated Level 19 from Level 20, grew thinner and thinner, groaning under the immense force of the fusion power.
Just a little bit more, just one more push, Leo urged himself, his internal voice cracking with excitement.
Leo's expression grew increasingly intense, his face flushed and strained, as if he were about to step across a threshold into a new, impossibly powerful world.
However, the brilliant light from the reactor in his hands began to dim with heartbreaking speed. The two still-bright currents diminished, flickering violently, and slowly receded from his arms.
Until it completely vanished. The miniature Arc Reactor, a marvel of human ingenuity, was now completely dark, depleted of all usable energy.
Leo immediately opened his eyes, the excitement replaced by a helpless, drawn-out sigh. He looked at the dead reactor in his hand, now just a silent piece of metal, and gently placed it aside.
"Almost there," he whispered, his voice rough. "If I had just one more reactor core, I think I could definitely succeed. That gap between nineteen and twenty is a deep trench."
He checked his mental panel, his anticipation dashed. The attribute panel remained stubbornly unchanged. He could feel, however, that his body was immensely stronger than it had been hours ago, and his senses were sharper. His mental strength had also increased, but the counter remained fixed at 19.
Leo realized that the difference between nineteen and twenty was not just one point, but possibly two entirely different realms of existence, demanding a catastrophic amount of energy to breach.
Looking at a pale ray of early morning sunlight creeping in through the window, Leo smiled, the exhaustion finally catching up to him. He lay down on the bed. "It seems like it's been ages since I had a proper night's sleep without worrying about an arms dealer or a super-genius."
He gently moved two fingers, and the scattered pieces of broken, depleted metal around him obeyed his silent command, instantly gathering into perfect small cubes and piling up against the wall.
The remaining 25 kilograms of intact gold-titanium alloy—the unused portion of the Mark III's material—flew into the air above the room.
Watching this small lump of high-grade, infinitely malleable metal slowly shift in the air, transforming first into the iconic, segmented shape of the Mark III, then into the broad, star-spangled shield of Captain America, and finally into the intricate, multi-limbed shape of Spider-Man, Leo suddenly sat up, eyes wide.
"Should I… should I get a battle suit too?" he mused aloud.
He shook his head, instantly rejecting the idea. "Pajama Baby and Iron Spider-Man are completely different heroes, okay?" he groaned.
But after glancing down at his still-small, unthreatening hands, Leo lay back down with a pout. "Damn it, I'm still too small. Even if I'm dressed in some kind of cool armor, people can guess who I am immediately. I'd be the world's youngest, most conspicuous superhero."
His body, having just consumed the fusion energy equivalent of a week's worth of food, gave a loud, demanding rumble. He rubbed his stomach vigorously. "Ugh. Despite all that power, I'm so hungry. I want to eat fried chicken."
Down beneath Stark Industries' main complex, Obadiah had begun his dark work in the newly christened, heavily secured Sixteenth Zone.
A dozen or so top-tier engineers and technicians, all dressed in sterile white jumpsuits and moving with silent focus, were working tirelessly on a massive, heavy-duty framework. The prototype of the Iron Monger—Obadiah's twisted, monstrous answer to the Mark I—had already begun to emerge, taking up the majority of the huge underground bay.
Obadiah watched from an elevated platform, comparing the Mark I's salvaged blueprints to the immense, brutish chassis before him. He realized with satisfaction that his armor was structurally very similar to the crude design Tony had built in the cave, but bulked up to titanic proportions, reflecting his own desire for overwhelming, undeniable physical authority.
Even the reactor containment port on the chest, a massive, custom-machined cavity designed to house a much larger energy source, was made to exactly the same internal specifications as the Mark I's chest cavity.
Looking down at the original Mark I armor, which sat disassembled on a nearby table, Obadiah reached out and ran his hand along the reactor hole—the exact space where Tony's original core had powered his escape. His eyes shone with cold, avaricious anticipation. He just needed the one thing Tony hadn't been willing to give up: the true power source.
It's coming, Tony, he thought, his smile returning, colder than ever. I'll show you who the true master of technology is.