Almost the instant the heavy door was blasted open, the well-trained Black Widows pulled their triggers in unison.
Wearing his armor, Tony watched countless muzzles flash with fire, watched dense bullets impact and deform on his body, clattering to the ground, but he felt nothing beneath this mobile fortress-like shell.
"Everyone calm down, let's sit and talk like civilized people."
As Tony spoke, a series of lock-on frames appeared consecutively on the display in front of him. With the assistance of the Jarvis AI, he locked onto each Black Widow shooting at him one by one.
The words "Target Locked" appeared on the screen simultaneously.
A hidden shotgun muzzle popped out from the right shoulder of the Iron Man armor. With just a chk sound, all the Black Widows fell to the ground in unison, instantly losing their ability to resist.
Dreykov watched this scene with wide eyes, watching the armor that had barged in like a descending god.
So effortlessly, so casually wiping out all his elites with a wave of his hand... No, strictly speaking, the opponent didn't even raise his hand.
After so many years of painstaking effort, his most elite Black Widows, each a firearms master who never missed, were useless in front of this red and gold steel demon.
Among them was even Taskmaster, Dreykov's biological daughter and his proudest creation. She could copy anyone's moves and possessed the strongest skills and best techniques. In fact, from the moment the enemy entered the door, Taskmaster had already begun observing, scanning, and analyzing the opponent, combining her massive database to predict the opponent's movements.
However, it was of no use.
Her exquisite skills, grandmaster-level martial arts, god-like predictive ability...
However, obviously, these were useless in front of a super exoskeleton armor with AI auto-aiming function.
Dreykov's trump card, the strongest Widow "Taskmaster," was sandwiched among everyone else, taken down by one of the scattered warheads from Iron Man just like that, as if she were no different from a small fry.
Only Dreykov knew best how much effort he had put into this Taskmaster, and how excellent she truly was. But precisely because of this, he could feel the powerlessness more clearly than anyone else when such a top-tier creation was treated like waste paper.
Times had changed.
Just like the birth of guns eliminated the Sword Saints of the old era. That red and gold iron armor single-handedly flattened his entire aerial fortress, instantly killing the Black Widows he was so proud of, making his "control the world with the Red Room" rhetoric seem like a ridiculous joke.
In an instant, Dreykov's grand enterprise, his ambitions and aspirations, all became a joke.
Tony had just taken out all the Black Widows with a single round of auto-guided buckshot, but he didn't hit Dreykov. This was intentional, because he still had questions to ask.
"Dreykov."
A voice processed by the armor's voice changer came from within the helmet. Tony walked up to Dreykov with the sound of mechanical operation accompanying his steps.
"You and your Red Room recently took a job to assassinate Tony Stark." Tony got straight to the point. "I want to know who the employer is."
Dreykov looked up directly at the golden faceplate, watching the distorted reflection of his own face on that steel mask.
"So, you are Stark's dog," Dreykov said coldly.
At least now he knew whose bad side he had gotten on to end up like this.
"Give me a name, you have three seconds," Tony said.
Dreykov sneered: "If you think this will make me talk... Ugh-aaaaah—"
His words turned into a violent scream before he could even finish.
In this instant, Dreykov felt as if his whole body had been thrown into an electrified bathtub. Every nerve ending felt like it was exploding, and the blood vessels under his skin seemed to turn into boiling molten lead. His fingers convulsed into claws, and every bone joint seemed to explode with an overwhelmed crisp sound in his ears, like walnuts being crushed by a hydraulic press.
It was a pain almost beyond words, so much so that he was even surprised at how he hadn't fainted yet.
Then the pain stopped. Dreykov was sweating profusely, trying to say something but seeming to have lost control of his tongue, unable to speak at all.
"Like it? This is a stimulating current I personally designed."
Tony extended a finger, and dangerous arcs of electricity were sizzling on that red steel fingertip.
"This device can release a specific pulse current within 0.1 seconds, precisely matching the nerve frequency... Simply put, it can stimulate your pain nerves to produce a sharp pain similar to a dental drill touching the dental pulp, just ten times more intense. During this time, I will also inject infrasound of a specific frequency to destroy the brain's adaptation mechanism to pain to prolong the period of pain sensitivity."
Tony paused, then added with a smile: "And do you know what's even better? By precisely controlling the current frequency, I can regulate neurotransmitters to cancel out the inhibitory signals caused by pain... In other words, no matter how much it hurts, you won't faint."
As he spoke, he released the current from his fingertip again. Dreykov once again let out a scream like a pig being slaughtered.
At this time, Natasha had stood up, supporting her disabled arm. She watched the painfully howling Dreykov, watched this seemingly inhumane interrogation scene, but felt no pity in her heart.
There was even a slight bit of... pleasure?
Because it was Dreykov who destroyed her, and destroyed the lives of all the Black Widows in the Red Room.
Every Black Widow was underage when thrown into the Red Room, many not even ten years old. But in the eyes of this demon, they were just items waiting to be modified.
He destroyed their organs through surgery, took away their ability to bear children, and then trained them in the cruelest way. Only girls strong enough to survive were qualified to become his brainwashed puppets.
So yes, she felt pleasure at the beast's screams, and almost felt grateful to Stark for venting this anger for her—even though she knew Stark was only doing it for his own purposes.
Dreykov's screams stopped briefly again. His face was pale, looking almost like a dead man.
"Alright, are you willing to share with me now, who hired you to kill Tony Stark?" Tony asked.
Dreykov's lips trembled.
"Okay, looks like you need a little more motivation."
Tony said, raising his sizzling electric finger again.
"Wait... wait a minute!" Dreykov shouted almost desperately, "I don't know... I really don't know who it is. We have cooperated with that client a few times, but the other party always communicates through encrypted channels. We do the work, they send the money, that's it."
Tony: "You mean to say, you took the money and did the job, but didn't know who sent the money or who you were working for?"
"It's true, I can show you... show you all our mission logs and transaction records." Dreykov said laboriously, "I only know a codename... that client's codename."
At this moment, Tony's helmet's built-in display was showing a lie detector interface, and the lie detector was marking a conspicuous "Truth" next to Dreykov's head on the display.
So this useless trash really didn't know who his client was.
"Fine, so what is that codename?" Tony asked.
Dreykov took a deep breath and spat out the name: "...Viper."