"Damn… when is he coming…"
In the dark, empty cave, Tony Stark stood in a cloud of dust, hammering away at a massive slab of metal with gritted teeth. His face was filthy, his body exhausted, and every strike sent a dull ache through his arms, but he didn't dare stop. He knew the terrorists were still watching him through the camera behind him, waiting to see if he would obey or try something stupid.
As for his opinion on the last few days, Tony only had one review.
Absolutely brutal.
One minute he had been drinking champagne, flirting with danger, and basking in his own spotlight. The next, he had a hole blasted through his chest and got dragged into a cave by lunatics who wanted him to build missiles for them. The drop in lifestyle had been so extreme it was almost offensive.
Fortunately, he already had a plan.
He wasn't going to build them a missile. He was going to build a suit. A crude one, ugly as sin, but enough to get him out of this nightmare alive if he could just finish it in time. That belief alone kept his hands moving when his body wanted to collapse.
And buried even deeper than that plan, there was another thread of hope stubbornly keeping him upright.
Iron Man.
For a hundred million dollars, that lunatic should show up, right?
The thought was ridiculous, but Tony clung to it anyway. On a sudden impulse before leaving, he had stuffed two bank cards into the envelope for Pepper. Now, stuck in this cave with death breathing down his neck, he was starting to think maybe that amount had been a little conservative.
"Should've added a few more," he muttered bitterly.
A saying suddenly drifted through his mind, and for the first time in his life, Tony Stark understood exactly how tragic it was.
The saddest thing in life wasn't dying.
It was dying and leaving all your money behind.
He slammed the hammer down again, sparks jumping from the metal. "Come on, Iron Man," he muttered under his breath. "Don't make me regret being cheap…"
Several days earlier, Rex Viper had arrived in Afghanistan and stepped into Bagram Air Base under a perfectly legitimate identity. Officially, he was a professional tracking expert invited by Stark Industries to assist in the search for Tony Stark. The paperwork was in order, the story held up, and nobody had enough reason to reject him outright.
For the first two days, he went out with soldiers from the base to search for Stark.
They found nothing.
That by itself wasn't surprising. What did catch his attention was how little urgency anyone seemed to have. The soldiers wandered around the nearby areas, moved through the motions, and then returned without any real pressure behind their actions. It looked like a search, but only if you didn't stare too hard.
The higher-ups weren't much better.
On the surface, the base command acted concerned. A major defense supplier had been attacked, and the son of the military-industrial elite had vanished in hostile territory. That should have triggered a full-force response. Instead, their efforts were sluggish, unfocused, and suspiciously restrained.
Rex didn't need much time to form a working conclusion.
Given the military power stationed here, if Stark's convoy had been attacked in a genuinely unacceptable way, air support should have arrived within minutes. Killing Stark would've been easy. Abducting him and disappearing without meaningful pursuit was something else entirely. The simplest explanation was the ugliest one.
Obadiah Stane wasn't just colluding with the Ten Rings.
He was likely tied into military leadership here as well.
Compared to Tony Stark, Obadiah was embedded far more deeply into the military-industrial machine. Tony might have been the genius face of Stark Industries, but Obadiah was the one who truly belonged to the system. In a sense, he was one of their own.
At first, Rex's arrival had been met with a certain amount of coldness. Outsiders asking questions were rarely welcome, especially in places where everyone had something to hide. But once the men at the base realized that he wasn't pushing too hard, wasn't grandstanding, and even seemed willing to slack off when they did, the mood improved considerably.
Shared bad habits had a way of building fast friendships.
They saw him as one of them.
The difference was that their goals and his had nothing in common.
They wanted Tony Stark dead in the desert, preferably at the hands of terrorists, with enough plausible chaos to wash the whole thing clean. Rex, on the other hand, wanted Tony alive. More than alive, he needed him to complete his transformation and come roaring back.
Because if Tony Stark didn't return as Iron Man, Rex's plan to make a fortune would take a very ugly hit.
And Rex had absolutely no intention of allowing that.
Besides, the base had delivered him an unexpected bonus the second he arrived.
The moment he stepped off the plane, he nearly went numb with delight.
Prey.
Everywhere he looked, the place was crawling with prey.
Bronze-level criminals were all over the base, packed in astonishing numbers. There were plenty of silver-level ones too, and even a handful of gold-level targets mixed in among the officers and specialists. For a moment, Rex genuinely felt emotional. At night he almost slept with a damp pillow, and not because Afghanistan was humid.
It was hunger.
Every morning he woke up thinking the same thing.
There still weren't enough enemies to kill.
A base this size had thousands of men. Two Gatling guns wouldn't be enough. A fat flock of chickens like this only came around once, and if he played it badly, he'd ruin everything. So he held himself back and started planning.
Not a decent plan.
Not a good plan.
A truly beautiful one.
Once night fell and the base sank into its exhausted routine, Rex slipped out of bed without a sound. Dressed in black, he avoided the patrol routes, slipped around the cameras, and quietly infiltrated the restricted sector. His objective was simple enough—a map.
A detailed map of the U.S. military's deployment in Afghanistan.
A distribution map of armed groups.
A database of terrorist positions already identified by military intelligence.
As it happened, he had started preparing for this days ago. He had already sneaked into the offices and conference rooms of several key personnel and planted highly advanced micro-listening devices in places nobody would think to check. The bugs were tiny, discreet, and more than good enough to turn the base into an open book.
What he heard while digging through their secrets had been eye-opening.
Absurd military waste. Corrupt procurement. Idiotic vanity projects dressed up as aid. One story involved a staggering sum spent to "boost" local industry by flying in livestock from Europe, only for the whole effort to collapse into stupidity. Another involved millions wasted on camouflage so badly suited to the environment that the soldiers wearing it became easier targets.
That was only the harmless side of it.
The darker intelligence was worse.
Drug expansion. Deliberate social corrosion. Schemes designed to rot resistance from the inside out. Quiet reports about villages erased from above. Stories of atrocity, trafficking, rape, murder, bombing, and everything in between. The more Rex listened, the less he felt surprised by the system's classifications.
These men truly did deserve the word prey.
Under the cover of night, he successfully copied the defense map and intelligence map from the base commander's computer. Then he spent even longer in the office of the colonel overseeing the armory, searching through restricted files until he finally found the piece of confidential information that made his eyes light up.
The next morning, he changed his behavior completely.
Rex threw a public fit, openly accusing the U.S. military of dragging its feet and making no real effort to search for Stark. The argument escalated fast and loud enough that everyone nearby heard it. Not long after, he stormed out and left Bagram Air Base entirely.
No one cared very much.
As far as they were concerned, he was only a tracking expert with an attitude problem.
That suited Rex perfectly.
A hundred kilometers away from Bagram, a military checkpoint sat at a transportation choke point that also served as a key traffic node. Because of its importance, more than a dozen U.S. soldiers were stationed there around the clock.
And a tank.
It was deep into the night, and the men on duty were barely functioning. This area had been quiet for months, with no major armed activity to keep them sharp. Boredom and false safety had softened them.
Then a sharp cry ripped through the darkness.
"Meow!"
Ryan, who had been standing watch, jolted awake and immediately kicked the private beside him. "Damn it, Gan, don't fall asleep on me."
The private blinked his eyes open, dazed and confused. Then his expression froze. His pupils expanded, his whole body started shaking, and he stared past Ryan like he had just seen the gates of hell swing open.
Ryan frowned and turned halfway toward him. "What the hell are you looking at?"
The private raised a trembling finger. "Gh-ghost… there's a ghost…"
A chill slid down Ryan's spine.
He turned around slowly, and under the weak, dim light, he saw it.
A monster over two meters tall stood there with its head tilted slightly to one side. Its body was covered in black-blue scales, dense and hard as armor. Its muscles looked like forged steel cables wrapped beneath the skin. The claws hanging at its sides were long and sharp like combat knives, and its pitch-black eyes stared at him with inhuman stillness. On its head rose a pair of twisted horns that made the whole figure look less like a living thing and more like a demon dragged out of a nightmare.
Ryan's mind went blank.
Before he could even process what he was seeing, the claw came down on him.
Boom.
His head burst apart like a smashed watermelon.
Private Gan tried to run, but his legs had turned useless. He tried to scream, but his throat locked up and only a broken rasp came out. The demon strode forward without hurry, then drove out a single punch.
Bang.
For one bright, fleeting moment, Gan felt himself flying, and somewhere in the back of his mind, a ridiculous memory flashed through him—running under a sunset that now felt impossibly far away.
Rex flexed his wrist once after the body dropped.
This was his first real test of the Demonized Body, and so far, he was satisfied. The physical enhancement wasn't dramatically higher than his normal state, but that wasn't the point. The black energy it produced was useful in ways raw strength couldn't replicate. It could contaminate emotions, push people toward violence and mania, and corrode metal fast enough to tear holes through steel.
More importantly, once transformed, all traces of his human aura vanished.
That alone made the power worthwhile.
It wasn't just a combat form. It was camouflage. If he ever stepped into Hell or the Beast Dimension later, he wouldn't have to worry as much about being discovered the instant he crossed over.
The noise from killing the two sentries had already drawn attention, and movement was starting up inside the barracks.
Rex didn't hesitate anymore.
He strode forward.
....
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