Chapter 237: Tony's Lethal Question!
The chopsticks had been a reasonable idea. Giant, hellfire-wreathed, guided — Tony had put real engineering thought into them, and the impact had been real. Decade had gone to one knee.
And then the smoke cleared and Decade was standing there, suit reverted, brushing ash off his shoulder like he'd walked through light rain.
Tony stared.
"Shift," he said, which was the politest version of what he was thinking.
He ran the numbers in his head. That combination — the skillet hit, the chopstick barrage, the detonation — should have been enough to trouble most things he could imagine. The fact that it had apparently inconvenienced Decade mildly was recalibrating several of his working assumptions about this situation.
Decade walked toward him with the specific energy of someone who hasn't decided whether they're done yet.
"Not bad," Tsukasa said. He sounded like he meant it. "Anything else?"
Tony assessed his remaining options, decided honesty was called for, and said the thing that had been sitting at the back of his mind since the fight started: "Who are you? What are you actually doing here?"
Ethan's hand came up.
No, Tony, don't—
Too late.
The question was already out.
In Ethan's internal experience, this was the equivalent of asking a volcano why it was hot. Tsukasa Kadoya's entire identity was built around being unknowable and moving on before anyone could pin him down. Every Rider who'd ever asked him a direct question about his purpose had received a Rider Kick as the answer.
"I'm just a passing-through Kamen Rider." Tsukasa's voice dropped into a register that had been calibrated across a hundred worlds for maximum dramatic weight. "Remember that."
"FINAL ATTACK RIDE—"
"DEEEEEEECADE—"
The kick connected before Tony had finished processing that the windup had started. It was clean, it was final, and it delivered Tony approximately four feet backward and out of his transformation.
Tony hit the floor and stayed there for a moment, hand pressed to his ribs, looking at the ceiling with the expression of a man reviewing his recent decisions.
Ethan crossed to him and helped him up.
"You're okay," Ethan said. "He pulled it."
"He didn't pull it that much," Tony said.
"You're walking, aren't you?"
Tony accepted this. "I'm building an anti-Decade suit," he said. "Starting tonight."
"You said that about me."
"I'm building two anti-Decade suits."
Tsukasa had dropped the transformation. He was walking toward them with his hands in his jacket pockets, the unhurried pace of someone whose business here was not yet concluded. His eyes moved between Tony and Ethan with the expression of someone running a comparison.
"Good fight," he said to Tony. The Hell's Kitchen form had genuinely impressed him — the weapon design, the tracking system, the improvisation. He'd faced enough Build variants to know when someone had done something original with the template. "You should keep working."
"I plan to," Tony said, with the dignity of someone who has lost and is not pretending otherwise.
Tsukasa's attention moved fully to Ethan. Something in his posture shifted — not quite recognition, but the specific attention of someone who's been looking for a particular frequency and has finally found it.
"Reed told me the Kamen Rider here was Ethan Cross," he said. Then, looking at Tony: "You're not Ethan Cross."
"I'm Tony Stark," Tony said. "Billionaire. Iron Man. I realize those things mean nothing to you."
"They don't," Tsukasa confirmed pleasantly. "But the name Ethan Cross does." He looked at Ethan. "You, though."
"Me," Ethan said.
"You have the Driver."
"I do."
Tsukasa tilted his head. "Which one?"
Ethan considered the question for a moment — not because he didn't know the answer, but because he was thinking about how this conversation was going to go after he answered it.
He reached for the Lost Driver.
"Henshin."
The transformation ran the way it always did — not the elaborate apparatus of Build or the card-flash of Decade, but something older and cleaner, the Lost Driver's sequence stripped down to the essential: the Memory, the sound, the suit.
"ETERNAL!"
The blue-white armor resolved around him. The black cape caught air it shouldn't have been able to catch indoors. Kamen Rider Eternal stood in the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility and looked at Tsukasa Kadoya.
Tsukasa went very still.
Then he looked at the suit for a long moment, reading something in it that Tony couldn't follow and Ethan could.
"W," Tsukasa said.
"W," Ethan confirmed.
"Eternal."
"Yes."
Tsukasa was quiet for another moment. Then: "You're not from the W world."
"No."
"But you have it."
"The System gave it to me."
Something moved across Tsukasa's face that was more complicated than his usual performance of mild superiority. He'd traveled through enough Rider worlds to have a working model of how things were supposed to fit together. A man from outside the Rider worlds entirely, with a System that dispensed Drivers — that didn't fit any model he had.
"I've been looking for you," he said.
"I know," Ethan said. "Reed called you the 'world-breaker's companion' in a message. That was you telling me something."
Tony looked at both of them. "I'm sorry, is this — are you two going to fight, or are you having a reunion?"
"Neither," Ethan said. He dropped the Eternal transformation. "We're going to talk." He looked at Tsukasa. "Where's Kaito?"
Tsukasa's expression shifted slightly. "You know about Kaito."
"He came through with you. He's been in Asgard." Ethan paused. "He also picked up something from Odin's vault that wasn't his to take."
Tsukasa was quiet for a moment. Then, with the specific weariness of someone who had expected this to come up eventually: "The Tablet."
"The Tablet," Ethan confirmed.
Tony looked between them. "I need someone to explain approximately half of what's happening right now."
"Later," Ethan said.
"Not much later," Tony said. "I'm going to start filling in the gaps myself and I promise you the version I construct will be incorrect in ways that cause problems."
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