Chapter 240: The Rider Showcase
The Faiz light sabers were something else.
Both of them held one — deep red, sharp enough in concept that Tony instinctively stepped back when they appeared — and the exchange that followed had the quality of a conversation that happened to involve bladed energy weapons. The swords clashed and clashed again, each impact throwing a spray of sparks that faded before reaching the floor.
Then, without discussion, both of them dropped the sabers simultaneously. The weapons hit the floor and simply ceased to exist.
Tony stared at the spot where they'd been.
He had been planning to take those.
"Ready—"
"Charge—"
The Rider Kicks crossed in midair — the deep crimson drill formation, both of them in Faiz form driving heel-first into each other, the detonation point exactly between them. The explosion that followed was modest by the standards of this fight, which meant it only cracked three tiles and blew out the lights in the adjacent corridor.
The smoke cleared.
They were already in Blade.
Silver and black, long swords that looked like they'd been designed to cut through the concept of a thing rather than the thing itself. Tony counted forms without meaning to.
Five.
"This is not a fight," Tony said, to no one in particular. "This is a product demonstration."
He thought about the HYDRA cameras that were definitely recording this. He thought about Reed, watching. He thought about what happened when people who were already dangerous saw a catalogue of capabilities they didn't have.
He told JARVIS to double the recording resolution.
If someone was going to do something with this data, it was going to be him.
In the monitoring room, Pierce had stopped pretending he was doing anything except watching.
"Record everything," he said. The agents who hadn't already been doing this started doing this.
Five forms. He wanted to know how many more there were. He was already having a conversation in his head about which ones he wanted, in what order, for what purposes.
"How many variants do you think there are?" he said.
Reed considered the question with the specific expression of a man who has a reputation for being the smartest person in the room and intends to maintain it. "I'd estimate fewer than ten. Development of each suit represents significant investment — the engineering, the power source, the systems integration. The organization behind this has clearly committed substantial resources, but there are real constraints. I wouldn't expect more than nine or ten total across all their personnel."
Pierce nodded. This was reasonable. This was probably right.
On the screen:
"HIBIKI!"
"KABUTO!"
"DEN-O!"
"KIVA!"
Four new forms in under thirty seconds.
Reed's expression did not change. His jaw moved slightly.
"Nine or ten," Pierce said.
Reed said nothing.
Pierce looked at the screen where two Kiva forms were summoning castle structures in a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility in New Mexico and thought about what he was going to say to Tsukasa when this was over.
Tony was at nine.
He'd lost count around Hibiki and restarted. He was now at nine confirmed unique forms between the two of them, not including Decade itself or the Legendorga system, not including Tony's own Build and Hell's Kitchen forms.
"Nine," he said. "They've hit nine."
He looked at his data log.
"There is no world in which this stops at nine."
In the room, both Ethan and Tsukasa had the particular quality of people who are genuinely enjoying themselves and aren't going to stop unless something external makes them. They'd been matching each other form for form for — Tony checked — twenty-three minutes. The facility around them had accumulated a meaningful amount of structural damage. Several agents had left voluntarily.
Ethan reached for a card.
Tsukasa reached for a card.
They looked at each other.
"W?" Tsukasa said.
"W," Ethan confirmed.
They'd already done W once. They did it again. This time Ethan let himself settle into it the way he couldn't the first pass — the Cyclone-Joker split, the familiar weight of a form he'd been in a hundred times before in a completely different context. It felt different wearing it through Legendorga. Like hearing a song through better speakers.
Tsukasa watched him do this.
"You actually know this one," he said.
"It was my first," Ethan said.
Something in Tsukasa's expression moved. The man who had copied every Rider form across every world, who had never carried any of them — looking at someone who had genuinely inhabited one.
They held the W forms for longer than the others.
Then Tsukasa said: "Ten?"
"Eleven?"
"Eleven," Tsukasa agreed.
They reached for—
The beam came from outside.
It came through what had been a wall, or rather through the space a wall had formerly occupied, and it landed between them with the precision of something aimed rather than incidental. The light it produced was not weapon-fire. It was directional, purposeful, the kind of thing that was meant to interrupt rather than destroy.
Both transformations dropped automatically at the impact.
Ethan and Tsukasa stood in the facility, de-transformed, looking at the hole in the wall and the sky beyond it.
Tony looked at his suit readouts, then at the hole, then back at his readouts.
"That's from outside," he said. "That's from — that's from the direction of the hammer."
Ethan turned.
Through the gap in the wall, in the distance, the unmistakable silhouette of Mjolnir was visible against the New Mexico sky.
It was glowing.
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