guys, updates are slow cuz we caught up with the official release, and theres only 1 update a day
Chapter 179: Tony's New Toy
With the Apocalypse investigation assigned, Ada and Eleanor conferred briefly and settled on a division of labor: Eleanor would handle the field work. Ada would stay behind.
Which is to say: Ada would manage the company.
Ada's feelings about this were not ambiguous.
A quiet life was something she'd once wanted badly. Administrative work was not included in that vision. She had never enjoyed desk duties. Given the choice between sitting in the office processing data reports and going out on actual fieldwork, the answer was not complicated.
Unfortunately, she lost the negotiation to Eleanor and found herself holding the short end of it.
She accepted the half-finished paperwork Eleanor handed over, took a long breath, and looked at Matthew.
"Mr. Lawrence. I'd like to formally request that we rehire Jessica — the one who has now been kidnapped twice. I need someone to take some of this off my plate."
"Between managing everything Umbrella-related and whatever Doudou can handle, I'm still going to need another person in the mix."
Matthew considered this for a moment. "And if I say no?"
"Then I'll ask again, but more persuasively." Ada smiled in a way that made the meaning of that entirely clear.
He looked at her expression and decided he had no interest in finding out what "more persuasively" involved.
"Fine. You can bring Jessica back. On one condition: she doesn't get kidnapped again."
"Understood." Ada was already moving. "I'll handle the transport personally this time. Mission guaranteed."
She walked out.
The moment the door closed, Matthew reached for the chip bag Ada had left on the desk.
His phone went off before he could open it.
He looked at the screen.
Tony Stark.
"What does he want."
He answered anyway.
Tony's voice came through with the particular energy of someone who had been waiting longer than they were prepared to wait.
"Hey! Matthew!"
"I seem to recall that before the whole New York situation, we had an arrangement. You were going to come test my new invention. That was some time ago. I haven't heard from you. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with that."
"Do I actually have to come pick you up?"
Matthew clapped a hand to his forehead.
Right. He had completely forgotten about that.
They'd made the arrangement on the Helicarrier before the battle. Since then he'd been entirely focused on the System point situation, and the promise had simply fallen out of his mind.
"My apologies. I got busy and it slipped."
"Do you want me to come now?"
"Obviously," Tony said immediately.
He did add one thing before hanging up: "Matthew, what I'm bringing out is not a toy. If you're planning to send an Astartes for the test, bring the most current version. Anything older probably won't hold up."
An Astartes that might not hold up.
That was enough to make Matthew genuinely curious.
He said he'd be there shortly and ended the call.
He also decided not to use an Astartes after all. The test sounded like a better fit for the ultimate Nemesis.
Stark Industrial Park.
The same testing ground from before, though it had been expanded and the floor reinforced since then, because the previous version hadn't been built to absorb the kind of punishment a real stress-test produced, and it had shown.
Matthew stood in the center of the facility and looked toward the far end, where Tony was in a white suit of armor attending to something large that was still being assembled, reactors being loaded, outer plating going on.
The white armor.
Matthew looked at it and found himself thinking of a particular parallel timeline he was aware of: one where an Iron Man in white armor had become something considerably less heroic.
Was Tony going in that direction?
He was mid-thought when Tony finished what he was doing, detached from the assembly, and descended to ground level.
He spotted Matthew and turned with the particular kind of confidence that people who know they're impressive deploy when they want to confirm it.
"OI. Matthew."
He spread his arms and let the suit speak for itself. "Well? How does it look?"
Matthew didn't immediately respond, which Tony took as an invitation to continue.
"New color scheme. Full equipment refresh. And a completely new deployment system."
"It borrows from how symbiotes work. The nanometal stores inside the bone structure and under the skin. When you need it, you're in the suit in under a second."
"Getting caught off-guard is officially no longer a problem for me."
That was a direct reference to Obadiah — twice — and to Loki's surprise appearance on the Helicarrier. Those three incidents had made the case for always-on armor deployment in a way Tony had apparently taken seriously. This was the response.
Though it was also possible, Matthew noted, that having Umbrella's biological engineering operating at the level it was operating had pushed Tony's own competitive instinct and produced the nanometal tech ahead of schedule. It wasn't hard to imagine.
"Nice," Matthew said, scanning the armor. "But I thought there was something else you wanted to test?"
"This isn't it?"
"This is not it." Tony shook his head.
"The suit is a recent project. What I actually want your input on is over there."
He guided the white armor toward the far end of the facility, where something nearly seven meters tall stood under a black covering.
Tony reached up and pulled the cloth off.
What it revealed was a large military-green mech. Nothing like any of Tony's previous armor designs. It had two missile launcher pods mounted at the shoulders and was holding what could only be described as an oversized grenade launcher.
Matthew went quiet.
He recognized it.
Or more precisely: what he was looking at bore a very close resemblance to a mech from a video game he knew.
Titanfall. BT-7274.
Not identical. Tony had made it his own in the details, adding his own touches throughout. But the structural design, the proportions, the general configuration were close enough that there was no question where the starting point was.
After a moment, Matthew looked at Tony.
"Can I ask what led you to this?"
"What was the actual thought process?"
He asked it with complete seriousness.
Tony matched the tone. "Simple. I wanted a mech that was technically solid but also structurally resilient. Something that could take real punishment without falling apart. A few iterations later, it became this."
"As for inspiration..." He paused. "Honestly, your Astartes Legion had something to do with it."
He pointed a finger upward, as though he'd just remembered something. "Oh, and there's one more thing. I put a new technology in it."
He paused for effect.
"Energy shielding."
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