Chapter 180: A Demonstration of Biotech Tony Won't Forget
Up until now, every Iron Man suit had relied entirely on physical armor for defense. An energy shielding system was new territory. This was Tony's first attempt at it.
Which was why he needed the right test subject.
The Astartes, performing at the level they performed, seemed like the obvious answer.
He was practically vibrating with the readiness to see his own work in action.
Matthew glanced at the Titan sitting across the testing ground and offered a preliminary disclaimer before things started. "Just so we're clear: if the test breaks your fancy little invention, you're not going to hold that against me?"
Tony, hovering at light altitude in the white nanometal suit, spread his hands and smiled. "Of course not."
"Between the two of us it's always been friendship first, competition second."
"Besides, technology needs to be pushed to find its limits. You can't improve something until you know where it fails."
"Isn't that right?" He looked at Matthew with the easy confidence of someone who had already decided this was going to go well.
The Titan's baseline specifications had been set to match Astartes-level performance, then deliberately exceeded in most categories. Tony was not lacking confidence going into this.
He had peaked at wanting to start immediately.
Matthew had nothing more to add. He cleared his throat.
Then, as a ripple moved outward through the air around the test arena, the ultimate Nemesis materialized from nothing.
Biological stealth. Standing where it had always been standing.
Tony's eyebrow went up.
It had been there the entire time. He hadn't detected it once.
He filed that immediately. "JARVIS. Thermal imaging stays on from now on. No exceptions unless I specifically authorize it. I don't want invisible-capable targets getting that close again."
"Understood, sir."
For the actual test, both of them relocated to a monitoring room that had been set up in advance, separate from the arena. Keeping observers out of a fight that was about to produce a lot of shrapnel was simply common sense.
The room had a 100-inch screen covering one wall, positioned for the best possible angle on the arena below. Two leather armchairs facing it. A side table between them with some fruit and an open bottle of red wine.
They sat.
Tony poured himself a glass and looked at the screen. "I don't know if you've updated your Astartes specs recently, but I'm still putting my money on the Titan."
"Stakes being... how does the GTR from my garage sound?"
"I'll take the Titan winning too, then."
Tony stared at him. "..."
"That's not how betting works. You have to bet on your side. Otherwise you'll just tell your Astartes to lose so you can collect on both ends."
"Fine." Matthew shrugged. "Though I should mention he's not an Astartes."
"He's not? Then what..."
"It's the Nemesis. The one from Afghanistan. The one that pulled you out of that situation."
"He's been through several upgrades since then. His performance across the board is well above a production Astartes."
After the Battle of New York, with the Ancient One's warnings about future threats still sitting in his mind, Matthew had started what he thought of as a new arms race.
The first item on the list had been upgrading the ultimate Nemesis: fusing in the Extremis Virus and a targeted application from the E-Type Mold's properties.
The Extremis Virus gave Nemesis accelerated regeneration and the ability to generate extreme sustained heat.
The E-Type Mold's contribution was raw physical output — stronger, faster.
Both together pushed Nemesis's combat ceiling up another tier.
Tony absorbed this information without visible reaction. He'd already placed his bet.
Two men settled into their armchairs and watched the screen like punters at a race.
The test arena.
Tony hit the remote activation from the monitoring room.
The Titan came out of standby immediately, red optic sensors firing to full brightness, locking on to Nemesis across 1,000 meters of open floor in the same instant.
The oversized grenade launcher, which had been resting at the Titan's side, rose and leveled.
No pause. Target locked, trigger down.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The enhanced launcher put out nearly a hundred rounds in the space of a single second, each one leaving the barrel with the sustained cadence of a rotary cannon.
Against a standard Astartes unit, that volume of fire at that yield might genuinely have been a problem.
Against this Nemesis, it was an opening act.
Nemesis was Umbrella's most continually upgraded B.O.W. Of everything in Umbrella's current arsenal, excluding Matthew himself, Nemesis was the apex. Hunk, Leon, Wesker: none of them were in the same category.
The symbiote armor responded to the incoming rounds before they arrived.
Iron-grey living plating flowed up and over the frame, and in the same motion, hundreds of symbiote filaments built a three-meter shield directly in front of the body. Thirty centimeters of dense, reactive material.
Single arm on the shield. The other summoned a three-meter combat blade from the same symbiote mass.
Nemesis walked forward into the fire.
Grenade rounds hit the shield like a sustained downpour, each impact churning up scorched craters in the floor and sending shrapnel in all directions. Each one carried enough force to flip a main battle tank.
The pace didn't change.
Iron-grey boots on the arena floor, each step leaving a web of cracks in the reinforced concrete. Thirty centimeters of shield angled forward. The walk of something that had decided the fire was not a reason to stop.
The symbiote plating cracked under hits and sealed again in the same second.
1,000 meters. 900. 700. 500.
The Titan's red optics flickered.
Tony's onboard tactical system completed its threat assessment in a fraction of a second and output a recommended approach.
Simple. Stay mobile. Create distance. Don't let it close.
No hesitation. The Titan's thruster array fired.
Blue flame erupted from the exhaust ports with a low sustained roar. Dozens of tons of armored machine reversed at speed, pulling away from the incoming Nemesis while the floor beneath it fractured under the recoil.
The grenade launcher didn't stop. It kept firing on the move, each round laid precisely in front of Nemesis's path rather than on its current position.
The Titan's tactical AI predicted forward.
Nemesis's next move was the thing that made the tactical system pause.
It stopped.
Hard stop. Iron-grey boots drove into the floor.
Then, using the momentum of the charge, Nemesis torqued its body at the waist.
And threw the shield.
The release produced a sonic boom that rattled the test facility.
The shield crossed the distance at beyond-sound velocity. As it traveled, it changed. The symbiote mass moved through itself like mercury, centrifugal force drawing the edges thinner and thinner, until what had been thirty centimeters of dense plating became a three-meter circular blade with edges stretched to the thinness of a razor. The teeth at the rim shrieked at a frequency that made the air visibly white along its path.
Aimed at the Titan's waist. The junction between the upper and lower armor sections: the weakest point in any bipedal mech.
The Titan didn't dodge.
It caught it.
Right arm up, four fingers spread.
The palm of that hand was sub-Adamantium alloy. One of the few materials in existence that came close to Vibranium's hardness. Tony had also specified that the grip force be sufficient to compress diamond.
Astartes could tear tank armor with their hands. For the Titan to hold its own in close-quarters combat, it needed more output than that.
The saw-blade connected with the palm at full velocity.
A screech of metal on metal, an order of magnitude louder than anything a construction site produces, filled the arena along with a spray of sparks.
The blade spun in the palm. Tried to cut through. The sub-Adamantium held.
When the blade stopped spinning, the palm had a one-centimeter cut in it.
The Titan's optics flashed red. A tactical instruction generated.
Wrist rotation. Throw it back.
As the targeting began to acquire, something broke the air directly above its head without any warning.
A black shape dropping from height. Straight down. Fast.
Nemesis had jumped the instant the shield left its hand.
The explosion of the grenade rounds had thrown up enough dust and debris to give the biological stealth a window to re-engage. Nemesis had gone straight up, nearly forty meters, at a near-vertical angle, then used the symbiote to form wings and adjusted angle at the apex.
Then it came down.
Tons of mass plus gravity plus a full-commitment downward strike, the blade tip moving without sound until the last moment, directly at the Titan's head.
If it connected flush, the Titan would be skewered from crown to base, straight through.
The energy shield activated.
A pale blue hexagonal energy barrier expanded across the Titan's upper frame in the instant before impact.
The blade hit.
The deflection was complete: the downward force redirected sideways on contact, like a foot sliding on a wet surface. The energy field absorbed none of the kinetic force, but it changed the angle entirely.
The impact still transmitted. The Titan went backward, the stabilization system working hard to correct the landing angle before it hit the floor.
The blade was in the ground.
Nemesis landed.
In the same motion, the symbiote blade dissolved out of the ground and reformed in the other hand as a square-headed war hammer.
Full swing at the energy shield.
The Titan staggered sideways but held its footing. It came back to balance and brought the grenade launcher up into direct contact with Nemesis's faceplate.
No range. No targeting required. The muzzle was already there.
The trigger pulled.
The round detonated at point-blank range.
Fire across the entire face. Shrapnel in every direction. The head of the Nemesis expanded under the pressure of the blast and came apart.
The smoke was still moving when the Titan's optics registered something wrong in what the image was showing.
At the torn edge of Nemesis's neck stump: no fractured bone. No severed muscle fiber. No blood.
Only iron-grey symbiote.
Moving. Slowly, like stirred sludge. Tendrils at the rim of the cut floated and coiled, the way grey worms look when their structure is disturbed.
Empty.
The symbiote armor was empty.
The tactical AI completed its inference in the time it took to process the visual.
At the moment the muzzle made contact with the head, the occupant had already vacated. What had taken the shot was a remote-operated shell, running on symbiote control alone.
It had been a trap. Set specifically for this.
The Titan registered the realization and moved to activate its shield.
A blade made of flesh, running at extreme heat, came through its back before the shield came up. It went straight through and lifted the Titan into the air.
The missile bays opened. Last resort. Targeting began.
The blade applied heat and force in the same motion and cut the mech in half lengthwise.
The Titan lost power before the missiles locked. It came down like something that had had its strings cut.
The symbiote armor returned to the Nemesis frame.
Nemesis looked up at the camera mounted in the ceiling and stated, without any inflection: "Test complete. Target is fully incapacitated."
In the monitoring room.
The screen held the image of the Nemesis standing in the wreckage.
Tony Stark was still holding his glass of wine. He had not touched it since the fight started. He had, in fact, forgotten that he was holding it. His eyes had not moved from the screen.
From the opening charge under sustained fire, to the shield throw becoming a saw-blade, to the vertical drop from forty meters, to the last reversal that had put his blood pressure somewhere he wasn't comfortable with — all of it had come without warning, each piece of it connected cleanly to the one before.
Tactical deception. Biological stealth. Extremis heat generation. Symbiote remote control.
Four separate capabilities, used in the same fight, transitions between them seamless, every stage producing a result he hadn't seen coming.
He took a slow breath and set the wine glass down.
"I should have taken your bet," he said, somewhere between a joke and an admission. "Put my money on the Nemesis."
He stood.
"Looks like compared to your Nemesis, my marvelous little toy still has a few things that need work."
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