Chapter 199: An Avengers Meeting in the Works
In the end, Nick Fury never did find out exactly what yield that warhead had been.
What he did know was that Matthew Lawrence had walked away from a direct nuclear strike without a scratch, and every worst-case scenario he'd been running in his head had turned out to be nothing.
That said...
He needed to think carefully about what Matthew's existence actually meant for the world and for humanity.
One person who could take a nuclear warhead to the face with his bare body was frightening enough on its own. The fact that this same person also commanded an extraordinarily powerful legion and ran one of the largest corporations on the planet made the picture considerably more complicated.
An entity of that magnitude, if it ever decided to stand against the world one day...
Of course, that was still hypothetical.
But thinking ahead was not optional when the stakes were this high. It was the only responsible thing to do.
Fury's eye moved with the quiet weight of that thought.
Here's hoping Matthew Lawrence's ambitions don't grow to match his power. Because if they do, the story of the young man who set out to slay the dragon and became one himself stops being hypothetical very quickly.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world.
Tony was still burning toward Eastern Europe at five times the speed of sound when the mushroom cloud filled his display.
He watched it climb into the sky and gradually let his speed fall off.
"Sir," JARVIS said. "Based on the cloud formation and the radius of the shockwave impact area, the yield of the warhead appears to be in the megaton range."
"At that yield... even accounting for Mr. Lawrence's physical modifications..."
JARVIS didn't finish the sentence.
Tony was smart enough that he didn't need it finished.
He stared at the roiling column of smoke and fire on the display, at the blinding light that was only now beginning to fade at its edges. For a while he said nothing.
About half a minute passed.
Then Tony let out a single, very emphatic profanity.
"JARVIS. The last time I ran a simulation on the symbiote armor, the result was that it could hold up in a nuclear blast environment for thirty minutes without taking any radiation damage. Is that still accurate?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good."
He stopped hanging in the air and threw himself forward again, a streak of white nanometal accelerating back toward Eastern Europe.
Then, just as the fading edge of the mushroom cloud came into view and he was about to dive straight into it, something unexpected appeared in his display.
A message.
[Sender — Matthew Lawrence: Tony, I got JARVIS's notification. Don't worry. I'm fine.]
Tony Stark's forward momentum came to a complete stop the moment that message registered.
"...JARVIS. Get Matthew on a video call."
"Of course, sir."
A few seconds later, Matthew's face appeared on the display.
He was standing in what had been a city. He was dressed neatly. There was no visible damage on him.
Tony let out a long, slow breath. The thing sitting in his chest finally settled.
"How is there that much static in your feed?" Tony said, studying the flickering interference on the image.
"Oh, that." Matthew glanced around without much interest and waved a hand. "Radiation. It's nothing."
"Radiation." Tony's brain produced a row of question marks, and then the question marks became something else entirely. "...Matthew. Don't tell me the reason your feed has that much radiation interference is because you are currently standing at ground zero."
Matthew nodded, completely unguarded about it. "That's exactly where I am, yes."
Tony drew in a slow, controlled breath.
"So what you're telling me is that you just personally experienced a close-range nuclear detonation."
"More precisely — I took the full force of it. Directly."
A faint smile crossed Matthew's face. "Honestly, this is the first time I've ever been this close to a nuclear detonation and actually lived through it."
"...I'd say 'lived through it' is an understatement."
"You look like you don't have a scratch on you." Tony shook his head.
He was starting to understand what it felt like to be left behind by the rest of the human race.
In the beginning, Tony had set his benchmark against the first Nemesis — that thing in the cave had made an impression that stayed with him. Then his benchmark shifted to the Astartes. And now...
Through the display, Tony looked at a man who had just walked out of a megaton nuclear blast intact, and quietly began to wonder whether the technology-advancement route was already obsolete by comparison.
He'd pushed as hard as he could, and what he had to show for it was an armor that could fly at five times the speed of sound, carry an energy shield, and take a missile hit without damage.
Matthew had just absorbed a megaton nuclear warhead.
"Well." Tony collected himself and went for dry instead of defeated. "At the rate you're going, Matthew, I'm going to lose sight of your back inside of a year."
Matthew shrugged. "It's still not enough."
"There are threats moving closer that most people haven't noticed yet. If I can't keep getting stronger, I can't guarantee humanity makes it through what's coming. Not even close."
Tony heard something between the lines in that.
"What do you mean?"
"What I mean is — a new storm is already forming, and standing still isn't an option."
"So push the tech tree as hard as you can. Because if humanity hasn't caught up by the time the next crisis hits, there won't be anything left to fight back with."
Then, without a pause, Matthew shifted gears. "Anyway, Tony. Fury's job is wrapped up, but I've got a few things to handle on this end. I'll be back in New York before long. We can talk properly then."
"Take care."
The call ended.
Up in the clouds, Tony turned Matthew's last few sentences over in his head, running them the way he ran engineering problems — systematically, until they gave something up.
He was smart enough to know when someone was telling him something without quite saying it.
"Does Matthew know something? Something about what's coming?"
He turned the idea over for a moment and concluded: yes. That was exactly it.
Matthew knew something. And that had been his way of saying so.
Tony thought for a moment, then spoke. "JARVIS. Contact Nick Fury. Notify all Avengers except Matthew — I want everyone assembled. There's something I need to work through with them."
If Matthew was saying a bigger crisis was on its way, then the time to prepare was now, not when it arrived.
The plan forming in Tony's head wasn't regional. It wasn't a localized defense measure.
It was a global one.
And something that scale couldn't be decided alone. It needed Fury, it needed the team, it needed the kind of conversation that happened face to face.
JARVIS relayed the message without comment.
A moment later, a notification chimed.
[Nick Fury: Tony, if it works for everyone, how does 2 PM sound? It's lunchtime right now and if you're all coming over I'm going to have to order more pizza.]
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