The Mark VII's chest beam fired.
A thick column of orange-gold light erupted from Tony's torso and hit Obadiah square in the chest at point-blank range. The Iron Monger flew backward through two walls and disappeared into a cloud of dust and falling debris.
Tony hovered in the corridor, smoke rising from the chest housing. The Mark VII was a different machine from the Mark V. Independent power supply, heavier plating, full weapons suite, flight capability that actually deserved the name. The suit had its own reactor. Tony's arc reactor only kicked in as a backup when the suit's energy was depleted.
A lesson learned from the first Iron Monger fight. The hard way.
Tony turned to Abel. Through the helmet's HUD, he assessed the hooded figure standing in the wreckage with a wooden stick and absolutely zero apparent concern for the seven-hundred-pound armored maniac they were fighting.
"Abel. How's the situation?"
"Don't get cocky." Abel's voice was flat, focused. "Something's off. Obadiah had you pinned and didn't finish you. He's been fighting like a man who's putting on a show, not a man trying to kill."
Tony paused. "You think he's holding back?"
"I think he didn't plan to kill us tonight. He's here for something else. The attack is real, the hatred is real, but the intent isn't lethal. Not yet."
"Doesn't matter. We take him down or lock him up again, problem solved."
Abel considered that for half a second. "Fair enough. Go. I'll support from range."
"Music to my ears." Tony's faceplate snapped shut. His repulsors flared. "I charge, you back me up. Try to keep up, kid."
He shot forward.
Puts on a real suit and immediately thinks he's invincible. Classic Tony.
Abel cast a levitation charm on himself and followed, rising off the ground and drifting after the two armored figures at a safe distance. He considered using Caecus to go invisible, but discarded the idea immediately. Both suits had thermal imaging as standard. Invisibility was useless against infrared.
The fight moved through the mansion like a wrecking ball through a china shop.
Tony was faster, more agile, darting around Obadiah with the fluid grace of someone who'd spent hundreds of hours in flight simulators and live combat. His repulsor blasts hammered the Iron Monger from every angle, probing for weak points, testing the armor's limits.
The problem was, there weren't many weak points.
Obadiah's armor was absurdly thick. Tony's repulsor shots scorched the surface, left marks, but didn't penetrate. Even the chest beam, the Mark VII's most powerful weapon, had only pushed Obadiah back. Not through. Not past the plating.
Obadiah swatted Tony out of the air with a backhand that sent him spinning. Tony caught himself mid-tumble, hands and feet firing in concert, stabilizing in a burst of controlled thrust.
"Tony, your armor is impressive technology," Obadiah said, his voice carrying the lazy confidence of a man who knew he was winning the attrition game. "But technology that can't translate into combat power is just a costume. You wasted your genius making it pretty instead of making it dangerous."
All six of Obadiah's thrusters ignited at once. The Iron Monger launched forward like a freight car off its rails and slammed into Tony before he could fully dodge. The two armored figures locked together, grappling in midair, crashing through what remained of the second floor in a shower of glass and steel.
Abel deflected a chunk of concrete with a flick of his wand and made his decision.
Tony can survive being buried. Obadiah can survive being buried. But one of them I can pull out, and the other I can trap.
Abel floated out through the nearest hole in the wall, touched down on the cliffside lawn, and turned to face the mansion. What was left of it. Half the structure was on fire. The other half was structurally compromised, walls cracked, supports buckled, the whole thing swaying like a drunk at closing time.
He raised his wand high and began casting.
Not a single spell. A sequence. Dozens of targeted Reductor curses, each one striking a load-bearing column, a foundation support, a structural joint. The wand moved in precise, surgical strokes, white light erupting from the tip in rapid bursts.
"Reducto. Reducto. Reducto."
The mansion groaned. The sound started low, a deep structural complaint, then built into something vast and terrible. Metal screamed. Concrete fractured. Glass shattered in cascading waves.
The entire villa collapsed.
Not gradually. Not in sections. The whole structure came down at once, floors pancaking onto each other, the weight of the upper stories driving everything into the ground in a thundering avalanche of debris. Dust billowed outward in a wall, engulfing the lawn, the driveway, the cliff edge.
Abel was already moving.
His left hand rose, Sling Ring sparking. He drew a circle and the portal opened directly into the collapsing interior, right where his magical awareness could feel Tony's armored form dodging falling debris. Abel pointed his wand through the portal.
"Wingardium Leviosa!"
Tony flew out of the portal like a cannonball, tumbling across the lawn, his armor dented and dusty but intact. The portal stayed open for one more second.
Through it, Abel saw Obadiah. The Iron Monger was lunging for the portal, one massive armored hand reaching through the opening, trying to follow Tony out before the building came down on top of him.
Abel closed the portal.
The golden ring of sparks contracted and snapped shut. The edge of the closing portal passed through the Iron Monger's right wrist.
The hand fell to the ground at Abel's feet with a heavy metallic clang. Clean cut. The portal's edge had sheared through the armor plating like it wasn't there. Inside the severed gauntlet, wires sparked and hydraulic fluid leaked in thin streams.
No blood. Obadiah's actual arm hadn't been long enough to reach through. The cut had taken only the armor's hand, not the flesh inside.
Close. An inch deeper and I'd have taken his real hand. Would have been cleaner that way.
Behind the closed portal, the mansion finished collapsing. The roar of it shook the cliff, sent tremors through the ground. Then silence. Just the sound of settling debris and the distant crash of waves.
Tony picked himself up and walked to Abel's side, the Mark VII's systems running diagnostics. "Did you just collapse my entire house on purpose?"
"Yes."
"My twelve-million-dollar Malibu mansion."
"The one that was already on fire and structurally compromised beyond repair? Yes."
Tony stared at the ruins for a long moment. "Fair point."
"A collapsed building won't hold him long," Abel said. "His thrusters can push through rubble. We have maybe thirty seconds before—"
The rubble exploded upward.
Obadiah erupted from the wreckage and hung in the air, thrusters screaming at full burn. His right arm ended in a sparking stump where the hand had been. His armor was battered, dented, scraped raw in a dozen places. But he was flying. He was functional. And he was furious.
Then, from the ocean, four shapes approached at high speed.
Robot soldiers. Bulky, angular, vaguely humanoid, moving in tight formation across the water's surface on thruster jets. They reached the shore in seconds and landed on the cliff edge, weapons already tracking.
Obadiah laughed. The sound was raw and ugly.
"Tony. And the mysterious sorcerer." His voice crackled through damaged speakers. "You're lucky tonight. Both of you. Next time, I won't be holding back. Next time, I wipe you off the map completely."
He turned and accelerated away, climbing into the night sky, his six thrusters painting a trail of fire against the stars. In seconds, he was a shrinking point of light. Then nothing.
Tony's repulsors were already charging. "I can catch him. The Mark VII is faster than—"
A scream.
Pepper's voice, sharp with terror, coming from behind the garden wall where Abel had told her to hide. One of the robot soldiers had found her.
Tony didn't hesitate. He didn't finish his sentence, didn't weigh options, didn't calculate. He just turned and flew, full thrust, straight toward Pepper's voice. The repulsor blast that destroyed the robot soldier was almost an afterthought, a golden beam that punched through the machine's torso and sent it crashing into the cliff face in a shower of sparks and shrapnel.
Tony landed beside Pepper, his faceplate retracting. "Are you okay? Are you hurt?"
Abel watched them for a fraction of a second. Then he turned to face the remaining three robot soldiers, which had adjusted their targeting from Tony to him.
Three machines. Armed. Locked on.
Abel raised his wand.
The first two he dealt with simultaneously. A flick of the wrist sent them careening into each other with the force of a head-on collision, metal crushing metal, limbs tangling. Before they could separate, Abel drew a sharp line through the air.
"Bombarda."
Not Maxima. Just Bombarda. A controlled detonation, precise, economical. The red light hit the tangled wreckage and blew it apart. Components scattered across the lawn like metallic confetti.
The third robot had used the distraction to close the distance. It was five meters away, weapon arm raised, targeting laser painting Abel's chest.
Abel looked at it.
"Diffindo."
The blue-white light carved through the robot's midsection diagonally, shoulder to hip. The cut was clean. The two halves separated, slid apart, and fell to the ground in opposite directions. Sparks fountained from severed wiring. The targeting laser blinked once and died.
Silence.
Abel lowered his wand. Three robots, destroyed in under ten seconds. He wasn't even breathing hard.
Tony, still kneeling beside Pepper, had watched the entire thing through his HUD's rear-facing camera. His expression, behind the faceplate, was somewhere between impressed and mildly terrified.
Abel walked toward them across the debris-strewn lawn. The ocean wind pulled at his hood, carrying the smell of salt and smoke and burning electronics.
"Obadiah's gone," he said. "He'll be back. And next time, he won't come alone."
Tony stood, one arm around Pepper, who was shaking but unhurt. "Next time, I'll be ready."
Abel looked at the ruins of the mansion, at the severed Iron Monger hand still lying on the grass, at the scattered remains of the robot soldiers. Then he looked at Tony.
"We need to talk. About Obadiah's backer, about who built him that reactor, and about how he knew exactly when and where to hit you." He paused. "But not tonight. Tonight, get Pepper somewhere safe. I'll be in touch."
Tony nodded. For once, he didn't make a joke.
Abel opened a portal and stepped through. The sparks folded in on themselves and vanished, leaving nothing but the sound of the sea and the crackle of burning wreckage.
END CHAPTER 42