Free Web NovelChapter 60: Chapter 60 - One More Rescue
Vanko’s helmet split open with a hiss, and the smug bastard looked from Tony to Lucius as though he had rehearsed the moment in his head often enough to trust it.
"Good to be back."
Lucius glanced sideways at Tony.
"Did you have a secret affair after I left Monaco?"
Tony, already irritated by the direction of the joke, gave him a flat headshake.
Vanko answered for him in that heavy accent of his.
"He came to my cell after. Lovely time."
Tony’s patience finally snapped.
"Enough with the underhanded jokes, gentlemen."
He rose a little higher in the air on the suit’s repulsors, as though elevation alone might improve the company.
Lucius turned back to Vanko.
"Do you remember how I beat you in a heartbeat back at Monaco?"
Vanko gave a rough scoff.
"That was then. I am prepared this time." He touched the chest of his new armour with open pride. "Two cores. Your powers are useless."
Lucius tilted his head.
That answer interested him for all of one second.
Then he smiled.
"You know, I have an idea."
He froze Vanko in place before the man could even tighten a finger. One moment the Russian was talking, and the next he was standing helpless inside his new suit like a man trapped in his own arrogance.
At the same time, Lucius let illusions spread for the rest of the world to witness.
To the cameras, the crowd, the reporters, and everyone else enjoying the public version of events, Tony and Lucius surged forward into a proper beating. Iron Man landed a clean hit to the chest. Lucius ripped through the suit with some invisible force. Vanko staggered under a rain of heroic punishment that the world was perfectly happy to watch.
The illusion did not stop at one exchange either. Tony seemed to drive Vanko back across the sky with a hard sequence of repulsor bursts that flashed against the armour in bright, punishing bursts, while Lucius hung off the right flank and tore at the heavier plating with telekinetic impacts that looked almost surgical from a distance. Every time Vanko tried to recover, the public version of the fight punished him again. A knee from Iron Man. A twisting drag from Lucius that yanked the suit off line. Another burst to the chest. Another invisible blow to the face. The camera feeds loved it as it looked clean, decisive, and satisfyingly cruel to the correct target.
Down below, the crowd gave the illusion exactly what it wanted. People shouted every time Vanko reeled backwards. Reporters started talking over one another as if they were calling a prize fight. On several screens, Lucius looked like the calm executioner while Tony played the furious hammer, and together they sold the story of two famous men beating the shite out of a bad man in bad armour over a famous New York crowd. It was simple enough for the public to follow and violent enough for them to cheer, which made it almost perfect.
-
In reality, none of that happened.
Lucius floated over, took Tony with him in a lazy telekinetic tug, and brought them both in close beside the immobilised armour.
"Stay still," he told Vanko. "You’re being inspected."
Tony landed next to the man and immediately started studying the cores with the offended focus only a genius could manage.
He had checked the reactor output in Monaco. That first improvised reactor had pushed around 1.8 gigajoules. This one was different. Vanko had learned from the Mark II Rhodes stolen and handed over to Hammer, which was irritating in principle.
Tony ran the numbers through the suit sensors and felt his expression tighten inside the helmet.
"Five gigajoules."
Lucius glanced over. Tony did not miss the opening.
"At least you were able to learn from your betters," he told Vanko, and the jab landed exactly where it was meant to.
Vanko’s face darkened with a frustration so raw it almost stopped being funny.
Not only was he frozen in place by the same damn mutant, not only had the doubled cores and higher output failed to matter, but now Tony Stark and the bastard were standing beside him like mechanics leaning over a customer’s faulty car. His life’s work had become an object lesson, and he was the only person in the scene not allowed to move.
Lucius looked over the armour with clinical disgust.
"You really did take Hammer’s aesthetic into account. That was your first mistake."
Tony traced the core housing with the suit’s readouts.
"No, his first mistake was thinking that more power and more ugliness could cover the engineering. The wiring is cleaner than Monaco, though. I’ll give you that. The rest still looks like a nervous breakdown in metal."
Vanko tried to force his arm to move. Nothing happened.
Lucius saw it and smiled.
"Careful. Struggling only makes you look provincial."
Tony finished the scan and straightened.
"Two cores. Better output. Better stability than the first one. Still not enough to matter if somebody smarter gets hold of you."
Lucius turned to him.
"The show is coming to an end, Iron Boy."
Tony looked offended at once.
"Man," he corrected. "The most manly man of all men in the history of geniuses."
Lucius did not even grant him a glance.
"Yes, yes. Whatever keeps your blood pumping, Playboy."
His attention stayed on Vanko.
For the first time since they had frozen him, the amusement in Lucius’s face flattened into something colder and more deliberate.
"Tell me, Ivan Antonovich Vanko." He said the full name with surprising care. "Would you like to be part of something larger than petty revenge? A bigger continuity of science, perhaps. A better role than dressing like a fetish electrician and trying to whip a billionaire to death in public."
Vanko stared at him.
He was not stupid. Quite the opposite. He understood exactly what his position was. There were moments in life when pride mattered, and moments when survival needed to do the talking. This was very clearly the second kind.
If there was a path through this that left him alive, he would take it and postpone the revenge until a more practical date.
So he nodded.
Lucius’s smile returned at once.
"Lovely."
He turned to Tony.
"I’m going to create an explosion and see you later."
Tony frowned.
"What?"
Lucius did not bother answering aloud. One of the two cores tore free from Vanko’s armour under telekinetic force, and the instant it came loose, Lucius destabilised it just enough to make the whole thing worth believing.
The blast punched out hard.
Tony went flying backwards under the shockwave, the telekinetic shield taking the worst of it before dispersing. To the rest of the world, it looked exactly like Vanko had tried one final desperate move. Iron Man was hurled clear. Lucius was lost in the blast, and the villain seemed to explode into nothing. The heroic illusion around the rest of the fight was already doing the rest of the work.
By the time the smoke folded in on itself, Lucius and Vanko were gone.
A moment later, Tony heard Lucius’s voice directly in his head.
Tell them he detonated himself when he realised there was no way out. That covers the explosion. The illusion did the rest. I’ve saved you again, and you’re welcome.
Tony righted himself in the air, stared into the wrecked space where Vanko was supposed to be dead, and felt a mix of irritation and unwilling admiration he had grown disturbingly used to around that bastard.
Below, the crowd and cameras already believed what they had been given.
That was the problem with Lucius. He never just solved a problem. He made sure the solution came with public theatre, private leverage, and a smug aftertaste.
-- ƒreewebɳovel.com
Ivan Vanko opened his eyes to a cold breeze.
He was lying on the ground with snow under his back, pine above him, and a wind sharp enough to make his skin understand immediately that he was nowhere near the Expo anymore.
For one disorienting second, he could not process the shape of it. Dark tree line. White ground. Needle scent. A strip of sky between branches. Then his body tried to move and discovered the telekinetic hold still wrapped around him so tightly that even breathing felt supervised.
His armour was gone.
Every piece of it.
That realisation hit next. There was no suit with double cores, no weapon system, and none of his beloved whips. Just his own clothes, the snow, and the knowledge that whatever the mutant wanted, he wanted it badly enough to extract him from the centre of a public battle rather than kill him there.
Vanko turned his eyes and found him a few feet away.
The freak was smiling. freewebnσvel.cøm
Worse, he was waving.
Around them, the forest stretched dark and still beneath the night sky. Pines dominated the ridges and slopes, exactly the sort of harsh northern growth Vanko would have expected in a place like this. Which made the palm trees visible farther off all the more absurd. They stood there among the snow like a joke told by a lunatic with power.
Vanko looked from the palms back to Lucius and decided, with growing certainty, that he had just been kidnapped by a madman who preferred his threats landscaped.
Lucius crouched a little so their eyes met more evenly.
Then he whispered a single word.
"Sacrifice."
