The rain started as a thin, needling mist, just enough to silver the asphalt and set halos around the streetlights. From three blocks out, Hammer Industries' Queens facility looked like any other graveyard shift plant: sodium lamps, a skeleton crew, steam coughing from rooftop vents. Up close—through S.H.I.E.L.D.'s blacked-out optics—it was a hornet's nest. Perimeter cameras rode on rails. Wall turrets slept with their eyes open. Patrol drones prowled in intersecting figure eights, plotting kill cones in the dark.
Inside the command truck, the air smelled like coffee and cordite. Holo-screens painted everyone in cold blue. Fury stood with one hand braced on the console, his voice low and iron-flat.
"Last sweep: patrol timing, interior movement, escape routes."
Agent Sitwell flicked through overlays. "Light drones on rooftops—white and blue, energy forearms, two-second delay on locks. Heavies inside—dark hulls with micro-rocket arrays and rotary cannons. Turrets are linked to a central controller in the east hangar."
"Vankos?" Fury asked.
"They should be in the workshop," Coulson said.
Fury looked around the packed bay: two strike squads in matte charcoal armor—Stark-S.H.I.E.L.D. hybrids—their helmets sealed, jammers slung like compact spines over their shoulders. No capes. No speeches. Just people who planned to live through the next ten minutes.
"Here's the rule," Fury said. "No showboating. We take the father, we take the son, we take the toys, and we take a bow nobody sees. Clear?"
A chorus of calm yes-sirs.
In the back corner, Tony Stark leaned against an equipment rack, the Goliath frame open like a steel chrysalis. Even half-assembled it was imposing: an eight-foot exosuit of reinforced gold-titanium, thicker than anything he wore in public. No airbrushed finish, no vanity panels—just ribbed power conduits under armored ribs, and a chest housing big enough to be called an engine room. Across his forearms, prototype emitter vanes arced faint light: directional EMP, a tight beam jammer, and a whole family of ugly surprises.
"Just for the record," Tony said, conversational as gravity, "this suit was designed to punch above its weight class. Like—Luther, or maybe Hulk. Now we're using it on Russians. I hope they feel honored."
"Save the toasts for later," Fury said. "You're the lead brawler. Teams Alpha and Beta suppress. No collateral."
Tony's visor slid down. The HUD woke: geometry, distances, and the slow heartbeat of the suit thrumming through his bones. He exhaled. "Let's do the responsible thing, then."
***
They went in on the rain and timing.
Two quinjets ghosted to low altitude and killed their lights. Alpha Squad rappelled to the loading dock; Beta took the roof. The jammer nodes on their spines started a soft, subsonic hum that Tony felt in his teeth more than in his ears. It rolled over the facility like fog.
The white-and-blue rooftop scouts were first to bite. Three pivoted to fire—and jittered, optics scrambling, servos stuttering. One stepped off the parapet and toppled to the pavement with a hollow, stupid clang.
"Jammers are sticking," an agent reported, breath steady. "Advancing."
They made it ten meters before the Vankos bit back.
Somewhere deep in the complex, a signal screamed—not refined, not elegant, just sheer amplitude with a boot on its neck. It ran over the strike team's local bubble, clawed into every machine with an ear, and yanked. Half a dozen rooftop drones shook themselves awake and leapt forward like wolves. Below, hangar doors shuddered open, and something huge moved in the dark.
"Contact, contact!" Beta's lead barked. "Engaging!"
The night erupted. Blue-white pulses stitched the roof like sewing needles of light. Stark's Goliath strode from the loading bay in a shimmer of repulsor heat, its gleaming alloys catching the chaos. Each step landed with the weight of a tank as it bulldozed into the hangar—frames looming ahead, broad shoulders bristling, rotary cannons spooling to life.
Stark brought his left arm up and hammered the lead unit's chest. It cartwheeled into a forklift and detonated in a fountain of sparks.
"Fun toys," Tony muttered.
On his HUD, the jammer field's coverage rippled like a bruise. He kicked Goliath into a charging sprint—no finesse, just mass—and shouldered the second heavy into a wall so hard the cinder block cracked like ice.
"Alpha, collapse to me," Stark called. "Beta, keep the roof clean."
"Copy. Rooftop hostilities reduced," Beta answered, with the kind of dispassion that meant everyone was doing their job and nobody had time to be scared.
Inside the workshop, Anton Vanko tightened the neck seal of his armor and felt the weight settle down his spine like a verdict. He wasn't a young man anymore, but he still decided to go into the fight as plates locked over plates; hydraulics sheathed his legs. The chest modules—six compact missile wells and two micro-turbine ram injectors—whined to life. The HUD drew a red circle around the brightest signature outside: Stark.
Ivan stood beside him, a silhouette of ugly intent. His right arm ended in a spindle that bristled into a rotary cannon with the sound of a bone saw. His left unfolded with a metallic hiss and birthed a whip of collared, humming segments. Arc-light danced up the line like midnight lightning.
"Looks like today we are going to get revenge," Anton said simply.
Ivan agreed; as they had all the advantages in numbers and technology, there was no reason to lose.
The blast doors punched outward, and the Vankos stepped through fire like mythology written in grease and wire. Stark also discovered them. He stepped up to meet them, and for a second the battlefield held its breath.
Ivan struck first. The whip flicked and carved a glowing line across Goliath's right pauldron, metal screaming, paint vaporizing. The second strike wrapped Stark's forearm and discharged—his HUD jittered and recovered, dumping power into redundant paths. Tony grabbed the whip, braced, and yanked. Ivan slid three yards, boots grinding furrows in wet asphalt, but planted and refused to fall.
Anton raised his arm and let three micro-rockets leap. Tony flared a shield from the chest projector, took the blast on a gold-white oval of energy, and drove into Anton chest-to-chest. The impact shook them both. Tony's left hand crushed forward and found a joint seam; hydraulics screamed as Goliath forced it open a fraction.
Then ten rooftop drones landed like carrion crows.
"Squad, on me!" Alpha's lead shouted. Four agents pivoted in perfect drill, firing short, disciplined bursts from Stark-built disruptor rifles—coherent arcs tuned to cook targeting processors without blowing torsos through office windows a block away. Two drones dropped. Three more staggered, reacquired, and returned fire. A helmet visor crazed like ice. The agent went to a knee and kept shooting.
"Fury," Coulson said into the command net, calm over hard static, "we're seeing manual overrides. They built a second layer under the net. If we don't break the father-son node, this keeps going."
"Stark?" Fury asked.
"In the middle of that conversation," Tony grunted, as Ivan's whip scored Goliath's thigh plate and made every warning in the suit light up like a Christmas tree. "Tell your people to keep the roof thin. I'm going to pull the plug."
"Define plug."
"Everything," Tony said, and let Anton hammer him backward as he primed the core.
The coil in Goliath's chest woke and made the air feel thick and viscous. HUD warnings stacked into a column: FIELD STRENGTH RISING. COLLATERAL SYSTEMS AT RISK. RECOMMENDED ABORT. Tony ignored them, counted under his breath, and kicked a heavy drone sideways to keep it from eating an agent.
"Alpha, Beta, on my mark: brace and cut your power for one second. That includes your jammers," he said. "Yes, I know what I'm asking. Three… two…"
Anton saw what was coming. He drove forward, missiles cycling, trying to close the distance and physically shield his son. Ivan spun the whip and charged, screaming wordless rage in Russian.
"…one."
Tony hit the world.
The EMP pulse slammed outward, a blue-white ripple racing across concrete and steel. Every light in the block died. Drones froze mid-step, optics fading to black like frightened eyes. Rooftop turrets went slack. The rain fell suddenly, startlingly quiet over the facility, absolute.
The strike team staggered as their own suits hiccupped into dead air for the heartbeat they had agreed to surrender. Then power returned—by design, on hard-wired lines that the pulse couldn't touch. Their visors cleared. Their jammers rebooted. Their boots found grip.
The Vankos were still on their feet.
Anton swayed, HUD bleeding static, servos half-responsive. The missiles in his chest failed safely and locked behind armored doors. Ivan's whip sputtered and died; he shook it, furious, and it twitched like a dead snake.
"Now!" Alpha's lead cried. "Non-electronic restraints!"
They swarmed with the old world.
Magnetic clamps hammered onto armored knees and elbows with brutal, satisfying thunks. Bands hissed around biceps and locked to anchor points with manual ratchets that didn't care about power. A foam charge detonated at Ivan's ankles, expanding into a hardening wedge that pinned his boots together like a welded block.
Ivan roared and tried to bring the cannon up. Tony stepped in, caught the barrel in his left hand, and crashed. Metal screamed; the drum seized.
"Stay down," Tony said, almost conversational. "We are way past your best night."
Anton swung a piston-heavy fist at Goliath's head. Stark took it on his forearm, let the weight slide, and put a repulsor pulse into Anton's chest at point-blank range—low power, calibrated to bruise metal and not people. Anton took a step, found his knee locked by a clamp, and went to the ground with a breathless grunt.
"Targets contained," Beta reported, ''already moving past to clear the vehicle bay. Heavies neutral. Rooftop clean."
"Good," Fury said. "Begin the seizure protocol. I want drives, cores, schematics, and anything that looks like a receipt."
"Sir," Coulson adds, a ghost of dry humor creeping in, "Hammer is trying to leave through the front office with a potted plant and a duffel bag."
"Bring me the plant," Fury said with a joking tone. "The bag can be sold on eBay."
Justin Hammer's arrest was not cinematic. He didn't get a speech or even a camera. Two agents intercepted him in the lobby as he tried to shoulder into the rain, grabbed him by the elbows, and turned him around so fast his loafers squeaked. He started to explain about a misunderstanding, about consultants and NDAs, and about how he was actually the victim here. He got as far as "This is an over—" before the cuffs settled and the recitation of rights began.
He looked very small when they walked him past the shattered shell of a white-and-blue drone and the hulking silhouette of Goliath standing over a crumpled exosuit twice the size of a man.
"Tony," Hammer tried, grasping for a friendly face, "buddy, tell them—"
"Tell them what?" Tony asked, helmet up now, rain streaking his face. "That you can't tell a steering wheel from a circular saw? You outsourced your soul to the lowest bidder, Justin. This is what you bought."
Hammer shut his mouth.
Chain-of-custody ran on paper and padlocks that night. Fury had learned the hard way that some infestations lived in the wires. Drives went into Faraday bags. Cores were capped with physical safety. A dozen evidence crates took numbers and signatures, double-inked on carbon forms. The strike teams ferried secured hardware down the line to waiting vans while the quinjets settled into the street like predatory birds coming home to roost.
Anton and Ivan sat on a steel pallet under quad-LEDs, suits half-peeled back, wrists bound in old-fashioned cuffs that had never once in their lives crashed from a software update. Rain ticked on the pallet like a clock.
Anton lifted his head when Stark approached. His face was gray and old, but his eyes still burned.
"You are just like your father," he said in accented English, voice low and cutting. "Always thinking about how to keep everything for yourself. The world will choose, Stark. And it will choose power… not you."
Tony studied him for a moment. He wanted to come back with something sharp, something that would sting later in a concrete cell. Instead, his reply came out tired but firm.
"The world can choose whatever it wants, but I choose when the civilians aren't in the blast radius."
Tony turned to go.
Ivan spat something in Russian that didn't need translation.
Tony didn't turn back.
***
Above it all, unseen by anyone who didn't know where to look, two tiny shapes watched at the end of the night. A spider-sized scarab clung to a support beam, lenses dilating and contracting with insect patience. Farther out, a coin-thin disc hung in the wet air, its surface shimmering as it bent the light that should have given it away. Both fed their vision into the same encrypted vein and sent the story of the evening to someone who preferred to watch rather than star in mortal dramas.
They recorded the way Goliath stood with rain hissing off the heat of its plates, the quiet, practical efficiency of S.H.I.E.L.D. collecting their due, and the father and son set down among the wreckage of their ambitions. Then their lenses were closed. A small decision somewhere far away cut the feed. The scarab folded into itself and dropped into a gutter. The coin flipped twice in the air and became nothing at all.
The quinjets lifted. The rain slackened. By the time the power company's first truck rolled into the neighborhood to ask why half a block had blinked out, the street had gone back to looking like just another night that didn't make the news.
Fury stood in the open doorway of the command truck, watching the last van door slam. Coulson joined him, hands in his coat pockets, collar up against the cold.
"I have cleaned everything," Coulson said.
"Excellent work as always," Fury praised Coulson's efficiency as he glanced toward Stark, who was rolling his shoulders as the Goliath de-armored itself with hydraulic sighs. "Get the paperwork ugly and the headlines quiet. Hammer goes dark. The Vankos go deeper. And for once, nobody builds a statue."
Coulson nodded. "What about Stark?"
Fury's mouth ticked. "He'll tell himself this was just about tech and theft and Russian pride. Let him. He showed up where it counted. That'll have to be enough."
Tony walked past them a minute later, the suit packed into the back of a Stark van, hair wet, eyes bright in that way they got after he survived something big enough to rewire a life. He paused, glanced back toward the hangar, and for a heartbeat looked like he might say something vulnerable.
Then he didn't. "Send me a bill if I scratched any of your toys," he said instead, and flashed a grin that didn't quite reach his eyes.
Fury grunted. "You couldn't afford it."
Tony's grin sharpened. "Please. I invented 'afford it.'"
He climbed into the van, and it pulled away into the wet dark.
By dawn, the facility was wrapped in crime-scene tape and quiet men in coveralls. By noon, a dry press release said Hammer Industries would be cooperating fully with federal authorities. By evening, the only proof of the fight was the scuffed arcs on the asphalt where something too heavy had tried to turn too fast.
The Expo lights would still come on that night. Photographers would still beg for quotes from men in nice suits. The world would move, because it always did.
But the father and the son were gone from the board, their machines crated and tagged, their access severed by paper and lock and simple distance. The arc of this particular mess bent toward silence.
And in a lab across a city and a world away, a different kind of work resumed—the kind that didn't need witnesses to know it was important.
Hammer fell.
And nothing exploded that didn't have to.
Authors not looks like like you guys have to wait for at least one week for the interesting part of course patreon also is a option but don't know how long people can support since this month I have uploaded only 6 chapter due to health issues