Inside the dusty, oppressive heat of the cave, Tony Stark stood encased in his masterpiece of scrap metal. The Mark I suit was a crude, brutalist beast, but it was his only ticket out. He waited, his heart pounding a frantic rhythm against the arc reactor in his chest, as the suit's primitive systems slowly booted up.
Outside, the terrorists had noticed the silence from their high-value prisoners' workshop. The leader, a man whose paranoia was his only real survival skill, sent two of his men to investigate.
"Yinsen! Stark!" one of them yelled, his voice muffled as he peered through the small observation slit in the heavy iron door. The cave was too dark, the light too limited. All he could see were two figures hunched in a corner, working on something large and metallic. "Hey! What are you doing in there? Open this door, now!"
His voice, speaking in a language neither of the prisoners understood, echoed harshly in the confined space. Even if they had understood, they were a little busy. Seeing his orders completely ignored, the terrorist's caution evaporated, replaced by a surge of anger. He unbolted the lock and threw the door open.
BOOM!
The entrance erupted in a flash of fire and shrapnel. A jury-rigged claymore, another one of Stark's desperate inventions, had done its job, blowing the two men back into the tunnel. The blast was small, designed more to startle than to kill, but the sound was all that mattered.
The suit was still powering on. The explosion had bought them seconds, but it had also alerted the entire camp.
A tide of shouts and the thunder of running feet rushed toward them from the outside world.
"Oh my God," Dr. Yinsen whispered, his hands fumbling over the keyboard that controlled the suit's boot sequence. "They're coming!"
"Just keep it going, Yinsen!" Tony urged, his voice tight with a tension he was trying desperately to hide. "Once I'm online, you stick right behind me. We're getting out of here. Both of us."
Yinsen's face was grim, his eyes fixed on the agonizingly slow progress bar. "It's too late," he said, his voice heavy with a terrible finality. "They're already here." He looked up at Tony, his eyes filled with a sad, resolute determination. "I will buy you some time. You must get out."
"No! Yinsen, stick to the plan!" Tony yelled, but he was a prisoner inside his own creation, unable to move, unable to stop the brave man from making a fatal choice.
He heard the roar of gunfire from the tunnel, punctuated by Yinsen's defiant shouts. Each shot was a hammer blow to Tony's heart. He was helpless, trapped, listening to his friend die for him.
Then, just as the progress bar crept past the halfway mark, the gunfire stopped. An abrupt, chilling silence fell over the cave.
An ominous dread washed over Tony. But there was no time to process it. One of the terrorists from the initial blast, his face a mask of blood and rage, staggered back into view. He didn't understand what the hulking metal man was, but he understood the hatred burning in his gut. Forgetting his leader's orders to keep Stark alive, he raised his rifle, aiming for the one vulnerable spot he could see: Tony's exposed head.
Revenge was the only thought in his mind.
Bang.
The gunshot exploded in the confined space. The smell of cordite filled Tony's nose. He instinctively squeezed his eyes shut, a bitter, ironic smile flashing across his mind. The world's greatest merchant of death, about to be killed by one of his own weapons. Hilarious.
He waited for the impact, the pain, the end. But it never came. After a long moment, he cautiously cracked one eye open.
And then both eyes went wide with disbelief.
Hovering in the air directly in front of his face was a shimmering, circular shield of golden light, crackling with fiery orange sparks. A bullet, the one meant for his brain, was suspended in mid-air just before the shield, slowly melting into a droplet of molten copper from the intense heat. The terrorist who had fired it was frozen in place, his expression of murderous rage locked on his face as if he'd been turned to stone.
"You built an operating system this complex for a suit this crude?" a calm, slightly amused voice remarked from his left. "You're lucky the whole thing didn't crash."
Tony stiffly twisted his neck. Standing beside the computer console, dressed in a simple black robe, was Leo. He was casually scrolling through the boot sequence code, a critical look on his face.
Tony looked at the magical shield. He looked at the robed stranger. He looked at the petrified terrorist. His entire worldview, already shaken by the past few months, began to crumble.
"Uh," he asked, his voice uncertain. "Am I dead?"
Seeing the legendary Tony Stark so completely bewildered was a rare opportunity. Leo decided to have a little fun with it.
"What do you think?" he replied, a playful smirk on his face. "Heaven or Hell?"
Tony actually hesitated. Before this, he would have said Heaven, no question. The weapons he built were for peace, for protection. But now, seeing them in the hands of these men, knowing what they were used for… "Alright," he said, a strange sense of peace settling over him. "If it's Hell, I'll take it." He seemed to deflate, the weight of his guilt lifting. "But, uh, quick question. Do they have booze in Hell? Any supermodels? And Yinsen… any chance I could see him again?"
Leo's lips curved into a grin. "Oh, sure, there's booze. Tastes like horse piss. And plenty of beautiful women, all of them carriers of exotic, incurable diseases. As for Dr. Yinsen," he said, his voice dropping theatrically, "you can forget about seeing him in Hell."
"What?! That's a cruel and unusual punishment!" Tony blurted out, a flicker of his old self returning. "Wait a minute, my heart's still beating. I think I can still fight this!"
"Hah! Relax, you're not dead," Leo said with a laugh. "But I've got to hand it to you, Tony Stark. Only you would try to negotiate with the devil."
Just then, a final, satisfying ding echoed through the cave. The Mark I was online.
Tony felt the suit respond, the servos whining as he finally stood to his full, intimidating height. He checked his reflection in a shiny piece of scrap metal, relieved to see his forehead was, in fact, free of bullet holes.
Then he watched as Leo casually waved a hand, tearing a fiery, circular portal open in the air. He grabbed the frozen terrorist by the collar and unceremoniously tossed him through. For a brief second, Tony could see a vast, snowy wasteland on the other side before the portal snapped shut, cutting off a single, fading scream.
Tony stared at the empty space. "Okay," he said slowly. "You're sure you're not a messenger from Hell?"
Leo just shook his head, his smile unwavering. "Of course not."