Three hours after sunrise, Tony Stark was in a desert.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
He had flown 541 miles in thirty minutes to make sure no one saw what he was about to test.
The Mojave stretched endlessly around him, heat shimmering over sand and stone. No satellites overhead. No S.H.I.E.L.D. drones on radar. JARVIS handled all of that.
Tony stood in the center of a concrete testing pad Stark Industries built years ago and never publicly acknowledged. It was his playground—raw, sun-bleached, and quiet.
Perfect for seeing if he'd built a miracle or a bomb.
Mk-43A stood ready.
The armor waited on the automated rack, plates opened like a steel lotus.
The Celestium alloy caught sunlight in odd ways—not reflective, not matte.
Almost… responsive.
Tony circled it once, studying the frame.
"JARVIS, run internal alignment again."
[Already at ninety-nine point three percent. Any more adjustments will destabilize the Aether-linked channels.]
Tony paused.
"Still hate that word?"
[Deeply, sir. Linking your biology to prototype armor is—]
"Progress."
[…extremely unsafe progress.]
Tony stepped onto the platform.
The armor closed around him.
Not like older suits—metal locking against metal.
This felt… organic. The plating slid together with the smallest whisper, like the pieces were finding their natural place.
Lights synced. The HUD flickered on.
> MK-43A ONLINE
> AETHER FLOW: 7%
> CELESTIUM RESPONSE: ACTIVE
Tony inhaled.
The suit almost inhaled with him.
"Take it easy," he whispered.
The HUD responded with a spike of neural-link confirmation.
"JARVIS, run pre-flight."
[Running.]
Wind stirred the dust around his ankles.
If this backfired, there would be nothing left of him but a crater and an obituary written by someone who didn't like him.
Perfect testing conditions.
"Flight test," Tony said. "Primary thrusters."
Thrusters ignited.
But not the blue flame he was used to. The output coloration leaned white, like the plasma was burning hotter than it should.
He rose three feet.
Five.
Ten.
He hovered. Perfectly still. Not wobbling. Not correcting.
The Mk-43A reacted to every micro-shift in his intent before his limbs even moved.
Tony let out a breath he didn't realize he was holding.
"That's… smooth."
[Your vestibular feedback loop is running at ninety-three percent predictive efficiency] JARVIS said.
[That is not how physics is supposed to work.]
"Write a strongly worded letter to physics."
"Alright," Tony murmured. "Let's stress you out."
He shot upward.
The world blurred.
G-forces pressed against him hard enough to be noticeable but not painful. The suit compensated faster than the human nervous system could register.
He broke Mach 1 with a crack of air, streaking across the desert.
Sand whipped up beneath him, trailing like a comet tail.
[Sir, your heart rate is steady.]
"That's new."
[It is… concerning, sir.]
Tony banked left.
The suit leaned with him, almost anticipating the maneuver.
He dove.
Pulled up at the last second.
Skimmed low enough that the wind kicked up a line of sand for a mile.
Every input felt clean. Efficient.
Almost… too efficient.
He slowed and hovered above the pad again.
"Alright. Mobility's a go. Let's test defense. Bring up the drones."
Twenty buried pods cracked open around the pad. Turrets rose—old Stark tech he'd retired years ago for being too lethal to sell. They locked on.
"Low yield, kinetic only. I'm not in the mood for a crater today."
"Firing."
The first rounds hit.
They didn't ricochet. They didn't stop.
They just… ceased.
A ripple of void-white distortion flared around the suit for a quarter-second, edges bleeding black fractal sparks. The bullets were suddenly ten feet to the left, tumbling end-over-end into the sand like they'd been teleported.
Tony stared.
"JARVIS, what the hell was that?"
[Preliminary designation: Event Shell. Incoming kinetic vectors are being rotated along a non-Euclidean displacement plane. The energy is being dispersed into the upper atmosphere. I dislike everything about this.]
Tony laughed—short, sharp, involuntary.
"Displacement, not absorption. That's elegant."
[It is also impossible.]
"Add it to the list with physics."
Next test: Repulsor output.
He raised his right hand. The repulsor node in the palm brightened to a hard, surgical white.
"Target plate. Full yield, focused beam."
A pencil-thin lance of Aether-cut light punched through the ten-inch hardened target and kept going until it carved a glowing trench into the desert floor.
The beam punched a cylindrical hole through the metal. Clean. Smooth. One-shot.
"Output?"
[Four hundred twelve percent above previous maximum at the same power draw.]
"Four hundred?"
[Rounded down for your ego, sir.]
Tony exhaled. "We're keeping this quiet."
"Too late."
On the horizon, dust clouds. Six tan Humvees screaming in from the east gate, sirens off but lights flashing.
Tony groaned. "Of course."
The convoy braked hard thirty yards out. Colonel James Briggs stepped down from the lead vehicle—crew cut, sunburn, permanent scowl. He'd been Tony's military liaison since the Jericho days and still hadn't forgiven him for any of it.
"Stark." Briggs shaded his eyes. "Sonic boom, unidentified energy spike, and half the Nellis range just lit up like Christmas. Care to explain?"
"New repulsor calibration. Got a little enthusiastic."
Briggs looked past him to the smoking trench and the drones lying in pieces.
"That doesn't look like calibration."
"It's an iterative process."
Briggs pinched the bridge of his nose. "You're not supposed to test experimental weapons on U.S. soil without—"
"Technically this is Stark Industries soil. I checked the deed."
"—without notifying the DoD, damn it."
Tony landed, boots touching concrete with a soft hiss. The faceplate retracted.
"Look, Colonel. I'm stress-testing safety systems. The world's been quiet for a while. Quiet never lasts. When it gets loud again, I want to be the loudest thing in the room."
Briggs stared at the suit—at the matte plates that didn't quite reflect the sun the way metal should.
"That armor looks different."
"New paint job."
"Bullshit."
Tony smiled without warmth. "You'll get the redacted report in six to eight weeks. Same as always."
Briggs didn't smile back. "Whatever you're building, Stark… don't let it be bigger than you can control."
Tony's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes went still.
"Story of my life."
Briggs held his gaze for another second, then climbed back into the Humvee.
The convoy peeled out, kicking sand across the pad.
Tony watched them go.
When the dust settled, he was alone again.
"JARVIS."
[Sir?]
"Lock down all telemetry from the last forty minutes. Triple encryption. If anyone asks, we were running routine flight certs on the Mark 42."
[Understood. Though I feel compelled to point out that lying to the U.S. Air Force is technically—]
"Tuesday. It's Tuesday."
He looked at the trench the beam had carved. The edges still glowed faintly.
Twenty percent Celestium. And it already felt like cheating.
"Start the fab queue for Mk-45L," he said quietly. "Forty percent lattice. Full production run."
[That will require another eighty kilos of refined Type-0 substrate.]
"Then we refine it. Whatever it takes."
The HUD pulsed once, almost eagerly.
AETHER FLOW: 9%
Tony looked east, toward New York.
"Get me home, JARVIS."
[Course laid in. ETA twenty-nine minutes.]
Tony rocketed skyward, leaving a trail of void-white light that hung in the air long after he was gone.