AutumnXd
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CHAPTER 20
🕑 Added 2025-06-22 15:20:51 +0000 UTCIn the tense quiet that followed the initial assault, Aidan made a calm assessment of the situation. He had the advantage, but it was a fragile one. His internal monologue was a cold, clear calculation of his own limitations. If I had the combat awareness of a special forces operator, I could have used the arrows to eliminate this entire camp before they knew what was happening. But he wasn't a soldier. His physical fitness was high, but he lacked the killer instinct, the ingrained ability to predict an enemy's movements. Furthermore, his microbots, while formidable, were not forged from vibranium or adamantium. A sustained, lucky burst of machine-gun fire could still breach his armor. Caution was his greatest weapon now.
Outside, the Ten Rings terrorists had suspended their futile attacks. The cave mouth had become a deadly funnel, and they knew it. They placed sentries just out of sight, waiting for a breakout, while the three electromagnetic arrows hovered silently, guarding the entrance.
"Is there anything I can do to help?" Yinsen asked, his voice steady despite the circumstances.
"No, I have all the materials now," Tony replied, his mind already whirring, a new sense of purpose overriding his fear. "I just need to build it."
In a makeshift command tent, the leader of the cell, a man named Raza, stared at a grainy surveillance feed. "Who is that?" he snarled. His commission had been to kidnap Tony Stark, with a secondary objective of grabbing the boy genius if possible. He pulled up a file on his laptop. The face of Aidan Parker, the wunderkind from Midtown High, stared back at him. "It can't be," he whispered in shock. "He's a high school student." He couldn't fathom how a child had just single-handedly dismantled his elite guard. Before he could process it further, the gentle-faced boy on the screen looked directly into the camera, offered a polite, almost mocking wave, and the screen dissolved into static.
"FK!" Raza roared, slamming his fist on the table. "Get me a rocket launcher! I want them caught alive!"
"Boss, we can't get in!" one of his lieutenants protested. "That entrance is a death trap."
"Then draw them out!" Raza pondered for a moment, his mind racing. Their heavy explosives had been destroyed in the initial assault. Then, an idea, simple and brutal, came to him from a suggestion by one of his men. "Blow the entrance," he commanded, a cruel smile spreading across his face. "Block them in. They can't have enough food and water to last more than a few days. We'll starve them out."
A few minutes later, a series of grenade explosions rocked the mountainside. The narrow cave passage roared, and the entrance collapsed in a deafening cascade of rock and dust. Inside, the ground shook violently, and gravel rained from the ceiling.
"What's happening?" Yinsen asked nervously, shielding delicate palladium components with his body.
Aidan’s eyes, which had been closed in concentration, opened. The HUD from his headband displayed a structural scan of the blockage. "They're sealing us in," he announced, a note of amusement in his voice. "Quite clever, actually."
"Clever? We're trapped!" Tony shot back, stopping his work. "They're going to bury us alive!"
"Relax," Aidan said with a relaxed expression. He snapped his fingers. A single microbot detached from the wall, and a tiny, intensely hot point of blue light appeared at its tip. It effortlessly sliced a perfect circle out of a nearby boulder. "Several of my bots are equipped with laser-induced plasma cutters. They just gave us the privacy we needed to work. Digging our way out won't be a problem."
Tony stared at the perfectly cut rock, then back at Aidan. "I'm diagnosing you with clinical persecution paranoia," he declared. "This is an insane amount of backup planning."
"If he had persecution paranoia, he wouldn't have come to rescue a notorious arms dealer in the first place," Yinsen countered gently.
With the immediate threat neutralized, the three returned to their tasks. Tony began the painstaking process of grinding a small piece of palladium into a fine powder. Aidan, with nothing to guard against, idled over and watched him.
"Palladium?" he asked, his curiosity purely scientific now.
"Yep."
"You're building a cold fusion reactor," Aidan stated, not as a question, but as a conclusion. "Using heavy water electrolysis to induce a nuclear reaction at room temperature. It's a brilliant way to bypass the need for a massive heat-containment system."
"Yeah, well, your work on plasma confinement gave me the final piece of the puzzle," Tony admitted, not looking up from his work.
"A device like this could solve the world's energy problems," Aidan mused. "It would change everything."
"Right now, I'm only thinking about my own life," Tony said, shaking his head and pointing a thumb at the glowing electromagnet in his chest. "I'll worry about changing the world after I'm not running on a car battery."
"Indeed," Aidan agreed. "But it's an elegant solution for powering a machine, Mr. Stark. As a long-term biological implant… the leached palladium toxins will be cumulative, and eventually, fatal."
Tony’s hands stilled. He looked down at the device he was building, the key to his survival, and for the first time, saw it not just as a savior, but as a slow-acting poison. His face sank.
At that moment, Yinsen, having finished disassembling a component, brought the refined palladium over to Tony. He then turned to Aidan with a warm smile. "We have not been properly introduced. I am Yinsen."
"Aidan Parker," Aidan replied, shaking his hand. "Student at Midtown High."
"The little genius who invented the fighting robots?" Yinsen asked, his eyes lighting up with recognition.
Aidan tilted his head in surprise. "Has my reputation spread all the way to Afghanistan?"
"No," Yinsen chuckled. "But I follow the news from the Big Apple. For a while, your name completely overwhelmed Mr. Stark's in the headlines. It was hard not to know who you were." He paused, his expression turning serious. "You are very brave to come out here alone. Aren't your family worried?"
The question hit Aidan like a physical blow. In the whirlwind of the past few days—the desert lab, the Archangel suit, the infiltration, the fight—he had completely, utterly forgotten. Aunt May. Peter. The press. The inevitable media storm that would erupt when the world learned that he, the "boy genius," was also attacked alongside Tony Stark. The headlines flashed in his mind: Boy Genius Aidan Parker Missing After Terrorist Attack on Stark Convoy!
"Uh… haha… about that…" Aidan stammered, his face, for the first time since entering the cave, a mask of genuine panic.
