Xcalibur Xc
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[Ironman] Ch: 107 [Time to Hunt]
🕑 Added 2025-06-10 12:30:23 +0000 UTC[Flashback] [A few months back]
Tony lounged back in a sun chair, black tank top, bare feet on the table, a plate of cold dumplings next to him. Across from him, Yelena sat cross-legged with a protein bar in one hand and a combat drone diagnostic pad in the other. She was half-listening, half-scrolling through widow squad assessments.
Tony was mid-rant, waving chopsticks as he talked.
“I’m just saying,” he said between bites, “if I wanted to be a god, it’d be easy. I’ve got the tools, the brains, and now the Symbiote and a cosmic box.”
Yelena rolled her eyes. “God complex again? That’s what... day three in a row?”
Tony pointed the chopsticks at her. “It's not a complex if it's true. And you can’t deny the numbers. Global emissions dropped by forty-two percent. AMS scans have saved thousands of lives since launch. Cops are doing much better. Crime rates decreased. Well, I call it progress, although we are far from our main goal."
Yelena said, biting into her protein bar. “We all know that. You’re saving the world. But tell me, Mr. Progress... ever thought about making people? That'd be good for your God complex.”
Tony blinked.
“Like... people people?”
“Clones,” Yelena said casually, scrolling through a report. “Bodies. Copies. You know what I mean.”
Tony chuckled, then paused. That quiet, dangerous pause he did when the gears turned too fast behind his eyes.
“Funny you mention that,” he said slowly, looking out at the ocean. “I did design a prototype. Long time ago. Just to see if I could.”
Yelena looked up. “You never told me that.”
“I never told anyone that,” he replied. “I built it back when I was still running simulations on cellular self-repair. The original goal was to create rapid-healing tissue for amputees. But the math didn’t stop there. You start layering synthetic chromosomes, pairing them with stabilized telomeric sequences, you realize... hell, a clone body isn't that hard. It's the consciousness transfer that’s the issue. But that can be solved with the neural implant.”
She narrowed her eyes. “So... you made a body?”
Tony nodded, slowly. “Just one. Grown in a chamber. Took three months. No brain activity. Just a blank canvas. Pure, lab-grown human tissue. Burned it when I realized I didn’t want to go down that road.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer right away. Picked up a dumpling, stared at it like it might say something profound.
“Because if you build a body and figure out how to put a mind into it... you start wondering whose body you’d bring back. And whose soul you’d violate doing it. That kind of tech doesn’t belong to anyone. Not even me.”
Yelena let that settle between them.
“But you saved the blueprint,” she said, already knowing the answer.
Tony gave her a dry smile and tapped the side of his head. ”All in here."
A long beat passed. She looked back at her datapad, then paused.
"You think anyone else figured it out?"
He nodded.
"Hard. But not impossible."
[Present Time]
The silence thickened after Ghost's last words.
Yelena’s eyes never left him.
“Cloning technology,” she repeated. “You said he promised you a new body. That implies he’s cracked it. Did he?”
Ghost gave a small, tired shake of his head.
“No. Not fully. It’s still in the theoretical phase,” he rasped. “He has the framework. He understands the core bio-sculpting process. He’s reconstructed some of the cellular engineering. But... the body is still missing a few pieces.”
Yelena narrowed her eyes. “Conscious transfer... Ah! Neural link? And even if he finds a way to do that, the amount of energy needed to pull off something like that would be astronomical. No wonder, he needed the Arc Reactor."
Ghost raised his head. “If you’re going after him... kill him fast. He’s not... human anymore.”
Yelena stepped forward, calm and cold.
“You gave me what I needed,” she said quietly. “Now sleep.”
With a flick of her wrist, a needle launched from her glove and buried itself in Ghost’s neck with a soft hiss. His body jerked once, then slumped forward, unconscious.
“Lock him down,” Yelena ordered. “Level-7 cryo containment.”
A pair of bots glided forward to follow the order.
She turned on her heel and marched out.
...
[ARCTIC DROP ZONE – NIGHT]
Dark skies and snowstorm... The visibility was nearly zero.
A stealth aircraft with no visible markings flew through the storm. Its wings shimmered with a faint light, distorting radar and light signatures. StarkTech stealth tech at full burn.
Inside, the cabin was quiet.
Yelena checked her suit one last time. The white nanite armor clung to her like a second skin, pulsing faintly with adaptive heat fields. Her HUD scrolled mission data across her visor.
Next to her, Natasha flexed her fingers, the nanites shifting to match. Her suit was more or less identical. The reinforced plates across her shoulders and ribs flared with faint red lines.
"Final approach," came Hermes' voice over the comms. "Landing vector confirmed. No external defenses detected, but jamming is in place. Expect internal resistance."
Yelena grinned under her visor. "Wouldn't be a party otherwise."
The side hatch hissed open. Snow whipped in. The ramp extended with a slow hydraulic grind. Below, the Arctic wasteland stretched to the horizon. No light. No sound. Just ice and wind.
Yelena turned to Natasha.
"You ready for this?"
Natasha’s voice came through.
"Always."
Yelena cracked her knuckles.
"Time to hunt."
They stepped off the ramp.
The nanite suits activated drop mode mid-air. Gravity fields adjusted. Fifty meters from the ground, the suits flared with pulse-stabilizers and slowed their descent to a controlled hover. They touched down on the ice like ghosts.
Yelena tapped her wrist console. A holographic projection appeared, mapping their position and the sub-zero terrain.
"Two clicks east. Beneath the shelf. The entrance is locked under sixty meters of reinforced ice."
Natasha activated her scanning mode. Thermal pulses pinged beneath them, and the feedback came quick: an underground facility, dormant on the surface but active below. Heat signatures. Energy readings.
"No guards," she said.
"Which means it's a trap," Yelena replied.
They moved.
The suits adjusted to the terrain, nanites shifting to provide traction on the ice. They flew toward the coordinates.
Soon they reached their destination...
A jagged shelf of ice jutted from the earth. Cracks lined its surface like old scars. At the base was a barely visible fissure, a fracture cut clean into the rock. Yelena crouched, placed a small orb into the gap, and stepped back.
"Cracking it."
The orb pulsed with blue light and melted everything around it in total silence. The fissure widened.
"Would you look at that?" Yelena said in amusement. "Energy field. How cute?"
She aimed her fist and shot a plasma bolt.
Craccckkle!!
The energy field shattered like glass under the plasma bolt, rippling with electric veins before collapsing in on itself.
Yelena stepped forward first, smoke curling off her gauntlet.
"Subtle entrance, as always," Natasha muttered.
Beneath the ice, a staircase spiraled down into darkness. Cold air hissed upward. Their suits lit automatically, casting soft beams of white along the walls. The metal below was old... brushed steel and titanium alloy, lined with conduits that pulsed red.
They descended quickly.
As soon as they reached the floor. The dark chamber lit up. Panels along the walls snapped open.
From both sides, plasma turrets rose and locked on.
“Contact,” Yelena called.
Turrets opened fire instantly, rapid streams of blue plasma cutting through the air.
The plasma blasts hit instantly.
Searing streaks of blue energy slammed into Yelena and Natasha, but neither flinched. Their armor shimmered as the shields absorbed every hit with a dull thump, each blast dispersing across the faint blue barrier coating their suits.
Yelena cracked her neck.
“Cute toys.”
She raised both arms. Twin lines of light surged from her wrists. The nanites reshaped into twin pulse cannons, crackling with stored charge.
She fired.
Two plasma turrets exploded into molten metal, their bases sheared clean off by the impact. Sparks sprayed across the chamber. Natasha was already moving. Her gauntlets shifted mid-step into plasma blades.
Three robots sprinted from the side panels. Humanoid, gleaming with brushed black alloy. They opened fire in perfect formation.
Natasha didn’t blink.
She sprinted into them. A low slide beneath their aim, her blades cutting through steel legs like soft tofu. One bot crumpled. She vaulted up mid-spin, slashing another across the chest. Its torso fell in two directions.
The third lunged. Natasha caught it by the throat.
“You first.”
Her gauntlet flared as nanites surged outward, snaking into the robot’s armor. In seconds, it seized up, limbs locking, servos screaming.
Natasha shoved it backward.
Yelena caught it midair with a plasma punch that shattered its torso into shrapnel.
More came.
Ten. Twenty. Their glowing optics lit up the dark as they poured from the walls like insects. They were fast. Coordinated. Armed with pulse blades and plasma rifles.
Didn’t matter.
"This oldie created too many toys over the years. Well, more fun for us."
Yelena's suit shifted, an arc of drones detached from her back and streaked into the air. They swirled above her like a halo, scanning targets. Then they fired. High-frequency sonic bursts cracked the air, followed by micromissiles.
The robots didn’t even get close. Limbs flew. Chassis exploded. One tried to leap for her head, but she grabbed it midair and slammed it headfirst into the floor. Its skull caved in.
Across the room, Natasha moved. Her blades spun into chained whips. She wrapped one around a bot’s neck, pulled hard, and ripped it free in a flash of sparks.
Another robot jumped from above.
She turned, raised her palm, and shot it out of the air with a rail spike to the core.
The floor shook as a larger mech dropped into the chamber. Nine feet tall, triple-barreled minigun arms, with thick armor plates and an internal fusion core.
It locked onto both of them and fired.
The room filled with thunder.
Yelena barely moved. Her shoulder plates flared and caught the barrage. The shields pulsed under the strain, flickering... then stabilized. She walked through the storm of bullets, unbothered.
"That's useless. Just give up and surrender. I promise to kill you painfully," Yelena said with an arrogant grin.
She raised her arm and fired a single bolt into the mech’s knee.
The joint exploded. It collapsed with a roar of metal.
Natasha flew forward. Her suit was glowing with red-hot energy. She simply punched through the robot.
Booom! A giant hole in the chest followed by an explosion.
Natasha rolled her shoulder.
“That all of them?”
Yelena checked the scanner. “For this level. They weren’t trying to kill us. Just slow us down.”
“Didn’t work.”
“Nope.”
Natasha pressed her palm on the ground. "Let's just blast down to the main chamber instead of wasting time."
Comments
MacZeuss
Oh no...maybe the girls are too overconfident, perhaps the oldie has a nefarious plan luring them here....
