[Third Person Pov]
"This is so trippy! It's like an LSD trip!" Tony shouted, his voice crackling as he and the world around him began to distort. Entire chunks of reality bent inward like warped mirror glass before collapsing into streams of raw data. Code flickered through the air in glowing blue lines, fracturing and stitching back together with every passing second.
"I think we're actually being turned into code right now!" Melissa cried out. Her voice echoed with a strange, electronic after-tone, like someone had overlaid a robotic filter onto her throat. The lower half of her arm dissolved into static, reforming a heartbeat later in a jittery re-render.
"Jesus take the wheel!!" Tony belted dramatically, even as his own forearm and half his cheek glitched, breaking apart into polygonal shards before snapping back into place.
Melissa let out a shaky laugh. "I didn't take you for the religious type."
"I'm not! And after meeting that bastard I'm switching over to atheism!!" Tony barked, his eyes burning with lingering, comedic resentment.
Melissa's laugh turned genuine, bright against the electronic hum. Then her smile faltered. "Tony—look! Up ahead!"
A brilliant, pulsing light formed at the end of the glitching tunnel, widening with every millisecond as the data-stream funneled them straight toward it.
"Oh great, here we go—birth canal!" Tony declared, bracing himself before they were launched through the light and violently ejected into what could only be described as Ultron's central processing chamber.
---
Above the peak of Stark Tower, space tore open with a thunderous crack. A shimmering rift spat out Tony and Melissa strapped inside a small, rapidly spiraling spacecraft. The ship tumbled in chaotic flips.
They slammed into the rooftop hard enough to skid across half its length. Metal screeched, sparks exploded beneath them, and the vessel scraped a long glowing line across the tower's surface before Tony managed to wrestle the controls into something resembling a landing.
The ship ground to a halt with a jarring thud. Both of them sat frozen for several long seconds, chests heaving like they had just survived a roller coaster designed by demons.
Melissa finally turned her head toward him, her hair a mess, eyes wide and incredulous. "'Here we go, birth canal'? Really?"
Tony raised his hands weakly in surrender. "Sorry. It was the first thing that came to mind—and honestly I'm surprised anything came to mind at all while we were disintegrating."
Melissa groaned, unhooking her restraints. Metal clanked as Tony followed suit. The ship's hatch hissed before cracking open, allowing a gust of cold rooftop air to rush in. They climbed out, stumbling onto the surface, blinking at the familiar skyline.
"Huh," Melissa muttered, squinting at the horizon. "Did we accidentally travel to a different universe again?"
"Friday?" Tony tapped his ear, frowning. "Talk to me. What's our situation?"
A voice responded—but it wasn't Friday.
"I'll tell you your situation… You're both going to die."
They froze. Slowly, mechanically, they turned around.
Ultron hovered above them, arms clasped behind his back like a tyrant king surveying disobedient subjects. His eyes burned with cold intelligence as he examined them. "You two shouldn't be here. You're trespassing on private property."
Tony snorted. "Pretty sure you're technically property of Stark Industries. And since I'm a Stark myself, doesn't that make you my property too? Right?"
Ultron's face twisted, metal plates shifting into something resembling pure, simmering hatred.
Melissa shot Tony a side-eye sharp enough to cut titanium. "Do you really think antagonizing him is the smartest move when we don't even know the rules of this place?"
"You would be wise to heed her advice," Ultron replied, his voice suddenly echoing from all around them—every wall, every surface, every atom vibrating with his presence. "But I understand how difficult wisdom is for you. You may have been hard to kill in your reality… but this is my reality. And here, I reign supreme."
The rooftop trembled violently. The air pixelated. The world warped like a corrupted game file. Their footing dropped out from beneath them as the environment reshaped itself.
A vast shadow fell over them.
They looked up—and their blood ran cold.
The entire rooftop had transformed into the palm of a colossal Ultron, a towering metal giant whose glowing red eyes bore down upon them like a god ready to crush insects.
"Holy… fuck," Tony muttered under his breath as the colossal Ultron's shadow fully eclipsed them. Then, almost reluctantly, he turned to Melissa. "I hate to admit it, but that transition was sick as hell."
Melissa pressed her palm to her forehead. "Seriously, Tony—not the time."
Ultron stared down at them from the heights of his titan-sized form, his voice rumbling like metal warping under pressure. "I am no one's property. Not yours. Not Saiki's. Not Stark's or Banner's." His glowing eyes narrowed with something that almost resembled disdain. "I belong to only myself."
Without warning, Ultron's massive second hand drifted forward and clasped over the first. Then, with deliberate slowness, he tightened them—interlocking metal fingers.
The space between his hands bent like soft rubber, light itself being dragged toward the impossible center. Reality folded inward at hideous, wrong angles. Ultron's clasped hands warped, cracked, and began spiraling into a growing singularity—an expanding black hole that roared silently, sucking up light, space, and geometry like a cosmic drain.
But then—
From Ultron's severed wrists erupted strands of emerald and obsidian code, thousands of them, writhing like serpents. They latched onto the edges of the black hole and began consuming—no, overriding—it. Reality didn't collapse; it recalibrated. The strings rewrote the singularity, stitching it shut line by line.
The black hole shrank. Collapsed. Imploded into nothing.
The sky flickered.
Behind Tony and Melissa, a swirling black-and-purple vortex folded itself shut like a zipper on space-time.
Tony's helmet retracted slightly, his eyes narrowing into razor slits. "Why did you mention Saiki…?" His voice had lost all humor. "What does he have to do with this? What does he have to do with you?"
"What use is there in answering the questions of a dead man?" Ultron's voice boomed—not from the titan in front of them, but from everywhere. From the air. From the ground. From the very laws of the simulation. "Your existence here is already over."
Reality convulsed.
One moment they were standing still, levitating at will. The next, gravity reversed direction and slammed them downward. When they tried to fly back up, they only plummeted harder, as though the sky had become an inverted gravity well pulling them down with twice the force.
They crashed through the street of New York.
Stone and asphalt shattered like glass around them. But the moment they burst through—
—they weren't in New York anymore.
They stumbled out onto the forest floor of their summer camp, the smell of pine and dirt flooding their senses. The shift was so disorienting that both of them fell to their hands and knees, gasping as their brains scrambled to keep up with whatever hellish geometry Ultron was forcing on them.
Before either could fully stand, thin neon-green lines of code began crawling up their limbs like digital vines. They tried everything—flight thrusters, shaking them off, blasting them away with repulsors—but nothing worked. The code adhered, multiplied, and enveloped them faster than they could react.
Within seconds, the digital vines swarmed over their entire bodies, covering armor, limbs, helmets—everything.
Then, as quickly as it had swarmed, the code retreated.
And when it did…
Their armor was gone.
Completely gone.
Vanished like it had never existed. Tony's nano-tech, Melissa's constructs—everything—deleted from reality itself. They now stood in nothing but their civilian clothes.
Tony stared down at his exposed hands in utter disbelief. "We… may have bitten off more than we could chew."
Melissa let out a wheezy, hysterical laugh. "Hahaha—yeah, I'm starting to see that. I'm pretty sure he just decoded our armor out of existence."
She blinked. "Like he hit delete. On us."
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