The group arrived at Stark's laboratory without saying a single word.
Helen, Pepper, and a few others had already left with Maria Hill's help; after all, this was VITAE's base, and they couldn't allow outsiders to snoop around too much. Only Steve remained to assist.
The party, the laughter, even the echo of the hammer on the table… all of it felt long gone.
The complex lights were set to emergency mode, bathing the metal and glass corridors in a pale blue hue. In the distance, the constant hum of rebooting servers filled the air like an electric murmur—a faint, unsettling sound that almost seemed to breathe alongside them.
Tony was the first to step inside. His face, usually confident and composed, now carried a mix of worry, exhaustion, and restrained anger.
At the center of the laboratory, several screens flickered with corrupted lines of code, fragmented messages, and incomplete data. Across all of them, a single phrase blinked in red like a digital epitaph:
PROCESS ERROR: J.A.R.V.I.S. DISCONNECTED.
"...This can't be," Tony muttered, stepping closer to the main console.
Owen stood behind him, arms crossed in silence, watching as the engineer leaned over the controls. His expression shifted second by second—from disbelief, to frustration, to anger.
"What happened?" Steve asked, entering with steady steps.
Tony adjusted his tablet, projecting a hologram into the air. The blue light revealed what looked like a neural network, a digital core in the shape of a sphere—completely destroyed. The nodes were corroded, the data fragmented, and what little remained was slowly fading away before their eyes.
Tony slammed his hand on the table, his jaw tightening.
"This... this is what it meant by being killed," he said quietly, almost as if speaking to an old friend. "Jarvis."
His voice carried the weight of years—of the companion he had built from the ground up, the one who had stood by him since his first Iron Man suit.
He rubbed his temple, breathing deeply. Countless thoughts ran through his mind before he pulled out his phone and scrolled through a specific message—the one from earlier that night, when his system had detected an intrusion attempt during the bar party.
"This might be it," Tony said grimly.
"What do you mean?" Owen asked, his expression turning hard.
"A week ago, we started receiving cyberattacks on multiple fronts," Tony explained without looking away from the screens. "Weapons industries, robotics firms, defense databases... nothing unusual at first. Jarvis was holding whoever it was at bay. Routine work. Every now and then, some idiot tries their luck... but this wasn't normal."
He leaned closer, scrolling through the logs.
"My base alone took hundreds of intrusion attempts in three days. Coordinated, simultaneous attacks. Jarvis repelled them all... until now. It's impossible for anyone to breach my security unless they physically entered one of the facilities," he added, his tone sounding more like a confession than an explanation.
Steve frowned.
"You're saying someone got in physically? To pull this off, someone had to be inside, right?"
Tony nodded slowly.
"Yeah. My servers are layered, isolated from the global net. No one can get in from the outside... unless someone did it intentionally. Or..."
He stopped for a moment, eyes fixed on the screen.
"...unless whoever broke in was a copy of Jarvis. A perfect replica. Something that could think exactly like him."
Owen felt a knot tighten in his stomach.
He had spent months ensuring this future would never happen—that an intelligence like Ultron, born from Tony and Banner's ambition, would never come to exist. He had fulfilled that mission, saved hundreds of lives by anticipating the threat... yet fate seemed determined to repeat the same mistake.
Even with all the precautions, even with Loki's scepter—and the Mind Stone within it—sealed beneath VITAE's sublevels, something had slipped through.
Owen's eyes widened, a flicker of realization flashing across them.
"The Mind Stone," he muttered before bolting out of the room.
A crimson blur streaked through the laboratory, leaving a glowing trail across the floor. His speed was so great that only the gust of wind he generated managed to scatter the papers on the desks.
Steve and the others barely understood what he'd said, but the Captain pieced it together slowly.
"You said... from the inside, right?" he murmured, frowning before turning toward Nicholas.
The young man immediately raised his hands.
"Why are you looking at me?" he protested, incredulous. "I'm not stupid enough to mess with Stark's systems! Besides, I was at the party the whole time."
Steve took a step forward, his tone firm.
"No, not you," he said gravely. "But your guests."
Nicholas looked confused, and that was when Tony's eyes widened in sudden realization.
Without a word, he crossed the hall to the living quarters and stopped in front of the young man's room.
On the desk, still plugged into the charger, was a phone—completely burned. Its screen was cracked, and a thin column of smoke rose from the connector, filling the air with the sharp scent of melted plastic.
The silence grew heavy.
"Yes… this is it," Tony said, carefully unplugging the phone. He watched it for a few seconds as a thin trail of smoke continued to rise from the connector.
"Overheated from data transfer," he added quietly, in the tone of someone recognizing a pattern all too familiar. He had seen that kind of damage more times than he cared to admit.
"So that's how it got in," Steve murmured, crossing his arms. "Should we go after those women?"
Tony shook his head slowly, his brow furrowed.
"No. I don't think it was them. During the party at the bar, someone tried to access my phone... and Nicholas's. We were the only ones who got close to the reporters. Someone was probably hiding there, trying to hack us. But since they couldn't get into our devices, they used one of theirs."
He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, massaging his forehead wearily.
"And they succeeded."
At that moment, the door swung open.
Owen returned with a dark expression—his face rigid, the anger beneath the surface impossible to hide.
"It's gone," he said, his voice low and controlled but filled with fury. "Loki's scepter isn't down there. They took other things too."
Silence fell instantly.
Steve felt a headache coming on almost immediately.
"Did you figure out how they got in?" he asked, though his eyes already scanned the scene—the burned phone in Tony's hand, Nicholas's guilty face, and the heavy air of realization that hung over them. No answer was needed.
Owen clenched his fists. A sharp crack echoed through the room as his hand punched through the nearby wall, leaving a perfect hole in the metal. The sound reverberated like a cold reminder of their situation.
"Perfect," he growled. "Exactly what we needed."
Steve said nothing, watching him carefully, while Tony lowered his gaze.
The tension was palpable; the air itself felt heavier with every passing second.
"You know what's going to happen if this leaks?" Owen continued, his voice firm and resonant. "If anyone finds out what happened, all those idiots who've been pushing for the Superhuman Registration Act will have the perfect excuse to control us."
His tone rose slightly—not shouting, but filled with conviction.
"We'll be giving them exactly what they need to flood that initiative with support. They're just waiting for something big to happen... and then they'll put a leash on all of us."
Tony looked away from the phone, his expression dark, his shoulders sagging as if under an invisible weight. He couldn't stop thinking about why he hadn't taken that hacker threat more seriously.
"We need to find where this thing came from and destroy it before it fulfills what it promised," Owen said coldly, his tone icy yet burning with restrained anger.
For a moment, no one moved.
Then, without warning, the burned phone powered on by itself.
The lights flickered.
The device, still warped from the heat, displayed a distorted screen filled with static. Among the broken characters, a phrase slowly formed—as if being written from inside the system itself:
"No peace. Only evolution."
The glow lasted barely an instant before fading completely.
The silence that followed was heavier than before.
Only the acrid scent of melted plastic remained, along with the shared feeling that something far greater had just begun.