Killian settled into the back seat and let the city slide past the windows while his assistant Eric pulled into traffic.
He reached into his jacket pocket and turned the Dragon Ball over in his palm. It was a perfect sphere, warm from his body heat, the single star at its core holding steady from every angle. He'd found it a year ago — a meteorite recovery, or so it had appeared at the time. He'd recognized it for what it was only when the stones woke up and the knowledge arrived with them.
"If we get the other six," Eric said from the front, eyes on the road, "you can actually fix the side effects?"
"Fix them and improve on what we have." Killian watched the ball catch the light. "The Extremis formula works. Cellular regeneration, structural repair, your arm came back — that's real. The thermal instability is an engineering problem, not a fundamental flaw. The right wish resolves it cleanly."
The side effects were the limiting factor on everything. An Extremis subject under emotional stress or physical attack ran hot, and if the temperature spiked past a threshold without discharge, the result was explosive. The destructive yield was significant — more than conventional ordnance of comparable size. It made his enhanced soldiers unpredictable in close environments and impossible to deploy near anything he wanted to keep intact.
Solve that, and what remained was a formula that regenerated tissue, restored lost limbs, and produced fighters who could project intense heat as an offensive capability and recover from almost any wound. No company on Earth was manufacturing enhanced individuals at scale. AIM could be the first.
But first, six more Dragon Balls.
Eric glanced back through the rearview. "What do you need from us?"
"Surveillance and acquisition. When I locate a ball, your team moves immediately to secure it." Killian tucked the Dragon Ball back into his pocket. "Finding them is my problem. Getting them is yours."
Eric nodded. That division of labor suited him. Reconnaissance across an entire planet was not a task anyone could brute-force. Combat retrieval was different — that was something he understood.
Killian opened his tablet and pulled up the acquisition boards.
He stopped.
Four million per ball. The price had climbed while he was sitting across from Pepper Potts talking about bioelectric optimization. He scrolled through the posting history. The jump from three and a half million had happened within the last two hours, and the new offer had a Stark Industries footprint underneath it despite the proxy layers.
Killian smiled without warmth. Tony again. Still playing the same game — outspend, outposition, assume the market bends.
He opened his own account and posted.
Four million, matching price. His name wasn't attached, but the signal was clear enough to anyone watching the board: there was now a second buyer with no stated ceiling.
Let them chase numbers. He already had one ball. That was an advantage no bidding war could replicate.
Five Hummers pulled through the gate of Tony's property and parked in a line along the drive. Xu Xialing stepped out with Jon from the former Golden Dagger Club on her left and the Death Dealer on her right. The rest of her team stayed in the vehicles.
She paused in the courtyard.
A stuffed rabbit, approximately three meters tall, occupied the far corner of the garden with the absolute confidence of something that had been placed there by someone who thought it was funny and had not reconsidered.
Xu Xialing looked at it for a moment and kept moving.
The front door opened before she touched it.
"Ms. Xu Xialing." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere — the house's integrated speaker system, she realized. "Mr. Stark is expecting you in the living room."
She adjusted quickly. AI home system, JARVIS, she'd heard of it. She led her two men inside.
The living room contained an Iron Man suit sitting on the couch.
Xu Xialing kept her expression neutral, but her internal commentary ran immediately: he's wearing full armor to receive a guest in his own house. Either he considers her a threat serious enough to warrant it, or this was Tony Stark being theatrical. Possibly both.
"Good to see you again," Tony's voice came from the suit. "Last time was the tournament."
The suit's faceplate was up. The chair behind the desk in the adjacent room was empty. She caught the faint hum of remote operation and understood — he was downstairs in the lab, running the armor by remote while he worked on something else. This was a demonstration more than a precaution.
"I've had people running searches since I landed," she said. "The coverage is thin. Three public explosions attributed to this Mandarin, all of them claiming Ten Rings authorship. No one in my organization matches the description or the name. I can say that with complete certainty."
"Nine," Tony said. "The actual count is nine. The government kept six of them out of the news cycle to avoid public escalation."
Xu Xialing absorbed that. Nine was a more committed operation than three.
"We plan to go public immediately," she said. "Press statement, online channels, direct denial. The Mandarin is an impostor — not a member of the Ten Rings, not affiliated with us in any capacity, not operating under any authority we recognize. We want that on record before this gets worse."
"Do it," Tony said. "Going public has a secondary benefit — it might shake something loose. Whoever built this fiction chose the Ten Rings name deliberately. Disrupting their cover story puts pressure on them."
"We also want to visit the explosion sites directly. Nine locations, whatever intelligence is still recoverable."
"I'll send you the coordinates of all nine." Tony paused. "No bomb casings at any of them. I've been running the forensics myself. Two possibilities: an exotic delivery system we haven't seen before, or an enhanced individual capable of producing the detonations directly."
Xu Xialing considered that. "If they have someone like that — someone who can cause explosions on that scale without a device — why frame it as the Ten Rings? Why not operate independently? What does our name give them that their own organization wouldn't?"
"That," Tony said, "is the question worth answering. Find out what they needed the Ten Rings brand for and you'll know who built this."
Xu Xialing nodded slowly. The Death Dealer beside her was already noting coordinates on his phone.
"Send me everything you have," she said. "We'll start at the sites."