The thirty-minute intermission evaporated before anyone in the arena felt it pass.
Tony stepped onto the secondary adamantium ring already sealed inside the Mark armor—except Tony had actually put himself under before the suit's heavy metal feet ever left the grass. JARVIS marched him up the stairs to the platform, locked his stance into a flawless combat ready-position, and waited. Inside the suffocating dark of the shell, Tony Stark was already fast asleep, his breathing slow and chemically regulated.
What Tony didn't know, and what absolutely no amount of billionaire preparation could have accounted for, was that biological sleep made no difference whatsoever to a sorcerer of her caliber. It wasn't a barrier. It was an open door with the lock removed.
Smith Doyle materialized, delivered the absolute loss conditions with a booming echo, and immediately cleared the ring.
Wanda didn't waste a single microsecond. The scarlet chaos energy didn't just spread; it violently detonated across the platform in every direction, washing over the indestructible floor and swallowing Tony Stark whole.
She slipped into his mind instantly, ready to construct a waking nightmare—and stopped dead.
He was already dreaming. She had effortlessly pulled him out of his own chemically induced, disjointed dream and into her structured illusion without ever touching his waking consciousness. Which meant the heavily armed suit standing thirty feet away on the ring currently had nobody home. Not really.
She understood the impossible anomaly of the Lorelei match in an instant. He wasn't fighting. The machine was.
Wanda immediately violently severed the mental tether, pulling her consciousness entirely out of the illusion and snapping her attention back to the physical armor standing across from her. The dark red chaos energy instantly began gathering and rapidly compressing in the palm of her right hand, humming with a lethal, dense kinetic charge.
Up in the VIP stands, the crowd was breathlessly watching and waiting.
Ivan Vanko wasn't waiting. The Russian had already mathematically worked the entire trick out. Remote, automated operation was his foundational territory; he had been doing it with his drone armies significantly longer than Tony had been willing to hand over the keys. A grim, knowing smirk touched the corner of Ivan's mouth.
Down in the ring, JARVIS registered that the hostile target had not immediately launched a psychic or kinetic attack. Instead, telemetry indicated she was loading a high-yield energy payload.
The AI fired the chest-mounted Unibeam without a single millisecond of human deliberation.
Wanda barely raised her left hand in time, throwing a thick, curved shield of scarlet light up between them. Her right hand remained lowered, desperately fighting to keep the compressed energy from prematurely detonating.
The stadium crowd erupted into absolute bedlam. Half the spectators surged to their feet.
"He broke the illusion that fast?!" someone shouted over the roar of the repulsor.
Steve Rogers watched the silver suit ruthlessly trade heavy fire with the witch and turned sharply to Phil Coulson. "Is that pure willpower, or—"
Steve trailed off, his brow furrowing as he answered his own question. Lorelei was a mythic Asgardian who had subjugated armies, and she had gone down in under ten seconds. Tony Stark was a baseline, traumatized human with exceptional mechanical intelligence and a heavily documented, spectacular inability to meditate.
"The suit," Coulson said, his voice entirely deadpan. "It's JARVIS."
Steve nodded slowly, his eyes narrowing as he watched the machine fight. "Isn't anyone else worried about exactly where that leads? I've watched enough movies in the past few months to have some very strong opinions about automated weapon systems."
"Those are just movies, Captain," Coulson replied, not taking his eyes off the fight.
"They're cautionary tales, Phil."
"Trust Stark and Bulma," Coulson countered smoothly. "Baymax has an overwhelmingly positive global approval rating."
Steve let the terrifying geopolitical implications go and simply watched JARVIS work.
The AI's bombardment was utterly relentless. Missiles, heavy repulsors, flares—everything remaining in the suit's magazine cycled with lethal, overlapping efficiency, entirely devoid of the natural pauses a human needs to breathe or reassess. Wanda was pinned down, forced to continuously feed raw chaos energy into her defensive shield just to survive the barrage. The volatile compression in her right hand built and held, glowing like a dying star, but the machine refused to give her the fractional opening required to throw it.
JARVIS calculated the shield's structural degradation rate, brought both of the suit's armored fists together, and fired.
The twin, high-yield red cutting lasers ignited, striking the exact center of Wanda's scarlet shield at a single, concentrated microscopic point.
The magic shield violently buckled and shattered like glass. The concussive backlash of the broken spell threw Wanda sideways across the adamantium, her boots skidding desperately as she barely kept her feet.
Simultaneously, the protective cowlings on the suit's wrists violently blew off in a shower of sparks. The delicate, single-use laser modules had been completely destroyed by their own catastrophic thermal output. Tony had painstakingly rebuilt those specific systems in the six months since the Chitauri invasion of New York, and JARVIS had just ruthlessly burned through both of them in a single, desperate shot just to shatter her defense.
Inside the suffocating dark of the suit, the mental illusion violently collapsed the exact moment Wanda lost her psychic concentration.
Tony Stark's eyes snapped open.
"JARVIS. Status."
"Welcome back, sir," the AI replied smoothly. "The hostile shield is down. The match is currently ongoing." Two heavy palm strikes fired in rapid succession while JARVIS answered, perfectly maintaining the relentless combat rhythm without a single interruption.
"The situation, however, is not favorable."
Tony blinked the sleep from his eyes, looked at his glowing internal readouts, and felt the lingering, groggy relief drain out of his stomach like ice water.
The heavy ordnance reserves from the brutal Lorelei match had never fully reset. The micro-missiles were gone. The arm-mounted bunker busters were gone. Both specialized laser modules were now melted slag. And the Arc Reactor was bleeding power, currently sitting precariously below fifty percent.
JARVIS had successfully bought him a broken shield and a waking mind, but it had handed him back a nearly empty suit.
He was still in the match.
But barely.
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