From the Aesir Security factory to the skies above, then back down to the ground again.
Tony Stark, clad in the Mark III suit, remained locked in combat with Obadiah Stane's Iron Monger. In terms of raw power, Tony was no match for Obadiah.
But Obadiah was no tactical genius. Strip away his title as a Stark Industries board member, and he was nothing more than an ordinary man who'd just strapped himself into a bulky suit of armor.
Whether it was suit control, flight stability, or the finer details of the armor itself, Obadiah's Iron Monger couldn't even be mentioned in the same breath as Tony's Mark III.
The brainless piling-on of firepower made the Iron Monger grotesquely bloated, and its sheer size doomed it to clumsiness—no chance of pulling off any real tactical maneuvers.
Compared to the Mark III, which had been refined and upgraded time and again, the Iron Monger looked like a lumbering oaf.
As long as Tony kept circling behind it and used his repulsor blasts to systematically shatter the exposed hydraulic pistons and joints, Obadiah would eventually become a turtle in a jar—trapped and helpless.
If Batman had been the one facing the Iron Monger, he would have executed that glaringly obvious plan the instant the fight began.
But Tony Stark didn't. First he traded raw firepower with the Iron Monger head-on, then they both soared into the sky together, and now, after crashing back to earth, he was still trading blows the hard way.
Clang!
The Iron Monger's fist—roughly the size of a laptop—collided with Tony's only slightly oversized gauntlet, producing a sharp metallic ring.
"Sir, if we utilize the Mark III's superior speed to target the exposed components, we can end this fight within ten minutes," JARVIS said.
"JARVIS, do you know how you truly crush an enemy?" Tony Stark replied. "You start with the thing he's proudest of."
Tony Stark wasn't an idiot. The reason he chose to meet Obadiah's Iron Monger in a straight-up slugfest wasn't just to beat the armor itself—it was to break the man hiding inside it.
He was going to make Obadiah see, crystal clear, exactly why the gap between them existed.
Arc reactor, armor design, combat skill—Tony was going to prove he outclassed Obadiah by more than just a single tier.
Even if the bastard had stolen his reactor, the difference in armor quality alone put them on completely different levels.
Their battlefield had returned to the interior of the Aesir Security factory.
As warehouse roofs and walls were ripped away and toppled by their clash, the weapons Obadiah had hidden here were gradually exposed.
Machine guns, missiles, every kind of explosive—virtually every weapon Stark Industries had ever produced was here in abundance.
Tony even spotted the entire unsold stock of Jericho missiles his company had manufactured, lying quietly in the warehouses, the Stark Industries logo glaringly conspicuous and infuriating.
The Mark III's fists clenched tight. Tony swung with everything he had, hammering the Iron Monger in a frenzy. The relentless clang-clang-clang of metal on metal never stopped.
"He's venting, not fighting," Batman observed silently from the shadows.
Batman could tell at a glance that most of Tony's blows were landing on the Iron Monger's thickest plating. Apart from noise and sparks, the actual damage was negligible.
Ever since returning from the Middle East, Tony Stark had kept his emotions remarkably steady. But the moment he saw Stark Industries weapons stockpiled here, his rage finally erupted.
While Tony burned with fury, Obadiah threw his head back and laughed, his voice dripping with mockery and vindictive glee.
"Harder, Tony! Come on, hit me harder! Just like when you were a kid throwing tantrums and smashing your toys! Look at all this!"
He seized the Mark III with one massive hand and slammed Tony into the ground, pointing at the weapons now exposed by the ruined warehouses.
"This is our family's legacy! The cornerstone of the empire your father and I built together! You really thought shutting down the factories would make them disappear? No! They're right here, waiting for someone to use them!"
"Stop being so naive, Tony. If we don't make weapons, someone else will. Rather than letting that kind of dangerous, unstable power fall into someone else's hands, why not keep it in ours—like we always have?"
"Wake up, Tony. Your genius plus my business sense—Stark Industries would become the biggest arms dealer on the planet. Your father would be proud of you for protecting his weapons empire!"
A missile streaked from the launcher on Obadiah's shoulder, blasting Tony high into the air before he crashed back down.
"His anger is blinding him. JARVIS can see the weaknesses, but Tony refuses to listen."
Batman watched Tony crawl out of the rubble and charge once more at the hulking figure, his attack pattern barely changing.
This was an emotion-fueled war of attrition—inefficient and brutal.
Unless Tony found himself in real danger, or Obadiah was rendered helpless and about to be executed in cold blood, Batman had no intention of stepping in.
He had come only to prevent those two outcomes. Helping Tony defeat the Iron Monger was never part of the plan.
Batman's gaze drifted past the two combatants to the high-yield weapons scattered around.
To Tony, they were symbols of shame—fuel for his rage.
As the fight reached fever pitch, both men began grabbing whatever weapons they could reach and hurling them at each other.
Under the night sky, fire lit the darkness and explosions thundered nonstop. It felt less like the outskirts of New York and more like some terrorist-controlled region in the Middle East.
Reporters, photographers, rubberneckers…
Besides Batman, plenty of others watched from a safe distance, filming the clash between the large and small armored figures and uploading the footage online.
Police were doing their best to evacuate and disperse the crowds, but it wasn't working very well.
BOOM!
Another explosion. Both Tony Stark and Obadiah Stane stood at the heart of the fireball.
Their battle had detonated a Jericho missile. In the near-point-blank blast, Tony in the Mark III was hurled skyward while Obadiah, a fraction slower, was swallowed by the flames.
One missile's detonation triggered a chain reaction. Under deliberate repulsor impacts from Tony, missile after missile went up, gradually engulfing the entire Aesir Security factory complex.
Black smoke billowed, flames roared into the sky, and Tony plunged back into the inferno. He dragged out Obadiah—armor half-destroyed, the man inside barely clinging to life.
Part of Tony wanted to let Obadiah die right there. But not yet. Tony didn't just want to beat him—he wanted to expose every crime, and he needed Obadiah alive to clean house at Stark Industries once and for all.
Those aftermath matters had little to do with Batman. He simply met Tony again as Peter Parker, handed over the intact chain of evidence, and vanished.
The next morning, just as Batman was heading to the Batcave to finalize repairs on the Batwing's lift platform, the Bat-communicator he had once given Silver Sable suddenly activated.
The voice on the other end was not Silver Sable's, but a deep, unfamiliar male timbre Batman had never heard before.
"Batman… this is T'Challa."
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