The air in the corridor smelled of a perfume of absolute destruction. Tony stood before the last remaining barrier, the heavy blast door leading to the inner sanctum of Nick Fury. He reached out with his mind, locating the atomic lattice of the locking mechanism and willed the molecules to vibrate until the steel shrieked and shattered.
Inside the suit, his Super Soldier physiology hummed with a focused heat. His High Speed Regeneration was working overtime, the few stray scratches he had taken from the desperate heavy fire in the hallways closed before the blood could even bead on his skin. He was a perpetual motion machine of vengeance, fueled by an infinite battery.
The heavy blast doors groaned, metal fatigue setting in instantly, before they shriveled inward and were pulled violently outward by an invisible hand. Tony stepped into the command center, smoke curling lazily from his cooling thrusters.
Nick Fury stood at the center of the room, his one eye wide, his hands raised in a gesture of peace that looked pathetic against the backdrop of the carnage Tony had left in his wake.
Maria Hill and a dozen loyalist agents had their guns drawn, but their hands were shaking visibly. They had seen the feed. They knew they were aiming toys at a hurricane.
"Tony, stop!" Fury shouted, his voice cracking with desperation. "We can talk about this! We're purging the compromised cells as we speak! Stand down before you cross a line you can't come back from!"
The faceplate of the Mark VIII retracted with a hiss. His eyes were bloodshot, glowing faintly with the blue remnants of his Eye Boy activation.
"Talk?" Tony's voice was a jagged blade, scraping against the silence. "You want to talk now, Nick? After the blood has dried for eighteen years?"
"I didn't know the extent of it, Tony! I knew there were anomalies, but I was trying to fix it from the inside… "
"Liar!" Tony roared. The sound was amplified by the suit's external speakers, shaking the glass walls of the strategy deck.
Bullet Time engaged, transforming him into a literal streak of gold and red light. He crossed the room in a nanosecond, grabbing Fury by the throat with a metal gauntlet. He slammed the Director against the main viewscreen, the reinforced glass spiderwebbing behind Fury's head with a sickening crunch.
"You knew my parents were murdered," Tony hissed, his unmasked face inches from Fury's, spittle flying. "You knew they were founders of this 'organization,' and you knew they were hunted down by the very shadow this place was built to house. Howard Stark built the cradle you sleep in and you let the snakes breed in the blankets!"
"Tony... listen..." Fury gasped, his face turning a dark shade of purple as the metal fingers tightened.
"No, you listen! This organization is so rotten to the core that it devoured its own creator in the middle of a public road and you didn't even bother to investigate? Or maybe you did," Tony's eyes burned. "Maybe you looked at the file, saw the Hydra sigil and decided that maintaining the status quo was more important than justice for the man who gave you your job!"
Tony dropped him. Fury slumped to the floor, coughing violently, clutching his bruised throat.
"Look at the screens, Nick," Tony said, gesturing broadly to the chaos unfolding on the monitors around them. "Aryan did what you were too cowardly or too compromised to do. He showed the world the truth. Your 'Shield' is seventy percent poison. The police, the Pentagon, the Council… they're all screaming Hydra. And you sat at the top of the pile, playing chess with a board that was already on fire."
"I was protecting the world, Stark! If I had burned it all down then, there would have been a vacuum!" Fury yelled back, struggling to his feet, his defiance returning.
"There's a vacuum now," Tony replied, his voice dropping to a low register. "And I'm filling it with the ashes of everyone who touched that file and stayed silent. You kept my father's death as a 'strategic asset.' You treated my mother's murder like a classified footnote."
Tony's Technopathy flared one last time. Every screen in the Triskelion flickered and began scrolling high definition images of Howard and Maria Stark overlaid with their autopsy reports.
"I'm not a member of your 'team,' Fury. I'm not a hero," Tony said, staring down at the spy. "I'm the consequence."
Tony turned his gaze to Maria Hill and the remaining shivering agents. "If you aren't on the list Aryan released, leave. Now. If you stay, you're choosing to die for a tomb."
The agents looked at Fury, then at the man god in the gold armor and then they ran. They scrambled for the stairs, the elevators and the parachutes, abandoning their posts.
Tony looked back at Fury. "I'm leaving you alive, Nick. Not because I forgive you. But because I want you to watch. I want you to stand on the sidewalk and watch while the 'greatest intelligence agency in history' collapses under the weight of its own lies. S.H.I.E.L.D. is dead. And if I ever see your face again, I won't use a suit. I'll use my bare hands."
Tony's Magnetism reached out, seizing the structural supports of the bridge deck. The floor began to tilt dangerously. The glass walls began to shatter outward, raining down on the Potomac.
"JARVIS, initiate the 'Icarus' virus. Wipe every S.H.I.E.L.D. server on the planet. Burn it all."
"With pleasure, Sir."
Tony ignited his boots. He crashed through the ceiling, ascending into the sunlight in a plume of debris, leaving Nick Fury standing alone in the ruins of his empire.
Below him, the Triskelion began to groan… as Tony's magnetic wake literally started pulling the building apart at the seams.
The digital purge initiated by the Red Queen had stripped away every veil, exposing the dark heart of the beast. As the Triskelion groaned under the weight of Tony's magnetic fury, his Technopathy pinpointed a shielded energy spike beneath the Potomac River… a deep underground bunker, shielded by lead and vibranium reinforced concrete.
"There you are," Tony hissed.
He positioned himself over the central hub of the crumbling building and flared his Magnetism to its absolute Alpha limit. The structural steel beams beneath his boots liquefied into a hyper dense needle. Tony plummeted, punching through forty floors of reinforced concrete in a single second.
BOOM.
He slammed into the sub basement with the force of a tactical nuke. The dust cleared to reveal a cathedral-like bunker, untouched by the chaos above. At the far end stood Alexander Pierce, the World Security Council member and the secret architect of the Hydra resurgence. Surrounded by three hundred elite Hydra "Shadow Guards" in high tech exo-suits, Pierce looked like a cornered rat.
"Stark! You're out of your mind!" Pierce shouted, his voice echoing over the electronic hum of three hundred assault rifles charging up. "You're destroying the only thing keeping the world from chaos!"