A thick beam of orange-yellow energy exploded from Tony's chest—the Mark VI firing at full power. The blast didn't just hit Obadiah Stane. It announced itself, a straight-line statement of physics that turned the air around it into shimmering distortion. The beam caught Obadiah mid-charge and launched him backward like someone had kicked a truck off a cliff.
He crashed through what remained of the mansion wall. Stone, steel, and glass detonated outward. For a heartbeat, Obadiah vanished into the wreckage outside.
Tony didn't even slow down. He flexed his gauntlets as if checking the fit of gloves, and I heard him mutter—half to himself, half to his suit—"That's more like it."
Even from where I was hovering, I could tell the Mark VI felt different on him. The earlier suitcase suit had been a brilliant panic solution: impressive, fast-deploying, and absolutely not something you wanted to fight a real battle in if you valued having bones. This armor moved like it belonged to him. Stable power output. Reinforced plating. Less wobble in his posture, less "I'm improvising" in his breathing.
It wasn't just better tech.
It was Tony remembering what Afghanistan had taught him, and what Obadiah had nearly killed him for the first time.
"Abel!" Tony called, voice amplified through his speakers as he turned his helmet slightly toward me. "How's that for an upgrade?"
I was hovering above the ruined hallway under a Levitation Charm, the magic humming under my feet like a low engine. I drifted down toward him, cloak fluttering in hot updrafts. "Less suicidal than the suitcase armor," I said. "Still reckless, though."
Tony snorted. "Reckless is kind of my brand."
He was trying to joke, which—if you didn't know him—might've sounded like confidence. But I'd heard him on the phone. I'd seen the palladium lines creeping up his neck. His humor wasn't confidence.
It was armor.
And something about this fight still felt wrong.
I landed lightly beside him on a fractured marble floor that used to be expensive art and was now expensive rubble. The mansion groaned around us, structural beams complaining like old giants with bad knees. Outside, waves crashed and the wind carried ash in lazy spirals.
"Tony," I said, keeping my voice low, "don't get cocky."
He angled his helmet toward me again. "I just fired a chest cannon at my dead mentor in a robot suit. I feel like cocky is allowed."
"That's not what I mean." I stared toward the hole in the wall where Obadiah had flown out. My wand hand tightened without my permission. "He's not trying to kill us."
Tony actually paused. Fully paused, mid-combat stance, repulsors humming faintly as if the suit itself was waiting for his brain to catch up.
"He literally tried to punch me through three walls," Tony said.
"Yeah," I replied. "But he keeps talking. Keeps posturing. Keeps letting you respond. He's playing with the tempo."
Tony's helmet tilted a fraction. A human gesture, made mechanical. "You think he's… stalling?"
"I think he's buying time," I said. "For something. For someone. For a second phase."
Tony didn't answer right away, and that silence was louder than his sarcasm. Because Tony Stark didn't stop moving in a fight unless the logic was undeniable.
Outside, stone shifted. Metal scraped. A huge silhouette rose from the rubble like an industrial nightmare climbing out of its own grave.
Obadiah Stane stood again.
His armor was bigger than Tony's, bulkier, brutal—built more like a walking crane than a person. Intimidation-first engineering. Heavier plating. Thicker limbs. Less elegance, more "I'm going to crush you and then sue your remains."
The chest reactor burned bright, steady, like a stolen sun.
"You've improved, Tony," Obadiah called, his voice booming through external speakers. It echoed off broken walls and the coastline like the world itself was forced to listen. "But you're still predictable. Still emotional. Still a child playing engineer."
Tony's head turned fully toward him. "You sound like every bad review I've ever ignored."
He raised his arm and fired again—repulsors flaring, bright blue-white. Obadiah brought up an arm and the blast hit, sparking across plating, more irritation than damage.
Then Obadiah charged.
The collision was violent enough to make the mansion flinch. Armor slammed into armor. Shockwaves rolled through the broken structure. Concrete split. Support beams snapped. The floor buckled under their weight like it regretted ever existing. Tony's suit shrieked as it absorbed impact; Obadiah's suit groaned like an angry engine.
They traded hits—Tony faster, more precise; Obadiah heavier, more brutal. Tony tried to create space, to keep distance, to leverage mobility. Obadiah kept closing, forcing close combat, trying to make strength matter more than engineering.
And the whole time, Obadiah talked.
That was what made my stomach twist.
A man trying to kill you doesn't monologue like he's auditioning for a villain documentary. A man trying to keep you busy does.
I floated upward again, lifting myself above the dust cloud to get a better view, my senses stretching through the chaos. I watched the way Obadiah's suit moved—how it adjusted, how it compensated. The tech wasn't as refined as Tony's, but it had something else: resilience, redundancy, and a kind of crude confidence.
Like it had been built with help.
Like it wasn't a lone genius's project.
If this keeps going, the whole place is coming down, I thought.
Then I realized something worse.
If this keeps going, Tony might not survive long enough for my antidote to matter. Not because the poisoning would finish him tonight—because the fight would.
So I made a decision that was going to make Tony furious later, which honestly meant it was probably the right decision.
I raised my wand and aimed at the fractured foundation beneath them. Not at Tony. Not at Obadiah. At the structure itself.
This wasn't elegant magic.
This was sabotage.
I cast a wide-spread destabilizing spell—raw force threaded through stone supports, cracking load-bearing points like a surgeon cutting tendons. The magic rippled outward. The mansion shuddered.
Then it collapsed.
Not slowly. Not with cinematic grace.
Instantly. Violently.
Like the world snapped its fingers.
Dust and debris plunged downward. The ceiling became falling rubble. The entire structure surrendered to gravity with a sound like the earth itself exhaling.
Tony was still inside.
My stomach dropped so hard it felt like I'd swallowed ice.
But I'd already anticipated that. I snapped a portal open beneath Tony's armor signature—gold sparks carving a ring in midair—and yanked him through like grabbing someone by the collar and dragging them out of a burning building.
The portal spat him out onto the dirt outside, rolling. He hit the ground with a heavy metallic thud, armor sparking and complaining. He pushed himself up immediately, because of course he did.
Tony Stark could be on fire and he'd still try to stand up out of spite.
He groaned, then looked at me. "Okay," he said, voice strained but somehow still sarcastic. "That was new. Next time warn me before you redecorate my house."
"I just saved your life," I said.
"And I appreciate it," Tony replied. "But you owe me a security deposit."
A roar cut through the night.
Obadiah burst out of the collapsing rubble like a demon refusing to stay buried. The armor was battered. One arm was… not fully there anymore.
The portal edge.
When I'd opened it under Tony, the ring had sliced through whatever crossed its boundary. Obadiah must've been too close. The cut was clean, mechanical pieces severed below the forearm. Sparks danced along the torn edge as internal systems tried to compensate.
And the terrifying part?
The armor adjusted fast.
Too fast.
Servos shifted. Balance corrected. Weight redistributed. It was like watching a creature lose a limb and immediately decide it didn't care.
"Not enough," I muttered.
Tony was already back on his feet, repulsors glowing, posture squared. He looked like he wanted to launch himself straight at Obadiah and settle this with pure stubbornness.
"I'm going after him," Tony said.
"Wait—Tony," I started, because something was wrong and my instincts were screaming it again.
Too late.
His repulsors flared and he shot into the air, chasing Obadiah as the larger armor lifted with heavy thrusters, climbing toward open sky.
And that's when I sawthem.
Machines.
Four huge mechanical signatures coming from the ocean, heavy and coordinated, moving with the kind of momentum that made the ground subtly tremble even at a distance.
I turned toward the sound.
The sea near the cliff churned, and then shapes rose from the water—massive humanoid robot soldiers climbing out like steel sea monsters. They were not sleek Stark drones. Not SHIELD tech. Their design was crude and aggressive, with thick plating and blunt limbs like walking tanks.
They marched toward us in formation, water pouring off them, servos whining. Two angled their heads toward Tony in the sky. Two angled toward me on the ground.
"Tony, incoming!" I shouted, projecting my voice with magic because the wind and the distance would swallow it otherwise.
Obadiah laughed.
A real laugh. Loud. Genuinely amused.
"You're lucky today, Tony!" he called, climbing higher. "Next time, I finish this."
His thrusters screamed and he shot into the night, using the robots as cover. The four machines adjusted—two peeled off to pursue Tony, and two stayed behind to keep me busy.
Tony hesitated for exactly half a second.
Then a scream cut through the air.
Pepper.
It wasn't a distant, vague sound. It was close enough to be real, sharp enough to punch straight through the noise of combat and lodge itself in Tony's soul.
Tony didn't debate.
He turned mid-flight instantly and rocketed toward the scream, abandoning Obadiah without even a curse word. No strategy. No calculations. Just Tony Stark being Tony Stark: the man who will save someone he cares about even if the world is burning behind him.
I watched him go and let out a breath that was half sigh, half resignation. "Yeah," I muttered. "That tracks."
Two robots followed Tony.
Two stayed with me.
Great.
One of them raised an arm, and something inside its forearm rotated with a mechanical click. A muzzle. A weapon system. It fired—not bullets, but a burst of high-velocity metal flechettes that tore through the air with a scream.
I flicked my wand and threw up a shield.
"Protego!"
The barrier flared. The flechettes hit and scattered, dropping to the ground like deadly rain. The impact rattled my arm and made my teeth buzz.
Okay. That's not fun.
I tried a Stunning Spell out of reflex—pure habit.
"Stupefy!"
The red bolt hit the robot's chest…and did absolutely nothing. No flinch. No stumble. No nervous system to disrupt. No human core to overload.
Right.
Magic that targets biology is pretty useless against a walking metal fridge.
"I really need to update my spell list," I muttered, because if I survived this, I was absolutely going to spend the next week developing "anti-robot wizardry" like it was a final exam.
The robots advanced, heavy footsteps carving dents into the soil. Their heads tracked me with cold precision. No fear. No hesitation. Just targeting.
So I changed tactics.
Instead of trying to stun them, I grabbed them.
"Wingardium Leviosa!"
The spell caught both robots by the legs with invisible force, jerking them upward. They were heavy, and my magic groaned under the strain, but I had leverage—momentum and surprise.
I swung them.
Hard.
Their bodies slammed into each other midair with a metallic shriek. Plating buckled. Joints protested. One robot's shoulder assembly cracked, sparks bursting outward like fireflies.
They tried to recover, limbs whirring, but I didn't give them time.
I drove them downward into the ground, then yanked them back up and smashed them together again, like I was trying to clap two angry appliances into scrap metal.
They staggered, systems flickering.
Still moving, though.
Still dangerous.
I poured intent into the next spell—real intent. Not "disarm." Not "stun." Not "please cooperate."
Destroy.
"Bombarda Maxima."
Red filaments spiraled from my wand tip, wrapping around both machines like glowing threads of violence. For a heartbeat, the spell held—pressure building, energy compressing.
Then it detonated.
The explosion was deep and concussive, blowing dirt outward in a circular wave. Metal fragments scattered across the hillside, spinning end over end before embedding into soil and rock. One robot's torso split, the reactor core inside it—if you could call it that—sparking and dying. The other collapsed into a heap of twisted limbs, systems finally going silent.
For a moment, the only sound was the ocean.
Waves.
Wind.
My own breathing, harsh and uneven.
I stood there with my wand still raised, scanning for movement. My magical senses didn't detect life—because these things weren't alive—but they did detect heat fading, residual energy draining away.
Neutralized.
I checked my reserves automatically, like a habit carved into me by too many fights.
About forty percent left.
Yeah.
Not great.
And Tony and Obadiah were already gone—one chasing Pepper's scream, the other escaping into the sky with a laugh and a plan that clearly had backup.
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Hey guys, I'm Aurelius D. Black, your author, and welcome to Path of Arcane (or How to Survive and Maybe Craft Hogwarts in Another World).
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