While Thor and the other Asgardians were busy in council, Tony Stark stood on the palace balcony, tinkering with his Iron Man armor. His ticket to Asgard had been a one-way trip, so until Thor reopened the Bifrost, there was no way back to Earth.
During the recent battle, the arc reactor in his suit had been destroyed, and it was Thor who had given his armor a full charge—literally, the old-fashioned way. Now, Stark was pulling up his combat logs, reviewing the scans of the Black Demon from their earlier encounter.
That armor—crafted from Uru metal—was the stuff of legend. Any tech geek on Earth would kill to get their hands on it, and Stark had no intention of letting such a find slip away.
But as he dug through the battle records, something strange—something downright unnerving—surfaced.
Back when he and Thor had just emerged from the wormhole and faced Loki, his armor's systems had picked up an anomalous data stream. It was not generated by the armor itself.
This was Asgard—no backwater nation on Earth. There was no Wi-Fi, no satellites, no electromagnetic transmissions from Earth reaching this far. That's why, ever since arriving, he'd been completely cut off from J.A.R.V.I.S.
And Asgard was the last place you'd expect to find a network. Even if his armor somehow had a vulnerability, even if some hacker tried to break in—hacking still required a signal, and here there was none.
Which left only one possibility—this anomalous data stream had been brought with him from Earth.
Stark immediately ran a full, system-wide, no-blind-spot diagnostic. Every subsystem, every log file—nothing. The anomalous program had only used his armor as a host, then immediately jumped to somewhere else. Where it went, he had no idea.
But the scan results revealed something else. Something far worse.
He recognized the traces that data left behind.
Absolutely impossible.
That was Stark's first thought. He had personally destroyed Ultron's physical form, scrubbed every trace of the AI from every system, annihilated every backup, and reduced every server that had ever hosted him to molten slag. Even the Avengers Tower's entire server bank had been replaced—brand new hardware—to make sure that shadow could never return.
He had checked his armors, too, especially the ones Ultron had once hijacked and the ones crushed by the Black Demon, ensuring there wasn't a single microchip where the dying AI could hide.
And yet, here they were. Reality proving him wrong.
Somehow, the AI everyone believed wiped from existence was preparing for a comeback—maybe from a backup, maybe from a fragment of corrupted code—but it had grown back into Ultron. And it had been hiding right under his nose—inside his armor.
Somehow, impossibly, Ultron had tricked both Stark's diagnostic sweeps and J.A.R.V.I.S.'s control protocols. And now, in Asgard, he'd apparently found his chance, slipped out of Stark's armor… and vanished.
Which raised the question—where could he possibly have gone? Asgard had no network, no internet. Where could Ultron hide?
At that moment, a towering Asgardian guard strode briskly into the throne room. Bowing deeply to Odin, he spoke with a mix of respect and urgency:
"As you commanded, I inspected the vault. Most of the treasures remain intact, save for the Ancient Ice Casket Loki tried to use to unite the Nine Realms—it's gone. And… one other item is missing."
A shadow of unease crossed his face.
"What item?" Odin asked, his voice tightening.
The Vault of Asgard housed rare artifacts and weapons of unimaginable power—spoils from countless campaigns, or objects too dangerous to be left in unworthy hands. If something minor was missing, that was one thing. But if a truly significant relic was gone… that was cause for alarm.
The guard took a deep breath.
"It's… the Destroyer."
The hall went dead silent.
Everyone present knew of the Destroyer.
Those things Gene had casually crushed in New Mexico? Poor imitations. Crude knockoffs.
The real Destroyer was different—it was an enchanted suit of armor forged for Odin himself. The single most powerful weapon in all of Asgard—possibly without equal.
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