After sending Bruce Banner away, Tony Stark pressed his fingers to his temples and sank into the only intact chair left in the room. Today had been… a lot. He had fought and beaten the Hulk—no, an enhanced version of the Hulk—and he still struggled to believe it. He had actually injected himself with the Extremis virus.
And the results had blown past every one of his expectations.
What thrilled him most was how perfectly his newest creation, the Genesis Armor, had performed. Tony had always known the armor was packed with upgrades, but never imagined that when paired with Extremis it could unleash such overwhelming power.
He wasn't just wearing the Genesis Armor anymore. He was fused with it. His mind synced seamlessly with the systems, his thoughts flowing into circuits and servos as easily as flexing a muscle. With nothing but a neural impulse, he could even command the servers.
And yet… something felt off.
No glitches, no hardware malfunctions, no software corruption. His full diagnostic scan confirmed that the Genesis Armor was operating flawlessly. Still, the nagging sense lingered—like a note slightly out of tune in an otherwise perfect symphony.
Maybe it was just first-time jitters, he told himself. The growing pains of man and machine becoming one.
"So, Stark let Banner slip away?" Gene asked, his voice calm yet tinged with intrigue as he observed global surveillance feeds.
"Correct, Creator," Tianwang replied evenly. "If nothing interferes, Dr. Bruce Banner will be leaving the city by tonight."
Tony's decision hadn't surprised Gene in the least. Technically, it bent the rules—hard—but it was exactly the kind of thing Stark would do. Since taking up the mantle of Iron Man and de facto leader of the Avengers, Tony had changed a great deal.
The old Stark was a billionaire playboy who never backed down from anyone—not even kings. But responsibility had carved new edges into him. Now, he knew how to bend without breaking, when to compromise without surrendering. Letting Banner go was proof of that growth.
But if one thing had genuinely caught Gene off guard in this whole mess at Avengers Tower, it wasn't Stark's compassion. It was the Genesis Armor.
The armor had shattered every prior assessment in Gene's database of Iron Man's capabilities. It didn't just push the limits of Earth's science and engineering—it ignored them, operating at a level that should have been impossible.
And then there was the Extremis factor. During the battle, Tony's body temperature had spiked for an instant to over five thousand degrees—the temperature of the sun.
That meant Extremis was back.
Gene frowned slightly at that revelation. He had personally overseen the destruction of Aldrich Killian's research, eliminating every scrap of Extremis data and returning every test subject to Hive Base. Yet clearly, something had slipped through the cracks.
What Tony had injected wasn't the old Extremis. The biochemistry was different. Improved. Stabilized.
"Interesting," Gene murmured, eyes narrowing as lines of data flowed across the holographic screens.
Even more fascinating—Stark hadn't yet tapped the Genesis Armor's full potential. The system was still raw, still imperfectly synced. There were countless refinements to be made. This wasn't Iron Man at his strongest. Not yet.
Gene leaned back, curiosity sparking. Just how powerful would Stark become when the man and the Genesis Armor truly became one?
As for the mess created by the so-called "Leader," that was finished. Gene had seen it with his own eyes: the Leader consumed in fire as his plane went down, his body turned to ash. Red Queen and Skynet's life scans confirmed it. No heartbeat. No brain activity. The man who had dreamed of infecting humanity and ruling the world was gone before his grand plan had even begun.
His intelligence—yes, a thousand minds' worth of brilliance—had value. But the tedious old ambition? Conquest, domination, control? Predictable. Tiresome. Better to cut the infection out at the root.
Gene wasn't mourning the loss. It meant one less distraction.
The disaster was cleaned up. But there was still one problem—an enemy lurking in the shadows, one who refused to stay dead. And Gene had decided it was finally time to drag that ghost into the light.
Still, before that confrontation, there was an experiment to run. He needed to test the integration of Skynet, Red Queen, and Ultron—three minds woven into a single system.
Gene thought for a moment, then issued his command.
"Ultron. Search for Bruce Banner."
"Searching…"
A moment later, the holographic screen lit up with feeds from New York's surveillance grid. Cameras zoomed and focused until they locked on a lone figure in a heavy trench coat and oversized sunglasses.
Banner.
A green targeting box framed his face, with cascading data beneath it: his Social Security number, phone number, home address, childhood history, and the long, messy trail of incidents since the Hulk was born.
"Amusing," Gene said softly, lips curling into a faint smile as he studied the feed.
Then his eyes sharpened, his voice commanding once more.
"New target… the Destroyer. Search parameters—unlimited."
The order echoed like a spark struck against steel.
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