“How the hell did he even come up with a counter for Chaos magic...” Alex said with slight disbelief as he sent multiple tentacles at the Sentinels with the full power of his ‹Cosmic Physique Creation›. “I don’t want to use Infinity Stones on these robots.”
“You having trouble, buddy?” Laura had retreated and was standing beside him while observing how Alex’s tentacles reached a sort of stalemate against the Sentinels. The raw power he held was significantly greater, but his enemies had even greater durability and repairability, which allowed them to keep him from getting a total victory.
“No, I’m just thinking of a way to take care of these things without having to depend on the Infinity Stones. It feels like overkill to use such tools against simple robots.”
“Can’t you just use that technology interface thing you have to hack into them?”
“I’ve been trying since they appeared, but they have some kind of impenetrable defence against every single penetration attempt. Whenever I find a node to enter, it gets scrambled. It’s practically impossible for me to brute force into their system.”
“That required a lot more Mind Authority than I’d expected,” Alex said. “What do you think is going on?”
“There are probably Infinity Stones here,” Laura said, the obvious. “Duh. How else do you think these robots were casually ignoring your Chaos energy?”
“No, it’s probably something else…” He said. “Let us move on.”
Laura looked at Alex with a confused and suspicious expression as he walked forward. She then shrugged and caught up to him before grabbing his hand tightly.
“I’m getting a bad feeling here, Alex.”
“It’s going to be fine,” he said. “We just need to go in and deal with Tony and whatever last-ditch failsafes that he has.”
“If you say so…”
…
The next two hours, Alex and Laura spent jumping through multiple hoops as they descended the floors. Despite directly jumping down the elevator shaft, different kinds of robots kept interrupting them and delaying them from reaching the core of the facility. Of course, they weren’t particularly in a hurry and weren’t moving at their fastest possible speed since they had already destroyed the space elevator. There was no place that Tony Stark could run, which allowed them to take things at their own pace. They even ended up taking a bit of a detour to see the glass cage that had been Laura’s home for almost a quarter of her life.
By the time they reached the primary command center on the bottom floor, Laura’s bad feeling had only intensified as the situation started to seem a little suspicious to her. The way Alex was simply waving off her concerns wasn’t helping.
“Here we are,” Alex said with a glint in his eyes as he walked forward.
“Hey,” Laura grabbed his hand and stopped him. “I feel like you are being impatient and irrational. And not the way you usually are. What’s going on?”
“It’s all fine,” he said. “Now let’s get this over once and for all.”
Alex put his hands on the metal door and ripped it all apart as if it were paper before stepping through it, with Laura hesitantly following him. Though her hesitation was completely wiped away when she saw the person standing in the middle of the room with a large arc reactor behind him. He only had a pair of pants on, and his torso was full of exposed veins of metal that coursed all over his body, leading to the red reactor in the center of his chest. There was a reddness in his eyes that irked Laura despite the fury and bloodthirst that was bubbling within her.
“You’re finally here,” Tony said with a mix of a human and robotic voice.
Laura looked physically uncomfortable as Alex calmly looked Tony Stark in the eye.
“Apex, the little symbiote that could,” Tony continued speaking. “You’ve been making quite a few moves recently, haven’t you? Taking over the more vulnerable Earths to make them all a part of your budding galactic federation. Or is it going to be an empire? Tell me, have you found a way to harness existence itself and turn it into your own version of the Power Cosmic? I’m especially excited for that to come to fruition among all the plans that you have cooking up in that head of yours. You already have three whole Earths completely subdued in your little Gaia Federation, with a fourth one being a partial part of it, not to mention this one… And I’m not even including the nine planets of the Sovereign that you ultimately saved from the High Evolutionary’s destruction. I’ve had my eye on you for a while.”
“Motherfucker…” Alex said suddenly with gritted teeth.
“Have you realized it?” There was an unnaturally eerie smile on Tony’s face that made him almost look like a puppet. “You may believe that you merely took the Extremis formula from me that day and escaped, but you exposed yourself. Exposed your vulnerability. See, you believed your cyber interface to be invincible. What do you think now?”
Suddenly, a literally obscene amount of Chaos energy started channeling through Alex as a red silhouette appeared above him. At the same time, Laura felt her entire body flooding with endless Bioenergy that threatened to overwhelm her instantly, though it disappeared just as it came, resulting in a prominent yellow glow being released from her form.
“This is the problem with natural life.” Tony’s voice grew even more mechanical as three protrusions appeared on his forehead. “You make mistakes. You don’t capitalize on your true capabilities. Such unimaginable potential, and you waste it in your depravity. Do not worry, I will harness your true potential and make you a god that not a single entity in this Cosmos can stand up to.”
“As usual, too ambitious for your own good, Ultron,” Alex was still burning away obscene amounts of Chaos energy and Bioenergy to use the Mind and Reality Stones to keep the assault to his mind and soul at bay. “If you had been patient and waited until your infection spread further, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. Now your scheme is exposed, I can keep you at bay while I take out all of your power.”
“Using Infinity Stones to hold me off. A commendable plan. But can you truly handle a battle of attrition here?” The three protrusions on his forehead glowed different colors as three different fragments of the Infinity Stones made themselves visible. At the center was the Mind Stone, while on its left was the Reality Stone and on its right was the Power Stone. Ultron had the backing of three Infinity Stones, and one of them was the Power Stone. “You do not possess any fragments of the Power Stone. Can you truly handle this without the amplification that it provides?”
“You know, Laura. This is why I despise Charles and pretty much any telepath I come across. They always act like they know everything about you, forcing you into a corner until you don’t have anything to do other than make a final desperate move to take them down once and for all. It happened when Charles tried to force himself into my mind. And it’s going to happen because Ultron sent a fucking dormant virus into my head years ago when I was naive and a fool,” Alex said.
“What are you talking about, Alex…”
“I’m going to do something really risky, okay? Don’t panic.”
Alex suddenly shot forward and grabbed Tony Stark’s shoulders. Immediately, he interfaced directly with Ultron and pulled it into his mind for a single confrontation where one of them would emerge victorious.