Chapter 123: Tony's Ace in the Hole
Tony stopped holding back.
The suit's full weapons array was a different conversation from close-quarters. Missiles, precision lasers, repulsor bursts — the kind of output that was genuinely difficult to read even with enhanced senses, because the problem wasn't any single attack but the overlap between them, the way each one forced a specific evasion that the next one was already accounting for.
Peter evaded most of it.
Most of it was doing significant work in that sentence.
The smoke cleared. The room's walls had absorbed what they needed to absorb. Peter was standing in the middle of it — suit scorched, face blackened with flash residue, breathing hard — and still standing.
Tony, who had come to Ethan's side to collect his Tesseract, stopped mid-reach.
"Fight's not over," Ethan said pleasantly.
Tony looked at Peter.
Peter looked at Tony.
"I've been through worse," Peter said. "Your hits are strong, but they're — organized. Ethan doesn't organize them."
Tony processed this sentence.
Your master is harder to fight than I am was what it meant, delivered with the complete guilelessness of someone stating a fact rather than making a point.
Tony found himself respecting this more than he expected to.
He sealed the helmet.
"Round two," he said.
The second phase was better.
Tony approached it properly — reading Peter's movement patterns, tracking the spider-sense's tell-signs, trying to find the moment between reaction and response where a fast enough attack could get through. It existed. He found it, occasionally. The problem was that Peter also found it, and Peter was getting faster as the fight went on, not slower.
Wanda moved to Ethan's side.
"He's going to win," she said, watching Peter. "At this rate."
"Not yet," Ethan said.
She looked at him. "Tony's energy is dropping. The suit configurations are cycling. Peter keeps getting better."
"Tony has a card he hasn't played," Ethan said.
Wanda raised an eyebrow.
"I don't know what it is," Ethan admitted. "But Tony doesn't lose fights he doesn't need to lose. His ego won't let him." He watched the exchange in the center of the room. "He's been holding something back. Not because he's protecting Peter — because he was saving it for something he thought mattered more."
Across the room, Richard had arrived beside Fisk.
"Can Ethan teach me?" Richard asked.
Fisk looked at his son. Looked at Peter, still moving, still reading Tony, absorbing hits that would have put most adults on the floor. Looked at the scorched suit and the blackened face and the eyes that were still completely focused.
"Ask him yourself," Fisk said.
"He said to ask you."
"He's being polite," Fisk said. "He deflects things he's actually willing to do by making them someone else's decision."
Richard thought about this. "So yes?"
"After you're older," Fisk said. "And tougher."
Richard looked at Peter again and reconsidered his timeline.
In the center of the room, Tony made his decision.
The energy reserves were at the point where continuing with the current configuration meant he was going to lose on attrition. Peter's durability was higher than Tony's modeling had suggested; his recovery between hits was faster; the spider-sense made sustained pressure increasingly inefficient because Peter wasn't just absorbing the pattern, he was learning it.
Tony had a suit he hadn't deployed yet.
He'd built it for Ethan. The full specification, reverse-engineered from three months of watching Ethan fight and thinking about what it would take to reliably counter gravity manipulation, Observation Haki, and Chaos Magic operating simultaneously. It was his most sophisticated work.
He'd told himself he'd never use it on someone he wasn't actually fighting.
Well, he thought. Peter's earned it.
He vanished.
Not dramatically — he activated the Homestead return, stepped through to Stark Tower, walked to the suit storage, and was back in four seconds. The room was still processing his absence when he materialized.
The new suit was different in ways that were visible even to the non-engineers in the room. Denser. Different energy signature. The design lines that Tony favored — aerodynamic, clean — but with something underneath them that suggested the aesthetic was concealing a different kind of engineering logic.
"New configuration," Tony announced. He looked at Peter. "This one I built for Ethan. So if you can beat it, you'll have beaten something that was specifically designed to handle your teacher."
Peter looked at the suit.
He looked at Ethan.
Ethan's expression was doing the thing it did when he was simultaneously amused and evaluating a situation. He looked at Tony with the particular warmth of someone who had just found out a friend had built a contingency plan specifically to counter them and found this more endearing than threatening.
"You built a suit to fight me," Ethan said.
"You ran the Tesseract through a building I was in without telling me," Tony said. "I respond to information."
"I told you I borrowed it."
"I wanted to be prepared for when that stopped being true." Tony turned back to Peter. "Well? Still in?"
Peter looked at the suit one more time.
Designed to handle Ethan, he thought. That means it accounts for everything I've been trained against. Everything I've been trained with.
He adjusted his stance.
"Come on then," he said.
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