Chapter 124: Tony's Anti-Lord-of-Hell's-Kitchen Armor Series
The room took a moment to process what Tony had just said.
Pietro was the first to speak.
"He built a suit specifically for you," Pietro said, looking at Ethan. He sounded less alarmed than impressed. "While the rest of us have been — existing — Tony Stark has been quietly doing homework."
"In my defense," Wade said, "I also do homework." He looked at Tony. "Speaking of which. Anti-Deadpool armor. Do you have one? Have you thought about it? Because I feel like I deserve that level of consideration."
"I haven't made one," Tony said.
"So you don't think I'm threatening enough to bother."
"You're annoying enough," Tony said. "That's different."
Wanda had not joined this conversation. She was looking at Ethan with the expression she wore when she was deciding whether to act on something.
"Say the word," she said, quietly.
"He's fine," Ethan said. "This is just Tony."
"Tony built a suit to fight you."
"Tony builds suits for every eventuality. This is his version of being prepared." Ethan glanced at the suit — the design lines he'd been studying while the others talked. He could see the engineering logic in it, the layering of countermeasures. Tony had been paying attention. "I'm flattered, actually."
"Flattered."
"He took me seriously enough to do real work." Ethan looked at her. "That's not a threat. That's respect."
Wanda considered this for a moment. Then she looked at the suit again, and her expression shifted from protective to the particular alertness of someone who was now also studying it.
Peter took the offered free swing.
He hit Tony as hard as he could.
Tony didn't move.
Not an inch. Not a wobble. The suit absorbed it with the quality of something that had been specifically designed to absorb exactly that kind of input, which it had been, because Tony had spent three months calibrating it to Ethan's benchmarks and Peter trained to Ethan's benchmarks.
"Again," Tony said, not unkindly.
Peter hit him again. Different angle, different force distribution, the technique Ethan had taught him for finding the joint between structured materials. The suit compensated. It had anticipated the technique because the technique came from Ethan's training and the suit had been built around Ethan's training.
The thermal layer activated — not dangerous, just enough to make sustained contact uncomfortable.
Peter stepped back.
"The suit heats up," Tony explained. "Automatic response. Also—" he turned slowly, and the room picked up the slight delay in everything around him, the way moving objects near the suit seemed to encounter a fraction more resistance than physics usually provided "—the monitoring array runs at roughly four hundred times normal processing speed. Anyone within proximity, it's already tracking and responding before they've committed to the motion."
Peter looked at it.
"So it reads spider-sense," he said.
"It reads everything that produces a signal before action," Tony said. "Including spider-sense. Including Observation Haki." He looked at Ethan. "Theoretically."
Ethan nodded. "Theoretically."
"Right." Tony turned back to Peter. "So. Round two."
It was brief.
The suit had been designed for Ethan, which meant it was calibrated for a threat level that Peter was approaching but hadn't reached. The gap was visible in real time — every counter Peter tried was anticipated, every combination absorbed. Tony moved efficiently within the suit rather than aggressively, letting the engineering do the work.
Peter went down on the third exchange.
He didn't stay down. He got up. That was noted by everyone in the room — he got up, looked at Tony, and accepted the outcome with the equanimity of someone who had hit a ceiling and understood what it meant.
Jessica called it.
Tony won.
He did not look happy about it.
He looked like a man who had used his best contingency against a teenager in a friendly sparring match and was now calculating how long it would take to design a second-generation version before Ethan had time to reverse-engineer the first.
Ethan walked over to Peter.
"You're significantly better than you were in March," he said. "The progression is real. What you just encountered is a targeting system designed around my training patterns, which means it was anticipating you based on anticipating me." He looked at Peter directly. "That's a compliment dressed up as a loss. Don't let it sit wrong."
Peter processed this.
"He beat me without trying," he said.
"He beat you with something he designed specifically to beat me," Ethan said. "And he said I'd need time to handle it. Which I would." He shrugged. "You got hit with something above your weight class. Nobody in this room would have done better."
Peter looked at the suit one more time.
Something in his expression resolved.
"Okay," he said.
Ethan crossed to Tony.
Tony was already standing with one hand out, not bothering to disguise the transaction he was here for.
"You built a whole suit," Ethan said.
"You walked into my building with capabilities I hadn't fully mapped," Tony said. "I respond to incomplete information by completing it."
"And now it's exposed."
"Now it's compromised," Tony said, with the specificity of someone for whom the distinction mattered enormously. "There's a difference. Exposed means seen. Compromised means the opponent has updated their model based on what they saw." He pointed at Ethan. "You've updated your model."
"I have."
"Which means the first-generation suit is now a known quantity and therefore significantly less useful than it was twenty minutes ago." Tony's hand was still out. "Space Stone. I'm going home to start on Mk. II."
"You're going to keep building versions of this."
"Until I'm satisfied with the result." Tony looked at him. "Don't take it personally. This is how I say I value our friendship in engineer."
Ethan looked at him for a moment.
Then he handed over the Tesseract.
Tony took it, confirmed it was real, nodded once, and was gone through the Homestead return before anyone had processed the handshake.
Ethan looked at the space where he'd been.
"He's going to build something genuinely dangerous eventually," Wanda said, from beside him.
"Yes," Ethan agreed.
"Are you worried about that?"
He thought about it honestly.
"No," he said. "Tony builds things dangerous because he takes threats seriously. The thing that would worry me is if he stopped building." He watched the empty space. "As long as he's building, he's engaged. That's what I want."
Wanda looked at him.
"That's a very specific way to think about friendship," she said.
"He said the same thing about his suit," Ethan said. "We're probably both right."
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