Chapter 234: Kamen Rider Decade, Entering the Stage!
Thor was crying in a way that defied easy categorization. Not quietly, not with dignity — the full thing, the kind that comes when you've been holding it together through interrogations and exile and hammer-failure and a brother delivering the worst possible news, and then someone shows up who actually came for you, and the last bolt finally gives.
Ethan looked at him. Two hundred pounds of Asgardian warrior, sitting on the floor of a S.H.I.E.L.D. detention room, reaching out with shaking hands.
Ethan used his chaos magic to hold him in place.
"You okay?" he said.
It was not, objectively, the right question.
"Father is dead," Thor said. The words came out in pieces. "Mother doesn't want me. I — I cannot lift the hammer."
Tony stood slightly behind Ethan's shoulder and processed this. "So," he said, carefully, "the Norse god is... having a family situation. In New Mexico. While we're — yes. Okay. I'm caught up."
"Not now," Ethan said.
"Not saying anything. I'm just—"
"Tony."
Tony looked at the ceiling briefly, then back at the scene, then adopted an expression of neutral supportiveness.
Ethan was about to say something to Thor when the door opened and the room acquired significantly more S.H.I.E.L.D. agents than it had contained a moment ago. Crossbones was in front, and he had the energy of someone who had been waiting for this.
"Finally," Crossbones said. "You have any idea how long I've been standing outside?"
Ethan assessed the room. Twelve agents, Crossbones, standard equipment. He looked at Tony.
Tony was already pressing the arc in his chest.
The armor assembled with the particular sound of something that had been designed to be impressive and had succeeded. Red and blue — clean lines, but with a secondary color system that Ethan clocked immediately. He'd looked at those schematics. Tony had borrowed design language from Kamen Rider Build's aesthetic — the ice and fire motif, the bicolor split, the specific way the power systems were integrated. It was its own thing, but the influence was visible to someone who knew what to look for.
"Go," Tony said. "I've got this."
"You sure?" Ethan said.
"I donated five million dollars to be here. I'm sure."
"Thor," Ethan said, releasing the chaos magic hold. "Jane and the others — go find them."
Thor got to his feet. The grief hadn't gone anywhere, but something had replaced the paralysis — the simpler, more immediate purpose of having somewhere to be and someone to get to. He went through the door at a run, shouting Jane's name in the way that people who grew up in palaces shout: with no concept of an indoor voice and no particular interest in developing one.
Ethan leaned against the wall and watched Tony work.
The new armor was good. Better than good — Crossbones was one of the most effective fighters S.H.I.E.L.D. fielded, functionally peer to Steve Rogers in most physical metrics, and Tony was moving him back. The ice-fire system was doing what it was designed to do, keeping Crossbones reactive instead of offensive, and Tony's footwork had improved in ways that suggested he'd been putting time in outside the suit.
He's not as far behind as he was, Ethan noted. Getting close to something.
"Somewhere I heard Thor yelling," Tony said, between bursts of suppressive fire at the agents. "Did he just — did he run that way? There's no indication of where those people are."
"He's working with what he has," Ethan said.
"He's working with volume."
"Asgardian approach."
Tony shot an agent who'd gotten too close, nonlethally, watched him go down. "Their technology is wild by the way. They have ships. They travel between worlds. And then they get down here and they just—" He ducked under Crossbones' swing and drove an armored elbow into his ribs. "—yell."
"They get results," Ethan said.
He'd sent a handful of Shadow Corps soldiers after Thor as a precaution — quiet, invisible, there if something went wrong. The Dark Magic was useful for exactly this kind of low-visibility backup. Thor wouldn't notice them and wouldn't need to.
He kept watching Tony.
Close to something. Maybe not quite there yet, but closer than Steve would expect.
The thought about Steve fighting Tony was still in his head from the film — the one where Tony went up against someone who knew him, who'd fought before suits existed, and the gap had mattered. That gap was smaller now. Ethan wasn't sure it had closed entirely, but it had closed.
It was then that the music started.
It was not loud, exactly, but it had a quality of arriving rather than playing — a rhythm that put the room on alert before anyone had processed why. Tony's head came up.
"What is that?"
Ethan had already placed it. The specific progression, the timing, the way it built. He'd heard it before, in a different context, before he'd come to this world.
A man walked into the room through the door the agents had come through. He moved like someone who had never once in his life worried about whether he was supposed to be somewhere. Black suit, pink — no, salmon — no, he looked at it again. The shirt was a color that existed in the specific range between pink and not-pink, and the man wearing it carried himself like someone who had strong opinions about the distinction.
His hair was doing something that suggested a stylist had either made a choice or failed to make one, and either way the result was its own aesthetic statement.
He looked at the room. His eyes moved across it with the assessment of someone who has walked into many fights and has a system for evaluating them.
Then he looked at Tony specifically, with the mild interest of someone selecting a sparring partner.
"You look like you're having fun," he said. "Mind if I join?"
He reached into his jacket and produced a card — a single card, held between two fingers, with the casual precision of someone who has done this ten thousand times. He slid it into the belt at his hip.
The room changed.
Not physically. But something shifted in the air — a pressure, a recognition, the sensation of something that had been waiting to begin finally beginning.
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere:
"KAMEN RIDER—"
"DEEEEEEECADE!"
Light. Magenta — specifically, precisely, non-negotiably magenta — erupting outward from the belt and resolving into armor with the aesthetic of someone who had been given access to every Rider's design and had synthesized them into something that was all of them and none of them, complete in itself.
Kamen Rider Decade stood in the middle of a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility in New Mexico and looked at Tony Stark.
Ethan straightened off the wall.
There he is.
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