Tony's message hadn't been part of Clark's plans, but that wasn't going to stop him from heading to New Mexico to meet one of this world's gods.
That same night, after getting home, Clark slipped into one of those convenient little side alleys that always seemed to exist when needed. His suit flowed up over him automatically, the bright red S spreading across his chest.
"Hopefully I can still make it back for dinner."
The next second, he bent his knees and launched lightly into the air.
Clark felt like he was finally starting to understand the trick of flight. At the moment, he still counted more as someone who could jump absurdly high and absurdly fast than someone who could truly fly, but getting there within a minute was no problem.
A streak of blue tore across the sky toward Los Angeles at terrifying speed.
At the same time, on the West Coast, in Los Angeles.
The Stark Industries campus had already turned into a wrecked battlefield, and Tony's Mark III was very clearly losing.
Tony looked at the steel monster stomping toward him and felt nothing but misery.
He had honestly thought the Mark III, powered by his cutting-edge miniaturized arc reactor, would be more than enough to deal with Obadiah, the thief and traitor he had once trusted.
What he had not expected was that Obadiah would go completely insane, enlarge the original Mark I desert plans, and build this armored killing machine.
Against that sheer size and brute-force advantage, the Mark III suddenly felt small and fragile, like some overconfident student getting shoved around by a heavyweight.
"Tony! You're still as weak as ever!" Obadiah roared.
Inside the Iron Monger, he strode toward a city bus that had been caught sideways in the pileup.
It was packed with passengers.
People inside were pounding desperately on the windows, unable to get out because they were jammed together too tightly.
"Look at them, Tony! All these helpless people!" Obadiah laughed as he seized the bus. "You shut down the weapons division. You keep talking about protecting them. But I'm telling you, only weapons can rule this world!"
He hoisted the bus, planning to send both it and Tony straight to hell together.
"Take your ideals and your naivete with you. Go see your parents!"
"No!"
Tony tried to fight back, but the Mark III was nearly drained, and in raw strength he was completely outmatched.
Even so, he forced himself upright and kept firing his repulsors at Iron Monger, though all it really did was burn away the last of his power.
He could only watch as the bus slipped from Obadiah's grip.
Not only was he about to die at the hands of the man he had once treated like family, he was about to take an entire busload of innocent people with him.
I'm sorry...
That was Tony's last thought.
But the scene he expected never came.
Instead, he saw the bus stop dead in midair.
Beneath its massive frame, one man held the entire thing up with a single hand braced against the undercarriage.
It was a man in a deep blue suit.
A red cape whipped behind him in the wind. In reality, Clark had just grabbed a piece of red fabric on the way over, because what was Superman without a cape? Across his chest, the scarlet S blazed in the California sun.
"What the hell is that?!" Obadiah blurted. Even he couldn't one-hand that bus.
"JARVIS," Tony said faintly, staring, "has physics... finally left the building?"
"No, sir," JARVIS replied. "Physics remains intact. The man in front of you, however, does not fit within any model I can produce."
Clark held the bus up with one hand and didn't even bother looking at the two stunned men in metal.
First things first.
He carried the bus over and set it down safely to the side. The passengers, having just escaped death, stared at him like they had forgotten how to scream.
Once the bus was secure, Clark turned back and dusted off his hands.
"You two go ahead. This is your personal feud. Just pretend I'm not here."
Then he leaned casually against a nearby car and looked at the two combatants, who now seemed weirdly reluctant to keep fighting.
That, naturally, enraged Obadiah.
He didn't care where this spandex freak had come from. Anyone who got in his way had to die.
"You circus clown! You think you can show up out of nowhere and grandstand? Die!"
Tony heard that and nearly short-circuited.
Wait, what? Bro, you're not here to help me?
Weren't we supposed to meet in New Mexico this weekend?
How am I supposed to make that if I die now?
Iron Monger raised his right arm. The rotary gun locked onto Clark, and a stream of bullets tore toward him.
Clark looked mildly tired of it all.
Really, this again?
No originality at all. Just the same useless attacks over and over.
"Watch out!" Tony shouted on reflex, apparently forgetting who exactly he was yelling at.
Then Clark's response completely shattered Obadiah's arrogance and, at the same time, wrecked Tony's last scraps of faith in modern weaponry.
Clark didn't even raise his hands.
He just stood there.
The bullets, powerful enough to tear through armored vehicles, hit his chest, his face, even his eyes, and burst into a rapid chorus of metallic clinks before falling harmlessly around his feet.
They couldn't do anything except make noise.
When the barrage ended, Clark glanced down at the flattened shells around him, then at his intact suit. Another quiet thank-you to Oscorp's accidentally donated advanced polymers and his own biofield.
"Not bad," Clark said thoughtfully. "Kind of like a high-end massage gun, but very disposable. Wasteful, really."
"That's impossible! That's impossible!" Obadiah shouted.
To be fair, he hadn't been following the news. He'd been a little too busy figuring out how to murder his surrogate nephew.
Then he hit the missile launcher on his shoulder.
A missile screamed toward Clark.
This time Clark moved.
At a speed too fast for the eye to follow, he reached out and caught the missile in his hand just before it could detonate.
A weapon powerful enough to level a building let out a pathetic muffled pop in his palm, coughed up a thread of black smoke, and became a lump of dead metal.
"..."
Obadiah had absolutely nothing left to say.
And did Tony have anything useful to say?
Not remotely.
"..."
After crushing the missile, Clark still didn't attack Iron Monger.
He had said it already. This was Tony's family business. He had no interest in stealing someone else's villain.
He was here as a high-end babysitter.
"Why are you both just standing there?" Clark asked, pointing at Iron Monger. "Aren't you supposed to be fighting? Keep going."
Don't mind me. I'm just here watching.
Obadiah was so humiliated by Clark's indifference that he redirected all his fury back onto Tony. Iron Monger swung his massive steel fists, and the two of them crashed back into each other on the freeway.
What followed on that Los Angeles highway was probably the strangest escort mission in Marvel history, and the least suspenseful.
Iron Monger grabbed a car and hurled it at Tony. Tony dodged, and the vehicle went spinning toward a group of civilians on the roadside.
Blue light flashed.
Clark appeared in front of them, caught the car one-handed, and set it down gently.
"Ma'am, this is an active combat zone. Please evacuate."
One of Tony's repulsor blasts went wide and hit a fuel truck. It was seconds away from setting off a chain explosion.
Blue light flashed again.
Clark hovered over the tanker, took a breath, and exhaled a freezing torrent of super-breath so cold it glittered with ice. In an instant, the entire truck became a solid block of frost. Not even a spark remained.
Obadiah tried switching tactics and used missiles to carpet-bomb the area, hoping to hit the nearby buildings and force Tony to split his focus.
But Clark was still right there.
He turned into a series of blue afterimages in the sky, plucking each missile out of the air like baseballs and crushing them one after another in his bare hands.
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